Every life must have its high point. Lorne Michaels and I might disagree about his, but I think it arrives on page 431 of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. After sitting through tryouts by some potential Letterman successors, Lorne and a big shot at NBC are ready to compare notes. “When I discovered Chevy—” Lorne begins. The exec cuts him off. “Let’s talk about what we just saw,” he says, and Lorne has to eat it.
Lorne, the man, is a would-be enigma who deploys bafflegab in tight situations. When he talks, it’s at a level above regular conversation: gnomic asides, elliptical reminiscence, delicate but perhaps not relevant apercus. When he eats dinner or goes to the beach, or does anything, it’s also at a level above, the level where rich people with superior taste indulge themselves. But when he puts together an episode of Saturday Night Live, he’s got his eye on our level. He’ll come up with something America will buy or at least settle for. He’s done it so often that he’s worth half a billion dollars. Now he also has a biography, a fat one.
Lorne, the book, is a 600-page magazine article that flows on and on, a steady ripple of smooth, unending prose dotted with famous names and plentiful quotations, some diplomatic, some daring or at least semi-daring. The writer’s Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker and former boss of The New York Observer. Somehow Morrison is also a person who watches Saturday Night Live. Her habit goes back decades: Kevin Nealon was a “superb sketch player,” she says. She may be the only person classy enough to secure Lorne’s cooperation for an up-close, book-length profile while being schlub enough to care about the product he puts out.
A schlub myself, I enjoyed the book and was glad to receive useful new information about the man who descended from suburban Toronto to remake American comedy. I don’t think Lorne’s up there with Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, mined by Morrison for details that are presented with and without credit. But that book’s limited to the show’s first decade. Morrison covers the whole megillah and comes up with plenty that isn’t in Hill and Weingrad (or Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, a waddling collection of block quotes that places a definite third out of three).
Lorne’s contributions include the afternoon young Lorne and his comedy partner tried writing jokes with Woody Allen; nothing gelled, as we see from a transcript extract. We also learn that Barry Diller said Lorne was the right man to create Saturday Night. An up-close look at the making of episode 854, November 2018, provides a lot of play-by-play and semi-daring quotes. Lorne thought Jonah Hill floundered with some dialogue—“Well, he can read.” He was sour about Maggie Rogers, who went onstage barefoot: “Barefoot? Where is she from? Kansas? A place with roads?” Maybe we hear because Hill and Rogers are dead letters for SNL; they haven’t been back since that week in 2018. Lorne isn’t an authorized biography, which would be automatically suspect and a bit tacky. But it seems like a work bearing the mark of shrewd cooperation. Off in the distance Lorne’s marriages come and go, his children are born and mature, but these things are acknowledged, not dredged for material.
If Lorne did guide Morrison toward the biography he wanted, that approach would match the picture given here. Michaels comes off as someone who won’t get in people’s faces but still manages to get his way. Morrison suggests that childhood’s the reason why yelling and showdowns aren’t his thing: his father died the day after the 13-year-old Michaels had a fight with him about curfew. Now the adult Lorne rules his domain by being the man who knows, the guy who thinks farther and explains it all better. He won’t raise his voice but he’ll talk you around, and he’ll do it before you know he’s doing it, because he’s that sly and that intent on prevailing—when prevailing strikes him as necessary. He can hang back, let those surrounding him follow their noses. He’s indirect, firm only in flashes, but events land where he wants them. We see the sly, quiet-voiced chieftain who fences in others with his words, crowding the chumps, herding them until everybody does what he wants.
“Let’s talk about what we just saw”—one appreciates Don Ohlmeyer’s bluntness. He was the executive who flattened Lorne’s nose that time they talked about who’d be host of Late Night. He was also the other choice for getting Saturday Night going back when Barry Diller gave his fateful advice, a point turned up by Morrison’s research. Two decades later Ohlmeyer was president of West Coast production, a post that somehow gave him power over Michaels’ operations, which were on the East Coast. I don’t say he wanted revenge, just that he repeatedly messed with SNL as the show limped toward the end of its second decade.
One reason, a big one, was that Ohlmeyer liked OJ Simpson and disliked jokes about his buddy killing people. The other was that Lorne had stopped paying attention and viewers could tell. This is more my interpretation than Lorne’s, but the book does tell us that in the early-1990s Lorne married a third time, started having children, presided over a mammoth hit (Wayne’s World), and tried becoming a big deal in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Chris Farley and the other boys were doing their sketch about anal probes.
Morrison sees a parallel between Lorne and Fabius Cunctator, who whittled down the Carthaginians until their invading force fled Italy. And eventually Lorne did get his way. His pick, Conan O’Brien, became host of Late Night, and Ohlmeyer’s meddling with SNL ended in 1998, a year before the belligerent former drunk departed NBC. But Ohlmeyer wasn’t driven out, he just left. Before doing so he forced the firing of Farley, Adam Sandler, Norm Macdonald, James Downey, and others. There wasn’t much Lorne Cunctator could do about it. Lorne Michaels as a father could string his little girl along when she asked about piercing her ear. As a contractor beset by a rampaging client, he was helpless; he had nothing to fall back on after finesse didn’t do the trick.
What he received was a slap on the head, and events suggest this persuaded Mr. Aloof to get down to business. Since the Ohlmeyer crisis Michaels has kept his eye on the controls for 30 years. The show’s never had a great streak, but it hasn’t stripped its gears. There are a lot of clinkers but also some good stuff made by smart people. (Never sit through an episode but watch some clips on YouTube and you can have a blast.) Meanwhile, national publications do viewer recaps about last night’s Bowen Yang sketch, and Susan Morrison of The New Yorker writes a tome about the founder and captain of our useful institution, the nation’s prime supplier of TV comedy that isn’t dumb but isn’t scary, that isn’t long, isn’t angry, isn’t obscure, and is funny often enough to preserve viability.