I Must Say (20 page)

But on
Saturday Night Live
, naturally, there would be no second takes, much less third, fourth, and fifth ones. And I'd heard many a horror story about its unrelenting pressure, and what it could do to one's psyche. Plus, was it even a hip show anymore?
SNL
is such an unbreakable institution now that it's hard to remember how tenuous its future was in 1984. Eddie Murphy had given the show a much-needed boost in the early 1980s, but now he was gone, and so was Joe Piscopo. NBC was giving serious consideration to just canceling the show outright. I remember being
stunned, when I finally did arrive, that
SNL
, unlike the low-budget
SCTV
, had no wig department—they still just rented stuff on a season-to-season basis, as if they were never sure if there would be a next season.

Dick Ebersol deserves a lot of credit for his crazy gambit the season I joined: shell out a bunch of money, George Steinbrenner style (that was the metaphor he used), to hire proven veterans, and let it be a somewhat different show—maybe a little more grown-up, a little more ready for primetime. It was due to the amazing people he had already recruited that I was swayed to say yes.

Billy Crystal, who had hosted the show twice the season before, agreed to come aboard, along with Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, who were red-hot from their mockumentary
This Is Spinal Tap
, the comedy event of the year. Dick also hired Pamela Stephenson from the British sketch show
Not the Nine O'Clock News
and the stand-up comedian Rich Hall, who had his own cottage industry with his
Sniglets
books of wordplay.

Like a lot of high-priced dream teams, this one didn't always gel. There was also the separate issue of the people retained from the previous season—Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mary Gross, Gary Kroeger, and Jim Belushi—who now had to take a backseat to the newcomers who very quickly emerged as the focus of the '84–'85 season.

Billy I knew a little from our days as Witt/Thomas/Harris actors, when I was in
I'm a Big Girl Now
and he, like Nancy, was in
Soap
. I had immediately taken a liking to him—so smart, fast, and versatile. Harry I also knew a little, because we had a friend in common, Paul Shaffer. Chris Guest I didn't know at all. But at our very first
SNL
read-through he struck me as a kindred spirit, both in his sense of humor and his own ambivalence about having enlisted. During Dick's tenure, there was a little stage in the
writers' room where, if you were so inclined, you could get up with your script and act out a sketch idea rather than just table-read it. At the read-through for the first show, Jim Belushi and Gary Kroeger got up to act something out. Everyone, me included, pivoted their chairs toward the stage to watch them—everyone, that is, except Chris Guest, who sat stock-still, his back to the stage, the whole time Jim and Gary were doing their thing.

When I turned back around, I saw that Chris had written three flight options back to L.A. on the top of my script: U
NITED 274,
A
MERICAN 117,
A
MERICAN 133
. Pure Chris. I now knew that I was not alone in my fretfulness, and that I was in the presence of a very dry wit. Years later, he would ask me, “Martin”—Chris is one of the few people who addresses me by my full name—“tell me, what is your new film
Captain Ron
about?” I said, “Well, it's about a man with three children who inherits a boat.” Without emotion or hesitation, Chris replied, “I didn't say spoil it for me.”

Chris, Billy, and Harry were a formidable trio, three major comic talents in full bloom. I was simultaneously intimidated and stimulated by their collective presence.

Though the first live show of that season didn't air until October, a bunch of us newcomers got together two months in advance to write and shoot some pieces. We members of the Steinbrenner brigade were keen to make our influence felt, and we pushed for the show to embrace more elements of
Spinal Tap
and
SCTV
: from the former, a deadpan cinema verité feel, and from the latter, more pretaped bits and a heavier reliance on prosthetics and makeup. No more Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford while looking and sounding nothing like Gerald Ford. If Harry Shearer was going to play Ronald Reagan, he would spend hours in a makeup chair to look not just a little, but
exactly like
Ronald Reagan—to visually match the accuracy of Harry's verbal impersonation.

Late in the summer of '84, Chris, Harry, Pamela, and I filmed a piece that Harry and I had written about a pair of brothers trying to make the Olympics as a synchronized swimming team—even though there was no such Olympic event as men's synchronized swimming. Harry was the older brother, a sort of determined but delusional everyman, and I was the younger brother. (Pamela played the Harry character's wife, and Chris, who improvised every word of his dialogue, was our choreographer, basically a trial run for the Corky St. Clair character he would play in
Waiting for Guffman
.) I knew right away that I should play my part as Lawrence Orbach, my “Half-Wits” character from
SCTV
, because he made sense as this guy who idolized his older brother with such deep sincerity that, even though he couldn't swim, he would gamely go along with whatever his brother wanted him to do.

Lawrence was outfitted in swim trunks, a bathing cap (his elaborately contrived thinning hair would have dissolved on contact with the water), nose plugs, and, just to complete the effect, a child's life jacket. His spastic limitedness of motion, however, wasn't an act. A month earlier I'd suffered a serious bicycle accident in which I broke my collarbone, punctured a lung, and splintered three ribs. For the month of July, Nancy and I had rented a cottage up in Muskoka, the lake country three hours north of Toronto, with Andrea Martin and her husband, Bob Dolman, Nancy's brother. We had baby Katherine, and the Dolmans had their two little boys, Jack and Joe. It was going to be my last bit of family-time relaxation before I walked into the
SNL
buzz saw.

But then Andrea and I went for a bike ride in which, while speeding down a hill, I flipped over the front of the bike and landed with an ominous thud. I dusted myself off and stood up,
but Andrea had this horrified look on her face and shouted, “Lie down! Just lie down!” Evidently a part of my collarbone was sticking out, and my skin was a sickly ashen gray. I was rushed to a hospital and spent the remainder of the month more or less immobilized.

And then? Straight down to New York and right into shooting “Synchronized Swimming,” with me still in a sling when we weren't on-camera. The robotic arm motions that Harry and I did to the rousing strains of Frank Stallone's “Far from Over” were dictated by my handicap—which was, perversely, a great gift to the piece. Harry and I knew we had something strong.

We did another good piece together that August, “Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous.” Harry was Robin Leach, and I was Katharine Hepburn's maternal third cousin, Nelson Hepburn, a hot-dog vendor in Central Park, who completed his Kate look—pinned-up frizzy hair—with a stained crop-top T-shirt and a pack of cigs rolled up in one sleeve. “We don't communicate at all,” Nelson complained in his identical-to-Kate warble. “Never did. I tried—through letter, through phone calls, anonymous sometimes—and she'd hang up. One time, she stopped by here, and I said, ‘Kate, don't you know me?' And she just looked at me and she said, ‘More mustard, please!'”

A bit later, as we were starting to prep for the live shows, I remember going into Harry's office and saying, “You know what I want to do, Harry? I want to always hold back a piece that I'm writing, keep it in reserve—the kind of piece that you want your friends to respect. So that I can tinker with it, let it ferment.” Harry heard me out and then immediately took to his typewriter, typed out what I had just told him, and said, “Sign this, won't you? I'm going to put it in my desk, so that when you come in every Tuesday evening without a fucking idea in your head, I'll be
able to ask you how that ‘fermenting' piece you're holding back for your friends is coming along.” Harry was all too prescient.

Y
et Billy Crystal always made me feel better about what we were getting into. He was prolific and kindhearted, with an adorable wife, Janice, and two young daughters. Like me, he was very driven to make something of this one-season opportunity—he'd been a late scratch from the original 1975 lineup of
Saturday Night Live
, and he wasn't going to let anything stop him this time. We had points of reference in common, too: a love of mid-century crooners and old-time showbiz. Billy, like me, did a Sammy Davis Jr., though he did Sammy as Sammy, not as a deranged albino.

Speaking of which, Jackie Rogers Jr. made the trip with me to
SNL
, as did Irving Cohen, as did Ed Grimley. Ed was a no-brainer—in every sense of the term. There was something intrinsic to him that made Ed perfect for the live format: manic energy. That, I learned as the season went on, was the key to success on
SNL
, and a big differentiator from
SCTV
: the need for insane, unexpected, can't-look-away energy. John Belushi had it. Gilda had it. Will Ferrell, when he did the show in the 1990s, had it. You can be incredibly talented comedically, but on the unforgiving stage of
Saturday Night Live
, if you don't bring that immediate energy, you just won't connect with the audience.

So it made sense to get Ed onto the show as soon as possible. For
SNL
, I gave him a new obsession. I loved the idea that Ed would be fixated upon a daytime game show; after all, what else could he possibly be doing with his days? Though I had never seen
Wheel of Fortune
, I knew that it was a big deal, and that the mere idea of Ed repeatedly, gushingly saying the name of its host, Pat Sajak, was inherently funny. So I wrote a sketch for the first
show in which Ed applies to be a contestant on
Wheel of Fortune
and soliloquizes about the wonders of Sajak while waiting to be interviewed. It made the cut. I was starting to think this
SNL
thing might work out after all.

But then the dress rehearsal for Episode 1 was a disaster. At
Saturday Night Live
, you do the dress at 8:00 p.m. before a live audience, and it's not uncommon for pieces to get reshuffled, and for one or two to fall out completely, and for the feel of the show to change utterly for the better, because the bad energy of one piece is no longer hovering over the two pieces that follow it. I knew none of this then, however—nor did I yet understand the magic that can happen between dress and air. At the dress that night, the audience felt dead, and very little of our material seemed to be landing. We seemed, as Ed would say, as doomed as doomed can be.

Nancy arrived backstage at 11:10. I was freaking out. “You know what?” I told her. “They should put on a repeat tonight. And I'm not just saying that. None of it's working.” Meanwhile Bob Tischler, Dick Ebersol's lieutenant on the show, had become convinced, along with Harry and me, that Dick should open the show with “Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous” rather than whatever opener we'd tried in dress—it was one of the few bits that had gotten laughs. Dick was concerned, though—and rightfully so—about starting a “live” show with a taped piece, and about abandoning the tradition of the cold open capped by someone shouting, “Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!” We argued to him that
SNL
tradition shouldn't get in the way of starting with our strongest material.

In retrospect, I think we should have adhered to the “Live from New York!” opening, simply because it's such a huge part of what
SNL
is. But we won the day, and the show opened with “Lifestyles.” In addition, Dick and Bob decided to run “Synchronized
Swimming,” which was scheduled for the second episode, near the top of the first episode. This was robbing Peter to pay Paul, but again, the “strongest material” argument prevailed.

At 11:30 there was no going back, and the tenth season of
Saturday Night Live
began with “Lifestyles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous,” which not only didn't die a primetime death but was uproariously received by the studio audience. As was “Synchronized Swimming,” as was Ed Grimley's
Wheel of Fortune
interview sketch, which Chris Guest and I did somewhere between the two pretaped bits. I was basically done by 12:10, and I had gone three for three in my very first show.

In other words, not only did my worst fears prove to be unfounded; I had just experienced, on October 6, 1984, one of the greatest nights of my career. Larry Brezner, one of my managers, came up to me at the end of the show, leaned in conspiratorially, and whispered, “Your stock just jumped
three-hundred-fold.
” Nan hugged me and said, “Okay, now you need to be institutionalized. You thought this was going to bomb?”

I could only say in reply, “I've done nothing wrong. If I had known this show could turn around like that, I swear, I never woulda . . .”

B
ut Nan was totally right: I needed to settle down and keep my anxieties in check. I did the best I could, but the metabolism of that show was strangely punishing to me.

Sunday night, I'd start getting a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. Monday morning, since I was a writer as well as a performer, I'd have to go in with the other writers to meet the upcoming show's host and start pitching ideas—“ideas,” more like stuff I blurted out on the spot, just to get through the meeting. And if by
the end of Monday I didn't believe in my ideas, and hadn't written anything that I felt I could actually work on the following day, I considered myself the biggest failure in the world. Never mind that forty-eight hours earlier I might have felt like the king of live television—that was irrelevant now. It was final exams every week.