The author was T. J. English, an Irish-American journalist who wrote for Irish American Magazine during the 1980s, and his book, The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob, chronicled the bloody misadventures of one of the most brutal gangs in the annals of New York organized crime. Unbeknownst to me, the Irish mob ruled Hell’s Kitchen during the 1970s and ’80s, exactly when was I working at the Skyline. According to the New York City Police Department and the FBI, the gang was thought to be responsible for as many as one hundred murders over a twenty-year period. Their big thing was chopping their victims up. Oh, and torture.
According to English, in the 1960s, a Hell’s Kitchen native by the name of Mickey Spillane ran the organization. To be perfectly clear, this was not the beloved crime novel writer who invented the fictional hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer portrayed by Stacy Keach on TV during the 1980s. No, there wasn’t anything make-believe about this Mickey Spillane, and he ran his crew much the way the Dapper Don, John Gotti, would run the Gambino crime family years later—while he operated gambling and loan sharking rackets, tossing in assaults and murders as needed, he also served as benefactor to the local community, earning his nickname “The Gentleman Gangster” by doling out turkeys on Thanksgiving, thereby ensuring the loyalty of everyone around him.
Things got interesting in Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1970s, when Spillane’s power was challenged by a young thug by the name of Jimmie Coonan, whose father Spillane had roughed up. Spillane fled to Queens, and Coonan took over. Spillane was eventually shot to death outside his apartment in Woodside moments after saying good night to his twelve-year-old son, Bobby, in 1977.
Coonan eventually joined forces with “Fat Tony” Salerno, who was a big cheese with the Genovese crime family, to split the proceeds in the construction of the Jacob Javits Convention Center at Forty-second Street. Coonan later buddied up with the Gambinos, a partnership that was later taken down by an ambitious Italian-American federal prosecutor by the name of Rudolph Giuliani.
Coonan got sixty years for his trouble. So did one of his top enforcers, James McElroy, aka Jimmy Mac, the guy who didn’t like to pay for his drinks at the Skyline. Jimmy Mac recently died in the California prison where he was twenty-five years into his bit. I read that at his May 2011 funeral at the Church of the Holy Cross on Ninth Avenue and Forty-second Street, a fair-sized crowd of people from the old neighborhood showed up to pay their respects to the man known for driving what they called the “meat wagon,” which ferried body parts of the Westies’ victims to be dumped on Wards Island, a lovely oasis in the middle of the East River known for its massive psychiatric hospitals that house the city’s criminally insane, a sewage treatment plant, and, because Robert Moses may have been the most interesting city planner of all time, a lovely park.
And all this time, as far as I was concerned, these guys had been polite, tipped well, and encouraged me to do stand-up.
Even after I read the book, nothing I learned tarnished my feelings for those guys. Years later, one of my dearest friends was Bobby Spillane, that twelve-year-old kid whose father was murdered. Bobby, an actor who had appeared on Law & Order and NYPD Blue, kept me sober a hundred times over the years. In the summer of 2010, Bobby fell to his death out a window of his sixth-floor apartment on Fifty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. He’d just returned from a vacation, and his unpacked bags were still inside the apartment. At the time, Bobby had been collaborating with my old SNL office mate Colin Quinn on a one-man show called A Hell’s Kitchen Story. The show died with him.
Just because I was drinking didn’t mean I wanted to, so I kept fighting the sobriety fight. I attended a regular AA meeting on Forty-sixth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. One of the guys who was also a regular there was supposedly a hit man, who claimed to have whacked eighteen people. He and another guy who was the brother of a well-known gangster had their own meetings in the back, because they didn’t want to share in front of others. The hit man wanted to whack someone in the meeting because he didn’t like him. He told this to Jackie, the big queen who ran the place.
“Look, I have the virus, so I’m not afraid of any of your shit,” Jackie said. “You ain’t whackin’ nobody in my fuckin’ meeting, you understand me?”
Everybody laughed.
“People are trying to get well, and you want to whack somebody? What the fuck is your problem?”
Anyway, the kid never got whacked.
Then there was Tommy, who used to brag that he was the best car thief on Long Island. He fell in love with a gorgeous Colombian girl named Valentina.
About six months after he started going out with her, I went up to him and said, “Tommy, you and Valentina are the best couple.”
“Yeah, but Darrell . . .”
I said, “What? You guys are awesome.”
He said, “You know, when I started going out with her, she wouldn’t let me touch her down there. After a few months, she did. She’s got a dick, Darrell.”
Oh.
“By the time I got down there and found out, it was too fuckin’ late. I already loved her!”
After meetings, a few of us would go to the diner on Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue. Hell’s Kitchen might have been rid of the Irish mob by then, but before Rudy Giuliani became the mayor the neighborhood had so many drug dealers and prostitutes and psychos wandering the streets, it was a seriously dangerous place to walk around. So my pal Sebastian, who was the queeniest drag queen you have ever seen, used to walk me home.
If someone said shit to us, Sebastian would snap his fingers and say, “Sweetie, I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever have and more of a man than you’ll ever be, so fuck off!”
Sebastian explained to me that a really successful pimp or a really successful drug dealer doesn’t want to deal with a crazy person. It could fuck up the whole night, and they could lose thousands of dollars. Don’t get into a fight with someone who’s screaming at you, just let the crazy person pass. Made perfect sense to me.
Later, when the dealers found out I lived on Forty-eighth and Tenth and they started to know my face, they said, “No, no, he lives here. Let him through, let him through. He’s neighborhood.” They didn’t want trouble, they just wanted to sell. I used to joke with people that I could buy anything on the planet on my stoop.
A week after Giuliani came into office, police vans started showing up, and these young buck cops came piling out, slapping all the drug dealers around, putting cuffs on. They made something like 130 arrests on my block alone in Giuliani’s first three months. I was told that the guys would get booked, somebody would pay their bail, then Giuliani would have them arrested again. Finally, they got tired of the game and moved on.
Hell’s Kitchen became the best neighborhood in New York City. There is every kind of cuisine, every kind of perfume, every kind of music, every color of person, every religion. Once the neighborhood was cleaned up, residents returned to their stoops. It’s a marvelous thing to see people in their lawn chairs having a bottle of beer with their grandkids playing nearby because it’s safe.
The comedy career was not going the way I’d hoped. Then I heard about a booker working out of some dumpy office in Times Square next to a whorehouse who booked gigs in New Jersey. So I went to him, talked to him for a while, and he decided to give me a shot. I didn’t even have to audition for him. Thanks to him, I made a living wage doing one-nighters on the west side of the Hudson.
And then I did a one-nighter with a dude named Dennis Regan, a fellow Floridian on the stand-up circuit who had previously owned an asphalt business with his dad called Tars and Stripes. Dennis’s younger brother Brian was, and is, a great comedian as well.
Dennis told me, “I’m a regular at the Cellar. Do you work out there?”
“Yeah, at fucking three o’clock in the morning with non-English-speaking tourists facing the other way and drunk on schnapps or going through methadone withdrawal.”
When people are blotto, or they’ve been dragged
in off the street for drink specials, they don’t give a shit about what you’re doing onstage, even if it is a bona fide comedy club and not some Podunk sports bar. Woody Allen once said the audience has to know they’re an audience. They have to come there specifically to be an audience, and know that they’re expected to laugh. If they don’t pay for that privilege, you’re in trouble.
Dennis said, “I’ll get you a decent audition. I think you’re funny.”
That was my first real break in comedy in New York. I got a spot at 9:00 p.m. instead of 3:00 a.m., and I did well, and I got booked into the Comedy Cellar on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village thanks to Estee, the manager. Her full name is Estee Adoram, but every comic in the universe knows her just as Estee. She gave a lot of people their break. Even comics who have made it big go back to the Cellar to try out new material—Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman. Seinfeld filmed a lot of his documentary Comedian there.
The cramped room with the iconic brick wall behind the stage is extremely well run; the audiences—the early ones, anyway—come because they really want to see comedy.
Rather than feature a single headliner, the Cellar is known for its showcase approach, booking several comedians for each show. Back then a single bill might include Ray Romano, Dave Attell, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, and, if I was lucky, me. I wasn’t even doing impressions anymore, just straight stand-up. I only had one brief impression in my act: “I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world,” and then in Bill Clinton’s gravelly drawl, “I hate you.”
By the early 1990s, I started getting booked at Dangerfield’s on the Upper East Side and the New York Comedy Club downtown in Murray Hill. Pretty soon I was making $75, $100 a night in cash. On weekends, the clubs paid about $50 a set; if I did six sets in three clubs, I could make $300 cash a night. If you worked hard, you could get by and pay your rent. That’s what we were all doing.
It was exhilarating to be a New York comic, to be onstage with those guys, all of us just hitting our stride. I was very proud that I was on the same bill with them. They were all really good people, but I didn’t hang out with them much, since I tended to slink off after my set to nefarious dive bars so I could drink bad liquor and get blind. The bartenders at my regular hangouts all knew my address so they could tell the cabdrivers where to take me at the end of the night. Hell knows, there were a lot of times I was in no condition to summon up something as challenging as where I lived.
And then one night in 1995, Marci Klein saw a set I did at Caroline’s near Times Square, and my whole world changed.
CHAPTER FIVE
It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
New York City
1996–2000
Some time before the beginning of my second season on SNL, fate smacked me upside the head again. My wife and I were in the best-friend stage between our two marriages, which is how I came to be dating Alison, a twenty-seven-year-old blond Kathy Ireland lookalike with a penchant for sticking her finger down her throat. We had broken up because I was trying to do the tough-love thing they teach you in twelve-step programs.
“I can’t stay around and watch you fill jars up with vomit and hide them during the night. I can only be with you if you get help.”
The next day, she was swinging from a rope in her apartment on Fifty-seventh Street.
God might have been telling me, “Not so fast, Mr. Hammond.” But the show must go on.
My second SNL season opened during the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, and much was made of the fact that President Clinton was well ahead of his Republican rival, elder statesman Bob Dole, in the polls. Ross Perot ran as an independent, as he had in 1992, but aside from giving Cheri Oteri material for SNL, his campaign didn’t have much impact this time around. Clinton’s enormous popularity was a huge boost for me professionally.
In the cold open of the first show, I appeared as a smug Clinton in an interview with Tom Hanks as Peter Jennings, in which Jennings declares Clinton the victor with “zero percent of the precincts reporting in.” This was before the insane 2000 election, when so many news outlets incorrectly predicted Gore’s victory, only to have to withdraw their comments in the wee hours of the night. But in the piece, Hanks/Jennings declares Clinton the winner two months before voters went to the polls.
It was the first of fifteen times I’d be putting on the white wig of the forty-second president that season alone, sometimes more than once in a night. I continued to suffer major lithium bloat, although it was still working for me as Clinton.
But it was more than my ability to impersonate people that contributed to my success on the show. I worked really fucking hard. I continued to live by the mandate I’d given myself at that radio station in Vero Beach all those years ago, that a small improvement every week would add up to major improvement in a year. My drinking sometimes got in the way, but I still managed to make progress. I was going up two or three hundred times a year at the Cellar to work on new impressions, and Caroline’s had a 1:30 a.m. show on Saturday night, so after SNL I’d walked the three blocks across town and do a set there.
I also owe a lot to the people who helped me, who perhaps saw some talent or promise in me when other people thought I sucked. In October of my second season, SNL veteran Dana Carvey—a master impressionist who had famously done George Bush the First and the Church Lady on SNL—came back to host the show. The writers had come up with a sketch in which Dana played Johnny Carson, as he had a number of times during his run as a cast member, and I was to play Phil Donahue. In the sketch, Donahue goes to Carson’s house to pick him up for a game of golf, but Carson refuses to leave until he finds his house keys. Dana was a bit of an angel, because the way it was written, Donahue was the stronger role. He could have had the sketch changed, or stopped it from going on the air if he wanted, but he didn’t. He’s a kind guy, and he understood that I needed help to solidify my place on the show.
It was a huge break for me. Remember, I was older than everybody, and I came from nowhere. A lot of cast members came from Second City, but I was essentially some guy Lorne found in a field on the plains in Somalia whom he’d seen kick a coconut, and he thought, That guy kicks pretty well. We should bring him back to New York, give him a job.
Again, if someone doesn’t walk into your world and pull you out of the fucking mess that you’re in, you could try forever and not make it in show business.
In December 1996, we debuted the Jeopardy! sketch in which stupid celebrities aggravate the hell out of Will Ferrell’s beleaguered Alex Trebek. This recurring sketch would become a fantastic showcase for Will. Host Martin Short was Jerry Lewis, Norm Macdonald debuted his acerbic and filthy Burt Reynolds, and I did a blustery Sean Connery, although he was not yet the lascivious insult-flinger he would become in later episodes. The double entendres (and single entendres) were left to the Burt Reynolds character. Mostly, a combative Connery threatened Trebek like an eighteenth-century swashbuckler, and all three of us answered the clues so stupidly that at the end Trebek says that money would be taken away from our charities.
In May, we did Jeopardy! again. Will reprised his Trebek, Norm his Reynolds, and host John Goodman was Marlon Brando. The Connery character hadn’t caught on yet, so I appeared as Phil Donahue, which had gone so well for me when I played him against Dana Carvey’s Johnny Carson earlier that season. In the sketch, Donahue refuses to answer the questions, instead rambling on as though he were on his own talk show.
When we did Jeopardy! in the fall of my third season, in October 1997, Will reprised his role as Trebek and Norm his as Reynolds, but I ventured out as a dim-witted John Travolta, with Friends star Matthew Perry playing Mr. Mom Michael Keaton, who made faces by way of answering the questions.
It wasn’t until our fourth outing with Jeopardy! at the end of that season, in May 1998, that Sean Connery returned. He would be there the next ten times we did the sketch, including my very last episode,
when Will came back to host the show in 2009. Host David Duchovny played an airheaded Jeff Goldblum. Norm had left the show a couple of months earlier, so the third contestant would be a rotating crew. In this one, Molly Shannon had a go at Minnie Driver.
With Burt Reynolds out of the lineup, the writers let Connery be the sex-obsessed blowhard that he would become known as. As the sketch opened, Connery tellingly misread a psychology category: “I’ll take ‘The Rapists’ for $200.” In a later episode, he would misread “The Pen Is Mightier” as the “Penis Mightier.” After Trebek corrects him, he says, “Will it really mighty my penis, man?” And even as Trebek further tries to set him right, he declares, “I’ll order a dozen!” In later episodes, the Connery character would take it up a notch, never missing an opportunity to declare that he’d been banging Alex Trebek’s mother.
I’ve often said that if you’re not prepared to lose a finger, a thumb, or any other body part during an SNL workweek, you’re probably not going to do well. There is tremendous drama all the way through to the very end, with the entire world watching. Models and political figures and world leaders and athletes and dogs and aardvarks and llamas and dancers, people in period costumes with parasols and high hats, a Model T Ford rolling by, Hillary Clinton walking by, Tom Cruise walking by, and then after a week of grueling work, you get cut from the show. You feel like your career is over, and you sit in your dressing room, trying not to cry.
That’s what it was like during the third episode of my second season, when I did a couple of pretaped voice-overs but didn’t appear on the show. It didn’t happen that way a lot, but when it did, it was brutal. Later that season, I was slated to be in a fantastic cold open, but host Helen Hunt, who was hot off the success of her soon-to-be-Academy-Award-winning role in As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson, decided she wanted to do a bit singing Christmas carols instead, so my piece didn’t make it. When I found out, I wanted to shoot myself. A few weeks later, I had a great piece with Sarah Michelle Gellar where I played Gene Shalit, the Today Show movie critic with the ginormous handlebar mustache, and she and I slow-danced, but it got cut. Being cut from a show feels like the first time a beautiful young woman calls you “sir.” It takes getting used to.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 7