Live From New York - James H. Miller [64]
I think Billy was trying to take me down a rung, and I probably was up a rung. I was probably a little too full of myself, you know.
I realized when I left that maybe I hadn’t been such a great guy. Maybe we weren’t so close. Maybe I’d been somewhat of an asshole. I left with self-doubts. And as time went on, it was a little easier to do it over the years because, you know, it was water under the bridge. But it did change my perception, because my perception had been all along that that first year was really a tight, close-knit family and that I just happened to emerge because of something someone had written and because people were responding to me as the first breakaway star.
BILL MURRAY:
I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host. That was because I was the new guy, and it was sort of like it was my job to do that. It would have been too petty for someone else to do it. It’s almost like I was goaded into that. You know, I think everybody was hoping for it. I did sense that. I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving and making his own career go. Everybody else was from the improvisational world, where you didn’t make it about you. You were an ensemble, you were a company. So when he left, there was resentment about that. It was a shock.
At the same time, Chevy was the big potato in the stew. He got the most sketches, he had the most influence, he got the most publicity — all of those things. So they didn’t miss that part of it. But there was still hangover feeling that he shouldn’t have left until everybody had that. You make sure everybody else is there and then you do it.
It did leave a big vacuum, because he was really heavy in those shows. You look at those early shows and he’s heavy. And so you had a whole year when the writers ended up writing, like writers do — they write for the guys who can get it done, who can get it on the air — and Chevy’s sketches got on the air because he was “the man,” you know. The other actors had to start over from scratch and teach the writers how to write for them. They were “new” people who had to be written for, but they weren’t new people, they’d been there all year; they just hadn’t gotten on. So the show had to sort of start up again from the beginning without him. I remember just sort of a general animosity that they felt, and he did come back as a star.
When you become famous, you’ve got like a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got like two years to pull it together — or it’s permanent.
JOHN LANDIS:
I’ve only been to SNL three times, and one time I was there, Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and Michael O’Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows. I mean, it was a huge argument. And the thing I remember about Bill Murray — I don’t know Bill Murray, but he’s screaming, you know, foaming at the mouth, “Fucking Chevy,” and in anger he says, “Medium talent!” And I thought, “Ooh boy, that’s funny. In anger he says ‘medium talent.’” That really impressed me. I went, “So, Bill Murray — wow, who is that guy?”
LARAINE NEWMAN:
It seems like there was a tension between Chevy and Billy all