Live From New York Part 21

There were two women on staff, me and Suzy Schneider, and she got fired in January. I'm used to boys-club situations. From starting in stand-up to any staff I worked on, women are always the minority, and I'm used to it and I'm very comfortable in that situation because I've never felt alienated. I've always felt welcomed by the men in those situations. It's only when I'm in a situation where I don't know the guys that I see the boys-club mentality.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

The Turners' big thing was "boys club," and that was a very hard thing to overcome. There was an incident, I think, when from what I've heard described - I wasn't there for it - I think Adam Sandler peed in a plant to make Downey laugh or something, and Bonnie Turner was disgusted by it - with, I'm sure, absolute justification. She was also, you know, a mother, and this all seemed to be wasting time. It was a natural complaint. And it was the end of a cycle: that it was a boys club and that women were not treated well.

VICTORIA JACKSON:.

I was the first woman in the cast to get a lead in a movie - Casual s.e.x? And my poster was all over town. And we never talked about it, but I'm sure that was everyone's goal. So that probably really bugged the rest of them, you know. No one ever said a word about it. It was invisible.

My theory is that men compete better than women. The men were competing against each other too, for lines, but when they compete and then the show is over, they pat each other on the back and have a beer. Women are much more vicious and scary. They don't do that. And sometimes I actually thought the other women were going to try to poison my coffee and kill me. If I had a really good joke in a sketch that got a huge laugh and was like a really great moment that would be repeated for all eternity - as in the "Big Pill" sketch, where I got this huge golden nugget of a great moment - it got mysteriously taken away from me. And I was like, "Why don't I have a line all of a sudden? It got a huge laugh at dress rehearsal."

They weren't nice to me. Maybe they were jealous or something.

JAN HOOKS:.

I had a huge ego. I just loved anybody that wanted me to show my stuff. I will do it. Oh man, let me go out there and show my stuff. And in my midtwenties, it kind of hit that it wasn't a hobby anymore, that it was my vocation, that I had to do this in order to live. And that shaded it in a whole different way. It made me afraid, you know.

Frankly I kind of miss those silly years of youth, where you're all ego and you just want to get out there and show your stuff. But now, I don't know. I'm in therapy.

NORA DUNN, Cast Member: I hadn't been to church in years, but when I got the part on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I went right to St. Patrick's Cathedral and just wept, because it was monumental. It really came out of the blue. I'd never even considered in my head that I was ever going to be on television.

No one takes you under their wing at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. There are no wings. I was also shocked that it was so hard for the writers to write for women.

JON LOVITZ:.

I think that Nora Dunn got a lot of her stuff on because of her relations.h.i.+p with Lorne. She would get everything on. I thought that was the reason, and a lot of other people thought that was the reason. Then she would complain: "The show's against women." She got all of her stuff on - almost all of it. She had her own writer hired for her, Christine Zander. And then she would say how tough it was for women and stuff. I just was like, what are you talking about?

She fought with a lot of people. She fought with me the first year. And then the second year she started again, and I said, "I'm not going through this with you for another year." She would pick a fight. She fought with everybody. And then one time, one of the funniest things was seeing Dana with her. It was Dana's first year, and I go, "You'll see." He asked me, "What are you talking about?" And then they did this Star Trek thing, or maybe it was a Church Lady. And he and Nora were just screaming at each other.

One of the funniest things was seeing her and Terry Sweeney both dressed as Diana Ross or Nancy Reagan - and the two of them screaming at each other over who gets to play which women.

VICTORIA JACKSON:.

Nora told us the first day I was there that she had a close relations.h.i.+p with Lorne. I'm not spreading gossip, since she actually told everyone herself - probably to intimidate us. I don't respect people who do that. I just went, "Oooh."

We had this meeting and one of the producers asked us what was wrong with the show. And everyone was supposed to say something, but no one was saying anything. And it was all of us sitting on the floor like high school or kindergarten or whatever. And the door was shut and she said, "Okay, come on, something's wrong with the show." Because there was a lot of tension and fighting and anger and stuff. And finally I go, "Okay, I'll say it in one sentence. You really want to know?" And then I felt like I was Robert De Niro - "You really want to know?" Like, "You talkin' to me?" I repeated it three times to build up the courage to tell the truth.

So then I was shaking, and I stood up and told everyone that what was wrong with the show was those two women - I pointed to Nora and Jan - and all the things they did bad: They didn't cooperate in sketches and they slammed doors in people's faces and back-bite and backstab and all that, you know. And then there was like silence and no one said anything. And so they both got up, really slowly, and walked out of the room. And then I said to the others, "Thanks a lot for standing up for me." Because everyone agreed, but no one said anything. And Dana goes, "You didn't hear anyone disagreeing, did you?" And everyone burst out laughing. And so then, after that, they were afraid of me and they didn't mess with me anymore. I mean, it was weird. It was kind of like you got rewarded for being mean.

TERRY TURNER:.

Victoria ended up standing on a chair and said Nora was a b.i.t.c.h. And she turned to Jan and said, "And you, you're the devil." So this explosive meeting where everyone got together to discuss how we could make our work situation better just got immediately crazy.

There was more backstage melodrama to come. When vulgar macho comic Andrew Dice Clay was booked to host Sat.u.r.day Night Live, cast member Nora Dunn found his act so politically incorrect, so antifeminist, that she refused to appear on the same television program with him. SNL was making headlines again - and not loving it.

RICK LUDWIN, NBC Vice President for Late Night: I will admit to a professional mistake when Lorne first said to me, "What do you think, Andrew Dice Clay is being offered to us." Andrew Dice Clay was then the hottest thing in comedy, and my reaction was yeah, we should do it. I knew he was controversial, but Sat.u.r.day Night Live had been no stranger to controversy over the years, and frankly, controversy can help ratings. So my reaction was, "Let's do it." Lorne obviously has the final say and agreed to do it, and it was only after that that I caught Clay's concert film on HBO or someplace. And after I saw it, I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, we're going to catch far more heat than I antic.i.p.ated." Because I didn't realize just how misogynistic his act was and is.

On the night of the show, the network broadcast standards people insisted that Sat.u.r.day Night Live be put on a delay so that if Andrew Dice Clay said something or did something that needed to be cut, it could be cut via seven-second delay or whatever it needed to be. Nowadays, you can do that electronically and it is a much, much easier method of delaying the video and the audio, but in those days it was still a matter of having one reel of tape on one machine recording the program and then literally the tape sort of going down to the floor of the tape room and back up to a second machine that would play it back. And Lorne was very wary of that system, because you just never knew; it was too untested and unreliable.

As it turned out, there was no point in the show where the censors wanted to cut anything, but because of the technical nature of this thing, this sort of jury-rigged system, the video got screwed up, and Lorne vowed never again. Whatever the circ.u.mstances, he would never allow that sort of tape delay on Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

Sat.u.r.day Night Live is live live. If someone were to say "f.u.c.k," it would go out over the air. At least the East Coast of America would hear it. They would make a repair for the West Coast.

BOB ODENKIRK:.

Lorne waits until the last second and then he picks whoever's hot. He and Jim Downey picked Andrew Dice Clay, and I don't think they knew who he was or what he did. I don't think they'd ever heard his act. And so they were shocked.

NORA DUNN:.

I didn't hear about Andrew Dice Clay hosting until Monday. I was very familiar with his work. He had a routine about sticking a woman's head into the toilet, f.u.c.king her up the a.s.s, and then telling her to make him some eggs. Where's the joke?

VICTORIA JACKSON:.

I think the Andrew Dice Clay thing was totally a publicity stunt on Nora's part. We'd had other comics that degraded women. Like Sam Kinison. Sam made fun of Jesus Christ and although I'm a Christian, I still went to work, because my contract wasn't based on, "I come to work if I approve of the host." If Nora's pa.s.sionate platform of life is women's rights, she was meaner to me than anyone in my life, and I'm a woman, so obviously she doesn't really love women.

LORNE MICHAELS:.

I came back on a Sunday. Nora Dunn announces to the press that she's not doing the show. It would have been nice if she'd called me. Already it was like a circus. It all seemed so out of whack. The reason I got so furious and stubborn about it was, "Wait a minute. You haven't seen what he's done yet. You're just a.s.suming that we're going to put him on in a full embrace." I was on Nightline the night before the show and some woman said something about Hitler and the Holocaust, and I went, "Whoa. Just a minute. How did we jump to the Holocaust? Because the Holocaust is really a giant thing, and we're here talking about a comedian with a bad act. And we haven't even done anything with him yet."

My sympathies were with him. One of the things you'll find is consistent from the beginning to now is that we've always obeyed the rules of hospitality. You don't invite somebody to your house to p.i.s.s on him. My point is that this person has put themselves in your hands, they're completely vulnerable, the show only works if they look good, so why would you have anybody over that you don't like? What - because you need the ratings? It doesn't make any sense. He was completely vulnerable.

Nora painted herself into a corner, I think. We're not one big happy family, you've probably figured that out. That said, everybody plays by a set of rules.

NORA DUNN:.

To me, Andrew Dice Clay hosting was the pinnacle of everything that upset me about the show. I still feel that it's a black mark that they endorsed him and let him walk through that door.

Anyway, I talked to a couple people at the show, told them I wasn't going to do the show, and then I made a statement. My brother had given me the name of a friend of his who was with the a.s.sociated Press, and he said, "You'd better just cover yourself here." So I made my statement to the guy, and he told me he wouldn't release it unless I wanted him to. I thought by Wednesday it would all be resolved and they would just tell him, "We'd rather you don't do the show." Then the reporter called me back to say that another statement had come out of Sat.u.r.day Night Live saying that I wasn't asked back for next year, and that I was disgruntled, that I was doing this because I thought I was being fired - which was a complete falsity. So we released my statement because of the other statement. I think Lorne did the SNL statement and I was very hurt by it. I felt betrayed.

I know that Lorne felt I didn't talk to him, but he was not accessible. He was never accessible. The whole experience had a huge impact on my life, and ultimately it was a really, really good thing.

TERRY TURNER:.

I remember there were metal detectors at the show for the first time, which was a little disorienting. People were calling up our house to talk to Bonnie, saying, "How can you write this week? How can you possibly continue working there when this man is hosting?" Some people called our house and hara.s.sed my wife about why go to work, and I wanted to say, "Well, there's tuition, there's a car payment," you know. There were a lot of reasons to work that week.

I felt that we were blindsided by Nora. Why not tell the people she had worked with for all these years that she was going to do this. So at least we'd know what to expect. And it really irritated me that suddenly Bonnie and other women who were writing the show were considered traitors and got a lot of hara.s.sment.

JAN HOOKS:.

A writer for the New York Post called and it was like, "Do you have a comment?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Nora Dunn has walked off the show." And I was dumb-founded. I had no idea. Because Lord knows, through all of the trials and tribulations of Sat.u.r.day Night Live, you go on with the show.

I called the office and there was kind of mayhem going on. What bugged me was that Nora had called the press. She didn't call Lorne. She didn't call the other women in the cast. She called the press. And I thought, "G.o.d, that's not fair." I mean, normally when you work with somebody, you call and go, "Look, I really feel uncomfortable with this and I would like to not do the show." Instead, she had no contact with us. That week was horrible. I got a lot of hate mail. It was like, "Why can't you be more like Nora Dunn and stand up for your rights?" - and all that s.h.i.+t.

I knew that her contract was up and I don't know if they had made an offer to her. But I was really disappointed. And it put us in danger, actually. I mean, all of these radical feminists were sending hate mail and we had to call in security. And I didn't even know who Andrew Dice Clay was. I didn't care. It's like just another host. Steven Seagal, we got through him. I just thought the whole thing was careless and unfortunate.

ANDREW DICE CLAY.

I didn't watch Sat.u.r.day Night Live every week. I was out. When that show started, I had to be - I don't know - fifteen, sixteen years old. And I really wasn't that into comedy at fifteen. So in those days, I was out on the weekends. I wasn't a Sat.u.r.day Night Live freak at all.

My management got the call about hosting. I actually got the call from my dad, who was advising me back then. He worked with my manager. And I was back in New York. I was getting ready for my picture Ford Fairlane to open, and the funny thing was, I just wanted a nice relaxing week before it opened, because I was really going through it as far as controversy goes. I just wanted to take it easy. But my dad said it would be a good thing to do. It's Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It's right before the movie comes out. You'll have a lot of fun. And I said, "All right, we'll do it."

So I'll never forget it. I show up and I'm waiting like in some reception area with my father, my sister, my right-hand guy at the time, Johnny West, and another guy who worked for me. And I'm waiting like a long time, like an hour. All of a sudden this girl walks in - I think it was actually Calvin Klein's daughter Marci, who was working for the show - and she says, "Lorne will see you now, and this is really crazy with what's going on." And I go, "What's going on?" She goes, "Nora Dunn walked off the show." And I go, right, you know, what do you want from me? So now I go into Lorne's office, and he sits down and he starts telling me about Nora Dunn walking off the show. And I'm sitting there looking at him like, "Who cares? What do you want from me?" And he goes, "She walked off because of you."

Now I look at him and I go, "Who is she?" Because I don't watch the show. I'm not interested. I mean, of course I know about Belus.h.i.+ and Chevy Chase, and I've seen their movies. But I was never an avid follower of Sat.u.r.day Night Live. And Lorne goes, "Don't you know the cast here?" I go, "No, I'll be honest. I really never watch. I know Dennis Miller, because he shows up when I'm performing.

Then from there it just turned into mania, you know. Next thing you know, I'm getting calls from Entertainment Tonight. I'm getting calls from all these different tabloid shows. And what was supposed to be a fun, light week wound up the most stressful week I had in my entire career. To this day, if I turn on the tape for somebody, you can see the blood in my face, how high my blood pressure was.

I was out of my mind, you know, doing that show. It wasn't fun, I'll tell you that much. What really bothered me about the whole thing is, these performers that are supposed to know what character comedy is didn't know I was playing a character. When I heard this was the end of Nora Dunn's contract, I'm going, "This is a play to get publicity - to make herself into something." In my opinion, she was just looking to make something out of her career after Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

The one good thing is, the ratings were incredible. It was the only time, you know, in the few times that I have seen Sat.u.r.day Night Live, that they threw people out of the audience. I mean, I got heckled during my opening monologue and they had to throw people out. There was all kinds of security. There was a bunch of people in the balcony they threw out. Because the dichotomy between who I am as a performer and who I am as a father and a husband is very different.

I've never met Nora Dunn to this day. And obviously it didn't work out for her the way she thought it would. And, you know what, that's what she deserved. I guess she thought she was going to become like a major star from that. That's not how you become a major star. I thought it was a foolish move to start with.

And Nightline is this great show and look what they're putting on. It's not a world affair. I'm a comic. I'm a bozo from Brooklyn.

JAN HOOKS:.

I know there was a meeting before Nora was due in the following week, so I think we had one more show. And we took a vote: Get her out of here! Get her out of here!

VICTORIA JACKSON:.

I ran into Nora's manager a couple of years ago in L.A. He mentioned he represented Nora. I'm like, "Oh. Great." I couldn't hide that I wasn't thrilled. And he goes, "I'll tell her you said hi." And I'm like, "Yeah, okay." So the next week I saw him again, and he goes, "I told Nora that you said hi, and she said she kind of gave you a hard time when you were working together." And I went, "Oh, so she actually admits it. Cool. I thought maybe it was all in my head, you know?"

DON NOVELLO, Writer: The first time I did Father Sarducci was at a place called the Intersection, a coffee house in San Francisco. But then I started driving down to L.A. to do comedy clubs in '73, and I started doing it at the Comedy Store. I was on the Smothers Brothers Show - I was a regular on their NBC show - and I did it there. When I got on Sat.u.r.day Night Live, I think it was the fall of '77, I knew Franken and Davis from the Comedy Store and I had met John Belus.h.i.+, and John pushed to get me on as well. I think Brian Doyle-Murray and I were the first new writers after the original group of writers.

People were just afraid of Father Sarducci, you know. Everybody always said, "We're not offended, but we think other people will be offended." When I began smoking, someone said, "Priests don't smoke." I never made fun of the religion. I never did the sign of the cross or talked about Jesus or anything like that. I just made fun of the hierarchy. One thing I did though was a thing about the bill for the Last Brunch. Actually I had wanted to do the bill for the Last Supper, and at that time the guy in Standards and Practices said we can't do the bill for the Last Supper, and so I worked it out that I could do the bill for the Last Brunch instead. Because of that it got much funnier. One guy only had eggs. Everyone else had all these big breakfasts. The moral of it was, if you're part of a big group, order the most expensive thing, because someone will always just say, "Let's divide it."

St. Pat's were our neighbors in Rockefeller Square, but I never had any problems from Catholics or from the Church or anything. I was arrested once in Rome when I was taking pictures of the Vatican, but that was for taking pictures without permission, they said. But I never had people complain.

ROBERT WRIGHT, NBC Chairman and CEO: When I came to NBC, SNL was not on my radar of things that were broken, needed fixing, were under hospitalization, or were enemies of the people. I kind of stayed away from it. I knew by reputation that Lorne had a princ.i.p.ality that had signed nonaggression pacts with other princ.i.p.alities. I didn't need to be there. I had so many other things I was involved in, and I didn't have any agenda with SNL. To me, if it was funny, that was good enough.

But I was only here a very short time when I got involved in an incident with Father Guido Sarducci. I'm a Catholic and I got a call from Cardinal O'Connor's office. His a.s.sistant, a very well thought of young priest who was made a monsignor, and was like an executive a.s.sistant, called me to say that the cardinal wanted me to come over and he had some things he wanted to talk about. The cardinal talked about labor unions, but in the process he also wanted to talk about Guido. And I was very defensive about it. They were politely saying to me how many Catholic organizations had been really offended by his portrayal. I didn't pretend to have any journalistic credentials, but I was really offended, because I thought it was very funny. And I felt that if I think it's very funny and I'm an upstanding Catholic, then "why can't you take a joke?" So I got very defensive about this whole discussion, it was something I kind of just stepped into, but I found myself defending it against, I think, the Catholic League at the time and some other groups. There are hundreds of them. I realized I had to stop defending the show in person because there were more groups than I had hours in the day. So that was my initial period. n.o.body asked me to do this. I just got into this stuff and then I realized I had to get out of it.

When the show began, hosts - like musical artists - were chosen as much for their novelty as for their proven popular appeal. Hence the appearances of Ralph Nader, Julian Bond, Ron Nessen, and other non-performers in the host's spotlight. The practice continued over the years - sports figures were added to the mix - but generally, the host pool became smaller and limited to stars of s...o...b..z, oftentimes those with a movie opening very near the date of their appearance.

There were good hosts and bad, those who came with their own entourages and their own writers - thus alienating the SNL staff from the get-go - and those who just came to have fun, to spend a week at a kind of amus.e.m.e.nt park for the very, very privileged. Some tried to bail out as Sat.u.r.day night approached. Some canceled at the virtual last minute. Some threw up. But most came and conquered and seemed to have a wonderful time. Some would say that, even having done it and enjoyed themselves, they still couldn't picture themselves doing it again, while others took so naturally to the unnatural experience that they were invited back repeatedly; they were old reliables who, because they pitched in with gusto, inspired the writers and regular cast members to be at their best.

BUCK HENRY, Host: There were people outside the cast that I look at and say, "They could have been cast members" - Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, John Goodman, and Steve Martin. Those four people were essentially cast members, because they really fit into the format and they understood their work, and they were really great guest hosts.

DANNY DEVITO, Host: They pitch lots of stories to you. You do the read-through, which is really cool. You read everything and everybody sits around the table. I was used to that kind of work on Taxi, because we were trying to get the show ready on Friday every week and we did a lot of table readings. So it's less shocking, I think, for an actor who comes to it after having had the experience of a table reading and trying to get a show in shape for seven o'clock on a Friday night, which is what we would do on Taxi.

When Jon Lovitz was on the show, he was hysterically funny. There was one incident where I think I shoot him like in the foot and he says, "Ya shot me." The way he said it was just so off the charts that n.o.body could keep a straight face. It was just one of those things where every time he said, "Ya shot me," I went crazy. "Ya shottttt me." And of course once you go, he just did it more and more and more and more to throw it out into the stratosphere. Even to this day, when we see each other we say, "Ya shot me."

JON LOVITZ:.

The sketch was kind of dying so I said it a lot. Like about ten extra times more than I was supposed to, just to get a laugh.

JOHN GOODMAN, Host: I was scared to death. I mean, I was petrified. It was something I always wanted to do. I remember stalking NBC when I first moved up here in 1975, you know, I would walk around after auditions and everything. I would always come through here just to see if I could see any of the cast members and stuff. And then I auditioned for the show in 1980 when they replaced everybody. It's something I've always loved, because I was a big fan of the National Lampoon and the Radio Hour and Michael O'Donoghue. So when I finally did do it, I was so d.a.m.n scared I just wanted to disappear, fall through a manhole cover - anything.

I like the day on Friday. Sat.u.r.day it's just too nuts. I'm getting to be an older man now, and all the running around and changing you've got to do, ugh. I've got to be rested and fit for that, so physically it's a little draining. But on Fridays I just like being there, I feel like I'm at home.

JAN HOOKS:.

I loved Dolly Parton. She came in and said, "Look, okay, here's the deal. I won't use any cuss words and I won't make fun of Jesus." Those were her two demands. And anything else was carte blanche.

GREG DANIELS:.

Mel Gibson did the show, and he has a pretty strong sense of humor. But I'm not sure if it's really the same sense of humor of the show. I remember him trying to pitch us doing a parody of Brideshead Revisited that he called "Bird's Head Regurgitated." He's like pitching that really strongly, and we were kind of politely nodding and thinking how do we not do "Bird's Head Regurgitated."

DANA CARVEY:.

Robert Mitchum hosted once and I did a sketch with him, and he was like out-of-body. I think he had like half a gallon of whiskey in his room. He was of the old school.

TOM HANKS:.

The second time you're back, you think you know how things are going. The second time I was on the show, Randy Travis was the musical guest. It was around the Winter Olympics in 1988. So by that time I had done it already once and the gee-whiz-bang aspect of being in the room was a little bit different. You fancy yourself a seasoned professional now. And you're just kind of in the middle of the show, middle of a season. Everybody's exhausted. Always a couple people around with the flu and just kind of like bang through it. I felt honored to be invited back, like I was in some sort of quasi-select club, but I don't think the show was all that great.

BOB ODENKIRK:.

They have a pool of names of potential hosts. They have a few that are anch.o.r.ed down for one reason or another - they have a movie coming out or whatever - and famous enough. But then, outside of that, for a normal show, two weeks ahead of time they've got a pool of names, two or three people, and they ask these people to host the show. And these people say yes or no, or maybe these people all want to host the show, and they're tentatively scheduled for that week. And then, as the week gets closer, Lorne picks one of them. And what happens then is the other two people get burned. Supposedly John Candy was like the most-burned potential host, in that he would never host the show, because he'd been asked to do it so many times and then told "no thanks" at the last minute by the staff - which is all Lorne.

AL FRANKEN:.

When there's a Beatle up in the office, nothing gets done. Because everybody is just following the Beatle around, you know? So here's my George Harrison story. I think it was the second season Lorne was back, so '86 or something like that. George went out to dinner with Lorne, and it was on a Tuesday night - Tuesday night as you know by now is writing night, right? So it's about eleven at night or something and George comes back to the show, comes up to seventeen, and he's really drunk.

And he hung around until like two o'clock in the morning, and nothing had gotten done. He was just really drunk. He's at the piano in the read-through room playing and playing, and my office was the office closest to the piano. And he plays the piano for like a real long time, and again he's really drunk, so I take Phil Hartman aside and I go, "Phil, watch this." Phil stands outside my office, I go into my office, and I SLAM the door as hard as I can. And Harrison jumped about three feet off the bench - and finally left.

So that's my George Harrison story.

GREG DANIELS:.

Judge Reinhold wasn't one of my favorites. The thing is, you get a lot of these guys right when they're at their maximumly famous, most fame-going-to-their-head moments. And they come in. They're in New York City. And they're hosting the show and they kind of give you like a couple of minutes and they want to run out and just have fun. That was definitely how Judge was that week. But I'm sure he's a nice guy now.

Even if all other attempts at livening up the show failed, it was almost guaranteed a new burst of energy every four years when election time came around. During the Ebersol years, SNL dabbled only lightly and mildly in political humor, but once Michaels returned, the show began to build a stronger and flintier political profile. In time it became an integral if impudent part of the process. The line between observing and partic.i.p.ating was sometimes blurred. Politicians who were roasted over a spit on Sat.u.r.day Night Live would nevertheless appear on the program themselves if given the opportunity - everyone, over the years, from Gerald Ford to Janet Reno (Bill Clinton was a notorious bad-sport holdout). George H. W. Bush was so enamored of Dana Carvey's presidential portrayal that he invited Carvey to the White House and eventually taped a cold open for the show.

Jim Downey was the best political satirist among the writers, though Al Franken wrote some great political sketches too. Among the all-time best was a 1988 primary "debate" by Downey and Franken and Davis which starred Franken as Pat Robertson, who then fancied himself a candidate, Dana Carvey as George Bush (Carvey then in the fetal stage of what would later become a cla.s.sic Bush impression), and Dan Aykroyd making a gala return to the show as a hilariously petty Bob Dole.

DANA CARVEY:.

I was just a.s.signed George Bush, and I couldn't do him at all. It was just a weird voice and weird rhythm. It's one of those things where you go, "There's nothing to do." Reagan was so easy because you just go, "Well, everybody." But then over time, after Bush won the election, one night I just sort of hooked it, and it was that phrase "that thing out there, that guy out there doin' that thing," and that sort of hooked it for me, and from there on I kind of refined it.

He enjoyed it. I give him credit. He was just incredibly friendly. Lorne and I had done a benefit for Pamela Harriman and the Democratic Party in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where I played George Bush, and he heard about that and invited us to the White House, Lorne and I, so he was just Charm Central. In '92 after he lost the election, he invited me back - which was really surreal, because I was actually talking to Jon Lovitz on the phone and I got the call waiting thing and the quote is, "This is White House operator number one, hold for the president." And I go, "Jon, I gotta go," and he goes, "Why? Is there a bigger name on the other line?" And I go, "Well, it's the president."

So he invited me out there to cheer up the troops, as he saw it. His sense of it was that it wasn't mean, that it was mostly silly. But I don't think he ever saw the one where we had him on his knees saying, "Please, G.o.d, don't make me a one-termer." I don't think they knew or wondered about my politics, whether I was incredibly left or whatever, but I was sort of in the White House and Barbara would bring up politics and George would say, "Let's not do it." And for my wife and me, it's still one of the peak experiences and most mind-blowing experiences of our life, to be in the White House with the president, who had just lost the election, during Christmas. It was just so gorgeous and surreal. And we're in the Lincoln Bedroom and suddenly he comes in, and he's six-foot-four and he goes, "How ya doin', meet ya downstairs," and he just sort of charmed the pants off us.

I only met him that one time for ten minutes in 1988, and then we just mercilessly made fun of him for four years. Al Franken's a pretty famous Democrat, Jim Downey's a real Republican, I refer to myself as a radical moderate. So in the beginning of George Bush's tenure, he was so d.a.m.n popular, I think he saw some of those sketches where the angle was how happy he was. It wasn't until the last eighteen months, where we had the recession and the no-new-taxes thing, where some of the stuff was heavier hitting. I think between Lorne and Al Franken, they wouldn't have allowed me to make it soft. We make fun of liberals too, you know.

It's scary to go out there and know you don't have it. You just say, "I'm George Bush" and cop an att.i.tude. When I was in college I would tape Dan Aykroyd off the television, tape his Jimmy Carter, shamelessly practice it, and then go to the clubs and just steal it, do his Jimmy Carter. Then eight, nine years later Danny's in the office going, "I really like your George Bush." It was kind of surreal.