Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (6 page)

John was a kid out of Chicago, the Chicago Second City troupe, and I was out of the Second City in Toronto. I came from the capital city of Ottawa, the child of two government workers; his father ran a restaurant, was in private business. But we grew up loving the same things:
The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits
, old black-and-white TV. When we first came up with the Blues Brothers, that was prior to
SNL
. John came up to Toronto to recruit for the
National Lampoon Radio Hour;
that’s when I first met him. He managed to get Gilda to come down to New York to work with him. I had this gig on a kids’ TV show at four in the afternoon, I had my job at Second City, I did radio and television commercials, and I had my speakeasy bar, which was all cash, no tax. So I was flush. I had rockets going everywhere. I was making more money than the prime minister of Canada. I had a car, a bike, an apartment in the city, my tent at the farm. I was living a beautiful life up there. There was no way I wanted to go to the States.

JUDITH BELUSHI,
Writer:

In John’s first interview with Lorne, one of the first things he said was, “My television has spit all over it.” That’s how he felt about television. He was asked to do a few television things. He was offered a guest shot on
Mary Tyler Moore
, which everyone thought could easily turn into a character role. And it was kind of a big deal to say no. He even liked Mary Tyler Moore. But he needed to be political and outrageous.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I had worked in television for eight years, so I was bored with people who go, “I don’t do television.” I had no patience for it, for people putting it down. They say, “I’m not doing television,” and then I go, “Well, then, there’s no point to us talking.” I told John, “I hear what you’re doing is great, but I don’t want you to have to do something that you don’t want to do.” My instinct was that he was going to be trouble.

JUDITH BELUSHI:

John went to talk to Lorne because, he said, “Well, if he’s hiring O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts and Gilda” — they were people John liked working with, and so he figured the show was going to be something different.

ANNE BEATTS:

They had been paying us the same amount, which was a big $750 a week. You can imagine, if we were happy to accept free restaurant meals from the
Village Voice
, $750 a week represented a considerable sum to us in those days. I mean, our rent was $675 a month, which everyone thought was just horrendously high for what Belushi called “the Winter Palace” on Sixteenth Street.

And then NBC told me, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be paying you as much as Michael. We’ve been paying you $750 a week, but that’s a mistake. And we want the money back.” They said it had been a bookkeeping error. And I basically said, “Go fuck yourself.” You know, “The money’s gone and you’re not getting it back. Furthermore, you better start paying
me
$750 a week.” Why shouldn’t I make the same as him? I don’t know. Because he had more credits or something. Or because he had a penis.

DICK EBERSOL:

Some of the auditions took place in a Steinway rehearsal hall on West Fifty-seventh Street. When we came back over to 30 Rock, even after John’s incredible audition, Lorne was really troubled about how one could discipline him. John was always the best person available in New York, bar none. But he always made it perfectly clear that he thought television was shit. Everything about television was shit. And yet he kept showing up for all these meetings and auditions. And Lorne was very worried about it. Finally, on the day the decision was made, the three of us — Michael, Anne Beatts, and I — really argued for John in a big way. And I think Lorne said at the time, the thing that finally turned his mind was I said I would take responsibility for him. I made a vow to Lorne that if he’s the nightmare some people think he’ll be, I’ll take care of him. I’ll be the minder of Belushi — which led to some awfully fun stuff for me, including him almost burning my house down. He did the same thing to Lorne’s place in New York.

JUDITH BELUSHI:

Just before John and I were married, I kicked him out of the house for this or that, and he went and stayed at Lorne’s place. He fell asleep with a cigarette going, and the mattress caught on fire. He didn’t burn the whole place down, but I’m sure it caused some damage. Lorne called me afterward and said, “Can I send him home now?”

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

I went down there after the fire, and there were odors I had never smelled before in my life. I mean, it was terrible. I was an old guy. I was used to comedians in tuxedos and ties.

CHEVY CHASE:

John was wonderful. He was trouble later on for me. Jesus, oh God, was he trouble.

GARRETT MORRIS,
Cast Member:

I’d been a licensed schoolteacher, taught two years at PS 71 in New York plus five years at the projects with drug-addicted kids. And you know what, I hadn’t worked in like a fucking year and a half. I’d done
Cooley High
and that was it. I left the school system to go back into a thing called
Hallelujah Baby.
My license had even expired.

I didn’t have a job. I was starving. So Lorne offered me a job. I won’t tell you how much it was, but it was good money.

LARAINE NEWMAN,
Cast Member:

I worked for Lorne the first time on a Lily Tomlin special. He had come to see me when we had just formed the Groundlings and we had our theater over on Oxford and Santa Monica. It was just the armpit of Hollywood, and he came to see the show. I was doing my characters and my monologues. They really were looking for men for the Lily Tomlin special, they didn’t need any more women. But they ended up hiring me. And that was just thrilling. I was twenty-two.

The following year, Lorne told me he had been approached to do a weekend replacement show for
The Tonight Show
and said it would be a cross between
Monty Python
and
60 Minutes.
And I thought, “I’d watch that,” you know. It was a big break and I thought, “This’ll be great.”

JANE CURTIN,
Cast Member:

John and I were the last two people hired, and John was hired about a week after me, so I didn’t have any idea of what was going on there. But I knew John, because John and I were also auditioning for the Howard Cosell show. So I was working with John in those auditions too. He was much sweeter back then, I think, because he couldn’t afford the drugs. He was more in control. He was accessible. I actually liked him when we were working on the Cosell show auditions. I thought he was a lot of fun, and I thought he was very talented. And then when he got hired by
Saturday Night
, I thought it was a very good idea.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Gilda and John and Danny had known each other from before. Danny and I had known each other because when I came down, I brought him down from Canada. Gilda and I went back forever. And so you had Laraine, who I brought from L.A., Jane Curtin, who we kind of heard about, and the girl we were going to choose, this girl named Mimi Kennedy. But Gilda was worried that they were too similar.

GARRETT MORRIS:

The way I got on the show as an actor is that a couple people on the writing staff were trying to get rid of me as a writer. Mind you, I had two plays that had been produced in New York City. In fact, New York commissioned a play from your boy, okay, and then I wrote another play, which was produced in New York and in L.A. I’m a playwright, so I was having trouble getting my stuff down to a minute or a minute and a half, to fit into some sketch.

The first three months or so, a guy there stole an idea and then added a little something to it, and he didn’t even give me credit for cowriting. This guy stole from me and then told Lorne I couldn’t write. Lorne’s response was even-tempered. He wasn’t necessarily stroking me like I was a pet, but he was fair. When the challenge came to get rid of me as a writer, Lorne let me audition for the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. He did not fire me. And to this day, I am thankful for that. So I got with the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and the look on that guy’s face for the next four years was the only thing that saved me from jumping on him.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

Lorne really stuck to his guns at the very beginning. He told the network, “I must have seventeen shows. Give the show time to grow.” They thought we were insane. And maybe we were. But it wasn’t until the tenth show that they really hit their stride. Lorne was this great young writer who had this vision of this type of show. He was also a good producer, but everybody forgets what a great writer he was, and certainly a great editor. He was like a conduit for all the comedy brains at the time. He was just “The Guy.”

JOHN LANDIS,
Film Director:

This is all hindsight, okay? I don’t want to take anything away from Lorne, but he was in the right place at the right time. There were comedy movements going on everywhere. In England you had the Pythons, in San Francisco you had the Committee, in Chicago you had Second City, and then in New York — starting in Boston but then moving to New York — you had the National Lampoon Show. If you look at
Saturday Night Live
’s cast for the first three or four years, you’ll see they were all either Lampoon or Second City. He cherry-picked people of great skill and talent that had been trained and gotten their chops.

BARBARA GALLAGHER,
Associate Producer:

Lorne was very shy, very funny, kind of quiet. We were exactly the same age. He called me and said that Dick Ebersol and he were going to do a show. It sounded like a “Look, we’ve got a barn, we’re going to put on a show” kind of thing. And because I’d had live TV experience by working on the
Ed Sullivan Show
, Lorne wanted me to come and write and be part of the team. I didn’t want to go back to New York, and I didn’t want to be a writer, so Lorne said, “How about ‘creative associate producer’? I just like the fact you’ve been on a live show.” So I said okay. I went back to New York in June of 1975.

I didn’t have a clue what the show was going to be. It just sounded fun and kind of groundbreaking.

EUGENE LEE,
Set Designer:

I can remember Lorne — he would
not
remember — saying to me, “God, this is going to be so great! We all get to just hang out in New York together.” I was living on a sailboat in Rhode Island, working with what was then called the Trinity Square Repertory Company — where I still work — and someone called my boat about this Canadian producer doing a comedy-variety show. They wanted to know if we — my wife, Franne, a costume designer, and I — would be interested in talking. He was at the Plaza, we could call and make an appointment. Well, why not?

Franne and I both came in to see Lorne. We brought along, as designers do, a few things to show him what we did. He didn’t seem that interested. I don’t think he ever looked at any of them.

ALAN ZWEIBEL,
Writer:

In 1975 I’m this Jewish guy slicing God-knows-what at a deli in Queens and selling jokes to these Catskill comics for seven dollars a joke. At night I would go on at Catch a Rising Star. I had taken all the jokes that the Borscht Belt comedians wouldn’t buy from me because they said the stuff was too risqué for their crowd and made them into a stand-up act for myself, hoping that somebody would come in, like the material, and give me a job in television.

Everybody hung out at Catch a Rising Star and the Improv in those days. And I’d just met Billy Crystal, who was starting out the same way. He lived on Long Island, three towns over from where I was living with my parents; he was married and had a kid already. We would carpool into the city every night. One night about four months into this horror show, it’s about one in the morning and I’m having trouble making these six drunks from Des Moines laugh, and I get off the stage sweating like a pig and I go over to the bar, and I’m waiting for Billy to tell his jokes so he can drive me home to Long Island. And this guy sits down next to me and just stares at me. Stares at me. And I look over — “What?” And he just looks at me and he goes, “You know, you’re the worst comedian I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I went, “Yeah, I know.”

I said that I wanted to have a wife and kids someday but they’d starve if something else didn’t happen soon. He said, “Your material’s not bad. Did you write it?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Can I see more?” And I said, “You bet.” I didn’t even ask who he was; I mean, I would have shown it to a gardener at this point.

But it was Lorne, and he was combing the clubs looking for writers and actors for this new show. So I went back to Long Island and I stayed up for two days straight and I typed up what I thought were eleven hundred of my best jokes, jokes that I wrote for the Borscht Belt comics, jokes that I practiced writing for other comics, jokes I heard in third grade — I mean, I just went nuts. And so I took my phone book full of jokes and went into the city for my interview with Lorne.

Oh, but first I called Billy Crystal, because he had been talking to Lorne about him being a part of the show from the beginning, either as a cast member or some sort of rotating player. So I said, “Look, I’m supposed to meet with this guy Lorne, can you tell me anything about him?” So Billy told me he used to submit jokes to Woody Allen, he’s produced a
Monty Python
special, and the new show is going to have these little films by Albert Brooks. Oh, and he hates mimes. Lorne hates mimes. So I said fine, I went over to the Plaza Hotel and met with Lorne.