Live From New York - James H. Miller [63]
JANE CURTIN:
My husband and I had tickets to the ballet, and I had on my best clothes, and Lorne called about ten minutes before we were leaving to go uptown and said, “I need to talk to you. Can you come up to 30 Rock?” I said, “We have tickets to the ballet,” and he said, “It will only take a minute.” So I went up there, and Chevy proceeded to say that he thought that he should be doing “Update” that week, and I said okay, and then he went through this whole thing about how his fans wanted to see him — I said okay — and Lorne was backing him up, and backing him up, and I’m going, “Okay, okay.” They were expecting a fight, and I honestly didn’t care, because it was just one week and I wanted to leave! I wanted to go to the ballet. But they had to make their point. So we were late. The two of them were on this feeding frenzy in the sense that Chevy was expecting something that he wasn’t getting from me, and he became more intent on selling his point of view and then Lorne would jump in. You sit there and you have pieces of your arm bitten off and then you leave. But it heals. It grows back.
CHEVY CHASE, Cast Member:
It was difficult the first year I went back to host. Because I went back feeling that I was still part of the family there and at the same time feeling probably, in retrospect, full of myself because I had become pretty famous. And I think that I had never really realized how envious John had become of me or had been while I was on the show. In fact, it was Lorne who verified that for me later on — that John had been pretty upset that I had become the star and not him, even though I told John many times that it was because I said my name every week, because others couldn’t pronounce his or spell it, and it would happen for him — that these things were more luck than talent or ability and that, of course, he should have been the star.
And that he could become one, you know, albeit dead later on. But what the hell, who knew? I wish he were around today.
So that first time I came back, two things were at work. One was my feeling that if I were to come back the audiences would really want to see me do a fall, and they’d want to see me do “Weekend Update.” That was somewhat egocentric of me, because Jane had been doing it all year. It was not thoughtful in that sense, I think — in retrospect again. But in any case, John had also, as I later found out, been spreading some pretty apocryphal stories about me out of his jealousy and anger or whatever to Billy Murray, who was protective of Jane and also, generally speaking, a feisty fellow. And I’m sure Billy wanted to take me down, you know. So Billy and I got into a kind of a preliminary fistfight that never really came to fruition but came close. And it happened just before I went on the air. It was not very good timing. That was painful for me.
In a sense, John caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake. Billy was out of line. I’d been out of line to some degree — certainly in Billy’s mind, initiated by the things that Lorne later told me about. So Billy came after me and tried to throw me off a little bit just before I was going on the air. Ultimately, Billy’s still Billy and I’m still me, but it didn’t faze me for the show. I was sure upset, but I noticed John when I was going into Billy’s dressing room, and John was like the Cheshire Cat — sitting there like “mission accomplished.”
I felt at the time I was a lot tougher kid than maybe Billy or anybody might have thought. I had grown up on the edge of East Harlem. I had been in a lot of fistfights. And I didn’t feel like anybody could take me — Billy Murray or anybody else, for that matter. And so, as intimidating as he can be, at the time I just let it pass. I was angry and I just let it go, thinking, “Big deal. This happened but I’ve got a show to do.”