Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  Fourteen

  Lorne

  THOUGH I had always heard wildly varied descriptions of Lorne Michaels, I really liked him. To hear fans of the show tell it, Lorne was the guy that changed television. Here was a guy who came out of nowhere—Toronto, actually—and made an indelible mark on the entertainment landscape with Saturday Night Live. He was immortal. He was a guy who told the network and the entire old establishment of America to stick it. He broke the biggest comedy stars ever, and he created a new kind of celebrity, a cool not-ready-for-prime-time-players celebrity. And it was all because of Lorne Michaels, genius.

  But to some people in the entertainment community—and certainly many former cast members—Lorne Michaels was downright diabolical. To them, Lorne was a man who would step on his grandmother’s throat to make a nickel. He was daft and put on airs. He was completely out of touch, notably with how uncool he had become. He also had no recollection of how cool he once was. I always figured the real Lorne Michaels was somewhere between these two versions, and I never had any sense that he was operating on some sort of diabolical level.

  Some past and present cast members were convinced that Lorne wouldn’t sleep at night unless he made their lives miserable. Not me. No matter how pissed I ever got at Lorne Michaels, I never forgot what he had done for me. I had an illness that the show’s lack of structure brought out of me. I had spent hours at a time on my knees praying to God not to let me die in my office or dressing room. I had suffered panic that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But I was also occasionally on television, and when I was, it was on Saturday Night Live. I had legitimacy. I was making a fortune performing stand-up at colleges and clubs. People stopped me on the street and in the malls and shook my hand. I walked into auditions with credibility. I never forgot for a second that all of it was because at some point Lorne had nodded his head. At some point in the hiring process, out of the hundreds of people that auditioned for the show, Lorne Michaels said, “Him.”

  Whatever Lorne might have been, I do know he was unflappable. The only story I heard about him breaking character happened when the band Skid Row was on the air. During the live show, Lorne always sat in a director’s chair under the bleachers, and he always had an Amstel Light at the ready. The show was live and Skid Row was introduced. Sebastian Bach took the mike and said, “It’s good to be here and we are live, motherfuckers!” Lorne dropped his Amstel Light onto the stage floor. Instantly he regained his composure, turned to one of the stage managers, calmly said, “Cancel their second song,” and walked away.

  I know enough to know how historically significant Lorne is to television. He definitely broke the back of the Lawrence Welk America. In my mind, he had started it all: antiestablishment, underground cool, late-night television. He created the mold and then threw it away. Every other imitator in his wake failed. Saturday Night Live originally went on the air in 1975, and Lorne Michaels has been executive producer of every episode, except for a brief hiatus from 1980 to 1985. How many people have produced the same television show for that long? Zero.

  Even the supposed bombs of movies that Lorne produces are cash cows. They cost practically nothing to make, and they’re already written by the time you get the idea to put them on film. In my opinion, the guy has written the book on how to be successful. Professionally speaking, if I were to analyze his career, I would have to give him As across the board. Personally speaking, I didn’t really form a clear-cut opinion of Lorne. As the Brits might say, I always found him to be rather pleasant, but mind you, I rarely actually saw him.

  I would joke to people who asked me how he was to work with that he was like Charlie on Charlie’s Angels. I seldom laid eyes on him, but each week he was the one providing me with my mission. Oddly, I never heard him crack a joke either. Was he funny? He had delivered the great line “If you want to pay Ringo less, it’s okay with me.” So when friends would ask me what type of guy Lorne was, all I could muster was an “I don’t really know.”

  Lorne’s office was on the other end of the seventeenth floor from the writers’ room, as well as from the offices of most of the cast and the writers. I’m sure this was by design. With the exception of waiting for the Monday-night pitch meeting to begin, there was never a reason for you to be hanging around his office. You could pretend that you were reading letters of protest for only so long.

  Lorne had an incredible number of secretaries. Stories about the show say they are called the Lorne-ettes. When I was on the show, I never heard anyone ever refer to them that way. They were all called by their names. They were all pretty beautiful, too. That, I’m sure, was also by design. There were at least five, but probably more. I could never make a definite head count because they were never all at their desks at the same time. But they were certainly there. No one could walk unimpeded to Lorne’s office without passing at least one of them. Checkpoint after checkpoint stripped you of your privacy as you arrived at the door.

  One thing was clear about Lorne: He was the master of our domain. In a strange way, the show ran itself until he felt like running it. I just didn’t know from where or when he did it. Though he did it rarely, Lorne made it clear he was the boss. During my second season when Lorne was addressing the outside rumors of the show’s impending demise, he lectured us. “Many of you hear things from the outside about how the show is doing,” he began. “I want to remind you that no one will ever stop you on the street to tell you how poorly you are doing. They will tell you only nice things, no matter how bad it’s going. If you don’t want to be here, there’s the door, and that’s the only thing keeping you from being a third lead on a sitcom.”

  Though he meant it as a jab, I remember counting seven people in the room who would be great third leads on sitcoms and wondering if they were thinking what I was thinking: That would be unbelievable. Alas, he was right. When I left SNL, I became the third lead on The Jeff Foxworthy Show.

  Most of us saw Lorne only on Mondays during the pitch meeting with the host, on Wednesdays at the table read-through, and on Saturdays during the rehearsals and the taping of the show. Unless you had a prescheduled meeting with him, any encounter was purely coincidental. Lorne wasn’t in the office as much as the rest of the SNL cast and crew, and when he was there, he was in seclusion. There weren’t any announcements when he entered the building either. The only time he gave me direct advice was after “Psychic Friends Network” was cut from the Shannen Doherty show. I told him that I was going to resubmit the sketch in two weeks when John Malkovich hosted, and he advised me: “No, do it this week. You have guilt and momentum on your side.”

  My second season on the show, I had managed to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Lorne. It was more than halfway through the season, and I was so unhappy with my lack of screen time that I figured I was going to take my complaint right to the top. I had bitched and moaned for so long to so many people that it was my only remaining option.

  I made a list of the shows I hadn’t been on. The list also contained all the sketches I had written that I felt should have made it on the air but had fallen into the department of dead letters. I was taking the meeting with Lorne Michaels seriously. I couldn’t have been more prepared. I had lists, for crying out loud.

  At the appointed hour, I presented myself to one of his secretaries and she asked me to wait. So there I sat for the next half hour in front of his platoon of secretaries. None of them tried to engage me in any small talk. They just kept answering their telephones and typing at their computers. I went over my lists. I knew that I was probably going to get only one shot. There was no one above Lorne. I was on my final appeal.

  Eventually one of the secretaries told me I could go in, but that proved tougher than it should have been. The door was closed, and when I tried to push it open, it felt unusually heavy. As I was opening it, it caught on the carpet on Lorne’s side. I had to either plow forward with the door or bend down and fold the carpet back down on the floor to get inside. Paranoid about knocking so
mething over, I bent down, pulled the carpet out from under the door, and reassembled it so I could swing the door over it.

  As I stood up after fixing the carpet, I saw Lorne sitting at his desk. He invited me in. I wasn’t sure if I should close the door behind me or not. Since I had gone to all the trouble of figuring out the door’s arc on the floor, I decided to close it. By the time I turned back around, Lorne had crossed to the front of his desk. The moment the door clicked shut, he put his hands in his pockets and told me that he wanted to apologize for the fact I had been used so infrequently. He went on to say how much I figured in the long-term plans of the show. “You are the future of the show,” he said.

  It was incredible. By the time it was my turn to speak, the only thing left for me to say was thank you. He had completely disarmed me. I never got to my lists. He took them away from me. He stripped me of every possible complaint. He covered everything that I was going to bring up and addressed it with assurance—though somehow I didn’t feel particularly reassured.

  Even though I was suffering from a serious drought of stage time, I never lost sight of the value of Saturday Night Live as a social chip. To be able to invite your friends to the live show was powerful. As they looked around, I could see in their eyes how cool a place it was. Being inside the machine for so long had caused me to lose sight of that. Regardless of this coolness, I still had to get away, so I flew to Los Angeles every break we had.

  These breaks were either one or two weeks long, and I commuted with no fear of having a panic attack on the plane. When the breaks rolled around, I was too tired to panic. All I could do was sleep. Having my legs broken week after week consumed every ounce of energy that I had. Whenever it was time for me to go back to New York, Nicole and I would get into huge arguments. They were usually over nothing, and were fueled more by booze than any animosity.

  Long after my career at Saturday Night Live was over, I realized why we were arguing so much then. It was because in my demented head, the arguments made her easier to leave behind. When I was in New York, I dreamed of being with her. I dreamed of being in Los Angeles with her and the sunshine. The women I saw in New York disgusted me. The same social chip that I could cash with my friends was the only thing I had to offer them. I hated them for that. I hated myself, too.

  U2 has a song on their album Achtung Baby! called “Light My Way” that talks about a woman’s love being a lightbulb hanging over your bed. My wife-to-be was my lightbulb. She lit my way. I believe that all human beings have a light inside of them. The light in me was getting very dim. I felt like a complete failure. Batting two for eleven in my second season was a disgrace.

  By that point, when people asked me what I did for a living, I stopped telling them that I was on Saturday Night Live because I really wasn’t. I would simply tell them that I was a comic. If I told someone I was on the show, they would always look excited at first and then eventually they would turn skeptical. They would ask me what characters I did, and if they hadn’t seen the Christopher Walken sketch, I would have to name other sketches where I had stood in the background mimicking a prop. As far as being a celebrity goes, I didn’t have anything to offer except stories about the people I worked with who were actually famous.

  At least there were plenty of those.

  When Roseanne hosted the show, she was famous. She was also out of her fucking mind.

  I have always been a fan of the television show Roseanne, and I respected Roseanne as a comedian. Roseanne was pleasant to me and never did anything to me to distort my perception of her. I’d read the tabloid journalism about her, but I’d never paid any attention to it. When Roseanne arrived on the Monday of the week she was to be host, it was like meeting a bossy, wry old housewife. By Saturday, she was like a six-year-old.

  The cast had filed into Lorne’s office between dress rehearsal and air and taken up their positions. Some muttered to themselves about their sketches being dropped from the rundown. Lorne waited for everyone to settle and began to give notes. The moment he started to speak, Roseanne belched.

  At first we thought it was by accident. Roseanne excused herself and motioned for Lorne to continue. As Lorne detailed the changes being made to the show, Roseanne continued to belch. She wasn’t doing it by accident, either. She would belch to punctuate a particular note of Lorne’s. She would belch during people’s questions to Lorne. After each burp, she would look around the room and smile as if we were all in a grade school classroom. Her burps weren’t exactly ladylike, either. She was letting out some real whoppers. Halfway through the meeting Roseanne literally ran out of gas.

  Refusing to stop a good party, Roseanne started to make herself burp. If she opened her mouth to burp and nothing came out, she would hold up her hand and say, “Wait! Wait!”

  Lorne wasn’t waiting. During the entire meeting, he acted as if her antics weren’t happening. There were a few scattered giggles at first when the belching began, but they quickly dissipated. Farley thought it was funny, so he threw out a couple of fake burps. As she continued the burping, it became unfunny fast and Farley stopped. Lorne spoke to us softly and made eye contact with everyone in the room. The more Roseanne burped, the quieter Lorne spoke. We had to lean in toward him to make sure we weren’t missing anything. I wasn’t on the show, so I had no reason to be attending the show meeting, but I was, and I was hanging on to Lorne’s every word. Lorne’s professionalism and savvy obliterated Roseanne’s little-kid routine. It was impressive, to say the least. Because of Lorne’s low voice, Roseanne’s burps were just annoying.

  A few minutes before the meeting ended, Roseanne gulped a bellyful of air and let out a monster. With a stern look, the assistant stage manager, Bob Van Rye, shushed her. The scoldings only made Roseanne’s burps more important to her. When the meeting was over, she walked out of the office burping. My take on this is that she is obviously mentally ill.

  Initially, the weird stuff that would happen in meetings with the hosts would incite panic attacks. But by the midpoint of the second season, these happenings simply amused me. On show number ten, I wasn’t in any sketches, Luscious Jackson was the musical guest, and Jeff Daniels got his face ripped off.

  The culprit was a prosthetic. When prosthetics are applied, the makeup department uses a special glue that cannot be taken off your face without first being loosened by an acetone solution. To remove the prosthetic, the makeup people would dip the edge of their paint-brushes in the solution, slice little lines through the prosthetic pieces, and then slide the brush up under the prosthetic to separate it from the skin. There was no other way to get it off.

  But somehow, there was a mixup on the Friday night that Jeff Daniels had his life cast removed. The jar of solution labeled as prosthetic glue was in fact some kind of Krazy Glue. When the life cast was being taken off Jeff, the acetone solution wasn’t working. The makeup artist tugged and pulled on the prosthetic and it became obvious that something was wrong. Someone had Krazy Glued the prosthetics onto Jeff Daniels’s face!

  I was later told that it was around midnight on Friday when Jeff finished rehearsals and the makeup department began removing his life cast. There weren’t any doctors available at that hour, and taking the star of Saturday Night Live to the emergency room the night before his live performance wasn’t a viable option. Someone at the show had the bright idea to call downtown to the New York University Medical School, and an hour later, four or five interns arrived at the eighth floor of 30 Rock and began the process of injecting Novocain through the life cast into Jeff Daniels’s face.

  After Daniels’s face was numb, the interns ripped the prosthetic pieces off his face, taking off a layer of skin with it. The story was that Jeff was in so much pain that he ripped the arms off the makeup chair, a feat requiring near superhuman strength, as the chairs were built like old barbershop chairs.

  It was quite a mystery as to how the mixup occurred. The makeup artist swore the jar was labeled correctly—meaning that someone had deliberate
ly switched the safe glue with the Krazy Glue. The makeup artist who put the glue on was a guy named Jack, and he was always straight with me. Honest and professional, Jack was another lifer who had been with the show since the first episode. If he said the jar was labeled correctly, then it was labeled correctly. In fact, the other makeup artists were kind and honest, too, and I couldn’t imagine any of them pulling such a nasty stunt. But someone was hiding the truth, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever figured out what really happened.

  Jeff Daniels, however, was the ultimate pro. He returned on Saturday night and did the show. I couldn’t detect any layers of skin missing from his face.

  When George Foreman hosted, he didn’t bring his grill, but he did talk to me about real fear. That week I had a bit part in a “Motivational Speaker” sketch with him about a guy who lived in a van by a riverbed, but it started nowhere and went nowhere. It wasn’t Foreman’s fault. With athletes, it was a roll of the dice because they aren’t actors. When athletes are on the show, it isn’t a fish-out-of-water situation; it is more like a fish from another planet. The booking of an athlete was always a big coup—Joe Montana after he wins the MVP award in the Super Bowl or Wayne Gretzky after he breaks the all-time scoring record—but historically, the shows with athletes are the least funny. I didn’t really care if Foreman could be funny, because all I wanted to talk to him about was boxing. How often do you meet someone who fought both Ali and Frazier?