by Sam Wasson
In that improv set, Alexander saw Bill Murray and his joyfully nihilistic fusion of sincerity and sarcasm, the “blend of outrage and resignation, passion and black humor” historian Bruce J. Schulman identified as the distinctively skeptical style of the 1970s outlaw. One moment, Murray totally lost himself in character, as if improvising for Paul Sills; the next moment he seemed to be standing outside of not just his character but the entire scene, joking about joking, too blasé to even pretend to act. How did he switch so easily between them? Taking deep into heart the wisdom of Del Close, who advised Murray, as he did everyone, to wear his characters like a trench coat—knowledge that had been passed on to Del, years earlier, from Elaine May—Murray developed a relaxed pose of simple, subtle behaviors easy to slip into and out of. “Using small effects is from Second City,” Murray reflected.
Crooning as a Las Vegas lounge singer, as he did in many improvisations offstage and on- throughout 1973, Murray, disco to Belushi’s rock ’n’ roll, would change his character name and shift from moronic dumb guy to dead-serious entertainer, exercising both muscles, intensity and irony, to incredible effect. Beside him at the piano, Second City’s longtime musical director, Fred Kaz—a powerful presence at the theater for many years—had the stylistic fluency to follow Murray wherever his riffs bore him, and vice versa; a good musical idea from Kaz and his piano, like another improviser, could sway Murray in yet another direction. He really could play Bach with his right hand and Monk with his left. Squinting between beard and sailor’s cap, Kaz was the paragon of nighthawk cool, Del’s analogue in jazz, discoursing in mumbled cycles of images and epigrams aimed at the unconscious, the conductor, he thought, of a comedy orchestra. Some regarded Kaz as the longest-running member of the company. “He kept us all afloat,” improviser Ann Ryerson said, talking to them with sounds, thinking music into their ideas. Kaz said, “Sure, you can say, ‘If you play diminished chords, it’s scary music. If you hold these notes down silently and strum the strings, it’s like a harp.’ But how do you say, ‘This scene is really dragging and it’s getting too serious and they don’t know how to bust out of it, so what if you go “diddle dee, wang wang” on the piano, someone in the wings comes out in a funny hat and walks out like Charlie Chaplin.’ Or what if you sense this is the real phrase of what is happening, where you can probably goose the response by taking the music out here, it makes a point and brings a response where there might not be a rise otherwise?” Kaz knew how. Out of the corner of his ear, Murray heard him.
“The whole lounge-singer thing,” Tino Insana said, “was there so Bill could just play with the audience.”
That character—making his mainstage debut as “Steve”—closed the first act of Et Tu, Kohoutek, Second City’s forty-seventh revue, with “Las Vegas,” a loosely structured outlet for Murray’s sultry impertinence. Lending support, Insana introduces the sketch from offstage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he proclaims, “Caesar’s Palace, right here in Las Vegas, is proud to present the comedy and song stylings of ‘Read ’em and Weep!’” Into the spotlight comes Murray, singing, “Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon—balloon!” and makes straight for the audience. “Say, where’re you from? Champaign? I love it out there . . .” Apropos of nothing, Insana runs on, pulled by an invisible dog on a leash—“Bow, wow, wow,” Insana jokes—and runs off again. Murray awards him a false laugh. “Get out of here, you nut!,” he says. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jackie Weep!” Then it’s back to brownnosing the crowd (“Are there any grandmothers in the audience tonight?”), feigning sincerity, flaunting self-importance (“You know, a lot of people have been putting this country down . . .”), and finally getting down on one knee for the big bullshit finish, “Walk on, through the rain / Walk on, through the storm,” which Murray full-throat belts, clutching onto Insana’s leg until the lights black out. “Thank you very much! Goodnight!”
Andrew Alexander went to Bernie with a good guess. He had never done this before, so bear with him: What if Alexander got a small, seven-thousand-dollar investment from this guy he knew in the meatpacking business, a guy who had already invested in the Adelaide Street venture, and reopened Second City in the Old Fire Hall, the multistory former fire station that a lawyer and three doctors, one of them divorcing and in debt, had ineffectively converted into a dinner and dancing venue, and—here was the winning angle—serve dinner with the show? Bernie knew what that meant. With food, enough to satisfy the Liquor Control Board (crepes didn’t cut it), Alexander could sell liquor, the absence of which had pretty much doomed the Adelaide enterprise. To keep the receipts looking fifty-fifty balanced between food and drink, Alexander would sell dinner-theater packages—food, booze, and entertainment rolled innocently into one. Of course, they’d have to get the improvisers back together, but it had only been six months, and—
“Sure,” Bernie said, summarizing Second City’s long-held business strategy. “Why not?”
Like that, Alexander—this quietly high-strung college dropout with few producing credits to his résumé—had the job. He called Joe Flaherty in Pittsburgh.
“Joe? I talked to the cast”—John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rosemary Radcliffe, and Gilda Radner—“and they said I had to get you back up here.”
“Yeah,” Flaherty said. “Sure!”
With its belfry and imposing brick archways, the Old Fire Hall looked like one of those cavernous orphanages out of Dickens, and after dark, when the drunk and homeless of Jarvis Street swarmed the liquor store opposite and that short block went Oliver Twist, you would have to second-guess your map if you were among those coming to Lombard Street dressed up for an evening of respectable Canadian dinner theater. “Nothing was bleaker,” Flaherty said, “than Jarvis Street in the wintertime.” But no, yes, you were at the right place. Inside, up the creaking, Miss Havisham staircase, you would begin with your prepaid dinner at the second-floor restaurant, a cranky “French” affair of gloved waiters and pretended elegance. “Most people with half a brain would never eat there,” said waitress Sally Cochrane. “We had an hour and fifteen minutes to serve everyone before the show. Everyone in, everyone out.” Soup or salad and pick your meat. “They’d be in a drunken bad mood after dinner,” Flaherty said, “because of the food.” The theater itself was its own bad mood. “You could barely see through the smoke,” Cochrane said, “and it smelled bad. The chairs were uncomfortable. The tables were tiny.”
Having replaced Flaherty three months into his Adelaide run, three months before the theater shut down, Eugene Levy entered the Fire Hall company an experienced beginner, a major asset to the sketch portion of the evening (memorably in his “Ricardo and the Trained Amoeba” skit, wherein, Levy said, “I do all the orchestral music while I’m working with this trained amoeba and then I crack the whip, he does a trick, and I take out my microscope to see if he’s where he’s supposed to be”), but when it came to taking suggestions, he clenched. Before the second set, while the others raced through improv suggestions backstage, Levy, uncomfortable with the go-go-go of Second City improvisation, held back. He could not lock in and commit to a scene element without reflecting on its consequences, and the consequence of those consequences, and the consequences of . . . time the intermission did not allow. “It’s hard to just flip from ‘Let’s go with that’ to ‘All right, let’s go with that,’” he said. “I’m not always there yet.” Without a solid conceptual foundation for an improvisation, Levy couldn’t launch. “Give Eugene a moment,” was a common backstage refrain. “Hold on. Wait for Eugene.” He ate the same way . . . chewing, chewing, chewing . . . chewing . . .
Not that Levy was thinking slower, or less; if anything, he was thinking more, Bobby Fischer playing out chess moves, each one an idea, on several boards at once. Onstage, his steady deliberation, evocative of Jack Benny, one of Levy’s heroes, paid dividends in segments like the fictional TV news anchors Earl Camembert and Floyd Robertson. The joke was that Flaherty, as Floyd, always delivered the important, big hea
dline stories, where Levy, as Earl, got the scraps—cat stuck in tree, a forecast of light showers over the weekend. The opportunities for Earl’s still and silent slow-burning self-doubt and humiliation, doubly hilarious next to Flaherty’s cheery flamboyance, would be vintage Levy, and serve him beautifully for the rest of his career. No one at Second City could swallow a volcano like Eugene, then let the lava drip from the farthest corners of his expression, until, drip by agonizing drip, his eyes scream I can’t take it anymore and, in a matter of milliseconds, explode.
Gilda was a different improviser entirely. She could not fail. “Her personality could bail her out of every situation,” Levy said. “The audience loved her. If she got stuck, she’d look out at the audience, the audience knew, and they would just howl.” Gilda didn’t need “character”; Gilda, Martin Short observed, was more than enough. When, for instance, the ensemble needed to buy time between sketches—maybe, backstage, the right prop couldn’t be located—an offstage voice would call out, “Stall!” and into the fray, a giggling Gilda, chewing a mouthful of sugarless gum, would appear onstage, laughing in shared nervousness with the audience, and start talking. About her day, about her outfit, about her breakfast . . .
“Hi. I’m Gilda. I had toast today . . .”
Regressing to a childlike state, even when she played adults, Gilda spun out of pure sugar the character of Miss Eleanor Teably, based on her girlhood nanny, Dibby. “I’m almost 32 years old,” she said in 1978, “and sometimes I look at my face and I don’t see a grown woman. What I see is a child who has lived for many years.” And so Miss Teably, shuffling along, squeaking about the inanimate objects she taught to speak on their own, came to life on the Second City stage, with the support of Eugene Levy. “She played a woman with a talking shoe,” Levy recalled, “and I would be her interviewer.” That shoe, Miss Teably beamed, was her prize pupil.
More than anyone else at Second City, the improviser in Gilda was about play, the poetic right to pretend, which the twenty-eight-year-old regarded, calmly and appreciatively, as permission to go comfortably insane. “If you think about it,” she said, “the concept of creating a reality on stage, and then having to bend that reality to wait for the laugh . . . it’s schizophrenic.” That’s just it. You could be crazy here. You could be everything that was you—and loved for it.
“What a gift,” O’Hara said of Radner, “to have a place where you could go every night and express yourself. You have something to say? Get on the stage.” O’Hara’s time came at last, after her second tryout, when she won a slot as an understudy. Her first improvisation came midway into 1974.
The suggestion: Mosquitoes.
Backstage, racing through ideas, Eugene refused the rush to scene assignments. His deliberate consideration of each possibility, each choice and its ramifications, unnerved O’Hara, who, in the early days of their association—one that would span decades—was his precise opposite, ready to go with anything, fast. As preparation time ran out, she would nudge him into speech: “Eugene! Eugene! Eugene!” But he only cleared his throat, hedging to buy himself another thought. Between themselves, Flaherty, Candy, and the rest, they delivered each other to an idea: mosquitoes swarming the cottage country of Muskoka. Eugene agreed. They’d slap bugs the whole scene.
Then they were on. “Because I knew Candy the best,” O’Hara said, “I stayed close to him, and because instinctively I knew he would be accepting, and because he had already hired me for the touring company, so I felt safe, I stayed next to him and slapped him for the whole scene, his whole body, just slapping him.”
After the show, Candy taught O’Hara how to fake a slap. “Anyone else,” she said, “would have killed me.”
In the summer of 1974, O’Hara was inducted into the main company. “I was flying blind,” she said. Until then, O’Hara’s sketch and improvisational training consisted of watching Gilda and the others, the few workshops she took under Flaherty, and, going way back to high school, “a great theater arts teacher who wore lopsided wigs and let anyone who wanted to create material, get up and create it.” When in doubt, O’Hara latched on to insane behaviors, unleashed her most argumentative self, and borrowed from real-life characters around her. “Getting the job at Second City gave me such a good excuse for watching people,” she said, “but I did it anyway.” At the encouragement of friends, who loved her imitations of a local woman she spied ambling around Aykroyd’s place at 505 Queen Street East, O’Hara stuck out her jaw and cultivated Penny, a bossy, toothless, argumentative, arguably insane person. “When Catherine played a character,” Levy said, “she was the character. She didn’t just throw on a sweater and call herself an Old Woman. She became that character.” It was a marked departure from the Del Close and Elaine May school of improvisational acting, which advocated a light touch, flexible in accord with a gestating scene. It was wholly in step, however, with the dawning school of legit theater-based, character-centric Toronto improvisation. “Maybe because everyone made me do it so I had so much experience doing it,” O’Hara said, “I could improvise longer as Penny than I could as any other character.” She—Penny—combined the cockiness and ignorance “at the core of every great comedy character,” O’Hara said. “It’s actually the core of life, going along as if we know what we’re doing when really we don’t.” From that real-life core of false confidence can come the actual confidence—seemingly out of nowhere—to improvise comedy. “I swear,” O’Hara said, “if life doesn’t beat it out of you, everyone is born with the possibility of being funny.”
Elaine moved Mikey and Nicky to Los Angeles, to the Sunset Marquis Hotel, a favorite of New Yorkers for its apartment-style suites and introverted, anti-Hollywood attitude, and spread her postproduction team and their equipment across several rooms, her own and theirs, where she could sleep and work a conscientious distance apart, and, in the spring of 1974, settled in to finish what she had been editing for many months already, beginning on location in Philadelphia and continuing in the Brill Building in New York. Since then—although, by some accounts, Elaine had already shot every scene at least once—she had come to Los Angeles to shoot even more. Finally, she really did have to stop; time, an accordion in Elaine’s hands, could not be stretched any further. There were consequences now. According to her contract, a poem of legal concision and contingency, she had until June 1—about a year since production began—to deliver a finished picture to Paramount. In exchange, they granted Elaine final cut. In exchange.
Did I mention she had a million feet of film? The equivalent of one hundred two-hour films? And that some scenes, shot with several cameras, she shot without a slate needed to sync sound to picture? And that at night, after her editor John Carter went to bed, she would tiptoe into the editing room and undo what he had cut together?
She decided that she and her team and their assistants required yet another set of eyes. In came Sheldon Kahn, assistant editor, to sync one of those slateless scenes, forty-eight hundred feet of film and six different cameras. Willing to work upwards of eighteen hours a day, six days a week, and, as a relative novice, too green to know the difference, Kahn took to Elaine’s nocturnal schedule, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m., without objection. She promoted him to editor.
For months of nights, Kahn and Carter worked on separate KEM flatbed editing tables, each in his own office, converted bedrooms of their two-room suite. What would have been the living room became Mikey and Nicky’s film library, home base for assistants charged with dumping out ashtrays (empty film cans) and syncing and cataloguing the miles and miles and miles of film, racked and stacked in boxes floor to ceiling—you couldn’t see wall—every frame of which Elaine had memorized. In editing, unlike production, no one ever had to wait for her. In fact, the opposite: Kahn and Carter had to race to keep up with Elaine’s imagination. Those synapses were their only hope for making that June 1 deadline. “Elaine was so fast on her thinking,” Kahn said, “that she would give me ideas of how to put a scene together and she would r
un over to John’s [Carter’s] room and work with him. She never had to wait for us to show her anything. She was always having ideas.” Possibilities gushed out of her, two, three, four at a time. They crossed in the air, impossible to understand. “She thinks so fast,” Kahn said, “that she would start a sentence and in the middle of a sentence go to the next sentence, and the thing is you learn when you’re working with Elaine that you wait for her to come around the second time to get the complete idea because you may not get it the first time. Within three or four weeks, I was right on top of it.”
For May, Kahn learned how to improvise with images. “I was willing to try anything Elaine wanted,” he said. “I never said no.”
Kahn, who had grown up listening to Mike and Elaine on LP, would begin every day with a joke he told May “purposely badly,” Kahn said, “so she could turn to me and go, ‘Oh, Shelly, that’s not the way you tell that joke,’” which she did, and followed it with a pitch-perfect recitation as precise and seemingly practiced as if she were competing in a spelling bee. “And then,” Kahn said, “she would tell me not only how far back the joke goes, but all the derivatives of that joke all the way from the beginning to where it is today.” Abundant in variation, editing Mikey and Nicky worked in much the same way. Casually, improvisationally, Elaine would offer Kahn an editorial suggestion, a what-if or let’s-try, and Kahn, not always knowing if she had shot and printed the material he needed to cut her thoughts together, had to dive into the living room of film, without thinking, the clock ticking, and swim around for places to drill drill drill. Story was oil, buried and liquid; but your ocean floor was Elaine’s surface. So drill! Go! Like she had Falk and Cassavetes, Elaine freed Kahn to discover the best of him, and therefore, them, providing his fingers with enough film, enough variations in shot size and performance, for him to reply to her imagination, in pictures, almost any way he imagined. One scene they would try sixteen or seventeen different ways, and each way had to be assembled, finessed, discussed, compared, and viewed in context. Try explaining this to a studio: a scene that would have taken Mike Nichols four or five hours took Elaine May weeks. “When you’ve got a million feet of film,” Kahn said, “you’ve got a lot of different ways to put a movie together.” But how Kahn would justify logical impossibilities (“Wasn’t Peter in the kitchen in the last shot?”), he had no idea. And yet he did. “I was learning so much from Elaine about how to put something together that shouldn’t go together necessarily,” he said. “I could get from one place to the next place because of Elaine, how to fake certain things in order to make it work. If she wanted me to cut something backwards and upside down—which she did—I would.” And then, after he made it work, Elaine would return from John Carter’s room to take a look at the results, nod at Kahn’s little screen, and say, “Okay, well, now let’s do that scene from John’s point of view.” And on through every point of view, and for each point of view there was a variation. “You know,” she would say, returning to assess the results, “I like the third way we did it best.”
