Live From New York Part 5

LORNE MICHAELS:.

In the beginning, there were two things John didn't do: He wouldn't do drag, because it didn't fit his description of what he should be doing. And he didn't do pieces that Anne or Rosie wrote. So somebody would have to say that a guy had written it. Yet he was very attached to Gilda and to Laraine.

DAN AYKROYD:.

There was a correspondents dinner that we went to in Washington. John and I played Secret Service agents to Chevy's Gerald Ford. Chevy invited us to come. It was at his behest. He was supposed to do Ford and he said, "I want to bring John and Dan down with me."

That John even went on that trip was interesting, because he had his problems with Chevy. Just - who's the bigger star, who's doing more important work, that type of thing. Of course, they had a history because they'd worked in the Lampoon Show together. So I think there was time for issues to foment there.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

That was a magical day in Washington, but we couldn't get over the fact that Belushi went to the White House without an ID. We get to the White House, the car's pulling up, we give our names at the gate, and they ask for ID. And John says, "I didn't bring any." All of us: "John, how can you not?! How can you not bring ID?!?" But we vouched for him and they let us through.

JUDITH BELUSHI:.

He had no ID with him when we got married. We eloped and went to get married in Aspen on New Year's Eve - and he has no ID. And when he's asked for any kind of identification, it's like he doesn't have any.

And John says, "Have you ever seen a show called Sat.u.r.day Night Live?" The woman says, "No." Then he pulls out this review of the show that he carried around and says, "See, here, this is me, John Belushi." And she's looking at him like, "You must be crazy." And I said, "You're telling me no one has ever gotten married without an ID, no one, ever? There must be someone who lost all their stuff. What did they do?" She said, "Oh, well, if he had a letter from a judge." We said, "Okay," and went to the phone and called a judge. And John said into the phone, "h.e.l.lo, Judge, I'm sorry to bother you at home, but have you ever heard of a show called Sat.u.r.day Night Live?" And the judge says yes. And John says, "Oh good, I have this problem, I'm here with my girlfriend and we're trying to get married." And the judge came down, and he did an affidavit and okayed it. John showed up everywhere with no ID. He had trouble holding on to his wallet.

AL FRANKEN:.

I went up to New Hampshire with my brother, who is a press photographer, to follow the campaign in '76. And I ran into Ron Nessen, who was the White House press secretary. I told him I was the writer of this show. And I was surprised that he had seen it - and that he liked it. I said, "Well, you should be on the show," and I went back to the office a few days later and I told Lorne. He kind of had to remind me that he was the producer of the show, and that I had only been in show business for about ten minutes. I was a writer. But anyway, Nessen ended up coming on.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I had to shoot Ford saying "Live from New York" and "I'm Gerald Ford and you're not" for the show. And I suddenly find myself in the Oval Office, and it's just me, the president, and this little crew. There's security too, I'm sure. And Ford does it, but the line reading is wrong, and I realized that it's just the same as working with anybody else and getting them to relax and do the line properly to camera. We'd done two or three takes, and to relax him, I said to him - my sense of humor at the time - "Mr. President, if this works out, who knows where it will lead?" Which was completely lost on him.

CANDICE BERGEN:.

I had one sketch with Gilda and Chevy, I think it was "Land Shark," and I messed it up. I dropped a line. And Gilda, of course, handled it beautifully. I just started laughing and threw the sketch to the wind.

MAYA RUDOLPH, Future Cast Member: Obviously in 1975 I was four years old, so who knows how much information I was retaining, but I know I was watching when Gilda was on, because I was doing Roseanne Roseannadanna impressions. I thought I looked like her, because we had the same hair when I was that age. I was probably five or six. I don't think I could have stayed up late enough to watch the show, but I remember seeing it when my mom was alive. My mom was Minnie Ripperton. She died in '79. I remember crawling in bed with both my parents and seeing the "Land Shark." I know my mom was around when I was watching that show. Somehow I was obsessed with it and I loved Gilda. I always did. I think I related to her because she was a girl and I thought she was so pretty, and I also just felt sort of connected to her.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

I was nuts about Gilda. I was crazy about her. I had first seen her in the Lampoon Show with Belushi. There was one sketch where she was dressed like Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, with the pillbox hat and everything, right? And every time there was what sounded like a gunshot in the sketch, she would start crawling backwards in the opposite direction. And just the way she did that, I swear to G.o.d, she didn't say anything, but I couldn't believe how much I was laughing. It made me nuts. And then the first day in Lorne's office, and it's G.o.d's honest truth, I was really intimidated by what was going on in this room. There was Danny, O'Donoghue, and Belushi and stuff like that, and in the corner of Lorne's office was this potted plant, and I hid behind it. I actually squatted down because Lorne was now going around asking people their ideas and I couldn't compete with this. So I'm there and I'm hiding when all of a sudden through the leaves I hear someone say, "Can you help me be a parakeet?"

So I parted the leaves and it was Gilda. I go, "What?!" She said, "I have this idea where I get dressed up like a parakeet, and I'm on a perch. But I need a writer to help me figure out what the parakeet should say. Can you help me?" I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was a human being calling me a writer so I go, "Oh yeah, I'm great at parakeet stuff." And she said, "Why are you behind there? You're scared, aren't you? Just look at this room, it's pretty intimidating, all this talent that's here. And so that's why you're here, because you're scared." I said, "Yeah." She said, "I am too. Can I come back?" And she came behind the plant with me. So now we're both behind this plant and we get to talking and all of a sudden she says, "Uh-oh, he's calling on you" - this is about five minutes later - and I get tongue-tied, you know, one of those things. Lorne's going, "Alan? Is Alan around here?" She says, "I'll take care of it." She gets up, goes around the plant to the front of the room, and she says, "Zweibel's got this great idea where I play this parakeet and I sit on a perch." So she attributed her idea to me. And I went, "Wow." I got up enough nerve to come out from behind the plant and Gilda said, "Wait a second. He's also got this funny, funny idea where I also play Howdy Doody's wife, Debbie Doody, and we're going to write this and all sorts of stuff," she said, "like a team." That's how I found out that I was going to be teamed up with Gilda. She just took pity on this puppy behind the plant.

CANDICE BERGEN:.

Gilda was so great. She was such an angel. And so gifted, so sweet. Everybody bonded with Gilda, because she was irresistible.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her. But that was in the early days of Second City in Canada. Our romance was finished by the time Sat.u.r.day Night Live happened. We were friends, lovers, then friends again. By the time we came to New York, we weren't involved by any means.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I had a thing with Danny for a while. He was just adorable and irresistible and we had a lot of fun. And I always knew, you know, exactly what I could expect from Danny, so I never really got hurt.

PAULA DAVIS, a.s.sistant: I started hanging out at SNL when I was a kid. I was thirteen or fourteen when the show started, and I watched the show with my friend Toby. We just loved it, and we decided to sneak in, because I think at that point my mom was working in the building on game shows. So we were confident we could sneak our way around the SNL studios, which we did. And we got in and we hung around, kind of like stage-door Johnnies, for probably a year. Everybody was very, very friendly to us. Chevy was very friendly to us. Belushi and Aykroyd talked to us a lot. Even Michael O'Donoghue was nice. So we did a lot of hanging around.

I remember one day when I was in high school, Rosie Shuster asked me to help her out. It was one of those things like come over, pick up my dry cleaning, pick up my lamp from the lamp repair place - because they had no free time. When I got there, I remember Aykroyd getting out of her bed, and I was totally surprised. Because last I knew, Aykroyd was with Laraine at that point.

PAUL SHAFFER:.

I was a little naive. I didn't get involved with anyone. I was friends with everybody, but I wasn't lucky enough to score with anybody.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I don't know what goes on backstage there now, but I remember the dressing rooms were put to some good s.e.xual purposes back when we were there. But those were just fleeting. They weren't really serious relationships. It was more clinging to someone, attaching to someone in the face of all we were going through.

CHEVY CHASE:.

The "s.e.x appeal" thing, I don't know where that came from. I know that I had s.e.x appeal because I know how much s.e.x I had.

You know what made me good was simply not giving a flying f.u.c.k. I had nothing invested there emotionally. I made sure that I had a contract that read that I had the option to leave after a year - the only one there. And I'd never had a job for more than a year before that with anybody.

ANNE BEATTS:.

The only entree to that boys club was basically by f.u.c.king somebody in the club. Which wasn't the reason you were f.u.c.king them necessarily. I mean, you didn't go, "Oh, I want to get into this, I think I'll have to have s.e.x with this person." It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection. Either you had to be somebody's girlfriend or, sadly and frequently, then you'd be somebody's ex-girlfriend. And then someone else's girlfriend, as I ended up being, and Rosie did too.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:.

Did I date anybody on the show? I don't know that I'd use the word "date." I had intimate encounters. We were young, and the guys were single and the women were single and we were together twenty-four hours a day - you do the biology.

We slept around then. And it wasn't weird. Yes, you could have s.e.x with someone at night and write a sketch for them, or with them, the next day. Totally. It happened a lot. Certainly to me it happened. That's the way life was then. You could sleep with a guy who worked on the show and just know it was de rigueur not to make a big thing out of it and just go to work with him.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

I guess Gilda and my secret was that we weren't sleeping with each other. Our relationship was platonic. It had, with the exception of the s.e.x part, everything else that a boy-girl relationship has. Emotions, the ups, the downs, the yelling, the screaming, the highs, I mean everything. She had said something very early on, when it was close to not being platonic, she had said something along the lines of, "Look, every relationship you've had and I've had with the opposite s.e.x has pretty much ended in disaster or crashed and burned. And we have a good thing going here creatively; let's try not to be boy-girl." That made sense, you know. Years later, now, I think she just wasn't attracted to me.

The first generation of Sat.u.r.day Night Live is remembered for more than its comedy or its cleverness or its revolutionary contributions to television. Most of the cast members and writers had come of age in the sixties and hewed to that era's values - turn on and tune in, if not quite drop out. These were heady days, some of the headiest ever at NBC. Open an office door in the SNL suite on the seventeenth floor and you might well be enswirled in marijuana smoke. Harder drugs were used as well - at least one cast member freebased cocaine, others dropped acid - right there in the haute-deco halls of the RCA Building.

CHEVY CHASE:.

Fame is a huge thing that is in your life, and we know now that taking drugs is self-medicating. What are we medicating? Something that is hurting us. Usually it's a depression of some kind or some sort of sadness or something stressful, right? That's what we're self-medicating. Fame is extremely stressful. That's why so many people who become famous so fast self-medicate. And what is there to self-medicate with? A hundred-dollar bill and, if it's 1975, some cocaine, or some pot or something. The point is that it all follows, it's as natural as a guy going home and having a drink at the end of a stressful day. But this kind of stress, this fame thing I was talking about, is huge.

I was already thirty-two, I had already been through many, many years of writing and working and being around this business, so in my own mind, I should have been able to not lose any perspective. And, of course, in retrospect, I had lost all perspective. I think if there is one perception that the public feels about people who become famous, it's that it is a great, wonderful, marvelous, magical thing. And that's true up to a point. But in fact it's also a very, very frightening thing, because it's one of the most stressful things. There's a certain amount of post-traumatic stress involved in being a regular guy and then suddenly an extremely famous one.

By and large, people who are performers are looking for some sort of immediate gratification to begin with, some validation of what their ident.i.ty is, who they are, some acceptability. They're not novelists who are waiting after ten years to see how they did. They want it right away. They're children, basically. And in all children there's this reservoir of self-doubt and guilt and sense of low self-esteem, I think. And so one lives with this kind of dualism, this disparity between the marvelous magic of becoming accepted by so many so fast and, at the same time, a lingering sense that one doesn't deserve it and sooner or later will be found out.

Lorne used to say that c.o.ke was G.o.d's way of telling you that you have too much money. He used to say, "Don't stay on one thing. If you're going to take anything, rotate them." This was a long time ago.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

There were drugs, but I was not nor have I ever been a drug user. I'd been around them in college. I just made different choices. I fell in love with business.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The widow Belushi was quoted in a book about a time when she found c.o.ke on John in the first season of the show and she said, "Where did you get it?" and he told her that Chevy and I gave it to him. But he had been doing c.o.ke for years.

CHEVY CHASE:.

Everybody was supplying him, supposedly. No, I was supplying Lorne, who was supplying John, it was a middleman kind of thing.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

John Belushi and I have the same birthday, January 24th. In 1976 they had a party for John but kind of included me. And the cake that they gave him was a facsimile of a quaalude. My cake was a facsimile of a Valium.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

I went on the road for four years with a rock group, and this was '69 through '72, the years before the show, and we opened for acts like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Those four years of touring for me - you talk about partying. Those were the great amazing rock-and-roll years. So by the time I came off the road in '72, I did a few years of performing on my own, and writing film doc.u.mentaries. So by '75, when I went to NBC to start to do the show, I'd already had years of rock and roll. And partying. And quite hard partying at that.

So now the midseventies were actually the comedy generation, a new generation; these were like the rock stars of that period - Belushi and Aykroyd and Chevy. It was a new generational thing. Those groups were now just experiencing the kind of era that I had been through already, officially on the road for all those years, so whatever they were up to never seemed as monumental as the craziness I'd already seen on the road.

TOM SCHILLER:.

Belushi was the first person to show me how to roll a joint. It was very exciting. You would come to the seventeenth floor, and as you walked down the hall, the stench of marijuana would greet you like about a hundred feet away from the offices. They kind of turned a blind eye to all that. It was like suddenly it was okay to do that. These "kids" were doing a show and it was all right. I remember Lorne at one of the earliest meetings, when we were sitting in his office, the first thing he did was light up a joint and pa.s.s it around. It was like saying, "It's okay to smoke up here."

Maybe Jane Curtin didn't smoke and maybe Marilyn Miller didn't, but that was about it. That was our drug of choice. Then it turned to c.o.ke. I didn't like c.o.ke. I tried it for one week and I just got diarrhea.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

My office was on the fourth floor. The writers basically never got there before one o'clock in the afternoon - ever. We had so little s.p.a.ce. Herb Sargent was back in a corner. In the hallway to Herb's office were like Franken and Davis and Alan Zweibel, the three apprentice writers. Al and Tom had bought their first-ever cocaine, and they had it all out on the desk. First time they were ever able to buy any. As apprentice writers, their pay was, I think, $325 a week. So they have the cocaine on the desk, they're like literally staring at it. I'm off in the distance. I'm in a tough place because I'm supposedly the executive, but I decided it wasn't my job to play the policeman.

Suddenly this figure comes roaring through the room. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a straw in his hand. He gets to the table, and he has half of that stuff up his nose by the time they knew who it was: Belushi. They didn't know whether to be thrilled that Belushi had just done this to their c.o.ke or be absolutely decimated, because that represented about half the money they had in the world at that time.

The drugs didn't bother me, yet I knew they could be the end of the world for the show. And when I found out there was a partially available s.p.a.ce on the seventeenth floor I said to Lorne that's where we're going. It's the best place because of the elevators. One elevator bank says fourteen and up, the other elevator bank one through sixteen in the old NBC. That's where everybody was, every executive was on that side, from the head of the network to the chief lawyers, between the first and the sixteenth floor. You could go up either elevator bank to the sixteenth floor, but if you got on the other elevator bank you only had three floors in common. Fourteen and fifteen were sports and press, sixteen was personnel and I figured, "f.u.c.k them." But if they were on the other elevator, they'd be on the same elevator with Schlosser. And so we were somewhat insulated, but initially in an area that was too small.

EUGENE LEE:.

That was a mistake, choosing the seventeenth floor, because we never thought that we'd have to wait for elevators. The elevator door used to be full of big dents where people had kicked it. They couldn't bear waiting.

EDIE BASKIN:.

Drugs were definitely part of the times, but I just think if you wanted to do it, you did it, and if you didn't want to do it, you didn't do it. It didn't have anything to do with pressure. I didn't think anybody was cool because they did drugs, and I didn't think anybody was cool because they didn't. People just made their own choices.

NEIL LEVY:.

Franken and Davis I think shared an apartment, and they threw a party so we could get together to watch Howard Cosell's Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It came on before us, which is why we weren't allowed to call our show Sat.u.r.day Night Live at first. We wanted to see this other Sat.u.r.day Night. All the writers showed up, Michael O'Donoghue, Dan Aykroyd. They were pa.s.sing around these joints. I had never smoked before, or not really gotten stoned, and I didn't want to seem like "the kid," so I started smoking. This pot was from Africa or something. You didn't even have to smoke it; you just looked at the joint and you were unconscious. It kept coming around and around to me, and then I just got so incredibly paranoid. Never in my life had I been that bad before. I locked myself in their only bathroom, and I was terrified, and I kept praying to G.o.d that it would stop. Every once in a while someone would come to use the bathroom and I'd flush the toilet and go, "I'll be out in a minute!" And I just got worse and worse, because people had to know I was in the bathroom and something was going wrong.

Finally Dan Aykroyd knocked on the door and he said, "Neil, this is Dan. You probably smoked some of that weed, you're probably paranoid, and you probably think you're the only one. Let me tell you, my friend, you're not the only one. We're all paranoid, we're all stoned." And he talked me out of the bathroom into the bedroom. And he started making me laugh. One of the things he did was he pulled his pants a little of the way down and pretended he was fixing the radiator as a radiator repairman. And later I remember he used that as a refrigerator repairman in a Nerds sketch. I think I saw it first.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:.

Alan and I were so young when we did that show, and we had so much extra fuel that after being up all night writing, we still had to think of other stuff to do. So one night we went into Franken and Davis's office and took out all the furniture - all the desks, ripped the phones out of the wall, took the chairs, took the file cases, took everything in the middle of the night and shoved it into Herb Sargent's office where it couldn't be seen. And then all we did was take a piece of paper and leave it on the floor that said, "See me. Lorne." This is like the first season, when they were apprentice writers! Alan and I thought this was hilarious. Needless to say, Franken wasn't too happy. But we did stuff like this all the time.

GARRETT MORRIS:.

People suppose that if you are in a cast, that means you automatically go everywhere together twenty-four hours a day and you can tell what every other member is doing and that in fact you think that's good. I have always been an a.s.shole with any cast I've been with. I was gone as soon as I could be. The fact that I didn't hang out with the gang at Sat.u.r.day Night Live is no reflection upon anybody but me. At that time, I was in my Carlos Castaneda thing, and so I was doing a whole lot of mysticism and stuff. I was a loner. And that actually cost me. Because with Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I learned that the social life is just as important as your own talent. Particularly with writers, they have to hear you talk and get to know you.

I'm not saying anybody was racist, but there are stereotypical things people draw from action that is devoid of me sitting down, talking, and getting into people's minds about what they think, et cetera, et cetera. For example, one time I said something about a particular duo of intellectual Jews at Sat.u.r.day Night Live which was then spread all over the whole Jewish world and for like a year I had the reputation of being anti-Jewish because I told these particular Jews that they were for s.h.i.t. The point is, no, I didn't hang out, but later I realized it was something I should have done.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

We loved television, quite frankly, and we had our own sensibility and we were given the opportunity to do it. But I think it was because of the love for television that anyone who ordinarily didn't do television did this show. So Belushi could say, "I hate television." I think what that really meant was, "I hate what they've done to television," or "I hate what television is right now." I don't think that was anything against Newton Minow or the medium itself.

The one rule that we had, if there was a rule, was if we make each other laugh we'll put it on television and hopefully other people will find it funny and tell their friends. So there was a purity about the intent.

There was a n.o.bility to me and Gilda taking a subway ride, saying something to make us laugh, and then we would go back to the office afterwards and write it up and it's on television a day later. There was an immediacy to it; it was just like, "This is the way the world works."

HERBERT SCHLOSSER:.

The word of mouth was starting to get around. It was either in our November or December board of directors meeting at NBC. Boards of directors, then as now, had old guys with ties and gray hair. And we did get flak about the show - bad taste and this and that. But one of the directors pulled me over and asked me if he could get tickets for one of his kids who was coming home from college.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

We were beginning to get some action out there in that first year, but people were not making a lot of money. Then some guy came along - I cannot remember his name - who was doing commercials for the United States military, and the Sat.u.r.day Night Live gang were hired to appear in these commercials. And Lorne, being a kind of a born sn.o.b, wanted no part of dealing with these people, but it was a good way for everybody to earn money. So I became the guy who was the link to the commercial guy and did all the coordinating and producing, as it were. And we actually made a series of commercials for the military. I never saw them. I've never even heard about them since. But it's a fact. This guy spent thousands of dollars on this thing. Belushi did them because he wanted that money, and fast. They all made money, including Lorne, but Lorne kept a very p.r.o.nounced arm's length from the whole venture.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

I knew Belushi was going to be a hit when Paul McCartney called and offered me $6,000 for Belushi to perform his Joe c.o.c.ker impression at his birthday party. John was making $800 or $1,000 a show. Six thousand dollars to sing like Joe c.o.c.ker? Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, he was so happy - not the money, just singing for McCartney. Oh my G.o.d.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I remember exactly how much money I made in 1975. I made $115,000, and it was more money than I'd ever imagined. I'd been offered the season before four Flip Wilson shows, four specials, for a little over a hundred thousand dollars and I said I would do one. The experience wasn't a special one for me. It wasn't a show I was terribly proud of, but it did a 46 share, and what I remember learning from that was if you did a show you really cared about, it didn't matter if anybody watched it. But if you did a show that wasn't any good, it was much better if everyone saw it. If it was highly rated, you knew you'd be able to work again.

JEAN DOUMANIAN, a.s.sociate Producer: I didn't start working for Sat.u.r.day Night Live until the eleventh show in 1975, because I had been working on the first show called Sat.u.r.day Night Live, with Howard Cosell on ABC. We were canceled after the seventeenth show, and Lorne called and asked if he could use the t.i.tle of the show.

CRAIG KELLEM:.

That was a signature issue as far as Lorne was concerned: he wanted to call his show Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It totally p.i.s.sed him off that the t.i.tle was taken by Howard Cosell. And when the other show went off the air and he got the t.i.tle back, I kind of chuckled inside, thinking how Lorne had decided that he wanted that t.i.tle and he was going to get that t.i.tle. And you know what? He ended up with that t.i.tle. That's Lorne Michaels to a T.

JEAN DOUMANIAN:.

Lorne had one corner office. And I had the other corner office. I liked Lorne a lot, we got along very well. But I was never intimidated by him. And I was never part of the family. I didn't do drugs, and I had a life outside the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The Desi Arnaz show in February was a great show. He wouldn't stay at our normal hotel; he had to stay at the Waldorf. The great moment was when he was doing "Babalu" live on the air with Desi Jr. I was in the control room watching and we were trying to figure out when to cut away. He throws himself into it so much, I'm like seeing his lips turn blue. He's going into it totally, like he's thirty. And I'm thinking, "Oh my G.o.d, he's going to have a coronary. What happens if he dies on live TV?" And so we finally cut away to commercial.

JANE CURTIN:.

There were huge highs and huge lows. I think that because of the talent, and because of the people's temperaments, you could have these incredible moments of sheer exhilaration and excitement, and then moments where you just feel like you're a pill, you're a tiny little piece of lint. You feel as though you don't deserve air. So the highs and lows were huge, but there was a middle ground, because the show had to go on. At eleven-thirty, you had to put all of that stuff aside and hit the ground running and do what you were trained to do - and, hopefully, have a good time. More often than not, you did.

LILY TOMLIN:.