Live From New York - James H. Miller [188]
BILL MURRAY, Cast Member:
Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way — over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour — maybe an hour and a half — just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick — hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.
In 1980, with Saturday Night Live just behind her and new careers in the theater and movies ahead, Gilda said, “I think I’d be a neat old woman — if I ever make it that far. I once said that to a guy I was going out with, and he said, ‘You already are.’
“But I feel with my life, somebody’s been so generous with experiences for me — whosever controlling it. I mean, I’ve enjoyed a real generosity there. So sometimes I feel maybe I’m getting this all now and quickly because there’s not going to be a whole lot later. I mean, maybe I’m going to die or something. I know that’s an awful way to think, but I have been real fortunate. Real lucky.”
5
Overpopulation: 1990–1995
BOB ODENKIRK, Writer:
Chris Farley was like a child. He was like an eight-year-old. One time when he was fucking, rip-roaring drunk in Chicago, he was tossing furniture around his apartment, actually picking it up and throwing it like ten feet. It was scary, man. Then all of a sudden, he turned to me and said, with complete innocence, “Do you think Belushi’s in heaven?” I didn’t know what to say.
Saturday Night Live was growing older and younger at the same time, entering the third decade of its existence with a few cast members who were even wetter behind the ears than the founders had been. While some of the new comedy struck longtime SNL loyalists as juvenile (the negative adjective most often applied to the show in the nineties), new generations drawn to SNL loved the humor and identified with the younger cast members.
The SNL audience has always felt protective toward the show and concerned about its possibly becoming tamer, less impudent, less willing to take risks. And from the earliest episodes, Michaels made the show a regular topic of the show; criticisms were addressed, and lampooned, on the air. In a lavish and complex production number that opened a December 1991 show hosted by Steve