Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison. She's the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. It went on the air October 11th, 1975, and at the helm was Lorne Michaels, a month shy of his 30th birthday. Michaels is now 80 and has been through the evolution of TV. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for her 600-page bio, as did members from Michaels' past and present. Names you've heard of like Bill Hader and Conan O'Brien, and names you might not know like Hart Pomerantz and Rosie Shuster.

Today, we start the book with Lorne's childhood. Lorne David Lipowitz was born in Toronto, Canada on November 17th, 1944, to Florence and Henry Abraham Lipowitz. He was the oldest of three children. That's where we begin with Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, our choice for Full Bio.

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Alison Stewart: Susan, Lorne's name was Lorne Lipowitz. His grandparents owned a movie theater. What kind of entertainment did he grow up watching and liking?

Susan Morrison: Well, he stressed that as a boy in very cold, very boring Canada, you had to kind of make your own fun, you had to make your own distraction. There's a lot of ice skating on flooded playground ponds and things like that. When American television finally came to Canada, that really turned the lights on. It really changed his life because, before they got American channels, the CBC was dominated by a lot of folk singing and Shakespeare. It's sort of boring.

As soon as he could watch The Phil Silvers Show, your show of shows, all the great American variety shows, he was completely hooked. One of the things that I loved hearing about from him is how he would watch with his grandmother, his very sophisticated kind of-- She had a movie theater, and she would explain who these men and women on the TV were.

There's a great thing that I think he really internalized. He'd be watching Jack Benny on TV, who was a guy, an older man with black hair, and his grandmother would explain how he had started out as a young man in vaudeville. Then radio came along and he was older and he was a white-haired man in radio. Then came television, and all these guys had to dye their hair or, if you're George Burns, get a toupée so you could be on camera.

He had this sense of the Darwinian nature of showbiz and adapting to changing media and to changing times. I love the idea that you can draw a direct line from eight-year-old Lorne watching TV to 70 and 80-year-old Lorne, figuring out how he has to change his show as the times change.

Alison Stewart: His mother Florence was a real character. What's an example of something she did that explained who you were dealing with when you were dealing with Florence?

Susan Morrison: He said, "My mother kept the compliments on a high shelf in a jar that wasn't open very often." I think she was a typical Jewish mother, right out of Philip Roth, in that she was very demanding of him and kind of withholding. When he was out of the room, she was bragging her head off about him. He was a prince to everybody else. When he was there, he felt like he wasn't quite measuring up. I think he internalized that management style. A lot of people have said the same thing about him.

Alison Stewart: He didn't have his father very long. His father died when he was 13?

Susan Morrison: 14.

Alison Stewart: 14. What happened with his father?

Susan Morrison: His mom, I think, was the really dominant parent. When Lorne was 14 years old, he and his father had an argument one night because he had missed his curfew. Lorne's mother had been pressuring Lorne's dad to discipline him about it. They had a big argument. They yelled at each other. Voices were raised. That night when Lorne was in bed, his father collapsed. It was an embolism. They didn't know that at the time. He was rushed to the hospital. Lorne didn't get to visit him there. He was in the hospital for two weeks and died.

Lorne carried around with him through his whole adult life this terrible feeling of guilt and shame that his last interaction with his father had been this very difficult fight. I think it really introduced a shade into his emotional palette. He, forever after, always avoided confrontation. You never see him raise his voice at anyone. He's afraid of conflict, I think. It also, as a 14-year-old, plunged him into a real kind of dark place. His mother was very depressed. He had to suddenly be the man of the house. He almost failed in school that year, almost had to skip a grade.

After this rough time, during which his mom was afraid he was going to become a juvenile delinquent, to use the phraseology of the 50s, he pulled himself together and learned how to manage and also how to manage people in a way. There's a picture in one of his yearbooks of a group shot of the class, and it's all these smiling bobby-soxers. There's Lorne in the back row looking very glum and blank. The caption described him as Lorne: The Author of How to Win Friends and Influence Teachers. He already had figured out, I think, how to use his gift of gab to make his way in the world. I think he had a tough time after his father died, and then he somehow turned on a dime and figured out how to navigate the world on his own.

Alison Stewart: Was there anyone who became a father-like figure to him as a teenager?

Susan Morrison: Yes. After losing his dad, he started on this path of all his life looking for interesting father figures. The first two, when he was a teenager, one was his Uncle Pap, who was a very successful businessman in Canada. Their family was much richer and more sophisticated than Loren's was. Uncle Pap really stepped up, took Lorne under his wing, taught him about money, taught him about business, gave him a job, really kept an eye on him, later would pay for him to take trips to Europe.

Another, maybe even more important mentor in Loren's life was Frank Shuster, who was the father of his friend Rosie Shuster. He lived a few blocks away. People don't know the name Frank Shuster today, but with his comedy partner Johnny Wayne, they had a two-man comedy act called Wayne and Shuster, which was an incredibly big act in the '50s and '60s. They were guests on The Ed Sullivan Show more than any other act, even more than Topo Gigio, which you might not get if you're not a baby boomer.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I got it.

Susan Morrison: Frank Shuster was this comedy star, and he lived near Lorne. Lorne basically camped out in his study until he was finished school. There was a comfortable den, there was a real live father in it. Frank Shuster taught him the ropes. He explained how the Marx Brothers' jokes worked. He told him who Preston Sturges was. He started telling him all these great old showbiz stories that form the backbone of Lorne's conversation even today.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for Full Bio. After his misbegotten high school years, he entered university, the University of Toronto. You write about this one teacher that used to get a laugh by the way he pronounced the name of someone, and that really sparked something in Lorne.

Susan Morrison: Yes. One of the fun things about writing about Lorne Michaels is that he has this life that almost kept making me think of a Victorian novel, like a Dickens novel or something. Every single thing that he did, every encounter that he had as a young man, he was very good at taking away a nugget of wisdom, taking away a lesson from it. He was interested in comedy as a college student. He loved watching Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and analyzing his monologues.

He was in a political science class, and the teacher was talking about the prime minister, Diefenbaker, and he just said the name Diefenbaker in a way that was clear that he was making fun of the man. He didn't actually make a joke about him. Everybody in the classroom laughed. It really struck Lorne, like, oh, he didn't actually make a joke. What he did is he made everyone in the room feel like they were on the inside. It made them feel like they were part of some little elite club.

I think he realized that that's one of the things that humor can do. It's like, "You get it, you're on the inside." That's a type of humor, a type of reaction that SNL has sought in its viewers for years, from the very beginning. You recognize that this is a recurring character. You've heard that catchphrase before. You're in the in-crowd. I think that was a really important thing for him to learn at that age.

Alison Stewart: Lorne met a man named Hart Pomerantz. Who was Hart Pomerantz?

Susan Morrison: Hart Pomerantz was probably the geekiest person to ever walk the earth. He was a law student in Toronto. His little brother, even geekier than Hart, named Earl Pomerantz, auditioned to be in the college review at the University of Toronto that Lorne was producing called the UC Follies. This guy wore Coke bottle glasses. One of his jokes was, "My eyesight is so bad that my windshield is made of prescription glass."

Earl auditioned. Lorne didn't think there was a place for him in the show. Hart Pomerantz called up Lorne. He was this law student, but he had had some success writing for local comedy reviews, including one that starred the hometown hero, Robert Goulet. Hart said, "Listen, I'd really like you to cast my little brother Earl. If you do, I'll write for you. I'll give you some sketches for your show."

At that point, Lorne was just this college student. The idea of having someone who was almost an adult, who had some professional credits, contribute a couple of sketches to his college review seemed like a good deal. That was the beginning of Hart and Lorne knowing each other. A few years later, after Lorne graduated, he had heard that Hart Pomerantz had actually gone to New York City, which was really a glamorous, faraway destination, and done some standup at a comedy club called the Improv.

Lorne, who was always looking for the main chance, figured, "Ah, this guy could be my ticket out of here, my connection to professional show business." He reached out to Hart and the two of them started writing jokes together and even developed a two-man comedy act, not unlike Wayne and Shuster's.

Alison Stewart: Lipowitz and Pomerantz, they were formed.

[laughter]

Susan Morrison: Right. One of the things I think is so funny about them calling themselves Lipowitz and Pomerantz is that Lorne's mother, like every mother in his neighborhood, had her heart set on her son going to law school. What sounds more like a law firm than Lipowitz and Pomerantz?

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: They earned something like $10 a joke when they wrote for people. Who did they write for?

Susan Morrison: They wrote for Joan Rivers. They tried to write for Dick Cavett, but he didn't hire them. The most exciting thing was when they were actually flown on an airplane down to New York to meet with Woody Allen, whose career was taking off at such speed at that point. He had a couple movies going, he had a play on Broadway, he had a lot of television appearances that his agent, Jack Rollins, wanted him to hire some writers to help. He brought Pomerantz and Lipowitz down to meet Woody Allen.

One of the really big pleasures of reporting this book is Hart Pomerantz actually had tape-recorded this whole brainstorming, joke-writing session in Woody's living room, between the three of them.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Susan Morrison: You have these two 20-something Canadians, very green, and Woody who's something of a success, just brainstorming jokes. They're trying to make a joke about a lobster in a tank. Listening to it, you really just get the sense of the grueling. It's just nine misses for every one hit. They just go around and around and around. It's just a fascinating document to listen to that. I excerpt a chunk of it in the book. You can already see the beginnings of Lorne's producer personality. He takes control. He's a little pushy with his ideas and yet he backs off when they're not accepted, and he's trying to be encouraging to Woody. It's fascinating to listen to.

No jokes came out of that meeting, except it really boosted Lorne's confidence enormously. Woody did compliment one joke that Lorne told him that he didn't use. Here, I'll tell you now because it is a pretty trippy, interesting joke. The joke goes, there's a guy who becomes obsessed with the notion that somewhere in the world is another person, a doppelganger who's thinking exactly the same thoughts as he is at the same time. He's desperate to meet this guy, so he looks and he looks. Somehow he finds the phone number of this man, calls him on the phone, the line is busy because he's been thinking the same thought as the other guy.

Woody didn't use that joke, but he told Lorne that it was brilliant, and that single-handedly kept Lorne going for a couple of years.

Alison Stewart: This is also when the name change happens. What led Lorne changing his name to Lorne Michaels?

Susan Morrison: In those days, almost everyone in show business who was Jewish, and not just show business, but other professions, would change their names, would anglicize them. Every Jewish comic you can think of had a much more unwieldy name at the start of their lives. In fact, Lorne's father, Abraham Lipowitz, probably would have changed his if he had been in a profession, but he didn't. All of his brothers had changed it. He just wanted something that was more showbiz-friendly.

He had married Rosalind Shuster by then, and her mother also urged him, as did Frank Shuster, to change Lipowitz. Rosie's mother said that she didn't want the daughter, who she had named for a heroine out of Shakespeare, to have the last name Lipowitz. He tried on all different possibilities, Lipton, and he settled on Michaels. I guess it's a nice, straight-ahead Anglo name. Hart Pomerantz speculated that he chose it as an homage to Mike Nichols, whose work really knocked Lorne out for years. He just was fixated on wanting to make a movie just like The Graduate.

Alison Stewart: After the break, we'll learn how Lorne Michaels made his way in Hollywood.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and we continue our Full Bio series with Susan Morrison. She wrote Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. In the 1980s, Lorne was asked by David Letterman about his career in comedy.

David Letterman: You performed yourself?

Lorne Michaels: Yes, I did.

David Letterman: What was the nature of that act?

Lorne Michaels: It was, sad to say, a comedy act. As you can see, there's almost no trace of that left in me.

David Letterman: [laughs] No.

Lorne Michaels: I began writing with another guy in Canada, and we would write and perform ourselves. I was not great at performing, although I was very good at-- Actually, my part was mostly asking questions, but I knew what the answers would be. Then I'd say stuff like, "Really?" I was a pacer. He was very funny, and I would take the pause moment in between and support him during that. Then I began to get more and more interested in producing and comfortable there.

Alison Stewart: Lorne landed jobs writing for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. It was his work on Lily Tomlin's cutting-edge specials, Lily, that gave him a calling card for what he wanted to do next; produce. Let's get back into our Full Bio conversation about Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison.

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Alison Stewart: Lorne Michaels was in LA in the late 1960s. He got a job on Laugh-In, a TV show from the late '60s, the early '70s, just a wacky variety show. Can you explain what the comedic landscape was like in the late '60s for TV?

Susan Morrison: Yes, it was an interesting time in television. Lorne showed up in LA from Toronto with an idea that he really wanted to radicalize television. He knew that the movies were really forging ahead. You had directors like Robert Altman and Scorsese and Terrence Malick breaking boundaries. In music, you had rock and roll, you had The Stones and David Bowie.

He found that television, when he got to LA, was somehow stuck in the 1950s. There were these very cornball variety shows. He worked on one, which was Perry Como's Christmas Special. He worked for one called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. Almost exclusively these places, as well as Laugh-In, which he went to next, were staffed and written by men in their '50s and '60s, guys who had started out working in radio.

Suddenly, he just felt like, "Oh, my God, I'm in this backwater." Television is a cul de sac. On The Phyllis Diller Show, there were guests like Ernest Borgnine, and Phyllis Diller would play her saxophone at the end of the show. It was just very corny. He had this idea that he wanted to take the variety show format, music sketches, blackout jokes, and update it, filling it with the concerns of his generation; sex and drugs and rock and roll. He used the term, "I want to make new wine in old bottles." He liked the structure, the format, but he thought that all the material was just for people 20, 30 years older than he was.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Laugh-In, and we can talk about it on the other side.

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Speaker 5: Forrest and I have the most violent political arguments. He thinks the Democrats can do no wrong. Of course, I'm for Johnson.

[laughter]

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Speaker 6: It is said that the man who soweth the oats in the garden of his neighbor, perhaps he has not a pot to plant in.

[laughter]

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Speaker 7: Raquel Welch may look exciting, but man cannot live by broad alone.

[laughter]

Speaker 8: It's not that I'm against marriage. I'd get married in a minute if I didn't have to live in.

[laughter]

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Speaker 5: Actually, there have been a lot of successful show business marriages. Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds; Eddie Fisher, Liz Taylor; Eddie Fisher, Connie Stevens.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: At Laugh-In, he was considered one of the young guys. What did their humor look like next to the old guys, the old radio guys?

Susan Morrison: There's an old Catskill vaudeville kind of style of joke that's called like a blackout, which is just-- It's one setup at a quick punchline, a real kind of ba-dump-bump sort of thing. Laugh-In really specialized in that. Its creator, George Schlatter, compared it to a pinball machine. It was just really fast, one-liners, gag jokes, people sticking their heads out of holes in a psychedelic wall, shouting a punchline. Lorne was much more interested in a cerebral, almost high-concept kind of comedy, closer to the kind of jokes that Woody Allen was doing.

He liked the idea that humor could reflect really what was going on in somebody's real life, emotionally. Laugh-In, even though it was modern or mod, as you'd say, kind of psychedelic graphics, politically, considering it was the late '60s, it was toothless. One of the head writers was a crony of Richard Nixon's. There wasn't going to be any criticism of the Vietnam War. There wasn't going to be any tough politics on the show. Lorne could never get a Nixon joke on that show.

The extent that they went at Vietnam, it was Goldie Hawn in a bikini confusing the Viet Cong for King Kong. It was a dumb blonde joke. They really didn't want to go anywhere near politics. Lorne, at that point, felt that humor-- He was messianic about humor. He wanted it to be smart. He wanted it to be able to change the world. As he put it, they were watching Watergate all the time. He really thought that humor should be dealing in just those kinds of issues.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book that several people think that Laugh-In was a progenitor of SNL. What do you think?

Susan Morrison: As I said before, Lorne took little bits and pieces of everything that he encountered on his journey to SNL and used it to stoke SNL. It is true that Laugh-In has bits and pieces that remind you of SNL, but it didn't have musical guests like SNL did. Other examples of people who said SNL came from here is Lorne's camp buddy, Howard Shore, who would become SNL's first music director. He thinks that SNL was born on the plywood stage of their summer camp, Camp Timberlane, where Lorne and the others put on something called The Fast Show, which was a variety show with sketches, and jokes, and music.

Rosie Shuster thought that the show came from her father's den, that so much of what Lorne learned from her dad really filled in all the blanks at SNL. Hart Pomerantz thought that SNL came out of The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, which was a variety show that the two of them did for the CBC, which also had a lot of similarities to SNL. It was kind of this concept that took root in his mind early on, and he just refined it and refined it and refined it over time.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for Full Bio. I want to mention two female comedians that were very important to Lorne Michaels. Rosie Shuster, who you've mentioned, and Lily Tomlin. Let's start with Rosie Shuster. They've been friends since they were kids. She was his first wife. Her dad acted as a mentor to him. That sort of describes her personally. How would you describe her professionally and her impact on Lorne?

Susan Morrison: I think she had a huge impact. One of the pleasures of writing this book was giving her her due in his comedy formation, of his comedy instinct. She said that growing up in that household, just the comedy rhythms would get in your blood. It was sort of a birthright to her to be proficient at comedy and to be a funny woman with a quick comeback.

I think that partly because she grew up in a comedy household, professionally at first, she wanted to distance herself from that. I don't think she thought immediately that she wanted to grow up to be in the comedy business. It might be for that reason and also just for reasons of women in the '50s and '60s not feeling comfortable putting themselves out there, that I think for the first years of their relationship, as Rosie put it, she would whisper funny things in Lorne's ear and then he would say them out loud.

It was second nature to her to be a handmaiden, to stay behind the curtain, to not take credit. Even when she did start writing for other comedy shows, she always used a pseudonym. When I was talking with her more recently, she said something. I can't remember exactly what her words were, but she said that she just had this instinct to be self-effacing and not to step forward and take credit. I think that through years of adulthood and therapy, she's now recognized how great it is to get credit for your work. Anyway, as I said, it's been a real pleasure and privilege for me to be able to restore some of the credit to her.

Alison Stewart: Lily Tomlin is the other person I wanted to mention. Lorne Michaels worked for Lily Tomlin on her series of specials. They won an Emmy for the show. She wanted to do thoughtful comedy. At that point in his career, could he do that?

Susan Morrison: He had been bouncing around LA, pitching this show in his head to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. It wasn't until he met Lily Tomlin that he found somebody who was on the same wavelength as he was in terms of wanting comedy that expressed interior states of being, wanting comedy that would play to what he called the TV generation. He and Lily were in the first generation to have grown up on TV. They also wanted to make fun of TV. They recognized that it had shrink-wrapped the culture, and they saw it as a big target for satire.

In all of the comedy that both of them did, there are parodies of television commercials, parodies of talk shows. TV was just a big fat target waiting there. No one had really gone after it. I think she really enhanced. He described the kind of work she did as a comedian's lib, that she liberated comedy from the punchline, from the seltzer bottle, from the ba-dum-bump rim shot. She wanted to write things that were almost like little plays that explored people's characters and what was just this odd, humorous strangeness of being a person in the world.

She also, for the first time, really wanted to include women's experience. A lot of the sketches in the specials that Lorne worked on with her, some of them written by him, really shone a light on women's experience, and it's really a breakthrough. As I said, I spent a day with her in LA and I came away from there thinking, "I don't know if I'm going to do this," but someone has got to write this woman's biography because she was really, really world-changing.

Alison Stewart: That was Susan Morrison, author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about the early days of SNL.

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Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for the 600-page bio, as did members for Michaels, past and present. Lorne Lipowitz became Lorne Michaels as he launched his career as a writer and a performer, but he showed early aptitude as a producer. He wanted to produce a show that was cerebral and unconventional. Here's Michaels talking to The Today Show about the original ethos of SNL.

Lorne Michaels: What had happened then was most of the established institutions had been discredited, and that change led to people not knowing where or how to trust. It was more important to try and be an honest voice. Our job is mostly to entertain, but to do it with a level of intelligence.

Alison Stewart: He got his chance when The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson announced he didn't want to do a show that would run on the weekend. The book details the beginnings of SNL, how it ended up at 30 Rock, how he managed the brass, where he found the talent, how the talent dealt with each other, and how Michaels walked away after five years on the show and discovered it wasn't pretty out there. Let's get into it with Susan Morrison, author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

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Alison Stewart: Johnny Carson didn't want to work the weekends. What were NBC's options at the time?

Susan Morrison: Carson wanted NBC to take his reruns off of Saturday night so that he could take a day off during the week. I think he probably expected that NBC would just put on a late movie or let the affiliate stations around the country just fill that hour however they wanted to. There was a really dynamic young president of NBC at that time named Herb Schlosser. He doesn't get enough credit for all of the visionary things he did at NBC even before this. We're talking 1975 now. He had put on the air a lot of shows about and created by African Americans at a time when that was really unusual. Sanford and Son, Julia, starring Diahann Carroll. He really had a lot of vision for what television could be.

He said, "Look, we have this time slot. Let's do something really creative with it." He dictated a memo about what he wanted on Saturday at 11:30. A lot of people don't realize that he dictated so many of the really precise details of what SNL would become. He wanted it to be live. He wanted it to be done out of New York City in Studio 8H in the RCA building. He wanted there to be rotating hosts. He had this idea that if they did something like this, it could be used almost like a farm team to spin off other shows in prime time.

It was really just a very innovative set of ideas there. It just so happened that a lot of the things on his list were the same kinds of things that Lorne Michaels was envisioning in the fantasy variety show inside his head. The one thing that Lorne wasn't sure about, and this was a big surprise to me, and I think really interesting. When they offered him this gig, he almost said no, because he wanted to stay in Los Angeles. This is a guy who grew up in the frigid Canadian climate, and he was really digging, living in LA. He loved the beach and he loved the desert.

He also liked what he described as the way California valued the aesthetic of fun, as a value in its own right. He knew that in 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. Crime was up. He'd seen Taxi Driver, Escape from New York, and The French Connection, and all these movies about New York and tatters. He thought, "Gee, maybe it's nicer just to stay here in my room at the Chateau Marmont.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Once he was approached about the job, how did Lorne Michaels feel about sharing the space with NBC's Dick Ebersol, who was also a part of this equation?

Susan Morrison: Dick Ebersol was a very young executive at NBC who had been tasked with finding the replacement for the 11:30 slot on Saturday night. He met Lorne when Lorne was working on the Lily Tomlin specials and really starting to see some concrete results of these visions he'd had in his head for a while. Ebersol was a real he was a real NBC company man. He's somebody who had rapport with the higher-ups. He could talk to the executives. He was a very useful go-between with the network. Lorne saw him as a useful partner in the same way that he thought Hart Pomerantz was a useful partner back in the '60s.

As the show got underway, as often happens, there was some tension because Lorne was clearly the creative mind behind the show. As the show was getting a little bit more successful, Ebersol seemed to be wanting to take a little bit more creative credit than most people at the show thought was warranted. It was almost as if he wanted the world to think that he was the co-creator of the show when, in reality, he was the network executive who facilitated the show getting on the air and was supposed to be responsible for budget issues and running interference with the network.

There was a little bit of creative tension. After five shows, Lorne and his manager Bernie Brillstein successfully got NBC to remove Ebersol from SNL and give him one of these promotions that seemed like was a promotion but not really a promotion, basically got him out of Lorne's hair.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for Full Bio. Where did Lorne Michaels go to look for cast members?

Susan Morrison: In the beginning, he was determined that everything about his show be different from everything else on television. He didn't want anyone who had ever been on television before. He had this faith that there were a lot of people out there like him and Lily Tomlin, who wanted to make a name for themselves, but also weren't interested in conventional television. He went to clubs, catch a rising star. He found Andy Kaufman, who wasn't in the original cast but was a regular on that first season.

If you've never seen Andy Kaufman, go to YouTube right now and watch him. He really telegraphed the out-there, almost arty ambitions that Lorne had for his show. When he first saw Kaufman at a comedy club in New York, one of his friends, Gary Weiss, said, "Man, this could be at the Guggenheim." It was so beyond, so post-punchline. Really, he got some people from the National Lampoon Radio Hour, he got some people from Toronto, people who he'd done comedy with before. He met Chevy Chase waiting in line to see Monty Python on the Holy Grail.

One thing that was interesting is that because his show was on at late night, the pay scale was going to be very low. Two people he wanted he almost lost. One of them, the writer Alan Zweibel, who was basically slicing cold cuts in a deli at the time that Lorne saw him doing a standup set, he almost didn't take the job from Lorne because he had been offered a spot writing the jokes for Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares. A pretty corny job, but it was prime time, so it was going to be a bigger paycheck.

Anyway, it was interesting that he wanted to find these very cutting-edge people, but he couldn't offer them a lot of money. They just had to be in on the renegade spirit of what he was going after. They did find those people and they made history.

Alison Stewart: Your book is full of so many stories about those early days. It's hard to pick one. You have Chevy Chase thinking that he was bigger than the show, Belushi behaving badly to himself, Gilda Radner suffering through anorexia. There were drugs everywhere. I'm going to ask you to offer one story that shows what it was like to be Lorne in a decision-making role and the choice he made.

Susan Morrison: Lorne from the very beginning, I think had a very intuitive grasp of management. He never read Management for Dummies or anything like that. I think it's just something in his background, being the fatherless boy, he intuitively knew how to handle creative people, I think. There's a story that I didn't know until I was researching this book that I think illustrates that. He wanted to have a Black writer on the staff. Someone he knew at the Writers Guild sent him some material by Garrett Morris, who was older than the rest of the gang. He was in his 30s and he was a Juilliard-trained playwright. He hired Garrett Morris to be on the writing staff.

After a few weeks, an incident happened where something that Garrett Morris was just talking about conversationally, one of the other writers wrote up into a sketch. A writer's room is kind of a big free for all people. Somebody mentions this, somebody else writes it up. It was a new enough thing that the protocols hadn't been established. Garrett Morris was incredibly offended and felt that his idea had been stolen and went to Lorne and complained, "This is a problem."

Lorne, generally, his management approach had been like a parent who wants the kids to sort out their squabbles themselves, so he did not intervene. What he did was he figured, "Okay, Garrett Morris is someone, a big talent, who we want on the show, but how do we get out of this complicated mess?" Instead, he said to Garrett, "Why don't you audition to be in the cast?" Which is what Morris did. He went to the cast auditions, he auditioned, and he was part of the cast. He got to be part of the project. This big squabble with the other writer was blown over. Lorne didn't have to get his hands dirty. I just think that's a good illustration of how he would sort out a mess.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. I want to ask about Bernie Brillstein. He was a talent manager and he had many people on the cast who he represented. Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. How did he cause Lorne an occasional headache? Because I think he was Lorne's manager too, right?

Susan Morrison: Yes. Lorne met Bernie Brillstein when he was working on The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. Lorne, ever since his father died, he gravitated toward slightly older guys who had been around, who had wisdom to impart about show business. Bernie Brillstein was one of these guys. He was a big, barrel-chested person with a beard. He was always described as a Jewish Santa. He liked Lorne and he signed him.

There was nothing cutting edge about the acts that Bernie Brillstein represented. Lorne was probably way out there in terms of being edgy compared to anyone else that Bernie had. Again, Lorne was so canny about who he surrounded himself with. He always felt that it was really good to have Bernie Brillstein as a gut check. He represented middlebrow taste. If Bernie Brillstein liked it, they would like it in Kansas. He was a guy who watched football on Sunday, something that Lorne didn't really do. Also, he had Lorne's back. He was the kind of person who would get into scrapes, have confrontations with people that Lorne didn't want to have because Lorne is by nature unconfrontational.

Now, he was Lorne's manager. In the early days of SNL, he quickly signed up Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, eventually some of the writers. That worked pretty well as long as they were all a big, happy band. As time wore on, it was a little bit complicated for Lorne because, for instance, in the fourth season, Brillstein was the executive behind The Blues Brothers, which is a movie that his clients Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were making. That was great for him. He got to have his big Mr. Hollywood moment. It wasn't so great for his other client, you might say his more important client, Lorne Michaels, who employed those two guys.

By setting up The Blues Brothers deal, Brillstein effectively robbed Lorne of two of his most important cast members. A lot of people always said, along the way, they didn't understand why Lorne didn't get madder at Bernie after things like that. I think he has a real ability to be able to compartmentalize, like, "Well, this is business. It's just business." That's what you're going to do. If you're a businessman, you're going to make that deal. Those kinds of conflicts of interest popped up here and there. I think at the end of the day, Lorne always valued Bernie because he was there at the beginning. That kind of longevity, that kind of loyalty, that spans decades, always counts for a lot with him.

Alison Stewart: In your chapter, Into the Wilderness, you write about the time that Lorne Michaels left SNL. It was after the fifth season, or he was kind of pushed out. I couldn't quite tell. How would you describe his leaving?

Susan Morrison: He had been doing SNL for five years. He was absolutely shattered with exhaustion. He'd lost most of his cast members. He wanted to keep going, but he said to NBC that he needed at least six months to regroup. He knew he'd have to hire all new people, and he just needed to rest. I think he felt pretty confident that they would do that because he, after all, had created this show. He wasn't that sophisticated in some ways about network politics. The network came right back at him and said, "No, no, you can't do that. We've already sold all the fall ad spots. The show has to go on as planned."

He entered into this complicated negotiation which got sort of fraught. I think he thought that he was going to prevail. Then something happened right before his final meeting with the president of the network, Fred Silverman, who was not his closest ally, where on an episode of SNL, Al Franken went on Weekend Update and did a bit making fun of Fred Silverman, the NBC president, for having a limo. The name of the bit was Limo for a Lame-O. Basically, Franken asked all the viewers to send in a postcard addressed to Limo for a Lame-O, saying that if Fred Silverman had a limo, Al Franken should have one, too.

Now, it's Lorne Michaels' practice to not get in the weeds of his writers' and cast members' comedy bits. He would not have told Al, "Just don't do that. I'm negotiating with Fred Silverman right now." It is kind of remarkable to think about that. This thing went over the air. Fred Silverman was completely furious. The negotiations sputtered out. I think Lorne still thought that he was maybe going to be able to save it.

Then suddenly, when he was out of town a few weeks later, he got a call saying that NBC had just announced a new producer. He was shocked because I think he thought that if he weren't going to do it, that NBC would just take it off the air. He thought it was really his baby, but he was wrong. It was NBC's property.

Alison Stewart: I want to back up one thing. Why did Lorne lose so many cast members in the first five years?

Susan Morrison: When he started the show, first of all, he didn't expect that the cast was going to be as important as it was. I think he almost thought of them as background players. You'd have the star hosts and you'd have these fancy rock bands, but the cast was enormously talented, and people loved them. They especially loved Chevy Chase. I think he became famous first because he looked into the camera every week and said, "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not." He became a giant star in the first season. He was getting all kinds of movie offers.

It also upset the emotional ecology of the show. There was jealousy and rivalry. Why was Chevy Chase on the cover of New York magazine and not them? At the end of that first season, Chevy left because Hollywood was calling. At that point or even today, if you're an actor trying to make it and you're suddenly getting movie deals and first-class tickets to LA, you're generally going to go.

When Chevy became a star, the others started thinking, "Well, gee, what can I get out of this?" Belushi was the next one whose ambition really took hold of him. He starred in Animal House, which was a movie that Lorne wasn't connected with, but was a massive, massive hit. He was suddenly gigantically famous. He wanted to pursue the movies. He and Dan Aykroyd, his friend from the show, had developed this act called The Blues Brothers. That was then made into a movie.

Basically, it's a pretty classic trajectory, people leaving TV for the movies when the movies beckon. I don't think Lorne had counted on it at that point. It made it hard for him to do the show, to have it be as good and as funny as he wanted it to be. He hadn't figured out by that time that the way to do Saturday Night Live, and certainly the way he's made it happen for 50 years, is that it has to exist in a constant state of renewal. He often compares it to a sports franchise. You have your stars, but you have to have your rookies on the bench.

It's a little bit like New York City itself. It's in a constant state of being torn down and rebuilt. It's one of the things that accounts for its unevenness. It's like the Dow or the Yankees. They're good years or bad years. In the first five years, it had never occurred to him that he was going to have to be constantly looking out for new talent, constantly hiring people. When he came back in 1985, that's what he had learned. You have to keep rejuvenating the show.

Alison Stewart: What did he do in the years he was gone from SNL?

Susan Morrison: That was interesting. As I said earlier, he was obsessed with Mike Nichols and always thought that he wanted to make a movie like The Graduate. After five years at SNL, he thought, "Well, the TV part of my career is done now. Now I'm going to go into the movies." He made a deal with MGM to produce and direct movies. He hired a bunch of his SNL writers, including Franken and Davis, to write scripts, but nothing really happened with them.

Part of it was that MGM, at that point, was in financial free fall, so they really weren't in a position to make any of Lorne's movies. He also didn't really know how to do it. One movie got made in that period called Nothing Lasts Forever, directed by Tom Schiller, who had made charming little films in the first five years of SNL, but it was like a little black-and-white art film. I think the studio was expecting a boffo, big-ticket comedy like Animal House.

There's Lorne, he was working on a script, which was an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. He had optioned Don DeLillo's White Noise. The movies in his head were not movies like Animal House. That was basically a disastrous five years. He did, and this is how I met him. In 1983, he signed with NBC to do a primetime variety show modeled on SNL called The New Show. I was an assistant on that show, which is how I got my foot into this crazy Lorne world. That show also was a disaster. Really, it was because it wasn't live. It was shot on tape.

He would amass several hours worth of stuff and then had to stay up all night editing it and it would air the next day. The value of The New Show is it made him realize what his talent is. His talent is doing things live with a knife-point of adrenaline and energy. Anytime you're sitting in an editing room chopping things up and doing them 18 different ways and adding a laugh track, you're going to sap all the electricity, all the energy from it.

Alison Stewart: Once Lorne returned to Saturday Night Live, what changed about him when he came back?

Susan Morrison: He got pretty banged up during the five years of hiatus. By the time he came back to the show in 1985, he had had to remortgage his apartment. He was in financial distress. He really wanted to get it right. The first year, he made a colossal mistake. He decided that he needed to get really young people for the new audience. He hired several people who had starred in John Hughes' teen movies. Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr. These guys, they weren't like ensemble comedy players. They were too young and not really seasoned enough to be able to do what SNL did best, which is ensemble work with other really funny people.

That season fell completely flat. He fired almost everybody at the end of that season. The three who survived were Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller, and Nora Dunn. The next year, he went back and hired people out of comedy clubs. That's when he hired, I think, one of the best cast that the show's ever had. You had Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman. These people were just amazing actors of the first terrible year with all the young people. Al Franken, who was the writer/producer on the show, he said you couldn't even do a hearing about a sketch about a Senate hearing that year because these guys, they barely had a shave. They were just too young.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about Lorne Michaels' highs and lows as a producer.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest this week has been Susan Morrison. She is the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and it went on the air October 11th, 1975. At the helm was Lorne Michaels, a month shy of his 30th birthday.

We learned about Michael's origins growing up in Canada, enthralled with comedy. We talked about his career as a writer and how he came to run SNL. Today, we're going to explore being Lorne. In adulthood, Lorne Michaels grew comfortable with the finer things in life. He married three times, and according to the book, believed in taking time off when he became a father. At work, SNL had rules. He didn't like improvisations on the show. He had thoughts on props and wigs. Michaels believed that SNL should evolve with the generations.

The show is geared towards whatever the zeitgeist is, whether the cast liked it or not. When celebrity and culture came around, so did impressions. When it was political season, out came the political sketches. He branched out and pitched a young guy named Conan O'Brien for a late-night talk show. Here's O'Brien on his show talking to Bill Hader about a regular occurrence, the Lorne Michaels impression.

Conan O'Brien: We both owe a lot to Lorne Michaels. Lorne Michaels gave me my shot, gave you your shot. Obviously, iconic, great man. Let's face it, everybody who has worked with Lorne, we're all comedy performers and when we get together, all we do is our Lorne Michaels impressions. Everybody does them. Everybody does that.

Bill Hader: Everybody does it.

Conan O'Brien: Yours is, I think, one of my all-time favorites because you got the voice down of Lorne Michaels, but you put a particular spin on it. You get very specific with yours.

Bill Hader: Fred Armisen pointed out a thing that when Lorne has to name-drop, which he does a lot because he knows--

Conan O'Brien: All of his friends are super famous.

Bill Hader: Super famous. He always rubs his eyes like this, like he's really put out by the amount of famous people he knows.

[laughter]

Bill Hader: We would do a bit John Solomon and some of the writers of Lorne name-dropping serial killers.

[laughter]

Conan O'Brien: He goes to restaurants to hang out with famous people and famous serial killers join him.

Bill Hader: Yes. One would be like, "I went to Kansas City with Alec and Marcy to try to get BTK killer off death row."

[laughter]

Bill Hader: They said, "Here comes BTK." I go, "His name is Dennis."

[laughter]

Bill Hader: He's a human being. One day, I'd be like, "I was at La Tanzi with Mick and Jeffrey Dahmer."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: To make it on SNL, you had to be on board, and some left because of the culture. A long-standing issue was the lack of minorities in the show for many years, which the author and I have a spirited debate about in our last segment of Full Bio. Lorne Michaels: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison.

[music]

Alison Stewart: For the last part of our conversation, we're going to talk about being Lorne because so much of the book is about being Lorne, how Lorne behaves, how he acts, and how he produces the show, and the different rules he has for how he produces the show and how he deals with people. He has said over and over that he has become somewhat of a mentor for young people becoming stars. What is the advice that he gives to young talent who find themselves thrust into stardom?

Susan Morrison: One of the things that I found as I was writing this book is that there's a whole lexicon of both Lornisms and SNL jargon. I wish I had had space to have a glossary at the end of my book. One term he uses a lot that I love is he talks about how a lot of his cast members are first-generation famous. Meaning that unlike someone like Candice Bergen, whose father was a famous TV ventriloquist, a lot of his people, they're coming from Oklahoma. They're 23 years old or something, they're coming to New York. Lorne is opening the whole world to them. They don't know uptown from downtown. They don't know how to live in the world. They don't know what to do with their newly large paychecks.

These people, the first-generation famous, they come to him for advice about everything. Not only does he have a whole set of rules about what makes comedy work and the rules of sketch comedy, but he has rules for living. In the first five years, when he was as young as his cast members and it was the 1970s, these rules tended to be things like, "Rotate your drugs." Now that he's older and his cast members are younger than he is, they tend to ask him advice about, "Well, should I rent a Lexus or a Mercedes," or, "How do I buy an apartment?" He has wonderful bits of advice on questions like these.

For instance, several different people told me that Lorne will say, "Always buy an apartment that you think you can't afford, that you think it's beyond your means. For one thing, you're definitely going to be making more money next year than you do this year. If you have an apartment like that, you'll come home at the end of the day, you'll look around, you'll say, 'Wow, who lives here?' And you'll say, 'Oh, I live here.'"

Another thing he says is, "You know what's better than 10-foot ceilings? 12-foot ceilings." He inculcates them in the good life. He's always been ahead of his time in terms of thinking about work-life balance and the value of leisure time. I think that's something that he picked up in the years he lived in Los Angeles. He arranged the show's schedule to be compatible with the vacation schedule of New York City private schools because he thinks it's very important that people always take vacations in warm places and relax. These are all values that he drills into the people who work for him.

Alison Stewart: Did he take time to get married? He got married three times. Is that it?

Susan Morrison: He got married three times. When he was very young, he married Rosie Shuster, his childhood teenage sweetheart. In the first five years of the show, he married Susan Forrestal, who was a model and art gallery owner. That wasn't that long-lived marriage. Then in the '90s, he married Alice Barry, who had worked at the show as his assistant. When he got married to Alice the third time and they started a family, I think that also really, as he would put it, kind of unlocks a chamber of your heart when you have kids. He really made a point of making time for fatherhood and not missing the Little League games and having proper vacations with his kids.

Tina Fey said something interesting to me. For a guy who kind of became a mogul during the '80s, at the time when New York was full of newly rich fat cats, he never caught that '80s disease of needing to act like he was a crazed workaholic. I remember in those years, every time you picked up a profile of someone like Jeff Katzenberg, Barry Diller, or Michael Milken or something, they would be talking about how they only needed three hours of sleep, got up at 4:30 every morning, worked out for an hour and a half, and then met with their financial advisor. Put this kind of crazy workaholism on display.

Lorne isn't like that. He sleeps till eleven o'clock every day. He works really hard, but then when he's not working he's serious about his time off and he spends it with his family and goes to nice places. Tina Fey also does this bit about Lorne buying a vacation home on the planet Naboo from Star Wars and how chic and undiscovered it is. They all make fun of him for this too, but they appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: Well, he seems like a creative person, but he clearly had to be talked into certain business ideas that gave him that kind of wealth. What made him wealthy?

Susan Morrison: That's a good question. After the first five years of SNL when he left, Buck Henry, his friend, the comedian who had hosted the show a lot, said, "So what was your cut of SNL? What did you walk away with?" He was kind of aghast to realize that he had nothing. He had not negotiated. He didn't have any ownership. He created this thing, but he didn't own any of it. As time went on, he hired people who could help him with that.

In particular, there was a guy named Eric Ellenbogen who he hired at Broadway Video, his production company. Eric had a lot more modern ideas about merchandising the show. In the first five years, Lorne thought that it would have been incredibly tacky to have Coneheads lunchboxes or any kind of merchandise connected with the show. That would be selling out.

As time went on, I think he realized, "This is just the lay of the land and this is how it's done." Suddenly, there were SNL T-shirts. When he got into producing the big buffo SNL movies that studios and audiences wanted, like Wayne's World 1 and 2, there was a ton of merchandising. There were figurines you could get at McDonald's. There were T-shirts, there were comic books. He also got much savvier about negotiating with the network for other different kinds of rights. Over the years, he acquired different kinds of foreign and domestic distribution rights, video rights. Just made a lot of much more sophisticated deals that eventually turned him into a very rich man.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It is our choice for Full Bio. It's interesting, I've heard you use the word, "He would describe something as tacky or it was unhip. He had the best restaurants, he had the best tables." How did he sort of acquire this persona? This guy from Toronto, Canada, acquired this persona of living the high life?

Susan Morrison: I think it actually has something to do with being Canadian. As I was spending so much time with Lorne reporting this book, there were definitely things about his personality that remind me of my friend and former colleague Graydon Carter, who was the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, has a new memoir out. He also is Canadian. Both Lorne and Graydon have a very ultra-refined sense of taste. I think it's almost the holdover of a kind of a nose pressed against the glass aspirational stance that maybe you develop if you grow up in Canada and are always looking south of the border thinking, "I want to make it there."

I think part of it is being Canadian, being from away and wanting to assimilate, wanting to really live the good life. I also think that he's a little snobby. It's something that he has turned into a comic bit. Whenever Lorne appears as himself on the show or in the TV Funhouse cartoons that the writer Robert Smigel used to do on the show, he's this almost prissy pasha, this rich guy having his nails done and talking in an affected English accent.

All the people in the writers' room have all these elaborate things they do to amuse each other. Making fun of Lorne, a character called Little Lorne Fauntleroy, and things like that. It's funny because it's partly true. He is that sort of person who is very fussy about food and wears Gucci loafers. Yet he's also figured out how to turn it into comedy fodder. It's very interesting the way he's done that, something almost meta about it.

Alison Stewart: Throughout the book, you reveal how the press had a field day with SNL and with Lorne. Saturday Night Dead was a regular headline over the course of the show's history. What is something that the press got right about the show, and what was something that really they got wrong, it wasn't SNL's problem?

Susan Morrison: That's so interesting. Well, I think for a long time, the press and viewers in general complained that the show lacked diversity in all different kinds of ways. I think he's always been very sensitive to wanting to present a lot of material relevant to women and women's lives but there were periods in the '90s when the writers' room was a bit more of a boys' club. There weren't enough interesting things for women to do. There certainly weren't enough people of color on the show, either on the screen or in the writers' room.

Lorne, for years took the position, which isn't crazy, that he didn't ever want to hire people according to any kind of quota. He just wanted to hire the funniest people, just get the funniest people, and let them do their thing.

Alison Stewart: I mean, come on.

Susan Morrison: Yes, exactly. He said that for years until I think that really wasn't viable at a certain point. Around maybe 2017 this really heated up. I think he just said, "Okay, I guess this isn't going to cut it anymore." He held auditions in the middle of the season searching for African American women for the writing room and the cast. This is how he met Leslie Jones. Hired her then. It was too little, too late. That should have happened 10 years earlier. For someone who is really attuned to when the music changes, he kind of missed that one and it was too late. He finally did it, and now the show I think has a great diversity record and you see all sorts of people on screen and in the writers' room and it's caught up, but it did take too long. I think they were right about that.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I thought about it because he really was very big and very smart about it being a generational show, that it had to switch generations.

Susan Morrison: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I wonder if because of his age, it's not like there weren't funny Black people out there 50 years ago.

Susan Morrison: I think it wouldn't have been a decision. It would have been more that they always looked in the same places. They looked at The Groundlings and they looked at the Chicago Second City. There were probably a whole lot of other places that they could have been looking, people that they could have been asking, that they just didn't because Lorne is also superstitious about his routines. He likes to do things the same way. Probably 10 years earlier, there were other places they could have gone looking for talent rather than these predominantly white comedy troupes. It was just not getting out of their own comfort zone, which is what they needed to do. They finally did.

What was the second part of the question? Oh, that was something they got right. You're asking me for something they got wrong?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Susan Morrison: In the mid-'90s, there was this terrible period that a lot of people forget when Lorne almost got fired. NBC was really unhappy with the show. It was a time when the press, the critics, which were mostly baby boomers, and the network executives, who were also primarily baby boomers, both agreed and were hammering on the show for being kind of sophomoric. One of the things that came up often in the press was there were too many sketches about anal probes.

Basically what this was is that trying to go younger, trying to, again, look at the sort of hinges between eras, as the Phil Hartman cast started aging out, he brought in a lot of young guys. At the same time, he brought in Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and David Spade. Their humor had a really different cast. It was smart smart-alecky. It was what we would come to call laddish later. A lot of people didn't like it. A lot of young people really liked it, but a lot of middle-aged people hated it. At the end of that scuffle, Lorne was made to fire Farley and Sandler who are so beloved and have made so many gazillions of dollars at the box office. That was the wrong call.

Within a couple of years of Farley being pushed out, Don Ohlmeyer, the network executive who had forced Lorne to get rid of him, called him and said, "I was wrong about Adam Sandler. Can you get me a print of Billy Madison so I could show it at my kid's birthday party?" Lorne was kind of seeing ahead into what the next generation of viewers wanted to see, but the network and the critics weren't onto it yet.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because he talks about the show being a generational show. Then in recent years, he's wanted to have, and he has had as hosts, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, when you would assume that the generation who works out of New York would tend to skew more Democratic. What happens when he wants to have an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump host the show?

Susan Morrison: Well, the first thing I'd say is I don't think of Musk or Trump, their selection, in terms of having anything to do with age or generation. From the beginning, he's always wanted and he's booked people outside of entertainment on the show. They had Ralph Nader, they had various sports stars. They had Brandon Tartikoff, the NBC president. I think it's more just like, who's going to be a big personality, who's going to get ratings? When Trump was first booked on the show, it was about The Apprentice. Nobody ever took Trump seriously as a politician. Who among us can take Donald Trump seriously as a politician, even now?

Musk, his booking would have nothing to do with politics. He was just this cultural weirdo. I don't really see either one of them as political bookings.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Susan Morrison: Yes. No, not at all. When Trump was booked the second time because he was a candidate, Hillary Clinton was booked as well. The whole idea there was to have both candidates on. Then the Hillary thing ended up falling apart. You wouldn't book somebody on the show because of their politics. This is showbiz. Donald Trump is a showbiz creature. I don't think that Lorne would consider booking someone like Elon Musk in his politicized incarnation now. When he was on the show, he was just the weird space guy who invented the electric car. There were people on the staff who didn't like that Musk was on the show and didn't like that Trump was on the show. They said that they thought that Lorne was just booking his rich buddies. That doesn't seem right at all to me because, first of all, Lorne is not and wouldn't be buddies with those guys. It's just, as I said, they're just kind of like strange cultural gargoyles who are going to make viewers turn in and watch, and I think that's what happened.

Alison Stewart: Lorne Michaels, I believe he's 80 years old.

Susan Morrison: Yes.

Alison Stewart: He's been doing this for almost his whole life. What happens to SNL when he retires?

Susan Morrison: Well, people have floated a lot of possible replacement candidates. People have said Tina Fey could do it, Seth Meyers could do it, Colin Jost could do it. I don't see it as a simple "replace Lorne" situation. I think he is too essential to the show. His taste, his personality, his demands. The show is essential to him. He's never missed a show in all the years he's produced it. He's never been home with a stomach flu.

I have an idea that I think could keep him doing it for 15 more years, which would be, he's really only truly essential two afternoons a week there. Wednesday, when they do the read-through and then pick a dozen sketches that are going to go forward in production. Then Saturday, when he comes and watches the dress rehearsal and makes a lot of last-minute decisions about what's going to stay and what's going to go. I think that if he could come to the office just those two chunks of time each week, his really able squad of deputies, Erik Kenward, Erin Doyle, Steve Higgins, Caroline Maroney, I think they could carry everything else out.

That's kind of what happened when they did the show remotely during COVID and Lorne was locked down in St. Barts. That would be my recommendation to keep him in there for a limited number of hours, twice a week, but don't try to replace him.

Alison Stewart: I love that you said he was locked in St. Barts during COVID.

Susan Morrison: Yes, he was.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything that someone has not asked you about Lorne Michaels that you think is really important to understanding him?

Susan Morrison: Well, there is one common misperception about him which I think is interesting. A lot of people peg him as a certain kind of Hollywood guy. There's certain comedy professionals who will listen to a joke, stand there with their hands in their pockets, and then just nod their head and say, "That's funny." He isn't one of those guys. He is someone who really does laugh and who is funny himself. A lot of people said, "Is Lorne funny or is he just like a bureaucrat?" He certainly had me laughing. Usually in a dry under-the-breath way, sly putdowns of people, but very funny.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. My guest has been Susan Morrison. Susan, thank you for giving us so much time.

Susan Morrison: Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Susan Morrison. Keep your eyes for all three Full Bio segments in your podcast feed. Full Bio was engineered by Jason Isaac, post-production by Jordan Lauf, and written by me.