Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (46 page)

It was late 1982 and Brandon was clearly back into serious problems with cancer. And at that point Grant knew, Lily knew, and I knew, and maybe one or two other personal friends and his parents knew. And that was it. And so he starts heavily into chemo and, actually, when his daughter Calla was born in November of ’82, Lily delivered Calla and then went, not that many hours after, to another part of the same hospital to hold Brandon’s hand while he had a chemo treatment.

Lily said to me, “He’s really pulling this off, or he thinks he is, but I know deep down inside that he’s kind of down.” And I got the idea at the time to put something in front of him. I called her two weeks later and said, “I have an idea. Brandon’s the ultimate ham. How about if I give him the ultimate moment? I’ll offer him hosting the season premiere of
Saturday Night Live
, and he’ll have five or six months to look forward to that if he successfully completes his chemo at the end of the spring.” And that’s how he ended up hosting that show. It was really initially done to give him something to look forward to as he went through the chemo. And you know, for those next six months, all I got from him were ideas about “I’ll do this, I’ll do that.”

LILY TARTIKOFF:

When they asked him to host, he literally had just finished chemo. If you look at the footage of Brandon, he is totally moon-faced. The steroids were still very much in his system. And at the time they asked him to host, he didn’t have a hair on his head, and yet you have no idea how thrilling it was for him. I don’t think he ever anticipated that anybody would ever ask him to host
Saturday Night Live.
But that was one of the great moments of his career that literally has nothing to do with his career. I had to remind him that that was not what he was supposed to be doing. In fact, when he said he would do it, I was furious, because I thought, “How much pressure can you put on yourself, and on me?” I took everything personally. I tried to talk sense into him, you know. I just said, “You’re not Steve Martin. You’re Brandon Tartikoff. You’re supposed to, like, wear a suit and run the network. Who do you think you are? What makes you think that they’re going to roll out that carpet and you’re going to know what to do?” But really, there was no way that I was going to get in the way of that. I think Brandon would have given up his day job to work on
Saturday Night Live
if they had ever asked. I think it symbolized every reason for him for ever being at a network and being able to put on a show, a
Saturday Night Live.
He was completely attached to it and loyal, and he wouldn’t, and couldn’t, give it up. It was a place all unto its own for him. He would leave the network before he would sever those ties or end that show.

BOB TISCHLER:

It was actually a fun week, and Brandon was quite good. He was like any other host really. He really wanted to do the show.

It so happened we were shooting a piece outside NBC, and he didn’t have an ID on him or anything — and the guards would not let him in the building.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

I think people in showbiz were on their best behavior when they came to do
Saturday Night Live
, because they were scared shitless of live TV. Who’s going to come in on Monday and make an asshole of themselves to these writers, knowing they’re going to have to go onstage live doing sketches five days from then. If someone was looking for bad showbiz behavior among our own people, it was there, but the hosts were all terrified. The hosts that were the best were the ones who were all relaxed about the work — Robin and Lily and people like that. Lily Tomlin was great, she was crazy. We had big arguments, but it was always about the stuff. Personality never came into it. Robin Williams was the same way. But we’d get people who were a little humor-impaired sometimes.

MARGARET OBERMAN:

I remember being really disappointed when Lily Tomlin hosted. Because we got so few women hosts, and growing up I always thought she was so funny and everything, so it was a little bit of an idolizing thing. And then when she came to the show, she was so condescending to us, especially to me and the other women writers. It was like, you know, “You should really write about something you know about, or something from real life.” It was one of those kinds of things. It was like, Oh my God! And she seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was being so insulting. It was sad, because before that I thought she was pretty cool.

LILY TARTIKOFF:

Brandon said that when he did the dress rehearsal, he was really relaxed. But when they said, “Live from New York, it’s
Saturday Night
,” he said he had never been that frightened in his life. And normally nothing scared Brandon. This is a man who just had survived nine rounds of chemotherapy.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

One little test I used to do was on a Monday morning when we’d meet the host, I would ask the host if he would be interested in doing a sketch called “The William Holden Drinking Helmet.” I would always gauge by their reaction, because poor Bill Holden had fallen and cracked his head open and bled to death. So I always thought, if they laughed at that at least, I knew it would be a good week. And if they went, “What?! Aw, no, that’s sick,” then I thought, “Aw-oh, we’re dicked.” That was my little running gag to see if they had a sense of humor or if they were going to be a dickhead like Robert Blake.

MARGARET OBERMAN:

Jerry Lewis hosted the show when I was there. That was a total trip. It was so out there, so insane. We had one writer who was just out of Harvard, he was twenty-one, and Jerry Lewis literally said to him, “I’ve got ties older than you.” He just was such an odd guy. It was his second marriage to a woman he’s still married to. I remember so vividly him taking the gum out of his mouth and her holding her hand out and him putting the gum in her hand. He told me some outrageously foul story about how he’d just done
Hellzapoppin’
with Lynn Redgrave and somebody asked him what he thought of Lynn Redgrave and he’d said, “I’d like to take my cock out and piss all over her.” It was just insane.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

My vote for worst host is Robert Blake. He was sitting in a room and a sketch was handed to him by Gary Kroeger, who was a writer-actor — a sketch called “Breezy Philosopher,” a one-premise sketch about a lofty teacher who’s kind of a biker tough guy, talking about Kierkegaard. Students kept asking questions while he combed his hair and he’d say, “Hey, I don’t know.” Blake sat there and read that, with his glasses down his nose, then wadded it up, turned to Kroeger, and said, “I hope you got a tough asshole, pal, ’cause you’re going to have to wipe your ass with that one.” And he threw it and bounced it off Gary’s face.

MARTIN SHORT:

Jack Palance was on once and no one laughed at the sketch, and it was so strange. Jim Downey wrote it, it was just the strangest scene, and it got cut at dress. I remember that some of those scenes that didn’t make it to air are just kind of classically funny to me in their way. This scene was something like, “What would you do if I told you Jack Palance was standing behind that door?” That was it, and then he would come out. And it died at dress. I remember I said, “Isn’t there an applause sign someone could have turned on or something?” And Billy Crystal said, “They
were
flashing the applause sign. The audience still wouldn’t clap.”

To me, Ed Grimley’s most memorable encounter was with Jesse Jackson — two people you just don’t expect to see in the same sketch — when Jesse hosted the show. We were supposed to be sitting next to each other on an airplane. They kept saying, “Now when you climb over Jesse, you mustn’t actually fall on him,” although it was in the script. I never did fall on him at rehearsal; I just did it for the live show. They didn’t want me to do anything that made him look silly or foolish. But he was terrific about it. He was great. He loved it.

DICK EBERSOL:

About eight shows into that season, just before Christmas of ’84, we did a show which Ringo Starr came to host. And everybody was exhausted. I think it was the second of three in a row or something. But everybody was just worn-out. And the Wednesday night read-through was a travesty. And I took Ringo and Barbara Bach, his wife, and walked, as you can from NBC, almost underground all the way back to the Berkshire Hotel over on East Fifty-second Street and kept saying, “Don’t worry,” to them, which you often tell a host. Lorne used to say — maybe he still does — you’re basically bluffing the host from Monday ’til Friday.

In this case, I leveled with Ringo. I said, “What you saw today won’t be the show,” and I went back with Billy and Chris and about ten people on the writing staff. I think this may be the only time it happened in the history of the show. I said, “We have nothing. I know everybody is exhausted. But let’s take all of our best characters and let’s write a show around them. And let’s break the rule that you go three or four shows between great characters,” whether it be Fernando at that point with Billy, or whether it was Marty doing Grimley. I said everything’s fair game. We just have to show this guy a great show. We’ve got nothing now.

And that night, with no sleep for two days, each one of them wrote a piece, and it turned out to be a pretty good show. I offer all that as evidence of the fact that here you have mature adult stars, as they were in the world of comedy — all of them — and they easily accepted, with no complaint, starting completely from scratch that late in the week, which up to that point never happened in the history of the show. They were pros.

MARTIN SHORT:

When Ringo hosted, that was exciting. I remember my wife coming in on a Friday, and when she saw Ringo, she got so flustered she was shaking. I said, “I can’t believe you’re shaking,” and she said, “That is a Beatle!” She was totally overwhelmed. That part of
Saturday Night Live
was always the most fun — meeting the celebrities and going to the parties.

ANDREW KURTZMAN:

Sid Caesar came in and was absolutely stunned at the way we did things. And I was given the task of working with Sid. He had a rather elaborate parody of, I think it was
Tootsie
and
Rocky
combined. I wasn’t quite hip enough to know I was writing the vanity piece that wouldn’t get on the air, because I knew
Your Show of Shows
and I guess Sid kind of locked onto me; they made me Sid’s boy for the week. He took me to a dinner at some hotel, not the Algonquin, but one of these faded-glory places where they knew him when he was the TV god of the fifties. The carpet was getting a little tatty but they still had the overpriced Italian dining room.

And he ate the strangest meal I’ve ever seen. Sid claimed to eat one meal a day. He starts with a veal chop as big as a baby’s head. The thing is oozing cheese, and he eats his and then eats half of mine, because I couldn’t get near it. He eats both our portions of spaghetti. As we’re gasping after all this food, he says, “Wait — they do me a special dessert. You won’t like it. It’s just for me. It’s this health thing.” They bring to the table a salad bowl, a large-sized box of Shredded Wheat — the ones where the biscuits are the size of Brillo pads — and it’s a full box, not your little individual serving packs. Then comes a thirty-two-ounce container of yogurt, an enormous bowl of berries, and an equally large bowl of raisins and nuts. I would say there were probably four pounds of food there. And he proceeds to combine this into a mash in the big salad bowl and then drops it on top of this Italian pasta we’d just been eating. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. And all the time he’s talking about the sketch we were going to do — a sketch that never got on the air.

What astonished Sid, what he could not believe, is that we wrote thirty sketches to get nine. He was absolutely baffled by that. Because that’s not the way they did it in his day. He said all of these things should be one line in a meeting. You kill it right there or you decide it’s perfect, it’s the right thing, and then you go work on it until it’s great. He just didn’t agree with the system. I don’t know if it was Lorne’s invention or what.

DICK EBERSOL:

I met Susan St. James when she came to host the show that was the second show of the next full season. At midnight the writers went on strike and we couldn’t go back on the air. She was pushing the movie
Carbon Copy
. She does the show on Saturday, and five weeks after that show we were married.

ROBIN SHLIEN:

This is a very Dick story: When Susan St. James hosted the show, that’s how they met — I guess it was immediate attraction — and he ended up with her at Xenon, a big disco back then. And they were like making out at Xenon and someone from some paper caught them and it was in the paper the next day. Now most people would be embarrassed about this, right? Dick put the clipping up on the wall of his office.

DAVID SHEFFIELD:

Favorite hosts included Stevie Wonder, who was a terrific host. It was an interesting week because cue cards were right out. He had a little earpiece, and someone was feeding the lines to him off-camera, his brother. He was just a great host.

There was one host who came on, he was drunk and senile. He kept going, “Where’s Gilda? When’s Gilda showing up?” He was so arrogant; he basically just did a monologue. Donald Pleasence.

DICK EBERSOL:

The first three shows of the ’82–’83 season — the first show was hosted by nobody. That was the one where Jimmy Caan’s sister had bone marrow cancer and he pulled out, so we did the show with no host. And Rod Stewart was the musical guest. And Tina Turner was in New York, and I suggested to whoever was managing Rod at the time, why don’t they get together, and they had a memorable duet.