In a sketch about giant lobsters attacking New York, I played the guy who said, "Oh, the humanity!" Like the radio reporter from the Hindenburg fire. There was a very revealing line in there that was pretty awful when you think about it: "Oh, John Belushi is dead. We knew he"d die young, but not this young!"
Another time, in one sketch we were rehearsing, Belushi had the part of the father - miscasting, but it was just a sketch. And he just was sort of shaking and quick-tempered and impatient, and finally we were almost going to hit each other. And Aykroyd breaks it up and calms everything down quickly and says, "Oh, I"ll do the part." It was like a terrible flare-up - a very bad memory - and Aykroyd, ever the mensch, stepped in and settled everything.
And it was nothing permanent with Belushi and me, but I do recall in subsequent weeks Belushi was off the show. I called it "getting docked," like at camp or something, where you"re being punished. This is another of Lorne Michaels"s talents that I"ll have to give him, that he was able to juggle this stuff. Because there were drugs around. There were cocaine lines the length of a desk, you know. And most people could handle it, but a few people fell very badly through the cracks.
JANE CURTIN:.
Lorne and I stopped speaking. It was during the second year. He wouldn"t answer my questions. I would say, "Why aren"t you doing something about John? I found him going through my purse. He set your loft on fire. His behavior is reprehensible. He"s not coming to rehearsals or if he does come, he comes three hours late. Do something!" And he didn"t. He would just sort of throw his hands in the air. Lorne doesn"t deal with issues. Lorne cannot confront an issue. So I thought, "Well, this is pointless, I"m not going to talk to him anymore."
Gilda became our go-between. When Lorne wanted me to do something, he would call Gilda and say, "Would you ask Jane if she would do this?" And Gilda would come up to me and say, "Lorne was wondering if you would mind doing this?" And I"d say, "No, that would be fine." This made life so much easier. We would say h.e.l.lo, but beyond that, there was nothing I needed from Lorne. I had "Update," so I didn"t need anything. I didn"t need a father. I had a husband who loved me, and a great little dog. Life was good.
KATE JACKSON, Host: I got a phone call from Bob Woodward when he was doing his book Wired, and he wanted to talk to me because he had heard that the show I had hosted was John"s worst in terms of drug abuse. I didn"t know that, because I never saw anybody do anything, so I didn"t talk to Woodward. I heard later that paramedics had been called over to the studio and were standing by for John all through the show.
But John didn"t miss the show. He was perspiring a little bit. But he never, never went way off on a wrong tangent, never went off the cards, or never messed anything up that made it hard for me to get back on track. He did what he was supposed to do.
John called me afterwards. For weeks he would call me on Thursday afternoons just to say h.e.l.lo and to thank me for saving his life. "Wow," he"d say. "Katie, man, you really saved my life, wow, and thank you." And I frankly didn"t know what he was talking about. I didn"t know why he was calling; he was just so sweet, you know. Danny had told me, "John is a bad boy, but a good man."
NORMAN LEAR, Host: I loved in John and also in Aykroyd what I loved in Carroll O"Connor and Bea Arthur - a madness that would allow them to go anyplace. I have to say, whatever year I am destined to die, I have five years or ten years on top of that because those people who offered me that touch of madness gave me time, added to my life.
NEIL LEVY, Production a.s.sistant: I was at Catch a Rising Star trying to pick up a girl one night. When I first started on that show I looked like I was about twelve, and this girl didn"t believe I worked on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. And then suddenly everyone turned toward the door because Belushi had entered. Whenever he entered a room, there was an energy about him that made people turn their heads. And this girl saw him, and John saw me, and he went, "Neil!" and starts coming right toward me. And I"m thinking, "This girl is going to be putty in my hands now." And he comes right up to me and gives me a big bear hug and says, "You got any money?" I"m thinking, "Not only do I know John Belushi, but he"s going to borrow money from me." So I take out my wallet and he takes the wallet out of my hands, rummages through it, hands it back, goes "Thanks," and disappears into the crowd. Well, he"d left me with a dollar. And there were no ATM"s back then. When I went to find him, he had disappeared.
If he did something like that, though, I remember more than one time him coming around later and saying, "Was I with you last night?" And you"d go, "Yeah," and he"d go, "I"m so sorry," and be really contrite. Then you"d hear him knocking on other people"s doors and going in to apologize about things.
AL FRANKEN:.
There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisciplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn"t have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting "til Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some c.o.ke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff.
People used to ask me about this and I"d always say, "No, there was no c.o.ke. It"s impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs." And so that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately - for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs. Comedians and comedy writers and people in show business in general aren"t the most disciplined people, so the idea of putting the writing off until you had to, and then staying up all night, was an attractive one. And then having this drug that kept you awake in an enjoyable way was kind of tempting too. But I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure n.o.body else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh-heh.
ROBIN SHLIEN:.
The band scored an ounce of c.o.ke on the air one night. According to the band member who told me, they got it during a commercial and divvied it up. I couldn"t attest to whether it was gone by the end of the show. The dealer used to be to the left of the stage, and the commercials were a couple minutes long. I thought that was kind of an amazing story.
TOM DAVIS, Writer: d.i.c.k Ebersol was the only real network suit who would pop into the offices on seventeen. And it didn"t bother him so much. I remember getting in an elevator with Tom Brokaw once, though, and I was just reeking of pot. Just stinking up the elevator, because I had really skunky pot. He couldn"t help but notice. He just got very quiet. Everybody on the elevator stopped talking. Brokaw kind of looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I just smiled. What else are you going to do?
RODNEY DANGERFIELD, Host: I never saw anybody do hard drugs there. Pot, sure. Put it this way: I"ve been smoking pot all my life. I"ve found it tremendously relaxing. I do it a lot. The doctor told me, "Don"t smoke cigarettes. Just smoke pot."
CARRIE FISHER:.
Lorne was the token grown-up in a sea of children and coeds. He was very professorial. He was only rated R while the rest of us were unruly, not well behaved, but fun-loving. I think he was trying to keep everything together without it looking like that"s what he was doing. But certainly he wasn"t fully partic.i.p.ating in all the drug nonsense. He would look at it and shake his head laughing - that kind of thing.
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
I came there with a drug habit. I"d had a drug habit since I was fourteen. It just got worse. I never worked intoxicated or high or anything. It was so much a part of me that it just permeated my outlook on things. It was also a very lonely time for me. I was pretty young, I didn"t know that many people in New York, I was terribly homesick, and I was frustrated about the amount of airtime I was getting. So those things made me want to escape what I was thinking and feeling a lot. Drugs were very available. That"s how I coped. I know they did their damage.
JANE CURTIN:.
Laraine was in a horrible position. She was a baby. She was like twenty or twenty-one, and she was uprooted from this very comfortable lifestyle in L.A., with all her friends, and into New York, where she was in a hostile environment and she was alone. She didn"t have anyplace to put that creative energy, so she had it tough. She was not happy. And I don"t blame her, because it"s hard enough to do that show in a comfortable environment, but when you"re totally at sea - when your surroundings are different and you"re just not comfortable - it"s extremely hard.
d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: The second year of the original show, I would take John to California with me every Sunday. By then I was married to my first wife, and I would take him home with me on Sunday and bring him back on Wednesday for read-through. And what I didn"t know at the time was, my first wife and he, after I fell asleep, nothing romantic about it, but they would go out again. They"d go out all night and just manage to get back before six o"clock in the morning when I would wake up. And I woke up one morning at six o"clock, still not having doped all of this out, and walk by our guest bedroom, which was smoldering, and John had fallen asleep smoking a joint.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
After I left Second City, John and his wife came to visit, and I had one of those floor heaters, you know, where the heat comes out from a grate on the floor. And they were fooling around on the couch and knocked a pillow on top of it. All of a sudden I woke up and there was smoke in the house. They didn"t even realize that the pillow was on fire.
PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer: I"d get calls about John in the middle of the night. "John just burned down my apartment, John just started a fire," that type of thing. Sometimes he would just knock on my door at three in the morning. We"d know when John got up in the middle of the night to eat, because there"d be spaghetti sauce imprints all over the kitchen. "Oh look, John was up. I guess he got hungry."
JUDITH BELUSHI:.
The second or third year of the show we were walking downtown, and there was an empty bar for rent. We got the idea of renting it ourselves. At that time we actually had a pretty good-sized place, on Morton Street, but we didn"t want to invite fifty people over. So we thought we"d use this bar as a place to hang out. After the show or other nights, we"d invite people over. We had instruments there, and we kept the bar stocked. For a while it was pretty crazy. After the show, there was always a Sat.u.r.day Night Live party. We"d usually go by that for a little while. The hosts would be there and all that. Then afterwards we"d go to the bar. It was just a big party. The hosts sometimes came down to the bar, but more often musicians, writers, actors, friends, and sometimes even people we didn"t know.
DAN AYKROYD:.
We opened the first Blues Bar in "77, I think. So for a few years we had a great place to party after the show. It was pretty easy to get in - you just had to show up and knock on the door. We used to go to the "After Party" for the show, and then we"d take all the writers and our friends and the musical guests and the host of the show and invite them down for a party where you didn"t have the public hanging around. Because usually at the After Parties, they let the public come in at some point. And we just wanted the inner circle there, so we needed a bar where we could entertain.
ROBIN WILLIAMS, Host: Years and years and years ago, before I even did the show, I"d come to the studio those nights when they were shooting, and then after they"d go down to the Blues Bar. Way back when. Dan brought me down there the first time. I said, "What is this?" He said, "Just step inside, don"t be afraid, Robin, just step inside. You"ll see - there"s amazing people, wonderful music, just step inside." It was like, you"d walk in and it was funky. "Funky" is a good word. The old sense of, "Was that a rat?" "Maybe." The rat"s going, "Hey, shut up." The crowd was a really mixed bag, you know - a lot of the performers, musicians, Michael O"Donoghue - always good for an unusual laugh - and Dan bartending and kind of being maitre d". A really wild, mixed group of people.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
There would always be a party, usually at some chichi restaurant. There was a velvet rope and it was supposedly, you know, the event. Actually, it was usually pretty grim. But Lorne would hold court at a table, usually with whoever the guest host was, and people would hang out in their own little cliques. Then there would be some talk, you know, about who the good-looking girls were, and things like that. But then people would bail out of there and go down to the Blues Bar. And there"d usually be a band, and Danny and John would be performing, and it was a lot looser atmosphere.
BILL MURRAY:.
I was one of those Blues Bar people. Stayed until the sun came up. You had to blow off a lot of steam. You had an amazing performance high that lasted because it had built to this explosive point at an odd hour of a normal person"s day, between eleven-thirty and one A.M.
You couldn"t really just say good night and go home and go to sleep. You were up for hours. You had all this energy and this uplift and you had to sort of work it off, so you could go to the Blues Bar, where you could dance and you could drink and you could be funny and could meet a lot of people and really carry on. It was necessary to have a place to go. You couldn"t just go to an ordinary place, because there were a lot of people who would crash into it.
You had a very weird energy; it was just a completely different energy after you did that thing. You weren"t fit for normal people. You had to go someplace where you could let yourself down gradually. So that was great that they provided this place where you could go and you"d be safe.
At any point, if there was someone that was bothering you, every person that was already in was a bouncer. And you"d just say, "You"ve got to go." And it was kind of funny, because they would think they"d just walk away from you, like, "No, that"s all right, man, I won"t bother you anymore." "No, no, you"re not going to bother anybody else either." And it was a shocking moment when someone would get in and start working it and then get evicted by anybody. The women would just go, "He"s out. Danny? Billy? This guy - out." And out he"d go. I know famous people got tossed out too. Famous people in their own area came, and when they obviously were just sucking blood, they were just evicted. We had no time for that. We were really just trying to get down to a safe level so you could sleep. Because you couldn"t really sleep until six in the morning no matter what you did.
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
When I saw Trainspotting they had a sign, "the filthiest toilet in Scotland." Well, the toilet at the Blues Bar was the filthiest toilet anywhere. It was so vile. Nothing short of Turkish torture with a hole in the ground. And the walls had water damage and were peeling and stank unbelievably. The floor was always wet, completely wet. Wadded-up tissue on the floor. And yet it was a fun hang - a windowless hole with lots of cool music people and the Stink Band, named such because they stank too. It would be John and Danny, plus people like David Bowie and Keith Richards and James Taylor. And then they had the backup group, the Natural Queens, one of which was my best friend, Lynn Scott, who is married to Tom Scott, who was in the Blues Brothers band. You"d go in, it was dark, you"d come out, it was dawn. Nothing more depressing than that. If there was s.e.x on the premises, I never saw it. And I shudder to think if it took place in the bathroom. That person couldn"t be alive today.
It really looked like it had been maybe a bar from the t.i.tanic that had been exhumed after several hundred years of submersion and just hastily dropped onto a sidewalk. It was practically rotting, which is probably how they got it, because the rent was reasonable and at the time none of us had that much money. We were still getting probably maximum $2,000 a show. I think our fourth season we all got $4,000 a show. We started the first year at $750.
ROSIE SHUSTER:.
I was hanging with Aykroyd at that point in time, so it was kind of amazing watching the whole scene - the Blues Bar and everything - take off. It was kind of like boys" fantasies of the blues, and then heavy saturation of the blues, and then, having played out all these different fantasies in TV sketches, suddenly there was this manifestation and they really inhabited these characters. And you could see that whole thing start to unfold in the Blues Bar. Some of those parties were pretty intense and wonderful, and just great music and dancing. I remember that really fondly. Just watching those characters explode.
And it was the end of the week and, well, you were psyched. It was like you were buzzing, you"d get turbocharged from the intense effort of it, and then there"s like adrenal burnout later. I remember sleeping at the Blues Bar, you know, as the light broke. Also probably there were other substances involved besides alcohol, and the party just spilled over. People really had a lot of energy they needed to shake off.
PENNY MARSHALL:.
The Blues Bar was a zoo, but it was fun. It was people getting famous at the same time, which is always very scary. We held on to each other desperately because we trusted each other. In hanging out with each other, we knew we weren"t going to tell on each other.
STEVE MARTIN:.
The first time I did the show, there was a fire in the studio. We had to go out to some other studio to do it. The cast was a little upset because they were not in their home world. We had to go to Brooklyn. I remember being very nervous and thinking, "Oh my G.o.d, it"s live." It was very tense but a lot of fun.
I ran into Dan early one afternoon, and he was sort of black and blue, and I said, "What happened?" and he said, "Oh, I got pushed out of a moving taxi." They were wild, Dan and John. I never went to their bar, the Blues Bar; I wasn"t that kind of guy.
DAN AYKROYD:.
All week you"re wound up. That"s the thing about Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Once you start on Monday pitching ideas, the pump starts, that adrenaline pump - sst sst sst sst sst - so Tuesday you"re writing sketches, Wednesday you"re reading them, you"re rewriting them Wednesday night, you"re blocking Thursday and Friday. All week that pump is going. And by the time you"re done at one o"clock Sat.u.r.day night, that pump"s still going at full race. And you can"t just go home and go to bed. So we needed a place to party. And frequently I remember rolling down the armor at the Blues Bar and closing the building at eleven o"clock Sunday morning - you know, when it was at its height - and saying good morning to the cops and firemen.
JANE CURTIN:.
I didn"t even know where the Blues Bar was. I sort of stopped going to the after-show parties after the first year, just because they weren"t fun. They were strange. I"d just go home.
JOHN LANDIS:.
I went up to the SNL offices, John was giving me a tour, when a very s.e.xy girl walks by. Tight jeans and a T-shirt, no bra, curly hair. "Oh my G.o.d, who is that?" And John says, "That"s Rosie Shuster. That"s Lorne"s wife and Danny"s girlfriend." Which is true. It was wild. Rosie"s the one who coined the best line about Aykroyd. Danny had studied in a seminary to be a Jesuit priest the same time he was doing Second City jobs in and around Ontario. Rosie"s the one who said, "Danny"s epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself."
HOWARD Sh.o.r.e, Music Director: I wasn"t great friends with John. As one musician to another, I don"t think he felt a real respect from me for what he was doing musically. A lot of the players in the band I created for the show had real careers in rhythm and blues and had made great records, important records, and our whole lives as musicians were steeped in this tradition. Yes, we were on a television show, but being musicians was really our life. So comedians who were kind of tinkering in music were not always taken seriously by us.
When the band did warm-ups for the show, some members of the cast wanted to get involved. I knew Danny from Toronto, so I let him do a few things. Then Danny wanted to bring John into it and I said okay, and I did a couple of things with Danny and John. I used to introduce them as "those brothers in blues, the Blues Brothers." I think John looked to us as more serious musicians, something he wanted to be.
DAN AYKROYD:.
When Carrie Fisher did the show, we used the Blues Brothers to warm up the audience, but we had played a couple of times prior to that. We played with Willie Nelson as our backup band, and Mickey Raphael on harp, and Willie Hall, and then the Uniforms at the Lone Star, and then we had Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues playing behind us as well. We wanted Duke to be our backup man, but he was with Roomful of Blues, and I think he felt that Belushi would dominate, so he kind of backed off that gig. And we ended up recruiting through Tom Malone, the horn player in the SNL band; we ended up getting Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn, and Lou Marini and Alan Rubin and Matt Murphy. Matt Murphy we found in a bar on Columbus Avenue, and we heard him play. He was playing with James Cotton, and we said, "We want this guy in the band." And then Cropper and Dunn, they had to be convinced, because they weren"t sure that we could acquit ourselves to the music. But they saw the respect, the reverence we had, and that we wanted to do a Memphis-Chicago fusion band - which ultimately the Blues Brothers turned out to be, doing Chicago electrified blues, and Memphis Stax R&B, and that was our set. They came on, and we did the first appearances with Carrie Fisher and then with Steve Martin.
JOHN LANDIS:.
Lorne was hysterical that Chevy was making a movie, and he refused to give me Danny for the part of D-Day in Animal House. He refused. He wouldn"t release Danny and he told him, "You have to be here and write or I"m going to fire you." He threatened Danny, and it was ugly. And by the way, that"s what happened on The Blues Brothers later, which is he wouldn"t release Paul Shaffer, who was a member of the band, who was the star, who put the band together.
As the stakes got higher, the atmosphere at SNL grew more fractious. Actors fought for airtime and for the attention of writers. After Chevy Chase"s ascent, and then Belushi"s, appearances on the show came to be looked upon by many performers as auditions for movie careers, as if the show itself were no longer the object all sublime.
Many of those who were there for those first five gold-standard years look back not in regret but in rueful resignation, or a kind of pained joy. Some had required chemical stimulation merely to maintain the show"s mind-bending schedule, working through the night, especially Wednesday and Thursday nights, and virtually living in the building. Taking a cue from Dan Aykroyd and his office bunk beds, Anne Beatts famously demanded that the network install a hospital bed in her office during a contract negotiation and got her wish. They and their cohorts were not just the staff of a TV show. They were still a commune, a subculture, and most of all, a family; sadly, the family was splitting asunder. That became evident when the prodigal prankster Chevy Chase returned to host a show. His stint as host set a new ratings record for SNL, but behind the scenes he was not warmly embraced.
JANE CURTIN:.
My husband and I had tickets to the ballet, and I had on my best clothes, and Lorne called about ten minutes before we were leaving to go uptown and said, "I need to talk to you. Can you come up to 30 Rock?" I said, "We have tickets to the ballet," and he said, "It will only take a minute." So I went up there, and Chevy proceeded to say that he thought that he should be doing "Update" that week, and I said okay, and then he went through this whole thing about how his fans wanted to see him - I said okay - and Lorne was backing him up, and backing him up, and I"m going, "Okay, okay." They were expecting a fight, and I honestly didn"t care, because it was just one week and I wanted to leave! I wanted to go to the ballet. But they had to make their point. So we were late. The two of them were on this feeding frenzy in the sense that Chevy was expecting something that he wasn"t getting from me, and he became more intent on selling his point of view and then Lorne would jump in. You sit there and you have pieces of your arm bitten off and then you leave. But it heals. It grows back.
CHEVY CHASE, Cast Member: It was difficult the first year I went back to host. Because I went back feeling that I was still part of the family there and at the same time feeling probably, in retrospect, full of myself because I had become pretty famous. And I think that I had never really realized how envious John had become of me or had been while I was on the show. In fact, it was Lorne who verified that for me later on - that John had been pretty upset that I had become the star and not him, even though I told John many times that it was because I said my name every week, because others couldn"t p.r.o.nounce his or spell it, and it would happen for him - that these things were more luck than talent or ability and that, of course, he should have been the star.
And that he could become one, you know, albeit dead later on. But what the h.e.l.l, who knew? I wish he were around today.
So that first time I came back, two things were at work. One was my feeling that if I were to come back the audiences would really want to see me do a fall, and they"d want to see me do "Weekend Update." That was somewhat egocentric of me, because Jane had been doing it all year. It was not thoughtful in that sense, I think - in retrospect again. But in any case, John had also, as I later found out, been spreading some pretty apocryphal stories about me out of his jealousy and anger or whatever to Billy Murray, who was protective of Jane and also, generally speaking, a feisty fellow. And I"m sure Billy wanted to take me down, you know. So Billy and I got into a kind of a preliminary fistfight that never really came to fruition but came close. And it happened just before I went on the air. It was not very good timing. That was painful for me.
In a sense, John caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake. Billy was out of line. I"d been out of line to some degree - certainly in Billy"s mind, initiated by the things that Lorne later told me about. So Billy came after me and tried to throw me off a little bit just before I was going on the air. Ultimately, Billy"s still Billy and I"m still me, but it didn"t faze me for the show. I was sure upset, but I noticed John when I was going into Billy"s dressing room, and John was like the Cheshire Cat - sitting there like "mission accomplished."
I felt at the time I was a lot tougher kid than maybe Billy or anybody might have thought. I had grown up on the edge of East Harlem. I had been in a lot of fistfights. And I didn"t feel like anybody could take me - Billy Murray or anybody else, for that matter. And so, as intimidating as he can be, at the time I just let it pa.s.s. I was angry and I just let it go, thinking, "Big deal. This happened but I"ve got a show to do." Others might have withered. I had a certain tensile strength about me from childhood with an older brother who had already kicked the c.r.a.p out of me through much of my younger life. And there"d been a number of times where I was in violent situations. So it wasn"t as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks. I had. And so I guess I simply weathered it. In other words, rather than be filled with the adrenaline that gives you the shakes and doesn"t allow you to concentrate on what you"re doing, that simply pa.s.sed, and it may be because I was in shape and I played a lot of soccer and had been in situations where I could calm down readily after something like that happened.
I think Billy was trying to take me down a rung, and I probably was up a rung. I was probably a little too full of myself, you know.
I realized when I left that maybe I hadn"t been such a great guy. Maybe we weren"t so close. Maybe I"d been somewhat of an a.s.shole. I left with self-doubts. And as time went on, it was a little easier to do it over the years because, you know, it was water under the bridge. But it did change my perception, because my perception had been all along that that first year was really a tight, close-knit family and that I just happened to emerge because of something someone had written and because people were responding to me as the first breakaway star.
BILL MURRAY:.
I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host. That was because I was the new guy, and it was sort of like it was my job to do that. It would have been too petty for someone else to do it. It"s almost like I was goaded into that. You know, I think everybody was hoping for it. I did sense that. I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving and making his own career go. Everybody else was from the improvisational world, where you didn"t make it about you. You were an ensemble, you were a company. So when he left, there was resentment about that. It was a shock.
At the same time, Chevy was the big potato in the stew. He got the most sketches, he had the most influence, he got the most publicity - all of those things. So they didn"t miss that part of it. But there was still hangover feeling that he shouldn"t have left until everybody had that. You make sure everybody else is there and then you do it.
It did leave a big vacuum, because he was really heavy in those shows. You look at those early shows and he"s heavy. And so you had a whole year when the writers ended up writing, like writers do - they write for the guys who can get it done, who can get it on the air - and Chevy"s sketches got on the air because he was "the man," you know. The other actors had to start over from scratch and teach the writers how to write for them. They were "new" people who had to be written for, but they weren"t new people, they"d been there all year; they just hadn"t gotten on. So the show had to sort of start up again from the beginning without him. I remember just sort of a general animosity that they felt, and he did come back as a star.
When you become famous, you"ve got like a year or two where you act like a real a.s.shole. You can"t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You"ve got like two years to pull it together - or it"s permanent.
JOHN LANDIS:.
I"ve only been to SNL three times, and one time I was there, Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and Michael O"Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows. I mean, it was a huge argument. And the thing I remember about Bill Murray - I don"t know Bill Murray, but he"s screaming, you know, foaming at the mouth, "f.u.c.king Chevy," and in anger he says, "Medium talent!" And I thought, "Ooh boy, that"s funny. In anger he says "medium talent."" That really impressed me. I went, "So, Bill Murray - wow, who is that guy?"
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
It seems like there was a tension between Chevy and Billy all along during the week. I don"t know why. I don"t know if Chevy provoked it or not. But it culminated with Billy saying to Chevy, "Why don"t you f.u.c.k your wife once in a while?" And I don"t even remember who threw the first punch, Billy or Chevy. But it was ugly. I"d never seen guys fighting like that, let alone people I knew. And you know, I don"t know how he did it, but Chevy went out and did the monologue a few minutes later. Watching him from the floor, he seemed shattered.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
Billy Joel, the musical guest, was out there singing his heart out while all this was going on backstage.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:.
There had come a point in the first season where Chevy wasn"t writing for the show as much as he was writing for Chevy. And that didn"t help things. I can"t put it in the degree of who was despised more or whatever. I know that when he left the show and he did the specials, there were some interviews with him where he was talking about the future of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, the show that he had just left. And I seem to remember him being quoted as saying things like, "I"ve used that show for everything I can, that show has no future other than to get weirder as opposed to smarter." As if the first year we"d just shot our wad. Those were the kinds of things that were coming back to us, and so those of us who were still in the coal mines shoveling seven days a week had to ask, "Why are you doing this? We worked really hard with you and for you. That made no sense."
I remember Chevy coming back after one of his specials and talking about it or raving about it, you know, proud of something he just did, and I remember Al Franken saying something like, "That"s good, Chevy, but we do one of those every week." So there were some ill feelings, I think.
In those first five years, Sat.u.r.day Night Live not only had probably its best cast ever, but also the best and b.a.l.l.siest collection of writers. The sketch form was older than television itself, but the way they approached it, bent it and shaped it, was their own, and it resulted in sketches that are remembered vividly to this day by the first generation of SNL viewers - such recurring cla.s.sics as the Coneheads, the swinging immigrant Czech brothers, romantic nerds Lisa and Todd, the Greek diner where all one could order was "cheeseburger cheeseburger" - and such beloved or notorious sketches as Danny Aykroyd"s hemorrhaging Julia Child, his virtuoso performance as the immortal "Ba.s.s-OMatic" pitchman, the violent and controversial "Stunt Baby," Buck Henry as pedophilic baby-sitter Uncle Roy, and the hilariously businesslike comportment of Aykroyd as Fred Garvin, Male Prost.i.tute.
STEVE MARTIN:.
When you"re young, you have way fewer taboo topics, and then as you go through life and you have experiences with people getting cancer and dying and all the things you would have made fun of, then you don"t make fun of them anymore. So rebelliousness really is the province of young people - that kind of iconoclasm.
DAN AYKROYD:.
Michael O"Donoghue was one of the really great writers on the show, and he really taught me how to write for television. He taught me to have the confidence, he taught me to go with the concept, to embrace the absurdity. He taught me structure, he was meticulous in the way he laid out structure bits, he taught me the discipline of writing for television.
LILY TOMLIN, Host: I enjoyed hosting. At least I think I did. I do remember that after the show got to be such a big hit, I hosted it again. By that time, I just remember everybody - not everybody, but people like Michael O"Donoghue - was a little bit manic. The dress rehearsal did not go well. And Michael was so eccentric and he must have been so angry with me, he was like putting the evil eye on me or something. And it was so kind of ludicrous that I burst out laughing.
It was so important to them at that point, because they were creating that show and getting it off the ground and everything, so that was their ident.i.ty, and I can understand their intensity - their wanting it to be this or that or great or whatever, and being put out with someone. I think I was forgiven.
CARRIE FISHER:.
I was around Michael O"Donoghue until he was deeply offended that I married Paul and his ex-girlfriend was maid of honor and he wasn"t in the wedding, and he never spoke to me again. I went up to him again at some point and said, "Can"t we put this aside?" He just screamed at me. It was horrible. But I loved Michael. Michael and I had gone to Ireland together, and I think we were actually the first people to do "ludes and mead. I was shooting the Star Wars movies, and John and Danny wanted to be in them as s.p.a.ce creatures or something. I think it was mostly John.
DAN AYKROYD:.
I was never proprietary about pieces. Look, if a piece didn"t work, you know, please get it out and let"s do what works for the show, let"s put someone else"s piece in there. But I had a lot of strength behind me, because I had Franken and Davis and Downey and O"Donoghue as my cowriters, and oftentimes we"d come in, and there"d be three or four of us real strong writers, and so we knew we were going to get on. The goods had been created.