Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (57 page)

GREG DANIELS:

One of the reasons I felt like I didn’t want to go in and talk to Lorne was, when I was there you could see Tom Davis there and Al Franken still being there, and it just seemed like it was possible to spend fifteen, twenty years working at
Saturday Night Live.
And it’s a really great show and everything, but I was scared that I would end up putting in my whole career there. It’s hard to really have your own voice there. I was more cowardly. I said, I’m leaving and I’m going to California and make my way.

TOM DAVIS,
Writer:

My breakup with Al was hardly just a matter of shaking hands and going separate ways. It was a really ugly divorce. It was just hideous. It was precipitated by someone he knew having to enter a twelve-step program. And they really had to. They had a serious problem. And then Al wanted me to go into a twelve-step program. And I didn’t want to go. And then I got married in ’89 and we were already drifting apart significantly. Because Al was into Al-Anon at that time. And the show kind of became twelve-step comedy. I just wasn’t going to join the program. That was one of the issues.

He thought I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He called me a garden-variety alcoholic and drug addict. He did his share of my drugs. He did plenty of experiments. I don’t want to embarrass him now, because I don’t think he needs that for his current career or whatever, but it was common knowledge. I was rather brazen and open about it in a way that was very politically incorrect when I was still doing that. And I’m sure that was a major issue.

And there were money problems. We were so close that we had just pooled our money together and assumed that our business manager was keeping track. And he wasn’t keeping track. And I discovered all of this when I got married. That’s when the lawyers got involved. And it became a bitterly contested thing. It was just about the worst breakup you could have. And the irony of all those years of doing comedy about ourselves breaking up I’m sure did not escape Franken either.

We don’t speak, except at funerals. Or at
Saturday Night Live
reunion shows. I saw him at the twenty-fifth reunion.

RICK LUDWIN:

I officially began working on
Saturday Night Live
in 1989. In the fall of that year, we had the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the show, so there was a big special that aired in prime time with every star there could be. That was my big first assignment after joining the show on the executive side of it. The show was doing pretty well at that time. It of course goes through hills and valleys, and that was one of the hills. The special did extraordinarily well for us. So I entered at a good time — only the usual crises, not any unusual ones.

But Eddie Murphy did not show up for the anniversary celebration. The story that’s told is that Eddie saw the David Spade “Hollywood Minute” where David did a joke about “catch a falling star” and referred to Eddie Murphy, and the following Monday, Eddie Murphy got David Spade on the phone and was very upset. David took the call and took the heat, and there was plenty of heat.

And I’m told that from that day forward, Eddie Murphy never set foot on that stage again.

Lorne Michaels would get a lot of wear out of his black suits over the years. Indeed, too much. He saw many former cast members meet heart-breakingly premature ends. No one broke more hearts, however, than the former
SNL
star and member of the founding family of 1975 who died on May 20, 1989, at the age of forty-two. Anyone given half a chance, it seemed, had fallen in love with her, whether literally or vicariously. In the history of the show, there were no brighter lights.

Gilda Radner.

Gilda — who got that name because her mother saw the movie
Gilda,
with Rita Hayworth, the year Gilda was born — was someone who often expressed disappointment in herself, plagued by anxieties that she had somehow let herself or others down. She was chronically unhappy with her appearance, no matter how many people told her they loved her just as she was. Gilda was not disappointed in life, however; she did not complain about bad breaks or misfortune, no matter how misfortunate.

Steve Martin touchingly eulogized Gilda on the first show to air after her death. A segment from the first five years was shown, a sketch without dialogue in which Martin and Radner, both dressed in white, danced romantically around the studio to “Dancing in the Dark” from the movie
The Band Wagon.
Introducing the segment, Martin had a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, and had trouble getting through his short speech — the first time viewers, or perhaps his own colleagues, had seen him so openly emotional.

STEVE MARTIN,
Host:

It’s one of those things that come over you. You’re introducing something and suddenly you just feel kind of emotional. I remember what it’s like to have an honest lump in your throat on television. Because most lumps on television are phony.

I wasn’t expecting it but, you know, I was just of that period. When we first did the dance, that was another period in our careers, where we were so young, so confident. It just felt like what we were doing was really funny to us and therefore it was going to be funny to “them.”

Gilda was so lovable in person as a person. And so it was easy to get sentimental about her, because in looking back over her life, I know she had trials and tribulations, but knowing her, it was never expressed. It was just joy and happiness and funniness and comedy.

MIKE MYERS:

Gilda Radner had played my mother in a television commercial for British Columbia Hydro when I was ten years old. It was a four-day shoot, and before it was over I had fallen in love with Gilda. I thought she was awesome, funny and cool and beautiful. I cried on the last day of the commercial, because I had so fallen in love with her. My brothers used to taunt me mercilessly about it.

And then one day my brother Peter said, “Hey, Mikey, your girl-friend’s going to be on this TV show called
Saturday Night Live
.” And I saw her, and I thought she was brilliant, and at that point I did turn to someone in my house and say, “Someday, I’ll be on this show.” Everyone laughed at me. I just really wanted to be on that show, and eventually I was. I got hired in February of 1989. I think it was May of 1989 when Gilda passed away, because it was on a Saturday, the last show of my first half-season. Somebody said to me as I was walking to work, “What’s your feeling about Gilda?” And I didn’t know she had passed away, so I said, “Well, you know, I think she’s amazing.” And they said, “Did you know she died?” And my blood ran cold.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER,
Writer:

I would occasionally go up to visit Gilda in Connecticut. One time she was very sick. We had lunch with Gene, but Gilda said she couldn’t really eat. What I didn’t know is that her intestines were closed off. She’d chew the food and spit it out just to get the taste of it. She couldn’t ingest it. Then she took me around the house to see some stuff that had been redone. She showed me this couch she had covered outside the bathroom. Then some friends of hers came over. She was like pumping me for everybody’s love life — who’s going with whom, who’s dating that one, all the gossip, always. And her friends were really nice. So we just sat with them and chatted, and then finally I said, “Okay, I have to go. It’s getting dark,” and I don’t like to drive in the dark. We go outside and Gilda gets in the driver’s seat of my car so I can’t leave.

I said, “Gilda, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go.” And she said, “Oh, everyone’s working and having so much fun and I’m not working.” And I said, “Not everyone’s having so much fun, they don’t like what they’re doing,” and so on. A lot of people were doing those bad boy-comedy movies at the time. Finally I said, “You
must
get out of the driver’s seat so I can drive home.” And finally she did. That was the last time I saw her.

And when she died, I read in her book that those people at the house were not friends. Those were nurses she had hired to give her chemo at home. She had set up a whole hospital in her house that she didn’t tell me about. Because by that time they had told her there was no hope. So she was on this chemo that was some other option that some other doctor came up with, administered by nurses at home. All those people were nurses — acting and calling each other by their first names because she had made it clear that no one was to know how sick she was, and no one was to know that she wasn’t going to live. So if you want to know how brave she was, that’s how brave she was.

BILL MURRAY,
Cast Member:

Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole
Monty Python
group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way — over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour — maybe an hour and a half — just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick — hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.

In 1980, with
Saturday Night Live
just behind her and new careers in the theater and movies ahead, Gilda said, “I think I’d be a neat old woman — if I ever make it that far. I once said that to a guy I was going out with, and he said, ‘You already are.’

“But I feel with my life, somebody’s been so generous with experiences for me — whosever controlling it. I mean, I’ve enjoyed a real generosity there. So sometimes I feel maybe I’m getting this all now and quickly because there’s not going to be a whole lot later. I mean, maybe I’m going to die or something. I know that’s an awful way to think, but I have been real fortunate. Real lucky.”

5

Overpopulation: 1990–1995

BOB ODENKIRK,
Writer:

Chris Farley was like a child. He was like an eight-year-old. One time when he was fucking, rip-roaring drunk in Chicago, he was tossing furniture around his apartment, actually picking it up and throwing it like ten feet. It was scary, man. Then all of a sudden, he turned to me and said, with complete innocence, “Do you think Belushi’s in heaven?” I didn’t know what to say.

Saturday Night Live
was growing older and younger at the same time, entering the third decade of its existence with a few cast members who were even wetter behind the ears than the founders had been. While some of the new comedy struck longtime
SNL
loyalists as juvenile (the negative adjective most often applied to the show in the nineties), new generations drawn to
SNL
loved the humor and identified with the younger cast members.

The
SNL
audience has always felt protective toward the show and concerned about its possibly becoming tamer, less impudent, less willing to take risks. And from the earliest episodes, Michaels made the show a regular topic of the show; criticisms were addressed, and lampooned, on the air. In a lavish and complex production number that opened a December 1991 show hosted by Steve Martin, the cast ridiculed both itself and the idea that the show was growing soft. Martin sang that instead of just “going through the motions” or “phoning it in,” tonight was the night “I’m actually gonna try” and “do the best I can” — for a change. As he led the singing cast through the studio (the number was a parody of the title song from the old movie musical
Babes in Arms
), Martin came upon Michaels, who — spoofing his own image — was having his portrait painted and getting a manicure, barely involved in the program, looking aloof and effete.
Saturday Night Live
defused criticisms of itself by turning them into comedy. But as the decade wore on, jokes wouldn’t be enough to placate all the critics, especially those high up in the ranks of network management.

To one of its noblest traditions, the show remained conspicuously true: discovering and showcasing comic talent that might otherwise never have come to the nation’s attention. Some of those who joined the cast in the nineties and had first watched the show in high school looked to Eddie Murphy as their ultimate
SNL
role model, rather than to members of the original cast, that comedy Mount Rushmore of Chase, Belushi, Radner, Aykroyd. Chris Farley was the exception. Belushi was his hero, his obsession, and he tried to pattern his personal and professional life after the wild Albanian’s — the best and, alas, worst of it. Like Belushi, Farley demonstrated amazing physical agility for someone of considerable heft and girth. It isn’t easy to be elfin when you weigh three hundred pounds, but Farley brought it off. Sadly, things he turned out to have in common with his idol included not only prodigious talent but an array of beckoning demons. And as with Belushi, the demons proved deadly.

ADAM SANDLER,
Cast Member:

Farley was a whole other level. It was not even a question of who we all loved and thought was the funniest. When he walked into the room, that was it.

LORNE MICHAELS,
Executive Producer:

As a kid, Chris had taped his eyebrow up to try and look like Belushi. We often said Chris was the child John and Danny never had but would have had if they’d had a child. Chevy came to see Chris once, and Chris was doing his falls, and Chevy said, “Don’t you use anything to break your fall?” Chris said, “What do you mean? Did you?” Chris had welts all over his chest. He just assumed that that was the price you paid for doing it.

FRED WOLF,
Writer:

I was in such awe of Chevy, and I know Farley was too. Chevy was very nice to Farley, and Farley would sort of sit at his feet and listen to him talk — because Farley was physical, Chevy was physical, and Chevy was telling Farley that he was worried about him throwing out his back or getting into the same problems that Chevy got into because of his physicality. Chevy would talk to Farley and be very nice to him. And Farley just loved it.

DAVID SPADE,
Cast Member:

Chris was my best friend in the cast. I was close to Adam Sandler and Chris Rock too, but Chris and I always had a real good time together.
Tommy Boy
was Lorne’s idea to make something based on how we are in real life, how we fight, how we laugh, and how we act. So we tried to make a movie to reflect a little of that; it was great.

We used to make fun of Chris at table reads. We were like, “Are you ripping off Belushi in this one, or just Aykroyd?” Because he liked those guys so much that he would incorporate them. He wore Belushi’s pants from wardrobe if he could find any, and sometimes he wore two pairs of pants, which I don’t even know how to explain. I used to get stuff that had old cast members’ names in them, but when his said “Belushi,” he loved that. He would keep those; he’d wear them.

Chris looked up to Belushi as the king. My argument was that I actually thought he was funnier than Belushi. And he wouldn’t accept that. Then, when I would get pissed at him, I would say, “Was Belushi trying to be like anybody? No. He just did whatever the funniest thing that he could think of was. You’re hysterical on your own, you don’t need any of that, don’t try to be like him, don’t even look up to him. We all think Belushi is great, but you are fine on your own.” And I thought that angle might get to him — that Belushi didn’t try to copy anybody or be like anybody, or look up to anybody, so why should he? It didn’t work.

JACK HANDEY,
Writer:

Farley was such a sweetheart. He would come offstage after being in one of my sketches and put his hands together in a sort of prayerful motion toward me and go, “Was that okay, was that okay?”

I remember one time we went to Tom Davis’s wedding at some resort in upstate New York. The resort had a bowling alley. In front of everyone, Farley would just throw his body out parallel to the lane and land from about a three-foot straight parallel drop to the bowling lane as a joke. That’s the kind of stuff he would do all the time.

FRED WOLF:

Farley and this girl on the show were going out. She was really smart and pretty, and Farley really liked her a lot. But she couldn’t put up with any more of Farley’s stuff, so they broke up. And then she started dating Steve Martin. So one day Farley comes to me and he says, “Fred, I hear that she’s going out with some guy. What can you tell me about it?” And, you know, nobody wanted to tell Chris Farley that she was dating anyone else, particularly Steve Martin. So I just said, “Well, I haven’t heard. I don’t know.” And he goes, “I know she’s seeing somebody. You’ve got to tell me who it is.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to get in the middle of any of that kind of stuff.” And Farley said, “Well, she may find somebody better looking than me, or she might find somebody richer than me, but she’s not going to find anybody funnier than me.” And what I couldn’t tell him was, he was wrong on all three counts. He had hit the hat trick of failure. Steve Martin was richer, better looking, and even funnier.

CHRIS ROCK,
Cast Member:

He was my man. I loved Chris. He was one of the funniest guys. Not competitive at all. We all knew he was funnier than us and it was totally acceptable. He would try to break me up on the air. He broke Spade up a lot. You have to watch the sketches.

Farley had no qualms running around naked. That wasn’t a big thing to him. I probably saw his dick more than his girlfriend did.

MOLLY SHANNON,
Cast Member:

I had some rituals before shows. Mostly I would pray. I’d say a little prayer. And Chris Farley did that too. I saw him once. It was so sweet. He’d kneel down and bless himself in his dressing room before every show. I peeked in one night and saw him, and I thought, “That’s sweet.” He was a very religious Catholic man. He was very Catholic. I was raised Catholic too. Lorne loves Irish Catholics. I don’t know why, but he really does seem to like Irish Catholics a lot.

FRED WOLF:

Farley once stuck his ass out the window of the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock and took a shit. Another time, in front of twenty or twenty-five people in a very crowded writers’ room — mixed company, women, men — Farley came in naked. He has his dick tucked between his legs and he was doing Jame Gumb from
Silence of the Lambs.
He took a golf club and shoved it about three inches up his ass, then pulled the golf club out and started licking it.

DAVID SPADE:

That Chippendales sketch where Patrick Swayze and Chris danced with their shirts off became pretty well known. It was early on, when we all thought you had to do whatever was asked of you. Chris took off his shirt then because he’s a fat guy and it is funny, and that was really part of the sketch. But I think later on he didn’t want to do that as much. Like most actresses — they’ll do the Cinemax movie, but then after that, they keep the shirt on.

KEVIN NEALON,
Cast Member:

Most of those guys who came in — Farley, Spade, Rock, and Sandler — were much younger than the rest of us. It was almost like they were our teenage sons. All their offices were clustered together way down the hall, and when you would go back there, the offices were messy, with
Playboy
magazines strung everywhere, and they’d be talking about what kind of action they got the night before with some model. But it was fun having them around.

Those guys probably knew Farley better than I did. He was always loud and acting up, and one time I caught his eye and said, “Take it down a notch.” So after that, if I’d look down at him, he’d go, “Take it down a notch.” I got to know his family; we had Mother’s Day specials two years in a row, and he brought on his mother and his family — all great people. I think Chris just wanted to make people laugh. He wanted to make sure that he was funny. He always felt he
had
to be funny — that was his torture.

AL FRANKEN,
Writer:

It got to be when cast members and new people came in, they sort of had this template to go by, which is do the show, become a star on the show, get movies, and become Eddie Murphy. And the problem was, many of the cast members that came in thought that would be their arc. And many of the people who came into the show thought it was sort of chapter two or chapter one in the incredible career of “Them.” Like, “This is Manifest Destiny. This is meant to happen. I am Eddie Murphy.”

And the worst of that was the attitude, “Get out of the way, old man,” to any of us who’d been there awhile, instead of, “I want to learn something.” Now Farley was not that way. Farley revered the show. And with anyone who had any contact with the old show, he just wanted to sit and listen.

JON LOVITZ,
Cast Member:

I was in California and Brad Grey calls me and said, “Lorne called and said they’re doing something on the show and it’s just a joke and they love you.” I said, “Oh. All right.” So I watched the show that night, and it’s a cold opening, and Lorne says, “You’re really leaving, huh?” And Dennis goes, “Yes.” And then Lorne says, “You’re not going to keep coming back like Lovitz are you? It’s pathetic.” I was like really hurt. I was like, “You asshole.”

And the audience didn’t laugh. It bombed. But I was really pissed. And I was like, “Fuck them, I’m not going back.” I thought it was really shitty. Because they kept asking me to come back. And then after that, they still asked me to come back! Lorne goes, “Oh, it’s just a joke.” I go, “Oh, what’s funny? It didn’t seem funny to me, and the audience didn’t laugh.” It was really mean-spirited.

Worried about losing cast members to the movies or prime-time television, Michaels overstocked the show and in the process proved that there can be too much of a good thing. A cast so large was bound to be fractious, with the competition for airtime fever-pitched. The
SNL
troupe of the early nineties tended to split along generational lines, with Sandler, Farley, and Rock — the new boys — pitted against veterans like Carvey, Hartman, Nealon, and Franken. Mike Myers sort of straddled the field, prepping for his own film career.

The show was turning another corner. Baby boomers who’d grown up with it were becoming less demographically desirable to advertisers. As the decade progressed, Michaels relied more and more on young, “hot” stars to host the show and lure younger audiences, knowing that viewers who’d been with
SNL
from the beginning might never have heard of them but that their kids — yes, now they had kids — probably had. It was a time of less than subtle humor but, often, huge laughs.

CHRIS ROCK:

I’ve been friends with Adam sixteen, seventeen years — since I started stand-up. I was a young comedian and he was a young comedian but also in college; he was going to NYU.

I was doing some movie,
Hangin’ with the Homeboys
, and they wanted to meet with me. And little-known fact: Lorne Michaels makes you wait two, three hours to see him. There’s many a funny comedian that couldn’t wait. None of them are very successful now that I know of. So I waited.

We auditioned the same night. There were all these great character guys ahead of us and we really felt inferior. We didn’t know why we were there. I didn’t even wait around to meet Lorne after the audition, because I knew I wasn’t going to get it. I guess Farley auditioned the same night too, but he auditioned at Second City. I got to audition, and then I stuck around and saw Adam’s audition. We passed, we got hired. And I remember years later I asked Lorne why he’d hired us — because I didn’t do any voices, anything particular that would help me on
SNL
— and Lorne said, “The reason I hired you guys was original thought.” He said, “Anybody can do impressions. Like, my uncle does impressions.” And I said, “Okay, good compliment.” And when I did casting for my show, I kept that in mind, the “original thought” thing.