Gasping for Airtime (16 page)

In the Walken sketch, John Turturro played Christopher Walken’s brother, Eugene. His impression was so funny that when he first spoke, I laughed directly into camera. The audience laughed when I laughed and I was never reprimanded for it. For one show, I was on fire, and I was having the greatest time of my life. Then they sent me back to the bench. In baseball, when you’re hitting, you expect to stay in the lineup. Not on
Saturday Night Live.

After John Turturro said his Good-nights, I had done three good sketches in two weeks; two of them I had written myself and one was the lead-off sketch. I anticipated that I would get more and better parts in read-through since I had shown what I could do in the last few shows. I didn’t. If the sketch that I wrote myself didn’t get picked to be on the show, my only shot of being on camera was if Tim Herlihy or Fred Wolf looked out for me. They always did, and in each show, I would have a few lines in someone else’s sketch.

But after John Turturro left, I went five weeks straight with virtually no airtime. Nothing I wrote was picked to be on the show. Out of eleven shows that had come and gone in my second season, sketches that I had written were in only two of them. I started to fear for my job security. They had every right to fire me if they wanted to. I was freezing.

Because I wasn’t on camera very often, I had plenty of free time on Saturday nights to roam around and meet the people who worked in the building. The undercover police officers who handled security for the show became good friends of mine. I got to know Jane, who worked as a janitor for the show, and I befriended Theresa, the NBC nurse. I spoke at length with all of them and found myself seeking their company each Saturday. They were beautiful, friendly people with families, pension plans, and summer homes. And like me, they were never on camera.

The undercover cops and I hit it off pretty quickly. They were blue-collar guys named Ron, Billy Mac, and Fat Phil. They dressed in suits and wore tiny earpieces to communicate with one another. They also carried .22-caliber pistols in their socks. I would chat with them during the show, and at the wrap party, they would always help me sneak in some extra friends. At the parties I would get so drunk that I couldn’t walk anymore. I always made sure my drinking took place in their sights. If I finally snapped, I wanted to make sure I did it in front of the guys who were packing.

The NBC nurse, Theresa, was a delightful woman. She had a husband and a house somewhere in New Jersey, and she always had a smile on her face. I confided in her about my panic attacks and even showed her my Klonopin pocket. Having a nurse close by was always comforting. Since NBC gave free flu shots to its employees at the beginning of the cold and flu season, I felt relieved to be friends with the person who would be injecting me.

I didn’t get a flu shot my first season and paid the price for it. I was flat out in my bed for a week with a fever. My second season, I decided to let NBC give me my flu shot. I couldn’t afford to miss a minute of work, let alone a week. I was afraid that if I was ever sick in bed again, I might not get up to come back when I felt better.

But the day of the free NBC flu shots, Theresa wasn’t there. She had taken a day off and there was a different nurse in her place. I wasn’t too crazy about someone I had just met giving me a shot. What bothered me the most was that I had heard that after you get a flu shot, you contract flulike symptoms for a few days and, in some cases, even a fever. For some reason, this information terrified me. Still, I forced myself to go to the nurse’s station the day they gave out the shots. I wondered if Theresa’s absence should be taken as some sort of omen. I rolled up my sleeve and let the substitute nurse shoot me in the arm with the needle. It didn’t hurt, and I suddenly felt manly and relieved. I proudly rolled down my sleeve when the substitute nurse shouted, “Oh my God! I am
so
sorry! You’re not allergic to chicken feathers, are you?”

How the hell did I know if I was allergic to chicken feathers? Now I was certain that I was. The substitute nurse quickly downplayed the entire thing, but I could tell from her initial outburst that she had really messed up. I walked out of the NBC nurse’s station planning the lawsuit that I would bring against NBC for shooting me with a needle full of chicken feathers. Henceforth, the show would be called
Jay Mohr’s Saturday Night Live.

The rest of the night I itched all over my body and felt nauseated. I was sure that any minute my windpipe would close up and I would choke to death. I never saw the substitute nurse after that night. I told Theresa the next time I saw her what had transpired. She was appalled that anyone would give another human being a flu shot without asking him if he was allergic to chicken feathers first. I was glad she was back.

Jane the janitor was probably the most refreshing person to talk to in the entire building. A black woman in her sixties, she didn’t have an ounce of show business in her. Usually when I saw her, she was pushing a gigantic trash barrel on wheels. She always had a genuine smile on her face and seemed happy to see me. When we spoke, it was never about the show. It was always about family. During these conversations we were never interrupted. It was as if there was a shield around us.

During my spectator period, I would sit with the show’s announcer, Don Pardo, who would sip tea to keep his throat loose and ask me about my parents. He also lived in New Jersey, and despite the generation gap, we knew many of the same places. He cracked me up. I had started talking with Pardo the moment I was hired on the show. When he first laid eyes on me in the hallway outside of studio 8-H, he shouted in the same voice he used for the show’s introduction, “Ladies and gentlemen…
Jay Mooohr!
” He had been the voice of NBC for so many years and had done so many commercials that whenever he spoke to me, I felt comfortable. I had heard Don Pardo’s voice so often that when he spoke, I felt as if I was sitting at home in my living room. Hearing Don Pardo shout my name was a career wake-up call. I must have arrived if Pardo was saying my name.

Once I asked Don Pardo who was his all-time favorite out of all the musical guests that ever appeared on
Saturday Night Live.
He answered in his booming voice, “Are you kidding me, man? B.J.” I asked him, “Billy Joel?” Pardo erupted,
“Bon Jovi!”
I was surprised, to say the least. Pardo was at least seventy years old, and his declaration caught me off balance. When I asked him if he was serious, he smiled. “That motherfucker can sing,” he said. Fair enough. Maybe it was a Jersey thing.

Don Pardo, Theresa the nurse, Jane the janitor, and officers Ron, Billy Mac, and Fat Phil all helped make my Saturdays seem bearable. They listened to me and always had something nice to say. They never wanted anything from me but to see me smile. As I spent more and more time with them, it began to dawn on me that for whatever reason, these people simply liked me. Not me the performer or me the comic. They never saw that when they looked at me. They liked me for who I was. There wasn’t a phony bone in any of them, and I loved them for it.

T
HOUGH
I had always heard wildly varied descriptions of Lorne Michaels, I really liked him. To hear fans of the show tell it, Lorne was the guy that changed television. Here was a guy who came out of nowhere—Toronto, actually—and made an indelible mark on the entertainment landscape with
Saturday Night Live
. He was immortal. He was a guy who told the network and the entire old establishment of America to stick it. He broke the biggest comedy stars ever, and he created a new kind of celebrity, a cool not-ready-for-prime-time-players celebrity. And it was all because of Lorne Michaels, genius.

But to some people in the entertainment community—and certainly many former cast members—Lorne Michaels was downright diabolical. To them, Lorne was a man who would step on his grandmother’s throat to make a nickel. He was daft and put on airs. He was completely out of touch, notably with how uncool he had become. He also had no recollection of how cool he once was. I always figured the real Lorne Michaels was somewhere between these two versions, and I never had any sense that he was operating on some sort of diabolical level.

Some past and present cast members were convinced that Lorne wouldn’t sleep at night unless he made their lives miserable. Not me. No matter how pissed I ever got at Lorne Michaels, I never forgot what he had done for me. I had an illness that the show’s lack of structure brought out of me. I had spent hours at a time on my knees praying to God not to let me die in my office or dressing room. I had suffered panic that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But I was also occasionally on television, and when I was, it was on
Saturday Night Live
. I had legitimacy. I was making a fortune performing stand-up at colleges and clubs. People stopped me on the street and in the malls and shook my hand. I walked into auditions with credibility. I never forgot for a second that all of it was because at some point Lorne had nodded his head. At some point in the hiring process, out of the hundreds of people that auditioned for the show, Lorne Michaels said, “Him.”

Whatever Lorne might have been, I do know he was unflappable. The only story I heard about him breaking character happened when the band Skid Row was on the air. During the live show, Lorne always sat in a director’s chair under the bleachers, and he always had an Amstel Light at the ready. The show was live and Skid Row was introduced. Sebastian Bach took the mike and said, “It’s good to be here and we are live, motherfuckers!” Lorne dropped his Amstel Light onto the stage floor. Instantly he regained his composure, turned to one of the stage managers, calmly said, “Cancel their second song,” and walked away.

I know enough to know how historically significant Lorne is to television. He definitely broke the back of the Lawrence Welk America. In my mind, he had started it all: antiestablishment, underground cool, late-night television. He created the mold and then threw it away. Every other imitator in his wake failed.
Saturday Night Live
originally went on the air in 1975, and Lorne Michaels has been executive producer of every episode, except for a brief hiatus from 1980 to 1985. How many people have produced the same television show for that long? Zero.

Even the supposed bombs of movies that Lorne produces are cash cows. They cost practically nothing to make, and they’re already written by the time you get the idea to put them on film. In my opinion, the guy has written the book on how to be successful. Professionally speaking, if I were to analyze his career, I would have to give him As across the board. Personally speaking, I didn’t really form a clear-cut opinion of Lorne. As the Brits might say, I always found him to be rather pleasant, but mind you, I rarely actually saw him.

I would joke to people who asked me how he was to work with that he was like Charlie on
Charlie’s Angels
. I seldom laid eyes on him, but each week he was the one providing me with my mission. Oddly, I never heard him crack a joke either. Was he funny? He had delivered the great line “If you want to pay Ringo less, it’s okay with me.” So when friends would ask me what type of guy Lorne was, all I could muster was an “I don’t really know.”

Lorne’s office was on the other end of the seventeenth floor from the writers’ room, as well as from the offices of most of the cast and the writers. I’m sure this was by design. With the exception of waiting for the Monday-night pitch meeting to begin, there was never a reason for you to be hanging around his office. You could pretend that you were reading letters of protest for only so long.

Lorne had an incredible number of secretaries. Stories about the show say they are called the Lorne-ettes. When I was on the show, I never heard anyone ever refer to them that way. They were all called by their names. They were all pretty beautiful, too. That, I’m sure, was also by design. There were at least five, but probably more. I could never make a definite head count because they were never all at their desks at the same time. But they were certainly there. No one could walk unimpeded to Lorne’s office without passing at least one of them. Checkpoint after checkpoint stripped you of your privacy as you arrived at the door.

One thing was clear about Lorne: He was the master of our domain. In a strange way, the show ran itself until he felt like running it. I just didn’t know from where or when he did it. Though he did it rarely, Lorne made it clear he was the boss. During my second season when Lorne was addressing the outside rumors of the show’s impending demise, he lectured us. “Many of you hear things from the outside about how the show is doing,” he began. “I want to remind you that no one will ever stop you on the street to tell you how poorly you are doing. They will tell you only nice things, no matter how bad it’s going. If you don’t want to be here, there’s the door, and that’s the only thing keeping you from being a third lead on a sitcom.”

Though he meant it as a jab, I remember counting seven people in the room who would be great third leads on sitcoms and wondering if they were thinking what I was thinking: That would be unbelievable. Alas, he was right. When I left
SNL,
I became the third lead on
The Jeff Foxworthy Show
.

Most of us saw Lorne only on Mondays during the pitch meeting with the host, on Wednesdays at the table read-through, and on Saturdays during the rehearsals and the taping of the show. Unless you had a prescheduled meeting with him, any encounter was purely coincidental. Lorne wasn’t in the office as much as the rest of the
SNL
cast and crew, and when he was there, he was in seclusion. There weren’t any announcements when he entered the building either. The only time he gave me direct advice was after “Psychic Friends Network” was cut from the Shannen Doherty show. I told him that I was going to resubmit the sketch in two weeks when John Malkovich hosted, and he advised me: “No, do it this week. You have guilt and momentum on your side.”

My second season on the show, I had managed to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Lorne. It was more than halfway through the season, and I was so unhappy with my lack of screen time that I figured I was going to take my complaint right to the top. I had bitched and moaned for so long to so many people that it was my only remaining option.

I made a list of the shows I hadn’t been on. The list also contained all the sketches I had written that I felt should have made it on the air but had fallen into the department of dead letters. I was taking the meeting with Lorne Michaels seriously. I couldn’t have been more prepared. I had lists, for crying out loud.

At the appointed hour, I presented myself to one of his secretaries and she asked me to wait. So there I sat for the next half hour in front of his platoon of secretaries. None of them tried to engage me in any small talk. They just kept answering their telephones and typing at their computers. I went over my lists. I knew that I was probably going to get only one shot. There was no one above Lorne. I was on my final appeal.

Eventually one of the secretaries told me I could go in, but that proved tougher than it should have been. The door was closed, and when I tried to push it open, it felt unusually heavy. As I was opening it, it caught on the carpet on Lorne’s side. I had to either plow forward with the door or bend down and fold the carpet back down on the floor to get inside. Paranoid about knocking something over, I bent down, pulled the carpet out from under the door, and reassembled it so I could swing the door over it.

As I stood up after fixing the carpet, I saw Lorne sitting at his desk. He invited me in. I wasn’t sure if I should close the door behind me or not. Since I had gone to all the trouble of figuring out the door’s arc on the floor, I decided to close it. By the time I turned back around, Lorne had crossed to the front of his desk. The moment the door clicked shut, he put his hands in his pockets and told me that he wanted to apologize for the fact I had been used so infrequently. He went on to say how much I figured in the long-term plans of the show. “You are the future of the show,” he said.

It was incredible. By the time it was my turn to speak, the only thing left for me to say was thank you. He had completely disarmed me. I never got to my lists. He took them away from me. He stripped me of every possible complaint. He covered everything that I was going to bring up and addressed it with assurance—though somehow I didn’t feel particularly reassured.

These breaks were either one or two weeks long, and I commuted with no fear of having a panic attack on the plane. When the breaks rolled around, I was too tired to panic. All I could do was sleep. Having my legs broken week after week consumed every ounce of energy that I had. Whenever it was time for me to go back to New York, Nicole and I would get into huge arguments. They were usually over nothing, and were fueled more by booze than any animosity.

Long after my career at
Saturday Night Live
was over, I realized why we were arguing so much then. It was because in my demented head, the arguments made her easier to leave behind. When I was in New York, I dreamed of being with her. I dreamed of being in Los Angeles with her and the sunshine. The women I saw in New York disgusted me. The same social chip that I could cash with my friends was the only thing I had to offer them. I hated them for that. I hated myself, too.

U2 has a song on their album
Achtung Baby!
called “Light My Way” that talks about a woman’s love being a lightbulb hanging over your bed. My wife-to-be was my lightbulb. She lit my way. I believe that all human beings have a light inside of them. The light in me was getting very dim. I felt like a complete failure. Batting two for eleven in my second season was a disgrace.

By that point, when people asked me what I did for a living, I stopped telling them that I was on
Saturday Night Live
because I really wasn’t. I would simply tell them that I was a comic. If I told someone I was on the show, they would always look excited at first and then eventually they would turn skeptical. They would ask me what characters I did, and if they hadn’t seen the Christopher Walken sketch, I would have to name other sketches where I had stood in the background mimicking a prop. As far as being a celebrity goes, I didn’t have anything to offer except stories about the people I worked with who were actually famous.

At least there were plenty of those.

I have always been a fan of the television show
Roseanne
, and I respected Roseanne as a comedian. Roseanne was pleasant to me and never did anything to me to distort my perception of her. I’d read the tabloid journalism about her, but I’d never paid any attention to it. When Roseanne arrived on the Monday of the week she was to be host, it was like meeting a bossy, wry old housewife. By Saturday, she was like a six-year-old.

The cast had filed into Lorne’s office between dress rehearsal and air and taken up their positions. Some muttered to themselves about their sketches being dropped from the rundown. Lorne waited for everyone to settle and began to give notes. The moment he started to speak, Roseanne belched.

At first we thought it was by accident. Roseanne excused herself and motioned for Lorne to continue. As Lorne detailed the changes being made to the show, Roseanne continued to belch. She wasn’t doing it by accident, either. She would belch to punctuate a particular note of Lorne’s. She would belch during people’s questions to Lorne. After each burp, she would look around the room and smile as if we were all in a grade school classroom. Her burps weren’t exactly ladylike, either. She was letting out some real whoppers. Halfway through the meeting Roseanne literally ran out of gas.

Refusing to stop a good party, Roseanne started to make herself burp. If she opened her mouth to burp and nothing came out, she would hold up her hand and say, “Wait! Wait!”

Lorne wasn’t waiting. During the entire meeting, he acted as if her antics weren’t happening. There were a few scattered giggles at first when the belching began, but they quickly dissipated. Farley thought it was funny, so he threw out a couple of fake burps. As she continued the burping, it became unfunny fast and Farley stopped. Lorne spoke to us softly and made eye contact with everyone in the room. The more Roseanne burped, the quieter Lorne spoke. We had to lean in toward him to make sure we weren’t missing anything. I wasn’t on the show, so I had no reason to be attending the show meeting, but I was, and I was hanging on to Lorne’s every word. Lorne’s professionalism and savvy obliterated Roseanne’s little-kid routine. It was impressive, to say the least. Because of Lorne’s low voice, Roseanne’s burps were just annoying.