February 14, 2025 • 51 mins
During its first 50 seasons, Saturday Night Live has welcomed legendary actors, superstar athletes, and notable politicians. But for one memorable night in 1977, Lorne Michaels turned the show over to an 80-year-old amateur.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Art originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
On October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, Connie Crawford did what
a lot of college students were doing every Saturday night.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I was in my first year at college, and every
Saturday night, every party shut down and we would all go.
There was only one TV and every dorm, and it
was usually one of those big console, old fashioned TVs,
and everybody would gather around and watch Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's Connie that year. She was a freshman at Vassar,
a liberal arts school in Poughkeepsie, New York. As you
might imagine, parties were frequent. It took a lot for
students to pass one up in favor of watching television,
but SNL managed to lure them in. It was hip, irreverent,
(01:11):
it spoke to them. The entire cast, from John Belushi
to Gilda Radner to Bill Murray, were becoming some of
the most famous comic actors in the country. Connie, however,
was a fan of one cast member in particular.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, they were all great, but I had a crush
on dan Aykroyd, and when I was in high school,
I think in the first year Saturday Night Live came out.
I wrote him a fan letter, and he sent me
back a picture of him on a motorcycle and in
crayon underneath. Because I think he thought I was a child.
He wrote Connie Let's Ride to Nicaragua Together Loved Dan.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
As Connie and her friends watched the episode, something a
little strange happened. There on screen was Lourene Michaels, the
creator and executive producer of the show. Michaels was making
an offer of sorts to the audience, and it wasn't
a bit. SNL was holding a contest that any viewer
(02:14):
could enter. The winner would be flown to New York
City and enter thirty Rockefeller Center on Saturday, December seventeenth,
nineteen seventy seven for the Christmas episode. That person would
be the first, and to date, the only civilian to
ever get one of the most coveted assignments in show business,
(02:38):
hosting Saturday Night Live. Entries came pouring in, well over
one hundred thousand of them, with everyone from aspiring performers
to housewives to at least one governor vying for the spot.
Some people showed up in person and only partially clothed.
(02:58):
But was it really possible for anyone to host SNL.
Could an amateur hold their own against the likes of Belushi,
Hurry and Radner? Or was SNL setting itself up for
an epic disaster? Welcome back to Very Special Episodes and
(03:21):
iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this
is live from New York. It's your grandmother.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I am one of
your hosts, Jason English. There's a famous tweet that reservices
during every Olympics. It goes something like, in each Olympic event,
there should be a normal person competing for reference, just
to show you how phenomenal the actual Olympians are. Today's
Very Special episode is the television equivalent what would a
(03:55):
chaotic sketch comedy variety show look like if you just
picked somebody or somebody's grandma off the street. I will
let Dana tell you in a minute. First, a quick
housekeep announcement. We are all hard at work here behind
the scenes on our next full batch of Very Special Episodes.
We'll be back to our regular weekly cadence later next month.
(04:18):
We're talking about adding in a second, still pretty special
episode on Saturdays. This spring. We'll keep working on that
and I'll give it back to Dana.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
When Lauren Michaels launched Saturday Night Live in the fall
of nineteen seventy five, he knew he wanted a different
guest host each week. Watching a famous actor or comedian
or athlete get thrown into the choppy waters of live
sketch comedy is what helped give SNL its reputation for
being dangerous, and it was also good for ratings.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Was just not to be missed.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
You know, whatever else you had pends on Saturday night,
you wanted to get home by eleven thirty so you
could watch this show. And I mean it just spoke
to me. The idea was to blow up the convention
of the variety show with the sketch show.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
That's Bill Carter. Bill is a longtime television critic who's
covered Late Night for The New York Times since nineteen
eighty nine. He's also written several books, including The Late Shift,
a definitive account of the war for Johnny Carson's chair
at The Tonight Show in the early nineties. His coverage
(05:27):
of SNL actually dates to the very first episode, a
time when SNL was less a pop culture phenomenon and
more of a what the heck is this thing?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
So I was right on top of it when it started.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
And my own situation was pretty interesting because the NBC
affiliate in Baltimore, WBAL, did not originally carry the show.
They did not sign on to carry Saturday Night Live
when it started, so I had to watch the first
I don't know how many four six episodes something on
your old antenna TV and trying to get a picture
(06:04):
through snow from the Washington and affiliate Baltimore.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Soon caught on, and so did the rest of the country.
SNL was unlike anything television had produced up to that point.
There had been variety shows like The Smothers Brothers and
laugh In with sketches and special guests, and even politicians
like Richard Nixon spoofing their own image. But SNL took
(06:32):
it further, much further.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
It was an incredible breath of fresh air to me,
and it was aimed toward me. I mean, I was
recent college graduates. You know what else did I want?
I watched some of those shows, but it wasn't like
they spoke to the generation I felt like I belonged to,
and this show did.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It had the vibe of the stage show.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
Had been done called Lemmings, which I had actually seen
an off Broadway show, and interestingly, it had both Chevy
Chase and John Belushi in it. So when Saturday Life
came out, I had seen them. I'd seen them on
stage doing this kind of antique kind of stuff, and
I was very open to it. I really responded to it,
and I think they just hit it. They hit the
(07:16):
mark so well from the beginning.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
The humor was born out of the Lemmings, Second City,
National Lampoon, all institutions where edgy comedy was thriving. Performers
like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Jane Curtin and others were
coming out of those improvisational troops and becoming major stars.
They got the cover of New York Magazine. There were
(07:42):
drugs and rock and roll and movies beckoning. SNL became
the cool hangout. Mick Jagger might have been too big
to perform on the show, but he was more than
willing to show up and watch. But one thing SNL did,
rather something it almost had to do, was very uncool.
(08:03):
It was the time tested publicity stunt, something out of
the norm to stir up the media or to drum
up ratings for sweeps weeks when networks try to grab
big ratings so they can charge more for advertising.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
They were still becoming sort of part of the network
while they were, you know, kind of the underground part
of the network, and Lauren, who's very skillful at managing
up and always was, I'm sure, was able to sort
of wrangle this, you know, and say it'll be different,
let's just try it. And as time went on, they
didn't really need to do that anymore because they got
(08:41):
tremendous leverage and they just got this following that wasn't
gonna all of a sudden kick up wildly because they
went to a different location.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
But in the early years they weren't above a ratings stunt.
In the show's second season, NBC arranged for the show
to air its first and only on location broadcast. Think
of it as a very special episode of SNL. The
cast and crew headed for Marty Grass. The idea came
(09:11):
from Lorne Michaels, who thought sketches based in and around
the celebration would add a different flavor to the show.
Cast member Jane Curtin and comic actor Buck Henry would
anchor the parade itself, commenting on the sites. It aired
at the more reasonable time slot of nine thirty and
(09:31):
on a Sunday, and almost immediately things went south. A
pedestrian was struck by one of the cars in the
Bacchus parade, which brought it to a halt and messed
up the show's timing completely. Guest star Cindy Williams, who
was supposed to appear with her Laverne and Shirley co
(09:54):
star Penny Marshall, got lost on the way to the shoot.
Unlike the studio audience in New York, this one was
made up of mostly drunk college kids who began throwing
gold coins, beads, and beer cans at the cast. The
episode never really recovered. Michaels found out SNL could never
(10:17):
be a traveling road show, but he wasn't done experimenting.
The next season, he made a rare on screen appearance,
speaking directly into the camera and with a perfect straight
man's delivery, he promised members of the fractured Beatles a
certified check for a whopping three thousand dollars. If they
(10:40):
agreed to reunite on the show, they could give ringo
star less of a cut, it was up to them.
The joke was picked up by the media and has
endured over the decades, and it came with a punchline
of sorts. Well two George Harrison actually showed up on
a later episode to pick up a check for three
(11:02):
hundred and fifty dollars. Paul McCartney would later say he
and John Lennon were actually watching SNL the week after
Michaels made his offer. They talked about taking a taxi
to thirty Rock just for the hell of it. They
never did, but the skit was notable for another reason.
It presented Michaels as an on screen persona something he
(11:26):
had once flirted with early on by considering casting himself
in the role of co anchor of Weekend Update.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Well, Loin was a performer, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
He was in a comedy team that performed in Canada
before he became a writer producer, and he was comfortable
with performing for sure. He obviously has a very big
ego to be running a show like this, but I
don't think he felt like all the attention had to
be on him so he had to also be on
the show. But I think he realized he can't possibly
do that and run this crazy machine that was going on.
(12:00):
But you know, his occasional appearances would only happen if
he wanted it that and so he definitely wanted it
to happen for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Michaels wasn't done experimenting, because the show itself wasn't yet
set in stone. In its third year, and practically every
year since, critics and viewers wondered if SNL's best days
were behind it. Chevy Chase had left shortly after the
second season to begin to pursue a film career. John
(12:27):
Belushi was filming movies and seemingly had one foot out
the door. There were critics said, too many recurring characters.
No one looked at it and said, well, this thing
will still be on the air in five decades, not
even Michaels himself, whose contract with NBC expired at the
end of the season. Michaels was getting tired of the grind,
(12:50):
saying quote, I can't work eighteen hours a day for
the rest of my life, or I'll die. But before
his possible departure, he had another idea, although arguably one
just as potentially disastrous as the Marti Gras Debacle, the
show would hold a contest, not a spoof contest or
(13:13):
the appearance of a contest, but an actual contest. On
October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, the second show of the season,
hosted by actress Madeline Cohn, Michaels appeared behind a desk
and he said, how many of you out there watching
the show right now are saying to yourselves? You know,
Madeline con is pretty good, but I think I can
(13:34):
do a better job than that. Well, here's your chance,
because now anyone can host Saturday Night Live. Michaels called
it the Anyone Can Host Contest, and the premise was simple.
Instead of being a famous star or comic or singer,
any viewer could potentially be the host for the show's
(13:55):
Christmas episode in December. No performing experience was needed to
be considered for the contest. Viewers could mail in a
postcard and explain in twenty five words or lie us
why they should be chosen as the guest host. Send
it to box seven to two radio City Station New York,
New York one zero zero one nine by midnight November first,
(14:19):
nineteen seventy seven. If they were one of five finalists.
They'd be flown out to appear on a November show
so viewers could vote for their favorite. The winner would
host the Christmas episode and receive the then standard hosting
fee of three thousand dollars. Put another way, they'd get
paid as much as the Beatles. Michaels believed the contest
(14:44):
was more than just a stunt in a meataway. He
thought he could demystify the idea of being an entertainer,
that it was reserved only for a chosen few. He
joked that quote, comedy is much too important to be
left to professionals. There was the pressure too of SNL
getting predictable. If roping in an amateur host was dangerous,
(15:07):
that was the point, and he offered very few guidelines,
say for stressing that anyone caught approaching him or a
cast member in person to make their case would be disqualified.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
I didn't know if it was for real at first.
You always have to wonder when they do things like that,
And then I thought, Okay, they're basically saying, this is
how confident we are that we can do this show
with anybody, You know.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
What I mean.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Amateurs had appeared on SNL's stage before. Fran Tarkenton, a
quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, hosted, so did Ron Nelson,
the White House Press secretary under Gerald Ford. These non
performers gave the show a different feel and energy.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
So they had to really write around that. So they
didn't do it just because they thought, oh, this will.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Be a blast.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
I think they did it as part of what they
were doing overall there, which is just we're just shaking
up all the conventions. This is another convention we're going
to shake up. We're going to have a host that
nobody'd ever heard of.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But even those hosts were recognizable. The winner of the
Anyone Can Host contest could be well anyone. The question
was just how many people wanted to host SNL and
what lengths would they go to in order to do it.
(16:35):
Millions of people watched Michaels make his contest announcement, but
you didn't have to be watching the show to hear
about it. Many major newspapers covered the contest. It was,
after all, a chance for literally anyone to headline the
hottest comedy show in the country. Within weeks, NBC had
(16:55):
gotten one hundred and twenty thousand responses, with people using
their allotted twenty five words to make their case. According
to Barbara Burns, a talent coordinator for the show who
was overseeing the contest, a surprising number of entries were
actually threatening in nature put me on the air or else. Those,
(17:16):
she said, went directly in the garbage. There were a
lot of nude photos with some people apparently hoping to
seduce their way onto the show. Those two were discarded,
and so were entries begging for the three thousand dollars
host fee. And despite Lorne Michael's cautioning against personal appearances,
(17:37):
some did show up At thirty Rock. One man came
as a people card instead of a postcard, dressed in
a postal sack and boxer shorts. He didn't win anyone over.
There were even celebrity entrants of sorts. Bella Abzig, a
former congresswoman, sent in a submission, so did Al Goldstein,
(17:59):
the widely loathed publisher of an adult publication titled Screw Magazine.
And then there was Connie Crawford's submission. Connie, you'll remember,
was a freshman at Vassar who had a standing offer
to run off to Nicaragua with Dan Akrid. What could
she say in twenty five words or less that would
(18:20):
make her postcard stand out from the thousands of other entries.
It was something she carried with her everywhere, her Vassar
student identification card.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And so my friend and I were like, this sucks,
and what is this ID? And you know without this ID,
we can't eat. Without this ID, we can't go into
certain places. This ID rules our life. And so I
was like, Okay, that's it. The id's stage a revolution.
(18:51):
My ID and my friend's ID go to the local
holiday inn and my friend staples my ID on a
holiday in postcard and I wrote, free me, and that's
what I sent in. And of course I don't know
if anybody got the backstory, it doesn't matter. I think
(19:14):
it was more that it was my actual college ID
stapled to a holiday and postcard in the words free me.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Connie sent it off and waited. Meanwhile, SNL still had
shows to do. Al Goldstein never hosted, but one of
his peers did. Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, hosted
the third episode of the season. Charles Grodin was next,
and then musician Ray Charles. By this point SNL's staff
(19:42):
had come to a decision. Out of the now one
hundred and fifty thousand entries received, the finalists had been selected,
and shortly Connie Crawford's phone rang, or more accurately, the
phone at the dorm rang.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And this was Vasser and these are old dorms, so
each of these phone booths had those folding wooden doors,
and you'd go in and you'd sit on these little
wooden things, and it was old school, even first seventy seven.
And the way you would get messages is they would
call the dorm and the person at the front desk
would write down a little message on a piece of paper,
(20:21):
fold it up and put it in your little slot.
So that's how I found out. I got a message saying,
Barbara Burns, the casting coordinator, wants to talk to you
about the contest. So of course I was really excited.
And there was an initial interview which I did in
one of those little wooden booths, and I think it
was mostly to just see am I crazy? Or you know, really,
(20:45):
who the fuck am I?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
At first? Connie remembers being told she was one of
twenty five finalists and being asked to send in a photo,
but quickly she was one of the final five. Connie
and four finalists had just a few days to make
their way into Manhattan. This was surreal. Just days Connie
(21:07):
was in class. Now she was at SNL, getting a
chance to see the stage, the audience seats, the cameras,
and the sheer energy of preparing for a live sketch
comedy show. Cast members ran around half dressed, moving from
one sketch to the next in a dry run before
the live broadcast.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I mean, you got to understand, they brought in these
five people and they're in the middle of doing their
live show and they're running around. They were busy. Bilda
Radner was very sweet, and the others were all polite
and everything.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Connie also got exposed to Bill Murray, who was not
yet the full force of nature he would become. This
was Murray's first full season as a cast member.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
He was always on in terms of what I saw,
which was just moments here and there. So I kind
of felt like he's the new guy. He's got this
amazing of Billy to just riff and he's both experimenting
with riffing. You know, he's practicing and he's doing it
all the time, which maybe that's him working on his craft.
(22:20):
Maybe that's him trying to get material, or maybe that's
just him how he works. I don't know, but brilliant,
clearly brilliant, because even his little riffs with the costume
person were just extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
But one person seemed to stand out even among this
group of performers, John Belushi. As a fan of the show,
Connie got to see some of the sketch rehearsals. In one,
Belushi reprised his highly popular Samurai, a man in a
top fun who delivers rapid fire gibberish while struggling to
adapt to modern customs. He often did the sketch with
(22:59):
Buck Henry, a frequent host who made for a good
straight man for Belushi's wild energy.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
In those studios, you know it's a great big room,
it's actually quite small, and then they have all these
little modular sets. So they were in one set, and
as you know, people who do tech are working and
they don't get sucked into the vacuum of acting because
they see a lot and they have work to do. Well, Belushi,
(23:28):
in one of the rehearsals, he just started riffing and improvising,
and Buck, of course went along with him. And he
must have gone, I don't know it. It felt really long.
I mean, I would say it was at least twenty
minutes for an original. I think the skets like two
or three minutes. And it was so funny and so
(23:49):
brilliant that every person in that whole studio stopped what
they were doing and gathered around this little modular set.
The more people who watched, the funnier he got. I mean,
it's one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. On
both their parts.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Belushi was also generous with Connie. She recalls he was
the only one to try and settle her nerves.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I was sitting around and he came over and just
started chatting. And he was drinking a beer during the day,
so we just started chatting. And he also did something
that was really kind, which was so they did on Saturday.
They run through the show once for a studio audience,
(24:35):
and then there's a little break and then you do
it live. And after the first run through of the show,
he came up to me and he said, just let
it go. He said, just pretend you're talking to some
of your friends at school, and you know, nobody else
said anything to me. The director nobody else you know,
(24:56):
basically told me to relax, calm down, and I just
really appreciated that.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Connie also met the other finalists, and they were a
highly eclectic bunch. There was deb Blair, an employment counselor
and mother of three from Peoria, Illinois, who wrote that quote,
my three sons only listen to people on TV. Please
let me host Saturday Night. There are a few things
(25:22):
I need to tell them. And there was David Lewis,
a bearded twenty year old college dropout from McMinnville, Oregon,
who sent in seventy five different entries. In the one selected,
he wrote that quote, I'm so bored in the town
where I live. I know all the vending machines by name. David,
(25:43):
more than anyone, seemed to have a big appetite for
show business. He told reporters he aspired to get into
comedy writing, but he didn't seem to make a big impression,
at least not with Connie.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
The guy from Oregon. I don't even really remember him
very much.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Weirdly, there was then current Governor of South Dakota, Richard Neap,
who wrote that quote, being host could be my big breakthrough.
In showbiz. Otherwise it's probably back to selling automatic milking
machines wholesale. Like before I was governor, Connie actually had
spent time in South Dakota, which made for an easy
(26:22):
camaraderie with the governor.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah. It was really funny because in between some of
the shoots, they said, okay, and one of the other
finalists here is the governor of South Dakota. And I
looked at him and I went, oh, my god, I
have spent the happiest months of my life in South Dakota.
And he said, oh, I love you, know, And so
we just immediately hugged and became really good friends.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
And finally Connie met an eighty year old grandmother from
New Orleans named Miskel Spelman. I'm eighty years old and
need one more cheap thrill since my doctor has just
told me I only have twenty five years left to live,
Spelman wrote. The contest was her first visit to New
York and her first time on an airplane.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
And of course the grandmother was completely charming and sweet
and just such a great sport.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And just like that, the final five were set. They
all settled into stereotypes that made them more palatable to
both the viewers and the writers. Connie, of course, was
the comely co ed.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I think given how little time there was, the writers
don't know who we are. You know, we're all stereotypes.
That's how they selected us, you know, the dropout from Oregon,
the Vassar co ed, the ninety year old grandmother from Louisiana,
mother of three from Peoria, and the governor of South Dakota.
You know. So they don't have enough time to know
(27:53):
who we are to build something.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
It was now up to America to figure out which,
if any, they liked. On November nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven,
SNL opened with Gilda Radner and Garrett Morris talking about
the contest finalists in a locker room, as though the
cast were a sports team about to go out and play,
and in a sense, they were. They came out to
(28:18):
meet America dressed in blue and white varsity sweaters. After
the opening credits, they were joined on stage by the
host of the episode, Buck Henry. Henry acted as a
kind of MC. He called them quote five amazingly brave
people and let each of them speak before reminding viewers
(28:38):
they had until November thirtieth to vote for a winner
using a form found in TV Guide. Each one had
a letter on their shirt ABCD and E in an
attempt to make voting easier.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
We were moving props more than anything. They would just
sort of shuffle us into a scene and shuffle us out,
so we weren't really performing. It was more like furniture.
And I don't mean that like, uh, treating me like
pieces chair or something. No, it was more like, Okay,
(29:16):
you five are gonna come in here and stand here.
Then you're gonna go sit over there, and next set,
you know, you'll be in here and you'll do this.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Later in the show, Henry appeared with each finalist in
a pre taped bit under the pretense of each trying
to convince Henry to pick them. The governor told Henry
he could give him something from his state's gold mines.
Debbie Blair, the mother of three, went for the guilt trip,
saying she needed the three thousand dollars hosting fee to
(29:49):
give her kids a nice Christmas miscl Spilman cautioned she
might be dead before in New Year's Eve, and as
the stereotypical comely co ed, Connie's role was to try
and seduce Henry.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So I go into this hotel room and there's a
little lounge area with the sofa, and they introduced me
to the other contestants and they say, okay, so each
one of you is going to try to bribe Buck
so you can be the host. And it's so telling.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
So I was.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Eighteen when this happened, and when it came my time
to shoot, they said, okay, you know what to do,
and I knew what to do, which was try to
seduce him, and so we just improvised it and they
used the first take.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Aside from the contest, the episode unspooled like a normal
SNL entry. There were coneheads with Akroyd and curtain playing
aliens with elongated heads and clipped speech and weekend update,
and John Belushi as a retired world class athlete disclosing
that his secret to premium performance is cigarette and chocolate donuts.
(31:04):
The five returned at the end of the show to
me one final plea. Connie said that by winning, she
could flunk every other course but at least pass drama.
Governor Neepe admitted he didn't really want to win, that
he was just doing the show for his staff and kids,
and not to vote for him. He later said he
thought the week needed to rehearse the show would be
(31:26):
too much of an imposition. Afterward, Connie got maybe the
second best perk of appearing on SNL getting to attend
the vaunted after party.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a party. And there
were all these amazing people there, like Eric Idle was there.
I mean that to me was huge. And I had
a little book and I had people autograph stuff, and
Paul Simon was really snotty to me and everybody else. Yeah,
it was fun.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
The show was about to take the next few weeks off,
giving staff enough time to prepare their two shows in December.
The second would feature the winner, who would America Pick.
People began tearing out the form from their copy of
TV Guide and scribbling down a letter. Then NBC and
(32:16):
SNL staffers tabulated the votes after counting viewers had decided
the next host of Saturday Night Live was the letter
e and the only contestant who had been born in
the nineteenth century. Watching the Finalists episode of SNL, one
(32:43):
thing becomes immediately apparent. The studio audience loved Miskel' Spilman,
while the other contestants were typically met with silence. Anything
Spilman said was greeted with laughter. Anything even dead panning
that she was old drew a big reaction, and so
when votes came in, Miskel was the overwhelming favorite, beating
(33:07):
second placed finalist David Lewis by over fifteen thousand votes.
One letter said, we cast our votes for the eighty
year young gal. She is a peach. Come on, Granny,
do your thing, wrote another. At least two people claiming
to be President Jimmy Carter wrote in endorsing her, making
(33:27):
at least one of them a fake. Even Governor Neepe
said he voted for her America at least the America
voting for a Saturday Night Live host wanted to see
an eighty year old interact with the not ready for
primetime players. That was something Connie Crawford picked up on
pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Oh well, there was no question from the beginning that
she was going to win, because she was ninety years
old and from Louisiana, and she had this little sparkle
about her, and just the fact that she was willing
to do this and that she did it with such
grace and again.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Spark Okay, so miss gal Spellman wasn't quite ninety. She
was born in eighteen ninety seven, generations removed from the
counterculture vibe of SNL, Yet she was an ardent fan
of the show, which she watched religiously, including Lauren Michael's
announcement for the contest. Her birth predated the invention of
(34:29):
television itself. If both comedy and drama come from conflict,
what could be better than someone like miscal thrown into
the hippist show on the air.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
That was evident from the first day. I mean, the
Governor was splashy, but she was the way I saw
it as like, oh, she's the special one, because you know,
this was a time where the generational gap was still
pretty strictured, and here was this ninety year old woman
coming onto the subversive show and she was from the
(35:03):
Deep South.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
In looking at the coverage of the contest, it's fascinating
to see how reporters didn't really get curious about Miskell.
Out of the five sweeping characters, the co ed, the Governor,
the dropout. She was a grandmother stereotype. One article mentioned
in passing she had been a widow for twenty years.
(35:25):
Someone with her maiden name of Weatherby once worked as
a telephone operator for a local rotary club. In nineteen fifteen,
she was commended for fielding two hundred calls in just
forty five minutes. While we can't say definitively that was
our Miskal, it probably was. Yet her work, her life,
(35:47):
none of it seemed relevant so much as the idea
of an octagenarian was going to host snow And while
her age was a big reason people voted for her,
not everyone was certain she could do it. Miskell's son
Otis was quoted as saying he was unsure about the
idea that his mother may not have the stamina for
(36:10):
live television. I think it would be too much for her,
he said. SNL was taking a risk too. They were
banking on a woman who had never before been on
an airplane or in New York, much less on television
before her finalist appearance, here's Bill Carter again.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
So that was the risk for the show.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Actually, the show was taken a risk because imagine if
she had frozen on stage, how bad that would look.
That they kind of put this woman in that position.
So you know, they did take a risk pushing her
out there in front of millions of viewers.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
It turns out that Miskell had plenty of energy. During
the finalists show, a reporter noticed Miskel was the only
one of the five who didn't seem all that nervous
to be going on live television. The rest were smoking, pacing,
or inhaling donuts. The week before the show, escorted by
her granddaughter Janine, Miskel boarded a plane from New Orleans
(37:08):
headed for New York. When she arrived, she was given
a warm reception by Lorn and the cast. Writers plotted
how best to utilize her, which was made easier given
how natural she had been in front of the camera
during the finalists show. But there was still a loose
cannon quality to miscal As charming as she was, as
(37:30):
comfortable as she seemed, she was still an amateur, and
amateurs can freeze up or lose their mark on stage,
So Michaels decided to give Miskell an on stage escort.
Buck Henry Buck, as you'll recall, hosted the five contenders
in this era of SNL. He was a kind of
(37:50):
all star, a bit of a nerdy vibe, very suburban dad,
but with a bit of a dark side. He was
also reliable.
Speaker 5 (37:59):
He was enormously admired and respected by the cast and
by Lorne. He was a veteran writer performer. People loved
his writing. He could handle anything. You know, he could
handle anything.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
You know.
Speaker 5 (38:13):
When Belushi cut his head with the sword at one time,
you know, he handled that. So they had great confidence
in him on stage.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
It's hard to know exactly what people were thinking or
hoping for when they switched on their televisions at eleven
thirty on Saturday, December seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven. Were they
hoping Miskell proved adept and witty? Were they anticipating the
cast would have to think on their feet to cover
up her mistakes. The show opens with John Belushi and
(38:46):
Lorraine Newman in the cast locker room. They discuss Miskell's age,
and Belushi makes an eerie joke about how he'll be
dead before he's thirty. The comment got a laugh then,
but given his death from a drug overdose at thirty
three in nineteen eighty two, hits differently now. Belushi, trading
(39:06):
on his party boy image, tells Newman that Miskell seemed nervous,
so he gave her a joint to calm her down.
The show leaned hard on two tropes this episode, Miskell's
age and the idea of getting a grandmother high.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Yeah, that's right, that was in the show. Yeah, that
kind of humor never hit me well anyway. I mean
I was like drug joke. Come on, I can do
better than that.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
After the opening credit sequence, Buck Henry walks out to
the stage with Miskell on his arm, and Miskell does
a very good job of pretending to be stoned, telling
buck Henry she can see colors. From that point on,
Miskell Spilman is deployed very carefully. She appears sitting next
to Jane Curtin as curtain reads a holiday story re
(39:54):
enacted by Belusi and Gilda Radner. In the story, Belushi
gifts his girlfriend a kidney and she gives him a
watch chain. Miskell nails her lines, and then it's onto
the requisite hosting duty of introducing the musical guest ladies
and gentlemen, Elvis Costello. She then appears briefly in a
(40:14):
sketch as Bill Murray's mother while Murray's character robs a bank,
but her real star turn is in the next segment,
when Belushi returns home from College to greet his parents
played by Dan Ackrod and Jane Curtin. He wants them
to meet his new girlfriend, whom he's brought home for
the holidays. The audience can sense what's going to happen next,
(40:37):
and they go crazy when Belushi ushers in Miskel his
new flame. Akrd and Curtain try to make sense of
it before accepting their son has found true love Harold
and Maud style. But before the show is over, the
worst thing possible did happen. Warren Michael's lost control. It
(40:59):
just wasn't Miskle's doing. During his set, Elvis Costello, who
had just released his first album in the Uba, stopped
the song he was playing, less than Zero and told
his band to move into radio radio instead. For Michaels
and SNL, this was verboten. Musical acts didn't just decide
(41:21):
on the fly what they were going to do. As
rebellious as SNL was, it still had NBC's censors and
the FCC to contend with. And for all its seeming spontaneity,
SNL was planned down to the second that Bill believes
is what really set Michaels off.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
This show has to basically end ninety minutes, so he
has to have a clock going in his head. So
if someone comes in and does something like changes the song,
well the song's gonna be maybe a different lane, so
that may mess up the whole next whatever the pattern
is after that. So yes, if somebody does something that
he doesn't expect or he didn't plan, not obviously an
(42:04):
ad lib, that's fine. If it's funny, that's fine. But
to change the structure in some way, that's not going
to go. And he doesn't like people messing with his show.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Michaels was furious. He allegedly gave Costello the middle finger
from offstage, and again allegedly Costello was banned from appearing
on SNL for a decade, and just like that, the
show was over. Miskel joined the cast on stage to
wave goodbye in a missus clause costume while the credits
(42:35):
rolled for a publicity stunt. It worked spectacularly well. The
Miskel Spilman episode of Saturday Night Live drew a staggering
fourteen point five million viewers, the highest rated episode of
the series up to that point, drawing more attention than
the season premiere with Steve Martin.
Speaker 5 (42:56):
They had this tremendous publicity, So it doesn't surprise me
that much that it did extremely well, because beyond everything
else was a curiosity like, oh my gosh, what is
I gonna do?
Speaker 3 (43:08):
The record wouldn't stand for long. Chevy Chase, returning to
host in February nineteen seventy eight, got twenty five million viewers.
Chase also got into a fight with Bill Murray backstage
in an apparent clash of egos, which is something else
Miskel Spilman couldn't brag about. What she could lay claim
to was being the coolest of customers in a pressure cooker.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
You could tell she was game. She was game for it,
you know what I mean. She wasn't intimidated. She was Okay,
whatever I'm supposed to do, I'm going to do it.
And I think people really admire that. You know, she
as an eighty year old person did not fit naturally,
but I think they embraced her, and that's why it worked.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
The Miskel Spilman episode remains a remarkable chapter in the
history of SNL. She wasn't the oldest ever host of
the show, not even then. In the second season, actress
Ruth Gordon hosted at the age of eighty one, and
decades later Betty White would set the record at the
age of eighty eight, but Miskel Spilman remains the winner
(44:13):
of the first and only Anyone Can Host competition. No
one in the forty seven seasons to follow hosted who
was totally unfamiliar to the audience, plucked from obscurity to
entertain a pet theory of Michael's. The closest SNL ever
came again to this grand experiment was in nineteen eighty
(44:35):
three when Brandon Tartikoff head lined an episode. While he
wasn't all that well known or much of a celebrity,
he did have one thing going for him. He was
the president of NBC's entertainment division. Miskel was the only
true civilian to ever do it.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
It was in the B range for me, As I recall,
I haven't gone back and looked at it. I thought
she was cute and occasionally adorable with what they were
doing with her, it didn't stand out. I mean, if
I went back and looked at it, maybe a sketch
would stand out to me, but it wasn't overly memorable.
(45:15):
And I think the most notable thing about it is
that they never did it again.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
They didn't really have to. As the years went on,
SNL grew from a counterculture maverick to an institution. There
were some interactive segments. Who could forget Eddie Murphy imploring
viewers to call in and vote to spare the life
of a lobster he wanted to boil in nineteen eighty two,
But for the most part SNL had tenure. In nineteen
(45:44):
eighty four, syndicated columnist Bob Green caught up with Miskel
to ask about her experience. She said it had been
the most thrilling night of her life. She said her
granddaughter was scared she might have a heart attack, but
that she didn't feel nervous at all. She recalled how
nice John Belushi was to her, how Bill Murray and
(46:04):
Gilda Radner invited her and her daughter out for dinner,
where they all talked until four o'clock in the morning,
how she and Radner had remained pen pals, writing letters
to one another for years. Afterward, Miskell was also gifted
a signed scrap book which congratulated her on winning. Lauren
Michaels signed it along with several of the writers, so
(46:27):
did Bill Murray, John Belucy, Jane Curtin, dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner,
and of course Buck Henry Inside were many of the
letters sent in that voted for her. As late as
nineteen eighty nine, she was still watching the show, admitting
she had to take a nap to stay up that late.
Her favorite cast member at that time was Dana Carvey,
(46:51):
and like most fans of SNL, she thought the show
wasn't as good as it used to be. In nineteen
ninety two, Miskell's Spilman, SNL's only civilian host, died at
the age of ninety five.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
You know what she says.
Speaker 5 (47:06):
She had a line in the show where she said
they had to give to me because I may only
live another twenty five years or something.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Like that, and damn she lived.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
She lived fifteen, She lived fifteen more years.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
She was ninety five.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
The fate of the other contestants is largely unknown. Richard
Neepe died in nineteen eighty seven, but Debbie Blair and
David Lewis, who were part of this strange chapter in
show business, aren't easily found. They were candidates for a
grand experiment. Michaels had set out to prove anyone could
(47:42):
host SNL and he did well, maybe he found out
miss goals. Bilman could host, But could anyone? Could you
host SNL? Stand on stage in front of millions of
people and not panic?
Speaker 5 (47:57):
It's not easy. It's not the easiest thing in the
world to do. As I said, if you don't have
a level of confidence to be out there in front
of that live audience and on camera, you could really
freeze up and have nothing. So I don't believe anyone
could do it. No, And I admire the fact that
she did it well. I think there was no built
in reason why she should have pulled that off, even
(48:18):
with the writing they had, etc. You see people try
to get up and just talk at a PTA meeting
and they can't do it.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Could Bill Carter?
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Hell No.
Speaker 5 (48:30):
The idea of standing in front of an audience and
getting them to laugh and the idea of not getting
them to laugh is like, you know, facing a crocodile.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
For Connie Crawford, the Anyone Can Host contest was meant
to be a fleeting thrill. After Vassar, Connie went on
to Juilliard, the prestigious acting school, and got involved in theater,
including the improv group, the Groundlings. She now teaches acting
and directing at Brown University. She's never gone back to
(49:03):
look at the episode where she was able to stand
next to a legend cast she had revered on television.
After all, it's called Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
I've never seen it, and I've made a point of
not seeing it just because it was so much fun.
I don't want to watch it and go oh, or
you know, I don't want to poison the memory because
it was live. I mean, that's the whole thing. That's
kind of hard today to have people understand the how
(49:34):
ethereal it was. If you missed it, you missed it,
and that's it, and you would never see it. That
was kind of the magic of it. And so that
was the fun of it for me. You know. Then
I go back to school, and you know, I just
have this kind of happy memory, and I've just chosen
(49:56):
to keep it that way because it was really special
and silly and and it was a great show.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
No oh, she didn't wind up running away to Nicaragua
with dan Akride.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
It was so disappointing. He didn't love me, no, But
by that point I wasn't in love with him anymore.
Uh No, I mean at that point, if I had
wanted to, it would have been Blue Shie.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Jake Rowson wrote today's episode. Jake also wrote last week's episode,
Super Streaker, and if you want to dip into the archives,
check out E T and Me, another Jake special about
a suburban kid who helped Steven Spielberg make his most
ambitious movie to date. Our producer, as always, is Josh Fisher.
(50:57):
The show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing
and mastering by Chris Childs. Original music by Alice McCoy,
Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
If you'd like to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
(51:20):
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Art originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
On October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, Connie Crawford did what
a lot of college students were doing every Saturday night.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I was in my first year at college, and every
Saturday night, every party shut down and we would all go.
There was only one TV and every dorm, and it
was usually one of those big console, old fashioned TVs,
and everybody would gather around and watch Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's Connie that year. She was a freshman at Vassar,
a liberal arts school in Poughkeepsie, New York. As you
might imagine, parties were frequent. It took a lot for
students to pass one up in favor of watching television,
but SNL managed to lure them in. It was hip, irreverent,
(01:11):
it spoke to them. The entire cast, from John Belushi
to Gilda Radner to Bill Murray, were becoming some of
the most famous comic actors in the country. Connie, however,
was a fan of one cast member in particular.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, they were all great, but I had a crush
on dan Aykroyd, and when I was in high school,
I think in the first year Saturday Night Live came out.
I wrote him a fan letter, and he sent me
back a picture of him on a motorcycle and in
crayon underneath. Because I think he thought I was a child.
He wrote Connie Let's Ride to Nicaragua Together Loved Dan.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
As Connie and her friends watched the episode, something a
little strange happened. There on screen was Lourene Michaels, the
creator and executive producer of the show. Michaels was making
an offer of sorts to the audience, and it wasn't
a bit. SNL was holding a contest that any viewer
(02:14):
could enter. The winner would be flown to New York
City and enter thirty Rockefeller Center on Saturday, December seventeenth,
nineteen seventy seven for the Christmas episode. That person would
be the first, and to date, the only civilian to
ever get one of the most coveted assignments in show business,
(02:38):
hosting Saturday Night Live. Entries came pouring in, well over
one hundred thousand of them, with everyone from aspiring performers
to housewives to at least one governor vying for the spot.
Some people showed up in person and only partially clothed.
(02:58):
But was it really possible for anyone to host SNL.
Could an amateur hold their own against the likes of Belushi,
Hurry and Radner? Or was SNL setting itself up for
an epic disaster? Welcome back to Very Special Episodes and
(03:21):
iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this
is live from New York. It's your grandmother.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I am one of
your hosts, Jason English. There's a famous tweet that reservices
during every Olympics. It goes something like, in each Olympic event,
there should be a normal person competing for reference, just
to show you how phenomenal the actual Olympians are. Today's
Very Special episode is the television equivalent what would a
(03:55):
chaotic sketch comedy variety show look like if you just
picked somebody or somebody's grandma off the street. I will
let Dana tell you in a minute. First, a quick
housekeep announcement. We are all hard at work here behind
the scenes on our next full batch of Very Special Episodes.
We'll be back to our regular weekly cadence later next month.
(04:18):
We're talking about adding in a second, still pretty special
episode on Saturdays. This spring. We'll keep working on that
and I'll give it back to Dana.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
When Lauren Michaels launched Saturday Night Live in the fall
of nineteen seventy five, he knew he wanted a different
guest host each week. Watching a famous actor or comedian
or athlete get thrown into the choppy waters of live
sketch comedy is what helped give SNL its reputation for
being dangerous, and it was also good for ratings.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Was just not to be missed.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
You know, whatever else you had pends on Saturday night,
you wanted to get home by eleven thirty so you
could watch this show. And I mean it just spoke
to me. The idea was to blow up the convention
of the variety show with the sketch show.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
That's Bill Carter. Bill is a longtime television critic who's
covered Late Night for The New York Times since nineteen
eighty nine. He's also written several books, including The Late Shift,
a definitive account of the war for Johnny Carson's chair
at The Tonight Show in the early nineties. His coverage
(05:27):
of SNL actually dates to the very first episode, a
time when SNL was less a pop culture phenomenon and
more of a what the heck is this thing?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
So I was right on top of it when it started.
Speaker 5 (05:42):
And my own situation was pretty interesting because the NBC
affiliate in Baltimore, WBAL, did not originally carry the show.
They did not sign on to carry Saturday Night Live
when it started, so I had to watch the first
I don't know how many four six episodes something on
your old antenna TV and trying to get a picture
(06:04):
through snow from the Washington and affiliate Baltimore.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Soon caught on, and so did the rest of the country.
SNL was unlike anything television had produced up to that point.
There had been variety shows like The Smothers Brothers and
laugh In with sketches and special guests, and even politicians
like Richard Nixon spoofing their own image. But SNL took
(06:32):
it further, much further.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
It was an incredible breath of fresh air to me,
and it was aimed toward me. I mean, I was
recent college graduates. You know what else did I want?
I watched some of those shows, but it wasn't like
they spoke to the generation I felt like I belonged to,
and this show did.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
It had the vibe of the stage show.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
Had been done called Lemmings, which I had actually seen
an off Broadway show, and interestingly, it had both Chevy
Chase and John Belushi in it. So when Saturday Life
came out, I had seen them. I'd seen them on
stage doing this kind of antique kind of stuff, and
I was very open to it. I really responded to it,
and I think they just hit it. They hit the
(07:16):
mark so well from the beginning.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
The humor was born out of the Lemmings, Second City,
National Lampoon, all institutions where edgy comedy was thriving. Performers
like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Jane Curtin and others were
coming out of those improvisational troops and becoming major stars.
They got the cover of New York Magazine. There were
(07:42):
drugs and rock and roll and movies beckoning. SNL became
the cool hangout. Mick Jagger might have been too big
to perform on the show, but he was more than
willing to show up and watch. But one thing SNL did,
rather something it almost had to do, was very uncool.
(08:03):
It was the time tested publicity stunt, something out of
the norm to stir up the media or to drum
up ratings for sweeps weeks when networks try to grab
big ratings so they can charge more for advertising.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
They were still becoming sort of part of the network
while they were, you know, kind of the underground part
of the network, and Lauren, who's very skillful at managing
up and always was, I'm sure, was able to sort
of wrangle this, you know, and say it'll be different,
let's just try it. And as time went on, they
didn't really need to do that anymore because they got
(08:41):
tremendous leverage and they just got this following that wasn't
gonna all of a sudden kick up wildly because they
went to a different location.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
But in the early years they weren't above a ratings stunt.
In the show's second season, NBC arranged for the show
to air its first and only on location broadcast. Think
of it as a very special episode of SNL. The
cast and crew headed for Marty Grass. The idea came
(09:11):
from Lorne Michaels, who thought sketches based in and around
the celebration would add a different flavor to the show.
Cast member Jane Curtin and comic actor Buck Henry would
anchor the parade itself, commenting on the sites. It aired
at the more reasonable time slot of nine thirty and
(09:31):
on a Sunday, and almost immediately things went south. A
pedestrian was struck by one of the cars in the
Bacchus parade, which brought it to a halt and messed
up the show's timing completely. Guest star Cindy Williams, who
was supposed to appear with her Laverne and Shirley co
(09:54):
star Penny Marshall, got lost on the way to the shoot.
Unlike the studio audience in New York, this one was
made up of mostly drunk college kids who began throwing
gold coins, beads, and beer cans at the cast. The
episode never really recovered. Michaels found out SNL could never
(10:17):
be a traveling road show, but he wasn't done experimenting.
The next season, he made a rare on screen appearance,
speaking directly into the camera and with a perfect straight
man's delivery, he promised members of the fractured Beatles a
certified check for a whopping three thousand dollars. If they
(10:40):
agreed to reunite on the show, they could give ringo
star less of a cut, it was up to them.
The joke was picked up by the media and has
endured over the decades, and it came with a punchline
of sorts. Well two George Harrison actually showed up on
a later episode to pick up a check for three
(11:02):
hundred and fifty dollars. Paul McCartney would later say he
and John Lennon were actually watching SNL the week after
Michaels made his offer. They talked about taking a taxi
to thirty Rock just for the hell of it. They
never did, but the skit was notable for another reason.
It presented Michaels as an on screen persona something he
(11:26):
had once flirted with early on by considering casting himself
in the role of co anchor of Weekend Update.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Well, Loin was a performer, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
He was in a comedy team that performed in Canada
before he became a writer producer, and he was comfortable
with performing for sure. He obviously has a very big
ego to be running a show like this, but I
don't think he felt like all the attention had to
be on him so he had to also be on
the show. But I think he realized he can't possibly
do that and run this crazy machine that was going on.
(12:00):
But you know, his occasional appearances would only happen if
he wanted it that and so he definitely wanted it
to happen for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Michaels wasn't done experimenting, because the show itself wasn't yet
set in stone. In its third year, and practically every
year since, critics and viewers wondered if SNL's best days
were behind it. Chevy Chase had left shortly after the
second season to begin to pursue a film career. John
(12:27):
Belushi was filming movies and seemingly had one foot out
the door. There were critics said, too many recurring characters.
No one looked at it and said, well, this thing
will still be on the air in five decades, not
even Michaels himself, whose contract with NBC expired at the
end of the season. Michaels was getting tired of the grind,
(12:50):
saying quote, I can't work eighteen hours a day for
the rest of my life, or I'll die. But before
his possible departure, he had another idea, although arguably one
just as potentially disastrous as the Marti Gras Debacle, the
show would hold a contest, not a spoof contest or
(13:13):
the appearance of a contest, but an actual contest. On
October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, the second show of the season,
hosted by actress Madeline Cohn, Michaels appeared behind a desk
and he said, how many of you out there watching
the show right now are saying to yourselves? You know,
Madeline con is pretty good, but I think I can
(13:34):
do a better job than that. Well, here's your chance,
because now anyone can host Saturday Night Live. Michaels called
it the Anyone Can Host Contest, and the premise was simple.
Instead of being a famous star or comic or singer,
any viewer could potentially be the host for the show's
(13:55):
Christmas episode in December. No performing experience was needed to
be considered for the contest. Viewers could mail in a
postcard and explain in twenty five words or lie us
why they should be chosen as the guest host. Send
it to box seven to two radio City Station New York,
New York one zero zero one nine by midnight November first,
(14:19):
nineteen seventy seven. If they were one of five finalists.
They'd be flown out to appear on a November show
so viewers could vote for their favorite. The winner would
host the Christmas episode and receive the then standard hosting
fee of three thousand dollars. Put another way, they'd get
paid as much as the Beatles. Michaels believed the contest
(14:44):
was more than just a stunt in a meataway. He
thought he could demystify the idea of being an entertainer,
that it was reserved only for a chosen few. He
joked that quote, comedy is much too important to be
left to professionals. There was the pressure too of SNL
getting predictable. If roping in an amateur host was dangerous,
(15:07):
that was the point, and he offered very few guidelines,
say for stressing that anyone caught approaching him or a
cast member in person to make their case would be disqualified.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
I didn't know if it was for real at first.
You always have to wonder when they do things like that,
And then I thought, Okay, they're basically saying, this is
how confident we are that we can do this show
with anybody, You know.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
What I mean.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Amateurs had appeared on SNL's stage before. Fran Tarkenton, a
quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, hosted, so did Ron Nelson,
the White House Press secretary under Gerald Ford. These non
performers gave the show a different feel and energy.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
So they had to really write around that. So they
didn't do it just because they thought, oh, this will.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Be a blast.
Speaker 5 (15:59):
I think they did it as part of what they
were doing overall there, which is just we're just shaking
up all the conventions. This is another convention we're going
to shake up. We're going to have a host that
nobody'd ever heard of.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
But even those hosts were recognizable. The winner of the
Anyone Can Host contest could be well anyone. The question
was just how many people wanted to host SNL and
what lengths would they go to in order to do it.
(16:35):
Millions of people watched Michaels make his contest announcement, but
you didn't have to be watching the show to hear
about it. Many major newspapers covered the contest. It was,
after all, a chance for literally anyone to headline the
hottest comedy show in the country. Within weeks, NBC had
(16:55):
gotten one hundred and twenty thousand responses, with people using
their allotted twenty five words to make their case. According
to Barbara Burns, a talent coordinator for the show who
was overseeing the contest, a surprising number of entries were
actually threatening in nature put me on the air or else. Those,
(17:16):
she said, went directly in the garbage. There were a
lot of nude photos with some people apparently hoping to
seduce their way onto the show. Those two were discarded,
and so were entries begging for the three thousand dollars
host fee. And despite Lorne Michael's cautioning against personal appearances,
(17:37):
some did show up At thirty Rock. One man came
as a people card instead of a postcard, dressed in
a postal sack and boxer shorts. He didn't win anyone over.
There were even celebrity entrants of sorts. Bella Abzig, a
former congresswoman, sent in a submission, so did Al Goldstein,
(17:59):
the widely loathed publisher of an adult publication titled Screw Magazine.
And then there was Connie Crawford's submission. Connie, you'll remember,
was a freshman at Vassar who had a standing offer
to run off to Nicaragua with Dan Akrid. What could
she say in twenty five words or less that would
(18:20):
make her postcard stand out from the thousands of other entries.
It was something she carried with her everywhere, her Vassar
student identification card.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
And so my friend and I were like, this sucks,
and what is this ID? And you know without this ID,
we can't eat. Without this ID, we can't go into
certain places. This ID rules our life. And so I
was like, Okay, that's it. The id's stage a revolution.
(18:51):
My ID and my friend's ID go to the local
holiday inn and my friend staples my ID on a
holiday in postcard and I wrote, free me, and that's
what I sent in. And of course I don't know
if anybody got the backstory, it doesn't matter. I think
(19:14):
it was more that it was my actual college ID
stapled to a holiday and postcard in the words free me.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Connie sent it off and waited. Meanwhile, SNL still had
shows to do. Al Goldstein never hosted, but one of
his peers did. Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, hosted
the third episode of the season. Charles Grodin was next,
and then musician Ray Charles. By this point SNL's staff
(19:42):
had come to a decision. Out of the now one
hundred and fifty thousand entries received, the finalists had been selected,
and shortly Connie Crawford's phone rang, or more accurately, the
phone at the dorm rang.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And this was Vasser and these are old dorms, so
each of these phone booths had those folding wooden doors,
and you'd go in and you'd sit on these little
wooden things, and it was old school, even first seventy seven.
And the way you would get messages is they would
call the dorm and the person at the front desk
would write down a little message on a piece of paper,
(20:21):
fold it up and put it in your little slot.
So that's how I found out. I got a message saying,
Barbara Burns, the casting coordinator, wants to talk to you
about the contest. So of course I was really excited.
And there was an initial interview which I did in
one of those little wooden booths, and I think it
was mostly to just see am I crazy? Or you know, really,
(20:45):
who the fuck am I?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
At first? Connie remembers being told she was one of
twenty five finalists and being asked to send in a photo,
but quickly she was one of the final five. Connie
and four finalists had just a few days to make
their way into Manhattan. This was surreal. Just days Connie
(21:07):
was in class. Now she was at SNL, getting a
chance to see the stage, the audience seats, the cameras,
and the sheer energy of preparing for a live sketch
comedy show. Cast members ran around half dressed, moving from
one sketch to the next in a dry run before
the live broadcast.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I mean, you got to understand, they brought in these
five people and they're in the middle of doing their
live show and they're running around. They were busy. Bilda
Radner was very sweet, and the others were all polite
and everything.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Connie also got exposed to Bill Murray, who was not
yet the full force of nature he would become. This
was Murray's first full season as a cast member.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
He was always on in terms of what I saw,
which was just moments here and there. So I kind
of felt like he's the new guy. He's got this
amazing of Billy to just riff and he's both experimenting
with riffing. You know, he's practicing and he's doing it
all the time, which maybe that's him working on his craft.
(22:20):
Maybe that's him trying to get material, or maybe that's
just him how he works. I don't know, but brilliant,
clearly brilliant, because even his little riffs with the costume
person were just extraordinary.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
But one person seemed to stand out even among this
group of performers, John Belushi. As a fan of the show,
Connie got to see some of the sketch rehearsals. In one,
Belushi reprised his highly popular Samurai, a man in a
top fun who delivers rapid fire gibberish while struggling to
adapt to modern customs. He often did the sketch with
(22:59):
Buck Henry, a frequent host who made for a good
straight man for Belushi's wild energy.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
In those studios, you know it's a great big room,
it's actually quite small, and then they have all these
little modular sets. So they were in one set, and
as you know, people who do tech are working and
they don't get sucked into the vacuum of acting because
they see a lot and they have work to do. Well, Belushi,
(23:28):
in one of the rehearsals, he just started riffing and improvising,
and Buck, of course went along with him. And he
must have gone, I don't know it. It felt really long.
I mean, I would say it was at least twenty
minutes for an original. I think the skets like two
or three minutes. And it was so funny and so
(23:49):
brilliant that every person in that whole studio stopped what
they were doing and gathered around this little modular set.
The more people who watched, the funnier he got. I mean,
it's one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. On
both their parts.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Belushi was also generous with Connie. She recalls he was
the only one to try and settle her nerves.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
I was sitting around and he came over and just
started chatting. And he was drinking a beer during the day,
so we just started chatting. And he also did something
that was really kind, which was so they did on Saturday.
They run through the show once for a studio audience,
(24:35):
and then there's a little break and then you do
it live. And after the first run through of the show,
he came up to me and he said, just let
it go. He said, just pretend you're talking to some
of your friends at school, and you know, nobody else
said anything to me. The director nobody else you know,
(24:56):
basically told me to relax, calm down, and I just
really appreciated that.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Connie also met the other finalists, and they were a
highly eclectic bunch. There was deb Blair, an employment counselor
and mother of three from Peoria, Illinois, who wrote that quote,
my three sons only listen to people on TV. Please
let me host Saturday Night. There are a few things
(25:22):
I need to tell them. And there was David Lewis,
a bearded twenty year old college dropout from McMinnville, Oregon,
who sent in seventy five different entries. In the one selected,
he wrote that quote, I'm so bored in the town
where I live. I know all the vending machines by name. David,
(25:43):
more than anyone, seemed to have a big appetite for
show business. He told reporters he aspired to get into
comedy writing, but he didn't seem to make a big impression,
at least not with Connie.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
The guy from Oregon. I don't even really remember him
very much.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Weirdly, there was then current Governor of South Dakota, Richard Neap,
who wrote that quote, being host could be my big breakthrough.
In showbiz. Otherwise it's probably back to selling automatic milking
machines wholesale. Like before I was governor, Connie actually had
spent time in South Dakota, which made for an easy
(26:22):
camaraderie with the governor.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah. It was really funny because in between some of
the shoots, they said, okay, and one of the other
finalists here is the governor of South Dakota. And I
looked at him and I went, oh, my god, I
have spent the happiest months of my life in South Dakota.
And he said, oh, I love you, know, And so
we just immediately hugged and became really good friends.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
And finally Connie met an eighty year old grandmother from
New Orleans named Miskel Spelman. I'm eighty years old and
need one more cheap thrill since my doctor has just
told me I only have twenty five years left to live,
Spelman wrote. The contest was her first visit to New
York and her first time on an airplane.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
And of course the grandmother was completely charming and sweet
and just such a great sport.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And just like that, the final five were set. They
all settled into stereotypes that made them more palatable to
both the viewers and the writers. Connie, of course, was
the comely co ed.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I think given how little time there was, the writers
don't know who we are. You know, we're all stereotypes.
That's how they selected us, you know, the dropout from Oregon,
the Vassar co ed, the ninety year old grandmother from Louisiana,
mother of three from Peoria, and the governor of South Dakota.
You know. So they don't have enough time to know
(27:53):
who we are to build something.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
It was now up to America to figure out which,
if any, they liked. On November nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven,
SNL opened with Gilda Radner and Garrett Morris talking about
the contest finalists in a locker room, as though the
cast were a sports team about to go out and play,
and in a sense, they were. They came out to
(28:18):
meet America dressed in blue and white varsity sweaters. After
the opening credits, they were joined on stage by the
host of the episode, Buck Henry. Henry acted as a
kind of MC. He called them quote five amazingly brave
people and let each of them speak before reminding viewers
(28:38):
they had until November thirtieth to vote for a winner
using a form found in TV Guide. Each one had
a letter on their shirt ABCD and E in an
attempt to make voting easier.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
We were moving props more than anything. They would just
sort of shuffle us into a scene and shuffle us out,
so we weren't really performing. It was more like furniture.
And I don't mean that like, uh, treating me like
pieces chair or something. No, it was more like, Okay,
(29:16):
you five are gonna come in here and stand here.
Then you're gonna go sit over there, and next set,
you know, you'll be in here and you'll do this.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Later in the show, Henry appeared with each finalist in
a pre taped bit under the pretense of each trying
to convince Henry to pick them. The governor told Henry
he could give him something from his state's gold mines.
Debbie Blair, the mother of three, went for the guilt trip,
saying she needed the three thousand dollars hosting fee to
(29:49):
give her kids a nice Christmas miscl Spilman cautioned she
might be dead before in New Year's Eve, and as
the stereotypical comely co ed, Connie's role was to try
and seduce Henry.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So I go into this hotel room and there's a
little lounge area with the sofa, and they introduced me
to the other contestants and they say, okay, so each
one of you is going to try to bribe Buck
so you can be the host. And it's so telling.
Speaker 5 (30:21):
So I was.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Eighteen when this happened, and when it came my time
to shoot, they said, okay, you know what to do,
and I knew what to do, which was try to
seduce him, and so we just improvised it and they
used the first take.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Aside from the contest, the episode unspooled like a normal
SNL entry. There were coneheads with Akroyd and curtain playing
aliens with elongated heads and clipped speech and weekend update,
and John Belushi as a retired world class athlete disclosing
that his secret to premium performance is cigarette and chocolate donuts.
(31:04):
The five returned at the end of the show to
me one final plea. Connie said that by winning, she
could flunk every other course but at least pass drama.
Governor Neepe admitted he didn't really want to win, that
he was just doing the show for his staff and kids,
and not to vote for him. He later said he
thought the week needed to rehearse the show would be
(31:26):
too much of an imposition. Afterward, Connie got maybe the
second best perk of appearing on SNL getting to attend
the vaunted after party.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a party. And there
were all these amazing people there, like Eric Idle was there.
I mean that to me was huge. And I had
a little book and I had people autograph stuff, and
Paul Simon was really snotty to me and everybody else. Yeah,
it was fun.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
The show was about to take the next few weeks off,
giving staff enough time to prepare their two shows in December.
The second would feature the winner, who would America Pick.
People began tearing out the form from their copy of
TV Guide and scribbling down a letter. Then NBC and
(32:16):
SNL staffers tabulated the votes after counting viewers had decided
the next host of Saturday Night Live was the letter
e and the only contestant who had been born in
the nineteenth century. Watching the Finalists episode of SNL, one
(32:43):
thing becomes immediately apparent. The studio audience loved Miskel' Spilman,
while the other contestants were typically met with silence. Anything
Spilman said was greeted with laughter. Anything even dead panning
that she was old drew a big reaction, and so
when votes came in, Miskel was the overwhelming favorite, beating
(33:07):
second placed finalist David Lewis by over fifteen thousand votes.
One letter said, we cast our votes for the eighty
year young gal. She is a peach. Come on, Granny,
do your thing, wrote another. At least two people claiming
to be President Jimmy Carter wrote in endorsing her, making
(33:27):
at least one of them a fake. Even Governor Neepe
said he voted for her America at least the America
voting for a Saturday Night Live host wanted to see
an eighty year old interact with the not ready for
primetime players. That was something Connie Crawford picked up on
pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Oh well, there was no question from the beginning that
she was going to win, because she was ninety years
old and from Louisiana, and she had this little sparkle
about her, and just the fact that she was willing
to do this and that she did it with such
grace and again.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Spark Okay, so miss gal Spellman wasn't quite ninety. She
was born in eighteen ninety seven, generations removed from the
counterculture vibe of SNL, Yet she was an ardent fan
of the show, which she watched religiously, including Lauren Michael's
announcement for the contest. Her birth predated the invention of
(34:29):
television itself. If both comedy and drama come from conflict,
what could be better than someone like miscal thrown into
the hippist show on the air.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
That was evident from the first day. I mean, the
Governor was splashy, but she was the way I saw
it as like, oh, she's the special one, because you know,
this was a time where the generational gap was still
pretty strictured, and here was this ninety year old woman
coming onto the subversive show and she was from the
(35:03):
Deep South.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
In looking at the coverage of the contest, it's fascinating
to see how reporters didn't really get curious about Miskell.
Out of the five sweeping characters, the co ed, the Governor,
the dropout. She was a grandmother stereotype. One article mentioned
in passing she had been a widow for twenty years.
(35:25):
Someone with her maiden name of Weatherby once worked as
a telephone operator for a local rotary club. In nineteen fifteen,
she was commended for fielding two hundred calls in just
forty five minutes. While we can't say definitively that was
our Miskal, it probably was. Yet her work, her life,
(35:47):
none of it seemed relevant so much as the idea
of an octagenarian was going to host snow And while
her age was a big reason people voted for her,
not everyone was certain she could do it. Miskell's son
Otis was quoted as saying he was unsure about the
idea that his mother may not have the stamina for
(36:10):
live television. I think it would be too much for her,
he said. SNL was taking a risk too. They were
banking on a woman who had never before been on
an airplane or in New York, much less on television
before her finalist appearance, here's Bill Carter again.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
So that was the risk for the show.
Speaker 5 (36:29):
Actually, the show was taken a risk because imagine if
she had frozen on stage, how bad that would look.
That they kind of put this woman in that position.
So you know, they did take a risk pushing her
out there in front of millions of viewers.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
It turns out that Miskell had plenty of energy. During
the finalists show, a reporter noticed Miskel was the only
one of the five who didn't seem all that nervous
to be going on live television. The rest were smoking, pacing,
or inhaling donuts. The week before the show, escorted by
her granddaughter Janine, Miskel boarded a plane from New Orleans
(37:08):
headed for New York. When she arrived, she was given
a warm reception by Lorn and the cast. Writers plotted
how best to utilize her, which was made easier given
how natural she had been in front of the camera
during the finalists show. But there was still a loose
cannon quality to miscal As charming as she was, as
(37:30):
comfortable as she seemed, she was still an amateur, and
amateurs can freeze up or lose their mark on stage,
So Michaels decided to give Miskell an on stage escort.
Buck Henry Buck, as you'll recall, hosted the five contenders
in this era of SNL. He was a kind of
(37:50):
all star, a bit of a nerdy vibe, very suburban dad,
but with a bit of a dark side. He was
also reliable.
Speaker 5 (37:59):
He was enormously admired and respected by the cast and
by Lorne. He was a veteran writer performer. People loved
his writing. He could handle anything. You know, he could
handle anything.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
You know.
Speaker 5 (38:13):
When Belushi cut his head with the sword at one time,
you know, he handled that. So they had great confidence
in him on stage.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
It's hard to know exactly what people were thinking or
hoping for when they switched on their televisions at eleven
thirty on Saturday, December seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven. Were they
hoping Miskell proved adept and witty? Were they anticipating the
cast would have to think on their feet to cover
up her mistakes. The show opens with John Belushi and
(38:46):
Lorraine Newman in the cast locker room. They discuss Miskell's age,
and Belushi makes an eerie joke about how he'll be
dead before he's thirty. The comment got a laugh then,
but given his death from a drug overdose at thirty
three in nineteen eighty two, hits differently now. Belushi, trading
(39:06):
on his party boy image, tells Newman that Miskell seemed nervous,
so he gave her a joint to calm her down.
The show leaned hard on two tropes this episode, Miskell's
age and the idea of getting a grandmother high.
Speaker 5 (39:21):
Yeah, that's right, that was in the show. Yeah, that
kind of humor never hit me well anyway. I mean
I was like drug joke. Come on, I can do
better than that.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
After the opening credit sequence, Buck Henry walks out to
the stage with Miskell on his arm, and Miskell does
a very good job of pretending to be stoned, telling
buck Henry she can see colors. From that point on,
Miskell Spilman is deployed very carefully. She appears sitting next
to Jane Curtin as curtain reads a holiday story re
(39:54):
enacted by Belusi and Gilda Radner. In the story, Belushi
gifts his girlfriend a kidney and she gives him a
watch chain. Miskell nails her lines, and then it's onto
the requisite hosting duty of introducing the musical guest ladies
and gentlemen, Elvis Costello. She then appears briefly in a
(40:14):
sketch as Bill Murray's mother while Murray's character robs a bank,
but her real star turn is in the next segment,
when Belushi returns home from College to greet his parents
played by Dan Ackrod and Jane Curtin. He wants them
to meet his new girlfriend, whom he's brought home for
the holidays. The audience can sense what's going to happen next,
(40:37):
and they go crazy when Belushi ushers in Miskel his
new flame. Akrd and Curtain try to make sense of
it before accepting their son has found true love Harold
and Maud style. But before the show is over, the
worst thing possible did happen. Warren Michael's lost control. It
(40:59):
just wasn't Miskle's doing. During his set, Elvis Costello, who
had just released his first album in the Uba, stopped
the song he was playing, less than Zero and told
his band to move into radio radio instead. For Michaels
and SNL, this was verboten. Musical acts didn't just decide
(41:21):
on the fly what they were going to do. As
rebellious as SNL was, it still had NBC's censors and
the FCC to contend with. And for all its seeming spontaneity,
SNL was planned down to the second that Bill believes
is what really set Michaels off.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
This show has to basically end ninety minutes, so he
has to have a clock going in his head. So
if someone comes in and does something like changes the song,
well the song's gonna be maybe a different lane, so
that may mess up the whole next whatever the pattern
is after that. So yes, if somebody does something that
he doesn't expect or he didn't plan, not obviously an
(42:04):
ad lib, that's fine. If it's funny, that's fine. But
to change the structure in some way, that's not going
to go. And he doesn't like people messing with his show.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Michaels was furious. He allegedly gave Costello the middle finger
from offstage, and again allegedly Costello was banned from appearing
on SNL for a decade, and just like that, the
show was over. Miskel joined the cast on stage to
wave goodbye in a missus clause costume while the credits
(42:35):
rolled for a publicity stunt. It worked spectacularly well. The
Miskel Spilman episode of Saturday Night Live drew a staggering
fourteen point five million viewers, the highest rated episode of
the series up to that point, drawing more attention than
the season premiere with Steve Martin.
Speaker 5 (42:56):
They had this tremendous publicity, So it doesn't surprise me
that much that it did extremely well, because beyond everything
else was a curiosity like, oh my gosh, what is
I gonna do?
Speaker 3 (43:08):
The record wouldn't stand for long. Chevy Chase, returning to
host in February nineteen seventy eight, got twenty five million viewers.
Chase also got into a fight with Bill Murray backstage
in an apparent clash of egos, which is something else
Miskel Spilman couldn't brag about. What she could lay claim
to was being the coolest of customers in a pressure cooker.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
You could tell she was game. She was game for it,
you know what I mean. She wasn't intimidated. She was Okay,
whatever I'm supposed to do, I'm going to do it.
And I think people really admire that. You know, she
as an eighty year old person did not fit naturally,
but I think they embraced her, and that's why it worked.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
The Miskel Spilman episode remains a remarkable chapter in the
history of SNL. She wasn't the oldest ever host of
the show, not even then. In the second season, actress
Ruth Gordon hosted at the age of eighty one, and
decades later Betty White would set the record at the
age of eighty eight, but Miskel Spilman remains the winner
(44:13):
of the first and only Anyone Can Host competition. No
one in the forty seven seasons to follow hosted who
was totally unfamiliar to the audience, plucked from obscurity to
entertain a pet theory of Michael's. The closest SNL ever
came again to this grand experiment was in nineteen eighty
(44:35):
three when Brandon Tartikoff head lined an episode. While he
wasn't all that well known or much of a celebrity,
he did have one thing going for him. He was
the president of NBC's entertainment division. Miskel was the only
true civilian to ever do it.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
It was in the B range for me, As I recall,
I haven't gone back and looked at it. I thought
she was cute and occasionally adorable with what they were
doing with her, it didn't stand out. I mean, if
I went back and looked at it, maybe a sketch
would stand out to me, but it wasn't overly memorable.
(45:15):
And I think the most notable thing about it is
that they never did it again.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
They didn't really have to. As the years went on,
SNL grew from a counterculture maverick to an institution. There
were some interactive segments. Who could forget Eddie Murphy imploring
viewers to call in and vote to spare the life
of a lobster he wanted to boil in nineteen eighty two,
But for the most part SNL had tenure. In nineteen
(45:44):
eighty four, syndicated columnist Bob Green caught up with Miskel
to ask about her experience. She said it had been
the most thrilling night of her life. She said her
granddaughter was scared she might have a heart attack, but
that she didn't feel nervous at all. She recalled how
nice John Belushi was to her, how Bill Murray and
(46:04):
Gilda Radner invited her and her daughter out for dinner,
where they all talked until four o'clock in the morning,
how she and Radner had remained pen pals, writing letters
to one another for years. Afterward, Miskell was also gifted
a signed scrap book which congratulated her on winning. Lauren
Michaels signed it along with several of the writers, so
(46:27):
did Bill Murray, John Belucy, Jane Curtin, dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner,
and of course Buck Henry Inside were many of the
letters sent in that voted for her. As late as
nineteen eighty nine, she was still watching the show, admitting
she had to take a nap to stay up that late.
Her favorite cast member at that time was Dana Carvey,
(46:51):
and like most fans of SNL, she thought the show
wasn't as good as it used to be. In nineteen
ninety two, Miskell's Spilman, SNL's only civilian host, died at
the age of ninety five.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
You know what she says.
Speaker 5 (47:06):
She had a line in the show where she said
they had to give to me because I may only
live another twenty five years or something.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Like that, and damn she lived.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
She lived fifteen, She lived fifteen more years.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
She was ninety five.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
The fate of the other contestants is largely unknown. Richard
Neepe died in nineteen eighty seven, but Debbie Blair and
David Lewis, who were part of this strange chapter in
show business, aren't easily found. They were candidates for a
grand experiment. Michaels had set out to prove anyone could
(47:42):
host SNL and he did well, maybe he found out
miss goals. Bilman could host, But could anyone? Could you
host SNL? Stand on stage in front of millions of
people and not panic?
Speaker 5 (47:57):
It's not easy. It's not the easiest thing in the
world to do. As I said, if you don't have
a level of confidence to be out there in front
of that live audience and on camera, you could really
freeze up and have nothing. So I don't believe anyone
could do it. No, And I admire the fact that
she did it well. I think there was no built
in reason why she should have pulled that off, even
(48:18):
with the writing they had, etc. You see people try
to get up and just talk at a PTA meeting
and they can't do it.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
Could Bill Carter?
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Hell No.
Speaker 5 (48:30):
The idea of standing in front of an audience and
getting them to laugh and the idea of not getting
them to laugh is like, you know, facing a crocodile.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
For Connie Crawford, the Anyone Can Host contest was meant
to be a fleeting thrill. After Vassar, Connie went on
to Juilliard, the prestigious acting school, and got involved in theater,
including the improv group, the Groundlings. She now teaches acting
and directing at Brown University. She's never gone back to
(49:03):
look at the episode where she was able to stand
next to a legend cast she had revered on television.
After all, it's called Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
I've never seen it, and I've made a point of
not seeing it just because it was so much fun.
I don't want to watch it and go oh, or
you know, I don't want to poison the memory because
it was live. I mean, that's the whole thing. That's
kind of hard today to have people understand the how
(49:34):
ethereal it was. If you missed it, you missed it,
and that's it, and you would never see it. That
was kind of the magic of it. And so that
was the fun of it for me. You know. Then
I go back to school, and you know, I just
have this kind of happy memory, and I've just chosen
(49:56):
to keep it that way because it was really special
and silly and and it was a great show.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
No oh, she didn't wind up running away to Nicaragua
with dan Akride.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
It was so disappointing. He didn't love me, no, But
by that point I wasn't in love with him anymore.
Uh No, I mean at that point, if I had
wanted to, it would have been Blue Shie.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Jake Rowson wrote today's episode. Jake also wrote last week's episode,
Super Streaker, and if you want to dip into the archives,
check out E T and Me, another Jake special about
a suburban kid who helped Steven Spielberg make his most
ambitious movie to date. Our producer, as always, is Josh Fisher.
(50:57):
The show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing
and mastering by Chris Childs. Original music by Alice McCoy,
Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
If you'd like to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
(51:20):
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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