By the time Saturday Night Live had been around for a quarter of a century, in 2000, a folklore developed among S.N.L. aspirants around the way Lorne Michaels hires people. (The protocols have remained consistent during the second 25 years.) There were the laugh-free auditions, the under-the-breath asides, the sphinx-like questions to interviewees who had sat on the couch in his outer office at 30 Rock for hours, listening as assistants booked helicopters to the Hamptons. (The S.N.L. writer Paula Pell compared it to waiting to get your teeth cleaned; Bob Odenkirk called it “Head Games 101.”)
“You’re right outside his office,” said Chris Rock, who waited six hours for his interview with Michaels. “You hear him. Occasionally he walks out to do something.” Through the years, careful students knew that if Michaels asked how you felt about wigs, that was a good sign.
When Michaels is watching people audition, he’s looking for a few different things—sparkle, utility, originality, likability. But the post-audition meeting in his office is a personality check, a chance for him to make sure people aren’t excessively annoying or crazy. “It’s like you’re being adopted into a family,” Kristen Wiig said.
“When you begin at the show, there’s a bit of ‘Come join us, and you’ll get your teeth fixed and learn how to talk to the rich and famous!,’” Amy Poehler said. (Michaels paid for her veneers.)
The first time Conan O’Brien and his writing partner Greg Daniels met Michaels, in Los Angeles, in the 80s, he kept his sunglasses on and asked them to name their favorite cast members. “I said I loved Kevin Nealon, because he was so dry and cerebral,” O’Brien recalled. “I could tell that was the wrong answer.” Later, they were summoned to New York with hours’ notice. They found Michaels in his office drinking red wine with the S.N.L. writer Jim Downey. Offered a glass, they declined. Later, they worried that the wine had been a test.
Jason Sudeikis was also sure that he’d messed up—by admitting he hated Cirque du Soleil.
Will Ferrell thought that the popcorn Michaels kept in a paper towel-lined basket within reach of his desk—a habit picked up when he quit smoking in the 80s—was a test: Was he supposed to eat it? (“It’s like going to Buckingham Palace for dessert,” he said. “Which fork do I use?”) Asked back for a second audition, he was thrown when he learned that he was supposed to do all-new material. (He came up with a bit about a man who plays with cat toys.)
He’d heard that Adam Sandler had made Michaels laugh at the post-audition meeting in his office by pretending to hump a chair, so he devised an elaborate bit that involved carrying with him a briefcase full of fake money and piling stacks of bills onto Michaels’s desk. On the meeting day, he was too nervous to open the briefcase. Worse, as he was leaving, the S.N.L. writer Steve Higgins smirked and said, “Nice briefcase.” After this story made the rounds, agents began telling clients not to do anything “big” or goofy during their Michaels meeting.
Fred Armisen just stared at him the first time they met and said, “My God. You knew George Harrison.”
Will Ferrell thought that the popcorn Michaels kept near his desk was a test: Was he supposed to eat it? (“It’s like going to Buckingham Palace for dessert,” he said. “Which fork do I use?”)
Michaels does most of the talking in these interviews, parceling out his showbiz stories (hanging in Prague with Neil Young) or comically bewildering koans (“There are two kinds of people in the world: people who build the house, and people who buy the house”), gauging how well the person listens.
He might mention what he’s reading, or refer to the summer he got through all of E. M. Forster (“Only connect,” he’ll murmur), or Middlemarch, or Chekhov’s stories. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, with its narrative of Tudor-palace intrigue, is a favorite conversational touchstone, and he gave copies of the novel to underlings. One young producer, who ended up being forced out, came to view the gift as a coded message; Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist, ends up without his head.
Michaels generally avoids the emotional expenditure of telling people that they’re hired. “It’s an amazing sense of discipline, almost Puritan in its restraint, how he doesn’t give himself the pleasure of hiring people,” Poehler said, particularly because his job involves saying no so often. Higgins is the one who told her she was hired.
Tina Fey said, “After 50 years, there’s only a certain amount of people’s gratitude that you can absorb.” Michaels knows that, as happy as the initial moment is, he might have to fire the person a year later.
The emotional-energy efficiency takes many forms. The writer Carol Leifer ran into Michaels in a loud restaurant once, and after a few volleys of shouted pleasantries, he amiably mouthed the words “Conversation over” and returned to his meal.
The cryptic hiring protocols extend to staying hired. Cast and writers are supposed to be notified by July about whether they are being asked back. (Michaels has a rule about not making big decisions in June, when he is sick of everyone, and exhausted.) That date often slips by, with people not knowing their fates until Labor Day, a month before the season premiere.
“At S.N.L., it takes three weeks for a writer to go from grateful to indignant,” Conan O’Brien likes to say. It’s common for performers to abruptly shift from worrying about being fired to worrying that they’ll never escape the show’s golden handcuffs.
After six seasons, Ferrell told Michaels that he thought it might be time to go; Michaels took him to dinner at Pastis to try to get another year. “Right now you’re riding high,” he told Ferrell. “You really want to start to dip a little bit, and then you should leave the show.” (Ferrell’s reaction: “Wait, what?”) When he did leave, in 2002, Michaels told him that he considered him one of the “top three” cast members ever. (“Am I third?,” Ferrell asked.)
Michaels warns his people that their agents, thinking of commissions, might want them to leave the show too soon. “Agents are about chess moves,” he says. “And they’re all morons.”
There’s genuine warmth, too. Wiig’s final show, in 2012, had her dancing with Mick Jagger as he serenaded her with “She’s a Rainbow,” and ending up in Michaels’s arms. Armisen, on his last show, wore a guitar strap printed with “ty lm i♥u.” As a parting gift, Michaels gave Nealon a Cartier watch with a message engraved on the back; he also apologized for the rough patches they’d had.
By the time Pete Davidson left, he had spent a quarter of his life on the show; now he wears a necklace that dangles a tiny charm with Michaels’s image inside, like a reliquary, and he fondly teases the boss about “Blabbagansett.”
Employees who said no to him or pulled away have accrued a kind of spookily legendary status in his world. A few later sent him letters of apology or regret, which underlings intercepted and mirthfully read aloud at meetings.
If a parting doesn’t go the way Michaels wants it to, a “cutoff psychology,” as one staffer calls it, kicks in. You’re out: off the Broadway Video T-shirt list, off the birthday and Christmas gift lists. “If you say no to the emperor,” the staffer went on, “you’re banned from the kingdom.”
Jim Biederman started as an assistant at Broadway Video in 1989; by the time he was producing the Kids in the Hall show, he was a Michaels pet, regarded as a resident Lorneologist, an expert at unraveling the boss’s deeply coded conversation for confused colleagues. While on staff, he developed a talk-show pilot called Wake Up, America, which involved life-size puppets.
On Broadway Video’s behalf, Biederman sold the show to Fox. When he called Michaels from L.A. with the good news about the deal, he got a flat response that didn’t make sense. “Great,” he recalled Michaels saying. “So you’re using my name to sell stuff?” Biederman was flummoxed. “I had been so good at slaloming my way between the poles of his psyche,” he said. A chill set in.
“Sometimes I think he’s Henry Kissinger, and sometimes I just think he’s Chauncey Gardiner in Being There,” Biederman said. “One bombs Cambodia, and the other didn’t know that we bombed Cambodia.” At an uncomfortable impasse, sometime later Biederman accepted a job with Howard Stern and called Michaels to tell him he was leaving. In a clipped tone, Michaels responded, “Right. Have a nice life.” Biederman recalls the exchange as “like kissing Fredo on both cheeks.”
In Michaels’s suzerainty, loyalty is a tortured concept. One of his regular sardonic asides is “You’ll find that your most loyal employees are your least valuable employees.” There’s a sense among people who know him that he doesn’t really respect people until they leave. When someone quits to do another TV show, he has a regular exit zinger.
“Let me know when it’s on,” he says with a smirk.
Susan Morrison is an editor at The New Yorker and the former editor of The New York Observer
