Live From New York - James H. Miller [44]
ANNE BEATTS:
The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club. Which wasn’t the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn’t go, “Oh, I want to get into this, I think I’ll have to have sex with this person.” It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection. Either you had to be somebody’s girlfriend or, sadly and frequently, then you’d be somebody’s ex-girlfriend. And then someone else’s girlfriend, as I ended up being, and Rosie did too.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
Did I date anybody on the show? I don’t know that I’d use the word “date.” I had intimate encounters. We were young, and the guys were single and the women were single and we were together twenty-four hours a day — you do the biology.
We slept around then. And it wasn’t weird. Yes, you could have sex with someone at night and write a sketch for them, or with them, the next day. Totally. It happened a lot. Certainly to me it happened. That’s the way life was then. You could sleep with a guy who worked on the show and just know it was de rigueur not to make a big thing out of it and just go to work with him.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
I guess Gilda and my secret was that we weren’t sleeping with each other. Our relationship was platonic. It had, with the exception of the sex part, everything else that a boy-girl relationship has. Emotions, the ups, the downs, the yelling, the screaming, the highs, I mean everything. She had said something very early on, when it was close to not being platonic, she had said something along the lines of, “Look, every relationship you’ve had and I’ve had with the opposite sex has pretty much ended in disaster or crashed and burned. And we have a good thing going here creatively; let’s try not to be boy-girl.” That made sense, you know. Years later, now, I think she just wasn’t attracted to me.
The first generation of Saturday Night Live is remembered for more than its comedy or its cleverness or its revolutionary contributions to television. Most of the cast members and writers had come of age in the sixties and hewed to that era’s values — turn on and tune in, if not quite drop out. These were heady days, some of the headiest ever at NBC. Open an office door in the SNL suite on the seventeenth floor and you might well be enswirled in marijuana smoke. Harder drugs were used as well — at least one cast member freebased cocaine, others dropped acid — right there in the haute-deco halls of the RCA Building.
CHEVY CHASE:
Fame is a huge thing that is in your life, and we know now that taking drugs is self-medicating. What are we medicating? Something that is hurting us. Usually it’s a depression of some kind or some sort of sadness or something stressful, right? That’s what we’re self-medicating. Fame is extremely stressful. That’s why so many people who become famous so fast self-medicate. And what is there to self-medicate with? A hundred-dollar bill and, if it’s 1975, some cocaine, or some pot or something. The point is that it all follows, it’s as natural as a guy going home and having a drink at the end of a stressful day. But this kind of stress, this fame thing I was talking about, is huge.
I was already thirty-two, I had already been through many, many years of writing and working and being around this business, so in my own mind, I should have been able to not lose any perspective. And, of course, in retrospect, I had lost all perspective. I think if there is one perception that the public feels about people who become famous, it’s that it is a great, wonderful, marvelous, magical thing. And that’s true up to a point. But in fact it’s also a very, very frightening thing, because it’s one of the most stressful things. There’s a certain amount of post-traumatic stress involved in being a