Susan Morrison had an exciting idea about a decade ago. Put together a pitch to publishers to write a definitive biography of one of the dominant forces in American entertainment and culture for the past half-century: Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live.
Morrison was (and is) the articles editor for The New Yorker magazine, an important position at a prestigious publication.
But she also had a potential impediment for a would-be biographer:
“I had never really written anything,” Morrison said this week, on the eve of the Random House publication of her book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.
Nothing, as in no previous books, not even any major profiles for a magazine. How was she confident she could do it?
“The fact is, I did not know I could do it,” Morrison said. “After I sold the book I had a lot of sleepless nights, thinking, oh my god, I’ve just told these people I know how to build the Empire State Building, and I haven’t a clue.”
However true that may have been at the time, the result is hitting bookstores next week and it is a bona fide towering piece of work: Well over 600 pages, packed with direct quotations from a massive range of SNL stars, music performers, celebrity friends, and most of all the subject himself, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live fulfills its “definitive” promise.
It took a lot of time and effort. Morrison sold the book soon after the 40th anniversary of SNL. She missed at least three deadlines along the way. She collected what she described as “a mountain of transcripts” of interviews. At one point the book was almost twice as long as the finished product.
But the timing of its publication could not be more fortuitous with the torrent of attention the show is receiving as its 50th anniversary special nears.
Morrison credits the sense of doggedness she acquired from her years observing many of the talented writers and editors she has worked with. But she knows the key to it all was the participation of the man at the center of the story.
Before she embarked on this adventure, Morrison knew Lorne Michaels somewhere between vaguely and casually. She first met him working in a minor position on the one singular failure of his career, a primetime sketch effort called The New Show that ran briefly on NBC in 1984. After that, she stayed on in another smallish job at Michaels’ production company, Broadway Video.
She saw the boss occasionally then. But she made valuable connections, like a friendship with legendary SNL writer Jim Downey. After that, she would fairly often attend the show in the company of one of her writers, Lillian Ross, who was a longtime friend of Lorne’s.
Morrison’s only other real early association with Michaels was that she attended a show in the first season hosted by Elliott Gould.
Was this enough to win co-operation for a fathoms-deep dive into a life?
“I showed up ten years ago and said, ‘Listen, I’ve just signed a contract to write a biography about you and the show,’ ” Morrison recalled. “ ‘I don’t need a thing from you. But if you would like to be involved, it would be a better and richer book.’ ”
She was not warmed by the initial reaction. “At first he was a little wobbly.” But only a few days later Michaels set up a meeting for drinks. “He just started telling stories and we were off.”
The stories flowed like Niagara after that, justifying all of Michaels’ reputation as a voluminous, colorful raconteur.
“I would go over on Friday night at 6 and we’d just start talking.” Morrison said. “It was a luxurious way to talk. I thought a lot about why he actually decided to give me this time. I think part of it is I approached him at the right time. I don’t think he’s a sentimental man, but he was thinking about his life and this thing he had created.”
The book clearly benefits enormously from this tale-telling, which stretches back to Michaels’ early days in Toronto, when he was inspired creatively by a fascination with show biz (his family owned a movie theater) and scalded emotionally by the early death of his father.
Michaels was only 14. That event would come to be a centerpiece of Morrison’s insights into Michaels’s emotional psyche. But the details could only come from one place.
“Most of the stuff came from Lorne,” Morrison said.
Michaels is the subject of endless fascination—and obsession—among his now enormous extended tribe of SNL vets, show-biz giants, politicians, and other folk of note, and almost all of them provided Morrison with information into and analysis of his character and personality.
About the deepest take, which Morrison could not fail to absorb, was Michaels’s struggle with father issues because of the early loss of his own. He connects with people on that level in expected and unexpected ways. SNL star Pete Davidson became a particular personal favorite virtually instantly because of the devastating loss of Davidson’s fireman father in the 9/11 attacks.
During his career, Morrison said, Michaels acquired a series of father figures, people as disparate as Frank Shuster of the Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster who made more appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show than any other comedy act, and William Shawn, the iconic editor of The New Yorker.
But Michaels also fell naturally into the role of father figure himself for a string of performers on the show, like Davidson and Chris Farley, and seemingly anyone else he encountered with father issues. Morrison noted that Michaels receives Father’s Day cards from all sorts of unexpected people, including Netflix boss Ted Sarandos and former Yankees pitcher David Wells.
“The whole SNL enterprise is still this culture, this tribe, this family, like The Godfather, ” Morrison said. She noted that the Museum of Natural History, of which Michaels is a patron, has named a new species of spider for Michaels. That could have afforded some easy jokes and sinister allusions, but Morrison found the true resonance came from the kind of spider it is: a “Daddy Longlegs.”
The task of getting inside all of the elements of Michaels’s complex character, from his natural and extraordinary instincts as a leader, to his eye for talent, to his ability to build relationships with a mind-boggling list of the biggest names of the past half century in the arts and culture and public life—the Pauls (Simon and McCartney), Mick (Jagger, of course) Jack (Nicholson, of course), Mike Nichols, John McCain, on and on—was a challenge Morrison knew was essential, but remained out of reach for years as she plowed on.
“I spent nearly two years peeling the vegetables that would go into the stew,” she said. “In hindsight I could have done it faster, but again, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Maybe the benefit of that was the material got under my skin.”
At one point when she realized she was years into the project and not yet even halfway to where she needed to be she thought: “How am I going to get over this mountain range? I felt marooned. But little by little I got the damn thing done.”
She had a flash of inspiration when she realized she needed the book to document not just the man but also his creation. She decided to break up the more or less chronological account of Michaels’ life and career with chapters designed to capture the mechanics of the show, how he leads a team to assemble and present a live comedy sketch show in an old TV studio inside an office building, live, in a six-day period. (On Sunday they rest.)
“I didn’t want it to feel like a plodding death march through the years,” Morrison said. “I realized I wanted to give the reader a vivid sense of how the show was made.” She asked Michaels if she could “embed” inside the show for a work week.
That happened in 2018 when Jonah Hill was hosting for the fifth time. Morrison said she got lucky because beyond all the inside details of the show getting made, that week included a memorable moment when Republican representative Dan Crenshaw appeared on the “Weekend Update” set to accept an apology from Davidson, who had mocked the former Lt. Commander for his eyepatch. He had lost an eye to an IED in Afghanistan.
During that weeklong embed, Morrison said she found “the in-the-room emotional ecology fascinating to watch.”
She of course had to address many other SNL moments that made news, not always in flattering ways. This was certainly true of the show’s inevitable, and often fraught, satirization of Donald Trump.
Michaels made a decision during 2016 campaign to have Trump on as host. The decision led to internal friction because many on the staff saw it as a mistake that could humanize Trump and help him win.
Morrison said she believes Michaels genuinely thought Trump would never win. “I think he recognizes that Trump is a dangerous lunatic,” she said. “But sure, he knew it was going to be a good rating.”
More recently, SNL had another MAGA hero on as host: Elon Musk. “I think Lorne recognizes Musk’s weirdness,” Morrison said, and that made him interesting. But she added, “It is food for thought: is just having them on your show showing support in some way?”
You can’t spend ten years embedding yourself in the life and work of one person and not have it seep into your own thoughts and psyche. Morrison cited scores of examples of how working with and for a figure as talented and enigmatic as Lorne Michaels has inspired endless conversation, speculation and imitation. (Many present and former cast members have worked on precise impressions of Michaels.)
In some cases, the obsession has included an element of haunting.
“People like Molly Shannon and Paula Pell and all these other people would tell me they would be dreaming about Lorne,” Morrison said, mentioning one former cast member and one writer. “I’ll tell you, when I was writing this book I was dreaming of him. When you’re writing someone’s biography, you’re kind of living in their head.”
Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live hits bookstores Tuesday, February 18th. It’s available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
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