Once upon a Time in New York

Lorne Michaels likes to say, “The history of New York is written by out-of-towners.” Susan Morrison, in her affectionate biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, writes that Toronto-born Michaels credits the line to Harold Ross. The founding editor of The New Yorker was, in fact, from Colorado. Morrison, who today is the articles editor at Ross’s now ancient magazine, has found no record that he said it, but both the maxim and the attribution feel true. Several seminal New York institutions were created by people drawn to the city’s lights rather than born under them, and it makes sense that one of their number might point out their collective contributions. If you’re going to take up space in Manhattan especially, the way Michaels has at Rockefeller Center for more than fifty years, you need to continue to earn it.

Graydon Carter, another Canadian émigré and the swoopy-haired editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, makes his own case for permanent New York residency in When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. The relative slightness of his memoir suggests that he has less to say about himself than Morrison does about Michaels, and for modern readers the page math seems about right.

There’s an urgency in Lorne that’s absent from Carter’s selective survey of his life. After Morrison delivers her central character’s requisite backstory — Lorne Lipowitz lost his father at fourteen and found one of several surrogates in Frank Shuster, his girlfriend’s dad and half of the comic duo Wayne and Shuster — her book gets an almost electric charge when Saturday Night Live enters the frame, as if picking up the show’s energy by osmosis. The spine of her narrative is a single episode from 2018, hosted by Jonah Hill, and her minute-by-minute accounting of the performance and the chaos behind the scenes is anxiety-inducing stuff. Lorne could have been written in the present tense. Starting with its title and continuing with every word after, When the Going Was Good is a lament for a lost past.

I was a writer at Esquire while Carter ran Vanity Fair, a small-town Canadian boy who never earned more than a visitor’s pass to New York. I still heard the possibly apocryphal lore of our rival’s gilded existence, passed along during boozy, envy-filled nights at Keens or Elaine’s: that Carter assigned four stories for every one he published, with the budget and ruthlessness required to kill the other three; that the famed photographer Annie Leibovitz made more in an hour than any of us made in a month. (Bryan Burrough, the author of Barbarians at the Gate and a Vanity Fair special correspondent under Carter, recently confirmed the rumours of largesse by revealing that he was paid $498,141 for three stories a year, a borderline-offensive sum even by the standards of peak magazine.) Vanity Fair felt to us like the glossy equivalent of the vaguely aristocratic, gossipy intellectual who looks down on you for your hustle and coarser tastes. We soothed ourselves with the knowledge that we’d kick their asses if we ever met them in the magazine division of the Central Park softball league. I did, anyway.

Carter’s book is like Carter’s magazine, which always seemed to me to deliver less than it promised, with a bloated masthead of hall of fame writers who didn’t write very much. (Even here, Carter employs a co-writer, James Fox.) I also know people who adored his Vanity Fair, and I’ve talked to former colleagues who loved When the Going Was Good and thought it was an enjoyable, dishy romp, a time-machine trip to a better world. Maybe it’s my holdover jealousy at play, but I can’t say I did. My favourite part was Carter’s account of his summer as a lineman on the railway in Saskatchewan, which feels honest and true, like the work. His later magazine escapades read like a boast when they don’t read like a eulogy; his book might contain more proper names than any other in history. (It does not have an index, but compiling one would have employed somebody for weeks.) Carter fancies himself as the outwardly self-effacing, inwardly self-satisfied guest you’d wish to sit beside at a dinner, and I’d wager he’s charming in person. I found the extended version of him and his often meaningless celebrity encounters wearying, but again, that might say more about me than about him. He was an iconic editor, a giant of our weird little industry, and I can see how someone only slightly more removed from his former orbit would be dazzled by his charmed life. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, he asks a stranger to direct him to the pool, and the stranger is Fred Astaire; he reaches for his wineglass at a dinner and accidentally bumps Dolly Parton in the breast.

Morrison’s book, in contrast, is the work of a different kind of obsessive and more illuminating for it. (She was one of the original editors at Spy magazine, Carter’s beloved shuttered satirical; “the only one with a proper Rolodex,” Carter remembers, and that checks out.) Lorne is deeply reported and cleverly structured, and it contains some gorgeous sentences. During an interlude when Michaels takes to gardening, Morrison writes, “It was satisfying to revel in the production values of ten thousand daffodils.” She started her book in 2015, and I sometimes wondered what she left out of it in exchange for her years of access. Michaels suffers in its pages, but he’s usually the innocent victim of sinister forces rather than the receiver of deserved consequences. Whenever critiques are directed his way, either by Morrison or by one of her interviewees — Michaels is sometimes too enamoured of himself and prone to coldness and credit seeking — they are love taps masquerading as torpedoes. (Conan O’Brien is an exception. “It took me a long time, as I grew up more and got therapy, to realize, he’s a really scared person,” he tells Morrison.) Lorne is otherwise a mostly glowing portrait of a genius, a philosopher king.

Given Michaels’s record, the talent he’s found, and the wisdom he’s acquired, he is one of a type. He’s about to turn eighty-one and still occupies the centre of everything that he’s built, an empire far more expansive than Saturday Night Live alone. He’s also at least partially responsible for the Late Night series, The Kids in the Hall, 30 Rock, and The Tonight Show, where he installed SNL alum Jimmy Fallon as host. “Do you know how many funny people there are in the world?” he often asks. “There are about nine. They know who they are.” Michaels, presumably, can name the other eight.

Lorne is nearly as flush with cameos as Carter’s book, and for better purpose, as it recollects the countless careers its subject has made: Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Tina Fey, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers . . . (Lorne has an index, and it is massive.) Over Saturday Night Live’s long history, its writers and cast have made running gags out of Michaels and his litany of famous-people anecdotes. Because he uses only first names when he spins them, he’ll say “Paul,” and everyone is left wondering whether he’s talking about McCartney or Simon, both of whom he claims as close friends, unless they’ve heard the tale before — and they probably have.

Men like Carter and Michaels are trophy hunters, really, and not only in their claiming of their slices of New York: he who dies with the most stories wins. My magazine friends and I were the same in our lesser capacities, as if we were collecting celebrity heads on the walls of our memory banks rather than deer antlers or mounted fish. Sometimes that meant we confused our proximity to fame with our own, inflating our essentialness to the scene. I spent a week at Saturday Night Live in 2017 — Michaels refused to talk to me, but I did take careful note of his edamame addiction — while I shadowed Alec Baldwin for a cover story for The Atlantic. I was in the early stages of a calamitous divorce, and Baldwin was generous, whispering “Better days” into my ear when we hugged on our final evening together. The kindness of my surprising new friend meant a great deal. A few years later, I appeared on his podcast to talk about a different story, and he had no idea who I was or any recollection that we’d met.

That was a necessary lesson in our importance and its relativity. I loved my tenure at Esquire and don’t want to minimize the good journalism that my colleagues did, alongside the regrettable “Sexiest Woman Alive” fare of a different time. Some of our stories mattered, and I remain proud of them. But I also put in shifts at a dry cleaner and on a hog farm — every Esquire writer had also been a salesman, which fit — and I’ve come to understand that “magazine writer” was a ridiculous way to make a living. (Once, early in my career, I had a painter at my house to give me an estimate, and he asked me what I did for work. I told him, a little too proudly. “You’ll have to pay in advance,” he said.) Now, not even a decade removed from my blessed time as one, I think back and marvel at our good fortune, that it was possible to make upper-middle-class money by jetting off to Los Angeles to write a story about George Clooney that a few people might read on an airplane. The late New York Times journalist David Carr referred to the job as a “grand caper,” and now I recognize that he was exactly right. We were all charlatans with varying success until 2016 or so. Carter, maybe the most successful of all, got an extra year on the lam. Then the world caught up to our mischief and replaced our shenanigans with a new model that offered dopamine hits and fleeting viral fame in lieu of actual currency. You get what you pay for and all that.

In a way, Carter’s and Morrison’s books both come off like displays of riches that younger generations can never hope to have, because they aren’t available to anyone anymore. When the Going Was Good is infused with melancholy, an accidental overdose of heartbreak. I think I would have preferred it had Carter treated everything more like the luxurious folly that it was. He is presently the co-editor of Air Mail, “a mobile-first digital weekly” that had escaped my attention until I read chapter 4. It has 500,000 subscribers, I’ve since learned, which has left me resurrecting my old softball fantasies, but Carter has also announced that it’s for sale, because who wants to edit glorified emails all day? The man knows parties, and ours was decadent and fun. It is also over. Carter approached Michaels decades ago when he was raising funds for Spy. “He turned me down in the nicest possible way,” Carter tells Fox, who tells us. “His rationale was that creative people don’t invest — others invest in them.” Once upon a time, they did.

After producing more than 900 episodes of Saturday Night Live, Michaels continues to work, pausing briefly to celebrate a milestone before resuming his forever search for the next “More Cowbell.” Saturday Night Live has changed less than our media in general since its inception — Michaels insists on still using handwritten cue cards, for instance — but even he can’t outrun the reality that network television is collapsing, and no one involved with the show can imagine its survival beyond his. (For people close to Michaels, it must sometimes be hard to know which is keeping the other going.) Amy Poehler, another of his discoveries turned stars, calls it “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.” Nostalgia has its easy appeal, and Morrison points out that most fans, when asked to name their favourite cast members, will name those who helped get them through high school. Michaels, unlike Carter, refuses to ache for the departed. “You can’t just spend the last half of your life watching the first half of your life,” he says. To him, looking back means that you’re faced in the wrong direction.

Perhaps that’s the secret behind his more sustained relevance. Michaels is expert in cultivating chaos in addition to his ten thousand daffodils. Comedy comes out of discomfort; it’s a response to the sight of ruins. Network executives will look in on the writers, expecting to see them sweating over their sketches and jokes — working, in the traditional sense — and they’re aghast to find a room full of people fooling around. “They don’t realize that there’s more invention in disorder,” Michaels says. That’s true of the world, too. Today’s is different from the one that came before it, that gave way to it, and it’s presenting different openings for different talents, telling different stories in different ways. People posting TikToks of mukbangs in their cars might seem like the makers of lesser art to those of us who liked our entertainments the way they were, but that’s how movie people thought of TV people, and how theatre people thought of movie people. An audience’s attention, like space in New York, is not a birthright. Sometimes it’s just someone else’s turn to occupy it.