“Are you on tonight?” she asked, giving me a warm hug.
“Hey, Darrell!” a voice yelled from behind me. I turned to find Jodi Mancuso, the Emmy Award–winning SNL hairstylist.
A moment later, a tap on the shoulder: another Emmy Award-winner, Katreese Barnes, assistant music director and keyboardist with the SNL Band.
The warm welcome went a long way toward calming my nerves at being back. I assumed everyone knew what bad shape I’d been in when I’d left in 2009, but it didn’t seem that way at all.
I went inside, past the line of tourists waiting in line for the NBC Studio tour, and headed for the elevator and up to the eighth floor.
Upstairs, Lindsay greeted me and showed me to my guest dressing room, where I picked up a new version of the script before heading over to the hair and makeup department, down the hall near the cast dressing rooms. On the way, I passed the shelf where the head models for the cast and recurring hosts are kept. I was a little sad to see mine was gone.
But when I turned into the hair and makeup room, there it was, and on top of it was a masterpiece of blond swirls that rivaled the real Trump’s signature “do.” Bettie Rogers, the head of the hairstyling department, another Emmy winner, had outdone herself. There was a set of handmade bushy eyebrows, courtesy of Emmy-winner Louie Zakarian, the head of the makeup department, to go with it. After a fairly elaborate process to cover up my own hair, which I’d let grow long for the Hound Dogs pilot, Jodi placed the wig on my head, glued the eyebrows on, and I was transformed.
A few minutes later, I was summoned to the main stage by the voice of Gena Rositano, the stage manager, over the PA system. There, I joined Tina as Palin, Kristen Wiig as Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann, Bobby Moynihan as Newt Gingrich, Jason Sudeikis as Mitt Romney. Each of us stood behind a podium as the candidates would for a debate, although mine was fashioned out of gaudy gold columns. “Unofficially” joining our fake debate was Kenan Thompson as Jimmy McMillan, the eccentric former New York gubernatorial candidate known for his dramatic facial hair and Rent Is Too Damn High Party affiliation. Bill Hader was moderator Shepard Smith.
As we ran through the sketch, a team of writers, along with Seth, who wrote the script, made notes about what worked and what needed to be changed. Kristen Wiig wanted to know if the way she bugged out her eyes when her Michele Bachmann challenged America to a staring contest was okay. Steve Higgins suggested I turn toward Tina when I got to the part of the sketch where Trump talks about how everyone but him is a loser except for Sarah Palin. Steve thought the two-shot of us would be the image that would run alongside the reviews in the Monday papers.
When we were done, I headed over to the costume shop to get fitted for my Trump suit. Nearly every superstar on the planet has been naked or half-naked in this place. The shop is a warren of rooms filled to bursting with clothes. Every wall is lined with racks, and the center is piled with clear plastic bins crammed with bras, shapers, corsets, Spanx, and—my favorite—Man Spanx. I noticed a large padded, pastel-colored bikini-like garment hanging on a wall and wondered what it was for. (Tina would wear it in a mermaid sketch later that night.)
And then it was back to my dressing room, where I had to turn myself into a larger-than-life six-foot-three businessman and reality TV personality with a booming voice from the fey five-foot-two Truman Capote I’d been inhabiting for the previous few weeks. As in the old days when I was on the show, I asked research to find recent clips of Trump speaking so I could see if there was anything new I should be adding (I’d done the impression more than a dozen times before). Over the next few hours, I watched over and over again videos of Trump giving a controversial speech in Las Vegas, a press conference taking credit for making President Obama release his long-form birth certificate, and instructions for a new Celebrity Apprentice challenge to Meatloaf and Star Jones.
Around six o’clock, I was really starting to feel the strain of the long day, so I decided to catch a nap on the couch in my dressing room. Whatever else my mother had done, she had at least trained me never to put my shoes on the furniture. As I reached down to untie the laces of my sneakers, I was suddenly taken back to that horrendous day the previous November when I’d taken a large carving knife to my arm. That morning, knowing that I had to come to SNL after rehearsing the play, I’d been even more discombobulated than I usually am in the morning. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my shoes. Annoyed with myself but very short on time, I reached into the back of my closet and grabbed the first pair of shoes I could find. It wasn’t until I went to take them off that I realized that I’d grabbed the same pair I’d worn that cold autumn day: they were still speckled with my blood, now dried to a sad, dark brown.
Around seven-thirty, there was a knock on the door. The young man from wardrobe who was assigned to me brought my suit. This being SNL, where every guest is taken care of in every way, he even helped me put the damn thing on.
For the dress rehearsal and the live show, costume, makeup, and hair moves to a space along the main hall leading to the studio to accommodate the fast changes everybody needs to make between sketches. On one side of the hall are the quick-change booths, one for each cast member, and each manned by someone from wardrobe. On the other side, the hair and makeup team assemble all the bits and pieces of their part of the process, moving each cast member through in an efficient if slightly harried assembly line, as if we were bombers coming off the line at Willow Run during World War II. As Jodi put my wig and eyebrows back on, I read the updated script.
After that, I headed over to the area under the audience bleachers where the cue card guys were furiously writing out the new dialogue. I’d taken that walk a thousand times before. Whenever I could, I liked to practice with the cards before going on. Sometimes I’d ask the guys to underline a phrase or sentence that I’d need to emphasize. I practiced facial expressions in a mirror that hung nearby while I fine-tuned the voice.
Then it was out to the floor for the dress rehearsal, the two-hour version of the show done in front of a live audience. Already some of the sketches had been dropped and moved around since the run-through, so the debate was earlier in the lineup and there was less time to get ready. We tried it out with the revised dialogue, and I did the turn to Tina.
Then it was back to hair and makeup to have my wig removed again, and off to my dressing room. They take very good care of the clothes, so my costumer came to once again retrieve the suit. I went back to watching videos of Trump doing his thing.
The dress rehearsal finished at 10:00 p.m. I waited a few minutes before going upstairs to the ninth floor to await the final meeting. There’s an anteroom where the interns feverishly compile the changes into scripts for everybody who needs them. While the cast cooled their heels, Lorne, the producers, and the writers were in the conference room talking about what to cut.
Around 10:30, Higgins came out and said, “Meeting!”
That was my cue to pile into the room with everybody to find out the fate of the sketch and talk about whatever additional changes would be made. Steve and Seth and I talked about how to tweak the Trump bit even further.
Steve said, “When you turn to Tina, hold the pose. Don’t say anything for a beat before you continue. That’s going to be the money shot for the media.”
When the meeting was done, the two-hour show had been whittled down to ninety minutes. The cast headed back down the stairs to the eighth floor to get back into wigs and wardrobe and makeup while a posse of young women took over the photocopy room to get the new scripts ready.
One more time, I got the Trump swirl wig and eyebrows and expensive suit on. The GOP debate would be the first sketch after Tina’s monologue, in which she sang a duet with also-pregnant Maya Rudolph to their unborn children. While they sang, I chugged a Red Bull. (I still want that endorsement deal.)
I swung by the cue card station one more time to read the latest incarnation of the script. I’d suggested a minor change to my lines, and I was really h
appy that Seth liked it and used it.
I walked under the bleachers past cables and wires and staffers and monitors and equipment—it was like walking through the actual guts of the show—and parked myself by the main entrance to the Hall to wait for the cue. Jim Carrey, who’d hosted a few weeks earlier, had dropped by to watch the show. Jim gave me a hug, and we chatted for a minute about the presidential reunion piece that Ron Howard directed for Funny or Die, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s video Web site, the year before, Jim doing a fantastic Ronald Reagan, Will Ferrell as W., Dan Aykroyd as Nixon, Dana Carvey as George H. W. Bush, Chevy Chase as Carter, Fred Armisen as Obama, and me as, of course, Clinton.
Kenan was in one of the two change booths right by the stage, where you went when there wasn’t enough time to go back to the quick-change booths down the hall. There was also a booth called “Pardo’s booth” and another called “Paint Cans” past the cue cards; a dresser might tell you to go to one or another between sketches based on which stage you would be due on next. Kenan was surrounded by a handful of hair and makeup people attaching the elaborate facial and scalp pieces that made up his costume as Jimmy McMillan. In the sketch, McMillan, in keeping with all the birther controversy that had been trailing Obama since his election, confirms rumors that he was born a billy goat. I don’t even know who he is, but the audience loved it.
In another host booth, the curtains were drawn, so all I could see was a series of hands and elbows emerging out the top and sides. When Gena called for the debate cast, Tina emerged in full Palin makeup and hair, trailed by four or five women who’d been crammed in there with her to get her ready. They’d put her in impressively high heels, which meant, at six months pregnant, she had to be escorted on and off the stage so she didn’t fall.
For this third and final version of the day, my gold-columned podium had acquired the word TRUMP in big letters across the top, mimicking the way his buildings were designed. When it came time for me to say, “Except you, Sarah Palin. I like you,” and I paused the way we’d discussed a half hour earlier, the studio audience took the bait and applauded. In fact, I got two applause breaks that night. Sweet.
When I came offstage, Seth chased me down the hall. “That was terrific. It’s great to have you back,” he said, shaking my hand.
The truth is, I was propped up, as I’d always been, by an incredible staff of Emmy winners—hair, make-up, costumes, writers, producers. I don’t care how great a person is, you put him out there without great material, he won’t look good.
After I got back into my street clothes, I swung by Marci’s office to say thank you. She was having a glass of wine with Renée Zellweger, who gave me a kiss. Marci said, “I love you. Stay for the good-byes tonight.”
There was at least half an hour of the show to go, so I hung out in the hallway, chatting with people. While Ellie Goulding, the musical guest, sang her second number, I saw four African American men dressed in gray wigs and ladies’ housecoats walk away from the studio. A moment later, I understood when I heard Gena say over the PA system, “Tyler Perry sketch cancelled.” That was always the risk of being in a sketch slated for the later part of the show—you might get cut if they ran out of time.
Except for my last night as a cast member and the night McCain hosted, I hadn’t stood on that stage at the end of the show in years. But I was feeling good. I knew the Trump bit had been a hit. So I not only got onstage, I stood in front. And the whole cast was lovely, giving me hugs. It was like going home, but in the nicest possible way.
A few days later, the real Trump announced that he wouldn’t be running for president after all. And that’s fine by me. But Steve was right—the photo of me and Tina was the one that ran.
Tru opened at the Bay Street Theatre on June 4. Judith Ivey had left the production a few days earlier, so it was down to me and Matt McGrath to make the final preparations. The first reviews were pretty good, and I was grateful. It was even more rewarding when Capote’s old friends, like the actress Anne Jackson, came backstage in tears, telling me they felt they’d seen the man reincarnated in front of them.
And yet I made the mistake of watching the first half of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s stupendous Oscar-winning turn as Capote in the eponymous 2005 film, and was filled with enormous doubt about how I was portraying him. I would note some of the gestures Hoffman used, and kick myself. Why didn’t I think of that? I had to remind myself that we were, in fact, playing two very different versions of the man. Hoffman’s Capote was young, vital, and at the top of his intellectual and productive abilities, about to produce In Cold Blood, the masterpiece that would define his career. The Capote I was playing was near the end of his life, secluded in his United Nations Plaza apartment on Christmas in 1975, ostracized by the society dames who felt he’d betrayed them when he published a thinly veiled story about them in Esquire. Even his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, had decided to spend the holidays in Europe without him. In his misery, Capote spends the duration of the play pickling himself to the point that he can barely speak.
During the show on opening night, I heard a cell phone ring in the front row. In character, I turned to the offender and said, “You on a waiting list for a kidney?” I was mortified when I realized it was Joy Behar, whom I admire a great deal. Sorry, Joy.
At the end of the play, I received a standing ovation. It was fantastic.
And yet some things never change. Can we talk about the sadistic fuck who invented Wednesday matinees? The Hamptons is a happening place on the eastern end of Long Island where celebrities and the well-to-do—think Alec Baldwin, Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart—mingle during the summer months, going to lovely restaurants and clubs and the theater—at night. The daytime performances are for the elderly and infirm, people whose physicians have advised them against exposure to sun, wind, sand, heat, air, waves, and small children flying kites. These snow-capped gnomes hobbled in on canes and walkers, or arm in arm like an osteoporotic chain-link fence trying to remain upright against a gale-force wind, settled themselves in the first rows of the theater, and promptly fell asleep. The only thing that snores louder than an old man is an old woman. Some of the elderly simply sighed audibly or whimpered like newborn puppies. It was just like being back on those cruise ships again.
A couple of weeks into the show’s run, I was half ready to quit if I couldn’t persuade the theater to cancel the matinees. “You don’t understand, I had a guy die in the middle of one of my performances under similar circumstances. I can not be thinking about whether members of the audience are expiring before my eyes while I’m trying to get through ninety-eight minutes of monologue.”
The theater is very small, and the set was designed to make the audience feel like it was sitting in Capote’s living room with him. It was a very cool layout, but during one of these horrendous matinee performances, an old woman tottered across the stage heading for the bathroom just as I was about to launch into a speech in which Capote contemplates killing himself. I tried not to let her distract me, but when she came shuffling back across the stage a few minutes later, it took a monumental act of fortitude to keep my composure. When the show was over, the audience woke in unison, struggled to their creaky feet, and gave me a standing ovation. They didn’t even see the play.
A few weeks later, I was at Yankee Stadium with my friend Julie. She texted Michael Kay, the Yankees announcer, that I was there. Next thing I know, I’m looking at the Jumbotron—Al Roker, then David Gregory from Meet the Press, and then my face is one hundred feet tall overlooking the stadium. How cool is that?
I do have to keep going to meetings, and I do have to keep examining my thoughts, but I’m happy a lot of the time. And no more drinking, hopefully.
But free? I don’t know. I’ll be on my deathbed—many, many, many years from now—trying to make out the faces of my nearest and dearest through the fog of my imminent demise, and I’ll say, “Well, I guess this is it. I’ll see you on down the road.” And the nurse will lean in and
say, “Now say it like Bill Clinton.”
Photographic Insert
When I was about seven years old, I finally discovered a way to connect with my mother. I noticed that if I could get her talking about certain people in the neighborhood, she would become enraptured doing impressions of them. Doing my best to copy what she did, I learned to do voices too. If for nothing else, she seemed to love me for that.
My father, Max, was sent to Germany an eighteen-year-old second lieutenant, the youngest commissioned officer in the history of the U.S. military at the time, or so he was told. He came home with a lot of medals and a tortured soul.
He still harbored plans to play professional baseball and go to law school after the war, but then he and my mother got married in Sylvester, Georgia, in 1947, so he had to work to support his wife.
Three years later, my Dad (center) was called back for duty in Korea. A week after that he shipped.
Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, if I wasn’t playing baseball, I was dreaming about it. Every day, the second I woke up, I wanted a bat in my hand. That cocky blond kid on the top left is me during the All-Star game in the Babe Ruth League. Sometimes before going out to do an SNL sketch, I’d think about the two doubles I hit off of C. P. Yarborough (2nd from right, rear) in one night.
Working at the University of Florida radio station on a series about suicide prevention. I interviewed students who had attempted to kill themselves as well as health professionals commenting on why people do it. A congressman was going to hold a press conference about it, but it was cancelled at the last minute when the spots were deemed too disturbing to air.
Photo courtesy of Michael Kooren
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 21
