Live From New York - James H. Miller [149]
MARGARET OBERMAN:
I remember being really disappointed when Lily Tomlin hosted. Because we got so few women hosts, and growing up I always thought she was so funny and everything, so it was a little bit of an idolizing thing. And then when she came to the show, she was so condescending to us, especially to me and the other women writers. It was like, you know, “You should really write about something you know about, or something from real life.” It was one of those kinds of things. It was like, Oh my God! And she seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was being so insulting. It was sad, because before that I thought she was pretty cool.
LILY TARTIKOFF:
Brandon said that when he did the dress rehearsal, he was really relaxed. But when they said, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night,” he said he had never been that frightened in his life. And normally nothing scared Brandon. This is a man who just had survived nine rounds of chemotherapy.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
One little test I used to do was on a Monday morning when we’d meet the host, I would ask the host if he would be interested in doing a sketch called “The William Holden Drinking Helmet.” I would always gauge by their reaction, because poor Bill Holden had fallen and cracked his head open and bled to death. So I always thought, if they laughed at that at least, I knew it would be a good week. And if they went, “What?! Aw, no, that’s sick,” then I thought, “Aw-oh, we’re dicked.” That was my little running gag to see if they had a sense of humor or if they were going to be a dickhead like Robert Blake.
MARGARET OBERMAN:
Jerry Lewis hosted the show when I was there. That was a total trip. It was so out there, so insane. We had one writer who was just out of Harvard, he was twenty-one, and Jerry Lewis literally said to him, “I’ve got ties older than you.” He just was such an odd guy. It was his second marriage to a woman he’s still married to. I remember so vividly him taking the gum out of his mouth and her holding her hand out and him putting the gum in her hand. He told me some outrageously foul story about how he’d just done Hellzapoppin’ with Lynn Redgrave and somebody asked him what he thought of Lynn Redgrave and he’d said, “I’d like to take my cock out and piss all over her.” It was just insane.
DAVID SHEFFIELD:
My vote for worst host is Robert Blake. He was sitting in a room and a sketch was handed to him by Gary Kroeger, who was a writer-actor — a sketch called “Breezy Philosopher,” a one-premise sketch about a lofty teacher who’s kind of a biker tough guy, talking about Kierkegaard. Students kept asking questions while he combed his hair and he’d say, “Hey, I don’t know.” Blake sat there and read that, with his glasses down his nose, then wadded it up, turned to Kroeger, and said, “I hope you got a tough asshole, pal, ’cause you’re going to have to wipe your ass with that one.” And he threw it and bounced it off Gary’s face.
MARTIN SHORT:
Jack Palance was on once and no one laughed at the sketch, and it was so strange. Jim Downey wrote it, it was just the strangest scene, and it got cut at dress. I remember that some of those scenes that didn’t make it to air are just kind of classically funny to me in their way. This scene was something like, “What would you do if I told you Jack Palance was standing behind that door?” That was it, and then he would come out. And it died at dress. I remember I said, “Isn’t there an applause sign someone could have turned on or something?” And Billy Crystal said, “They were flashing the applause sign. The audience still wouldn’t clap.”
To me, Ed Grimley’s most memorable encounter was with Jesse Jackson — two people you just don’t expect to see in the same sketch — when Jesse hosted the show. We were supposed to be sitting next to each other on an airplane. They kept saying, “Now when you climb