How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

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  The Saturday Night offices occupied most of the nineteenth floor of the Rockefeller Center complex. Space was too tight for an office at my humble level. A battered desk in a long hallway would have to suffice, but at least the semi-dark corridor was lightly trafficked. I felt isolated but not alone: a fellow hallway denizen sat at a desk a few feet away. Tom Schiller was a video guy doing short comic sequences dropped into the show now and then. He used his frequent downtime to try writing live-action bits for the show. Maybe because he didn’t wear the hot young performer’s slick coating of cool, Tom was open and helpful—as in answering “Where’s the john?” and other pertinent queries.

  Some SNL cast members had been regulars on the radio show. John Belushi, the terrifying performer, was a gentle, sweet-natured civilian. I had written a sketch making fun of Belushi’s Albanian descent; I showed him the script and he thought it was funny but asked me to kill it. He feared it would offend his Albanian-immigrant parents.

  Belushi’s frequent partner and cowriter, Dan Aykroyd, talked like an outlaw biker, usually in an aggressively loud, blustery voice. His energy was exhausting. His ideas—the ridiculous and ridiculously funny Coneheads, the blender that could turn a whole fish into soup—were original. Although we were fellow Canadians, this kinship never came up.

  Chevy Chase looked Ivy League. He’d leave the show in a month or so, and seemed to be preoccupied with his imminent stardom. He’d separated himself from his fellow cast members. Chevy was, from where I sat, the least popular guy in that close-knit group.

  You couldn’t not be a fan of Gilda Radner. Everyone felt protective of that needy soul: on camera, Gilda was hilarious, in control, a trouper who drew laughs whatever the role. Off camera was different: emotionally fragile enough to be in tears half the time, yet selflessly supportive of everyone who needed it. Jane Curtin came from a completely different world: affluent, suburban, settled. She was easy to talk to. How she got into the Saturday Night caravansary mystified me: she wasn’t funny, didn’t look weird, indeed was as straight as can be. And those factors, I realized, were just what the show needed: a figure the crazies could play off.

  Laraine Newman transmitted a West Coast sensibility that perfectly fit exotic roles. I never contacted her essence. The comedy duo of Al Franken and Tom Davis had no easy time on camera; their real value was in the writing they contributed. Franken had a wider grasp of life than anyone else; if “intellectual” could ever be ascribed to somebody working in TV comedy, Al Franken was one. Maybe the only one.

  Hundreds of fame-hungry writers would have gladly given their left testicle for the opportunity I’d been vouchsafed. I kept both of mine. I also kept a day-by-day diary. Impressions outweigh factual reporting, but the diary is a conscientious day-by-day record of that not-at-all-wonderful adventure:

  Monday

  Every step uncertain. Sit reading Time and the Post and looking engaged while people buzz all around, very busy. No typewriter. Schiller shows me around a bit, short talk to O’Donoghue, Beatts. See Michaels briefly. Overwhelming sense of confusion; standing at base of mountain whose top—the actual show—is obscured in mist. How to get from here to there? Suddenly, no idea. Hours drag. Weird schedule. Having done no work, hard to know when I can gracefully leave. Leave around 8.

  Tuesday

  Still no typewriter. More sitting around. Meet more people but feel keenly lack of “belonging” and have little to contribute to conversation. Borrow a typewriter, try to work out list of ideas. Work on Martin Bormann Amexco idea rest of day. Michaels suggests helping Alan Zweibel with “George and Cornelia” thing but he’s done it. Help Schiller write end of “Paris” sketch. Itch to produce ideas strong. Had worked up a few ideas in the previous week in Wainscott and at home, now put them on paper.

  Wednesday

  Bring in ideas and show to O’Donoghue. He critiques them. Left with three or four possibles and a sharper understanding of what is likely to and isn’t likely to work. Schiller slightly more encouraging but already clear O’Donoghue is tougher and better than anybody else. Make notes of what Michaels said re: each piece. Abandon Bormann thing. Meeting for run-thru in Michaels’s office at 2. Self-conscious in the meeting—I have nothing to contribute. It is unexpectedly relaxed and friendly all ’round. Still feel complete outsider. Had brought portable typewriter from home but my new machine finally arrives. Learn how 1-to-1 parody not enough. Anything that would work on Carol Burnett, etc., not for this show. You can’t be simply absurd. Have to cull ideas from real life, and twist them. “West Point Cheater Bowl” has possibilities. Resolve to show stuff around and not get too private. General pace and level of wisecracks and conversation is too quick for me. I feel sluggish. Say nothing funny. For a 41-year-old feel decidedly green and young.

  Thursday

  Had idea about “Eskimo in the R.A.F.” Wednesday night and try writing it most of Thursday. Start out in high gear but gradually it becomes clear that this is simply a phrase, not an idea, and lacking any logical action or a real premise, it won’t go anywhere. Schiller shows me around the set and associated mysteries. It is a maze. Everybody busy but me. Not relaxed. Keep working on “Eskimo” idea, but with sinking feeling. It will take more than that. Also thinking about Chinese Opera. A “good look,” as they say, but again, no real content. Seeing and hearing other people’s ideas makes me sometimes despair. Can I ever be that sharp? Not in the groove yet. Have to work through the pile of ideas I started out with in order to break into the right stuff. Beginning to grasp difference apt and inept ideas for skits. Much of my stuff only puns. Absurdist. Like radio material. This show demands more topicality. Every idea has to work harder. A matter of mental conditioning, too. My three years of hibernation, and three months in Wainscott, have left me somewhat dull and uninventive. The handful of ideas I’d had for articles or books seems suddenly very thin and paltry. Not enough stimulation. The demand for material on TV is insatiable and stirs your brains. You accelerate all aspects of the creative process. [My then agent] David Obst that night (Wednesday) describes fiasco of my book proposal at Random House and Simon & Schuster. A letdown, but not a very painful one in this context. I have new and more immediate worries. Word of David McClelland’s suicide that night. [Marginal note: (Watch cassette of “Citizen K”)]

  Friday

  Write “Weekend Update” things all day. Incredibly slow. Begin to perceive shape of these items is subtler than I’d thought. The joke has to be fast and at the end. Solzhenitsyn piece occupies hours. Traffic safety also. Chevy [Chase] is reasonably enthusiastic about these but I suspect he’s being nice. Tension is clearly mounting as time for show comes closer. Office largely empty while I work. Don’t visit set—too boring, too much time to do nothing while my energies are all throbbing. I’d burst. I am humbled, but not discouraged by Friday night. It will be harder than I thought. But it can be done, and after five days I’ve learned so much that it seems logical that another few weeks will get me where I have to be mentally. At which point I could contribute. Good ideas sometimes just arrive. No mechanical process is likely. They’re close-knit, and I’m not yet part of the group. Partly my unwillingness to let go of my privacy and reticence. Have to mix it up with them or no hope of success.

  Sunday

  Necessary social intercourse with platoons of strange people, from first minute to last every day of every work week, is the hardest aspect to adjust to. This is exacerbated by the absence of an office with a door that can be shut to seal you off from all the static. I’m exposed continuously, and haven’t yet been able to train my ears to filter out the extraneous.

  Last night’s show was I guess about average for SatNite, not terrific and not a total failure. The amount of energy, emotion, time, skill, money, and ego invested in those 90 fleeting minutes, though, was amazing. “Appalling” was my first choice of adjective. I stumbled out of the studio afterw
ards, wondering how these folks can muster the required industry and concern, etc., week after week after week, all for the sake of . . . that. That evanescent little series of pallid images on a TV screen. My panicky reaction at that moment was, I couldn’t and can’t. Most things don’t matter. But TV . . . it really doesn’t matter.

  Yet why is it so hard? I quickly counter. And it is hard to make live TV comedy work, as last night’s show by omission underscores. Worst of all creative worlds—a medium that is tripe, work that is unspeakably difficult and drudgery-laden.

  But then I remind myself that this is the recognized best of its kind, and any other show would be even worse. I think part of the sense of letdown I feel—felt all week—connects with the nature of the illusion that this is TV and showbiz; the seediness, scuzziness, utter lack of glamour and fun and illusion, behind the scenes. The discovery of all that rusty, dirty, ordinary-looking machinery behind the magic can make you cynical. Everybody in TV is cynical, I find. From where they sit, it’s inevitable. This seldom happens in print. The writer doesn’t have to pull proofs or watch the presses. If there indeed is any such creature as a “natural” TV writer, I’m not him. The term “apprentice” in reference to my position on that show is all too accurate. My nagging question is whether the apprenticeship is worth living through; whether I really want to go where the acquisition of TV writing skills is likely to take me—that is, into more TV and more into TV. Unlike most of my colleagues, I didn’t grow up in the fifties and sixties acutely aware of television and making plentiful room for it in my life and career. The medium isn’t one I have studied or even thought about much when I didn’t have to, which was all the time. I’m not sure at my age, with an almost spiritual loyalty to print, that I can now graft a TV mentality onto myself. And I begin to think that to succeed in this racket, you have to do just that. It’s a knack to un-learn, not to write for permanence as you do in print. On TV, you can learn to get away with whatever works at the moment, without reference to any larger frame of reference. My linear training keeps tripping me up. I work too logically.

  I’m also about the only non-doper, non-Village, non-Woodstock type in the general vicinity—an elderly bourgeois fellow with a wife and a clean apartment, even a dog. I felt so alien last night in the greenroom with all those types among whom it’s almost a matter of professional pride to be strung out. Their, er, lifestyles and mine are so hopelessly separate. Depressing, that. Not because I feel I’m too late or too old, but the opposite—what the fuck is a fellow like me, who has grown up and who found what he wants and likes it, and has dismissed ratty clothes and the putdown as conversational currency and the whole tedious business of “hanging out”—what am I doing among all these barely-post-juvenile delinquents? Only way I’m going to win this issue is by sweeping along on such a high tide of unassailable talent that they’ll just have to accept my middle-aged eccentricity.

  The show just kind of happens by Saturday in the rehearsals. I am still baffled as to the exact route things take from the blank sheets in the typewriters on Monday to the final typed-up script issued late Friday afternoon. Who decides what, and why, are veiled in Rosicrucian-like secrecy. There’s much quibbling and grousing about sketches that get dropped—they usually have 30 minutes more than the show needs. Sketches are rewritten and reworked virtually until airtime.

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  I’d never kept a diary, for the intellectually sound reason that the drama of my life was all in my mind, and arguments between the warring sides would be boring to read blow-by-blow years later. The Saturday Night diary was different. The major purpose of writing an entry every day was to talk to myself (because there was nobody to complain to), to answer broad questions, and to witness and record the strange world I’d stumbled into. Talking to myself also provided a candid look at what I was doing—for future reference.

  Exactly mirroring my state of mind, the diary peters out once I abandoned TV writing as a career and Saturday Night Live as a job. By then, I had nothing to learn and had become bored by the elephantine process of staging a five-minute comedy sketch. I made no friends there. Common use of drugs was a way of life among the cast; I wasn’t interested. That made me uninteresting. I came to the show over the transom, in the second season, when writers and actors had already formed relationships that had hardened. I was an interloper, needed by nobody.

  The age difference penalized me: I was at least a decade older than everybody in the writing and cast cadres. That was deadly: my values had been shaped in a world not familiar to these sprouts and vice versa. The culture had speeded up tremendously: no good at all, when the show’s very theme concentrated on the current me, not the now half-obsolete baby boom generation.

  “Despair” is a word flung around too carelessly: the dark feelings we all experience in life, if you haven’t actually checked out potential suicide locations, are depression. Extreme depression is close to despair.

  Gobs of the stuff occluded my skull the Friday afternoon in mid-November when I decided enough was enough and walked away from Saturday Night, still in the early days of its second season. Enough internal rage at never having solved writing TV comedy. Enough guilt at lacking the initiative and the guts to force myself into that fractious family. Enough regret, mixed in with guilt, that I had actually kept my distance from the writers and cast members I might have asked or, what the hell, begged to help me figure it all out. Those were only the obvious regrets; I’d keep digging up regret and guilt stragglers for years.

  Polly sympathized, but only so far. That show, she said in the spirit of the loyal opposition, is the gravy train. A very few writers will ever get a crack at it. And here I was, announcing defeat after a lousy three months. I countered with my increasingly existential response. Ultimately, it wasn’t my isolation or my sense of exclusion. I didn’t and never could feel excitement about working in TV. I toyed with accusing myself of gutlessness in turning off the superhighway to SNL, but even with my guilt working overtime, I knew there was another side to it. I’d earned a niche in the world of illustration. It would be illogical to throw away something I’d been doing all my life, gotten good at, and loved. The possibility of making money as an illustrator was a long-term goal, if a vague one. But from my current position in the back of the pack, it wasn’t exactly hardheaded reasoning to forecast big money waiting to be scooped up in the parking lot at the end of the rainbow.

  The central issue in our lives dictated a strange interlude: materially, I’d never had it so good (and this was still from the larder of advertising). Yet how long could the Big Bad Wolf be hammering at our front door? My sense of prosperity and the comfort of living well—all of it was built on sand. Sooner or later the bank account would dry up and end this sunny mirage of well-being.

  The next year lay fallow. I’d lost conviction, didn’t know who I was. I wasted an opportunity by doing a piece (both the writing and illustrations) on the Battle of Britain—one of the best pieces I’ve ever done—and throwing it away in the pages of Oui, a magazine aimed at readers who found its parent, Playboy, too intellectually challenging.

  We left Manhattan to start a family and try our hands at rural life. One of them worked out; my daughter, Amanda.

  Chapter 10

  Appalachia North

  I’d interred the Saturday Night Live experience in the darker corners of my memory, but it kept popping up like a guilty conscience. What could be done to shake the gloom that descended whenever I tried to foresee a life that worked? Passing myself off as a writer after my pratfall on a live TV show seemed almost criminally dishonest. The memory of a lifelong romance with words left a sour taste in my mouth.

  Maybe a normal upbringing would have shaped my career and produced a normal artist. But only extreme conditions could produce the kind of artist I became. The seesaw effect of trying to decide between writing and art had been roiling my innards since boyhood. I se
ttled it by defining myself as both an artist and a writer. That shut me up.

  New York itself was beginning to feel alien. When you aren’t being productive, the city has no place for you. The taste in my mouth was bitter. I couldn’t have fun in New York now. I didn’t deserve it.

  I wasn’t the first dummy to blame his screwups on where he worked. For me, depression—or its visible effects—gradually retreated, replaced by a fresh emotional state I invented: baseless optimism doomed to fail, or what psychiatrists prefer to call super hubris. This inspired a bold plan: run from the city that neither knew nor needed me, and hide. It was a plan that was, as a close friend remarked, “ten times wackier than before,” not to mention career suicide.

  I had insisted on buying a farm with a barn in Western Massachusetts’s all too authentic re-creation of Yoknapatawpha County, a place where neither of us had ever set foot, where nobody we knew lived. Making drastically illogical decisions—like ours to leave New York and invest our life in a mythical paradise—rapidly swelled into full-fledged reality. The deciding factor for us was the endorsement of my polymathic friend Dan Okrent, who’d recently left a job at Harcourt Brace and ventured north to start New England Monthly magazine. He didn’t try to stop us but lured us forward and right off the cliff. My official excuse for getting out of Manhattan was the shame of flopping at writing funny skits for the hottest comedy on TV. That, and we succumbed to the craze set off by Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal of trading in taxis and skyscrapers for gardening clogs and stone-mantel fireplaces.

  The Okrents found a rambling old house in the pleasant little crossroads town of Worthington, Massachusetts. It seemed only natural that Dan’s house abutted the local golf course. By the time Polly and I had started serious shopping, he and Becky were well settled.