Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (74 page)

I think I don’t love New York. I’m from Philadelphia, I’m an East Coast person and I fit in peoplewise here, but I don’t know, it’s sad here. I feel like I’m always in a building. And I have that bipolar thing too, and I’m claustrophobic, so I always feel like just closed in. You don’t see daylight very much, and my office doesn’t have a window. You can get an office with a window, but then you have to share with somebody. It was really difficult. It was very, very emotional. But then Laraine gave me good advice. She said, “You know, Cheri, back then therapy wasn’t what it is today. Drugs were taken to deal with the pressure, but we were so young. And you didn’t think you were abusing it and you didn’t think you were taking it for the pressure. You were just partying. But when you party to the point you’re emaciated, that’s not good.” They partied hard back then. And she said, “I can’t imagine how you deal with the pressure.” And I told her I wasn’t dealing with it well for three years. There was no escape, so I was like crying all the time. I would go to bed in disappointment — so much was so very, very emotional. And then I realized it, “I need help with this.” And then — I started taking drugs. No, I’m kidding!

DARRELL HAMMOND:

Sometimes they don’t give me the assignment until Thursday or Friday, and there are times I can’t get the voice by Saturday. You can’t aspire to perfection with so little time. You’ve just got to hope that you have enough training and preparation so that when you do throw some stuff, like when I did Richard Dreyfuss a few years ago, I had done enough voices like his to pick him up fairly quickly, but that doesn’t always happen. I’ve done some crappy impressions, but usually when they’re not good Lorne will pull them.

In its earliest days, the show’s famous “home base” was occupied by a more eclectic array — Raquel Welch, Desi Arnaz, O. J. Simpson, Hugh Hefner, Cicely Tyson, Ralph Nader, Norman Lear, Anthony Perkins, and Miskel Spillman, a little old lady who won an “Anyone Can Host” contest. But still today there are surprises — political and sports figures one might not expect take their turn in the show’s one-of-a-kind spotlight, or at least make a cameo appearance. Like Robert De Niro popping up to gripe about the way he was impersonated on the show, or Janet Reno busting through a fake wall to make essentially the same complaint.

The best hosts — Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman — are invited back repeatedly. The worst are, properly enough, dissed and trashed behind their backs once they’ve gone home.

ELLEN DEGENERES,
Host:

I can honestly say hosting was probably one of the highlights of my life so far. It was so much fun. I’d never even been to the show, so I didn’t even understand the speed of it. When you’re watching at home, you don’t realize they had to get out of that outfit and into another outfit just during the commercial. So as soon as the camera goes off you’re just pulled and people are ripping your clothes off and putting on a different wig and a different outfit. That was another thing to get over too, because I’m the most modest person in the world. So to have people ripping my clothes off and stepping one leg up while someone’s putting a wig on and you’re half-naked in front of these people — that was a bold move to me.

MARCI KLEIN:

In terms of desirable hosts, we of course always want to get Tom Cruise. I’m always trying for him. Then there are the ones that the writers want, but I don’t know how to explain to them that the network might not understand. Like Harvey Keitel, one of my, I thought, really good bookings. But we had to fight for Harvey. To me it’s important to have funny shows so that people hear that the shows are funny and then you’ll get ratings. It’s a longer way to getting a rating, but then there are times where you do a Britney Spears because you know it’s going to work. And it gets a big rating and she was really good at it.

I show Lorne the list, but it never gets circulated. No one sees it but him. I’ll talk to Jim Downey sometimes. We would have meetings — me, Lorne, Jim. We have meetings now and it’s me, Lorne, Steve; it’s not that I’m excluding anybody, but too many opinions get clouded. I know what they want, I know what Lorne wants, I know what the network wants, I know what I want, I know what the viewer wants. My job is to present the best of what I can. You know, hopefully, I don’t want to spend three weeks on one person. I want to say, “Let’s make an offer.” Cuba Gooding Jr. is a good example of somebody where I went and I saw
Jerry Maguire
and I came back and I said to Lorne, “I know no one knows who this guy is, but I’m telling you he is going to be a big star from this.”

Gary Oldman, who would be my dream host personally, was booked, and on a Thursday night before the Monday that he was supposed to come in, something happened and he had to drop out. I think Tom Hanks came in and really saved us on that one. Gary Sinise was another one. I was so excited. It’s always the ones you’re like really excited about that drop out. You call in Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, John Goodman; John’s done it when someone has fallen out. I mean, this is a major thing to ask somebody — “Hey, can you show up in two days?” — when they’re not prepared.

No one has ever dropped out during the week of the show, no, because the minute you get here it’s too much fun. I mean, honest to God, they are treated so well. When Jackie Chan got here, he said, “I want to get on the plane and go home.” And I went, “Ha ha ha.” I said, “I promise you on Saturday night at the party, you will be telling me you want to do this again next year.” He goes, “Never,” but I was right. Some of them freak out when they get here on Monday, but by Saturday they all feel like it’s one of the most fun things they’ve ever done.

You know that nightmare when you didn’t study for the exam or you’re naked onstage or something? I knew I was really producing the show when I started having dreams about hosts and musical guests not being there. Sometimes I’ll be talking to Lorne and I’ll go, “How are you not nervous?” I absorb. One host in particular was really nervous. I almost threw up during the monologue because I was so nervous for him.

Gwyneth Paltrow gets more people coming up to her saying, “You were so funny when you hosted
Saturday Night Live
” than there are saying, “You were amazing in
Shakespeare in Love
and congratulations on your Oscar.” People recognize when people are good.

GWYNETH PALTROW,
Host:

For someone like me, who’s usually relegated to corsets and British accents, it’s really fun to get to do something like hosting. It’s great fun for me to play a white girl who wants to talk like a ghetto chick. I never get to do stuff like that otherwise.

The first time I hosted, I felt incredibly nervous — not only about how it would come off but if I would make it through the night, because I adrenalize so much in those situations. When I was walking out to do the monologue, I couldn’t feel my hands and feet. But the last time I hosted, I wasn’t nervous. I really knew what to expect, and I just felt very free and very lucky to have an opportunity to be ridiculous. I’ve had experiences where I’ve been under extreme pressure, an awards show or something like that, but it’s very finite. This whole experience lasts for an hour and a half of live television. When you do a play, there’s three hundred people sitting there. Not millions.

My mom hosted once in the eighties. She just told me, “It’s going to be great,” as opposed to kind of chronicling what it was going to be like. She said, “Make sure you do this kind of accent,” that type of stuff, and, “Make sure they stretch you as much as possible and do things that you never get to do ordinarily,” because this is such a great chance to do that.

In one sketch I played Sharon Stone and got in all kinds of trouble. She was very offended by it. She kind of talked about it a lot in the press and stuff. I think she was very unhappy with it and she felt it was mean-spirited. But then she proceeded to go on TV and stuff and say I was disrespecting all the women that came before me, and stuff like that. She waged a press campaign against me. I look at it like it’s a rite of passage to be lampooned on that show. If people are making fun of you on that show, that means you’ve made it and you’re in the cultural lexicon, and it’s flattering. I suppose some people are less game for that sort of thing.

ELLEN DEGENERES:

To be honest, there was a time that I was scared of them, because as you know everybody is fodder. They’d made fun of me, especially the whole situation when I met Anne Heche, that whole situation was on a lot. I’m way too sensitive and my feelings got hurt and it was hard. Now I have perspective on it, and they were right to do so, you know?

CAMERON DIAZ,
Host:

I don’t like making fun of other people. I like making fun of myself. I really don’t like playing other celebrities and making fun of them. This program is about current events and parodies, which are fun, but I don’t want to participate as the person who’s doing a parody of a person who’s possibly at that moment being humiliated publicly.

GWYNETH PALTROW:

The nicest thing Lorne ever said to me was after the first time I hosted. There was a sketch at the very end of the show where I was supposed to say, “I’m Gwyneth Paltrow and you may know me from
Emma
and all this stuff but what I really like is hard-core porn.” And the sketch at dress was like a minute and thirty seconds, and he came up to me and said, “We’re unfortunately going to have to cut it out of the live show. I don’t want to — I love this thing — but we’re going to have to cut it because it’s thirty seconds too long. We’re over.” And I said, “I can do it, I’ll shave thirty seconds off.” And he was like, “Are you sure?” and I said, “Definitely.” And so I did it and I shaved exactly thirty seconds off, and he came up to me after and he said, “No one has ever been able to do that except” — I think it was Bill Murray and someone else — “and no girl, I mean no woman.” So I felt very good about myself.

LISA KUDROW,
Host:

When I hosted, I wasn’t really looking at it like, “Wow, I wanted to be part of the cast of this show and I didn’t get to do it, and now I’m hosting. Yay for me.” It didn’t feel like that, because it’s too terrifying to host. It’s this speeding train, and you feel like there’s no choice but to smash into the brick wall.

I didn’t feel confident enough to impose my own taste on the sketches. I know some people do, and they are pretty firm with Lorne Michaels and the writers about, “No, this one’s no good, I don’t want to do that sketch, and you’ve got to do that sketch.” I didn’t feel right about that, because I thought, “Lorne Michaels has been doing this for fifteen years and who am I to say that sketch won’t work? He thinks it will work.” And I deferred a lot.

Thursday or Friday, you’re feeling, “No good can come of this! It’s not possible this is going to work out.” But on Saturday night, when you’re behind that door, about to be introduced, you have to gear up, focus, and commit to, “It’s going to be just great. It’s going to be okay.” I’d been told a lot of hosts end up in tears before the show starts. I thought, “Well, at least I’m not crying. It’s not
that
bad. So I’m going to be okay.”

At Groundlings I had done a lot of live work. It did have that great feeling of you get to own the material when it’s live. It’s between you and the audience. Unless your mind starts wandering to, “When this is over, then I have to run over there and change into something else.” That’s when you’re in trouble, because you can’t then be dealing with the task at hand.

WILL FERRELL:

The worst host was Chevy Chase. He was here the first year that we were here, and then he came back the next year and that was the kicker, the following year. It started right from the Monday pitch; you could just tell something was up. I don’t know if he was on something or what, if he took too many back pills that day or something, but he was just kind of going around the room and systematically riffing. First it was on the guys, playfully making fun, until, when he got to one of our female writers, he made some reference like, “Maybe you can give me a hand job later.” And I’ve never seen Lorne more embarrassed and red.

In hindsight, I wish we’d all gotten up and walked out of the room. It was just bad news. I will have to say Chevy’s been nothing but nice to me personally, and I think he thinks I’m funny, so I’m cool with him, but yeah, he’s been quote-unquote the roughest host. A little snobbish, and he’d yell at someone down the hallway — scream and yell — and you would look at him, and he’d see you were looking at him and he would smile like, “I’m just joking.” We’d be like, “No, I don’t think you are.”

The other kind of classic one — and he wasn’t so much abusive, but he was just all over the place — was Tom Arnold. Even Lorne was like, “This will be a bad show, this will be a bad week,” and sure enough, it was like, “Oh, this guy is horrible.” Once again, though, he wasn’t mean. I think you’ll find a consensus on the Chevy Chase thing.

DAN AYKROYD,
Cast Member:

You know, it’s a funny kind of little I-don’t-know-what, but I don’t want to host. I’m a superstitious guy, like I have these little things in life — I won’t fly on the thirteenth, I don’t go under ladders, and if a black cat crosses my path, I’ll chase it with a white spray gun or something. And I just really actually would prefer to be remembered as a cast member, formerly, a Not Ready for Prime Time Player. I came in and did Dole, I did Haig, I did the thing with John Goodman when we were doing the Blues Brothers revival. I’ll sort of fill in and play music and be a part of the show, but I just want to be remembered as a cast member, not host. I know it’s kind of strange. If they need me, we’ll do the ghost of Nixon haunting Bush, or Dole anytime you want, or Carter or a Conehead. I’ll come back and help, but I just kind of want to be remembered as a cast member, that’s all.