God, if You're Not Up There . . . (20 page)

My second stalker was an amateur. A Turkish woman who showed up downstairs at the security desk asking to see me. She claimed my nonexistent brother was the father of her baby and she wanted money. She should have done a little more research on my family tree before she got to work, don’t you think?

The first stalker, however, was quite accomplished.

I met this attractive, charming, well-spoken woman at the Cellar one night in the early years of the millennium. She was a fan, we hit it off, and I invited her back to my place.

When we got to my apartment, she said, “I have to use the facilities,” and as she walked toward the bathroom, she turned and looked at me—it was as if someone else’s eyes had been transplanted into her head. She might as well have said to me, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.”
Air raid sirens.

“I’m not feeling well all of a sudden,” I said. “I need to go see some friends of mine.” I’d seen those eyes before, hadn’t I?

I escorted her downstairs to a cab.

Later that night, she called me. I didn’t pick up. She called again. And again. In total, she called about fifty times in the space of an hour. In most of the messages, she was screaming.

I took the messages to the local precinct. There was one detective nearing the end of a brilliant career who took care of it, but it took time, because, as he said, “This animal needs to come out of the bushes a little bit more. She’s not going to be happy with just yelling at you. She wants more, and she’s going to eventually have to come out to get it. So we wait.”

He eventually called her and said, “You need to understand that this is not going to work out for you. It’s going to be bad if you take this any further. I’m obliged to tell you that. I think it would be really great if you would just stop.”

But he understood this kind of person. He knew she wasn’t going to stop, and she didn’t.

Her next move was to have a friend of hers call this veteran detective and say he was a lawyer, telling the police what they couldn’t do. The boys at the precinct house just laughed.

Then she sent a horrible note threatening my family, and that was enough. The detective and I went to the district attorney, and the DA said, “If we want to take her to trial, will you testify?”

Ninety-nine point-nine-nine-nine percent of the time, once the DA and the NYPD get involved at the level they were prepared to get involved at, the harassment stops. Her friend got a call from the DA’s office, which was sufficient to change his mind about the things he’d said to the cops. Then the police went to her apartment, which I was told was done up like a shrine to me, with photos of me and interviews I’d done plastered all over the walls. They arrested her and incarcerated her at either the Tombs downtown or Riker’s Island. As the cops suspected, the experience was sufficiently horrific, and it was no longer worth it to her to continue. She copped a plea, and I never heard from her again.

And yet, although they stopped her, they couldn’t stop the fear I’d developed. It’s hard to do comedy when someone’s threatening to kill you and your family. When someone has a gun and can shoot from the shadows, they might as well be a hundred feet tall—either way, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. They’ve let you know that they want to do you harm, they let you know they know where you are, and due to the stalker laws, they have to make some kind of threat on tape or on paper before the authorities can get involved. But even then, how much can they do if a person really wants to kill you? Put them in jail for a few days?

It reached the point that I was leaving 30 Rock via the garage in the subbasement so that no one ever saw me exit the building.

I didn’t want to stop going to the Cellar because it was really helpful to me to work out new material there. Eventually I called Estee and said, “I need to do a set, but you can’t advertise that I’m gonna be there.” Sometimes my friend Eddie Galanek—a former NYPD detective who’d spent a couple of years undercover with the Gambinos before he started doing security for
SNL
, scanning the audience for troublemakers and looking after the celebrity hosts—would come with me, but you can’t get a top bodyguard to come with you every fucking night.

Still, you’ve got to be security conscious. You never know when you’re going to encounter some freak who was hit on the head when he was three years old at vacation Bible school after his dad molested him and spent the next ten years chained to the radiator in his grandma’s basement. It’s true that 99.9 percent of stalkers are adoring fans, but 0.1 percent is the guy chained to the radiator in his grandma’s basement, and that guy wants to kill you.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A Host of Hosts

F
or the hosts, being on
SNL
is a mixture of pampering and really hard work. They get lots of encouragement, lots of support, and there’s always an assistant or two floating around to make sure they have everything they need. There were some extremely famous people who walked onto that stage before, during, and after my tenure, but live television is a very different—and more daunting—experience from what most Hollywood celebrities are accustomed to. There are no retakes. You screw up, and millions of people will know about it. (Just ask musical guest Ashlee Simpson, who got caught lip-synching to the wrong song and walked offstage humiliated in 2009. If that weren’t bad enough,
60 Minutes
was on set that week, so the fiasco was replayed for a second time to a brand-new audience.) For the most part, people are on their best behavior as they walk through the hallowed halls of
Saturday Night Live
. No one wants to feel like they’re going out in front of sixteen million people alone.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t the showbiz people who seemed to have the easiest time of it. The athletes just expect that they’re going to figure out a way to do this. All of these hall-of-fame superstars would walk in seeming to think, Yeah, this is how I do things—I win. Tom Brady was fabulous. Peyton Manning was amazing. Jeter was great. According to the security guys—and they knew dirt on everybody—Jeter is one of the classiest guys going. He certainly behaved that way around
SNL
. Sometimes while raising my kid, I’d think, What would Jeter do? (When I did Trump, as I left the stage, I would say, “And Derek Jeter’s going to be there,” as a tip of the hat. Jeter’s Mr. New York City, as far as I’m concerned.)

Donald Trump was the same way. Trump doesn’t quite understand defeat. Even when it occurs, it doesn’t register in his brain. He has been millions in debt and never developed a drug problem, like some people would have. He reminds me of the horse Native Dancer, one of the most famous thoroughbreds in racing history. Back in the 1950s, he was undefeated for three years running, and he became accustomed to going into the winner’s circle after every race. When he finally lost the Kentucky Derby, he trotted over to the winner’s circle anyway. Winning was all he knew.

It reminds me of an old soft drink commercial where Larry Bird was supposed to miss a free throw.
I’m not being guarded, the basket is only ten feet away, and you’re asking me to miss this shot? I don’t know how.

When Trump hosted
SNL
, he dove in with tremendous enthusiasm. Here was one of the most famous men in the country asking more questions, spending more time with the cameraman, the lighting people, the costume people, than just about any other host I’d ever encountered.

At one point, shortly before we went on the air, he said, “Let me ask you a question. If I deviate from the script for a second, will that make things seem more spontaneous?”

Of course. Nothing could be more spontaneous.

“And if it’s more spontaneous, it’s more real?”

Yeah, and that makes it funny.

He’d been studying this for less than a week, but he broke that down pretty fucking fast. I was amazed, especially considering the chaos with hair and makeup and costuming that was going on backstage in the seconds before I was to join him on the main stage during his monologue:

“Where’s the brush?”

“Nobody said anything to me about a brush.”

“Did you get me a nose?”

“Didn’t have time. Just found out.”

“So did I. Did you get the elevated shoes?”

“Why do you need elevated shoes?”

“Because he’s a fucking foot taller than me.”

“Okay, tell Tom to hurry.”

“How’s the wig?”

“I didn’t get a chance to fit it.”

“Why?”

“Nobody told me.”

“Fuck.”

“Here are the shoes.”

“Thanks. Is that the wig?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t look like an onion loaf.”

“What?”

“His hair is supposed to look like a fucking onion loaf! It’s fucking Donald Trump. Jesus.”

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Oh, fucking no!”

“What?”

“These shoes don’t fit.”

“Ten seconds. You’ll have to go on without them.”

“But he’s a fucking foot taller than me!”

“Jesus, calm down.”

“I can’t. I’m doing Donald Trump to Donald Trump, and he’s a fucking foot taller than me.”

“Deep breath. Two seconds.”

“I’ve got no fucking shoes on! No onion loaf!”

“You’re on!”

The bit worked terrifically well—Trump had me “fire” Jimmy Fallon’s wildly gesturing Jeff Zucker—but in our matching dark suits and purple ties, I ended up looking like a Mini-Me version of the dude instead of his double.

S
haquille O’Neal was a little different because he had someone with him who appeared to act as his adviser. I happened to walk by the music room and saw this giant man sitting on a tiny couch with a normal-sized man sitting next to him, while writers and music people pitched a song they wanted him to sing. Without a word, he looked at the guy next to him, who must have said or gestured his approval, and then he said, “Yeah, okay.”

Sometimes, when you’re that famous, you’ve got to have someone who can say, “You’re not going to look good if you do this.”

Of course, Shaquille O’Neal singing a lullaby while holding Will Ferrell like a baby was a smash hit. Also, he ate more in one sitting than a mere mortal could eat in a year. Nice guy, real soft-spoken.

W
hen football stud Tom Brady hosted in 2005, Robert Smigel wrote a TV Funhouse sketch called, “Sexual Harassment and You.” The bit required Brady to walk through a warren of office cubicles to show how to “correctly” talk to women. In one scene, he walks through in a pair of tighty-whities and cups Amy Poehler’s breast. At read-through, someone had marked at the top of the script, “This one is for the costume shop.”

We also did a Dr. Phil sketch in which Tom played a husband who’s so clueless to his wife’s needs that Dr. Phil hauls off and slaps him. I was very proud of that because he demonstrated his athleticism by lurching his head with impeccable timing as I whizzed my hand past his face.

J
. Lo was one of those hosts who doubled as the musical act. When she appeared in February 2001, I got to see her extraordinary magnetism up close. Just walking down the hall, she owned the place. I overheard some tech guys by the coffee urn say, “Animals probably look at her and think, Why don’t
I
get that?” She’s certainly an attractive woman, but this is
Saturday Night Live
. If you’re hot, we’ve seen you. J. Lo was different. Catherine Zeta Jones had an imperial kind of beauty—you’d want your queen to look like her—but J. Lo has the shit that people go to war for, and this was a full ten years before the country fell in love with her all over again when she cried for the contestants as a judge on
American Idol.

There were men who seemed to have that effect on women too. I remember walking down Fiftieth Street with Scott Wolf, the young heartthrob from the hit drama
Party of Five
, and a convertible filled with attractive young women pulled up alongside us.

“Hey, Scott! Come with us!”

Is the balance of nature upset when something like that occurs? There’s no wooing, no cooing, no courting, no flirting, no getting to know you, no sizing each other up, no smelling each other’s cologne, just “Hey, Scott! Come with us!” What is
that
like?

S
hortly before air on October 18, 2008, I stepped out of my dressing room and slammed into a wall of the tallest, largest badass Secret Service agents the U.S. government has ever assembled. Before I could ask what was going on, I saw Sarah Palin walking past the hair and makeup department, past Jason Sudeikis’s dressing room, straight toward me. Wait, no, not toward me—toward the bathroom. Only the host and musical guest get a dressing room with its own bathroom. Other guests who make cameos, as Palin was to do that night, are consigned to public facilities.

Oh, no.

I drank tons of Diet Coke when I was working, so I used that bathroom a lot. The truth is, I’m pretty good about the bathroom, ladies. I lift the seat, and my aim is true. Most of the time.

I can’t let her go in there. What if I missed? I have to check!
How do you say that to the Secret Service?