Live From New York - James H. Miller [129]
MARGARET OBERMAN:
I remember when Eddie was really starting to make the big money. One night Jeffrey Katzenberg came up to the offices — 48 Hrs. had just opened — and he was sitting in the writers’ room on the ninth floor, waiting for Eddie. And when Eddie came in, Katzenberg gave him a check for a million dollars. And none of us had ever seen a check for a million dollars before.
That kind of stuff going on was just totally fascinating. And when Eddie wasn’t at read-through, we’d have to go find him; he’d be downstairs buying jewelry in the jewelry store.
HERB SARGENT, Writer:
Eddie came to me one day and said, “I don’t know who my friends are anymore.” And he was frightened, you know. He said that people would patronize him or compliment him, and he wasn’t sure that they were serious. Maybe it was only because he was on television. And he was scared. It wasn’t showing up in his work, but it was a real personal fear that he had. And so I got Harry Belafonte to come and talk to him. Because the same thing had happened to him when he was young.
Harry came up, and I put him in a room with Eddie and let them talk. I think it worked out okay.
ANDY BRECKMAN:
I remember he got a million dollars for appearing in just a few scenes of a Dudley Moore movie. Eddie framed that million-dollar check and put it on his wall. It was one million dollars for a few weeks’ work. Oh yeah, he cashed the check; the one on the wall was a copy.
JOE PISCOPO:
Eddie got death threats and — I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you — he was upset with that. That was as insane as it got. And I remember saying, “Eddie, these are just jealous creeps that don’t know what they’re doing, don’t even worry about it.” He was upset about it and in retrospect rightly so. Just think about it, a brilliant talent like that. I hate to even bring it up now, because there’s always a nut out there. Even after he left Saturday Night Live, I remember him being pulled over a lot by cops in Los Angeles. He was thrown against the car once. That is really sad.
BARRY BLAUSTEIN:
I think it was hard for Eddie. It was hard for both of them. I think when Joe saw Eddie eclipsing him tremendously, it was hard. The relationship changes. They’re no longer equals. Joe was a really good impressionist. He worked really hard on mannerisms, to get an impression down. And Eddie would then just be able to do that same impression — boom — like that.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
People thought that there was a big blowup between Eddie and Joey. They drifted apart. We all heard later that there were some Sinatra-like moments between them. It was that period where Joe was going on talk shows and talking about being friends with Eddie a lot — all that talk-show stuff about things he did with Eddie. And I remember someone saying that Eddie got really ticked about that.
ELLIOT WALD:
It was really hard to get hosts the first year I was there. We lost Nick Nolte the first night. He supposedly went into rehab, but he was seen preparing for rehab at Studio 54. But Eddie came in and took over as host and of course did great. That was the year Eddie was half there and half not.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
I got along fine with Eddie. It’s this weird thing in show business where you kind of lock into the relationship with the person at the point when you meet them. For people who knew Eddie as he was becoming Eddie, it was always easier to get along with him after that. There were entourage jokes and stuff like that among people on the staff, but I liked a lot of the guys in the entourage. The complaint about Eddie was that occasionally he’d flare up and say something snide. But listen — I met people who were much, much larger ass-holes on much less talent. The nice thing about the show was it was pretty democratic that way, which is that the ability to make people laugh generally won the respect of your colleagues, and that was all it needed.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
Ebersol was not a writer and he’s got cheap tastes. So — this is the frustrating thing — all the good scripts went into