Chevy Chase: Cut to the Chase

Do you miss the kinds of things you did on Saturday Night Live?

Absolutely. I really miss it a lot. But it's not something I can go back to. It's over. It was over when I left.

Your popularity on Saturday Night Live stemmed from a lot of physical comedy -- the way you played to the camera, the pratfalls you took. When people first meet you, do they still react to that side of you?

People fall down. There are two famous ones. One was this guy, an actor, 6'8". I was sitting at this outdoor restaurant, The Source, and this guy was alone and he saw me and wrote a little note. He walked by and had a glass of water in his hand and he took a horrendous fall just as he put the note down, thinking that it would get my attention, which it did. The glass broke, cut his lip really good, nice cut, a lot of bleeding. And the note said, "Please come down to the theater and see me in such-and-such a play." I just couldn't believe it.

Another guy fell at a store where my wife and I were looking at couches. He went down and his knee was gone. He had completely blown it, the paramedics had to come. People just don't know how to fall. John Belushi never knew. Whenever he fell he'd hit his head. Every time he did a Joe Cocker imitation he would fall down and hit his head.

What's been your most spectacular fall?

From grace.

Didn't the FCC once censor a bit that you wrote about how Johnny Carson used the word "penis" on his show? What was that about?

That was about the size of my dick. Twenty-four feet, [pause] It was a straightforward news story that I had written. Johnny had had Buddy Hackett on his show the night before. I hadn't seen the show but I'd heard about it. Basically Hackett was talking about owning a hand gun and Johnny Carson said something to the effect that there's an old Indian adage that man with big gun have small penis. So I wrote an Update in which I said that Johnny Carson last night on the Tonight Show used the word "penis" and was allowed to say it over the air by the Federal Communications Commission. I quoted the sentence about the old Indian adage and said that the rule was that the word "penis" could not be used in other sentences such as: "Look at the penis," or, "Is that the penis?" or, "I have here a penis." I just said it straight. There was nothing offensive about it. It wasn't as if I said, "The penis has hair on it and herpes." But you just don't say "Look at the penis" on television. At least not then.

Once you left Saturday Night Live did you feel that the quality never returned?

Pretty much. I felt that once I left it wasn't as good. We had done what we had come to do that first year, which was to parody television and to satirize political events. And once you ran out of that either A) because you did all the jokes, or the novelty had ceased to exist, or B) because others were now doing what you had started off doing and were winning Emmys for, or C) because everybody won Emmys and they were all full of themselves and they were starting to write "in" jokes, then the show was not going to be as good and therefore was just going to go downhill. And it seemed to me that after I left that happened.

In one of your Saturday Night Live skits you asked viewers to send in killer dope. Did anyone respond?

We did get letters with joints in them. I never smoked anything, God knows what the hell was in them. Once in a while one particular member of the cast would come in and smoke them. I'm not going to say who it was.

Was there a lot of drug use at the time?

Not too much the first year. I noted it quite a bit more when I went back and visited. And understood it. People were making more money, they were up later, working harder, getting tired of it. But the year I was there none of us had a lot of money to begin with, and coke was not particularly that exciting or interesting. There was pot, but with pot you'd come up with a hundred premises, giggling your ass off, and the next morning two of them were funny.

What was your own experience with drugs?

That started late in life. I was scared of them. People were smoking pot and even taking LSD and I didn't. When I first smoked pot I freaked. I didn't want to lose control. But it was something I'd gotten used to doing back in the sixties when everybody said it's not only okay but probably good to take psychedelics and smoke pot and snort a little coke. After all, we were told that coke was the last thing in the world you could get addicted to. Well, it turned out that isn't true. I never felt coke ever helped my mind. Just sped me up and made me nervous. But pot we used to smoke all the time in the sixties and seventies. It was common then. What's happened to pot today is it's very, very strong. It's a very different drug than it was when we were flying that Mexican stuff back at twenty bucks a shot in 1969. I'm very much against it and very much an advocate against drugs and alcohol.

Was there ever a period in your life, though, when you were very much into it?

The only time that I ever got heavily involved with drugs was during a period when I was very unhappy, during a long separation and divorce that I was going through. And when you're unhappy you tend to do things that are self-destructive. I don't do it anymore, I just don't care too much about it.

Was Belushi self-destructive?

John was a fluke. I don't think he ever put a needle in his arm. I think that somebody else shot him up and he liked it. If I'd known he was doing what he was doing I'd have killed him anyway. It was just way over the line. But he thought he could take it -- or do anything.

Did he ever reach out to you or to anyone else for help?

I think he went to other people for help, but what could you say? Except, "Cut it down a little, John." After he died I thought to myself, goddamn it, there were at least four, five, six people around him for three or four years there -- and I didn't see him more than two or three times in those years -- who knew all the time how much he did. And somebody should have said something. But maybe people were scared to, or maybe he was very defensive about it, or maybe he hid it, or was guilty about it. He wasn't happy, obviously, or he wouldn't have gone that far.

Did you read Wired? Or see the movie?

I read bits and pieces. I don't think it was accurate. There was no way a guy like Woodward was going to get an accurate version of who John was without being around him all the time. I never saw the film. I felt the book was sleaze and why do a film of it? But Wired didn't upset me or hurt me nearly as much as the Saturday Night Live book did [A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live], which I thought was just horrible. They said things about me I couldn't believe. I came away from that book thinking nobody on that show liked me, that I had been an asshole. It was the total opposite of what it was like. An awful book, and that hurt. That one, I literally cried. I read a chapter about myself and I cried. Because that was one of the happiest years of my life. We were very much together like a team. And we were happy.

We've recently lost another member of that team. Did you see much of Gilda Radner in the years before her death?

No, I didn't see much of her at all the last couple of years. I didn't feel it was easy to get to her. And she was sick. On the other hand, people said, "Well, you could always call her at home." I tried that on a bunch of occasions but she was sick and I didn't want to bother her. I had the impression that her close friends had a hard time, and that it had something to do with her marriage to Gene [Wilder], I don't know if that's the truth or not, so I won't talk about it.

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