Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (8 page)

“Well, the real reason was, I had to get out of the Valley. I’m not kidding, man, it was really getting hairy. My boyfriend, Brad, and I were just falling apart. We had this really nice relationship, we were going to get married and everything, and like, he installed stereo systems and customized fans, you know, and all he ever talked about was woofers and tweeters and push-pull rods, man, and it was really boring. It really grossed me out royal. And my relationship with his parents wasn’t too cool either, because I wasn’t Jewish, you know, and I, like, made a peach cobbler and I heard them say, ‘Well, look. The shiksa made us a Presbyterian pie….”

Bill Murray follows, introducing himself as Washington Redskin Dwayne Thomas and saying, “You know, professional football has been good to me.” He laments having been sentenced to “one-to-twenty in Texas for possession of herb,” then turns into interviewer “Jerry Aldini” and soon is doing an early version of Nick, the awful lounge singer, a character that helped establish him, after some early audience resistance, as a true star on
Saturday Night Live.
First he does a freewheeling version of the show tune “Hey There” from
The Pajama Game
: “Hey there, you with the starrrrrs in your eyes. Nobody told you what day it was, Nobody was surprised.” He pantomimes playing a cocktail piano, using the desk in front of him as a keyboard, threatening to sing and play “something by Bobby Vinton, something from his new ‘Polish Is Cool’ album….”

Gilda Radner, surprisingly, seems the least at ease in front of the camera. She giggles, looks off toward the wings where Lorne Michaels is standing. “I’m not going to talk about food,” Gilda says, “I’m not going to talk about guys…so I don’t have anything to say at all.” She rambles for a few seconds, then asks, “Wait — can we get an audience in here?” Aykroyd, just out of camera range, tries to help by asking such questions as what Gilda would do “if your period came on right now,” then pretends to be Peter Marshall, host of
The Hollywood Squares,
and poses a question to Gilda: “Is it true that women accelerate more than men on expressway ramps?” Gilda: “Only if they’re with a man.”

She offers to do her “only character, Colleen,” a clueless girl with the same goofy and faraway look no matter what the circumstances. Thus she looks exactly the same, blank and baffled, as she goes through a brief series of impressions: “This is Colleen at a Nureyev ballet…. This is Colleen going to an Irish festival…. This is Colleen having her first sexual experience.” All are the same.

Frustrated and restless, Gilda announces, “Lorne said if I just sat here and stared down the camera, it would take a lot of guts,” then asks plaintively, “Can I go now — back to Toronto?” Lorne, off-camera, shouts, “Gilda, that was great.”

Chevy Chase, in contrast to Gilda, looks supremely comfortable when he sits down in the chair and starts to talk: “You want me to do something here?” No member of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, perhaps ever, has been more at home and less inhibited on-camera, ironic considering that Chase originally wanted to be only a writer on the show.

Immediately, Chevy becomes the fatuous anchorman he would immortalize in the “Weekend Update” segment of
Saturday Night Live.
He is holding a few sheets of paper and reads from them — or perhaps simply recites the material from memory:

“Our final note concerns the birth of a baby sandpiper at the Washington Municipal Zoo this morning at 9:13. It’s the first such birth in captivity on record. The chick weighed in at just under fourteen grams, and it is said to resemble its mother quite closely.

“A final note of humor: the bird was stepped on and crushed to death by the baby hippo that was born on Wednesday.

“Said zookeeper John Pinkett: ‘Well, I guess I’ll have to pour kerosene on the mother and light it and hope for the best. Later, perhaps, we can take an electric cattle prod and drive it into the ears of the baby hippo. Or perhaps shove a couple of cherry bombs up its ass, light them, and hope for the best.’

“Well, that’s the news this Wednesday. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow” — basically the same ending that would be used for “Weekend Update” once the show premiered. Chevy is asked to hold up a few of Edie Baskin’s New York photographs so the camera can zoom in on them. Baskin’s pictures will be used for a montage under the opening credits of
Saturday Night Live.
Originally those credits featured only images of the city at night and no pictures of cast members.

Jane Curtin, up next, performs what seems for her unusually “sick” material, once she gets a mock commercial for “Jamitol” (Geritol, an iron supplement) out of the way. “In show business, I’ve had a fairly limited career,” she continues. “It’s hard to perform on stage in a wheel-chair. However, I entertain a lot of people at my parents’ family parties. Having a catheter, a lot of people think, is funny, and they like to see me dance. Thank you.”

A voice from the wings asks about what she does “in the privacy of your own home,” and Curtin replies, “That’s between me and my cat, isn’t it?” Murray steps into the frame and begins massaging her shoulders.

Garrett Morris — who, like Chase, signed on only to be a writer — materializes next. “As I have nothing prepared, I decided I might do some imitations,” he says. “The first imitation I will do is of James Mason: ‘This is James Mason speaking.’” Morris makes only the most minimal effort to sound anything like James Mason. “That’s James Mason. Okay, I’ll do another imitation. There’s a guy named Cross-eyed Jim that used to live on Federal Avenue in Marble City when I was a kid. Here is Cross-eyed Jim.” And he, of course, crosses his eyes. As a “general West Indian,” Morris talks about going to the second floor of Barney’s and buying clothes from the Johnny Carson Collection.

Aykroyd comes in to feed Morris straight lines, asking him about having spent ten minutes with an unnamed congressman. “He asked me for a joint,” Morris says, “and I didn’t have any on me. He usually gets a little high…. The indictments against him haven’t been proven yet, and I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Aykroyd, changing subjects: “You’re the man who saw the first mastodon come across the plains. Am I correct?”

Morris: “Yes, I did, I saw a mastodon. It wasn’t across the plains, though. It was in my backyard. And it was sort of noisy….It was three o’clock in the morning, man. I just got in at 2:45 and I needed some rest.” Told the mastodon left footprints fifteen feet wide, Morris says, “Jeez, that was a big mother.”

John Belushi’s turn before the camera that day was brief and very visual. And the instant Belushi sits down, he takes effortless command of the camera. He already has a compellingly “dangerous” look about him. “Okay,” he says, “we’re going to do some loosening up exercises.” He practices doing “takes” and “double takes” and then, as only Belushi could, some “work on the eyebrows.” He alternates left and right eyebrows, moving them up and down independently of each other in a series of eyebrow calisthenics.

He shifts gears. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the
Saturday Night
show. The show is live, the show is not on tape, so all the mistakes you —” He suddenly fakes a horrendous gagging sound, then regains his composure and continues: “So all the mistakes happening on this show are real. We don’t plan anything, because everything is real.” Now he breaks into a ghastly hacking cough, pretending to spit up into his hands.

“With tape you have the advantage of editing things that don’t work. With live television, anything goes.” He attempts to attach strips of tissue to his eyelids, using spit to hold them on. Someone calls for an imitation of Marlon Brando and Belushi does part of the taxicab scene from
On the Waterfront
: “Don’t you remember that night in the garden you came down and said, ‘Kid, it ain’t your night?’ Not my night! Charlie, it was you, Charlie.” He grabs more tissue, stuffs it in his cheeks, and does Brando in
The Godfather,
followed by a quick impression of Rod Steiger: “Teddy! Teddy! What’re you talking about?! What’re you talking ABOUT?! Don’t talk to me that WAY!”

Finally, the definitively eccentric comic and performance artist Andy Kaufman, who’ll appear on the
Saturday Night Live
premiere (lipsynching to the
Mighty Mouse
theme), sits in the chair looking incredibly young and bright-eyed, and simply recites the lyrics to “MacArthur Park” in a calm, conversational voice: “Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh, no.” He covers his eyes with his hands mournfully.

When he finishes, the voice of director Dave Wilson comes over a loudspeaker: “Andy, could you do that again, please?” “The same way?” “Exactly the same if you can.” And he does.

The tape ends with music director Howard Shore, very much the scruffy hippie, modeling a pimpish-looking outfit for Lorne, who directs his movements from the wings. The
Saturday Night Live
cast was on the brink of success, poised to revolutionize television, looking fresh, brash, and golden. The premiere was less than a month away — October 11, 1975. A date which will live in comedy.

BRAD GREY,
Manager:

Bernie was there for the first dress rehearsal. He looked out and he saw the band rehearsing. And it was getting close to starting time. So he turned to Lorne and he said, “Hey, Lorne, you know the band doesn’t have their tuxedos on yet. Better get them into wardrobe.” That always made me laugh, because it was so honest of Bernie. Tuxedos! And that’s sort of, I guess, the merging of two generations.

DICK EBERSOL:

Lorne’s telling me every day that Chevy’s got this great idea to open every show with a fall, and I am absolutely opposed. But Chevy was the only one who was funny and could write television for television.

We were reading scripts in those early days where people would have a three- or four-minute sketch take place on five sets, and it didn’t take a real scholar to know you couldn’t do that if we were going to do a live television show in a box the size of 8H.

DAVE WILSON:

Many of them had written for magazines or the
National Lampoon Radio Hour
or that kind of thing, so it wasn’t as if they were brand-new to writing, it’s just that they weren’t familiar with the medium of television. So of course we’d always go through things where you’d read their script and it says, “We start with a flooded studio.” And you’d say, “Well, you better rethink that.”

JANE CURTIN:

Before the show went on the air, we would all have to hang out on the seventeenth floor with the writers and pitch ideas and do all of that kind of stuff, and Lorne would call us all into his office for whatever reason, and he would always end up by telling us what “stars” we were. And I’m thinking, “Hey, we haven’t earned it yet,” not understanding the machine — the PR and all this stuff that was going to happen and that they were going to make happen. I think Lorne was trying to pump up the arrogance and the adrenaline in the room — which wasn’t hard — and I understand now that in order to do that kind of a show or any kind of a comedy show, you have to have arrogance and you have to have adrenaline. And by telling people they’re stars, maybe that’s one way of doing that.

But sadly, a couple of days later, I think some poor elevator operator was punched because he dared to ask somebody in the cast for an ID. I just kept fighting that kind of thing. I just kept thinking, “No no no no no, it’s just a TV show. It’ll be okay, and I’m fine.”

BILLY CRYSTAL,
Cast Member:

Three months before the show was supposed to debut, Lorne had found me in a club called Catch a Rising Star. I went, “This is a television producer?” He sounded like David Steinberg the comedian because he was from Canada. He was very appealing, he was very smart, and he was funny in a different way than I envisioned television producers to be. He asked me if I was interested in being a resident in the company. He felt I would do six appearances on the show, and then he saw me becoming a host of the show, among all the other hosts, in two years. They’d be grooming me to be one of the main guys. That’s how it came down prior to the show.

BUDDY MORRA,
Manager:

Billy turned down a Bill Cosby special, who was the hottest thing in the country at that time, to take
Saturday Night Live
, because they said, “If you do the Cosby show, we’re not interested in having you do this.” And so we opted to do
Saturday Night Live
. We had agreed in advance for Billy to do his special piece on the first show, and that the piece required a certain amount of time; it wouldn’t work in less time. So Billy was coming in every day from Long Island, and he just sat around all day long. They never spoke to him, they never got to him, they never said anything to him. He’d leave at the end of the day, after spending eight or nine hours waiting around, and then come back the next morning again. This went on for pretty much the entire week.

BILLY CRYSTAL:

Then we get to the Friday night. We had a run-through for a live audience and some NBC executives. Now my routine was an audience participation piece and it utilized Don Pardo and it was this African safari thing with sound effects. I played Victor Mature — it’s not going to sound funny — walking across the camp in Africa to knock the tarantula spider off Rita Hayworth’s chest. So that was the setup. Don Pardo, who we never saw on camera, had his hands in a big bowl of potato chips, and every time I took a step, Don would crunch the potato chips so it was like this whole sound effects thing. It was really funny on Friday night. And it ran six, six and a half minutes, because it took a long time to explain it. But there were laughs in the explanation and then the piece just sort of went on its own. And Friday night, it was the comedy highlight of the night, and I thought, “I’m in great shape here.” George Carlin’s hosting this new show and I knew everybody in the show and this is going to be sensational.