Live From New York - James H. Miller [186]
TOM DAVIS, Writer:
My breakup with Al was hardly just a matter of shaking hands and going separate ways. It was a really ugly divorce. It was just hideous. It was precipitated by someone he knew having to enter a twelve-step program. And they really had to. They had a serious problem. And then Al wanted me to go into a twelve-step program. And I didn’t want to go. And then I got married in ’89 and we were already drifting apart significantly. Because Al was into Al-Anon at that time. And the show kind of became twelve-step comedy. I just wasn’t going to join the program. That was one of the issues.
He thought I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He called me a garden-variety alcoholic and drug addict. He did his share of my drugs. He did plenty of experiments. I don’t want to embarrass him now, because I don’t think he needs that for his current career or whatever, but it was common knowledge. I was rather brazen and open about it in a way that was very politically incorrect when I was still doing that. And I’m sure that was a major issue.
And there were money problems. We were so close that we had just pooled our money together and assumed that our business manager was keeping track. And he wasn’t keeping track. And I discovered all of this when I got married. That’s when the lawyers got involved. And it became a bitterly contested thing. It was just about the worst breakup you could have. And the irony of all those years of doing comedy about ourselves breaking up I’m sure did not escape Franken either.
We don’t speak, except at funerals. Or at Saturday Night Live reunion shows. I saw him at the twenty-fifth reunion.
RICK LUDWIN:
I officially began working on Saturday Night Live in 1989. In the fall of that year, we had the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the show, so there was a big special that aired in prime time with every star there could be. That was my big first assignment after joining the show on the executive side of it. The show was doing pretty well at that time. It of course goes through hills and valleys, and that was one of the hills. The special did extraordinarily well for us. So I entered at a good time — only the usual crises, not any unusual ones.
But Eddie Murphy did not show up for the anniversary celebration. The story that’s told is that Eddie saw the David Spade “Hollywood Minute” where David did a joke about “catch a falling star” and referred to Eddie Murphy, and the following Monday, Eddie Murphy got David Spade on the phone and was very upset. David took the call and took the heat, and there was plenty of heat.
And I’m told that from that day forward, Eddie Murphy never set foot on that stage again.
Lorne Michaels would get a lot of wear out of his black suits over the years. Indeed, too much. He saw many former cast members meet heart-breakingly premature ends. No one broke more hearts, however, than the former SNL star and member of the founding family of 1975 who died on May 20, 1989, at the age of forty-two. Anyone given half a chance, it seemed, had fallen in love with her, whether literally or vicariously. In the history of the show, there were no brighter lights.
Gilda Radner.
Gilda — who got that name because her mother saw the movie Gilda, with Rita Hayworth, the year Gilda was born — was someone who often expressed disappointment in herself, plagued by anxieties that she had somehow let herself or others down. She was chronically unhappy with her appearance, no matter how many people told her they loved her just as she was. Gilda was not disappointed in life, however; she did not complain about bad breaks or misfortune, no matter how misfortunate.
Steve Martin touchingly eulogized Gilda on the first show to air after her death. A segment from the first five years was shown, a sketch without dialogue in which Martin and Radner, both dressed in white, danced romantically around the studio to “Dancing in the Dark” from the movie The Band