I Must Say (21 page)

I struggled through the second show, and for the third show, our host was the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had run for the Democratic nomination for president that year—losing to Walter Mondale, but doing better than any of the pundits expected. Jackson was a big get for
SNL
, and the pressure was on to come up with material worthy of his newsmaking presence.

In those precomputer days, if you wanted a piece you'd written to make the Wednesday afternoon read-through at 1:00 p.m., you had to slide your notes under the producer's door so they could be typed up in script form, and you had to do so by 7:00 a.m.—no exceptions. It was 6:15 on Wednesday morning when one of my favorite writers on the show, Andy Breckman—who would later create the hit cable series
Monk
—said to me, “Do you realize that there will be nothing handed in for the read-through that Jesse will actually love? No one's done anything remotely political, related to what he actually does for a living. We've got forty-five minutes. Let's write something we know Jesse will adore.”

Within a few minutes Andy and I had written an
SCTV
-ish sketch called “The Question Is Moot.” Reverend Jackson was the host of a game show in which he would pose a question to three dim-witted contestants, but before they could fully answer, he would interrupt and say, “The question is moot!”—and launch into an anti-Reagan tirade. Later that afternoon Jackson gave the sketch his stamp of approval, and it made the show, where he was actually pretty funny.

I brought Ed Grimley back for that episode, too. The premise was that he'd won a trip to Hawaii on
Wheel of Fortune
and
was now flying back home, and the passenger seated next to him was . . . Jesse Jackson. As an added twist, I borrowed from the plot of the famous
Twilight Zone
episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which a young William Shatner is terrified by a gremlin that he, and only he, sees through the window of the plane. Ed would flip out when a monster appeared on the wing of the plane, grabbing Jesse aggressively, trying to convince the reverend that what he'd just seen was real, crawling over Jackson to get away. But I was told quite sternly by Jackson's handlers, “You cannot fall and crawl over the reverend in such an aggressive manner.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I'll scale it back. Trust me on that.” And that's exactly what I did—during dress. Live, however, I went bigger than ever, stepping and falling into Jesse, my head practically landing in his crotch. Jesse, a pro's pro, was totally cool with it—a trouper all the way.

I
was no trouper, though. We had a week off after the Jackson show, during which Nancy, Katherine, and I went back home to Toronto for a few days, and I realized that I did not want to return. I wanted to quit
Saturday Night Live
immediately, three shows in. I simply wasn't having any fun, and I couldn't imagine continuing, given the pressure of the show and my (self-imposed) overwhelming sense of gloom and doom. That my contract was for only one season didn't help—it made me feel still more overwhelmed, because it meant that I could never coast, and that every show had to count.

So I sucked it up and flew back to New York. Michael McKean was the guest host that week, which was great for the show, since he was the third member of Chris and Harry's
Spinal Tap
triumvirate, and they were unveiling their new group alter ego the Folksmen, later to be seen in
A Mighty Wind
, the wonderful film
that Chris wrote with Eugene Levy. But in my spiral of dread, I just felt excluded from the fun. That Tuesday I went into Dick Ebersol's office and announced I wanted to leave the show.

I intended for my departure to be completely honorable. I hadn't cashed or deposited a single paycheck I had received since joining
SNL
, in case of this very eventuality. My faultless Canadian financial savvy led me to reason that hanging on to the checks meant leaving wouldn't be a problem: I was giving the money back, so what's the big deal?

Dick handled the situation masterfully. He was apologetic (“Wow, this place must really be dysfunctional if a good guy like you is this unhappy”) and complimentary (“But Marty, you have the highest Q rating!”—I still don't know, by the way, quite what a Q rating is). Above all, he was calm and reasonable. “Marty,” he told me, “if you leave now, this will look bad for us. But I'm here to tell you, it will also look really bad for you, too.” He offered a proposal: agree to stick around through Christmas, and if at that point I still wanted to leave, he would get me out of my
SNL
contract, no strings attached. Brilliant. The perfect thing to say. Since it was now almost November, I could already see the Christmas lights at the end of the tunnel.

Dick later told me that he was nearly certain what would happen next: I would get over the hump, figure out the show's rhythms, and complete the season. Indeed, I pulled myself through that fourth episode and figured it out: no matter what happens, Saturday night comes and there's a show to do. You can either plunge headlong into the process and, in a good week, see your stuff triumphantly realized on-air, or you can sit there petulantly like a spoiled, immature idiot and end up in one sketch at 12:50 if you're lucky, saying, “Yes, my liege” and handing someone a sword.

F
or the remainder of the season I plunged in headlong. I was never fully relaxed, because
Saturday Night Live
doesn't allow you to be, but my perseverance paid off, and lo and behold, I actually started to have fun. In a few short months I saw myself elevated from cult comic beloved by the James Wolcotts and Conan O'Briens of the world to a bona fide TV star. My repertory of characters was known across America: Ed Grimley, Jackie Rogers Jr., Irving Cohen, and Nathan Thurm.

Nathan was a new character, born on
SNL
and, like so many of the characters I'd already created, based to a certain degree on a real person. There was a long-serving, chain-smoking makeup artist on the show—let's call her Isabel—who was without question the most defensive human being I'd ever met. You'd sit there in her makeup chair and say, “Gee, Isabel, I look a little pale, don't I?” And she'd say, “I know that! You don't think I know that? I'm a makeup artist! I would know that.”

Anyway, for the sixth show of the season (hosted by Edward Asner), Harry, Chris, Billy, and I were writing a satire of
60 Minutes
in which Harry played Mike Wallace and Chris and Billy played the Minkman brothers, whose venerable novelty business was threatened by Chinese counterfeiters who were circulating inferior whoopee cushions, dribble glasses, and plastic vomit. In every Mike Wallace investigation on
60 Minutes
, he would inevitably conduct an adversarial interview with some stonewalling, defensive corporate weasel. That was my role: Nathan Thurm, attorney for the Chinese counterfeit-novelty overlord, Ping E. Lee.

Billy said, “Why don't you do him as Isabel? You do her behind her back all the time, anyway. She'd be perfect.”

“Are you nuts?” I said. “I can't do that. She'd find out.”

“C'mon, she'll never know,” Billy said. “They never know when you're doing them.”

So when I did Nathan, I gave him Isabel's smoking and verbal mannerisms, a stock
60 Minutes
villain's defensiveness, and Richard Nixon's peculiar form of perspiration. You know how Nixon famously had that smear of sweat on his upper lip during his 1960 presidential debate with John F. Kennedy? We used glycerin to create that effect on my upper lip. I also gave Nathan a special cigarette, rigged with a thin metal wire, so the ash just grew longer and longer throughout his interview without ever falling off. And he had circular wire-rim glasses whose lenses were so thick that I could barely see out of them.

Harry and I did our little Wallace-and-Thurm pas de deux: him saying, “Pardon me for saying this, but you seem defensive,” me saying, “I'm not being defensive,
you're
the one who's being defensive. Have you ever thought about that? Maybe you should think about that.”

What I had forgotten was that Isabel would be there when we were taping the piece because, of course, she was the makeup artist. So at one point, as Nathan, I was saying, “I know that! You don't think I know that? I'm a lawyer, I would know that.” And the director yelled, “Cut! He's sweating too much.” And Isabel, none the wiser, just as Billy predicted, responded, “I know that! You don't think I know that? I'm a makeup artist, I know that!” It was insane.

The Minkman piece proved to be a big hit, and thereafter Nathan was a convenient figure to bring back whenever the show needed a defender-of-the-indefensible character. Like, when reports came out in the news that a circus was presenting surgically modified goats as unicorns, Nathan was called upon in a “Weekend Update” segment to represent the animal modification company, telling the interviewer (Chris), “Maybe the ASPCA should publicly condemn
you
. For being so uninteresting facially. Have you ever thought about that? Maybe you should think about that.”

All this time, as Nathan recurred and re-recurred, Isabel never
caught on. I was so relieved. But then, at the final after-party of my one season on
SNL
, one of her assistants got drunk and said to Isabel, “How stupid are you? Don't you realize that Nathan Thurm is
you
?”

Poor Isabel was so hurt. She stormed up to me at the party: “I thought you were my friend.”

I felt so horrible: caught like a rat. “But I
am
your friend, Isabel,” I said. “Don't you know that impersonation is the sincerest form of flattery?”

To which Isabel quickly replied, “I know that! You don't think I know that?”

I
don't want to make my
SNL
season sound like an endurance test of unending anxiety. In the moment, onstage, I had some of the greatest fun of my life. Dick Ebersol did something really cool that year. In his zeal to revive the sagging fortunes of the show, he established a kind of rotating visiting professorship for veteran comic writers, wherein someone of great credentials—such as Alan Zweibel or Marilyn Suzanne Miller, both from
SNL
's original 1975–'80 run—would join the staff writers for a week to give that Saturday's show some extra oomph. One week, to my delight, the invited writers were my
SCTV
buddies Dick Blasucci and Paul Flaherty. With them, I wrote a sketch that was one of the high-water marks of the season.

Well, first, I suppose, I should tell you about the sketch that, too
SCTV
-ish for the
SNL
audience, went down in flames in dress. The premise was that Lucille Ball (me) was coming back to do one last sitcom, playing Bess Truman in a show called
Look Who's Married Harry
. In the episode in question, Lucy and Eleanor Roosevelt (Mary Gross) wanted to wallpaper the Oval Office before “the boys” got home—with hilarious consequences! It was one of those curveball concepts that just might have worked
in filmed form on
SCTV
, but boy, did it bomb before the live audience. I can still hear the crickets chirping. After the scene finished, I asked Chris Guest, “Why didn't they at least hit the Applause sign?” Chris replied, in all honesty, “They did.”

But Dick, Paul, and I, this time abetted by Chris and Billy, made up for that clunker with a game-show sketch called “Jackie Rogers Jr.'s $100,000 Jackpot Wad,” in which Jackie hosted a
Pyramid
-style program that paired civilian contestants with celebrities. It was nearly as absurd as “Look Who's Married Harry,” but it was more palatably absurd, and, above all, everyone in the sketch was at the top of their game. Jim Belushi, as Captain Kangaroo, just wanted to know when he was going to be paid (“You are paying me in cash, right? No checks. That was the deal!”), and Mary Gross was his playing partner, a frightened schoolteacher from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her challenger was Rajeev Vindaloo (Chris), a sexually ambiguous Indian private investigator, and his playing partner was none other than Sammy Davis Jr. (Billy). Chris and Billy were on fire in this one:

JACKIE:
The category is . . . “Horn of Plenty.” Sammy, describe these foods, if you will, sir.

(Popcorn.)

SAMMY:
Okay, this is a thing at the movies, it comes in kernels, you heat them up in oil.

RAJEEV:
Popcorn.

(Pickle.)

SAMMY:
This is a little hot, spicy number.

RAJEEV:
Rita Moreno.

SAMMY:
No, babe. It comes from a cucumber; they let it sit in a barrel with its brothers so it becomes something else.

RAJEEV:
A caterpillar.

SAMMY:
Let's move on.

(Angel food cake.)

SAMMY:
This is an après-dinner kind of thing, dessert, three layers, icing on top.

RAJEEV:
Japuti.

SAMMY:
No, babe. Say you're in heaven, you're flying around, you got a little halo, you're . . .

RAJEEV:
Dead.

SAMMY:
Yeah, but you did a lot of good stuff, you're . . .

RAJEEV:
Blessed.

SAMMY:
Yeah, but you got the wings, the halo, you're going from cloud to cloud . . .

RAJEEV:
I don't know, what is it?

SAMMY:
Next.

(Chocolate babies.)

SAMMY:
Uh . . . This is, uh . . .

RAJEEV:
Chocolate babies?

SAMMY:
Right.

Another of Dick's big coups that season was to get Eddie Murphy to return as the host of the Christmas show. Eddie had been the savior of Dick's early days in charge of
SNL
, and now he
was the biggest star in comedy. His first two movies,
48 Hours
and
Trading Places
, were hits, and he was coming on to promote his latest and biggest,
Beverly Hills Cop
. Well before the week of Eddie's episode, in fact, Dick was pestering all of us ringers, saying, “Are you writing stuff for Eddie? You've got to give me good stuff for Eddie. Eddie really wants to work with you guys.”