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Phoebe Neidl: Hello, listeners. I'm Phoebe Neidl, an editor here at Audible. Today I'm excited to be chatting with Susan Morrison. Susan is a longtime editor at The New Yorker magazine and is here to talk about her new book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Welcome, Susan.
Susan Morrison: Nice to be here. Hello.
PN: Thank you so much for joining us. So, Lorne Michaels. It's honestly hard to picture what the comedy landscape would look like without him, that's for sure. And Saturday Night Live is such a huge cultural touchstone for so many people. But what also makes him such an interesting subject for a biography, I think, is that he has this reputation as sort of an indecipherable figure. He's been an object of fascination for nearly everyone who's worked for him. He can be very difficult to get access to, and he doesn't do a ton of interviews with the press. So, just to start things off, how hard was it to get access to him? What was that process like, and how did this whole project come about for you?
SM: Well, about 10 years ago, right after the SNL 40th anniversary celebration, I started thinking a lot about Lorne, and realizing that his influence, I mean, no single person has had more of an influence on what generations of Americans find funny. It's not just what we laugh at, it's kind of rewired our brains. People use SNL catchphrases in their wedding vows. You see them on advertisements for antacids in the subway. I mean, it's so in the water. I started thinking what an interesting biography he would make, particularly because, as you just said, he's been a very private person all these years.
Now, I worked for Lorne briefly, in 1984, on a short-lived comedy hour that he did in prime time called The New Show. I was just a munchkin on that show, I was the writer's assistant. But I met him, we knew each other, and over the years we sort of would bump into each other maybe every five years and say hi. New York's not that big a town, actually. So, when I decided that he would be a good subject, I knew that if I just went to him and said, "Would you like to participate in a biography?" that he would say no, because that's worked for him all these years, and he likes to be behind the curtain.
But I had a real point of view about him, because I had so many friends who worked for him over the years and I've been hearing Lorne stories since I was 23. So, I wrote a book proposal, it went around town, surprised me by inciting a big bidding war, and I signed a contract with Random House. And then I went to see Lorne in his office and I said, "I have just signed a contract to write a book about you and the show. I don't need anything from you. You know I'm connected in your world." Among the writers I edit here at The New Yorker are Steve Martin and a lot of other funny people in Lorne's orbit for years. I said, "But if you wanted to talk to me and participate in this, it would be a richer, better book, more detailed and accurate." And I said, "Frankly, your legacy deserves that kind of a treatment."
To be completely honest, at first he was completely gob-smacked and was sort of like, “Ahhh!” He was not a man who wanted a biography inflicted upon him, but he's very civil and a very nice guy and he said, "Let me think it over." A couple of days later, we met for a drink, and he just started telling his stories, he just started talking. And he is one of the world's great talkers. Conversation rolls out of him like jazz. He has a million stories. He is very interesting and funny and low-key. And so it basically just began, and we didn't make any kind of a deal or arrangement. He wanted nothing from me. He didn't ask to see anything. He had no control over the book. It was my book, not a vanity project. But he's a very smart, sophisticated man, he knew that much better to have a book about him that was a real work of journalism by a real journalist than some kind of a vanity project, which is how some people in his position might have gone.
It was just very pleasant. I would go over to his office often on Friday evenings. He would have a chunk of time around six o'clock before he was meeting somebody at Orso for dinner, and we would talk for an hour or so. I think everyone else in his world, they knew that he was talking to me, so they all just started talking to me, too. So, it was all just very conversational and civilized.
PN: It shows, I think. You said you've been working on it for about 10 years, and it's really clear that you reported the hell out of the thing. It's very thorough and very detailed, but at the same time, it feels fast-paced, which is nice. There's so much to cover. It feels like everybody in show business has a story about Lorne Michaels and Lorne Michaels has a story about everybody in show business. So, I was curious, what felt like maybe the juiciest or most interesting stories that you came across, or anything that kind of really surprised you? Is there anything that stood out in that way? Probably so many things.
SM: Oh, gee, yes, a million things. I guess, to me, one of the most interesting things when you're a biographer—and I say this as this is my first biography, my first real book—but I quickly realized that the part of the story that's going to be most interesting is what happens before your character emerges onto the world stage. Because once the person is a famous person out in the world, the media has them in their sights. People have been covering Lorne Michaels in their smallish way since 1975. But what was most interesting to me was the years before 1975. His childhood was interesting, but I mean the 10 years that he was kind of doing yeoman's comedy writing jobs in Toronto and California before SNL. Nobody knows anything about that. So, for a biographer, that's what's really fun, because it's virgin territory.
I was astonished to find that everything he did, and he did kind of bounce from cruddy show to cruddy show—The Beautiful Phyllis Diller variety show, The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour, The Perry Como Christmas Show—these were really undistinguished programs, and each time young Lorne landed at one of them, he thought, "Oh, my God, I've ruined my life. I'll never get out of this. I'm washed up in a cul-de-sac." But each time, he learned something from it. He found some important takeaway, and you can see all these things adding up and feeding in to the skills that allowed him to eventually create SNL.
"He is one of the world's great talkers. Conversation rolls out of him like jazz. He has a million stories."
So, that was the most fun thing for me. But aside from the historical, time-marches-on biography part of the book, there's kind of a braided narrative. The reader of the book will be taken day by day through the week of a show, in current day. This was a show that Jonah Hill hosted. So, you get to see really up close—I mean, I was really right there at his elbow for a lot of this—exactly what the strange, political, emotional jujitsu that he performs to command these dozens of creative, stubborn, interesting young people who work for him. And getting to sit in those rooms, in these meetings, these very high-level confidential meetings as he's parsing what to cut and what to keep and how not to hurt this person's feelings, and this person maybe needs a little boost. It was fascinating.
The week that I was there, among the many wild things that happened right in front of my eyes was I was there when word came that Alec Baldwin had just been arrested in Greenwich Village for getting into a fight with somebody over a parking space. So that came in and was like, "Well, okay, I guess he wasn't gonna play Trump that week." But just to see the reactions of everybody in the place, which partly was like resigned exasperation. In the book I compare it to, it's sort of like when an exasperating relative just does exactly the dopey kind of thing you expect them to do.
But then there was a very interesting little debate also about, “Okay, is the show going to mention this incident on Weekend Update?” Do they spare Alec because he's kind of one of the gang, or do they report it because it's a bona fide news story? That tension was crackling all week. In the end, and this is so perfectly Lorne, they came up with a great solution, which is to mention it but to have it be part of a Fox News broadcast, so they called him "disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin." So, just to see these little dramas unfold in front of my eyes was really interesting and instructive.
PN: Yeah, being a fly on the wall and watching that, and that really comes through as the listener and the reader, was just fascinating to see all those dynamics play out and all the decisions he has to make. It made me think about Chris Rock, he calls [Lorne] the Quincy Jones of television producing. That’s how dynamic he is. I think he is like the Philippe Petit of television producing, because the balancing act you realize that he has to pull off in dealing with the egos of the performers and the rotating hosts, and dealing with the ratings pressures from the executives, but then also the comedy itself. He always says, "You're broadcasting to all 50 states," and trying to find comedy that has an edge but still isn't alienating his demographic.
I feel like a theme that comes up in the book a lot is what a good social IQ he has, or you talk about what a world-class schmoozer he is—he knows how to talk to people, he knows how to talk to powerful people, but also to normal people. So, the social IQ aspect, how much of his success can you attribute to that?
SM: I think that's huge. It's interesting, because he has a very detailed kind of management style, and yet I think it's completely intuitive. I think if you were to say, “What is your management philosophy?” he wouldn't be able to give you some kind of Harvard Business School case study. It's very complex, but I think it's purely intuitive.
Now, to get a little bit psychobabbly here, I think part of this has a little bit to do with a really important event in his young life. His father died suddenly when he was 14, his mother was depressive and I think a little bit unstable. He was vaulted in this position of suddenly becoming the man of the house and he was completely unprepared for this. But I think it created, as trauma in youth can, this enormous resilience. He's very resilient. He can adapt, change on a dime. He can do whatever is needed in any situation. So, if you add to that, the fact that, for a comedy person, he's very smooth talking to the suits, he's very good with the executives. In fact, I couldn't believe how, numerous times, I would be there and I would see his bosses, the chairman of Comcast and everything, waiting in his outer office for a moment with him. He seems to be the most powerful person at NBC, I think.
So, he not only has that facility, but because he actually was a comedy writer, the rank and file, the writers and the performers, they really trust him. A lot of times the executive producer of a show is just someone who's almost like an executive. They will maybe give you notes, but those notes are going to be about what would bother an advertiser, whereas Bill Hader would tell me about sitting down with a script with Lorne and Lorne with a pencil, sort of explaining, "The beats should go here. You want it to be like this, and then have a call back to that." And that's a rare thing for an executive producer or an executive of any kind to be able to offer.
PN: Yeah, the early comedy writing was interesting, too, because he did start out as a comedy writer, but it seems like his skills were never in that as much as being a great curator of comedy—a student of it, or almost like a theorizer of it. He can recognize it and knew how to marshal it in other people. When do you think he realized that his gifts were really more in being a producer than a comedy writer himself?
SM: Yeah, that's a great observation, and curator is a perfect word to use for Lorne. He told me that as early as in college, at University of Toronto, he directed and performed in a lot of their theatricals at the Hart House Theater. He described being on stage in a play written by Shelley—I can't remember what it was called—and standing there about to deliver his line and looking in the eyes of his scene partner and thinking, “Wow, he really is that guy.” Lorne didn't feel like that at all. He was doing his memorized lines, but he wasn't in the role that way. So that was one.
Then another time, the second indication for him, I think, that made him realize that producing was his life's work is when he was working on a show for the CBC in Canada called The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. That show actually was kind of a blueprint for what he ended up doing with SNL. But he was the co-host, he was a performer, he was the straight man in that show. But he said, similarly to the college experience, he would be sitting in the editing room editing that show after they had it all on tape, and he'd see his face on the film, and he realized that that guy onscreen was looking around to make sure the lights were right and to make sure the scenery looked right and paying attention to the big picture rather than paying attention to being in the moment. I think he found it more exciting to be the big-picture guy than to be the performer.
PN: So, going back to his early life again, you mentioned a really huge event in his life was that his father died very suddenly when he was 14 years old, hugely destabilizing. That comes up again and again in the book. I think one of the ways it comes up that I find interesting is his dynamic with his staff. This idea that SNL is sort of a family. He seems to have this father figure role in the lives of a lot of the people that have worked with him. He dispenses advice, he's lent them money, he's let them crash at his place if they needed it.
The flip side of that is that it can also mean sometimes he's withholding love, he's not giving them the praise that they need, he's keeping them off balance. I was fascinated by that, and I think that's a little bit probably why people who work with him are so fascinated by him. Conan O'Brien said, "If a bunch of comedy people are sitting around, we're gonna end up talking about Lorne Michaels." People are intrigued by him I think because there is this kind of emotional parent-child vibe almost that he develops with his staffers. Do you feel like that's correct?
SM: Yes. I mean, even in the very beginning, in the first season when he was roughly the same age as the people who were working for him, he felt a little conflicted. He wanted to be one of the gang, but he also had to be the boss, and so he had to figure out some moves. Then, as the show went on, he was years and then generations older than these people. So the father figure thing kind of naturally fell into place. And if you think about the vulnerability of the people who come to work for him, they're very often in their early twenties, they’re maybe coming in from Oklahoma, like Bill Hader, or something. They're completely green, they not only have this exciting new job, but this person is sort of opening the whole world to them. And aside from dispensing all kinds of theories and rules about comedy writing and acting, Lorne is a natural kind of Henry Higgins, he's always giving advice.
"He's very resilient. He can adapt, change on a dime. He can do whatever is needed in any situation."
I could have done a whole glossary in the book, which would've been really fun, of just the SNL lingo and the Lorne lingo. But one phrase of his that I especially like is "first-generation famous." That is used to describe these people who really come from nowhere, these middle-class people, and suddenly they're kind of rich and famous, and they're first-generation famous. They can't really ask their parents for advice, because their parents wouldn't know the first thing about whether they should get a Lexus or a Mercedes. He considers himself the world's greatest expert on how people deal with sudden fame.
To get to what you were asking initially, there are some people, maybe ones who are more students of Freud and really know more about psychology, who think that there's almost an unconscious thing where he allows himself to become the father figure and then withholds his love, thereby kind of reenacting, recreating the situation that happened to him as a child. Now, I don't know if it's that thought-out. I know some people feel that he kind of gets them in his grips and then he's withholding, but whatever it is, it kind of works, I suppose.
PN: One of the other things that Lorne's known for is that he's always very calm, that he has this sort of unflappable vibe, keeps his emotions very close. I think it was Tom Schiller, one of the writers, that was like, “You can't get past that glaze of brown eyes that he has.” To that point, as his biographer, were there any moments that you spent with him or witnessed, or things he said, that felt the most emotionally revealing? Did you feel like you kind of cracked that exterior, the glaze of brown eyes?
SM: Interesting. In my notebook, in one of my very first meetings with him, I remember writing down later, "Lorne is not somebody who has ever used an exclamation point, either in writing or in speaking." And I think somewhere in the book, I say, "When he speaks, he speaks in that kind of calm, low cadence of a man announcing a golf tournament." It's very level.
I guess the times when I would see him deviate from that would be, first of all, when he laughs, because he really does. He gets a bad rep and some people like to say, "Oh, he's that kind of guy who never laughs, but just says, ‘That's funny.’" But that's not true. I've really seen him completely break up at read-through. Sometimes you see him take his glasses off and put his head on the table laughing so hard. I think laughing is a time when he really lets go. Actually, he once said that he loves what he calls “hard laughs” in the show. I said, "How would you describe a hard laugh?" He said, "Well, that's when you're completely abandoned—a physical response," he said. "And it makes you feel free. It makes you feel like you're nine years old." Again, makes you think about that's when his father was still alive. Just a freedom that you get. And especially for someone as controlled as him, giving yourself over to a reflex like that, it must feel very liberating.
The only other time I think I saw him where he allows himself to break a little bit from that sort of decorum is on Saturday night when he’s under the bleachers watching the dress rehearsal, and then at the meeting right after that with the staff. It's not that he's emotional or yelling or anything, but it's just much more from the gut, much more fast-paced, there's an urgency. I think that's why watching that meeting is all the more remarkable, because it runs so counter to his otherwise super placid kind of take. But I don't think I ever asked him a question or brought anything up that caused him to lose his cool.
PN: There was a moment that struck me, and it wasn't that he lost his cool, but I did find it really interesting when you asked him about his Uncle Pep's indictment. So the listeners know, it was his Uncle Pep who really kind of stepped in as a father figure to him after his dad died, and he owned an auto parts business, I believe. He got indicted for something, which I think later got cleared up. And it's a small part of the book, it's not like it's a big thing, but you asked [Lorne] about it, and he at first was like, "I don't know what you're talking about." And you had to show him the articles about it for him to be like, "Oh, yeah." I thought the fact that he sort of was denying it at first, I thought that was really interesting. I don't know if it was just how protective he felt of his Uncle Pep, or if it was just some little underbelly there that he was like, "I'm not going there."
SM: I think it's both things, but the reason I put it in the book is I thought it was a really important moment between us. He is incredibly devoted to his family, both his relatives in Toronto and his nuclear family. He’s very, very protective of them and loves them very much. But I think that in that moment, that was more us going head-to-head, subject and biographer. I thought it was a test. I don't think he would ever have dreamed of saying, "Please don't put that in the book. I don't want that in the book," because that's not how it works. I'm going to put whatever I want in the book. But it did occur to me that, probably in a lot of other scenarios in his life, in his world as a professional, he could probably make a move like that and get the problem to just go away. Again, there was no raised voices or anything, but I just said, "Okay, well, so here's the Washington Post story about this." And, as I think I put it in the book, he's used to manifesting the reality that he wants. I think he thought that by saying that, I would just move on, but I didn't. And I'm sure, in the end, he respects me more for it.
PN: Just to switch gears, to talk about the audio of this. So, Kristen DiMercurio reads the book, narrates it, but you did the epilogue and the prologue. I was just wondering, did it feel really important for you to do those parts yourself? How was that for you?
SM: Well, initially, I was so excited about the whole thing that I really wanted to do it all. I put my hand up and I said, "I'll do it." And then we realized how long it was going to take. And the engineer, who was just a great guy, I said, "What if I do it just in the mornings?" because I have a full-time job at The New Yorker. And he said, "Well, then you'd have to do it every day in January from like 8 AM to noon." I even thought about it, but it would have been unworkable. They told me that sometimes it's done that an author reads the first and last chapters, and I said, "I would love to do that."
"I think NBC is definitely going to keep the show going... But it's really hard for me to picture the show without Lorne at the center of it. He's so much the heart and soul of the show."
When I was in the studio, I really enjoyed doing it, because what's funny is, when you've written the words—and my original manuscript was, if you can believe it, almost twice as long as what is published—so I've been through it so many times, and the rhythms really get in your blood. So, there was something very cathartic about reading the sentences. I also, when I was there, I said, "Ooh, let me read the acknowledgments, too, because that's so deeply personal, that's all about people that I love.” And that was very fun to do that.
PN: Were you involved at all with choosing Kristen to be the narrator?
SM: Yes, they gave me a bunch of people to listen to and I really liked her voice. I liked the way she read quotations, and that was really important because there's so much quotation in my book. So, then we got a little bit further into it, and another thing that was fun for me, let me feel a little bit like a director, was that there are a lot of quotes from Lorne in the book. I think as a woman reading a man's voice, there's maybe a reflex to have it be macho-y. And I remember the first time I heard a sample, he sounded like some kind of macho John Wayne kind of figure. I said, "Well, he has a very particular voice. And everyone who knows Dr. Evil and all the different people who've impersonated Lorne over the years, have a little bit of a sense what it is.” So, I had a lot of fun sending audio clips, including one thing I sent her to just give her a sense of the vibe was the British actor George Sanders doing the voice of the Tiger, Shere Khan, in The Jungle Book. It's kind of very dripping with sarcasm, and then it all kind of clicked. It was fun.
PN: Yeah, she did a beautiful job. She was an awesome narrator.
SM: I haven't heard it yet.
PN: Yeah. No, it's really good.
SM: Exciting.
PN: So, you had a line that kind of stayed with me as a way to think about [Lorne], that you said, "Being cool is his true north." That characteristic seems sort of directly related to one of the amazing feats of the show, which is to always move with the times. It's been bumpy, some seasons, but it's kind of perennially relevant. It keeps finding that young audience, generation after generation. What's the secret to that? How do you think this 80-year-old guy is still producing a TV show that the kids are watching? And how much longer do you think he's going to do this?
SM: Well, to answer the first question about why and how he still is obsessed with being cool, I mean, this is the advantage of looking at somebody's whole life, because I feel like I see the seeds of that in the years before SNL. When he started working in television, he was kind of a cultural omnivore. He went to see rock & roll shows when he was a teenager. He was besotted with The Graduate by Mike Nichols. And he could have done any of those things, I think. But he didn't, he ended up wanting to go into television. And when he landed in LA in the late ’60s to do television, he was shocked to find that television was like this really dusty backwater. All the other people in it were like 50 and 60 years old. The shows he was working on were like right out of the 1950s, really corny.
He looked around and he said, "Look at the movies." The movies were completely in step with the counterculture. You had Scorsese and Cassavetes and Robert Altman and Terrence Malick doing amazing things. Down the street, his old agent David Geffen was producing Joni Mitchell, and music was completely in step with the counterculture. Television was this weird backwater. So, he saw, from that perch, all of these really embarrassing cultural collisions. At that time, Dean Martin had a variety show, and he would begrudgingly have the Rolling Stones on, because I guess you have to because they're on the charts. And Perry Como, who Lorne worked for, he once had Jefferson Airplane booked on one of his Christmas specials, and he said, "I don't want to share the stage with those dirty looking people.”
[Lorne] saw this culture collision up close, these older guys not getting what was going on in the streets. I think he realized that, not only did he want to bring television up to date with what young people of the era were interested in, but I think it made him really attuned to sort of the hinges between cultural eras. You never see those weird collisions on Saturday Night Live. The ’70s kind of blends seamlessly into the ’80s, into the ’90s.The thing about SNL is, the cast kind of rolls over gradually, it's like a sports team. You'll have rookies who then ascend to become the main players, and it's always rejuvenating itself. But I do think that his experience on those older, goofy, lame shows honed his instinct for always being of-the-moment and making sure that he didn't have any of these awkward grandmother-with-a-hula-hoop moments, as I call them.
So, not only was he always bringing in young people for the cast and the writers, but he's very good at hiring the right people. And then he gives some pretty loose reins—he delegates and he trusts them. That's the unusual thing, for a guy in his sixties and seventies and now 80, to really be willing to listen to the 28-year-old in his talent department who says, "You should be booking this musical guest."
PN: So, how much longer do you think he'll keep doing this, now that he's 80 and he's 50 years in. This is a nice round number, 50, for him to maybe retire?
SM: Well, the succession plan for SNL has been a really fervent topic of conversation for the past year. There have been all kinds of names floated. Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Colin Jost, all of those people would do a great job. But it's really hard for me to believe that that is what NBC and Lorne would want. I think NBC is definitely going to keep the show going, because it's a hit, it's a big source of revenue. But it's really hard for me to picture the show without Lorne at the center of it. He's so much the heart and soul of the show.
I have a kind of a hybrid theory that I haven't heard anybody else float, and that's this: There are two days of the week when Lorne is completely essential at the show, that's Wednesday afternoon when they do a read-through of four-hours-worth of material and then Lorne and his deputies pick the show, where they winnow out like a dozen sketches that they're going to put into production. And then Saturday night, starting at eight o'clock when they have the dress rehearsal and Lorne watches the dress rehearsal on a monitor from his little bunker under the bleachers, and he makes a million rapid-fire decisions about what stays, what goes, what needs cutting, what needs a new wig, and then implements all those changes in this emergency-room kind of meeting, right before the air show.
I think I could imagine a schedule whereby he comes in Wednesday afternoon and Saturday afternoon, and I'm sure he could do this for years to come. He has a very able group of deputies—Erik Kenward, Caroline Maroney, Erin Doyle, Steve Higgins, and Jost and [Michael] Che. I think they could really handle running the other days of the week. So, that's my vote, that's what I hope will happen.
PN: Yeah. It's interesting, because in some ways he seems like he's so completely in control, which he is, there's no question who the boss is. But he is hands-off in other ways, he lets people show their talents. I think he has a quote he says in there about you should leave no fingerprints, “a producer should leave no fingerprints."
SM: Exactly. Yeah.
PN: Although arguably, I would say his fingerprints are all over Saturday Night Live. It is his baby, for sure. So, we've talked about how much he loves giving advice. And you've been living with this project and thinking about him for 10 years now. Is there any advice he's given you or that he regularly gives that has stayed with you at all?
SM: Well, that's interesting. I guess I think that my profession is a little bit of a kind of a caretaker profession. I've spent 40 years helping other people look good, improving their copy and everything. And I think that, now that I've done this project, which is sort of all about me, it's really different.
Your question makes me think of something that Adam Sandler told me. Adam Sandler said that when Lorne came to his wedding, Lorne took him aside and gave him this piece of advice. As background, Sandler is known in the business as somebody who is always hiring all of his extended family and all of his friends onto his movies. David Spade likes to say that the call sheet on an Adam Sandler movie looks like a page from ancestry.com. So, Adam Sandler told me that at his wedding, Lorne said, "Listen, Adam, you gotta stop feeling like you need to take care of everybody else. You have to save some of this for yourself. You have to enjoy it for yourself.” So, maybe the thing with me doing a book instead of working on everybody else's pieces all the time, that somehow resonated with me, because it has always been my instinct to just be the person who's fixing it for other people. Maybe that's not so surprising, but I do feel like I kind of started to internalize that.
PN: Yeah, I love that. You're the byline. You're the big name on the big book. And such a great subject. What an amazing, fascinating person to get to do a bio on, and you nailed it, you hit it out of the park. I think people are going to be reading and listening to this one for a long time.
Well, thank you so much, Susan. This has been a thrill talking to you about this. I absolutely loved listening to this book. It was fascinating, I learned so much. I've already been chatting about it with tons of people, just whipping out Lorne Michaels stories and facts to people [laughs]. I'm excited for you about this. Congratulations on it.
SM: Thank you so much. This has really been a pleasure. As I say many times in the book, it's really easy and fun to talk about Lorne.
PN: And listeners, you can get Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison on Audible now.
