There’s a chance you’ve heard this is the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live.” Sunday brought the live anniversary special (and guests galore) on NBC. It arrived on the heels of the documentary “Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music” and the 2024 feature film “Saturday Night” — a fictional re-creation of the 90 minutes leading up to the very first episode. Throw in the sheer tonnage of think pieces and appreciations and other navel-gazing and you’d be forgiven for asking: Do we also need a book about Lorne Michaels?
Somehow, despite all of the above, Susan Morrison’s “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live” — out Tuesday — emerges as indispensable, especially for “SNL” completists. Morrison, an editor for the New Yorker, brings that magazine’s combination of access, reporting and fluid analysis to a subject who, despite his high visibility, has often played it close to the vest.
The book has too many good Michaels stories to count, but we picked five of the most revealing tidbits that might help you better understand the man behind the show.
Live from New York
Michaels made his first trip to New York from Toronto in the winter of 1961 when he was 17. He was instantly smitten. Crashing with a buddy at an older friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village, he stared agog at the beatnik surroundings and took in one play after another, including Neil Simon’s first show, “Come Blow Your Horn,” Paddy Chayefsky’s “The Tenth Man” and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” A cast member of that show was dating a writer for “The Tonight Show” and Michaels, already a budding networker, arranged for tickets to go see Jack Paar in action. As Morrison writes, that writer, “a preppy young man named Dick Cavett, came down from the studio to give the boys their tickets.” Among the guests that night: Betty White.
Go home, Mick!
One of Michaels’ first hires for the show then called “Saturday Night” was writer-comedian Tom Schiller, who would often crash on Michaels’ sofa at the Osborne in New York. Except sometimes it took a while to hunker down at night. Michaels’ new friend Paul Simon would often be over, smoking a joint with his host and gabbing away until the wee small hours of the morning. Another frequent sofa denizen was Mick Jagger. “I kept praying that Mick Jagger would leave so I could go to sleep on that couch,” Schiller recalled.
Michaels soon hired his cousin, Neil Levy. As Morrison writes, “Now it was his turn to be kept up at night, waiting for Mick Jagger to stop talking and smoking pot and go home; he remembers the singer holding forth about architecture. He recalled asking himself, ‘How does a guy like Lorne, with okay credits, but not famous — a nobody — how does he pick up with Mick Jagger and suddenly be friends?’ The answer, he figured, was a combination of charisma and an ability to intuit what a person wants to talk about. ‘He always had an innate intelligence about reading people and guessing right,’ he said.”
Four faces of Lorne
Though the “SNL” buck stops with Michaels, he has what Morrison calls “four chief deputies, each of whom embodies a different facet of his personality.” One is Erik Kenward, “a calm ‘Harvard Lampoon’ alum with a neatly trimmed beard. He has worked at the show since 2001 and has absorbed the boss’s unflappable steadiness, with a tinge of the long-suffering.” Then there’s the one the public knows: Colin Jost, co-host of “Weekend Update” (with Michael Che). As Morrison writes, Jost “was also a ‘Harvard Lampoon’ editor,” and “is, like Michaels, demonstrably well-read and au courant about politics. He is married to Scarlett Johansson, which lends him a Hollywood shimmer that Michaels appreciates.”
Rounding out the quartet are Erin Doyle and Steve Higgins. Doyle started as an intern and became one of Michaels’ assistants. “She has a palpable warmth,” Morrison writes, “and, like Michaels, has a knack for dealing with high-strung famous people.” Higgins, who is also Jimmy Fallon’s announcer on “The Tonight Show,” “is a booster of silliness, a quality that Michaels considers essential to the show, and he is a reliable errand man when Michaels, known to avoid confrontation, has bad news to deliver.”
Absolute power
That said, there’s no mistaking who’s in charge here. “Michaels rules ‘SNL’ with detached but absolute power,” Morrison writes. “He harbors no illusions that his Canadian tendency toward self-deprecation is taken seriously by anyone. One talent agent routinely tells clients auditioning for Michaels to remember that he is the real star of the show. He is the alpha in most of his employees’ lives. To those people, and to the wider comedy world, he is, not accidentally, a mythic figure, a mysterious object of obsession.” As former cast member (and fellow Canadian) Mike Myers says, “He is aware of his own Lorne-ness.”
… But that doesn’t mean he wins every battle
In the mid-‘90s, as the show’s ratings tumbled and critics got out their knives on a regular basis, Michaels faced a revolt from the executive suites. Don Ohlmeyer, then president of NBC’s West Coast division, wanted a complete “SNL” overhaul, and he wanted Michaels to fire two of the show’s biggest stars, Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. Michaels quietly resisted and went into his common strategic stance of waiting out his adversaries until he emerged victorious. But the heat wouldn’t stop, and the possibility of the show’s cancellation seemed quite real. In the end, it sounds like Farley and Sandler weren’t quite fired, but their exit wasn’t exactly amicable. It’s strange to think that a show with a history of seeing its big talent leave to make movies actually pushed two of its biggest stars out the door.
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