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Simmons was eventually worn down by Reitman’s pushy persistence and agreed. The Canadian desperately wanted to work with The Lampoon Show’s cast. But the feeling was hardly mutual. When Reitman arrived for his first day of rehearsal in New York, he wore a wool hat, a long scarf, and a heavy parka. He walked into the room and smiled, flashing his oversize piano-key teeth, and introduced himself to the performers while taking off his jacket. When he was finished, Bill Murray put an arm around his shoulder, picked up the clothes he’d taken off, and put them back on him piece by piece. He steered Reitman to the door, gently guided him out like a stray, and slammed the door shut behind him. Reitman couldn’t muster the nerve to come back for two days.
After its run of out-of-town previews, a retooled version of The National Lampoon Show finally opened on March 2, 1975, at the New Palladium, a cabaret underneath the Time & Life Building near Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. During one memorable evening, the comedian Martin Mull was sitting at a table near the stage talking loudly and derisively with some friends as Murray was in the middle of his Honker routine. According to Simmons, Murray shot Mull a deadly look. But it didn’t put an end to Mull’s heckling. So Murray jumped off the stage and lunged into the audience, where he grabbed Mull by the throat and shook him until Belushi had to restrain him.
The reviews for The National Lampoon Show were mixed, mostly comparing it unfavorably with Lemmings. In The New York Times, Mel Gussow wrote, “Often there is a great gap, a comic void, between idea and execution.” The one cast member that the Times critic singled out was its whirling dervish leader, Belushi. Still, the actors weren’t trying to appeal to the Times or its establishment subscribers. They were speaking to a rowdier, younger audience who thought along the same frequency. The show would end up running for 180 performances over four months. The twin streams of Second City and the National Lampoon had finally formed a single river whose current would prove to be unstoppable for the next decade. “We all felt very confident that we were somehow going to be the next wave of comedy,” said Ramis. “That somehow our style would begin to dominate.”
He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Sitting in the audience at the New Palladium on several consecutive nights was a young Canadian writer-producer in a corduroy blazer and a Hawaiian shirt. His name was Lorne Michaels.
* * *
Back at the magazine, as 1974 was drawing to a close, it was dawning on Matty Simmons that the deadline for the buyout clause he had hammered out with Kenney, Beard, and their business-minded consigliere Rob Hoffman during the Lampoon’s founding five years earlier was rapidly approaching. It couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time. The good news was that the Lampoon was solidly in the black. Circulation was mushrooming and earnings were soaring. The bad news was that the contract called for Simmons to cough up a now-ludicrous sum that he didn’t have. Thanks to a crash in the stock market the previous year, the Harvard Three stood to receive a payday in the neighborhood of $6 million. In a sense, Simmons had been a victim of his and the magazine’s own success.
Simmons and his partner, Len Mogel, sat down with Kenney, Beard, and Hoffman (who came up from Dallas, where he was now working for his father). Hoffman would do the negotiating just as he had five years earlier, although this time he had much more leverage. Simmons appealed to their sense of fairness, explaining how the swooning stock market had put him in a financial pickle. He asked if they could wait until the market bounced back. Hoffman, playing hardball, said no. Simmons floated other, more creative payout structures. But again, no sale. The negotiations turned tense. Essentially, it boiled down to an unpalatable binary decision for Simmons: He could either hand over control of the magazine to the three men and work for them, or find a way to pay up.
Kenney and Beard had stayed silent through all of the back-and-forth. They went out of the room and talked it over. “We simply couldn’t find a middle ground,” says Beard. “And at one point, Doug said to me, ‘Look, it’s your call. If you want to go on with this and basically run the magazine, I’ll sign on.’ I thought about it and said, ‘I think we better take the money and run.’”
According to Simmons, when the three men came back into the room, Kenney started jumping up and down, screaming, “I want my money! I want my money!” Mogel got up and threatened to punch him in the nose. After a few heated beats, all five men in the room started cracking up. Simmons picked up the phone and called his friend Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Communications, and arranged for a loan to cover the payout.
When all of the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed, the Harvard Three would all become overnight millionaires. Kenney and Beard received $2.8 million each, and Hoffman headed back to Dallas $1.9 million richer. Simmons admits that Hoffman simply out-negotiated him. Said Kenney later, “Hardly anyone reads contracts. I certainly don’t. We lucked into something that I don’t even totally understand.”
Although the buyout occurred behind closed doors and directly involved only five people, the aftershocks were felt throughout the entire Lampoon office. The magazine was basically out of cash. There would be no raises for any of the other staff members who weren’t lucky enough to hit the lottery (although some were secretly pleased to see Simmons get fleeced). Belts and budgets would be tightened. And morale took a serious blow. “Matty would walk around the office referring to Doug and Henry as ‘the Pirates,’” says Sean Kelly, “like they’d boarded his galleon and taken all of his gold.”
Kelly says that during the drawn-out period when the payout was being negotiated, Henry Beard would occasionally make veiled promises over drinks to some of the more senior staffers that they would get a slice of the pie and that their kids wouldn’t have to worry about college. But Kelly just assumed that that was the wine talking.
“We thought maybe he’d remember, but no,” says Kelly. “What I resented is that it meant the magazine had no money and we had to crank out an amazing amount of work. We had to keep the ship afloat.”
On the day that the deal was finalized, Tony Hendra and Kelly walked into Beard’s office to congratulate him on his seven-figure windfall. Both were shocked by what happened next. As they sat down, Beard leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and announced, “I haven’t felt this happy since the day I got out of the Army.” Everyone knew that Beard had been working insane hours putting out the magazine every month, but he had never expressed any resentment about it or complained. He was the rock, the father figure in a madhouse of squabbling children. Had he been miserable all this time? So unhappy in all of their company? It hit them that they’d never really known their friend at all. Hendra and Kelly were both stunned and devastated as they exited his office. They didn’t know it then, but that was the last time they would see Henry Beard for years. That day, he left The National Lampoon and never looked back.
Kenney, the one who had made such a peculiar habit of periodically disappearing, decided to stick around—perhaps out of some small sense of guilt for having run the magazine into such dire financial straits in the first place. To some, he joked that his first big splurge would be a trip to Disneyland. But, in the end, he went someplace much closer. With hair down to his shoulders, a scraggly beard, and jeans that were more holes than denim, Kenney walked into a Manhattan Porsche dealership and bought a red 911 Targa, telling the shocked salesman that he intended to pay for it in cash. He also bought his parents a house in Connecticut, sent his sister to a fancy boarding school in Virginia, and began picking up the check wherever he went. He was careless with money simply because he’d never really had any. His friend Peter Ivers later recalled flipping through the pages of a book in Kenney’s apartment only to have an uncashed check for $186,000 spill out. The date on it was four months old. Kenney’s reaction was typical Doug: “Oh, I was wondering what happened to that.”
Another thing that Kenney could now afford was more expensive drugs.
* * *
By 1975, television still looked a lo
t like it had a decade earlier. Despite a handful of prime-time shows that dared to grapple with progressive themes and hot-button issues, such as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Maude, network programmers largely ignored what was going on in the world beyond the idiot box. They were more interested in the soap-opera twists of Rich Man, Poor Man, the unscientific science fiction of The Bionic Woman, and the cornpone family-values nostalgia of Happy Days and The Waltons. In late night, things weren’t much hipper. The Big Three networks offered a disposable and geriatric wasteland of wheezy reruns, movies of the week, and Johnny Carson sitting behind the desk on The Tonight Show—a desk he’d been manning like a suntanned mummy since 1962. To the college-aged readers of the Lampoon, it was Squaresville, USA (population: your parents).
NBC had been doing just fine in the Nielsens by airing Carson reruns at 11:30 on Saturday nights. But that was basically the only time slot where the limping, third-place network was succeeding. Plus, Carson was becoming weary of the weekend repeats. He thought they diluted his brand and he wanted them pulled. Peacock president Herb Schlosser had poached a hungry young executive from ABC named Dick Ebersol and tasked him with finding a new weekly show for Saturday nights at 11:30—something that could one day (preferably sooner rather than later) become a money-minting franchise. Ebersol landed on the idea of going after the elusive and coveted youth demographic that would never in a million years be caught dead watching Johnny banter with his even more embalmed sidekick, Ed McMahon. Advertisers would pay a premium just to reach them.
Some months earlier, another NBC executive thinking along similar lines had approached Matty Simmons about a Lampoon-inspired late-night satire show. But Simmons, already feeling stretched thin between the magazine, the radio show, and his stage experiments, demurred. NBC wasn’t the only one to make Simmons a TV overture. ABC was hatching its own top-secret Saturday-night project: a variety show to be hosted by the verbose sports broadcaster Howard Cosell. But it got only slightly further with Simmons before negotiations broke down. In the end, NBC and Ebersol decided to hand the reins over to a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian, a veteran of Laugh-In and a handful of Lily Tomlin comedy specials named Lorne Michaels. He was ambitious but calculated enough not to seem ambitious.
Born on a kibbutz in British-occupied Palestine in 1944 with the given name of Lorne Lipowitz, Michaels’s family moved to Toronto when he was a child. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he became half of a stand-up comedy act with a former law student named Hart Pomerantz. The duo performed on CBC radio and television shows under the name Hart and Lorne (before changing his name to Michaels, Lorne half-jokingly flirted with changing it to Lorne Ranger or Lorne Zwelk). The team proved to be too political for the government-owned network, so they left and began submitting jokes for other comedians, such as Woody Allen.
In 1968, Michaels moved to Los Angeles to work as a writer on a lousy Phyllis Diller variety show and then Laugh-In, where he saw his funniest, most off-the-wall ideas blendered into pap devoid of their intended flavor. From there, he got a job as a writer on a 1973 Lily Tomlin special, which won him an Emmy. He was bumped up to coproducer on subsequent Tomlin specials during which time he conceived the idea for his dream show: a rule-breaking late-night sketch program comprising a crazy quilt of absurd Python-esque skits, parody commercials, live music, and cutting-edge guest hosts anchored by a regular cast of young, dangerous comic actors—actors not unlike the ones he had seen at the New Palladium. It would be a variety show that satirized and subverted the notion of traditional variety shows. It would be television made for the first generation who’d been weaned on television. Both a celebration of the medium’s possibilities and an antidote to its plastic, commercial phoniness. When Dick Ebersol met with Michaels, he liked the innovative sound of the Canadian’s pitch. Now he just had to get NBC and its resident King of Late Night, Johnny Carson, to sign off on it.
On April 1, 1975, Michaels was officially hired as the producer of NBC’s Saturday Night (the “Live” would eventually be added in 1977, since ABC’s in-the-works Cosell vehicle had already registered a version of the name Saturday Night Live). Michaels was given a salary of $115,000 and the imperative to turn NBC’s graveyard slot into must-see TV for baby boomers—the largest generation in American history. Raised on rock ’n’ roll and recreational drugs, he couldn’t have been a more ideal candidate for the job. Michaels had told Ebersol that he wanted Saturday Night’s viewers to walk away with the impression that the network’s suits had gone home and a bunch of kids had slipped into the studio to put on a show. And when NBC told him that they wanted to air the show live, Michaels wasn’t rattled, he was turned on by the unpredictability of it. Now, with just six months before his new show’s debut, he had to find his team of writers and performers—his kids.
Michaels first focused on the Saturday Night writers’ room. One of the first people he pursued was the prickly prince of darkness Michael O’Donoghue, who had more or less spent the year since he’d left the Lampoon turning up sofa cushions for spare change. Although O’Donoghue and his girlfriend and fellow Lampoon veteran Anne Beatts made a point of telling Michaels how little they cared for TV, they were won over by the Canadian’s vision of the show, and signed on. Next, Michaels recruited another familiar face from 635 Madison, Chevy Chase. Chase, who had been living with Christopher Guest in Los Angeles since Lemmings ended, was writing for the Smothers Brothers’ latest stab at a comeback. One night, while waiting in line for a midnight screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he met Michaels and impressed him with an impromptu display of his wit, including a pratfall. Michaels hired Chase soon after.
When it came to casting his new show’s on-screen repertory company, Michaels’s main requirement was that the performers not have any actual experience in television. He felt that comedy was too important to be left to the professionals. The second requirement: They had to be willing to work for next to nothing. Michaels’s top priority was landing Gilda Radner, who’d knocked him out in both a Toronto production of Godspell and, more recently, in The National Lampoon Show. Then he moved on to Laraine Newman (a performer in LA’s Groundlings improv troupe whom he’d already known from one of his Lily Tomlin specials) and Garrett Morris (who was originally hired as a writer). Michaels then met with Belushi. It didn’t go well.
“I thought all television was shit and I let Lorne know it,” Belushi later said. “My own set at home was often covered with spit. The only reason I wanted to be on it was because Michael O’Donoghue was writing for it and it had a chance to be good.”
With Belushi yet to be cast and three spots left to fill (he’d since reconsidered Chase’s status and moved him over to the performing side), Michaels held auditions on August 12 and 13, 1975. Roughly two hundred comedians showed up. With her WASPy appearance disguising a caustic sense of humor, Jane Curtin quickly got the nod on day one. That left two openings to be filled on day two. Belushi, sensing the magnitude of the moment as he had when Tony Hendra came to scout him for Lemmings back in Chicago, broke out his A material, including his samurai character. He slayed. There was one final vacancy to be given, to either Bill Murray (who auditioned with a monologue as the Honker) or Dan Aykroyd (who showed up, flustered, in a derby hat and upper-crust British accent). Michaels couldn’t make up his mind.
As weeks went by, Aykroyd became more and more convinced that he wasn’t going to get the gig. So he went off to join Joe Flaherty at Second City’s newest club, in Pasadena. “Danny drove all the way down from Toronto,” recalls Flaherty. “And the day he got there, he got a call from Lorne in New York. Danny asked, ‘What do you think, should I do it?’ We didn’t know what it was going to be. We certainly didn’t know it would take the world by storm. All we knew was that we were doing this stupid-ass show in Pasadena that no one was coming to. So he went.” Michaels had his Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Later, he said, “We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being
a pop star was.”
Murray may have been disappointed, but he wasn’t out of work for long. He, his brother Brian, and Guest would all quickly be scooped up by ABC’s prime-time competitor. They had no clue what they were walking into. Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell premiered at 8 p.m. on September 20, 1975, three weeks before Michaels’s NBC show. The nasally sportscaster was his usual stiff self—a toupeed cadaver stiffly pantomiming the role of dog-and-pony vaudeville emcee. The show’s hipness quotient was reflected in its kickoff episode’s roster of celebrity guests: Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Paul Anka, Jimmy Connors, John Denver, Siegfried & Roy, and, as its musical act, the Bay City Rollers.
The show was mercifully put to sleep after eighteen episodes. “Everybody else was on the other show,” said Murray. “So we were on TV, and they were on TV. But they were the show, and we were on with the Chinese acrobats and elephants and all sorts of crazy acts, and we would get cut almost every other week.”
Just as Lorne Michaels was about to give the world the Beatles of comedy, the Murrays were stuck as the opening act for the Bay City Rollers.
* * *
At 11:29 p.m. on October 11, 1975, the air in NBC’s newly renovated Studio 8H was choked with anxiety, pungently aromatic smoke, and frayed-nerve electricity. The revolution was about to be televised. Five million Americans had just watched their local newscasts wind down and had no idea what they were in store for.
In the week leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night, up in his spacious seventeenth-floor office, Michaels’s face had broken out from nerves. There had been a series of bare-knuckle battles with NBC’s censors over the skits he wanted to air. The first week’s host, George Carlin, had reportedly been coked-up in the week leading up to the debut. There had been talk among the network brass of adding a delay of several seconds to his monologue in case any obscenities happened to fly out of his mouth on live TV. The only concession they would ever get from Carlin was making him wear a suit jacket over his T-shirt.