Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (87 page)

Lorne can be stingy with praise, but I think you have to be in that environment. They’re writing so much each week and the turnover is so fast, you don’t want people resting on their laurels and thinking, “Oh, I’m funny, Lorne thinks I’m funny,” and then, “Anything I write is funny and good.” I think it’s very important in terms of keeping the show fresh and edgy and funny and young that nobody relaxes. So I think it’s Lorne’s job to keep them on their toes.

Some people are able to make it and go on to other things, some people can’t, and some people end up killing themselves.

ROBERT SMIGEL,
Writer:

After my first season I thought I was going to be fired, because Franken said, “Well, I know it’s not looking good. I mean, you did great, but it’s going to be hard.” So I went back to Chicago that summer to work on a stage show. I was really expecting to be fired, and then Lorne brought me in days before the new season and just interviewed me. He asked, “What was your favorite thing you did last season?” It was a very odd kind of short interview. “All right, well, we’re just figuring things out.” I’d flown from Chicago to talk to him and then all he said was, “I’ll let you know.” I flew back to Chicago and got another call from him, and he said, “I don’t know, you didn’t write for the women much.” I said, “Well, you know, I just did the best I could, I thought I wrote a lot of good things.” “Well, you wrote good showbiz things, but you gave some of the actors a hard time.” So he was saying these things and then said, “Okay, get on a plane, come tomorrow.” It was so weird.

People get all paranoid about him unless they know him, and as I got to know him over the years, he’s a pretty real person and he really is in a very difficult situation. Whether he likes the situation and likes the grief that comes with it, I don’t know. It’s a very difficult setup here. Everybody’s pitted against each other. People have egos and people are insecure and it’s a formula for paranoia. When I was producing the Dana Carvey show, I actually got to see some things from the perspective of being in charge, and I called Lorne and said, “I apologize for ever not understanding what your job is.”

RACHEL DRATCH,
Cast Member:

I never get feedback from Lorne. You always get your notes from some middleman, like, “Lorne wants you to pick up the pace here,” or whatever. Sometimes after the show if you did a scene that went really well he’ll say something, but he never gets specific like, “Oh my God, when you said that line it cracked me up!” You just have to be able to do without stuff like that.

CHERI OTERI,
Cast Member:

I don’t think you ever really know where you stand with Lorne, and I think that’s frustrating, because it’s almost like a family, even with its dysfunction, because you want to please him. I always say, “Did Lorne laugh under the bleachers?” I don’t have much dialogue with him at all. You live for him to say just once, “Good job.” That’s the hardest thing, is not having the dialogue that I feel like you should have with your boss.

If you want to see him, he’ll see you eventually. But sometimes I think you wish that he would offer things to you. You want a little guidance. But he’s not that way. And in a way it’s good, because he lets you go and you’re very free to do whatever is instinctually there. And the other cool thing is, sometimes they’ll say, “He doesn’t want you to do that,” and I’ll go in and I’ll say, “I’ve got to do that, that’s important,” and he’ll say, “Okay.” He really trusts our instincts, the performers. I think he’s very respectful of what our instincts are.

One time I came back from the summer and he said, “I’d embrace you, but I think I might be coming down with a cold.” And I was like, “It’s okay, hug me anyway.” But I’ll go up and I will hug him sometimes and I will kiss him whether he likes it or not, because I feel it. But it’s hard when you don’t get it back. I understand people who aren’t comfortable with stuff like that. They can just give so much. And I guess he’s one of those people. He can just give so much, but when you’re working for him you really go like, “Anything??? Oh,
nothing
, huh?” Like, “Say ‘good show’ once. Just say it once.” You know? Nothing. And it’s like you feel starved sometimes. But then you get used to it, I guess. It’s fuckin’ crazy, it really is.

CAROL LEIFER:

Lorne and I had such a strange relationship. I don’t know what possessed me, but near the end of the season I saw him walking down the hall to go to the elevator, and I hid around the corner, and when he came around the corner I just went,
“Boo!”
And it kind of really startled him. And I remember in the elevator going down going, “I’m sorry if I threw you off with ‘boo’ there,” and he goes, “Whatever.” He really wasn’t happy that I did it.

CHRISTINE ZANDER:

One week I asked to talk to him after the table read. And I think when you asked to talk to him, I think he was always worried you had a problem and you were going to quit or you were going to confront him. I don’t think he really likes confrontation. So after the table read, I went into the office and it was sort of tense, but then I sat down and I just said, “Well, I’m gonna miss next week’s table read because I have to have an amniocentesis.” And he said, “Oooh, I remember my first amnio,” and it was his sister’s. But he made it his own. And he was really wonderful about it. We talked for about twenty minutes about how everything would be fine.

It’s difficult when you’re away from it for a long time to try to remember what made you so crazy or what made you so frustrated, and I think you realize, or at least I did, that a lot of it was in your own head and you can’t completely blame him. It’s more the combination of people and talent — incredible talent, I think, when I was there, and live television.

ELLIOT WALD,
Writer:

The only time I met him is when I did a piece on him for the
Chicago Sun-Times
in 1977. He was very charming. I don’t really claim to understand Lorne, but if you talk to enough people, you get a sense of Lorne and you realize that in his own way, Lorne was just as hard to work for as Ebersol — and in some ways harder. Lorne is more the smart, neurotic Jewish guy who knows exactly where the buttons on your keyboard are — because he has a similar keyboard himself. Ebersol, on the other hand, is more like a boss. If you cross him, he’ll just get mad. Lorne, from all indications, is much more like the diabolical version of yourself. He’s manipulative, and he knows exactly how to make people crazy. Someone once called him a psychological terrorist.

CONAN O’BRIEN:

Lorne is very aloof. He’s off in his own world. He has a standard joke if you’re a rookie writer and he doesn’t know you that well. He passed me in the hall once, and he said, “Still with the show?” Then he acted mildly surprised, as if to say, “I thought we got rid of you.” And that’s his little joke: “Still with the show?”

But I knew I was doing all right, because a few months later — it was late on a Tuesday night — Lorne came into my office. I was sitting at my desk, and he sat on the edge of it and started telling me about this great weekend he had just had in his home on Long Island. “I built a fire and I made some s’mores, and it was really nice, because it was very winterlike.” And I was sitting there and thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening. Is there someone else in the room? Is there some consequential person in the room? Because I’m certainly not.”

ANDY BRECKMAN:

You hear people on the White House staff talking about face time with the president, and that’s what goes on here. When Lorne would come into the office and sit for a few minutes, that was almost, you know, a pat on the back, even though there was, literally,
no
pat on the back. Just getting a few minutes of face time with him meant you were of some value to him.

JIMMY FALLON,
Cast Member:

I talk to Lorne regularly about everything. He’s the master. He’s been through it all, man. He knows everything. I have to make appointments to see him, because I’ll talk to him for an hour if I can. I mean, it’s like, “All right, my next issue is this: I’m getting an apartment.” And he’ll say, “Well, I think you should.” Whatever it is, he’ll give me advice on it. He’s just really great. That’s the guy I go to for an answer. He doesn’t beat around the bush. He gives you an answer and he takes away all the stress.

JAMES SIGNORELLI,
Director of Commercial Parodies:

I swear to God — and I’ve been around this guy for almost thirty years — Lorne has no interest in what you want to talk about. None. What Lorne thinks is, if you need him to help you solve it, it’s not worth solving. And you ultimately are going to solve it yourself, even if he told you a better solution. As Gertrude Stein used to say, “You can’t tell nobody what they don’t know — not even that they don’t know it.” And he embodies that. I’ll come into his office and say, “Listen, this is what I want to do,” and Lorne will say something completely at right angles to it. And I’ll go, “Well, I don’t think that’s really relevant.” And he’ll just go, “Okay.” Meaning — “I’m not listening to what you’re saying. This is what I’m saying. And I know that if you do it, you’re going to do it, so what are you here for? Let’s go do something else. Let’s go to dinner.”

It’s not his job to help me with logistical problems. His job is to look at something and if he thinks it’s funny, to laugh with all his heart and soul. When he laughs, America laughs.

CHRIS ELLIOTT:

If you see the movie
Man on the Moon
, you’ll see Lorne and Dave Letterman in it, both playing themselves, and it’s interesting how they each approached their appearance. Lorne actually tried to make himself look like he looked back when Andy Kaufman was on
Saturday Night Live
— he’s barefoot and he’s eating with chopsticks in his lounge chair. And then, when they re-created the scene when Andy was with Letterman, Dave has his regular glasses on, which he didn’t wear back then. He’s wearing his regular suit. He made no attempt whatsoever to act in this movie other than to go through the motions. And in a way it’s a lot easier for me to deal with a guy like Dave than it is with Lorne, who’s kind of an actor. He’s a guy who wants everybody to love him; Dave doesn’t give a shit about that. So I seem to be able to read Dave better. The bottom line is, you know, Dave; he’s nuts. There’s no doubt about it. But he also is what he is. He’s never acting, as far as I can tell. He is genuine, and when he’s pissed off, he’s pissed off, and when he’s in a good mood, he’s in a good mood. I could never tell any of that with Lorne.

COLIN QUINN,
Cast Member:

I always thought I could tell how Lorne really felt about things. Even though he doesn’t say it most of the time, he does laugh. Like at read-through. He reads all the stage directions, which is a hard thing to do. I’ve read stage directions before, and it’s fuckin’ hard. It’s a pain in the ass. And he does it every show. You can tell if he likes something or doesn’t like it by the way he reads those stage directions. He can be one of the bigger laughers at read-through, but when he doesn’t like it, he has no problem just sitting there quietly.

DAN AYKROYD,
Cast Member:

Lorne is not much of a mystery. This is a very decent guy who was brought up with really good values, with that Canadian work ethic, with a home that had a parental warmth, and he was able to explore his gift relatively early in life. He’s brilliant, he’s a genius, and to me there’s not much of a mystery there.

CHEVY CHASE,
Cast Member:

There’s no mystery about who Lorne is to me because we came in on the same level basically. It’s just that as time goes on, people become, they’re made into a legend by those who are hired and, you know,
Saturday Night Live
, oh, nobody’s going to live up to the original cast, nobody can live up to this or that. But there’s one thing that stays steady all the way through — Lorne Michaels. Nobody can live up to that, because he put the whole thing together.

He’s very nonconfrontational — probably both his strongest and his weakest suit. Lorne is both involved and uninvolved in some ways. His lack of confrontational abilities doesn’t serve him well on occasion, because he can’t fire anyone. He finds it difficult to fire people. That’s a lovely thing too in many ways. But when the chips are down and it comes to artistic integrity versus the network’s fear of what a sponsor might or might not say if such and such a sketch is put on, he’s there. He’ll confront.

Lorne may be frightening to the last five or six casts, to the younger set, as it were. It may be daunting to be around Lorne. I think he may seem intimidating because he seems to know so much. But he’s been there all along. He’s a real survivor. Anybody who really gets close to him would know that he is a kind and thoughtful guy who doesn’t look to hurt others.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I’m Canadian, and apologies are like mother’s milk to us. They just roll off the tongue. “I’m sorry I caught my hand in your car trunk,” that kind of thing. I don’t think Lorne ever apologized to people for keeping them waiting for a long, long time. Instead, he would drop some names, which was a big soother, and you’d have a tidbit to run back and tell your friends afterwards.

You can’t explain Lorne by Canada, that’s for sure. There’s an adopted British thing happening there. But there are some other elements that got internalized along the way and inside his psyche beside that.

ANDY BRECKMAN: