Caddyshack Page 7

  Then, at 11:30, the audience saw two men they’d most likely never laid eyes on before sitting in a pair of high-backed chairs for the show’s cold-open sketch. There was no introduction to the show, no credits. Belushi played an Eastern European immigrant who had come for an English lesson at the home of an instructor played by Michael O’Donoghue, who wrote the piece. O’Donoghue tells his student to repeat phrases after him—phrases such as “I would like … to feed … your fingertips … to the wolverines” and “I’m afraid … we are out … of badgers, would you accept … a wolverine … in its place?” Then O’Donoghue grabs his chest and keels over, stricken by a heart attack. Belushi looks puzzled for a beat, then grabs his chest, too, and throws himself to the floor. Just then, Chase enters from stage right playing the hapless floor manager, wearing a headset and holding a clipboard. He looks at the camera, smiles, and announces, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

  An hour and a half later, as the end credits rolled, it was clear to those watching at home that something ineffable had changed in the culture. How did this get on network TV? Saturday Night was defiantly topical, wildly satirical, and unabashedly political with an absurd, skunk-weed counterculture vibe. For the first time, the boomers had seen themselves—their tastes, their sensibilities, their attitudes—reflected back at them in a way that felt personal and intimate. For ninety minutes, at least, the underground went mainstream.

  Back at the Lampoon, Simmons saw red, correctly realizing (albeit too late) that all of the talent that had been under his roof less than a year ago had not only been cherry-picked by Michaels, but would also now be giving away for free what the Lampoon was still charging a dollar an issue for. Yes, he had once raided talent himself from Second City, but now Saturday Night was screwing him, and he didn’t like it. All he could do was wait it out. It would be a very long wait.

  Most of the nation’s critics weren’t immediately sure what to make of Michaels’s strange small-screen comedy insurrection. A month after his initial pan in The New York Times, John J. O’Connor made an about-face, writing, “NBC has found itself a source for legitimate pride, a commodity in scarce supply at any network these days.” He continued: “The future of Saturday Night is uncertain—intentionally so. Mr. Michaels and company are especially anxious about avoiding the pitfalls of being slick, coy, or predictably routine.… For however long it lasts, Saturday Night is the most creative and encouraging thing to happen to American TV comedy since Your Show of Shows.”

  Of course, critical love was beside the point. While the early weeks of Saturday Night brought only a small improvement ratings-wise over NBC’s Best of Carson reruns, it gave the network a whiff of insider cool. “SNL spoke to the whole generation,” says Ivan Reitman. “For the first time, somehow they were letting people like us on TV.”

  Director John Landis, whose path would soon cross with the Saturday Night cast’s, added, “By the end of the first season, Saturday Night had a tremendous cachet of hipness. Not everyone was talking about it, but the right people were talking about it.”

  As the outlaw show slowly began to snowball into a bona fide cult hit, picking up viewers and buzz each week, jealousy began to surface at the Lampoon. There had been an exodus of talent there, and now those refugees were thriving elsewhere. Michaels wasn’t shy about taking full credit for discovering his new stars—something that annoyed Simmons to no end. O’Donoghue and Beatts had left, and eventually Lampoon mainstays Brian McConnachie and Sean Kelly would join the Saturday Night writers’ room, too. You could almost feel the creative energy being slowly sucked from 635 Madison and moving a few blocks south and west to 30 Rock. Saturday Night was now the cool place to be. It had that same start-up excitement and reckless abandon that the Lampoon had had in 1970.

  Within a few weeks of its debut, it was clear that Chevy Chase had become the breakout star of the show. In its first few episodes, the show’s lineup of Not Ready For Prime Time Players had been forced to take a backseat to Michaels’s zeitgeisty guest hosts, such as Paul Simon, Lily Tomlin, and Richard Pryor. They had even taken a backseat to the Muppets—Jim Henson’s menagerie of felt-covered creatures that, in an environment that could exist only in the ’70s, had somehow managed to find their way into the show’s still-evolving mix of eclectic attractions.

  Two unspoken truths had become clear from the earliest days of Saturday Night. First, Michaels had cast himself in the role of a stern father figure who kept his paternal love at a distant, chilly remove. And second, though all of Lorne’s children were equal, some were more equal than others. The cast had to compete for his affection and approval. Michaels, who aspired to the high life of a hip, plugged-in New York media power broker, seemed to carry the social-climbing ambitions of a man who looked in the mirror only to see Lorne Lipowitz staring back at him. To him, Chase was what he wanted to be—to the manor born, charming, effortlessly funny, undeniably good-looking, and comfortable in any social setting. O’Donoghue may have been the show’s head writer, its self-crowned alpha dog, but Chase was the one who had his name on the marquee. Everyone seemed to know it. If they didn’t, Chase would soon make it clear himself.

  Jealousy and resentment were inevitable. And it didn’t help that while the rest of the ensemble was standing around anonymously mugging in humiliating killer-bee costumes, begging for on-air crumbs to be swept their way, Chase was being given the spotlight without having to even so much as ask for it. In season one, virtually every episode of the show opened with Chase taking a pratfall either as the stumbling president, Gerald Ford, or as himself. It was hard to tell which of the two was more famous. Chase had also been handed the high-profile recurring showcase of the “Weekend Update” anchor chair, which eventually became a solo vehicle for glib, self-aggrandizing jokes. Chase’s soon-to-be signature opening for the segment (“Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not”) wasn’t just a funny punch line (although it was that); it stung like an open-handed slap to all the other cast members patiently waiting for their shot.

  Belushi, who had always had a love-hate relationship with Chase dating from the Lemmings days, seemed to internalize the slight to his ego most acutely. He considered himself to be a more dynamic performer and more talented improviser than Chase, who seemed to succeed more and more the less and less he tried. For the first time in his career, Belushi felt overshadowed. The consummate upstager was being upstaged. Belushi would grouse about the secondary and tertiary roles he was given each week, saying, “I go where I’m kicked. They throw me bones dogs wouldn’t chew on.” To Belushi, Chase was becoming insufferable and smug, giving off the swollen-headed impression that he was bigger than the show.

  In December 1975, in the middle of Saturday Night’s third month on the air, New York magazine published a cover story on Chase. The cover line read: “And heeeere’s TV’s Hottest New Comedy Star!” The article, written by Jeff Greenfield, hit 30 Rock like a hurricane. Even early on, Saturday Night had generated plenty of press attention. It was the darling of the Manhattan media intelligentsia, but this was the first time that a publication had gone out of its way to single out one person to elevate above the rest. It just happened to be the person with the most memorable name and the shrewdest knack for repeating it while the camera was on.

  The article was a star-making air kiss to Chase, hailing him as “the heir apparent to Johnny Carson.” Chase, of course, had some idea that the New York article was coming. After all, he’d been interviewed for it. But he didn’t know that he would be its focus, or that he would be on the cover. And he certainly hadn’t gone out of his way to warn his costars about it. Years later, Chase would recall walking out of his Upper East Side studio apartment on the morning that the magazine hit newsstands. “A strange and fun moment,” he said. “I remember buying it off one of those stands on 61st Street and saying to the guy, ‘Look.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s you—you’re famous!’ I remember liking that.” Chase later said that the cover story changed hi
s life.

  The New York story not only cited the thirty-two-year-old Chase as the reason Saturday Night had become an overnight sensation with its young audience; it suggested that Chase already had his wandering eye on bigger and better things: “On the surface, Chase is cut from the conventional TV mold: A rich, ‘sincere’ voice; neatly cropped hair; a pleasant, harmless face; jacket and tie a permanent part of his wardrobe. But when he comes onstage, strange things begin to happen.” The article goes on … “This combination of reassuring form and outrageous content—the ‘naughty boy’ quality—has made Chevy Chase a hot property at NBC. Industry sources report that network executives see in Chase ‘the first real potential successor to Johnny Carson when he gives up the “Tonight Show.”’”

  Michaels didn’t help quiet any potential storm that the article would create backstage, saying in the piece, “All of the players are brilliant—the difference is that Chevy is always doing himself. The others are in character, and they’re not as accessible as Chevy.” In case it hadn’t already been clear enough to everyone on the show, there it was: Daddy publicly anointing his favorite son, a cold lesson about the ruthless mechanics of fame.

  The New York article further went on to detail a development deal that NBC was in the midst of preparing that would elevate Chase to becoming a guest host for Carson. Back in Malibu, Carson was more than annoyed. He felt blindsided. This was all news to him. Chase was now in a position to ask the network for anything he wanted. His bargaining position was only strengthened by the fact that he had signed only a one-year deal when he got the Saturday Night job (all of the other cast members had initially signed on for five years). He was barraged with movie offers. For its part, NBC tried to woo him with a $2 million deal to produce his own prime-time specials for the network. Chase hadn’t told anyone yet, but he’d already made up his mind that he would be moving on—and moving West.

  After the first season of the show ended, on July 31, 1976, Chase was finally free to publicly announce that he was leaving Saturday Night. By then, he’d already become more famous than the celebrity guest hosts he was ostensibly there to serve each week. Michaels would later say that it was clear after the first season that the show could only go in one of two directions: “Was the show going to become the Chevy Chase show or was it going to stay an ensemble show? I think he’d become too big a star.” Everyone assumed that Chase was heading to Hollywood for fame and fortune. But he always denied it, insisting that he left because of a woman.

  During his time on Saturday Night, Chase had been wrestling with a stormy long-distance relationship with a model and aspiring actress named Jacqueline Carlin. The two had got engaged. “I was conflicted with love,” says Chase. “I wanted to marry this girl who everybody else knew was the wrong one except me. It didn’t last. And she wouldn’t move from LA to New York. So she gave me the ultimatum to come back after a year on the show. Otherwise, I very well may have stayed.”

  Chase would officially leave Saturday Night on October 30, 1976, after the sixth episode of season two. Two months later, he and Carlin were married and moved in together on Mulholland Drive.

  “Everyone from Saturday Night came out for the wedding,” says Chase, “which, of course, was hilarious. John Belushi got so drunk that he started making out with my mother. It was very funny.” The marriage between Chase and Carlin would be a brief and unhappy one, during which he began his long affair with cocaine.

  “Lorne used to say that coke was God’s way of telling you that you have too much money,” Chase later said. Seventeen months after Chase and Carlin exchanged I do’s, she sued for a divorce. Chase would later say that he deeply regretted leaving Saturday Night when he did.

  * * *

  When Chase left Saturday Night, Michaels saw his exit as more than just one of his protégés moving on to bigger and better things. He lost his closest friend on the show. Some said that the hurt went even deeper—that he felt stabbed in the back and regarded Chase’s departure as an almost Shakespearean act of betrayal. Whether or not that’s the case, the fact is Saturday Night would do just fine without its biggest and buzziest name. With Chase gone, Belushi and the other remaining cast members were free to assert themselves and establish their own on-air identities, becoming household names themselves. But they were still a man down.

  Bill Murray, whom Michaels had initially passed over for the inaugural Saturday Night lineup in favor of Dan Aykroyd, was asked to join the show. He was finally being called up to the majors. Michaels had always admired Murray’s loose, anarchic style and his lack of the kind of craven neediness so many comedians have. Plus, Murray already had a built-in history with many of his Saturday Night costars thanks to his time at Second City and the Lampoon. But NBC wasn’t sold on the replacement. They thought that the twenty-six-year-old wasn’t telegenic and a bit too ragged around the edges—they were replacing the next Cary Grant with an Irish-Catholic Chicago street dog. Murray wasn’t just the new guy; he was the new guy who was replacing Chevy Chase.

  By that time, Doug Kenney had become such a regular presence backstage at Studio 8H that Michaels had offered him a writing job on the show. Kenney passed. He was done with deadlines. He’d recently fallen in love with a beautiful, sophisticated, and intelligent actress from Philadelphia named Kathryn Walker, to whom he had introduced himself at a party by biting into a crystal wineglass—part knight-errant, part carny geek. After the two began dating, Kenney had decided that it was time to move on from the Lampoon. He’d been there six years, which seemed like a decent run. When Kenney walked into Matty Simmons’s office to break the news that he was leaving, Simmons panicked and blurted out the only thing he thought might make Kenney reconsider. “I said, ‘You can’t leave; we’re making a movie!’ I knew that would get his attention.”

  It did.

  4

  Knowledge Is Good

  WHILE MATTY SIMMONS WAS DANGLING the carrot of a Lampoon movie in front of an antsy Doug Kenney, Ivan Reitman had separately moved forward with a similar plan. As part of the deal for Reitman to come to New York and oversee The National Lampoon Show, Simmons had promised him that he would get the first shot at directing a Lampoon movie—if and when one should ever happen. Not one to sit back and wait for opportunities to be handed to him, Reitman had recruited Harold Ramis to start hammering out a Lampoon-esque screenplay for him. He paid Ramis $2,500. They both agreed it was probably best to keep the project a secret from Simmons for the time being.

  “Everyone had gone off to do either Saturday Night Live or the Cosell show,” says Reitman. “Harold was the only one who got left behind, which I didn’t understand. So we tried to put together a movie based on some skits from the Lampoon Show that had kind of a high school theme.” Actually, Ramis based the first draft of his script on his own early-’60s fraternity experiences at Washington University in St. Louis. He was calling it Freshman Year. But after a few torturous months, Ramis and Reitman agreed that it wasn’t clicking. It needed a shot of the Lampoon’s lethal comic edge. Reitman decided it was time to go to Simmons.

  Since the most successful single publication that the Lampoon had ever put out was Doug Kenney and P. J. O’Rourke’s High School Yearbook parody, Ramis floated the idea of partnering up with Kenney for another stab at cracking the screenplay. The two had become friendly while Ramis was working at the Radio Hour, and they both shared a wicked, wiseass outsider’s sensibility even if, outwardly, they couldn’t have been less alike. Ramis was professorial with an air of Zen calm, while Kenney was more like an ADHD-addled kid in the back of the classroom doing everything he could to get sent to detention. But somehow, they complemented each other. “One of my mottos is, you only want to collaborate with people who are at least as good as you are if not better,” said Ramis. “And that’s what I found with Doug. He was just as smart as anyone I ever knew.”

  The premise for Ramis and Kenney’s movie was so out-there it could barely be contained in the crude form of a high-concept
pitch. The closest that they could come up with was: Charles Manson in high school. Fueled by significant amounts of marijuana, the two imagined the mass-murdering SoCal Svengali as a demented and strangely seductive loner in Midwest suburbia corrupting the local youth and forming a depraved cult of flying-saucer-worshipping teenage zombies. They called it Laser Orgy Girls. “Every time they had a new idea, it had sex and drugs and everything,” says Simmons. “I thought these guys were going to get me shot. Everyone was drunk or high in it. So I said we’re going to have to move this to college so it’s not quite as offensive.”

  As soon as the word “college” came out of Simmons’s mouth, Kenney and Ramis immediately thought of Chris Miller. Miller had been the Lampoon’s in-house fraternity specialist. His hilariously lewd short stories such as “The Night of the Seven Fires” and “Pinto’s First Lay” had leaned heavily on his own firsthand experiences as an Alpha Delta Phi brother at Dartmouth in the early ’60s (in fact, the Pinto character was based on him—he was given the nickname in his fraternity allegedly due to the splotchy birthmarks on his penis). The stories had also been some of the most popular in the magazine’s history. Kenney, in particular, was a huge fan of Miller’s work. So he asked him if they could borrow his material and use it as the basis for his and Ramis’s script.

  “Doug went crazy over [my stories] because they didn’t do shit like that at Harvard,” says Miller. “I told them, Sure, they could use them, but what was my part in this? They offered to buy the stories from me, but I told them, No, I want to be one of the writers or I’ll beat you to the script and write it myself.”

  The three amateur Hollywood wannabes met for a largely liquid brunch at a restaurant called Casey’s in Greenwich Village and proceeded to spew forth every outrageous college story they could remember happening to them or anyone they knew over Bloody Marys. Each embroidered the others’ experiences with his own, while Ramis took notes on a legal pad. By the time they left the restaurant, they were already calling their project Animal House. “We were there for hours just cracking up and ruining everyone else’s meals,” says Miller. “At the end, I remember saying: At the center of any great animal house is a great animal. And there was about a half second pause and we all looked at each other and said, ‘Belushi!’”