Live From New York - James H. Miller [58]
NEIL LEVY, Production Assistant:
I was at Catch a Rising Star trying to pick up a girl one night. When I first started on that show I looked like I was about twelve, and this girl didn’t believe I worked on Saturday Night Live. And then suddenly everyone turned toward the door because Belushi had entered. Whenever he entered a room, there was an energy about him that made people turn their heads. And this girl saw him, and John saw me, and he went, “Neil!” and starts coming right toward me. And I’m thinking, “This girl is going to be putty in my hands now.” And he comes right up to me and gives me a big bear hug and says, “You got any money?” I’m thinking, “Not only do I know John Belushi, but he’s going to borrow money from me.” So I take out my wallet and he takes the wallet out of my hands, rummages through it, hands it back, goes “Thanks,” and disappears into the crowd. Well, he’d left me with a dollar. And there were no ATM’s back then. When I went to find him, he had disappeared.
If he did something like that, though, I remember more than one time him coming around later and saying, “Was I with you last night?” And you’d go, “Yeah,” and he’d go, “I’m so sorry,” and be really contrite. Then you’d hear him knocking on other people’s doors and going in to apologize about things.
AL FRANKEN:
There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisciplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn’t have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting ’til Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff.
People used to ask me about this and I’d always say, “No, there was no coke. It’s impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs.” And so that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately — for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs. Comedians and comedy writers and people in show business in general aren’t the most disciplined people, so the idea of putting the writing off until you had to, and then staying up all night, was an attractive one. And then having this drug that kept you awake in an enjoyable way was kind of tempting too. But I only did cocaine to stay awake to make sure nobody else did too much cocaine. That was the only reason I ever did it. Heh-heh.
ROBIN SHLIEN:
The band scored an ounce of coke on the air one night. According to the band member who told me, they got it during a commercial and divvied it up. I couldn’t attest to whether it was gone by the end of the show. The dealer used to be to the left of the stage, and the commercials were a couple minutes long. I thought that was kind of an amazing story.
TOM DAVIS, Writer:
Dick Ebersol was the only real network suit who would pop into the offices on seventeen. And it didn’t bother him so much. I remember getting in an elevator with Tom Brokaw once, though, and I was just reeking of pot. Just stinking up the elevator, because I had really skunky pot. He couldn’t help but notice. He just got very quiet. Everybody on the elevator stopped talking. Brokaw kind of looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I just smiled. What else are you going to do?
RODNEY DANGERFIELD, Host:
I never saw anybody do hard drugs there. Pot, sure. Put it this way: I’ve been smoking pot all my life. I’ve found it tremendously relaxing. I do it a lot. The doctor told me, “Don’t smoke cigarettes. Just smoke pot.”
CARRIE FISHER:
Lorne was the token grown-up in