Susan Morrison’s Engrossing New Lorne Michaels Biography Is As ‘Inside’ an ‘Inside Book’ Can Get

How do you describe the man who’s done everything?

Or reasonably close to everything, at least in the world of television. After a half-century of running arguably the most talked-about entertainment show ever broadcast, Lorne Michaels can fairly lay claim to that characterization.

During his long career, descriptions of him have ranged from comedy guru to television revolutionary, talent-savant, impresario, star-maker, star-collector, influencer extraordinaire (before anyone thought of such a role in society), and, by any objective analysis, at or near the top of any list of the greatest producers in the history of the medium.

Every one of those designations is explored and illuminated in the comprehensive, compelling, completely entertaining biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, hitting bookstores today from Random House.

Written by Susan Morrison, the articles editor of The New Yorker, has never been a reporter, and had not previously published a book of any kind, a fact that should astound any reader of this convincing and superbly written work of non-fiction.

Maybe the proper title—and metaphor—for the Lorne Michaels in these pages is maestro. There is much that is musical and sometimes operatic about the show Michaels created, an entertainment with outsized influence on the collective consciousness of America over the past 50 years.

But the ensemble he has conducted has been brilliant and unruly, inventive and chaotic, all in about the same measure, but consistently demanding and deserving of attention. More like an improvisational ensemble than a tight symphony orchestra.

As the show careened toward its opening night in October 1975, it carried with it no expectations and much skepticism. Michaels then-wife and writer for SNL, Rosie Shuster tells Morrison that during the incubation period “everybody was kind of falling in love.” Differences in class and style faded, Morrison writes.

“That was the thing I was smartest about,” Michaels says, teaching a very young, very brash group how to play off each other, like jazz musicians.  

Like most of the memorable maestros of any art form, the Michaels Morrison captures is complicated and often inscrutable, not just to the audience but also to row upon row of the talent he hired and put in place. They seek his attention, crave his praise, agonize when they don’t get it and just want to know why.

Legions of SNL performers and staff members have attempted to figure him out. Morrison says of his armada of female assistants (known as the Lornettes) that they were worked hard but “stepping out for a therapy appointment was encouraged.”

Michaels has long been described as low-key, unemotional, fond of pauses. Morrison backs all that up.  “His conception of the comedy he liked was similar to the way he conceived of himself: underplayed, with a light touch, never ‘sweaty’ or trying too hard.”

One surprising comedy comparison pops up frequently. “The kinda Jack Benny thing, above-it-all and unflappable,” in the words of one of Michaels favorite hires, Dana Carvey.

Jack Benny? Lorne Michaels, the avatar of new comedy, revolutionary television, was akin to a giant of radio comedy?

By the time that comparison begins to occur to people who worked for him, Morrison has established that Michaels had deep roots and affection for old-time show biz. His family owned movie theaters. He saw scores of films working in that shop. And he never stopped absorbing and dishing out show biz lore.

A Canadian by birth and lifelong temperament, he never completely lost some of his original outsider status. He referred often to a Canadian view of the world as he assimilated into American entertainment.

But what shaped him most were twin impacts of his parents: a mother who was decidedly measured in her affection, and the devastating loss of his father when Michaels was only 14. The latter created a hole that Michaels tried to fill with a succession of influential father figures, and then with a commitment to serve as a father figure himself to many of the talented young people who came to work with him.

His mother, in Morrison’s description, was almost mythologically withholding. Staff members openly questioned how he had survived her.

But Michaels early on had an almost instant impact on people he met: he impressed them. Phyllis Diller hired him to write for a special. So did Lily Tomlin. The NBC executive picked to put SNL together, Dick Ebersol, thought literally no one else could do it—and was willing to quit to get him the job.

More than that, celebrities were drawn to him. Long before he became the iconic leader of SNL, people like Paul Simon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger became his friends. It later became a matter of some mockery on the show that Lorne would be off dining or sharing a yacht with one of his celebrity pals. But the connections were genuine; they created long-lasting friendships.

One original SNL writer, Tom Schiller, recounts his meeting with Jagger at Lorne’s home and how he asked 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 Morrison says Schiller came to was, “a combination of charisma and an ability to intuit what a person wants to talk about.”

The leadership role he was thrust into came naturally to him. And he was unquestionably good at it. One decision Morrison makes is hugely effective: Showing Michaels in action leading the almost magical process that results in a live 90-minute show going on the air after just six days of work.

She embedded with the show for one week in 2018 and does a day-by-day breakdown of how it comes together. Each of the six days of work are separate chapters Morrison weaves through the book. For committed fans of the show, these chapters are totally arresting.

To her great credit, Morrison does not stint on storytelling to keep the book entertaining. It is about a comedy show, after all.

She includes descriptions of some sketches that never got on. Like a sketch written by the legendarily idiosyncratic writer Michael O’Donoghue, who had a weird thing about the talk show host Mike Douglas. He wrote about a sketch about new Catholic liturgy, in which the host would be supplemented with a co-host, representing the body of Douglas. (NBC censors killed it.)

Robert Smigel, another writing legend, had an idea for a sketch called “It’s a Wild, Wild, Wild, Wild Kingdom,” a combo nature show and prank comedy which played jokes on animals. “Look! We told a turtle he’s gonna get a limo ride with Burt Reynolds. Watch his face when he finds out it’s just a Burt Reynolds impersonator!” (Didn’t get on.)

Some of the laughs are definitely at Michael’s expense. Many of the performers did (and do)  impressions of Michaels and often had fun with his penchant for claiming credit for the hit sketches and disavowing ones that flopped. That turned into a “Hands on-Hands off” game. As in:

“Battle of Hastings? Hands on! Soviet invasion of Hungary? Hands off! Invention of Penicillin? Hands on!”

And on his penchant for name-dropping, the writers invented Lorne’s less successful brother who pals around with much lesser names: “You know, we were with Weird Al and Tony Danza at a minor-league game…”

Michaels’ great friend Steve Martin even had fun comparing Michaels to David Letterman: “Dave is genuinely self-deprecating. He genuinely doesn’t think he’s any good. Those issues don’t come up for Lorne.”

This is an example of something else very much to Morrison’s credit. The book is far from a hagiography. She explores and gives vivid examples of some of the personal characteristics Michaels takes heat for. Like frequent name-dropping, a bent toward unrestrained verbosity, and what seems like status-seeking and a sometimes grandiose self-image.

An example of the latter is comparing himself to Shakespeare. Morrison quotes him: “I know he had a Belushi. That’s why Falstaff appears in three plays.” But Morrison gives Lorne a legitimate rationale for the comparison. Shakespeare ran a theater company, cast his plays and had to think about time. He cut 20 minutes out of Hamlet so the play wouldn’t end in the dark.

Not too far from cutting 20 minutes of sketch material so the show doesn’t end in a test pattern, it could be argued.

Morrison drops in multiple examples of what she calls Michaels’ “koans”—little bits of apparent mystical wisdom that don’t always leave listeners clear on what he means. Like: “You always go back to your last hit.” And “It knows what it is.”

There isn’t any stinting either on the controversy of giving Donald Trump, the candidate, a shot at hosting during his first presidential campaign. Some of the staff complained angrily because it helped humanize him and possibly led to his election. Morrison notes that when Michaels recruited Alec Baldwin to play Trump he told him it would last no more than three episodes, because there was no way Trump was going to win.

After he did, Michaels told his staff “We did our best.”

Much has been written about Michaels and his creation before. But Morrison adds much to the Lorne-ology.

She relates that he told her at one point he spoke with some people about the possibility of becoming editor of The New Yorker. He thought he could do it but probably needed more action than that would provide.

At another point, when Trump’s Apprentice had taken off as a primetime hit, NBC approached him to lead his own backstage reality show. He declined.

When Sydney Pollack was casting Tootsie he asked Michaels to play the part of Dustin Hoffman’s buddy. Not interested. Bill Murray got the part.

The “Beavis and Butt-head” sketch that killed last season was originally written for the show Morrison watched being made in 2018. Only with Ryan Gosling hosting this season did it find the right Beavis to work.

Obviously, Lorne is a book that will surely fascinate the segment of America that had been hooked on SNL since they first watched it in high school. It is about as “inside” an “Inside Book” as anyone can ever imagine.

But it manages to be more, largely because Morrison is adept at expanding the focus to include how significant the show has been to the wide culture and the national conversation over the past 50 years.

In a passage that works as someone speaking for the author, former SNL cast member Fred Armisen gave a speech when Michaels was feted with a Kennedy Center Honors Medal at the Library of Congress in 2021.

Armisen said that when he was one of those kids first discovering SNL, he was convinced the sketches were private messages intended for him.

“But it’s all Lorne,” Armisen said. He cited the “indelible sketches and seminal cast members” and how the “collective remembering of them connects us to other people as profoundly as any classic moment in cinema or literature. We pass and trade the language of SNL back and forth like some family heirloom we share with the entire world.”

Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.