During my gig that night, I resorted to doing random impressions of Porky Pig and Barney Fife, the hapless deputy sheriff played by Don Knotts in the 1960s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. These were bits I had performed more than a decade earlier when I was starting out.
But that night also saw the birth of a new impression: the gloriously unpredictable New York City gadfly, Al Sharpton. A Baptist minister and civil rights activist, Rev. Sharpton is as famous for his track suits and bouffant hairdo, styled after his hero James Brown (whom he did a killer impression of on SNL), as he is for his demonstrations whenever any incident even suggests a racial motivation. Sharpton had drawn attention to a number of racially charged incidents, from the murder of three African American men in the Howard Beach section of Queens in the 1980s to the shooting death of Sean Bell in a hail of fifty NYPD bullets on the eve of Bell’s wedding in 2007. He’s staged unsuccessful but always colorful campaigns for public office numerous times, from mayor of New York City to the U.S. Senate and even president of the United States. He never came even close to succeeding, but his speeches and debate appearances were always fun to watch. He was pretty powerful up there sometimes.
I’d been thinking about doing him for a while, and then I saw him on television in the days after 9/11, taking a run at Mayor Giuliani, who was at the time universally praised for how he handled himself in the wake of the terrorist attacks. On one of those Sunday-morning political shows, I saw Senator Dick Gephardt talk about Homeland Security. On another channel, I saw Senator Joe Lieberman talk about the Patriot Act. Then I turned on Hannity & Colmes, and I heard Al Sharpton say in his distinctive preacher voice, “I did not call Giuliani a bozo.”
When I did him that night for the college, I pretty much just repeated what Sharpton had said verbatim, and the audience roared.
Eventually I would be able to work some of our national nightmare into my stand-up routine. I remembered how drunken audiences seemed to really go for a little patriotic bloodletting, so I came up with: “If we ever capture Osama bin Laden, instead of turning him over to the United Nations, we should kidnap him and drop him along a dusty road in Daleville, Alabama. Instead of getting justice from the United Nations, he gets it from some farmer with a twisted leer and a misshapen head. ‘You’re a loooooong way from Tora Bora, ain’t ya, boy? Jethro, get the Slip ’n’ Slide! We’re gonna love you!’ ” It was cheap, the crowds used to really go for it, but I’m not at all sorry that the joke is now obsolete, and not just because the dude is dead.
During the first week of December 2001, the city was still reeling. The smell of the fires still burning at Ground Zero permeated lower Manhattan, and remnants of nearly three thousand bodies were still being recovered.
That week, I went to the funeral of an old drinking buddy from Hell’s Kitchen who had died at thirty-three of cirrhosis. For all the devastation I’d caused in my own life with my drinking, it was a blow to see the corpse of such a young man who had literally been killed by booze.
After the ceremony, I joined my friend Caryn Zucker, who was then–NBC head Jeff Zucker’s wife, and Today Show host Katie Couric for dinner. I wanted so desperately to function at Katie’s level, because her rarified world was supposed to be mine too, but I felt like she could see right through me. I was sweating profusely throughout the meal. I was fumbling to make myself understood. It was as though there was a line right down the middle of the table, Katie and Caryn sitting on one side, in the light, and me on the other, sitting in darkness.
After dinner, I went back to 30 Rock for a late rehearsal. Rock god Mick Jagger was the musical guest that week, and the writers were trying to work him into a couple of sketches. I had played Karl Lagerfeld opposite Maya Rudolph as designer Donatella Versace at the beginning of the season, and there was another sketch with those two characters slated for this week. But when Jagger came up to me and asked if I’d mind if he did Lagerfeld, I was both flattered and relieved. Sure, have a go! Normally, if someone tried to poach a part from me, I’d be pissed, but it was Mick Fucking Jagger.
Besides, I was still in a daze from seeing my friend in his open casket, knowing full well it could have been me.
CHAPTER NINE
You Want Me to Go Where?
New York City
2002
I got along great with everyone at SNL, but I didn’t hang out with cast or crew at the infamous postshow after-parties because my partying wasn’t really about partying. It was about getting obliterated, and I didn’t want those people to see it. The flip side was that when I was trying to stay sober, it was hard to be around revelers because I couldn’t join in. The alcoholic’s catch-22.
But I was at work a lot, so when I was using—I’d started adding an obscene amount of cocaine to my binges—I had to be creative about how I did it without other people catching on or letting it interfere with the work. At least too much.
In those days there were beautiful young women who would walk up and down Sixth Avenue, visiting various office buildings to take orders for coke. Addicts themselves, they provided this service for the dealers in exchange for drugs. And the dealers they worked for supplied the purest, strongest stuff you could get. Once you started, you couldn’t stop.
One night on Fifty-eighth Street, I met up with this tiny Russian woman, Irina, who’d been selling to me for a while. There was blood running out of her nose and over her lips from all the powder she’d snuffed up her own nose. She was in a kind of stupor.
“I didn’t get all of your coke,” she said. “But I got most of it. Can I blow you to make up the difference?”
At another time in life, perhaps, when confronted with a hot Russian chick saying, Hey, how ’bout if I blow you?—I couldn’t imagine a context in which that would not be appealing. But then again, I couldn’t have imagined such a girl having blood all over her face.
“Thanks, but you’re bleeding, and I don’t want blood down there. I like nice things down there. Like strudel.”
She just looked at me dumbly, continuing to bleed.
“Why don’t we get you cleaned up?” I said.
We went to a deli on Seventh Avenue and got some napkins. Then we went to her apartment, and we stopped the bleeding. While we were there, her phone rang—it was her supplier with the rest of the coke.
So he came over, and we did coke together. And then my nose started bleeding. For a moment, I stepped out of myself, like a tourist in my own life, and saw this pathetic scene: these three people in this squalid apartment ingesting lines of white poison in the name of a good time. I thought, I don’t like this anymore.
My coke use got so bad that when I called Irina for more a couple of months later, she said, “I’m not selling you any more. You are out of control. You’re famous, and I can’t have that. I can’t have some terrible thing happening and I was the last person you saw that day. I don’t need it.”
It’s not a good sign when your dealer cuts you off.
I went to Las Vegas to perform at a Microsoft event a short time thereafter. I’d done a lot of coke and drunk about a fifth of vodka on the plane. There was supposed to be a rehearsal the morning I arrived, but I was in no shape to attend. I couldn’t find the theater on my own, so someone was sent to fetch me from my hotel. When I was finally where I needed to be, I was unable to walk or speak very well. If they had only let me sleep for a few hours, I could have walked out there and behaved as if nothing had happened. They moved the rehearsal back to the evening to give me time to sober up.
But instead of going back to my room, I seem to have played the slot machines, because I ended up with a bucket filled with quarters. I tried to give my coin stash away to a group of Asian women, but I guess I didn’t make as good an impression as I thought I did, my clothes rumpled, unable to keep my balance, slurring, and my hair standing straight up, a feat I would have been unable to accomplish with even the largest tub of styling gel.
Somebody from Microsoft found me and got me back to my room. I slep
t, and I came back that night as if nothing had occurred. I had a great rehearsal, we did the show the next day, and I got a standing ovation.
But waiting in the wings of the stage where I did my set was a man with airplane tickets to Minnesota, one for him and one for me. Apparently, the Microsoft people had called someone at NBC, who called my manager. As a result, the people in my life—my manager, my agent, my wife, and Lorne, I think—became concerned, and there was a bit of an intervention. The man with the tickets relayed a message: You have a great career ahead of you, but only if you take these tickets and go to Hazelden.
Founded in the 1940s by a recovering alcoholic named Austin Ripley, Hazelden was initially intended for the treatment of alcoholic priests(!), although that plan was quickly scrapped and replaced with the credo: “A sanatorium for curable alcoholics of the professional class.” Fortunately, they’re pretty relaxed about that definition, or they’d have stopped me at the door, as I’m anything but professional and I’m not sure you’d say I have much class. It might not be quite as famous as the luxurious Betty Ford Center in California, but Hazelden is one of the premier addiction treatment facilities in the country.
It was clearly an offer I couldn’t refuse. I went.
I cursed myself that I didn’t get drunk on the plane. Detox facilities actually prefer it if you show up under the influence—makes you easier to manage—but I didn’t give a shit about that. I was just sorry I’d blown my last chance to drink. Instead, I spent the two-hour flight from Vegas to Minneapolis trying to grasp the concept of never drinking again. I knew I’d stopped for long periods before, but somehow this seemed more final.
When I got to Hazelden, the escort left me on the patio by myself. I sat down on the ground and started crying. There were other people in their first hours of detox standing around smoking cigarettes. No one said, “Hey, are you all right?” They were out of their minds. We were all out of our fucking minds.
After I went through an intake assessment, in which they determined what kind of addict I was and what my mental health issues were (it was a long meeting), they gave me Librium, which is given to help ease the agitation of withdrawal.
Men and women are housed separately. In my dormitory, there was one phone and between thirty and fifty men. I was initially supposed to have a roommate, but they ended up giving me my own room because I was still waking up screaming. (Also, I snore.) There was another guy there who had his own room. He had been a drug dealer who’d found a pregnant woman who had hung herself and the baby had fallen out of her. It freaked him out so badly he could never sleep at night.
As part of my treatment, they put me in a trauma group with people who had been raped and tortured. I had to go every day and listen to men and women talking about being kidnapped, sexually abused, beaten, and worse. One guy had been strapped down while someone had carved him up. The counselors seemed to think this was where I fit in.
But ultimately, like the mental health clinic at college, the folks at Hazelden said, “We’re not equipped to handle someone like you.” They wanted to send me to a military trauma unit.
“What? You’re telling me I have the symptoms of a guy who was in a POW camp?”
“Yes, you do.”
“C’mon, you’re just making that up, right?”
“No, Mr. Hammond. We think it would be best.”
I could barely wrap my head around the idea that I really belonged in a trauma unit, but more than that, I figured if I went there, I wasn’t going to get out for a long, long time.
I wanted to get back to New York and SNL.
After twenty-eight days, on a Thursday, I was released. On Friday, I flew home to New York. On Saturday, I did a cold open as Dick Cheney.
I think I got drunk a couple of times after I got back, but eventually I got sober and stayed that way. I went to meetings every day when I could. No cutting, no drinking, no flashbacks, no nothing. I was living in the alien territory of hope.
CHAPTER TEN
I’ll Show You Multiple Personality Disorder, Pal
If you’ve ever met me—and I’m assuming you haven’t—you’d know that I’m as far from professorial as a person with a college education can be. But I think the art, if you will, of doing impressions offers what parents like to call a teachable moment. Bear with me.
For starters, an impressionist is not a practitioner of Impressionism, which involves a talent with a paintbrush that leads to the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than a late-night sketch comedy show on network television. An impressionist, to put it in a nutshell, is someone who imitates the voice, pattern of speech, and gestures of others, although the voice is the key thing. An impersonator specializes in imitating just one person, like the guy who showed up at your wife’s bachelorette party dressed as Elvis.
Impressionists were all over British television starting in the 1960s, especially a guy named Mike Yarwood, whose impressions of famous Englishmen were so convincing that when he invented catchphrases, people assumed they came from the people he impersonated, even when they had never uttered the words themselves.
In the States, the dominant impressionist in the 1970s was Rich Little, also known as “The Man of a Thousand Voices.” He first came to prominence when he was a guest on Judy Garland’s variety show in 1964 and did an impression of James Mason, her costar in A Star Is Born. He went on The Tonight Show and did Carson for Carson, and he was a regular on Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts. He was perhaps best known for his impression of Richard Nixon, which may have hurt him in the long haul, as he was still doing Nixon when he appeared at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2007. But Little was extremely versatile, and so good doing other people’s voices that when the British actor David Niven was so frail that his voice wasn’t strong enough for his roles in Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther, Little dubbed the voice and no one was the wiser, not even Niven, who didn’t find out about it until he read it in the press. (I would do the same for longtime SNL announcer Don Pardo—one of the most recognizable voices on television—when he was down with laryngitis on the episode hosted by Elle MacPherson. And you know he had to be really ill, because Pardo still announces the show, well into his nineties and several years past his official retirement from NBC. )
Then Dana Carvey hit the airwaves in the mid-1980s, and no one was sure who the real George H. W. Bush was anymore. Even the former president found himself quoting Dana’s impression of him in his eulogy for Gerald Ford in 2007 when he said, “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.” That’s when you know you’ve arrived, when the person you imitate does an imitation of you imitating them. If I can get Bill Clinton to bite his lip and give the thumbs-up at the same time, I’ll be golden. Dana would do something else I’d never be able to compete with—he did both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Around the turn of the millennium, I had been invited to join the game show Hollywood Squares for a couple of weeks. In varying incarnations, Hollywood Squares was on the air for nearly four decades, starting back in the 1960s, when Peter Marshall hosted and Paul Lynde was the center square. If you’re too young to have seen Bewitched, even in reruns, he was a delirious Uncle Arthur to Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha. And he won two Emmys for his center square gig over the course of a decade on the show. By the time I was invited on, the show had been revived by King World Productions, the fine people who bring you Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!—the real one, not the parody we did on SNL—and they’d enlisted Whoopi Goldberg as a producer as well as the center square.
The show had a long history of catering to the relative expertise of panelists. Paul Lynde was always asked questions that allowed him to make a snarky, and occasionally perverse, reply. Apparently Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowall was a wiz at all things Shakespeare. Setting the precedent for me was Rich Little, a frequent Squares guest in the 1970s. Every time a contestant selected him, the question the host posed was usually about some celebrity or
politician so that Little could do an impression of the person. When I was on the show, host Tom Bergeron did the same thing: every question—by amazing coincidence!—seemed to require my doing an impression in the answer. Over the course of a couple of weeks, that was a lot of impressions.
I was extremely flattered when Whoopi called me a shape-shifter. That might sound a little woo-woo mystical, but truth be told, it might actually be the best description of what I do. According to mythology, though, a real shape-shifter has trouble returning to his original form after a while, whereas I, unfortunately, had no such issue. Anyway, it was an amazing compliment.
Lorne recognized that predilection in me from the start, which is why I usually wasn’t part of the sketches unless an impression was required. I think Lorne wanted me to focus on being ready to learn a new voice at a moment’s notice. If one of the writers gave me an impression on Friday night, could I learn it by Saturday morning? Sometimes a sketch that featured Dick Cheney on Friday had been reconfigured to include Geraldo Rivera on Saturday. Lorne wanted me to be able to make that switch without the interference of having to prepare for other sketches during the week.
That’s why over nearly a decade and a half on the show, I performed only a handful of made-up characters but more than a hundred impressions. From my first season to my last, the best known were Clinton, who I did more than eighty times, Dick Cheney (twenty-six times), Chris Matthews (twenty-two times), Al Gore (twenty times), Ted Koppel (seventeen times), Sean Connery (eighteen times), Jesse Jackson (fifteen times, including once as a cartoon), Dan Rather (thirteen times), Regis Philbin (twelve times), Arnold Schwarzenegger (eleven times), Donald Rumsfeld (ten times), and, in the year between March 2008 and March 2009, John McCain (eight times). But I would take on anybody they gave me, from Don Imus to Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, one of two (notably unattractive) women I played. In fact, when I went out as Schott, they dressed me in a hideous short-sleeved shirt that clearly showed my scarred arms.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 12