Live From New York - James H. Miller [84]
I thought I’d pressed the button to start the tape recorder, but I didn’t. I’d had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn’t get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students bums. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a bum.
And then the producer of the Snyder show called me up and said, “Don’t do that. If there’s somebody on our show that you hate, don’t come down and harass them. That’s not good for our show.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
When Al went down to the fucking sixth floor to berate Spiro Agnew, Chevy and O’Donoghue and I were like, “Al, what the fuck are you doing?” Al took that “nattering nabob” speech personally. He was probably twenty-three when the show started, I was thirty. It has always seemed to me that the people who made the most noise about artistic integrity were the first people to buy a Mercedes, and the more people railed about things, when you examine their lives twenty-five years later — well, you know.
TOM DAVIS:
One day Henry Kissinger calls up, and the call is picked up at an NBC page’s desk. And the page goes, “Henry Kissinger’s on the phone. He wants tickets for his son.” And Al grabs the phone and yells into it, “You know, if it hadn’t been for the Christmas bombing in Cambodia, you could’ve had your fucking tickets!”
PAULA DAVIS, Assistant:
My first official job was working for Michael O’Donoghue. I was dying to get into SNL. It was all I wanted to do. And I found that there was an assistant position open in the talent department, which I really wanted. So I had Michael write a reference letter to Lorne. He wrote me this long recommendation and then, at the end, he wrote, “P.S., I’d rather stick my dick in a blender than write another one of these letters.”
ROBIN SHLIEN:
As part of my job, I would have to do things like walk into the prop department or the costume department and say, “They just wrote in six Nazi extras.” Well, there would be big laughs, because it’s so crazy to tell people things like that. Or when I would tell them the creamed corn just wasn’t making it as vomit and they had to do something else to the vomit. A lot of these changes took place on Friday nights, and back then there was no FedEx, no faxes, no nothing, and a lot of the wardrobe houses were closed on Saturdays. I was often the messenger of bad news.
ROBERT KLEIN:
Rockefeller Center was one of the better-run office complexes, and it was beautiful. They don’t like you putting things on the wall or anything like that. Aykroyd and Belushi had a little corner office with barren walls, and they had nailed against the wall panties sent in by girls, some of them soiled, and many other odd things as well. And it was sort of like rebellion, you know, in these stodgy halls.
DAN AYKROYD:
I had one episode of rage. And that was when this guy — an accountant, a unit manager — billed me for a hundred and fifty bucks for some meals we were having when we were writing. “Wait a minute. These are expenses that should be picked up by the show.” But he kept sending me these bills. So finally I wrote a satanic message on the wall in lipstick — I think Michael O’Donoghue came in and saw it and approved of it — and it was something like, “Your relatives will all burn in hell forever.” It was very effective.
CARRIE FISHER:
Danny was always into weapons and cars and doing his little imitations. He was always hanging around with the person who does the autopsies — the coroner. That’s who he would hang around with. And of course he really took care of John. He loved him.
I was set up with Danny by John. John invited me over and