Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (55 page)

I know that Lorne felt I didn’t talk to him, but he was not accessible. He was never accessible. The whole experience had a huge impact on my life, and ultimately it was a really, really good thing.

TERRY TURNER:

I remember there were metal detectors at the show for the first time, which was a little disorienting. People were calling up our house to talk to Bonnie, saying, “How can you write this week? How can you possibly continue working there when this man is hosting?” Some people called our house and harassed my wife about why go to work, and I wanted to say, “Well, there’s tuition, there’s a car payment,” you know. There were a lot of reasons to work that week.

I felt that we were blindsided by Nora. Why not tell the people she had worked with for all these years that she was going to do this. So at least we’d know what to expect. And it really irritated me that suddenly Bonnie and other women who were writing the show were considered traitors and got a lot of harassment.

JAN HOOKS:

A writer for the
New York Post
called and it was like, “Do you have a comment?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” And she said, “Nora Dunn has walked off the show.” And I was dumb-founded. I had no idea. Because Lord knows, through all of the trials and tribulations of
Saturday Night Live
, you go on with the show.

I called the office and there was kind of mayhem going on. What bugged me was that Nora had called the press. She didn’t call Lorne. She didn’t call the other women in the cast. She called the press. And I thought, “God, that’s not fair.” I mean, normally when you work with somebody, you call and go, “Look, I really feel uncomfortable with this and I would like to not do the show.” Instead, she had no contact with us. That week was horrible. I got a lot of hate mail. It was like, “Why can’t you be more like Nora Dunn and stand up for your rights?” — and all that shit.

I knew that her contract was up and I don’t know if they had made an offer to her. But I was really disappointed. And it put us in danger, actually. I mean, all of these radical feminists were sending hate mail and we had to call in security. And I didn’t even know who Andrew Dice Clay was. I didn’t care. It’s like just another host. Steven Seagal, we got through him. I just thought the whole thing was careless and unfortunate.

ANDREW DICE CLAY

I didn’t watch
Saturday Night Live
every week. I was out. When that show started, I had to be — I don’t know — fifteen, sixteen years old. And I really wasn’t that into comedy at fifteen. So in those days, I was out on the weekends. I wasn’t a
Saturday Night Live
freak at all.

My management got the call about hosting. I actually got the call from my dad, who was advising me back then. He worked with my manager. And I was back in New York. I was getting ready for my picture
Ford Fairlane
to open, and the funny thing was, I just wanted a nice relaxing week before it opened, because I was really going through it as far as controversy goes. I just wanted to take it easy. But my dad said it would be a good thing to do. It’s
Saturday Night Live.
It’s right before the movie comes out. You’ll have a lot of fun. And I said, “All right, we’ll do it.”

So I’ll never forget it. I show up and I’m waiting like in some reception area with my father, my sister, my right-hand guy at the time, Johnny West, and another guy who worked for me. And I’m waiting like a long time, like an hour. All of a sudden this girl walks in — I think it was actually Calvin Klein’s daughter Marci, who was working for the show — and she says, “Lorne will see you now, and this is really crazy with what’s going on.” And I go, “
What’s
going on?” She goes, “Nora Dunn walked off the show.” And I go, right, you know, what do you want from me? So now I go into Lorne’s office, and he sits down and he starts telling me about Nora Dunn walking off the show. And I’m sitting there looking at him like, “Who cares? What do you want from me?” And he goes, “She walked off because of you.”

Now I look at him and I go, “Who is she?” Because I don’t watch the show. I’m not interested. I mean, of course I know about Belushi and Chevy Chase, and I’ve seen their movies. But I was never an avid follower of
Saturday Night Live.
And Lorne goes, “Don’t you know the cast here?” I go, “No, I’ll be honest. I really never watch. I know Dennis Miller, because he shows up when I’m performing.

Then from there it just turned into mania, you know. Next thing you know, I’m getting calls from
Entertainment Tonight.
I’m getting calls from all these different tabloid shows. And what was supposed to be a fun, light week wound up the most stressful week I had in my entire career. To this day, if I turn on the tape for somebody, you can see the blood in my face, how high my blood pressure was.

I was out of my mind, you know, doing that show. It wasn’t fun, I’ll tell you that much. What really bothered me about the whole thing is, these performers that are supposed to know what character comedy is didn’t know I was playing a character. When I heard this was the end of Nora Dunn’s contract, I’m going, “This is a play to get publicity — to make herself into something.” In my opinion, she was just looking to make something out of her career after
Saturday Night Live.

The one good thing is, the ratings were incredible. It was the only time, you know, in the few times that I have seen
Saturday Night Live
, that they threw people out of the audience. I mean, I got heckled during my opening monologue and they had to throw people out. There was all kinds of security. There was a bunch of people in the balcony they threw out. Because the dichotomy between who I am as a performer and who I am as a father and a husband is very different.

I’ve never met Nora Dunn to this day. And obviously it didn’t work out for her the way she thought it would. And, you know what, that’s what she deserved. I guess she thought she was going to become like a major star from that. That’s not how you become a major star. I thought it was a foolish move to start with.

And
Nightline
is this great show and look what they’re putting on. It’s not a world affair. I’m a comic. I’m a bozo from Brooklyn.

JAN HOOKS:

I know there was a meeting before Nora was due in the following week, so I think we had one more show. And we took a vote: Get her out of here! Get her out of here!

VICTORIA JACKSON:

I ran into Nora’s manager a couple of years ago in L.A. He mentioned he represented Nora. I’m like, “Oh. Great.” I couldn’t hide that I wasn’t thrilled. And he goes, “I’ll tell her you said hi.” And I’m like, “Yeah, okay.” So the next week I saw him again, and he goes, “I told Nora that you said hi, and she said she kind of gave you a hard time when you were working together.” And I went, “Oh, so she actually admits it. Cool. I thought maybe it was all in my head, you know?”

DON NOVELLO,
Writer:

The first time I did Father Sarducci was at a place called the Intersection, a coffee house in San Francisco. But then I started driving down to L.A. to do comedy clubs in ’73, and I started doing it at the Comedy Store. I was on the
Smothers Brothers Show
— I was a regular on their NBC show — and I did it there. When I got on
Saturday Night Live
, I think it was the fall of ’77, I knew Franken and Davis from the Comedy Store and I had met John Belushi, and John pushed to get me on as well. I think Brian Doyle-Murray and I were the first new writers after the original group of writers.

People were just afraid of Father Sarducci, you know. Everybody always said, “We’re not offended, but we think other people will be offended.” When I began smoking, someone said, “Priests don’t smoke.” I never made fun of the religion. I never did the sign of the cross or talked about Jesus or anything like that. I just made fun of the hierarchy. One thing I did though was a thing about the bill for the Last Brunch. Actually I had wanted to do the bill for the Last Supper, and at that time the guy in Standards and Practices said we can’t do the bill for the Last Supper, and so I worked it out that I could do the bill for the Last Brunch instead. Because of that it got much funnier. One guy only had eggs. Everyone else had all these big breakfasts. The moral of it was, if you’re part of a big group, order the most expensive thing, because someone will always just say, “Let’s divide it.”

St. Pat’s were our neighbors in Rockefeller Square, but I never had any problems from Catholics or from the Church or anything. I was arrested once in Rome when I was taking pictures of the Vatican, but that was for taking pictures without permission, they said. But I never had people complain.

ROBERT WRIGHT,
NBC Chairman and CEO:

When I came to NBC,
SNL
was not on my radar of things that were broken, needed fixing, were under hospitalization, or were enemies of the people. I kind of stayed away from it. I knew by reputation that Lorne had a principality that had signed nonaggression pacts with other principalities. I didn’t need to be there. I had so many other things I was involved in, and I didn’t have any agenda with
SNL.
To me, if it was funny, that was good enough.

But I was only here a very short time when I got involved in an incident with Father Guido Sarducci. I’m a Catholic and I got a call from Cardinal O’Connor’s office. His assistant, a very well thought of young priest who was made a monsignor, and was like an executive assistant, called me to say that the cardinal wanted me to come over and he had some things he wanted to talk about. The cardinal talked about labor unions, but in the process he also wanted to talk about Guido. And I was very defensive about it. They were politely saying to me how many Catholic organizations had been really offended by his portrayal. I didn’t pretend to have any journalistic credentials, but I was really offended, because I thought it was very funny. And I felt that if I think it’s very funny and I’m an upstanding Catholic, then “why can’t you take a joke?” So I got very defensive about this whole discussion, it was something I kind of just stepped into, but I found myself defending it against, I think, the Catholic League at the time and some other groups. There are hundreds of them. I realized I had to stop defending the show in person because there were more groups than I had hours in the day. So that was my initial period. Nobody asked me to do this. I just got into this stuff and then I realized I had to get out of it.

When the show began, hosts — like musical artists — were chosen as much for their novelty as for their proven popular appeal. Hence the appearances of Ralph Nader, Julian Bond, Ron Nessen, and other non-performers in the host’s spotlight. The practice continued over the years — sports figures were added to the mix — but generally, the host pool became smaller and limited to stars of showbiz, oftentimes those with a movie opening very near the date of their appearance.

There were good hosts and bad, those who came with their own entourages and their own writers — thus alienating the
SNL
staff from the get-go — and those who just came to have fun, to spend a week at a kind of amusement park for the very, very privileged. Some tried to bail out as Saturday night approached. Some canceled at the virtual last minute. Some threw up. But most came and conquered and seemed to have a wonderful time. Some would say that, even having done it and enjoyed themselves, they still couldn’t picture themselves doing it again, while others took so naturally to the unnatural experience that they were invited back repeatedly; they were old reliables who, because they pitched in with gusto, inspired the writers and regular cast members to be at their best.

BUCK HENRY,
Host:

There were people outside the cast that I look at and say, “They could have been cast members” — Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman, and Steve Martin. Those four people were essentially cast members, because they really fit into the format and they understood their work, and they were really great guest hosts.

DANNY DEVITO,
Host:

They pitch lots of stories to you. You do the read-through, which is really cool. You read everything and everybody sits around the table. I was used to that kind of work on
Taxi
, because we were trying to get the show ready on Friday every week and we did a lot of table readings. So it’s less shocking, I think, for an actor who comes to it after having had the experience of a table reading and trying to get a show in shape for seven o’clock on a Friday night, which is what we would do on
Taxi.

When Jon Lovitz was on the show, he was hysterically funny. There was one incident where I think I shoot him like in the foot and he says,
“Ya shot me.”
The way he said it was just so off the charts that nobody could keep a straight face. It was just one of those things where every time he said,
“Ya shot me,”
I went crazy.
“Ya shottttt me.”
And of course once you go, he just did it more and more and more and more to throw it out into the stratosphere. Even to this day, when we see each other we say,
“Ya shot me.”

JON LOVITZ:

The sketch was kind of dying so I said it a lot. Like about ten extra times more than I was supposed to, just to get a laugh.

JOHN GOODMAN,
Host:

I was scared to death. I mean, I was petrified. It was something I always wanted to do. I remember stalking NBC when I first moved up here in 1975, you know, I would walk around after auditions and everything. I would always come through here just to see if I could see any of the cast members and stuff. And then I auditioned for the show in 1980 when they replaced everybody. It’s something I’ve always loved, because I was a big fan of the
National Lampoon
and the
Radio Hour
and Michael O’Donoghue. So when I finally did do it, I was so damn scared I just wanted to disappear, fall through a manhole cover — anything.