Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (13 page)

It was hard to be female; it always was, you know. Gilda had a good coping device for that somehow, because she could just be charming and darling. When you’re actually pushing your own material, when you’re in the trenches with the guys, it’s a little harder. We were in the front lines, like Vietnam nurses. It was intense. It was very, very intense.

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
Saturday 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, “Hello, Judge, I’m sorry to bother you at home, but have you ever heard of a show called
Saturday 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 God, 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 God’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
Saturday 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,
Assistant:

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 sexual 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 “sex appeal” thing, I don’t know where that came from. I know that I had sex appeal because I know how much sex I had.

You know what made me good was simply not giving a flying fuck. 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 entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club. Which wasn’t the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn’t go, “Oh, I want to get into this, I think I’ll have to have sex 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 sex 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 sex 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 sex 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
Saturday 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.