Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [68]
I walked back through the halls reinspecting the walls for photos, hoping that I had missed one. I hadn’t. When I got to the hair and makeup department, Chris Elliott was sitting in a makeup chair. Because he refused to shave his beard, he looked a little like a landlocked sea captain. Across from him was a dummy’s head with a hairpiece on it. I leaned against the makeup counter and asked him how he liked the dressing room. He joked that it was the definition of luxurious, and I bit my tongue. I looked around the room for the owner of the hairpiece, but everyone in the chairs had full heads of hair.
“Chris, whose toupee is that?” I asked.
Very calmly he responded, “That’s mine.”
I was embarrassed and also immediately baffled. I had watched Chris Elliott on television for years and one thing was clear: He was slowly losing his hair. Whenever he appeared on Letterman, Chris always had a few wisps of stray hair waving off of his head. Those wisps, I discovered that night in the makeup room, were fake. The guy was brilliant! He had a hairpiece that made it look like he was losing his hair so no one would realize that he actually was losing his hair.
Though Chris has since dropped the lid, there was one cast member (who shall remain nameless because he’s still using the hairpiece in secret) who was found out when he had a toupee mishap. It occurred at a Monday night basketball game during my second year. This particular cast member had been on the show a long time and rarely fraternized with the rest of us, but he had decided to play. He arrived with a baseball hat on his head. About five minutes into the first pickup game, he went up for a rebound and his baseball hat fell off. We were all crowded around jumping for the same rebound, so when his hat came off with his hair still in it, we gasped in horror. The guy was completely bald!
Some of the cast and writers knew this already, but even if we had all known, it still would have been mortifying. We all backed away and watched as the hat fell top side down with the hair still in the hat looking up at us. The cast member calmly bent down, picked up his hat, put it back on his head, and walked out of the gym without saying a word. After that night in the gym, whenever I saw him, I would look at his shoulders when I spoke to him so I wouldn’t be tempted to stare at his hairline. And from that point on, whenever I saw him on television, I would stare at the screen and remember his entire head of hair in the baseball hat on the gym floor.
As I was standing in the makeup room talking to Chris about hairpieces, I realized that I would eventually have to go back to my room and change into my wardrobe. I dreaded going back to my room because I knew that every time I opened the door to go in or out, all the people in the show’s greenroom would see me because my dressing room was directly across from it.
The greenroom was the place where the overflow of guests would be put during the show. Whenever there was a sketch that took place in the hallway, there was always a pope, three Vegas showgirls, a guy in a mule suit, two guys in a horse suit, and various and sundry paid extras. All of these characters in the hallways were directed to wait in the ninth-floor greenroom across from my elevator shaft dressing room, and because I had removed the sign, sometimes they would overflow into my private space. If a celebrity brought a dozen friends, they would watch the live show from the greenroom while the celebrity would undoubtedly be on the studio floor standing next to Marci Klein.
Unlike the people in the tour group, I didn’t want anyone—not even the guy in the pontiff costume—coming out of the greenroom to recognize me.