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’d had Billy Crystal come back to host the show, and subsequent to that, he did a couple other cameos. And I said, “Just grant me the notion that, if we stop this whole process of believing everybody we hire has to be unknown, we can really build a hell of a cast.” And he said, “Who do you have in mind?” And I said, “Well, I think I can get Billy, Marty Short, probably could talk Chris Guest into it.” Others ultimately fell into the mix. But those were the names. And also Andrea Martin, who subsequently we chose not to get, because the guys I was hiring fell in love with Pamela Stephenson. And so we didn’t make Andrea the offer. But Brandon said yes, and that represented the first time in the history of the show, and I don’t know if it’s true anymore, that we broke favored nations among the cast. Everybody received the same thing except for Billy, and Billy got a deal at a higher level.

BOB TISCHLER:

It was really my call at that point. I said to Dick, “You know, this is really going to be our last year here,” because Dick had already decided to leave, and we had a chance to leave after one more year. And I said, “Let’s bring in funny people — let’s bring in people that we know are funny on-camera and off-camera and who can work together.” And I basically suggested bringing in some big names, including Chris Guest, the person who actually was responsible for me getting into show business. Dick did suggest bringing Billy in.

DICK EBERSOL:

There’s a very interesting story there that I’ve never told publicly, which is, having gotten Brandon’s okay to do all this, I went out to California in May of ’84 and sat down with Billy’s management. And Buddy Morra was one of the managers at the time; I can’t remember who the other ones were. But we had a lunch and they explained to me that Billy moving back to New York to be a cast member of Saturday Night Live was a nonstarter. They didn’t think it would be good for his career at that stage. He’d had a few movies, and Soap had been on the air and had a lot of notoriety and was, by that point, off the air. And they were adamant and told me no at lunch. And I went upstairs to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, without hesitation, called his house to talk to his wife, Janice, who I heard say in New York when Billy had hosted, “I’d love to bring my daughter back to New York for one year at some point in her life.” She wasn’t talking about Saturday Night Live, but I just overheard her say that. And I said, “Janice, look, here’s what’s happened. This is a great opportunity, at least I think, for Billy to come back. He’ll certainly be well paid, and I’m not going to get you into that. But he could come back to New York, be a cast member on Saturday Night Live, do what he really loves — which is all of his characters, where he’ll be free to write them and do all of that — and you’d have a wonderful year before you lose a daughter to college, and so on, and have everybody living under the same roof.” Well, how she did it or what she did, I don’t know, but by that night, Billy called me back on the phone and said, “Forget whatever you’ve been told by my managers. Provided we can make the right business deal, I want to come to New York.” And that deal was made in about the next twenty-four hours.

I knew Janice at that point maybe about a decade, from the time I’d first seen Billy in the clubs in New York in the midseventies, when I was roaming around that year before — or those months before I knew Lorne. In any case, Billy helped me get Chris and Marty and subsequently Harry Shearer, who, sadly, didn’t work out for me any better than he did for Lorne. There were just too many problems behind the scenes. He’s a gifted performer but a pain in the butt, unfortunately. He’s just so demanding on the preciseness of things and he’s very, very hard on the working people, you know, whether it’s the makeup people or the prop people, or the engineering people. He’s intolerant of other people’s issues. He’s just a nightmare-to-deal-with person.

BILLY CRYSTAL, Cast Member:

I wasn’t having the