Live From New York - James H. Miller [43]
So I parted the leaves and it was Gilda. I go, “What?!” She said, “I have this idea where I get dressed up like a parakeet, and I’m on a perch. But I need a writer to help me figure out what the parakeet should say. Can you help me?” I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was a human being calling me a writer so I go, “Oh yeah, I’m great at parakeet stuff.” And she said, “Why are you behind there? You’re scared, aren’t you? Just look at this room, it’s pretty intimidating, all this talent that’s here. And so that’s why you’re here, because you’re scared.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I am too. Can I come back?” And she came behind the plant with me. So now we’re both behind this plant and we get to talking and all of a sudden she says, “Uh-oh, he’s calling on you” — this is about five minutes later — and I get tongue-tied, you know, one of those things. Lorne’s going, “Alan? Is Alan around here?” She says, “I’ll take care of it.” She gets up, goes around the plant to the front of the room, and she says, “Zweibel’s got this great idea where I play this parakeet and I sit on a perch.” So she attributed her idea to me. And I went, “Wow.” I got up enough nerve to come out from behind the plant and Gilda said, “Wait a second. He’s also got this funny, funny idea where I also play Howdy Doody’s wife, Debbie Doody, and we’re going to write this and all sorts of stuff,” she said, “like a team.” That’s how I found out that I was going to be teamed up with Gilda. She just took pity on this puppy behind the plant.
CANDICE BERGEN:
Gilda was so great. She was such an angel. And so gifted, so sweet. Everybody bonded with Gilda, because she was irresistible.
DAN AYKROYD:
I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her. But that was in the early days of Second City in Canada. Our romance was finished by the time Saturday Night Live happened. We were friends, lovers, then friends again. By the time we came to New York, we weren’t involved by any means.
LARAINE NEWMAN:
I had a thing with Danny for a while. He was just adorable and irresistible and we had a lot of fun. And I always knew, you know, exactly what I could expect from Danny, so I never really got hurt.
PAULA DAVIS, Assistant:
I started hanging out at SNL when I was a kid. I was thirteen or fourteen when the show started, and I watched the show with my friend Toby. We just loved it, and we decided to sneak in, because I think at that point my mom was working in the building on game shows. So we were confident we could sneak our way around the SNL studios, which we did. And we got in and we hung around, kind of like stage-door Johnnies, for probably a year. Everybody was very, very friendly to us. Chevy was very friendly to us. Belushi and Aykroyd talked to us a lot. Even Michael O’Donoghue was nice. So we did a lot of hanging around.
I remember one day when I was in high school, Rosie Shuster asked me to help her out. It was one of those things like come over, pick up my dry cleaning, pick up my lamp from the lamp repair place — because they had no free time. When I got there, I remember Aykroyd getting out of her bed, and I was totally surprised. Because last I knew, Aykroyd was with Laraine at that point.
PAUL SHAFFER:
I was a little naive. I didn’t get involved with anyone. I was friends with everybody, but I wasn’t lucky enough to score with anybody.
DAN AYKROYD:
I don’t know what goes on backstage there now, but I remember the dressing rooms were put to some good sexual purposes back when we were there. But those were just fleeting. They weren’t really serious relationships. It was more clinging to someone, attaching to someone in the face of all we were going through.
CHEVY CHASE:
The “sex appeal” thing, I don’t know where that came from. I know that I had sex appeal because I know how much sex I had.
You know what made me good was simply not giving a flying fuck. I had nothing invested there emotionally. I