Lorne Michaels Author & Saturday Night Live Writers Swap Stories in Sag Harbor

For show business history aficionados and Saturday Night Live fans, the place to be Aug. 15 was The Church in Sag Harbor. The occasion was a sold-out event called “Stories. Noisemaking. Laughter: A Portrait of Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live” led by Michaels’ biographer Susan Morrison. Joining her were SNL’s longest-serving writer and former “Weekend Update” producer James Downey and Sarah Paley who wrote for the iconic late-night comedy show in 1979 and 1980.

Along with discussing the creative process and dishing about some of its most difficult cast members and mercurial guests, the trio reenacted a sketch that never made it on the air when Paris Hilton, whom Tina Fey infamously called a “nightmare,” hosted in 2005, with Downey doing a spot-on impersonation of Michaels. On hand as well was longtime staff photographer and part-time Springs resident Mary Ellen Matthews, who recently published a bestselling coffee table book called The Art of the SNL Portrait, followed by a signing with Matthews and Morrison afterwards.

Morrison began watching Saturday Night Live as a young teenager shortly after its premiere on October 11, 1975. The Stamford, Connecticut native also made her first foray into Studio 8H to attend a show hosted by Elliot Gould during its inaugural season when her friend Robin’s aunt who worked at NBC got tickets for them. “Being in the suburbs and watching the first season of that show was so radical at the time,” recalled Morrison. “Finally, there was something on television for our generation. I think its very hard for young people today to get a sense of how revolutionary that was.”

Seven years later — after studying English history and literature at Harvard, graduate school at the University of Manchester in England and cutting her journalistic teeth at The Times of London — Morrison briefly worked for Michaels in 1984. She did so as a writer’s assistant on the one singular flop of the comedy kingpin’s career, a short-lived primetime sketch series for NBC called The New Show, where she also became friends with Downey, before landing some of the most coveted jobs in American journalism.

After working as an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair under Tina Brown, this included becoming an original editor of Spy magazine in 1986 with Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter whom she succeeded as editor-in-chief of The New York Observer in 1992, a stint as features director at Vogue and serving as articles editor at The New Yorker for the past 29 years, a position Brown recruited her for in 1997. Along the way, she edited a book of essays called Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections By Women Writers, published in 2008. Then came the idea for Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, Morrison’s exhaustively reported 600-plus page tour deforce, chronicling the SNL creator and executive producer’s life and career from birth until the present day. Debuting at number four on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller following its release two days after the show’s star-studded 50th anniversary special this past February, the book quickly became mandatory reading for the comedy department of talent agency giant William Morris Endeavor.

Morrison’s impetus for writing it began ten years earlier, shortly after SNL’s 40th anniversary special in 2015. She had also attended the show numerous other times as an audience member over the years, often accompanied by legendary New Yorker scribe Lillian Ross who was a close friend of Michaels’ as was William Shaun, the magazine’s fabled editor. During the 40th anniversary special, Morrison’s ah-ha moment was seeing the closing sequence, with a tuxedo-clad Michaels surrounded by SNL alumni and other luminaries gathered on the main stage of its 30 Rockefeller Plaza studios, known as homebase.

A black and white photo of it also serves as the cover of her book. “My two kids had gone to college and I was an empty nester,” Morrison explained. “I had this idea that I would have a lot of free time and maybe I should try and do something scary and new when I realized here was Lorne hiding in plain sight. I knew him a bit, and I had been hearing all these writer friends tell stories about him for years. I knew how obsessed they were with him and it was interesting to me how they would kind of alternately lionize him and demonize him.”

After putting together a proposal shopped around by literary agent David Kuhn, a bidding war ensued and she quickly landed a six-figure deal with Random House in February 2015, the same month of the 40th anniversary special. There were two major obstacles, however. First, was that despite her pedigree, Morrison had never actually written a book before, much less a single article even though she had edited thousands of them. Her second roadblock was the notoriously publicity-shy Michaels. Opting not to let him know about it until after the ink on her contract was dry, she said, “I knew enough about him to know that if I had gone to him first, he would have said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

Shortly afterwards, Morrison sent Michaels an email requesting a meeting. Though he agreed to see her, he was predicably nonplussed.

“Lorne hates surprises and he literally looked like he was going to pass out,” she said.

But then, to Morrison’s great surprise, he set up another meeting several days later, this time for cocktails at the London Hotel around the corner from 30 Rock. She was even more taken aback when he began waxing nostalgic about his childhood growing up in Canada and the early days of SNL. “He just skipped over the negotiation discussion and started in with his stories,” remembered Morrison. “Once he began talking, we were off. What was fantastic is that he asked nothing of me and there weren’t any restrictions at all. It was completely my book.”

What followed were dozens of other interview sessions, often taking place in Michaels’ seventeenth and nineth floor offices at NBC on Friday evenings in between rehearsals for SNL. She also interviewed him strolling along the beach in Amagansett, where Michaels has had a home since the early 1980s. Additionally, Morrison spoke with many past and present cast members, writers and production crew, along with Michaels’ two former wives and many of his A-list friends, including Steve Martin, Paul McCartney, Randy Newman, Candice Bergen and Paul Simon.

Notable also is that much of the book—which took nearly a decade to complete and is delineated by days of the week with each section prefaced by a detailed account of how SNL comes together—was written by Morrison at her home in Sheter Island. For the past eleven years, she has divided her time between here and Manhattan with longtime partner, songwriter and musician Loudon Wainwright, where they are actively involved in the Fresh Pond Neighbors Association.

And she’s been keeping busy this summer promoting Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live on the East End with other recent appearances at Authors Night and Guild Hall in East Hampton, as well as many other events around the country, including an upcoming talk this fall at The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where Michaels recently donated his personal archives.  “The response to the book has been incredible and I’ve been having blast since it came out,” she said.

One person who hasn’t read it—at least not yet—is Michaels. However, Morrison has been in touch with him and there are hopeful, if not cryptic signs. “The last time I saw him, he told me he still hadn’t read it, but that he thought he might read it over the summer,” she said. “Others have told me he has, but what he does, which is very sweet, is text me when he hears about friends who’ve read it. He let me know that Candice Bergen liked it and Peyton Manning.”