One night in 1976, right around the time I took the SATs, I found myself sitting in the audience in Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center for a broadcast of NBC’s “Saturday Night,” as it was then called. Elliott Gould was the host, and the episode contained the famous “Star Trek” sketch, in which Gould, playing an NBC exec, walks onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and tells a startled Captain Kirk (John Belushi) that “Star Trek” is cancelled, before plucking the pointy prop ears off Spock (Chevy Chase). I’m sure I missed most of the references in the show, but I distinctly remember the insiderish thrill of sitting in a working television studio, with cue-card guys in the aisles and cameras on cranes whizzing over my head. It was the show’s first season, and I had no way of knowing then how it would intersect with my grownup life. I also didn’t know that, somewhere uptown, this magazine’s editor, William Shawn, and the writer Lillian Ross were glued to their TV sets, watching. They were early boosters of “S.N.L.,” and had taken its creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, under their wing. Ross began a years-long reporting project, with the intent to profile Michaels for the magazine. Shawn remained a comedy fan all his life; toward the end, his favorite movie was “This Is Spinal Tap.”
Next month, “S.N.L.” is set to celebrate fifty years of being on the air, the same week that The New Yorker will toast its hundredth anniversary. It’s not as surprising as it might seem that these two venerable New York institutions would, over the years, occupy so much common ground. When Michaels was plotting “S.N.L.,” he had The New Yorker in mind as a model, in terms of wanting sketches with distinct voices, whose writers would be recognizable by their styles. (The reason he became a producer, he has said, “was to protect my writing, which was being fucked over by producers.”) Shawn became a mentor to Michaels; both had to contend with corralling the swirling egos of needy creative types while meeting a regular weekly deadline. Michaels developed a persona that is as elusive and mysterious as Shawn’s was; for both it had the effect of heightening people’s fascination with them. (At one point, Michaels believed that he might even be named as Shawn’s successor.)
I met Lillian Ross in 1984, when I was working as a writers’ assistant on “The New Show,” a comedy hour that Michaels produced during a hiatus he took from “S.N.L.” She was still at work on the profile, which got derailed when, three years later, Shawn was fired. The show was short-lived, as was my television career. I became a magazine editor, but the brilliant writers whom I met on “The New Show”—Jack Handey, Steve Martin, George Meyer, Sarah Paley—would stay in my stable of writers forever. Another writer in my stable was Lillian Ross.
When I showed up in Lorne Michaels’s office ten years ago and told him of my plan to write a book about him (he never asked for a biography to be inflicted on him), he took a few deep breaths but then generously opened the door. We had seen each other now and then over the years, often when I was with Lillian, who died in 2017. For both of us, I think, my project had a feeling of kismet about it—me picking up a thread that she had left dangling. Crossing the finish line with the book the same week that “S.N.L.” turns fifty and The New Yorker (which its founder, Harold Ross, called the “comic weekly”) turns a hundred was never part of the plan, but it feels just right.
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