Part 6 (1/2)

Never, never, never, never would it occur to me that I could teach them something about comedy. Comedy is so personal and so individual, and no, I would never have the att.i.tude that I was there to teach or something. Oh my G.o.d, no. Some of that has been written at different times - not about them specifically, but my part in comedy, let's say - but it would be like me telling someone how to perform or something. It would never occur to me.

Laraine was always good. And of course Gilda was a very adorable person. I don't know Chevy really well, but I've always liked Chevy. And Jane Curtin - I was never close to her and I don't know that anyone was, but while the other girls were just kind of spinning around her, Jane was always just kind of centered, and ironically she's the one that's had the biggest career. She was always very anch.o.r.ed. I was always impressed with Jane.

The original, still-most-famous cast in the history of Sat.u.r.day Night Live actually remained intact for only one season. Chevy Chase, the only performer who regularly identified himself by name on the show and who was the player most featured in magazine and newspaper stories - even as possible successor to Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show - left at the end of the first season, returning in later years only for cameos and guest-hostings. Because he had signed a contract with NBC as a writer and not a performer, and stipulated a one-year term instead of five, he was free to go. In August 1976, when the parting was announced, Chase radiated self-effacing graciousness, saying he had ”a very strong love affair with the show” but that ”my leaving won't affect it. It has its own momentum. There's more talent in Danny Aykroyd's right hand than in my entire body.” Twenty-three years later, at the unveiling of a Lorne Michaels star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, Chase would tell a crowd a.s.sembled for the event that leaving the show when he did was a mistake - and that he still regretted it.

BUCK HENRY:.

I thought Chevy shouldn't have left. I thought it was really stupid to leave that early in the run, because he was so great on it. The show made him. He should have gone and done his movies later. Maybe Belus.h.i.+ wouldn't have blossomed so much, though, if Chevy had stayed. Because John was so happy to see him go.

JUDITH BELUs.h.i.+:.

John and Chevy were always antagonistic and friends. It was a love-hate kind of thing. They worked together well when they were trying to. A funny thing they used to do on the side - underwear ad posing. They would just strike a pose together, like Chevy's arm on John's shoulder, one knee up on a chair, like the underwear poses in the Sears catalog.

I'd say John had mixed feelings about Chevy leaving. The whole thing around Sat.u.r.day Night Live was, if you were in the circle with Lorne, you could get a lot more of what you wanted. Chevy was part of that circle, and Paul Simon and whoever, I forget. And Chevy was getting a lot of airtime and John felt he should get more, and that Chevy was sometimes cast for things that John thought he could do better.

JOHN LANDIS:.

The part of Otter in Animal House was originally written for Chevy Chase. Ned Tannen at Universal said to me, ”Here's this script, Animal House. If you can get me Chevy Chase and John Belus.h.i.+ and a movie star, I'll make it.” So Ivan Reitman was desperate to get Chevy. Chevy was the first star out of SNL for a very simple reason, which is that if you look at SNL, he's the only one who said, ”I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not,” and he became a celebrity. His face was up front. He was also d.a.m.n funny.

But I was adamantly opposed to casting him. I had nothing against Chevy, I just believed that he wouldn't feel honored, and that he was too old. So I had this wonderful, famous lunch that Ivan Reitman will remember differently but where Ivan and Thom Mount desperately blow smoke up Chevy's a.s.s, trying to convince him to take Animal House even though he's been offered Foul Play as well. Chevy was smoking a huge cigar; this was the first time I ever met him. A good-looking guy in good shape, and I was doing everything I could to sell it to him. And finally I had a masterstroke. I said, ”Chevy, if you take Foul Play, you're then like Cary Grant; you're opposite Goldie Hawn, a major s.e.x star, you're like Cary Grant. But if you take Animal House, you're a top banana in an ensemble, like SNL.” And under the table Ivan gave me I think the most vicious kick I've ever had. He was furious, but it worked: Chevy took the other movie.

CHEVY CHASE:.

For me at the time, the question was, could I actually be in a movie with somebody who's talented - Goldie - and actually be in something I'd never done before and actually try to act? You know, what would that be like? It wasn't a question of could I do something that was marginally subversive for movies, when I'd already done five years of underground television on Channel 1 and had written for Mad magazine, the National Lampoon, et cetera. Animal House is an ensemble piece any way you look at it.

DAN AYKROYD:.

It's fair to say that John's mood, on a read-through day or whatever, was infectious to the point where he could dominate - like if he was in a jovial mood, it became a jovial table reading, or if he was down, it didn't. I think when you have great people that have charisma like that, that's probably a truism. Yeah, for sure, it was him and Chevy, him and Chevy were the ones primarily that could make the room, bring the room up or bring the room down. O'Donoghue to a certain extent too. You know, the giant talents like that.

CHEVY CHASE:.

Look, I would have stayed. There was this girl I wanted to marry who ended up throwing a candelabra at me. Lorne knew she was wrong for me, but I thought I was in love. I also felt after one year that we should all leave, that we should all take off at least one year and think this over, because otherwise it was going to become solipsistic - jokes about ourselves, showcases for characters as opposed to what it should be, which is a vehicle to take apart television. Satirize it and rip it to pieces, show it for what it is - and we'd done that. We had a year to do it, we did it, there wasn't a h.e.l.l of a lot more that you could do except start on something else. That was the way I felt then. But I'm still hurting, I still grieve for all those years that I could have had there.

And you know, if Lorne had put his arms around me and given me a hug and asked me to stay, then I probably would have. But he didn't.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:.

Bulls.h.i.+t. Chevy was my client, and he said in my office, ”The reason I'm leaving is I am a producer and a writer, and Lorne's a producer and a writer, and that's a conflict.” The real reason was he got a f.u.c.king car and more money. William Morris was blowing smoke in Chevy's ears as well as his wife at the time, that he should leave the show. They weren't getting big commissions from the show, I think eighty bucks a week or something. I thought he should stay on the show for at least two or three years, for no other reason than that the exposure he was getting was great. But William Morris went to NBC, and NBC was so unsure about SNL, they just wanted to make sure they kept Chevy, because he was a good-looking guy and he was like a television star. They gave him two specials. William Morris got a package commission for the specials, and NBC gave Chevy a car. I think it was a Porsche. So NBC attacked its own show.

Chevy was very gentlemanly. He came to me and paid all the money he owed me and he said, ”Look, I want to do it on my own. I'm compet.i.tive with Lorne, I want to produce too.” He went and did the movies, you know, and for a while he was fine, but he destroyed himself.

d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.

Lorne just felt totally betrayed when Chevy left, not because he was losing his biggest star, but because this was his biggest partner on the show.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I'm sure I was devastated by it, but I knew there would have been a struggle: was the show going to become the Chevy Chase show or was it going to stay an ensemble show? I think he'd become too big a star.

ANNE BEATTS:.

I don't know exactly when Michael and Chevy's relations.h.i.+p went sour. I know that Chevy said - I'm sure you've heard this - that Michael told him once in a taxi, ”One day you'll be a B-movie star.” I know that Chevy has really taken that remark to heart. And so I think that perhaps the Michael-Chevy going sour thing was part of Michael calling it as he saw it, which he unstintingly did even when it was detrimental to his best interests.

CHEVY CHASE:.

You have no idea what my life was like as a kid, you have no sense of that at all. You're probably looking into books and saying, ”Hey, he went to a private school,” as if that somehow is an explanation for my personality. You have no sense at all - nor would I share with you what my childhood was like.

ANNE BEATTS:.

Chevy was the Waspy golden boy that neither Michael nor Lorne would ever be.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

It was emotional. We were a colony. I don't mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn't go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

No one thought we'd have a summer holiday, because n.o.body at the network thought they could rerun these shows. I said, ”No, we're going to put on reruns.” And when we put on the Richard Pryor show, it rated higher than it had originally. And I won the case.

Some of us spent the summer together. We went to Joshua Tree in California. I'd been there many times before. It was a spiritual place for me, and so I was showing them this place that had a lot of meaning for me. We stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn, a motel with a pool in the center. John and Danny were in the room next to mine.

One night we had a barbecue. Chevy, who came with his girlfriend, cooked. I remember it was a very beautiful night, and we were all sort of grateful for each other and just beginning to soak up whatever that first season was. This was late June or early July, and we were just beginning to understand what being on a hit show was like, the full throttle of that.

We drank a lot and stayed up really late. Then at about five o'clock in the morning, the sun was way too bright and woke me up. There was some sort of noise outside, so I staggered to the door. When I opened it, I saw Danny standing in the archway just a few feet away, and he's in the same shape I'm in, and we look out and there's John, on the diving board, doing these cannonb.a.l.l.s. He goes straight up, hits the board, comes down, and then flips over into the pool. This was just for our benefit, Danny's and mine, because there was n.o.body else awake or watching it. And we were like completely wrecked, the two of us, and just barely conscious, and Danny looked at me and he said, ”Albanian oak.”

And that's what we believed. We believed this guy was absolutely indestructible. He was like an animal. You couldn't have been through the night we'd just been through and be up at five o'clock doing cannonb.a.l.l.s - neither of us could live that hard - but there was John.

The beauty of all that for me is that we were comrades-in-arms in the way that, growing up after World War II, you'd hear people talk about army buddies, or say the only people they could talk to were people who had been through it with them. A year earlier, we hadn't been in any way linked or close, and now we were suddenly on a holiday together. All this stuff was swirling around in the press and we were together at the center of it. We'd gone all the way to the finals and we'd won the Emmys and here we were on the road. We all liked each other. We had more in common with one another than with any other group of people.

To me, our first season was ”that champions.h.i.+p season.” That said, I'm not sure it was the best season in terms of quality, but the freedom was intoxicating. And so was the success.

2.

Heyday: 19761980.

By the beginning of its second season, Sat.u.r.day Night Live was the talk of television, a national sensation both hot and cool, and the first hit any network ever had at eleven-thirty on Sat.u.r.day night. Chevy Chase had become a star and flown the coop, though he would continue to make the occasional cameo appearance. Some cast members and writers saw his leap into greener pastures as tantamount to treason, but it kept SNL from turning into ”The Chevy Chase Show” and cleared the way for John Belus.h.i.+, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and others to become the kind of household name that Chevy had managed virtually overnight.

The Muppets were gone. Short films by Gary Weis and Tom Schiller would replace those of Albert Brooks. NBC censors were virtually forced by the program's surging popularity to become less strict - this was well before people could say ”p.i.s.sed off” or ”that sucks” on television - and as other programs took advantage of the liberation, a new candor and a new realism came to American TV - for better and, sometimes, for worse. The way people talked on television was becoming closer to the way people talked in everyday life; a longtime boundary was being erased. Today one hears language in prime-time sitcoms and even commercials that was unthinkable on early editions of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. (In time, the show would break the ”p.e.n.i.s” and ”v.a.g.i.n.a” barriers, among many others.) They couldn't fully know it at the time, but the cast, writers, and producers of Sat.u.r.day Night Live were living through the program's golden age, from 1975 to 1979, the era of the original cast (with Bill Murray replacing the departed Chevy Chase), the founding writers, and occasional visits from such off-the-wall novelties as quixotic comic Andy Kaufman and Mr. Bill, a little clay man who each week would be mauled and mangled. This was a time of exuberance, adventurousness, and unbridled excess. It would become legendary and infamous and set standards by which every subsequent manifestation of the show, including all future casts, would be judged.

LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member: There was one point in the second season where we were onstage rehearsing a Nerd sketch or something, and we were all talking about what we were naming our corporations. And I think it was Gilda who said, ”Listen to us, for G.o.d's sake. We're talking about our corporations! What's happened? We've joined the establishment.” And we were really kind of being hurled into all the trappings of a successful adult life at a young age.

TOM HANKS, Host: It was the cultural phenomenon of the age. It was truly as big as the Beatles. It was this huge riotous thing and it was on every week and everybody gathered together on Sat.u.r.day nights to watch it.

We would get together in college and then, later on when I was working in the theater, we would all get together after shows at a house and watch. Everybody from the theater that I was working at in Cleveland was in the living room of this rented house watching a ten-inch black-and-white television with a coat hanger for an antenna. And that's just what you did every week - got together and had something to eat and sat around waiting for Sat.u.r.day Night Live to come on.

BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY, Cast Member: The show felt like it was the center of the universe. There was such a clamor about it. People at parties would stop and turn on the show and watch it. So it felt like the big high point of TV. Half your job seemed like arranging for tickets for people you knew.