Live From New York - James H. Miller [150]
DICK EBERSOL:
About eight shows into that season, just before Christmas of ’84, we did a show which Ringo Starr came to host. And everybody was exhausted. I think it was the second of three in a row or something. But everybody was just worn-out. And the Wednesday night read-through was a travesty. And I took Ringo and Barbara Bach, his wife, and walked, as you can from NBC, almost underground all the way back to the Berkshire Hotel over on East Fifty-second Street and kept saying, “Don’t worry,” to them, which you often tell a host. Lorne used to say — maybe he still does — you’re basically bluffing the host from Monday ’til Friday.
In this case, I leveled with Ringo. I said, “What you saw today won’t be the show,” and I went back with Billy and Chris and about ten people on the writing staff. I think this may be the only time it happened in the history of the show. I said, “We have nothing. I know everybody is exhausted. But let’s take all of our best characters and let’s write a show around them. And let’s break the rule that you go three or four shows between great characters,” whether it be Fernando at that point with Billy, or whether it was Marty doing Grimley. I said everything’s fair game. We just have to show this guy a great show. We’ve got nothing now.
And that night, with no sleep for two days, each one of them wrote a piece, and it turned out to be a pretty good show. I offer all that as evidence of the fact that here you have mature adult stars, as they were in the world of comedy — all of them — and they easily accepted, with no complaint, starting completely from scratch that late in the week, which up to that point never happened in the history of the show. They were pros.
MARTIN SHORT:
When Ringo hosted, that was exciting. I remember my wife coming in on a Friday, and when she saw Ringo, she got so flustered she was shaking. I said, “I can’t believe you’re shaking,” and she said, “That is a Beatle!” She was totally overwhelmed. That part of Saturday Night Live was always the most fun — meeting the celebrities and going to the parties.
ANDREW KURTZMAN:
Sid Caesar came in and was absolutely stunned at the way we did things. And I was given the task of working with Sid. He had a rather elaborate parody of, I think it was Tootsie and Rocky combined. I wasn’t quite hip enough to know I was writing the vanity piece that wouldn’t get on the air, because I knew Your Show of Shows and I guess Sid kind of locked onto me; they made me Sid’s boy for the week. He took me to a dinner at some hotel, not the Algonquin, but one of these faded-glory places where they knew him when he was the TV god of the fifties. The carpet was getting a little tatty but they still had the overpriced Italian dining room.
And he ate the strangest meal I’ve ever seen. Sid claimed to eat one meal a day. He starts with a veal chop as big as a baby’s head. The thing is oozing cheese, and he eats his and then eats half of mine, because I couldn’t get near it. He eats both our portions of spaghetti. As we’re gasping after all this food, he says, “Wait — they do me a special dessert. You won’t like it. It’s just for me. It’s this health thing.” They bring to the table a salad bowl, a large-sized box of Shredded Wheat — the ones where the biscuits are the size of Brillo pads — and it’s a full box, not your little individual serving packs. Then comes a thirty-two-ounce container of yogurt, an enormous bowl of berries, and an equally large bowl of raisins and nuts. I would say there were probably four pounds of food there. And he proceeds to combine this into a mash in the big salad bowl and then drops it on top of this Italian pasta we’d just been eating. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. And all the time he’s talking about the sketch we were going to do