Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (22 page)

When we did the “Franken and Davis Show” sketches, our theme was usually that we were breaking up. Once we had Al’s real parents in town, coming to the show, so we dressed up in SS uniforms and we dressed his parents in these death-camp stripes. It was going to be something. In the sketch, Al’s father would say, “You know, Al, your mother and I are very uncomfortable with this piece. We think it’s tasteless.” And Al would say, “Oh come on, Dad, you wanted to be on TV. This is funny.” Elliott Gould was the host and Elliott was going to go along with it. But Standards and Practices was really sweating. And Lorne and Bernie Brillstein were like, “Oh God!” And then Lorne finally decided, “No, no, you can’t do it.” And Joe and Phoebe, Al’s parents, were really dejected. They were excited about being in the piece and being on TV.

So there we are up in Lorne’s office in our SS uniforms, black skulls on the hat and everything, and Joe and Phoebe, this old feeble Jewish couple, are dressed in the prison outfits. And we got cut. And Al’s parents walked out of the room. And Lorne said, “Don’t ever do that to me again. I don’t want to ever cut your parents like that.”

NEIL LEVY:

There was a time in the third season when the writers all thought they were being cheated out of their paychecks and there was an insurrection. Everybody got paranoid at one point that they weren’t getting paid enough. They discovered there was a certain amount of money in the writers budget, but when they divided what all the writers were making, where was all this extra money? It was going into sets and other things, and it wasn’t their business what was happening to it. But there was an insurrection, really. Somebody kicked a hole in a wall and then Lorne came in and said, “What’s going on here?” And he was confronted by this mob. And he didn’t say a word — he just turned and walked away and went back into his office and closed the door. And then there was dead silence, and then en masse, all the writers stood in front of Lorne’s door begging his forgiveness, banging on the door and pleading, and he wouldn’t talk to them — ’til later.

One charge that plagued
Saturday Night Live
was that the show was a boys club, which meant women had to struggle first for admission and then for recognition. Women writers were easily among the most prominent and creative of the first group yet still remained in the minority — a state that would worsen rather than improve in years to come. Among cast members, men who stood out or became stars have outnumbered women, partly because better roles are written for men on the show — by male writers. During the 1976–77 season, the writing staff consisted of thirteen men and three women — Rosie Shuster, Anne Beatts, and Marilyn Suzanne Miller.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:

There was a sort of sisterhood that extended — you know, there weren’t that many people, so we were like each other’s best friend, because we didn’t even know anybody outside the building. By “we” I mean all six girls, the writers plus the performers.

GARRETT MORRIS:

Either it’s that they were all niggers with me or I was a woman with them — because I got the same raw deal.

LILY TOMLIN:

There was a lot of misogynist stuff that I considered to be demeaning to women — or to any group — on
Saturday Night Live
. It was not my style, you know. You can do anything about anything if there’s some artistry involved, but I never was very big on imitating celebrities and putting them down either. It was too limited to me. It was too easy in some sense. And it was just not my style. I was much more interested in pervasive culture types. I was mostly trying to feed back the culture, really, and do stuff that I was pretty infatuated with. I was more interested in the humanity that held us together. Not to say that it shouldn’t be satirical and edgy or whatever. It should be.

Their satire is seldom that hard-hitting. It’s more — oh God, I don’t know. I don’t have too many views about analyzing comedy and what everybody does and what everybody didn’t do or how they did it. It rises to the top or it doesn’t, I suppose.

JANE CURTIN:

John absolutely didn’t like being in sketches with women. He told me women were not funny. Actually, Chevy said it to me as well. And I found it stunning.

Lorne didn’t help, because that isn’t what Lorne did. Oh, it was ridiculous. It was just insane. There’s no way you can respond to that, so you just have to learn to live with it, plod on, and hope that Marilyn will get a piece on that week.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

I think Lorne was really a champion of the women writers and gave them an even break. His background was working with women. He started writing for Phyllis Diller, he produced most of the Lily Tomlin specials. He hires women and he’s supportive of women. He is not one of those people that thinks women are not funny.

But the boys got away with a lot. They were bad and we were good. We were punctual and they were late. We were clean and they were dirty. We were prepared and they weren’t — it was that stuff. I don’t think we really got into personalities, because we didn’t really have that many. Jane certainly didn’t have relationships with the guys on any level. She had a life and was married. I was very fond of everybody. It was a family. I always think of that scene in
The Right Stuff
when they’ve gone to that event that Lyndon Johnson planned for them, and they’re backstage before they’re introduced at this big party on their behalf, and they’re all just sitting around realizing what they’ve all done, and they’re just kind of looking at each other like, you know, “Here we are.” And that is how we all felt. It’s like we’d been through this incredible lifeboat of a situation and we’re all tied together because of it.

DAN AYKROYD:

I think if you look back on the first four years, it was pretty evenly balanced. The women were pretty strong. Jane, Laraine, and Gilda were strong and played strong characters. So I would question whether it was a boys club, just because what would it have been without those women there? It would have been very empty.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER

I’m not sure how to say this, but everybody sort of thought I was good, and when I wrote something, people wanted to do it. It was a little niche I created for myself.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

Was Lorne prejudiced against female writers? I think we sometimes had to try harder. I remember being instructed by Lorne to write at least nine separate drafts of this stupid sketch called “Backstage Banter” that I just wanted to throw in the garbage can. I wanted to chuck it and say to him, “You’re not the boss of me.” There were times we were dismissed, or there were times that I would quietly pitch something in the room in a little voice, ’cause I would not, you know, jump on Lorne’s desk and tap dance it out. I was quiet. Someone else would pick up the idea in the room and then sock it home. Stuff like that happened all the time. But I don’t have any bitterness. I just think we did have to pave the way. We were on new ground. And it was challenging, let’s say. Lorne had a real way of juggling a lot of hot egos. I’m sure he saw backbiting and infighting that we didn’t see; he was probably privy to more of that than any other person. I know he was, because he used to confide certain stuff to me.

AL FRANKEN:

My daughter was the first
Saturday Night Live
baby, the first new child born to anybody who worked on the show.

TOM DAVIS:

Gilda and G. E. Smith, the musician, were living together in the Dakota, and Gilda wanted to give Al’s wife, Franny, and the new baby a shower. G. E. and I are in the back room of the apartment where all his guitars are, because the shower’s for women — all the secretaries, all the wives, Jane is there, Laraine is there. Everyone is waiting for the baby to arrive and there’s a knock at the door and G. E. and I peek in from the other room.

AL FRANKEN:

My wife came with her sister first and I was to bring the baby. My other sister-in-law came with me. So I got a doll the exact size of the baby and swaddled it — I told Franny I was going to do this — and there’s like thirty women, and I walk in and they’re all going like, “Ohhh… ahhhh,” and I walk in and I hit the baby’s head on this piece of furniture and I go up in the air and I come down with everything,
everything
, going onto this doll, so that there is no way I didn’t kill the baby. And the screams, the screams!

TOM DAVIS:

The scream that came out of these women, it just made everyone’s hair stand on end. They just witnessed this man kill his newborn baby. To this day, I’ve never heard a more terrifying sound than all those women witnessing this baby being killed by its father.

AL FRANKEN:

And then my sister-in-law Carla walks in with the real baby.

TOM DAVIS:

I’m telling you, Al did shit like that. I love him for it.

STEVE MARTIN:

And then there was Gilda, who was the sweetest, kindest, funniest person. She was so happy on-camera, she had such a happy face on-camera, you really did grow to love her. You understand what it means when people say they “love” a performer, because they’re bringing such happiness into their world.

BILL MURRAY:

Gilda was really an extraordinary and spectacular person. And she was tough. She was really, really tough. Gilda would just give herself up to a moment, she really gave herself up, she sacrificed herself. She knew how to serve a scene or another person in the scene just so devotedly. She really had the most of that of anyone. As a result, because she made other people look good, she herself looked fantastic.

And she had a charm about her and people could write things for her and sketches would be written and somehow she always took it back to that level of her childhood play. They wrote a lot of sketches to that — you know, of her Judy Miller dancing and bouncing on her bed and stuff — but her own sense of childhood play was really her touchstone.

She was a fantastic laugher. I never enjoyed making anyone laugh more than her. Never. I could make her laugh. I remember one day, I made her laugh so hard — you know there are girls who say, “Oh my God, I wet my pants,” all the time — and I made her laugh so hard, she thought she was going to die. And I just couldn’t stop. I used to be really funny, and in those days I used to have almost like a vengeful thing; I could just go for a long period of time and try to be funny. I don’t do it like I used to. And I miss that. I’m still funny, but back then I would take something and not let go of it, just take something and not let go of it.

PENNY MARSHALL:

Cindy Williams wasn’t even sure she wanted to go into television, having done movies. So I was like reading with the world for who would play Shirley on
Laverne and Shirley.
And I called Gilda, because I needed someone strong. I said, “What’s your contract? Can you get out?” But she had a loyalty to Lorne, which I understood. Gilda was funny. Gilda was great.

ROBERT KLEIN:

Once Gilda made me laugh so hard, it was one of the hardest and longest laughing jags I ever had in my life. Do you remember years ago there was a yogurt commercial where they show these old Russians in a village and they live to be a hundred and six because they eat yogurt? Well, she played the old woman with the babushka, and yogurt was going all down her face. She was as good as it gets.

KATE JACKSON:

I was so shy and nervous when I hosted, because these were the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. They were better than anybody else on television and everybody knew it. Lorne and the writers were there, and I was wondering if when I opened my mouth to start talking were they going to laugh? Would they roll their eyeballs, look at me, and go, “Oh Lord, have mercy”?

After the cold opening I rushed to change clothes and was doing my wardrobe change and waiting for the lights to come up, and Gilda just very quietly said to me, “You’re really good at this.” And that just sent me flying. She just absolutely released me and allowed me to have the kind of confidence that lets you do the best you can do. That was the most generous thing. It was just wonderful of her to do that.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER

We were aware of Gilda’s eating problems, but we didn’t know it was called bulimia. We thought it was this incredibly brilliant idea that Gilda thought up, and I underscore that and I suggest you put it in your book. Yeah, we thought it was a great idea. There were a few girls in my sorority house that went into the bathroom and threw up right after dinner. Which we also thought — by “we,” I mean the entire female population thought — was the most wonderful idea and many of us tried to do. It didn’t have any name like bulimia, and nobody had said it was a disease. We just thought it was a great idea. And then when it went on for a while we thought it was a great
weird
idea.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

I was concerned about Gilda’s bulimia because I’d had a very close friend who was bulimic all through her teenage years. I knew the things that could happen, so I was really worried about Gilda in that context. She was very open about it — not covert, which I always thought was typical of people with that illness. They’re usually very hidden. But she was so funny about it, because she would really announce it to us.

Jane and I and Gilda shared a dressing room until the third year. The boys always had their own dressing room; we had to share one. And Gilda used to make this joke about how when we were tired we would have to split a couch three ways. We would all be on the couch together. Then at one point, Gilda would get up and say, “Well, I’ve got to go into the bathroom.” And there were times when she and I would hang out at her house and I would be snorting heroin and she would be eating a gallon of ice cream. And I remember her staggering to the bathroom to make herself throw up, and saying, “I’m so full, I can’t hear.” And I laughed so hard. There we were, practicing our illnesses together. She was still funny throughout all of it.