Live From New York - James H. Miller [148]
Tartikoff was involved in his own far more dramatic and consequential life-and-death struggle, having been diagnosed years earlier with Hodgkin’s disease. Through it all he showed an unflappable resiliency. He hosted right after an exhausting round of chemotherapy, wearing a toupee to hide the attendant hair loss.
DICK EBERSOL:
It was late 1982 and Brandon was clearly back into serious problems with cancer. And at that point Grant knew, Lily knew, and I knew, and maybe one or two other personal friends and his parents knew. And that was it. And so he starts heavily into chemo and, actually, when his daughter Calla was born in November of ’82, Lily delivered Calla and then went, not that many hours after, to another part of the same hospital to hold Brandon’s hand while he had a chemo treatment.
Lily said to me, “He’s really pulling this off, or he thinks he is, but I know deep down inside that he’s kind of down.” And I got the idea at the time to put something in front of him. I called her two weeks later and said, “I have an idea. Brandon’s the ultimate ham. How about if I give him the ultimate moment? I’ll offer him hosting the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, and he’ll have five or six months to look forward to that if he successfully completes his chemo at the end of the spring.” And that’s how he ended up hosting that show. It was really initially done to give him something to look forward to as he went through the chemo. And you know, for those next six months, all I got from him were ideas about “I’ll do this, I’ll do that.”
LILY TARTIKOFF:
When they asked him to host, he literally had just finished chemo. If you look at the footage of Brandon, he is totally moon-faced. The steroids were still very much in his system. And at the time they asked him to host, he didn’t have a hair on his head, and yet you have no idea how thrilling it was for him. I don’t think he ever anticipated that anybody would ever ask him to host Saturday Night Live. But that was one of the great moments of his career that literally has nothing to do with his career. I had to remind him that that was not what he was supposed to be doing. In fact, when he said he would do it, I was furious, because I thought, “How much pressure can you put on yourself, and on me?” I took everything personally. I tried to talk sense into him, you know. I just said, “You’re not Steve Martin. You’re Brandon Tartikoff. You’re supposed to, like, wear a suit and run the network. Who do you think you are? What makes you think that they’re going to roll out that carpet and you’re going to know what to do?” But really, there was no way that I was going to get in the way of that. I think Brandon would have given up his day job to work on Saturday Night Live if they had ever asked. I think it symbolized every reason for him for ever being at a network and being able to put on a show, a Saturday Night Live. He was completely attached to it and loyal, and he wouldn’t, and couldn’t, give it up. It was a place all unto its own for him. He would leave the network before he would sever those ties or end that show.
BOB TISCHLER:
It was actually a fun week, and Brandon was quite good. He was like any other host really. He really wanted to do the show.
It so happened we were shooting a piece outside NBC, and he didn’t have an ID on him or anything — and the guards would not let him in the building.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
I think people in showbiz were on their best behavior when they came to do Saturday Night Live, because they were scared shitless of live TV. Who’s going to come in on Monday and make an asshole of themselves to these writers, knowing they’re going to have to go onstage live doing sketches five days from then. If someone was looking for bad showbiz behavior among our own people, it was there, but the hosts were all terrified. The hosts that were the best were the ones who were all relaxed about the work — Robin and Lily and people like that. Lily Tomlin