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him out of the room and she said to me, “Well, he’s good, but I like Robert Townsend better.” And I went nuts, you know. I threatened to quit. At that point there were so many mistakes, I was actually heartbroken, because I’d been on the original show, and it went beyond mistakes for me. It was like there was a spirit that I knew that existed in that show and she had no idea what that was, and she was missing it. She would choose Robert Townsend over Eddie Murphy — not that Robert Townsend isn’t great, a good actor, but the difference in terms of what was right for that show was so obvious, and compounded with all the other crap that was going on, I couldn’t take it.

So she hired Eddie as a featured player just to spite me. He was the only featured player that year. He should’ve been a regular. She hired him only because I pressured her, and then to spite me she wouldn’t make him a regular. She only wanted to hire one black actor and Townsend hadn’t signed his contract yet, so she signed Eddie.

The point of it is that she didn’t want him, and she’s been claiming that she discovered him for years. Now Ebersol I heard is claiming he discovered him, and Ebersol wasn’t even on the show when Eddie came. But Ebersol used to take credit for all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, so that doesn’t surprise me.

JAMES DOWNEY, Writer:

When I first met Eddie Murphy, I was up there visiting Jean — I’d recommended a couple of writers to her — and Eddie was hanging around. He’d been hired as a featured player, but he would just go around to everyone’s office and make everybody laugh. He made me laugh the first day I met him. And he was just so clearly the funniest person on the floor. I remember saying to Jean Doumanian, “You’ve got to use this kid Eddie Murphy, you’ve got to put him on.” And I remember her going, “He’s not ready.”

JEAN DOUMANIAN:

I didn’t have enough of a budget to put Eddie on as a member of the cast, because I had already selected the cast when I auditioned him. So I let him be a featured player. They said okay. After the first two shows, I said to the administration, “Listen, you have to make this guy a member of the cast, you just have to, he’s so great.” He was eighteen when I found him. They finally said okay. And then I found out from Eddie that a network vice president was trying to tell him to leave the show and that he’d get him a sitcom on NBC. But Eddie wouldn’t do it.

NEIL LEVY:

One night Jean was five minutes short in the show. She had nothing, whereas Lorne always had something in the bag, a short film, something so you go over instead of under. If you’re under you’re left with nothing, and she had nothing. This is fifteen minutes before the end of the show when Audrey Dickman, who was timing it, realized it was going to run short. Dave Wilson was sitting there saying, “What are we going to do, Jean?” And she was pacing and she didn’t know what to do. And I remembered Eddie’s monologue from his audition like three months earlier. So I said, “Why don’t you see if Eddie can do the monologue that he did for his audition?” And she said, “Oh no, that won’t work.” And then about a minute later, she said, “Why don’t we get Eddie and he’ll do the audition piece?” And they laughed in the booth, and I said, “Yeah, okay, great.”

And I ran up and I found Eddie and I asked him. And his face lit up like he’d been waiting for this moment his whole life, and he said, “Yeah!” So we rushed him downstairs and he did that piece. And in another week or two, I think, he was made a regular.

Doumanian’s fate was sealed on a night in late February 1981. Charlie Rocket was playing the victim of a shooting in a show-length spoof of the then-popular prime-time soap opera Dallas and its famous “Who shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. Mere minutes before the oneA.M. closing time, Rocket, in a wheelchair ostensibly because of injuries suffered in the assassination attempt, complained about having been shot and said — for all those watching at home and in the studio to hear — “I’d like to know who the fuck did it.”

FRED SILVERMAN,