Before she was officially hired, Gilda had to be approved by Dick Ebersol. She came to NBC to meet him one morning in April accompanied by a scruffy young friend she'd worked with in the Toronto company of Second City. He waited on a stool outside Ebersol's office while Gilda and Ebersol conferred within. He wasn't introduced, but his name was Dan Aykroyd. Danny, just twenty-two, knew Lorne well: Besides being a guest on Hart and Lorne's CBC shows, Danny sometimes dropped by an improv class Lorne taught at the New School of Art in Toronto. He'd also been a frequent visitor to a big pink house Lorne and Rosie lived in near the university, known by its many residents as Hormone House because of all the unwanted pregnancies conceived there. When Rosie moved out, Danny helped her move her refrigerator. Although Lorne had talked to Danny about the show, he wasn't as sure about hiring him as he was about Gilda, and it wasn't until several months later that Aykroyd, or Belushi, joined the cast.
Even Anne Beatts found Andy Kaufman eccentric. "He twitches!" she said.
As it happened, Dan Aykroyd twitched too. He came to visit Lorne one day dressed in full motorcycle regalia, with leather gloves and heavy black boots, his wallet and keys attached to his jeans with a chain. Michael O'Donoghue was appalled at his appearance, and said so to Lorne. Aykroyd, meanwhile, entertained a couple of the other writers by writhing around on the floor for several minutes, curled in a tight ball with his hands behind his back, struggling desperately to free himself from the bonds of some imaginary rope. Then he calmly got up, dusted himself off, and glanced out the window to make sure his Harley, which he'd parked on the street below, hadn't been stolen.
Saturday Night was chaotic by design. From Lorne on down, the tenets of the show's production philosophy were that inspiration, accident, and passion were of greater value than discipline, habit, and control. Saturday Night was the first program of its kind to commit itself to the subconscious, to emulate as much as it could the spirit of artistic abandon embodied and endorsed by the gods of twentieth-century hip. Baudelaire, William Blake, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, the Beatles, and Hunter S. Thompson were as much fathers of Saturday Night as Kovacs, Carson, Benny, and Berle. Dan Aykroyd called it Gonzo Television. They were video guerillas, he's say. Every show was an assault mission.
If Dan Aykroyd found something he liked, he'd magically be able to make himself fit into it. He became especially fond of the black polyester suit he wore when he played Richard Nixon and looked for ways to work the suit into the sketch. He was also a stickler for detail. He had a reference book of badges from which he'd copy designs for any uniforms he wore on the show, and munitions manuals that he'd consult to specify the exact make and caliber of any guns he needed. Danny was such as aficionado of weaponry that when a fully functional M-16 rifle being used as a prop one week disappeared from the set, people assumed Danny had taken it. They did not, however, mention this to agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms who came to investigate the theft.
After the meal break Weekend Update was rehearsed for the first time. The cast members, when they weren't on the Update set, prepared for dress, going over script changes as they sat in the makeup room or in their dressing rooms. Some were more dilligent about keeping track of the changes than others. Gilda Radner carefully marked off her parts in each new script with a yellow felt pen. Dan Aykroyd, usually refreshed by a nap during the dinner break, seemed to have an almost photographic memory. He'd flip through the pages of the script, mechanically ticking off the changes as he read: "Got it. Good cut. Got it." John Belushi and later Bill Murray relied more on cue cards; Belushi often retired after the dinner break to his dressing room for a massage.
The miracle of Saturday Night was that things didn't go wrong on-air more often than they did. Catastrophe struck many times in dress rehearsal. Writer Don Novello, who joined the show in the third year, broke his hip during rehearsal of an ice hockey sketch; a week later, on crutches, he made his first appearance as Father Guido Sarducci. Dan Aykroyd was once bitten by a snake in dress rehearsal, and Laraine Newman nearly drowned. She played an accused witch in a sketch with Steve Martin called "Theodoric, Medieval Judge." Theodoric decreed that Laraine's character be submerged in the Trough of Justice--is she sank she was innocent; if she floated she was guilty. She was innocent. The trough was filled with real water but equipped with a hidden wall. Newman, her hands tied loosely behind her, had to work her way under the wall to be pulled from the trough by stagehands off camera. She almost didn't make it, and by the time the stagehands finally got her out, she'd inhaled a dangerous amount of water. Still, she repeated the stunt an hour later on-air.
Dan Aykroyd once played a refrigerator repairman whose pants, like the pants of countless repairmen in real life, very obviously revealed a goodly portion of his posterior wherever he bent over. The censor ordered Aykroyd to cover up, thereby obviating to a large degree the point of the sketch. In the meeting between dress and air, Danny told Lorne: "Nope, I'm gonna do it," and that night male cleavage took center stage on national television.
Some of Saturday Night's most popular bits had to be repeated insistently before they caught on...Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd's swinging Czech Brothers were another example.
Danny had noticed that Martin in his concerts did a voice of an Eastern European. He suggested doing something about two immigrant brothers who, having "run from the tanks" in Czechoslovakia, ended up pursuing the loose American sex they'd heard so much about back home. Danny and Martin asked Marilyn Miller for help, since as a woman she was more familiar with the sorts of come-on lines the brothers were likely to deliver, and she was accomplished at writing dialects. Miller and Danny stayed up much of the night writing the sketch; the "wild and crazy guys" line came from Martin's stage age.
The Czech Brothers (their names were Jorge and Yortuk Festrunk) got no more than a few giggles from the audience the first time they appeared, and both Martin's and Danny's characterizations were not nearly as sharply defined as they would become. By their third appearance, the Festrunk brothers were snapping their fingers and almost bending over backward in their geeky version of a soul strut, and roars of recognition greeted them the moment they walked on stage.
[On Saturday Night rehearsals] At one point during a lull on the second day, a strange man burst through the swinging doors leading into the room. He was carrying an umbrella and an attache case and wearing a derby, and he stood in front of the assembled group and yelled: "I've been waiting out there for three hours and I'm not going to wait anymore and I'm going to miss my plane! That's it, gentlemen, you've had your chance." Then he charged out.
Stunned, Dave Wilson turned to Lorne and said, "What the hell was that?"
"Oh, that was just Danny Aykroyd," Lorne said. "He's probably going to do the show."
"Lorne says that in his mind Danny's spot on Saturday Night was never in doubt, but he thinks that when Danny saw so many people at the auditions, he misunderstood. Aykroyd, in fact, felt Lorne had been so vague that after the auditions he decided to accept a job with a new company Second City had opened in Pasadena, California. He'd already flown out to the Coast when Lorne called and coaxed him back to New York. Danny and his friend John Belushi didn't like Lorne jacking them around.
The one person most universally admired on Saturday Night as both a writer and a performer was Dan Aykroyd. Danny got a bit of a slow start on the show, in part because he was distracted by a movie he was commuting to in Canada, in part because he was inexperienced in television. He was also amazingly young. But he was so intense that sparks seemed to be coming out of his head, and once he caught on he couldn't be stopped. His talent was so original that Lorne, Chevy, and O'Donoghue looked upon him as a sort of Orson Welles of comedy.
Danny would become best-known for his impressions of Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, and Jimmy Carter, but as much edge as he brought to those characters, it was when he wasn't tied to a recognizable personality that he truly soared. His pinnacle of the first season, everyone on the show agreed, was the "Bass-O-Matic" sketch on the show hosted by Gerald Ford's press secretary, Ron Nessen, in April. What made the "Bass-O-Matic," along with all of Danny's other commercial parodies, work so well was the sheer lunatic power of his performance, which amplified the sleazy essence of late-night television pitchmen to dizzy new heights.
How this came across on the air to the many viewers who, because Ron Nessen was the host, were watching the show for the first time that night is anybody's guess, but to those on the 17th floor the "Bass-O-Matic" was so exhilaratingly strange that many remember sitting and listening, open-mouthed, when Danny presented it at the Monday writers' meeting. Nobody felt jealous of it because they couldn't imagine writing anything remotely like it.
The day before the dinner, Chevy, his fiancee, his brother, Lorne, John and Danny took the shuttle to Washington. John and Danny were along to play Secret Service agents. That afternoon, Nessen gave them a tour of the White House. Belushi was worried that he would have trouble getting in the gate, having as usual no identification on him whatsoever, but he passed right through. Once inside, Danny was so amused by the decor that he starting dropping coins for tips into the spotless ashtrays.
The only warning anybody on the 17th floor had that the Hell's Angels were coming was a frantic phone call from the security desk downstairs: The Angels just stormed through, the guard said. They were angry and they were looking for Saturday Night
It was a sleepy morning a few days after the Emmy ceremonies and the offices were almost deserted. Michael O'Donoghue, Audrey Dickman, Kathy Minkowksy, Neil Levy, a secretary, and a production assistant or two were the only ones there. None of them had time to react before two Angels came striding through the front door and stood, looming, over Kathy Minkowsky's desk. Security was correct: They were obviously unhappy.
The Angel who did the talking was named Big Vinnie. Vinnie stood several inches over six feet and weighed at least three hundred pounds. He wore black jeans, boots, a gold earring, a fur hat, and a snakeskin vest. His huge chest and arms were covered with swastika and skull tattoos. Neil Levy could smell him from several feet away. The only details people remember of the other Angel was that he was nearly as big as Vinnie and that he carried a large hunting knife in his belt.
Vinnie was yelling that he wanted to see whoever was in charge of the operation, that the show had used the Angel's colors and the Angels didn't like it--they were gonna get their fucking colors back or somebody was gonna get fucking hurt.
Kathy Minkowsky cowered, her knees literally knocking together beneath her desk. She finally figured out what Vinnie was ranting about. There had been a sketch on the show the previous Saturday in which a gang of Hell's Angels rampaged throught a suburban house singing "Johnny Angel." They'd been wearing the Angels' winged -skull insignia--their "colors"--on their back. The Angels, Kathy gathered, considered this bad for their image, and they considered the unauthorized use of their colors as a violation of some sacred Angels code.
Kathy choked out that she'd get somebody, got up, and ran into Audrey Dickman's office. She slammed the door behind her and locked it. The Angels laughed at her as she ran.
"There are two of the most disgusting men I've ever seen out there!" she gasped.
Audrey's first thought was that they must be some of Belushi's friends. When she heard Kathy's story, they called Michael O'Donoghue's extension. O'Donoghue answered, his voice calm but higher-pitched than usual. "Yes?" he said.
"Are they in there, Michael?" Kathy whispered?
"Yes," O'Donoghue said again, at a slightly higher pitch. Audrey Dickman decided the only thing to do was to go outside and be a witness if somebody got killed.
There are those who claim that when Big Vinnie and his friend appeared in O'Donoghue's doorway, O'Donoghue spilled the tea he was drinking down the front of his shirt. O'Donoghue denies this. Whatever terror he felt, he recovered quickly, walking forward to compliment Big Vinnie on one of his tattoos. Vinnie laughed, pushed O'Donoghue aside and repeated that he'd come for the Angel's fucking colors.
O'Donoghue did his best to nod sympathetically as Vinnie vented his anger. O'Donoghue claims the tension was broken when Vinnie saw the picture of Richard Speck on his wall. "Hey, I know that guy," Vinnie said. "What's his name? I like that guy."
"That's Richard Speck," O'Donoghue says he answered, "and as a matter of fact, I like him too."
Audrey Dickman by then was standing at the Xerox machine outside O'Donoghue's door, pretending to do some copying.
"Audrey?" O'Donoghue said. "What time does wardrobe open today?"
"About noon," Audrey said.
"These guys would like the Hell's Angels costumes," O'Donoghue said.
"I'm sure that can be arranged, Michael," Audrey answered.
The Angels left peaceably, but still threateningly, with that promise. The rest of the morning was filled with jittery rehearsings of their visit for RCA's security guards, various NBC executives, and everyone else on the show as they arrived. A general alert went out in case the Angels decided to return.
When Dan Aykroyd arrived (who had supervised the design of the Angels costumes in the first place) heard the story he was thrilled. Immediately he insisted that he go along to take the colors back--no way was he going to pass up an opportunity to meet the famous Hell's Angels. Somebody brought the jackets up from wardrobe, and Aykroyd, O'Donoghue, and Neil Levy caught a cab for the Angels' headquarters on the Lower East Side.
Levy says that when the cab driver heard where they were going he refused to take them any closer than seven blocks away. As the three of them, on foot, entered the Angels' block on East Third Street, Danny said, "Don't worry. I know how to handle these guys. Just act like you respect them--treat them like they're true men."
A group of Angels standing around a van saw them and started toward them on the street. Vinnie was leading the group, and when they met, once again he launced into a threatening tirade about the colors. Sandy Alexander, the Angels' leader, cut him off.
"We watched the show the other night," Alexander said quietly, "and we didn't like it. We want our colors back."
Danny pulled the jackets out of the bag he was carrying. "We got 'em for ya," he said, and handed them over. As the Angels took them, Danny kept talking. "You guys are real men," he said. "Real, true Americans. We really respect you. You guys are great."
The Angels laughed at that, but they were pleased and they laughed when they saw that the colors on the jackets Danny had given them were nothing more than blown-up copies on paper, flimsy play-act replicas of the real insignia.
Soon everybody was slapping one another on the back. Danny kept saying what real men the Angels were and the Angels kept saying how much they liked the show. Deciding it was best to withdraw when things were going well, the boys from Saturday Night left a few minutes later, smiling and waving and saying the Angels should come to the show whenever they wanted.
Saturday Night got along famously with the Hell's after that. Once they did come to the show, in masse, wearing so much armor that as they walked past security they clanked. When the Guest Relations attendant duty behind the desk tried to stop them, one of the Angels patted him on the head. "That's all right, little fella," he said. They were seated at the back of the studio to keep them out of camera range, and when they sat down they pulled out a bottle of whiskey and passed it around. Danny came up to say hello that night; on other nights the Angels guarded the door at the Blues Bar, a seedy downtown hideaway that John and Danny set up for themselves and their friends. The next anybody heard of Big Vinnie he'd been indicted for murder, charged with throwing a woman to her death off the roof of the Angel's headquarters.
Certainly more than a touch of the Angels' machismo imbued the boys of Saturday Night, and accounted in no small part for their success. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and then Bill Murray embraced, consciously and proudly, the romance of the outlaw, the flat-out, no-holds-barred ethic that writer Hunter S. Thompson called "Gonzo."
Their defiance was different from that of Chevy Chase, whose confidence was born of privilege. Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote once that alongside the others on the show, Chevy seemed "like the lone rich kid at the neighborhood birthday party." Belushi, Aykroyd, and Murray were staunchly working-class, their humor and the anger beneath it blunt and hard-edged. Like their personalities.
"They were," Rosie Shuster said, "bad-assed, macho, go-get-em bravado types. They were formidable in that way, and their charisma came from that as well. They weren't the sensitive, crying males--this was not their brand. They were in reaction to that. In the first half of the seventies, feminist and gay rights were coming out, but the New Macho guy started to emerge in the second half of the seventies, and that was very much alive on Saturday Night."
Lorne Michaels, who didn't have that Gonzo mentality and who struggled harder and harder as time went on to keep it from overwhelming Saturday Night, came to call them the "Bully Boys."
John Belushi embodied Gonzo in its rawest form...The Gonzo flame burned every bit as brightly in Belushi's friend and co-conspirator Dan Aykroyd, but in more complicated and mysterious ways. Whereas Belushi's private and public characters merged, Aykroyd hid behind his characters onstage, and for that reason never did become as big a star as Belushi. At Lorne's request, Danny played himself as the co-anchor on Weekend Update for the third season, and he couldn't wait to get out of it. When he did, he almost never identified himself on camera as Dan Aykroyd again.
Offstage, Danny sometimes hid behind Belushi. On the street he'd often walk a few feet behind John, and fans would swarm around Belushi, never seeing Aykroyd standing nearby. Aykroyd was happy to let Belushi take the public heat: John loved it; Danny hated it. Danny had a talent for projecting an aura of anonymity that deflected the glances of passers-by, and as a result he was the only cast member who continued regularly to ride the subways and walk the streets unrecognized at the height of his fame.
He kept a shield around himself that was all but impenetrable. When a production assistant put his address and phone number on a staff list once, he angrily confronted her and forced her to redo it, leaving his whereabouts blank. He along among the performers never let publicist Les Slater interview him for an official NBC bio. He'd promise to do it but would always beg off, saying he was too busy. He was articulate with the press, but he talked to reporters only a few times in the four years he spent on Saturday Night.
Danny had a well-developed contempt for the trappings of success. His offstage uniform remained motorcycle jackets and boots, T-shirts and jeans. Steve Martin once invited him to go shopping at Saks. "I'm not too into clothes," Danny said. Many Saturdays at the end of the show he'd wave goodnight from the stage already changed, ready to take off on his Harley for Canada or parts unknown.
He called himself a "mercenary" in show business, and it was a business he considered far to ephemeral and phony to trust. "You never know when this show could go off the air," he's say, snapping his fingers. "It could go like that." Danny always had his bags packed, his friends say, ready to head for the high country, yet he was at the same time a ruthless perfectionist when it came to his own work. After a bad show he's call himself a "cheap impressionist," and say "Fuck this. It's worthless shit. I should leave and just forget it."
He often talked about buying and running an auto parts store or a snow removal company, "something," he said in one of his rare interviews, "with an inventory." For a while he had his eye on a truck stop he's grown fond of on Route 401 outside Toronto. At the end of the third season he said he was going to quit the show and go back to college; he'd once taken some criminology classes in Canada, and he sometimes talked of following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a Canadian Mountie. He was fascinated by the world of cops and small-time thieves. Rosie Shuster's brother used to say that Danny's perfect fantasy would be to rob a bank and then arrest himself for it.
He was more of a watcher than a fighter--sometimes on the street he'd wear a pair of thick-framed glasses with no lenses--but he didn't shrink form violence. He often acted as the bouncer at the Blues Bar, a job he took seriously, and he once sported a black eye on the show for a couple of weeks, the result, he vaguely explained, of an altercation outside a club.
Danny's affection for and casual familiarity with what some might consider the seamy underbelly of life gave him an outsider's orientation that accounted in large part for the uniqueness of his genius in front of the camera. Belushi invented his madness from the stuff of legend, but Aykroyd just seemed to be there. Danny had webbed toes, a twist of nature he often pointed to with pride as proof that he was a genetic mutant, and many of his friends share the conviction that he always had one ear tuned to frequencies from other planets.
"You look at the floor and see the floor," he said to a friend once. "I look at the floor and see molecules."