Splitting Our Sides
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison; Random House, 656 pp., $36
After God created the Heavens and the Earth and saw that it was good, He thanked Lorne Michaels in his acceptance speech and rested. Lorne said, “Not bad. Now try making something new like that every week for 50 years. While worrying about sponsors.” Then Lorne name-dropped some of the cooler archangels in a story about the time he bought motorcycles with Paul Simon and Zadkiel the Merciful, way back before Creation. God went home exhausted, wondering if maybe Lorne hated him.
This might be a slight exaggeration—Zadkiel wasn’t born back then—but such is the mythology around Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live and its vast ecosystem of offshoots. His reach in the comedy world borders on the universal: everyone knows someone with a Lorne story. (Mine is typical: he called my roommate and changed his life.) But perhaps being so powerful in a field that can be mistaken for unserious has allowed the extent of his influence to go at least partially unnoticed. “The nature of comedy is you get the audience, you get the money. Respect is the last thing you get,” he says in Lorne, Susan Morrison’s new “definitive biography.” If Lorne Michaels were a tech company, he’d have been broken up long ago for being a monopoly.
He was born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighborhood. Michaels’s grandparents owned a movie theater and talked about actors as if they were old friends. One of his neighbors was one half of the comic duo Wayne and Shuster, a regular act on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Michaels went on to marry Shuster’s daughter, Rosie. An infamous 1956 government-funded case study painted Forest Hill as a hothouse of second-generation Jewish superachievers, a place that tended to produce neurotic strivers. The social scientists suggested that as many as 10 percent of Forest Hill’s children needed psychiatric attention owing to parental compulsions and “matriarchal tendencies.” In the Lipowitz home, comedy was both defense mechanism and worthy of praise in itself. Michaels’s father, successful enough in business to semi-retire early, died at 50, not long after Michaels’s bar mitzvah. As did many of her generation, his mother, a natural problem solver and master manipulator, kept compliments to her son out of reach and earshot.
Somehow, out of all this, Michaels became a comedian. And yet he seemed to emerge from this showbiz cast and caste at least a quasi-singular soul. A well of determination, producing revue shows at summer camp on Saturday nights, visiting New York at the age of 17 eager and bumbling, milking his contacts to meet a young Dick Cavett and then ordering a shrimp cocktail to sip on because he thought it was an alcoholic drink. He spent his 20s crisscrossing the coasts and the paths of legends and those soon to be. He ultimately landed a job writing for Lily Tomlin. He followed her into the revolving door of show biz and, as one of Tomlin’s associates quips, somehow came out ahead of her.
But the main thrust of Morrison’s book is how on earth a furrier’s son from Toronto came to create, produce, and helm Saturday Night Live. In the five decades since it first aired on October 11, 1975, the show has given America’s biggest comedy stars their biggest starts and become so enmeshed in American culture that a judge ruling in a case involving SNL once cut a replica of Mr. Bill with scissors, to which courtroom onlookers responded, “Ohh, noooo!” The demise of Saturday Night Live has been spoken of as a forgone conclusion almost from the start, but the show has not just survived but thrived, becoming, as Amy Poehler jokes, “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”
Who is the person behind all this? “The tendency toward catastrophic thinking sparked by his father’s death was turning out to have a possible upside that served him well when he was in charge,” writes Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker and a founding editor of Spy magazine. “If you’re always afraid that life can devolve into chaos without warning, you become vigilant about order. You become a person with a clipboard, or a producer.” If this formulation is a little neat, other theories abound. Morrison traces a series of mentors, uncles, comic actors, and agents, inspirations both artistic and sartorial. Always Michaels is looking for models of comportment. He emerges as a kind of deft octopus picking up shell fragments to arm himself further or simply to blend in when necessary. You can’t help but marvel at the creature, whose cunning seems almost playful, a deeply human if confoundingly jolly little stoic mogul, social then reclusive, an alienlike master of surviving and getting what he wants.
Morrison’s Michaels is a study in contrasts, capable of flickering between contradictions in an instant. A micromanager bent on controlling studio audience demographics and a hands-off leader of comic geniuses who picks his horses and then lets them run the race. A stone-faced surgeon ruthlessly cutting sketches and a comedy fan and collaborator with what Seth Meyers calls “one of the great laughs.” A genial Saint Peter ushering the worthy into comedy paradise and a distant father figure withholding his praise from young charges because it will never be enough. A creator of a macho boys club and a fierce advocate for funny women. A showbiz careerist always bent on living to fight another day and a thankless workhorse putting his career on the line time and time again in service of what’s best for the show and for comedy. A half century’s worth of your favorite comedians have lost sleep trying to decipher what he thinks of them, a comedy general responsible both for inspiring the character of Dr. Evil and for giving its creator, Mike Myers, his career.
Morrison’s book is a well-titrated glut of behind-the-scenes SNL stories—from Norm Macdonald’s firing to Kate McKinnon’s tragically cringy turn as Hillary Clinton singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—viewed from over Lorne’s shoulder. The book is worthwhile in part for the showbiz wisdom it proffers from Michaels and his comedic progeny. If Lorne isn’t a showbiz version of The Art of War, it’s at least a pretty great biography of Sun Tzu. “I teach by humiliation. But after you leave me, you’ll be able to work anywhere,” Michaels says.
Calling Lorne a “definitive biography” indulges in the very kind of marketing that SNL sought to puncture in its early days, as if any biography isn’t just an exercise in trying to guess someone’s lunch from a fart. But the meal and the whiff here are both remarkable. Will Lorne become, as Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up did in 2007, the much-purchased book carried around by comedy hopefuls looking for the secret to success? Born Standing Up was the writings of a saint. Lorne is about the man upstairs himself.
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