Live From New York - James H. Miller [59]
LARAINE NEWMAN:
I came there with a drug habit. I’d had a drug habit since I was fourteen. It just got worse. I never worked intoxicated or high or anything. It was so much a part of me that it just permeated my outlook on things. It was also a very lonely time for me. I was pretty young, I didn’t know that many people in New York, I was terribly homesick, and I was frustrated about the amount of airtime I was getting. So those things made me want to escape what I was thinking and feeling a lot. Drugs were very available. That’s how I coped. I know they did their damage.
JANE CURTIN:
Laraine was in a horrible position. She was a baby. She was like twenty or twenty-one, and she was uprooted from this very comfortable lifestyle in L.A., with all her friends, and into New York, where she was in a hostile environment and she was alone. She didn’t have anyplace to put that creative energy, so she had it tough. She was not happy. And I don’t blame her, because it’s hard enough to do that show in a comfortable environment, but when you’re totally at sea — when your surroundings are different and you’re just not comfortable — it’s extremely hard.
DICK EBERSOL, NBC Executive:
The second year of the original show, I would take John to California with me every Sunday. By then I was married to my first wife, and I would take him home with me on Sunday and bring him back on Wednesday for read-through. And what I didn’t know at the time was, my first wife and he, after I fell asleep, nothing romantic about it, but they would go out again. They’d go out all night and just manage to get back before six o’clock in the morning when I would wake up. And I woke up one morning at six o’clock, still not having doped all of this out, and walk by our guest bedroom, which was smoldering, and John had fallen asleep smoking a joint.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:
After I left Second City, John and his wife came to visit, and I had one of those floor heaters, you know, where the heat comes out from a grate on the floor. And they were fooling around on the couch and knocked a pillow on top of it. All of a sudden I woke up and there was smoke in the house. They didn’t even realize that the pillow was on fire.
PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer:
I’d get calls about John in the middle of the night. “John just burned down my apartment, John just started a fire,” that type of thing. Sometimes he would just knock on my door at three in the morning. We’d know when John got up in the middle of the night to eat, because there’d be spaghetti sauce imprints all over the kitchen. “Oh look, John was up. I guess he got hungry.”
JUDITH BELUSHI:
The second or third year of the show we were walking downtown, and there was an empty bar for rent. We got the idea of renting it ourselves. At that time we actually had a pretty good-sized place, on Morton Street, but we didn’t want to invite fifty people over. So we thought we’d use this bar as a place to hang out. After the show or other nights, we’d invite people over. We had instruments there, and we kept the bar stocked. For a while it was pretty crazy. After the show, there was always a Saturday Night Live party. We’d usually go by that for a little while. The hosts would be there and all that. Then afterwards we’d go to the bar. It was just a big party. The hosts sometimes came down to the bar, but more often musicians, writers, actors, friends, and sometimes even people we didn’t know.
DAN AYKROYD:
We opened the first Blues Bar in ’77, I think. So for a few years we had a great place to party after the show. It was pretty easy to get in — you just had to show up and knock on the door. We used to go to the “After Party” for the show,