Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (84 page)

If I had to make only one deal in my life with the devil or Satan, I’d send Lorne. Because after the conversation was over, they would give him what he wanted. He is the most articulate guy in the world. He doesn’t always know if he’s right or wrong, but he always makes it sound great.

CHRIS ROCK,
Cast Member:

How can anyone hate the guy? A lot of people have problems with Lorne. A lot of people I’ve met from the show come from these great backgrounds, and they’re not used to working for people. And you know he hired you to work
for
him, there’s no working
with.
You’re only working
with
if you count the money at the end of the night. Otherwise you’re working
for
. And when you’re working for somebody, you’re going to have to do shit you don’t want to do. And sometimes they’re not going to talk to you. And that’s what working for people is.

BOB TISCHLER,
Writer:

I don’t have a whole lot of respect for Lorne’s opinion. To me, it was better if Bill Murray said he liked a sketch. I just don’t think Lorne is creatively terrific. I don’t know him that well, but whenever I had a meeting with him, I’ve walked out of the room going, “I don’t even know what the fuck just went on.” I don’t hold him in the same regard that a lot of people do. I was just never very impressed with him. I thought he spent more time talking about theories of comedy, things that were very nonsubstantive in terms of what we had to do.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY,
Cast Member:

I was down in Florida working on the movie
Caddyshack
with Harold Ramis and I came back a little late. As soon as I arrived, my brother Bill asked me, “Have you seen Lorne yet?” I said, “No, I haven’t seen him.” He says, “Don’t you realize you’re supposed to go kiss the Pope’s ring?”

LILY TOMLIN,
Host:

I don’t really want to say a lot about Lorne. I don’t think he could accomplish what he has accomplished if he wasn’t ambitious. Also he’s much more astute politically than someone like me. He would know who to have lunch with. It would never occur to me to have lunch with somebody, or something like that. I’ve never understood about functioning in the system.

CRAIG KELLEM,
Associate Producer:

My theory about Lorne is that he is one of these guys whose mother told him every day of his life when he was a kid that he was the most wonderful person in the world and he could do no wrong. Because Lorne just believed in what he was doing, and nobody was going to get in his way. He was determined to get what he wanted, to accomplish what he wanted, and do it the way that he wanted it. If something worried him, he wasn’t overt about it. He just figured out what he wanted to do and somehow his willpower outlasted everybody else’s resistance.

JANEANE GAROFALO,
Cast Member:

My secret assumption about Lorne is that he may suffer from such a deep case of self-loathing that if you agree to be on his show and you are nice to him, he cannot respect you. So therefore you are left to wallow in your own despair. He was always very nice to me, but I just presumed that he had to have been aware that the environment was toxic. He had to know that there were so many unhappy people, yet as far as I know, he was never concerned. He rules on the theory of a house divided is a house that’s more easily controlled.

ALEC BALDWIN,
Host:

Lorne is a good friend of mine. I have a lot of respect for him and I admire what he’s done and continued to do, and not just because of the longevity. I still think the show from time to time is really funny. Lorne is the glue that holds it together — or doesn’t hold it together, as the case may be, because he can be very laissez-faire about how he conducts the whole thing. He lets the whole show kind of sort itself out, the people’s wants and desires and egos and everything. Because of my fondness for Lorne and my being around the show so much, I would sometimes look at the people and want to say to them: “There’s a very good chance that it’s never going to get any better for you than this.”

CHRIS ELLIOTT,
Cast Member:

When people talk about Lorne, “pompous” and “self-centered” usually come up. A lot of people say he enjoys hearing himself talk, and I’m not necessarily saying that in a bad way, because to me that’s who he is. It never bugged me. It was always kind of entertaining. I always enjoyed those Monday evening dinners with Lorne and the host. They were always fun. And if you got Lorne and Steve Martin together, the two of them would really go off.

TOM HANKS,
Host:

I think he’s one of the most mesmerizing conversationalists you’ll ever meet. He is a fabulous person to sit down and have a dinner conversation with, because it just never stops. Sometimes it’s flashy like, “Oh, you know, Mick came over last night, and Mick and I…” You know, “Mick” came by. “I’m going to guess that’s Mick Jagger, right?” “Oh, understood.” But you know, he’s also got kids, he’s also got the same vision of the business I think that we all have, that we respond to excellence. You know how a lot of times you’ll meet royalty and they’re kind of boring? He’s not. He’s this kind of royalty that ends up being convivial and intelligent and, in some ways, inclusive, even though he has an inclination to tell the same story over and over again if you haven’t seen him for a few years. But he’s magnificent, well-read, hip company to keep.

BILL MURRAY,
Cast Member:

I had a different relationship with Lorne than the others, I think. I was adopted. You can love an adopted kid, but there’s still something different.

Lorne’s social life is different than mine. He travels in a more rarefied circle than mine. He travels the world. He sees it from a different point of view. Part of it’s because he’s an alien, you know — a Canadian. They have sort of like British echoes that they have to fulfill. They have to go to Wimbledon and they have to do stuff like that that we Americans don’t really feel anything about.

When I hosted the show a couple years ago, I remember just turning to Lorne and saying, “God, you really learned how to do this.” He was really good at it, much better than I knew or appreciated at the time. I think he’s better now than he was in the old days. He used to seem sort of arbitrary sometimes, but he really did learn how to do it. I think given the firepower of that group in the first couple of years, there were a couple people besides him that could have done it.

But he fought the great fights; he really was good at that. He fought the fights against the network. He fought the fights for the best crew. He got the network off our backs, he put us on a different floor, he kept us away from everybody, he gave us the independence that we needed so we didn’t feel like we were under a microscope. And it worked. He made great choices. And now just in terms of producing a TV show, he’s really good at it.

CANDICE BERGEN:

Well, he’s an extraordinarily good friend. He’s a wonderful storyteller and he loves to talk. You’d think he wouldn’t have time to pay attention to you, but he pays real attention and he’s incredibly generous as a friend. And very loyal. He’s so smart and perceptive about people; he just gets people so quickly and he’s so astute in what he picks up about them. He’s amazingly measured and wonderfully witty. I love hearing Lorne’s point of view on everything, basically, because I just think what he has to say is so worth hearing. Lorne is only a force for good.

I loved Lorne immediately, as soon as I met him, and he’s just one of the people that really matters in my life, and in hundreds of people’s lives. When my husband died and there was a tribute for him, without even asking, Lorne had it filmed and had videotapes made. And it was the kind of thing he would do and never even refer to it.

STEVE MARTIN,
Host:

I think I understand him. I never found him inscrutable. I hear it sometimes said about myself. When you’re dealing with all different kinds of people all day, and everyone has a goal toward you, a lot of times you don’t fulfill their goal, and then they think, “Oh, uncommunicative,” when really it’s just that there’s no time to fill everyone’s goal. Lorne hasn’t changed that much. He’s Lorne. He’s always been a talker, always been kind of wise, always had an overview of how things work.

GWYNETH PALTROW,
Host:

When I first met him, I was very intimidated by him. I’d never met such a Waspy-seeming Jew in my life. And I was like, where’s the “in,” you know? I didn’t get how to access him at all and I found him very intimidating. And then I sort of feel like I broke through and didn’t feel intimidated, and now it’s easy to be around him. I am very fond of him. I think he’s very smart and a very nice guy, and such a fan of comedy and talent. He’s really an amazing person.

The most interesting thing is to kind of be around people like Will Ferrell who talk about Lorne. He carries such weight for all these guys. And they sort of talk about him with love and fear, it’s like he stays with them in an extraordinary way. They tell stories of him being very encouraging while also kind of not letting them get a big head about where they are, kind of being discouraging at times in his effort to maintain the hierarchy there. And they’re always imitating him, constantly. Everyone imitates Lorne.

GARRETT MORRIS,
Cast Member:

There’s this commercial with a guy sitting on top of a John Deere machine and the guy says, “How long does a John Deere last?” You know, they’re like a Maytag, nobody ever goes to repair these mother-fuckers, right? That commercial has always reminded me of Lorne. Nobody ever had to call the repairman on him.

I was lucky to work for a man like Lorne, who was a great guy and a genius. Two or three times I figured I should’ve been fired. It wasn’t that he was soft, he just dealt with his people a certain way. He knew I was totally dysfunctional. He accepted the responsibility of hiring me, whatever I was. But if you did something wrong he would tell you about it. He would cut me to pieces. It wouldn’t take him long to cut you down either — about a minute and a half and I was crawling back to the dressing room. Lorne dug me with all of my flaws, I dig him with all of his. I’m still a Lorne Michaels man.

TOM SCHILLER,
Writer:

I don’t hold anything against Lorne at all. I think he’s a shrewd businessman. He realized his dream. He has the power to galvanize people around him who can help him realize his dream, he can make you very excited about the possibilities of exploring your own creativity, and he can get you going. He’s good at that.

I was friends with him for a while, but I haven’t spoken to him in years. I don’t think anyone can get really, totally close to him.

PAUL SHAFFER,
Musician, Performer:

I don’t know if Lorne was standoffish. He was very good to me in that he let me participate in anything I wanted to. I could be right in there with him and Paul Simon and his inner circle anytime I wanted, and I was just the piano player. I was very impressed with that. So though I can’t say I was tight with him, he was really, really good to me by including me in the early days of the show.

CARRIE FISHER,
Host:

Lorne was on my honeymoon, so by all rights I should know Lorne very, very well. He was always like Big Daddy, giving his little comedy treatises and lectures and explaining things to you about comedy. I was really young and I thought I had quite a bit to catch up on. I actually don’t know that I did, but that was the feeling I had, because most people were older than I was.

Lorne talks a lot. He’s an expert. He liked to warm to his topic. It used to be me and Paul and Lorne and his wife Susan in St. Bart’s. He was a little bit dignified, which was funny in combination with Paul’s a lot of bit dignified. But they are very close friends. They’ve been the closest of friends for, my God, thirty years. I liked Lorne because Lorne was much more social than Paul might be. He wanted to stay up and talk, and he was extremely social and he would have people over, and I had grown up that way. It was the way I liked to live. Paul liked to dip into it but also liked to leave and go back and work. He had a more solitary profession.

CONAN O’BRIEN,
Writer:

Robert Smigel and I were working on this silly pilot for Lorne called “Lookwell,” and one night he said, “Let’s have dinner and talk it over.” So we go to the restaurant and Lorne’s there and he’s eating a bread stick. And we sit down and he says, “Some friends are going to join us,” and I said, “Fine.” And we’re sitting there for five minutes, and all of a sudden I hear over my shoulder, “What’s goin’ on?” And I turn around, and it’s Paul McCartney and his wife, Linda! And they come over and sit down!

Now if you asked me who I would most want to meet in the world, it’s like — well, John Lennon’s dead, so I guess Paul McCartney, you know? And now he’s sitting right there! So I’m trying to recover while they sit down, and Lorne is gesturing with this bread stick and he goes like, “We’ve been talking about a TV pilot. Conan, tell them what it’s about.” And my mind is just frozen. I’ve just suddenly been handed this ball and I’m completely frozen. Lorne’s eating a bread stick and I’m thinking, “Why do I have to talk?”