by Bruce McCall
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My satirical bent perfectly jibed with the mission of the Lampoon. The difference was that while the Lampoon exposed and trampled contemporary bogeymen, their lies and misdeeds, I wandered back through time to uncover satirical fodder and ridicule the false promises of technology and the future. Henry gave me carte blanche and I took it, at an agreed frequency of thirty pages per year. I slaved to produce a nine-page brochure on behalf of RMS Tyrannic, the “Biggest Thing in All the World.” “So safe that she carries no insurance”; decks stretching off to infinity; a mile-long dining salon; the dark, barren tunnel that was X-deck steerage quarters. I also took sweet, deeply personal revenge on Detroit’s befinned fifties road hogs and their advertising in an eight-page brochure for the 1958 Bulgemobiles: “So All-Fired New They Make Tomorrow Seem Like Yesterday!”
Life had flung open the doors. I’d been waiting for a chance to strut my satirical stuff, and boy, did I get it. I’d work all day and through the night on a painting, goaded not by a deadline but my own passion. It was the peak of my creative career. The style that best expressed my view finally solidified.
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The momentum of its exotic humor, its quality, kept the Lampoon churning ahead. The circulation numbers proved it. By 1974 the magazine could boast a million readers. Never noted or praised for prescience, I continued to beaver away in my own contented groove, blithely assuming that this blissful state was permanent. Until, goddamn fate, it wasn’t. My abiding ignorance of the feuds, tensions, and shifting alliances simmering below the surface prevailed until the day in March 1975 when Doug and Henry jointly exercised a contract clause, collected barrels of cash, and walked out of 635 Madison forever.
It ranks as something less than Henry Beard’s finest hour. Absent as usual, I later found out from a few attendees what allegedly had transpired. After taking his check but before exiting the office, he called a meeting in an open area roomy enough for everybody to gather. Standing on a desk in the hallway near his office, he confirmed the rumor that was now no longer a rumor. He and Doug had acted on a contract provision from 1969 that paid them, as agreed back when they started out, sizable sums. The money, Henry said, was payment for the six years of hell he was ending that day: the nights and weekends he’d lost; the times he’d had to step in and rescue a piece somebody had been too lazy to figure out. And then, in a final salvo that has become Lampoon lore, hostility poured from quiet, reasonable, ever-agreeable Henry. He purportedly said something to the effect of, “I’ve hated every minute of this damn job. Zero satisfaction. Nobody really helped. So I’m leaving for good. And I hope I never see any of you again.”
Everybody wanted to, needed to, talk to everybody else. Who’d be in charge? Is the magazine broke after that huge payout? Which one was the real Henry Beard—the patient, calming presence who never raised his voice, or the sore, dour, angry son of a bitch who knew the Lampoon’s salad days were over and didn’t care?
The shriveling of the Lampoon began immediately after Messrs. Beard, Kenney, and Michael O’Donoghue left. The self-styled Mr. Mike had quit the magazine a bit earlier, in a rage over—well, you name it and you’d probably be correct—and the outrageousness of his Lampoon work was lost. I swiftly realized that a Lampoon denuded of Michael, Henry, and Doug wasn’t a magazine I wanted to work for. The young office assistant, P. J. O’Rourke, began his climb up the ladder when publisher Matty Simmons declared the shit-kicking Ohio doper the new editor. Popular he was not; O’Rourke had been kicked around by the Lampoon loyalists, who wrote him off as Simmons’s toady, with a busy mouth and insufficient deference to the proud anti-Republican–free love–impeach-Nixon Lampoon aura.
By then, late spring of 1975, I was once more an unattached freelance, temporarily in career limbo. But plum assignments from high-riding Playboy, its adopted (and mercifully short-lived) Euroslut sister Oui, and Esquire chained me to the drawing board and bought a respite from the reckoning I’d have to face. Those freelanced pieces, “Mementos and Memories of the 1936 Cairo World’s Fair,” “That Fabulous Battle of Britain!,” and “Zany Afternoons” (later the title of my first book) forced me to dig deeper, reach farther, and work harder than ever before. I needed to prove myself afresh as a satirical artist and prose writer. All three pieces were as strong in concept and execution as anything I’ve done.
Proud of them as I was, I knew those pieces represented brief blips in my post-Lampoon life, not a new career. With the Lampoon on its deathbed and no home for my eccentric art visible, I surveyed prospects for future work. Naturally, my assumption that money for rent and groceries would roll in every month produced collywobbles. It was scary, and on sleepless nights terrifying, to think about being jobless. I’d assumed that helpless state belonged to the distant past. Queasy insecurity felt like seasickness, and whenever I went walking, it was cautiously: What if fresh banana peels had been stuck to the soles of my shoes?
This augured for a shabby prelude to the imminent start of my married life. Polly and I married on a beautiful July afternoon, in the beautiful garden of the beautiful house we rented in Wainscott, one of the last Hamptons havens to stay remote from the beautiful people.
Many of the minds behind the National Lampoon populated the ranks at Saturday Night Live, including, very briefly, me. I’m on the bottom right.
(Courtesy Arky & Barrett)
Chapter 9
Saturday Night Dead!
The summer of 1976 was splendid, except for the niggling matter of joblessness. Otherwise I was newly married, had few other attachments or responsibilities, and a plump fiscal cushion in the bank from the advertising days. Polly and I moved into a swish apartment on Central Park West, hired a decorator, and got a dog. I bought my first Mercedes (I’d had use of one at Ogilvy & Mather, but this was my first one in full). Hardly a breadline.
We had a bunch of good friends, but I wasn’t avid to expand the list: solitude, sealing myself off from the world, seemed to me a rare luxury. If that sounds like a misanthropic grunt, come back with me to 101 Union Street in Simcoe, on a rainy July afternoon in 1947. Pack six kids into the second floor of a creaking old barn of a house. A cacophony has already erupted: Walter and Tom are both bawling, in an early preview of stereo sound, after breaking a few dishes for fun. Mike is gabbing on the phone with a crony. Alas, the household racket drowns out the Bunny Berigan record he’s playing. Hugh is scraping the bow across what’s left of the bridge of his violin. Four-year-old sister Chris has started singing “Bobby Shafto”; she could be out to break her own record of singing it eighteen times without an intermission. I flip aside the book I’ve been trying to read. At moments such as this, I envy the Count of Monte Cristo.
It’s now twenty-nine years later. I’ve followed the saga of the Lampoon. Publisher Matty Simmons, who hasn’t given up after Beard and Kenney defected, taking the soul of the magazine with them, can’t—and won’t—believe the Lampoon is doomed. A million-circulation magazine that’s lost some cachet can still survive: a new editorial slant, a new editor, and an infusion of fresh young energy were crucial.
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A brief interlude here—a noncommercial break—to catch up with the other McCalls. Mike is still in the navy, flying planes (we McCalls always find a way to go against the grain). Hugh recently started as editor of Track & Traffic, which I helped secure for him through my relationship with the boss, Jerry Polivka. Tom was in the navy, too. But unlike Mike he was actually on ships (well, submarines), working as supplies support. Walt moved from St. Thomas to Windsor, where he became a local reporter for The Star. My kid sister, Chris, married one of my best friends, John (Jno) Jerome, in 1966. Both were magazine editors who despised New York life and quit in 1967 to live like hippie pioneers in rocky, isolated northern New Hampshire. Their departure robbed me of lively company. I railed against the move; it t
ook me a couple of years to square Chris and John’s shucking of cosmopolitan Manhattan life for freedom and independence. Which they valued and I would, down the road a ways, noisily embrace.
John was that rarity, an intellectual Texan. He was tall and slim and looked like a cowboy. His taciturnity hid a sharp wit that never stooped to cruelty. Quiet in his manner, Jno was the shyest man and best conversationalist I’d ever met. He’d followed a zigzag path to reach book publishing and wrote only about what interested him: building a stone wall; rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup; the strange allure of mountains; the “sweet spot” in sports. He wrote poetically but adhered to reality, acquiring a devoted readership far from the mainstream. Enough readers were attracted to support John Jerome’s work over a span of twenty-eight years.
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P.J. cleaned house. Into the trash went the literary element. Sex mattered. The editorial ambience dropped from faux Harvard to what you’d find in the auto-repair shop class of first-year boys enrolled in an unlicensed Arkansas trade school. The laughs were coarser. As in the Beard-Kenney era, females had only one major role: as photographic models showing their secondary sex characteristics. P.J. hired a crew of new writers headed by Chicagoan John Hughes, later Hollywood’s darling for writing and directing a slew of warmhearted teen-agony movies. It worked: the magazine replaced its lost cachet with a nose-picker persona from O’Rourke’s semi-redneck origins. The Lampoon’s heart was transplanted to Hollywood, where a single mammoth movie hit, Animal House, rerouted the magazine’s major purpose to making movies.
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In autumn 1975, a young Canadian refugee from Sonny and Cher, Laugh-In, and other network TV shows, Lorne Michaels, was aiming to be more than just a writer. He wanted to produce and call the shots, from casting to script approval and the myriad other elements of a TV program. Michaels charmed NBC into giving him the opportunity to run a new show. In return, NBC got a phenomenon. Michaels insisted that his new show be live, boast no stars, and run in one of the least coveted network slots imaginable: eleven thirty on Saturday night to one on Sunday morning.
As it turned out, it didn’t much matter whether the show was coming from the Hindu Kush, whether the week’s star host was Idi Amin, or whether the musical guest was Kate Smith. Showbiz glitz was out. Saturday Night Live debuted in October. Within a month it was a hit. Within a year it was a sensation. The sophisticated slapstick style pioneered in the pages of the National Lampoon came off even better on television, adding movement and sound, with weekly musical acts that were a must-see lure for the younger generation.
Lorne Michaels looked more and more like a genius, toppling stale shibboleths. Example: A live show ninety minutes long gave television’s old guard the willies. It forced cast members to navigate a tightrope in a milieu of nonstop tension. But a loosey-goosey young generation was forgiving of miscues; in fact, most believed a live TV show should stumble now and then. The Saturday Night crowd relished the odd gaffe: it made television more human.
The mouth-breathers would always have their comic books, but for many educated young people, the success of SNL deflated that appeal. Why get your laughs from a slow, clumsy, time-wasting medium like print? Never mind the fact that print forced you to pay to read it while TV was free, which led to America becoming a couch-potato nation. Except for PBS treats like a six-part documentary on the history of ink, network TV stuck to (moronically) simple ideas, expressed in (crude) simple words. You avoided having to learn anything: with TV, your one task was to turn the set on.
The National Lampoon, my central money source for five years, had been transmogrified into something cruder, aimed at kids. I no longer belonged. My alternative employment options shivered no timbers: stitching together enough assignments to underwrite Polly’s and my New York lifestyle was impossible—a fantasy. Yes, I regularly wrote and illustrated light humor for Car and Driver and Road & Track, the Red Sox and Yankees of car magazines, but they needed only occasional japes. Beyond that, my universe was empty. The odd windfall assignment wasn’t a career. I had to accept the fact that my artistic skills were too arcane to be trusted by most advertising art directors. Once again my imagination froze when the chips were down. I’d made no contacts that could generate a chain of tips and introductions, either in advertising or on the editorial side. My blinkered vision told me that one option remained.
A résumé needed to be prepared. I had an advertising career to make claims about; everything else in my employment history was crap. Any potential boss would slide his or her eyes down the page and discover, under the Education heading, proof of such incompetence that my fate would be sealed, as in, say, a tomb. My tactic in the face of probable defeat was ingenuity itself: write like a hack professor in a backwater college, someone striving to impress his betters with erudition and boldness so striking that I’d be hired just so they could have a latter-day orator around.
I decided after a month with no responses, either from editors or creative directors, that somewhere in the résumé there must have been a gaffe, a political hint, or some other wordage that wrecked my cause. That was the moment when I abandoned the formalities and pleaded with Michael O’Donoghue to get me an interview for a job as a writer on Saturday Night Live. I compressed my suitability credentials to a couple of points. One: I was a good writer in print and a professional artist who naturally thought in images. No minor plus for a show so dependent on a creative use of settings. Two: I’d been writing satire in some form since I was a kid. I was also that rarity in America: a humorist specializing in satire, the lifeblood of this new kind of TV comedy.
Mr. Mike broadcast his disdain for all network comedy and most comedians, Lenny Bruce excepted. Brooking no criticism, he felt Bruce was the one uncorrupted humorist, probably in the known universe. Over the years, O’Donoghue’s uncompromising humor and his role-playing as a sharp-witted cynic made him a kind of front man—for the Lampoon but also as a Che Guevara for all comedic rascals. His jump from 635 Madison to 30 Rockefeller Center was momentous for both sides. He had become the poster boy for the Lampoon’s brash-brat reputation. That was okay with Mr. Mike, who relished (and burnished) his enfant-terrible image. Everything he wrote reflected outrage: an O’Donoghue piece never flattered his audience so much as beat it up. Lorne Michaels’s hiring of O’Donoghue helped position Michaels as a pioneer of advanced TV comedy. O’Donoghue never pulled his punches. Out went fifty years of mass-audience American comedy. In crashed a new barbarian mode.
O’Donoghue and I had never had a fight or even cross words. He and his gal pal, Anne Beatts, dined now and then with Polly and me. Polly had helped Michael produce the Lampoon Radio Hour; his willfulness and daily tantrums, often aimed her way, failed to faze her. Once he realized she wouldn’t take his guff, Michael backed off, although he still managed the occasional fond dig, as in his description of Polly as “a rich girl with no money.” To this point I’d avoided asking Mr. Mike, as he styled himself, to get me in on the action, but now I shamelessly importuned him to use his influence on my behalf. I wanted an interview in the Comedy Xanadu with Lorne Michaels.
Mr. Mike came through. Two weeks later, on a hot, late August Friday afternoon, I drove into Manhattan from our rented Wainscott summerhouse to be inducted into the world of network television. Lorne Michaels was polite and undemonstrative, in the Canadian way. I immediately played my Canadians-in-U.S.-showbiz card: “We Canadians seem to be taking over American comedy, all right!” My piercing insight elicited no response. I tried our common bond of growing up in Toronto. That and my bulletin on U.S. comedy becoming Canadian-heavy had bought me five minutes of “Auld Lang Syne.”
We chatted briefly. There’s a lingo used by senior showbiz types. Lorne knew it; I didn’t. The interview went from tired generalities by me to Michaels’s generalities in reply. He got up from his desk, the signal that our talk was over. I headed for the d
oor. Lorne was offering me a provisional job. He had no budget for another writer, but I could come aboard at a mere token salary; if I showed promise by the end of the 1976–77 season there might be an opening I could fill.
No slap on the back as I left. Michaels was already on the phone to someone who counted. The interview and the half job was a personal favor to Mr. Mike; he entertained no conviction that this modest introvert would soon be deluging him with brilliant TV skits. My desperate need for employment had been satisfied—if you interpreted “satisfied” to mean supplementing a nothing salary with my own savings. I took the elevator down to street level, harboring feelings that matched its rate of decline. Lorne Michaels knew every TV comedy writer on the planet, and we both knew I wasn’t one of them.
I was now a part, however modest, of TV’s hottest entertainment property. Why, then, did this triumph of ambition feel so similar to the agony of defeat? I should have barged in, fire in the belly and smoke pouring out of my ears. Instead, I spit the bit. Polly tried cheering me up the weekend before my first day at Saturday Night in early September. I bucked up and used every erg of willpower to banish my self-image of the beaten-down dunce of 1951 that had never gone away, only skulked nearby, waiting to bring me down. The palliatives of money and relative success had smothered the pain of my early life. Willpower alone kept the pain and its partner, distress, at bay but hadn’t abolished it. Those ancient bruises connived to return whenever actual progress threatened.
