Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (23 page)

ELLIOTT GOULD:

Gilda became a very close friend of mine. She was the greatest. Just the most lovely and sensitive human being you could imagine. Gilda told me that when she couldn’t sleep, she would order food at about two or three in the morning, and she was so bulimic she would order enough for six or seven people, even though it was just her alone. And then when the delivery guy came and rang the bell, she would say, “The food’s here! The food’s here!”

TOM SCHILLER:

“La Dolce Gilda” was an attempt to capture the sadness of Gilda when she was at parties and all these sycophants would come around her, done in the style of Federico Fellini, my favorite director. We shot it in black and white after the show, at a place where we had our parties sometimes. For the end of the film, where she says, “Go away, leave me alone,” we stayed up all night in order to get the real feeling of dawn coming up. Then I realized you could shoot that at dusk and it looks the same. So I was learning filmmaking at the same time.

I eventually got to show the film to Fellini himself. I went to Cinecittà Studios in Rome and said I was a friend of Henry Miller’s and Paul Mazursky’s, which was true, and they let me in to watch Fellini direct one of his pictures there. I met him and said, “Look, I made this homage to you, I’d love to show you.” He said, “We must arrange a screening.” So they showed him the movie, and he said it was “very sweet” and “it had the feeling of some of my work.” Oh, I was in heaven when I saw him there. And he was so welcoming and supportive and everything. He was a neat guy.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

I really enjoyed doing the “Perfume for One-Night Stands” commercial parody. That one I really had a great fondness for, because it brought together a lot of what was going on at the time in terms of casual sex and waking up next to somebody whose name you didn’t remember and hobbling out in the morning in last night’s dress. It was a great character for Gilda. I mean, I can’t imagine Jane Curtin doing that one.

LARAINE NEWMAN:

I had a situation involving Gilda when Christopher Lee was host. I was the one who wanted him to host. I’m a big horror movie fan and I just knew his work from that. And he turned out to be an excellent host, even though he dropped a bomb on us the first day. He walked in and said he refused to do Dracula on the show.

I know there is a story about me threatening to quit over that show, but I would like to set the record straight on that. They had written the sketch “Dr. Death” for a couple of shows before that, and I knew it was Gilda’s sketch but I’m thinking, “Fuck!” This is the conversation I had with Lorne: “Why does she get to do that sketch? She gets so much airtime. This is a character that I could do. Why can’t I do that sketch?” So it got turned into this big thing that I had threatened to quit unless I got that sketch, which I never did. Lorne said, “If you really feel that way, you should quit,” and I said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m just saying that this is really difficult for me. This is very hurtful and unfair.” So I don’t know who told who what, but that is really what happened.

The day of read-through, when we went in there, Danny was furious with me, because he had heard I’d threatened to quit. I only found out years later that Gilda had partially written that sketch. Now if I had known that, I would
never
have asked to do it, because my sense of fair play would never have allowed me to want to do something that someone else wrote. She wrote it with Alan Zweibel, but no one told me at the time. I just thought it was something that Alan wrote that I could have easily done — and what hardship would it have been on Gilda, when she had so much to do in the show? Especially with Christopher Lee, who was the host that I wanted?

And as it happened, I was cast as the little girl. And the sketch turned out okay.

NEIL LEVY:

I had to go fish stars out of bars all the time, especially the first and second seasons. Oh God — Broderick Crawford was completely drunk all the time. He actually disappeared. He’d always try to get to the elevator. I’d say, “Where are you going?” He’d say, “I gotta go find my script, I left my script downstairs.” I’d say, “I’ll go with you.” “No, you don’t need to come with me.” But Lorne had given me very explicit instructions: “You have to stay with him all the time.” And Crawford tried to trick me, and then he’d get angry when I caught him at it. He did get away from me once, and I found him in a bar.

Kris Kristofferson was completely wasted during dress rehearsal. He couldn’t say his lines, sloshing around, slurring the words. Lorne said, “Just get the biggest pot of coffee you can.” I remember Louise Lasser on her hands and knees crawling into my office looking for pot. Why she was on her hands and knees, I don’t know. And then the day of the show, she decided she wasn’t going to do the show unless a certain sketch was cut. And we were all preparing to do the show without her. In fact I remember Aykroyd getting excited about it: “We can do it, Lorne. We can get out there and we’ll improv it. We’ll do a helluva show.” And they were ready. And Lorne told her agent that he would make sure everyone knew if she walked out.

DON NOVELLO:

The Frank Zappa show was like one of the worst ever. And I looked at that recently and I really liked seeing how awkward he was in that. Zappa’s a genius, but he doesn’t trust people, he does everything by himself. A lot of performers after dress are shaken; it doesn’t go well and all of sudden, “Oh God, in two hours I’m going on live.” With Zappa what happened was we had a terrible dress and what was he going to do? What he did, not telling anybody, was he turned into Dean Martin. The approach he took was, he read the cards like he was reading the cards — he made a point of it. He was obviously reading the cards. That was his approach to the humor. No one else in the sketches knew it. It was real bad, because I always liked Zappa, I think everybody did, but it was just a terrible show. Lorne was really upset.

HOWARD SHORE:

Hugh Hefner wanted to sing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” when he hosted, and we rehearsed it endlessly all week and did the dress, which was great. Then we did the show, and during the show he stopped listening, which a lot of amateur singers do. He saw the audience and just stopped listening to the band and went off into his own world. And I looked at Shaffer, who was playing piano, and it was just like, oh my God, he was bars ahead of us and we’re on the air and we’re trying to catch up.

RICK LUDWIN,
NBC Vice President for Late Night:

Belushi was thrilled to hear that Milton Berle was coming on, because Belushi admired Milton Berle, and it was one of those things where they were all hanging around Milton’s dressing room for the first day or two of the week, you know — Milton, tell us about this, tell us about that. And then Milton assumed he was not hosting
Saturday Night Live
, Milton assumed they were doing
Texaco Star Theater
, and as Milton sometimes did, he took over the production and tried to make it his own, as opposed to being the host. And Lorne disliked the show to such an extent that it’s never been seen on Comedy Central, it’s never been seen anywhere, since. Lorne was so upset with the way Milton had just steamrolled his way over everyone that he never wanted that show to see the light of day again.

ROSIE SHUSTER:

Anne Beatts and I had written this sketch for Gilda and Milton Berle when he hosted. He was to play an old man in an old folks home, and she was going to feed him dinner. And during dress rehearsal Uncle Miltie did these painfully broad spit takes, enough to make Danny Thomas cringe. So I was sent to Uncle Miltie’s dressing room between dress and air to deliver this one simple note, which was, do not go overboard on the spit takes. But he was totally focused on his opening monologue, which was looming in an hour, and he was trying out jokes on me. He was pacing around in his boxer shorts, very proud to parade in his shorts in front of me. Thank God they weren’t briefs, because it was already too much information.

He left me no verbal airspace. I could not get a word in. He was like a totally crazed tennis ball machine spitting shtick at me, a comedy filibuster on my little one note. He just drowned me out. And finally wardrobe fetched him, and I found myself running after him screaming, “Don’t be broad!” Of course he went even broader, if that was possible. It was sort of like watching a comedy train accident in slow motion on a loop.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:

Milton Berle took a liking to me and gravitated to me, I think because in the early seventies, I had written all these jokes for Catskill comics. And I wrote jokes for a lot of the Friars Club roasts, where Uncle Miltie was usually the roastmaster. You played to people’s stereotypes with those jokes — Jack Benny was the cheap one, and so on — and with Berle, all I had known was he wore a dress on TV and supposedly stole everybody’s jokes. And also I learned early on that he was the guy with the big dick, one of the biggest in show business. So I started writing big dick jokes about him for these Friars roasts.

Now fast-forward a few years and I’m in Milton Berle’s dressing room at
Saturday Night Live
. He’s sitting on a couch behind a coffee table and he’s wearing a very short kind of bathrobe, the kind that comes down to about midthigh. And somehow I just say to him, “You know, it’s so weird that I’m here talking to you, because for years I was writing jokes about your dick.” I said, “I wrote all these jokes about your cock and now I’m talking to you — I feel like there’s some violation or something here.”

He says to me: “You mean you never saw it?” I said, “Uh, no, I don’t believe I did.” Then he said, “Well, would you like to?” And before I had a chance to say, “Not really” or “Can I think about it?” or whatever, he parts his bathrobe and he just takes out this — this anaconda. He lays it on the table and I’m looking into this thing, right? I’m looking into the head of Milton Berle’s dick. It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, “What do you think of the boy?” And I’m looking right at it and I go, “Oh, it’s really, really nice.”

At which point Gilda opens the door to the dressing room. It’s like an
I Love Lucy
sketch, but this honestly happened! She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his dick saying, “Yeah, it’s really, really nice.”

I tell Milton, “I’ll talk to you later,” closed the door, and left.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I had resisted having Berle on, but Jean Doumanian talked me into it on the basis of “How could we not?” I knew we were heading for disaster from minute one. The sketch in the old folks home was supposed to be sentimental, but during rehearsal, when Gilda would feed Milton, he was letting the food dribble out and all over his face. So I go, “Milton, she’s giving a speech here and you’re completely upstaging her with the mashed potatoes coming down your chin.” And he’d say, “Now you’re getting two laughs instead of one.” And I’d say, “Well, no,” and then he’d pat me on the shoulder and go, “I know, I know — ‘satire.’” He’d say that whenever I’d say anything.

Just before the close of the live show — and it’s not a very good show — he said to me, “Don’t worry about a thing, the standing ovation is all arranged.” He was singing “September Song,” and I swear to God there were ten people, which was the number of seats he had, who stood up in the balcony. The only time it’s ever happened. I was quite clear in the booth about not cutting to it. We don’t do that.

I have great affection for old-time show business. But it had become corrupt. It wasn’t what it had been. The show was trying to get away from that.

Saturday Night Live
invigorated viewers because it represented so many departures from the safe, the sane, and the expected. One of Michaels’s rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home. In those first five years especially
, SNL
writers were not pleased when a studio audience applauded some social sentiment or political opinion in a sketch or “Weekend Update” item. The writers wanted laughs, not consensus.

In its earliest days, the
SNL
company exuded a contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years — and the innocuousness that infected virtually every genre, including sketch-comedy shows. Pandering to “the folks at home,” a near-sacred TV tradition, was anathema to the original
SNL
writers and performers, who felt it was better to aim high and miss than aim low and get a cheap laugh. The collective approach of the show’s creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, “We think this is funny, and if you don’t, you’re wrong.” The show reflected and projected writers and performers who strove first to please themselves — to put on television the kinds of things they’d always yearned to see but that others lacked the guts to present.

To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refreshing, a virtual reinvention of the medium. The stars of
Saturday Night Live
were saying, “We’re not coming to you, you have to come to us — or at least meet us halfway.” They produced television that commanded attention because it demanded attention. Everything wasn’t made easy and lazy and served up predigested.

The more sophisticated viewers were, the more they “got” the jokes, or so it seemed, and the more eagerly they embraced the show. That helped give the series a cachet that few other TV programs had enjoyed.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
imported from England by public TV, was among that tiny group, but its audience was incomparably smaller and, obviously, it was anything but indigenous. Regular
SNL
viewers felt like members of a special sort of club, one made up of lapsed or expatriated TV viewers bored by the corporate-approved banalities that most TV programs served up.