Dear Tim,
The approaching Minnesota winter whistled through my open bedroom window last night, so when I awoke I decided that I wasn’t going to agree with whatever you wrote about Tom Shales’ and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York, newly published to much hoo-ha. We’re like that here in passive aggressive Minnesota: You’re cold because you left the window open, so you slag the Pulitzer-Prize-winning television critic of the Washington Post and his co-writer.
That said, I completely agree with you that Shales has both painted his masterpiece and presented, at last, a definitive work on Saturday Night Live. Compared even to Edie, that other great oral history, Live From New York is more interesting, dirtier, and populated with people far more talented than the dimwits who surrounded Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgewick in their glory days.
Shales’ canvas is worthy. Despite SNL’s unevenness over the last quarter-century, it’s not exactly cutting-edge social commentary to remember how special Saturday Night Live was when it debuted in 1975 because it seemed the first show made for “us.” More important than “us,” however, was that Saturday Night Live was the first television show made for Tom Shales—he hailed its debut more than 25 years ago as “the freshest satire on commercial TV” that deserved added hosannas for occurring “nakedly, brazenly, and perilously live.”
The old generation of pre-Shales TV critics had been a mostly fuss-budgety lot, always demanding more Edward R. Murrow Harvest of Shame pain-and-misery documentaries, even when Edward R. Murrow had moved on to grinding out propaganda for the U.S. government. A generally status-free job in the newsroom slightly above the obituary department, the old-guard TV critics were the men who hounded Jack Paar off the air for saying “water closet,” who helped pull the plug on The Smothers Brothers Show for booking well-known Stalinist Pete Seeger.
Shales was the brightest of the baby boom TV critics, weaned via television on Vietnam’s living-room war and Sen. Sam Ervin as Watergate’s Moses. Still, even those in the media who liked Saturday Night Live didn’t seem to know what the hell it was its first season. New York magazine made Saturday Night Live sound like a Chevy Chase vehicle, and put the preppie with the Harold Lloyd pratfalls on its cover. (This enraged John Belushi into a paroxysm of jealousy; he was redeemed when Chase quit the show after a year, tying McLean Stevenson’s decision to leave M*A*S*H for worst career move in TV history.) Meantime, the New York Times thought Saturday Night Live was a music show, though the critic admitted he’d missed 40 minutes of the program.
Whatever Saturday Night Live was—and one shudders to think of the number of Ph.Ds Shales’ and Miller’s exemplary effort will provide primary material for in the future—Saturday Night Live’s meaning has seemed as impossible to decrypt as the gibberish that Eddie Murphy was singing in his brilliant “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub” skits.
Not that vast forests haven’t been felled in the trying. In fact, the best book review I ever heard concerned the biography of a Saturday Night Live hero. The book was Bob Woodard’s Wired, the Watergate-buster’s pathography of the putatively grimy life and death of John Belushi. The review: “Somebody should a drop a safe on Bob Woodward’s head,” from SNL stalwart Bill Murray. “Woodward had an agenda in getting everything so wrong. He’s jealous. He knows that no matter how many Pulitzers he wins he’s still going to rank behind John and then Red Grange as the most famous person to come out of Wheaton, Illinois.”
Like all truly good definite works, Shales and Miller dish the dirt, or at least allow everybody else to kick dirt upon each other like Pete Rose and some woebegone umpire. Live From New York is already notorious among those in it: At the recent Friar’s Club roast of Chevy Chase for Comedy Central, Paul Shaffer, the former musical director for Saturday Night Live, made an in-joke from the dais about the massive scatological sludge tossed between its covers.
If I have any small quibble, it’s that I wanted more of Shales, briefly, even with a few words, interjecting himself in the narratives. Nothing blowzy, just something like ed .note from Shales: bull**** when he catches someone spinning a yarn. As someone said about Lucky Luciano or Roy Cohn, Shales has been so wired into the show for so long that “he knows where the bodies aren’t buried.”
In the meantime, we and scholars of the future are left to ponder: Was the show really Albert Brooks’ idea? Was Robert Klein originally going to be the permanent host?
In the meantime, we can thank Shales for hooking on to a show that surprisingly still matters. This morning, I interviewed Jonathan Alter, the Newsweek columnist and political commentator who watched SNL as a teenager in Chicago. Last night, Alter attended the party at the Rainbow Room for the book and ran into Sen. John McCain, who’s hosting the show this week.
“McCain was telling a story and referred to someone as a ‘prick,’ ” remembered Alter, “and I thought it boded well for his campaign that here was someone willing not afraid to say that word to a reporter in public. I thought it also boded well for a show, that it still had the kind of cutting edge where it was still willing to have someone on as host willing to say ‘prick.’ “
That utmost critical point is made in Shales’ and Miller’s book, and it is a point that has somehow escaped each of the SNL tomes that preceded it. Ya think?
Best wishes,
Neal
