Part 7 (1/2)
In a sketch about giant lobsters attacking New York, I played the guy who said, ”Oh, the humanity!” Like the radio reporter from the Hindenburg fire. There was a very revealing line in there that was pretty awful when you think about it: ”Oh, John Belus.h.i.+ is dead. We knew he'd die young, but not this young!”
Another time, in one sketch we were rehearsing, Belus.h.i.+ had the part of the father - miscasting, but it was just a sketch. And he just was sort of shaking and quick-tempered and impatient, and finally we were almost going to hit each other. And Aykroyd breaks it up and calms everything down quickly and says, ”Oh, I'll do the part.” It was like a terrible flare-up - a very bad memory - and Aykroyd, ever the mensch, stepped in and settled everything.
And it was nothing permanent with Belus.h.i.+ and me, but I do recall in subsequent weeks Belus.h.i.+ was off the show. I called it ”getting docked,” like at camp or something, where you're being punished. This is another of Lorne Michaels's talents that I'll have to give him, that he was able to juggle this stuff. Because there were drugs around. There were cocaine lines the length of a desk, you know. And most people could handle it, but a few people fell very badly through the cracks.
JANE CURTIN:.
Lorne and I stopped speaking. It was during the second year. He wouldn't answer my questions. I would say, ”Why aren't you doing something about John? I found him going through my purse. He set your loft on fire. His behavior is reprehensible. He's not coming to rehearsals or if he does come, he comes three hours late. Do something!” And he didn't. He would just sort of throw his hands in the air. Lorne doesn't deal with issues. Lorne cannot confront an issue. So I thought, ”Well, this is pointless, I'm not going to talk to him anymore.”
Gilda became our go-between. When Lorne wanted me to do something, he would call Gilda and say, ”Would you ask Jane if she would do this?” And Gilda would come up to me and say, ”Lorne was wondering if you would mind doing this?” And I'd say, ”No, that would be fine.” This made life so much easier. We would say h.e.l.lo, but beyond that, there was nothing I needed from Lorne. I had ”Update,” so I didn't need anything. I didn't need a father. I had a husband who loved me, and a great little dog. Life was good.
KATE JACKSON, Host: I got a phone call from Bob Woodward when he was doing his book Wired, and he wanted to talk to me because he had heard that the show I had hosted was John's worst in terms of drug abuse. I didn't know that, because I never saw anybody do anything, so I didn't talk to Woodward. I heard later that paramedics had been called over to the studio and were standing by for John all through the show.
But John didn't miss the show. He was perspiring a little bit. But he never, never went way off on a wrong tangent, never went off the cards, or never messed anything up that made it hard for me to get back on track. He did what he was supposed to do.
John called me afterwards. For weeks he would call me on Thursday afternoons just to say h.e.l.lo and to thank me for saving his life. ”Wow,” he'd say. ”Katie, man, you really saved my life, wow, and thank you.” And I frankly didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't know why he was calling; he was just so sweet, you know. Danny had told me, ”John is a bad boy, but a good man.”
NORMAN LEAR, Host: I loved in John and also in Aykroyd what I loved in Carroll O'Connor and Bea Arthur - a madness that would allow them to go anyplace. I have to say, whatever year I am destined to die, I have five years or ten years on top of that because those people who offered me that touch of madness gave me time, added to my life.
NEIL LEVY, Production a.s.sistant: I was at Catch a Rising Star trying to pick up a girl one night. When I first started on that show I looked like I was about twelve, and this girl didn't believe I worked on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. And then suddenly everyone turned toward the door because Belus.h.i.+ had entered. Whenever he entered a room, there was an energy about him that made people turn their heads. And this girl saw him, and John saw me, and he went, ”Neil!” and starts coming right toward me. And I'm thinking, ”This girl is going to be putty in my hands now.” And he comes right up to me and gives me a big bear hug and says, ”You got any money?” I'm thinking, ”Not only do I know John Belus.h.i.+, but he's going to borrow money from me.” So I take out my wallet and he takes the wallet out of my hands, rummages through it, hands it back, goes ”Thanks,” and disappears into the crowd. Well, he'd left me with a dollar. And there were no ATM's back then. When I went to find him, he had disappeared.
If he did something like that, though, I remember more than one time him coming around later and saying, ”Was I with you last night?” And you'd go, ”Yeah,” and he'd go, ”I'm so sorry,” and be really contrite. Then you'd hear him knocking on other people's doors and going in to apologize about things.
AL FRANKEN:.
There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisciplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting 'til Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some c.o.ke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff.
People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, ”No, there was no c.o.ke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs.” And so that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately - for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs. Comedians and comedy writers and people in show business in general aren't the most disciplined people, so the idea of putting the writing off until you had to, and then staying up all night, was an attractive one. And then having this drug that kept you awake in an enjoyable way was kind of tempting too. But I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure n.o.body else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh-heh.
ROBIN SHLIEN:.
The band scored an ounce of c.o.ke on the air one night. According to the band member who told me, they got it during a commercial and divvied it up. I couldn't attest to whether it was gone by the end of the show. The dealer used to be to the left of the stage, and the commercials were a couple minutes long. I thought that was kind of an amazing story.
TOM DAVIS, Writer: d.i.c.k Ebersol was the only real network suit who would pop into the offices on seventeen. And it didn't bother him so much. I remember getting in an elevator with Tom Brokaw once, though, and I was just reeking of pot. Just stinking up the elevator, because I had really skunky pot. He couldn't help but notice. He just got very quiet. Everybody on the elevator stopped talking. Brokaw kind of looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I just smiled. What else are you going to do?
RODNEY DANGERFIELD, Host: I never saw anybody do hard drugs there. Pot, sure. Put it this way: I've been smoking pot all my life. I've found it tremendously relaxing. I do it a lot. The doctor told me, ”Don't smoke cigarettes. Just smoke pot.”
CARRIE FISHER:.
Lorne was the token grown-up in a sea of children and coeds. He was very professorial. He was only rated R while the rest of us were unruly, not well behaved, but fun-loving. I think he was trying to keep everything together without it looking like that's what he was doing. But certainly he wasn't fully partic.i.p.ating in all the drug nonsense. He would look at it and shake his head laughing - that kind of thing.
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
I came there with a drug habit. I'd had a drug habit since I was fourteen. It just got worse. I never worked intoxicated or high or anything. It was so much a part of me that it just permeated my outlook on things. It was also a very lonely time for me. I was pretty young, I didn't know that many people in New York, I was terribly homesick, and I was frustrated about the amount of airtime I was getting. So those things made me want to escape what I was thinking and feeling a lot. Drugs were very available. That's how I coped. I know they did their damage.
JANE CURTIN:.
Laraine was in a horrible position. She was a baby. She was like twenty or twenty-one, and she was uprooted from this very comfortable lifestyle in L.A., with all her friends, and into New York, where she was in a hostile environment and she was alone. She didn't have anyplace to put that creative energy, so she had it tough. She was not happy. And I don't blame her, because it's hard enough to do that show in a comfortable environment, but when you're totally at sea - when your surroundings are different and you're just not comfortable - it's extremely hard.
d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: The second year of the original show, I would take John to California with me every Sunday. By then I was married to my first wife, and I would take him home with me on Sunday and bring him back on Wednesday for read-through. And what I didn't know at the time was, my first wife and he, after I fell asleep, nothing romantic about it, but they would go out again. They'd go out all night and just manage to get back before six o'clock in the morning when I would wake up. And I woke up one morning at six o'clock, still not having doped all of this out, and walk by our guest bedroom, which was smoldering, and John had fallen asleep smoking a joint.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
After I left Second City, John and his wife came to visit, and I had one of those floor heaters, you know, where the heat comes out from a grate on the floor. And they were fooling around on the couch and knocked a pillow on top of it. All of a sudden I woke up and there was smoke in the house. They didn't even realize that the pillow was on fire.
PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer: I'd get calls about John in the middle of the night. ”John just burned down my apartment, John just started a fire,” that type of thing. Sometimes he would just knock on my door at three in the morning. We'd know when John got up in the middle of the night to eat, because there'd be spaghetti sauce imprints all over the kitchen. ”Oh look, John was up. I guess he got hungry.”
JUDITH BELUs.h.i.+:.
The second or third year of the show we were walking downtown, and there was an empty bar for rent. We got the idea of renting it ourselves. At that time we actually had a pretty good-sized place, on Morton Street, but we didn't want to invite fifty people over. So we thought we'd use this bar as a place to hang out. After the show or other nights, we'd invite people over. We had instruments there, and we kept the bar stocked. For a while it was pretty crazy. After the show, there was always a Sat.u.r.day Night Live party. We'd usually go by that for a little while. The hosts would be there and all that. Then afterwards we'd go to the bar. It was just a big party. The hosts sometimes came down to the bar, but more often musicians, writers, actors, friends, and sometimes even people we didn't know.
DAN AYKROYD:.
We opened the first Blues Bar in '77, I think. So for a few years we had a great place to party after the show. It was pretty easy to get in - you just had to show up and knock on the door. We used to go to the ”After Party” for the show, and then we'd take all the writers and our friends and the musical guests and the host of the show and invite them down for a party where you didn't have the public hanging around. Because usually at the After Parties, they let the public come in at some point. And we just wanted the inner circle there, so we needed a bar where we could entertain.
ROBIN WILLIAMS, Host: Years and years and years ago, before I even did the show, I'd come to the studio those nights when they were shooting, and then after they'd go down to the Blues Bar. Way back when. Dan brought me down there the first time. I said, ”What is this?” He said, ”Just step inside, don't be afraid, Robin, just step inside. You'll see - there's amazing people, wonderful music, just step inside.” It was like, you'd walk in and it was funky. ”Funky” is a good word. The old sense of, ”Was that a rat?” ”Maybe.” The rat's going, ”Hey, shut up.” The crowd was a really mixed bag, you know - a lot of the performers, musicians, Michael O'Donoghue - always good for an unusual laugh - and Dan bartending and kind of being maitre d'. A really wild, mixed group of people.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
There would always be a party, usually at some chichi restaurant. There was a velvet rope and it was supposedly, you know, the event. Actually, it was usually pretty grim. But Lorne would hold court at a table, usually with whoever the guest host was, and people would hang out in their own little cliques. Then there would be some talk, you know, about who the good-looking girls were, and things like that. But then people would bail out of there and go down to the Blues Bar. And there'd usually be a band, and Danny and John would be performing, and it was a lot looser atmosphere.
BILL MURRAY:.
I was one of those Blues Bar people. Stayed until the sun came up. You had to blow off a lot of steam. You had an amazing performance high that lasted because it had built to this explosive point at an odd hour of a normal person's day, between eleven-thirty and one A.M.
You couldn't really just say good night and go home and go to sleep. You were up for hours. You had all this energy and this uplift and you had to sort of work it off, so you could go to the Blues Bar, where you could dance and you could drink and you could be funny and could meet a lot of people and really carry on. It was necessary to have a place to go. You couldn't just go to an ordinary place, because there were a lot of people who would crash into it.
You had a very weird energy; it was just a completely different energy after you did that thing. You weren't fit for normal people. You had to go someplace where you could let yourself down gradually. So that was great that they provided this place where you could go and you'd be safe.
At any point, if there was someone that was bothering you, every person that was already in was a bouncer. And you'd just say, ”You've got to go.” And it was kind of funny, because they would think they'd just walk away from you, like, ”No, that's all right, man, I won't bother you anymore.” ”No, no, you're not going to bother anybody else either.” And it was a shocking moment when someone would get in and start working it and then get evicted by anybody. The women would just go, ”He's out. Danny? Billy? This guy - out.” And out he'd go. I know famous people got tossed out too. Famous people in their own area came, and when they obviously were just sucking blood, they were just evicted. We had no time for that. We were really just trying to get down to a safe level so you could sleep. Because you couldn't really sleep until six in the morning no matter what you did.
LARAINE NEWMAN:.
When I saw Trainspotting they had a sign, ”the filthiest toilet in Scotland.” Well, the toilet at the Blues Bar was the filthiest toilet anywhere. It was so vile. Nothing short of Turkish torture with a hole in the ground. And the walls had water damage and were peeling and stank unbelievably. The floor was always wet, completely wet. Wadded-up tissue on the floor. And yet it was a fun hang - a windowless hole with lots of cool music people and the Stink Band, named such because they stank too. It would be John and Danny, plus people like David Bowie and Keith Richards and James Taylor. And then they had the backup group, the Natural Queens, one of which was my best friend, Lynn Scott, who is married to Tom Scott, who was in the Blues Brothers band. You'd go in, it was dark, you'd come out, it was dawn. Nothing more depressing than that. If there was s.e.x on the premises, I never saw it. And I shudder to think if it took place in the bathroom. That person couldn't be alive today.
It really looked like it had been maybe a bar from the t.i.tanic that had been exhumed after several hundred years of submersion and just hastily dropped onto a sidewalk. It was practically rotting, which is probably how they got it, because the rent was reasonable and at the time none of us had that much money. We were still getting probably maximum $2,000 a show. I think our fourth season we all got $4,000 a show. We started the first year at $750.
ROSIE SHUSTER:.
I was hanging with Aykroyd at that point in time, so it was kind of amazing watching the whole scene - the Blues Bar and everything - take off. It was kind of like boys' fantasies of the blues, and then heavy saturation of the blues, and then, having played out all these different fantasies in TV sketches, suddenly there was this manifestation and they really inhabited these characters. And you could see that whole thing start to unfold in the Blues Bar. Some of those parties were pretty intense and wonderful, and just great music and dancing. I remember that really fondly. Just watching those characters explode.
And it was the end of the week and, well, you were psyched. It was like you were buzzing, you'd get turbocharged from the intense effort of it, and then there's like adrenal burnout later. I remember sleeping at the Blues Bar, you know, as the light broke. Also probably there were other substances involved besides alcohol, and the party just spilled over. People really had a lot of energy they needed to shake off.
PENNY MARSHALL:.
The Blues Bar was a zoo, but it was fun. It was people getting famous at the same time, which is always very scary. We held on to each other desperately because we trusted each other. In hanging out with each other, we knew we weren't going to tell on each other.
STEVE MARTIN:.
The first time I did the show, there was a fire in the studio. We had to go out to some other studio to do it. The cast was a little upset because they were not in their home world. We had to go to Brooklyn. I remember being very nervous and thinking, ”Oh my G.o.d, it's live.” It was very tense but a lot of fun.