Part 13 (1/2)
I was so busy doing my job that I never saw any writing on the wall. I thought the shows were getting better. We were all working so hard. I was really not aware of anything going on behind the scenes. That's how unaware I was. I was putting in eighteen hours a day, easy. I knew I could do it.
JOE PISCOPO:.
I could never describe to you in words how painful those first ten months really were. You just knew that this was America's favorite television show, and yet here we were, taking it right into the toilet.
Sat.u.r.day night, after the show, it was pretty much like a funeral, like you were mourning. Oh my G.o.d, oh my G.o.d, did we really do this, oh my G.o.d - and then we had to turn it around on Monday all over again.
Hopeless as the situation seemed, Doumanian actually had a tremendous secret weapon in her a.r.s.enal - so secret that, sadly for her, even she didn't realize it. This was a young, brash cast member who spent most of the season in small bit parts, except in the seventeenth-floor offices, where he kept coworkers continuously entertained. He was not a ”great white hope.” Au contraire. Definitely great, however. His day would come, but not in time to save the very doomed Doumanian.
NEIL LEVY, Talent Coordinator: Jean had cast an actor named Robert Townsend to be ”the black guy” on the show. And then this guy Eddie Murphy started calling me - it sounded like from a pay phone - and I told him, ”I'm sorry, we're not auditioning anymore.” But he called again the next day, and he would go into this whole thing about how he had eighteen brothers and sisters and they were counting on him to get this job. And he would call every day for about a week. And I finally decided I would use him as an extra.
So I brought him in for an audition, and he did a four-minute piece of him acting out three characters up in Harlem - one guy was instigating the others to fight - and it was absolutely brilliant. The timing, the characterizations - talent was just shooting out of him. And I went, ”Wow,” and I took him in to Jean and I said, ”Jean, you've got to see this.” He did his audition for Jean, and she sent him out of the room and she said to me, ”Well, he's good, but I like Robert Townsend better.” And I went nuts, you know. I threatened to quit. At that point there were so many mistakes, I was actually heartbroken, because I'd been on the original show, and it went beyond mistakes for me. It was like there was a spirit that I knew that existed in that show and she had no idea what that was, and she was missing it. She would choose Robert Townsend over Eddie Murphy - not that Robert Townsend isn't great, a good actor, but the difference in terms of what was right for that show was so obvious, and compounded with all the other c.r.a.p that was going on, I couldn't take it.
So she hired Eddie as a featured player just to spite me. He was the only featured player that year. He should've been a regular. She hired him only because I pressured her, and then to spite me she wouldn't make him a regular. She only wanted to hire one black actor and Townsend hadn't signed his contract yet, so she signed Eddie.
The point of it is that she didn't want him, and she's been claiming that she discovered him for years. Now Ebersol I heard is claiming he discovered him, and Ebersol wasn't even on the show when Eddie came. But Ebersol used to take credit for all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, so that doesn't surprise me.
JAMES DOWNEY, Writer: When I first met Eddie Murphy, I was up there visiting Jean - I'd recommended a couple of writers to her - and Eddie was hanging around. He'd been hired as a featured player, but he would just go around to everyone's office and make everybody laugh. He made me laugh the first day I met him. And he was just so clearly the funniest person on the floor. I remember saying to Jean Doumanian, ”You've got to use this kid Eddie Murphy, you've got to put him on.” And I remember her going, ”He's not ready.”
JEAN DOUMANIAN:.
I didn't have enough of a budget to put Eddie on as a member of the cast, because I had already selected the cast when I auditioned him. So I let him be a featured player. They said okay. After the first two shows, I said to the administration, ”Listen, you have to make this guy a member of the cast, you just have to, he's so great.” He was eighteen when I found him. They finally said okay. And then I found out from Eddie that a network vice president was trying to tell him to leave the show and that he'd get him a sitcom on NBC. But Eddie wouldn't do it.
NEIL LEVY:.
One night Jean was five minutes short in the show. She had nothing, whereas Lorne always had something in the bag, a short film, something so you go over instead of under. If you're under you're left with nothing, and she had nothing. This is fifteen minutes before the end of the show when Audrey d.i.c.kman, who was timing it, realized it was going to run short. Dave Wilson was sitting there saying, ”What are we going to do, Jean?” And she was pacing and she didn't know what to do. And I remembered Eddie's monologue from his audition like three months earlier. So I said, ”Why don't you see if Eddie can do the monologue that he did for his audition?” And she said, ”Oh no, that won't work.” And then about a minute later, she said, ”Why don't we get Eddie and he'll do the audition piece?” And they laughed in the booth, and I said, ”Yeah, okay, great.”
And I ran up and I found Eddie and I asked him. And his face lit up like he'd been waiting for this moment his whole life, and he said, ”Yeah!” So we rushed him downstairs and he did that piece. And in another week or two, I think, he was made a regular.
Doumanian's fate was sealed on a night in late February 1981. Charlie Rocket was playing the victim of a shooting in a show-length spoof of the then-popular prime-time soap opera Dallas and its famous ”Who shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. Mere minutes before the oneA.M. closing time, Rocket, in a wheelchair ostensibly because of injuries suffered in the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt, complained about having been shot and said - for all those watching at home and in the studio to hear - ”I'd like to know who the f.u.c.k did it.”
FRED SILVERMAN, NBC President: Doumanian got out of control. I think the thing that really did it was that there was a kid on the show by the name of Charlie Rocket, and one night he did the unpardonable: He said the f.u.c.k-word on live television, and it went out to the whole network. And that was it. I said, ”Who needs this aggravation?” I think we'd made the decision even before then that we had to get rid of her. This woman was a train wreck, and the shows were just not watchable.
GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.
I was sitting in the offices talking to Eddie one day, when all of a sudden some woman comes in and says, ”Eddie, somebody from NBC wants to speak to you.” And he gets on the phone and he goes, ”Yes, yeah, okay, no. No, I won't tell anybody.” And he hangs up. Before the phone even hits the cradle, he tells me, ”Jean Doumanian's been fired.”
The next day or so, Jean Doumanian was going to make this announcement to the cast and crew that she'd been fired, but by then everyone knew it. And it was weird, because they had this improv teacher named Del Close hired there for some reason, and so she calls everyone into her office, and everyone's sitting there, and she's tearfully telling everyone that she's been fired and everything but that she wishes everyone the best and whatnot. And, in the midst of all this, all of a sudden they walk in with a cake, singing ”Happy Birthday,” and it's put in front of this Del Close guy. It was a very surreal situation.
DAVID SHEFFIELD:.
It was clearly coming and she knew it.
JEAN DOUMANIAN:.
I was down in Irwin Segelstein's office for maybe four hours, trying to convince him to please give us more money for the show, but I also found out that some of the people on my show, that I'd hired and helped, were going downstairs and talking to the bra.s.s behind my back. I don't know this for a fact, but I was told. They were really sabotaging the show and me.
He had sent me some wine when I got the job, as a congratulatory thing. But before I told anybody anything, I broke open about five bottles of wine and I said, ”Everybody, come on in. I have something to tell you, and don't be upset about it, because I'm not upset about it. I just want to tell you you've done a wonderful job. I think you're all terrific. I want you all to go on and try to make the best of it, but they told me that I've served my purpose and that's it for me.” And that was it. In retrospect, I think really they put me in there on purpose, because after a very successful show, the second guy usually fails and then the third guy comes in, takes over, and succeeds.
PAM NORRIS:.
I've sort of learned, in the subsequent twenty years I've been in show business, that people just aren't that clever, and sometimes things that look like clever schemes are just people stumbling over their own feet.
JEAN DOUMANIAN:.
I must say, my friends were very happy that that part of my life had ended. Because they thought I was working so hard and I was so determined that they were concerned about my health. But I was really disappointed. I thought Brandon and the network were going to stick behind me, and they didn't at all. If you read the newspapers, they didn't support me at all. So that's when I kind of discovered that I had been used. I don't consider that show a failure for myself. I consider it truly an accomplishment.
GILBERT GOTTFRIED:.
After I was fired from the show, I kind of was like walking around with this feeling that everybody was looking at me going, ”Oh, that's the guy who was on a bad season on Sat.u.r.day Night.” The funny thing is, after time pa.s.ses, people come up to you and go, ”I really liked you in that sketch with John Belus.h.i.+.” Or, ”I liked you in that sketch you used to do with Gilda Radner and Molly Shannon.” It gets all mixed up together. I didn't feel like I was a big star when I was on the show, and I didn't feel like I was a n.o.body without it. But I walk around with that stigma. I hated it for the longest time when someone would recognize me from Sat.u.r.day Night.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:.
In retrospect, what Jean did was just take the hit that was going to come to anybody who was going to try to recast that show with new stars. I liked Jean. I really did. She was very direct. She had bad press and not a lot of support from the network. I'm not so sure it's not tough being a woman in that job.
Network chief Brandon Tartikoff felt an emotional attachment to the show and desperately wanted to keep it on the air, even when other network executives advocated cutting the umbilical and letting it float off into s.p.a.ce. In his desperation, Tartikoff turned to old pal and fellow Yalie d.i.c.k Ebersol, a man who had never produced a comedy show or professionally written a sketch in his life and who, in fact, had not so long ago been fired from an NBC executive post by Tartikoff's bellicose boss, Fred Silverman. But Brandon's friend had also been present at, and instrumental in, the creation of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. The embalming process was halted and shock therapy began.
Michaels and Ebersol had little in common when it came to style and personality, but they did have this: Each thought the other wanted too much credit for the creation of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It took both of them working together at the very outset to bring Sat.u.r.day Night Live to life, but once it premiered, Michaels would have preferred Ebersol to have disappeared.
When Ebersol was asked to rescue the show after the Doumanian cliffhanger, he wisely sought Michaels's approval and blessing before taking over. That meant that creative people loyal to Michaels wouldn't feel they were committing heresy or poking him in the eye if they went to work on the Ebersol version - a problem that had reputedly helped sink Doumanian.
Though Michaels and Ebersol weren't close, they were both close to Tartikoff, who felt the show represented more to the network than a profit center; it was a badge of honor too, and Tartikoff was one network executive who cared about prestige in addition to profits. For Ebersol, the situation was rife with irony. After helping create the show in 1974 and then being sentenced to a certain anonymity for his efforts, he would be called back to keep the show going by his old nemesis Fred Silverman, the guy who fired him. And Tartikoff, the longtime friend who did the actual recruitment of Ebersol, had become head of programming when Ebersol was pa.s.sed over for the job.
What Ebersol lacked in imagination, he made up for in iron-willed determination. Swinging a baseball bat or just lugging it around like some swollen scepter, Ebersol pitched a ferocious battle to make Sat.u.r.day Night Live a hit again. He would save the show, whatever it took.
d.i.c.k EBERSOL, NBC Executive: I remember Jean's last show. It was just beset with problems. It was the night that Charlie Rocket said ”f.u.c.k” on the air. And I stayed up with Brandon quite late, and he asked me again, ”Would you consider fixing it?” I said I would come as long as I could hide inside 30 Rock, watching on the internal system how the show works, the camera blocking, watch to see if the talent is mature enough to save a piece, because I could think of a million pieces from the earliest days of the show which absolutely sucked on Wednesday and had at least an 80 percent life by the time they went on the air. The talent was that good, and some of the writers were good enough to fix it.
And I said, ”Number one, only if it goes off the air. This is not something you can fix in a week. And number two, I get to pick what airs all the weeks it's off the air.” I wanted to put on four or five of the greatest shows from the first five years, just to get people back in the sense of ”this show was about something.” Actually, I think I said to take it off for two months.
So this meeting was set up in Fred Silverman's apartment on a Sunday afternoon. And Fred is so uncomfortable to have me there, because there is no love lost between the two of us and I just did not respect him. So they go through this whole thing about will I do it, and I said, ”Yeah, under certain circ.u.mstances.” And we argued and debated, and finally it became five weeks that the show would be off the air. I didn't want a lot of money; I just wanted a guarantee that I would get series commitments for every year that we managed to keep the show alive, and this would be stuff I would develop myself. That's how Friday Night Videos and the Bob Costas talk show Later came to be. And finally, I said, there was one last condition: ”We don't have a deal until I have a conversation with Lorne. I'm not doing this show unless Lorne wants it to survive.” And Fred felt like he had really been set up. He wasn't happy, but he grudgingly said, ”All right. But I want to know where this is tomorrow.”
I called Lorne and we went to dinner and wound up over at his apartment, and we sat there basically all night talking. And I honestly believe it's one of the five or six most important nights in the history of the show, because I'd hired Lorne when we were first sitting in L.A. putting it all together back in the spring of '75. I said, ”Lorne, I'm willing to do this only if you'll bless it.” He just had to put the word out. Anyway, around five or six in the morning he finally said, ”I do want to see it go on. I won't go back, but I will completely support it.”
And that word was out by the time Lorne woke up the next afternoon.
LORNE MICHAELS:.
Michael O'Donoghue's manager, a guy named Barry Secunda, explained to me the simple fact that Michael had no money. And Michael was very proud, but he really needed a job. Barry wanted to know if I would speak to Ebersol on his behalf, which I did. Of course, the very first thing Michael did was to meet with everyone and say, ”We have to obliterate Lorne Michaels, we have to pour gasoline on him and set him afire.” And then he burned some picture of me. Pretty soon after, he was fired.
I love Michael. And I would have expected no less. It wasn't as if I helped him thinking I'd get the thanks of a grateful nation. After all, it was Michael. Of the three of us - the senior three males in the first months of the show - Chevy went on to fame and stardom, I got what I got, and Michael wanted more performance time. The rewards for him weren't as great as he felt he deserved.
d.i.c.k EBERSOL:.
Lorne told me I should hire Michael. He persuaded me it would be a good idea. O'Donoghue thought the show was s.h.i.+t and he thought the people involved were s.h.i.+t. He wanted to give it a ”Viking funeral.” He was going to be, quote, ”in charge of the writing staff.”
Since Ebersol was determined that the show regain its lost l.u.s.ter as well as its lost ratings, it may seem odd for him to have installed O'Donoghue as head writer, especially since O'Donoghue was so fond of proclaiming Sat.u.r.day Night Live dead. But what made him attractive to Ebersol is that he represented a link to Lorne Michaels and his era, and Ebersol was anxious to establish such links. Few were available, but O'Donoghue had been a very conspicuous and productive presence during those first five years. Ebersol wanted to be a member of that club, and O'Donoghue seemed one way - however risky - to gain acceptance. It would be a recurring theme of Ebersol's stewards.h.i.+p.
NEIL LEVY:.
d.i.c.k wanted to be Lorne, basically. The first words out of d.i.c.k's mouth to the writers was, he broke them into two teams at the first meeting and said, ”Here's what we're going to do. I have two ideas and we're going to make short films. And half of you are going to do this one idea and the other half are going to do this idea about a bag lady.” I forget what the first idea was. And the writers kind of scratched their heads - a bag lady? What's funny about that? But d.i.c.k said to go and do it.