Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we discuss a fully researched biography for a few days. Our guest is Susan Morrison. She's the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. It went on the air October 11th, 1975, and at the helm was Lorne Michaels, a month shy of his 30th birthday. Michaels is now 80 and has been through the evolution of TV. Susan Morrison got Lorne Michaels to agree to talk to her for her 600-page bio, as did members from Michaels's past and present, names you've heard of, like Bill Hader and Conan O'Brien, and names you might not know like Hart Pomerantz and Rosie Shuster.

Today we start the book with Lorne's childhood. Lorne David Lipowitz was born in Toronto, Canada, on November 17th, 1944, to Florence and Henry Abraham Lipowitz. He was the oldest of three children. That's where we begin with Susan Morrison, the author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, our choice for Full Bio.

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Susan, Lorne's name was Lorne Lipowitz. His grandparents owned a movie theater. What kind of entertainment did he grow up watching and liking?

Susan Morrison: He stressed that as a boy in very cold, very boring Canada, you had to make your own fun. You had to make your own distraction. There was a lot of ice skating on flooded playground ponds and things like that. When American television finally came to Canada, that really turned the lights on. It really changed his life because before they got American channels, the CBC was dominated by a lot of folk singing and Shakespeare. [laughs] Boring.

As soon as he could watch The Phil Silvers Show, Your Show of Shows, all the great American variety shows, he was completely hooked. One of the things that I loved hearing about from him is how he would watch with his grandmother, his very sophisticated-- she had a movie theater and she would explain who these men and women on the TV were.

There's a great thing that I think he really internalized. He'd be watching Jack Benny on TV, who was a guy, an older man with black hair. His grandmother would explain how he had started out as a young man in vaudeville. Then radio came along and he was older and he was a white-haired man in radio. Then came television and all these guys had to dye their hair, or if you're George Burns, get a toupee so you could be on camera.

He had this sense of the Darwinian nature of showbiz and adapting to changing media and to changing times. I love the idea that you can draw a direct line from 8-year-old Lorne watching TV to 70 and 80-year-old Lorne figuring out how he has to change his show as the times change.

Alison Stewart: His mother, Florence, was a real character. What's an example of something she did that explained who you were dealing with when you were dealing with Florence?

Susan Morrison: He said, "My mother kept the compliments on a high shelf in a jar that wasn't open very often." I think she was a typical Jewish mother right out of Philip Roth in that she was very demanding of him and withholding. When he was out of the room, she was bragging her head off about him. He was a prince to everybody else, but when he was there, he felt like he wasn't quite measuring up. I think he internalized that management style. A lot of people have said the same thing about him.

Alison Stewart: He didn't have his father very long. His father died when he was 13?

Susan Morrison: 14.

Alison Stewart: 14. What happened with his father?

Susan Morrison: His mom, I think, was the really dominant parent. When Lorne was 14 years old, he and his father had an argument one night because he had missed his curfew. Lorne's mother had been pressuring Lorne's dad to discipline him about it. They had a big argument. They yelled at each other. Voices were raised. That night when Lorne was in bed, his father collapsed. It was an embolism. They didn't know that at the time. He was rushed to the hospital. Lorne didn't get to visit him there. He was in the hospital for two weeks and died. Lorne carried around with him through his whole adult life this terrible feeling of guilt and shame that his last interaction with his father had been this very difficult fight.

I think it really introduced a shade into his emotional palette. He forever after, always avoided confrontation. You never see him raise his voice at anyone. He's afraid of conflict, I think. It also, as a 14-year-old, plunged him into a real dark place. His mother was very depressed. He had to suddenly be the man of the house. He almost failed in school that year, almost had to skip a grade. After this rough time during which his mom was afraid he was going to become a juvenile delinquent, to use the phraseology of the '50s, he pulled himself together and learned how to manage and also how to manage people in a way.

There's a picture in one of his yearbooks, a group shot of the class, and it's all these smiling bobby sockers. There's Lorne in the back row, looking very glum and blank. The caption described him as Lorne, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence Teachers. He already had figured out, I think, how to use his gift of gab to make his way in the world. I think he had a tough time after his father died. Then he somehow turned on a dime and figured out how to navigate the world on his own.

Alison Stewart: Was there anyone who became a father-like figure to him as a teenager?

Susan Morrison: Yes. After losing his dad, he started on this path of all his life looking for interesting father figures. The first two when he was a teenager, one was his uncle, Pap, who was a very successful businessman in Canada. Their family was much richer and more sophisticated than Lorne's was. Uncle Pap really stepped up, took Lorne under his wing, taught him about money, taught him about business, gave him a job, really kept an eye on him. Later would pay for him to take trips to Europe. Another, maybe even more important mentor in Lorne's life was Frank Shuster, who was the father of his friend Rosie Shuster. He lived a few blocks away.

People don't know the name Frank Shuster today, but with his comedy partner Johnny Wayne, they had a two-man comedy act called Wayne and Shuster, which was an incredibly big act in the '50s and '60s. They were guests on The Ed Sullivan Show more than any other act, even more than Topo Gigio, which you might not get if you're not a baby boomer.

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Alison Stewart: I got it.

Susan Morrison: Frank Shuster was this comedy star. He lived near Lorne. Lorne basically camped out in his study until he was finished school. There was a comfortable den. There was a real live father in it. Frank Shuster taught him the ropes. He explained how the Marx Brothers jokes worked. He told him who Preston Sturges was. He started telling him all these great old showbiz stories that form the backbone of Lorne's conversation even today.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. The name of the book is Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for Full Bio. After his misbegotten high school years, he entered university, the University of Toronto. You write about this one teacher that used to get a laugh by the way he pronounced the name of someone, and that really sparked something in Lorne.

Susan Morrison: Yes. One of the fun things about writing about Lorne Michaels is that he has this life that almost kept making me think of a Victorian novel, a Dickens novel or something. Every single thing that he did, every encounter that he had as a young man, he was very good at taking away a nugget of wisdom, taking away a lesson from it. He was interested in comedy as a college student. He loved watching Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and analyzing his monologues.

He was in a political science class, and the teacher was talking about the prime minister, Diefenbaker. He just said the name Diefenbaker in a way that was clear that he was making fun of the man. He didn't actually make a joke about him. Everybody in the classroom laughed. It really struck Lorne, like, "Oh, he didn't actually make a joke, but what he did is he made everyone in the room feel like they were on the inside." It made them feel like they were part of some little elite club.

I think he realized that that's one of the things that humor can do. It's like, you get it, you're on the inside. That's a type of humor, a type of reaction that SNL has sought in its viewers for years. From the very beginning, you recognize that this is a recurring character. You've heard that catch phrase before. You're in the in crowd. I think that was a really important thing for him to learn at that age.

Alison Stewart: Lorne met a man named Hart Pomerantz. Who was Hart Pomerantz?

Susan Morrison: Hart Pomerantz was probably the geekiest person to ever walk the earth. He was a law student in Toronto. His little brother, even geekier than Hart, named Earl Pomerantz, auditioned to be in the college review at the University of Toronto that Lorne was producing, called the UC Follies. This guy wore Coke bottle glasses.

One of his jokes was, "My eyesight is so bad that my windshield is made of prescription glass." Earl auditioned. Lorne didn't think there was a place for him in the show. Hart Pomerantz called up Lorne. He was this law student, but he had had some success writing for local comedy reviews, including one that starred the hometown hero, Robert Goulet. Hart said, "Listen, I'd really like you to cast my little brother Earl, and if you do, I'll write for you. I'll give you some sketches for your show."

At that point, Lorne was just this college student. The idea of having someone who was almost an adult, [laughs] who had some professional credits, contribute a couple of sketches to his college review seemed like a good deal. That was the beginning of Hart and Lorne knowing each other.

A few years later, after Lorne graduated, he had heard that Hart Pomerantz had actually gone to New York City, which was really a glamorous, faraway destination, and done some stand up at a comedy club called The Improv. Lorne, who was always looking for the main chance, figured, "Ah, this guy could be my ticket out of here, my connection to professional show business." He reached out to Hart and the two of them started writing jokes together and even developed a two-man comedy act, not unlike Wayne and Shuster's.

Alison Stewart: Lipowitz and Pomerantz. They were formed. [laughs]

Susan Morrison: Right. One of the things I think is so funny about them calling themselves Lipowitz and Pomerantz is that Lorne's mother, like every mother in his neighborhood, had her heart set on her son going to law school. What sounds more like a law firm than Lipowitz and Pomerantz.

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Alison Stewart: They earned something like $10 a joke when they wrote for people. Who did they write for?

Susan Morrison: They wrote for Joan Rivers. They tried to write for Dick Cavett, but he didn't hire them. The most exciting thing was when they were actually flown on an airplane down to New York to meet with Woody Allen, whose career was taking off at such speed at that point. He had a couple movies going, he had a play on Broadway, he had a lot of television appearances that his agent, Jack Rollins, wanted him to hire some writers to help. He brought Pomerantz and Lipowitz down to meet Woody Allen.

One of the really big pleasures of reporting this book is Hart Pomerantz actually had tape-recorded this whole brainstorming joke-writing session in Woody's living room between the three of them. You have these two 20-something Canadians, very green, and Woody, who's something of a success, just brainstorming jokes and they're trying to make a joke about a lobster in a tank. Listening to it, you really just get the sense of the grueling. It's just nine misses for every one hit. They just go around and around and around. It's just a fascinating document to listen to that. I excerpt a chunk of it in the book.

You can already see the beginnings of Lorne's producer personality. He takes control. He's a little pushy with his ideas and yet he backs off when they're not accepted. He's trying to be encouraging to Woody. It's fascinating to listen to. No jokes came out of that meeting except it really boosted Lorne's confidence enormously. Woody did compliment one joke that Lorne told him that he didn't use. Here, I'll tell you now because it is a pretty trippy, interesting joke.

The joke goes, there's a guy who becomes obsessed with the notion that somewhere in the world is another person, a doppelganger who's thinking exactly the same thoughts as he is at the same time. He's desperate to meet this guy. He looks and he looks. Somehow, he finds the phone number of this man, calls him on the phone, the line is busy because he's been thinking the same thought as the other guy. Woody didn't use that joke, but he told Lorne that it was brilliant, and that single handedly kept Lorne going for a couple of years.

Alison Stewart: This is also when the name change happens.

Susan Morrison: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What led Lorne changing his name to Lorne Michaels?

Susan Morrison: In those days, almost everyone in show business who was Jewish, and not just show business but other professions, would change their names. Would Anglicize them. Milton Berle, every Jewish comic you can think of had a much more unwieldy name at the start of their lives. In fact, all of Lorne's father, Abraham Lipowitz, probably would have changed his if he had been in a profession, but he didn't. All of his brothers had changed it. He just wanted something that was more showbiz-friendly. He had married Rosalind Shuster by then and her mother also urged him, as did Frank Shuster, to change Lipowitz.

Rosie's mother said that she didn't want the daughter who she had named for a heroine out of Shakespeare to have the last name Lipowitz. He tried on all different possibilities, Lipton. He settled on Michaels. I guess it's a nice straight ahead Anglo name. Hart Pomerantz speculated that he chose it as an homage to Mike Nichols, whose work really knocked Lorne out. For years, he just was fixated on wanting to make a movie just like The Graduate.

Alison Stewart: After the break, we'll learn how Lorne Michaels made his way in Hollywood.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our Full Bio series with Susan Morrison. She wrote Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. In the 1980s, Lorne was asked by David Letterman about his career in comedy.

David Letterman: You performed yourself?

Lorne Michaels: Yes, I did.

David Letterman: What was the nature of that act?

Lorne Michaels: [laughs] It was sad to say, a comedy act. As you can see, there's almost no trace of that left in me. [laughter] I began writing with another guy in Canada and we would write and perform ourselves. I was not great at performing, although I was very good at-- actually, my part was mostly asking questions, but I knew what the answers would be, and then I'd say stuff like, "Really?"

David Letterman: Really?

Lorne Michaels: I was a pacer. He was very funny and I would take the pause moment in between and support him during that. Then I began to get more and more interested in producing and comfortable there.

Alison Stewart: Lorne landed jobs writing for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. It was his work on Lily Tomlin's cutting-edge specials, Lily, that gave him a calling card for what he wanted to do next, produce. Let's get back into our full bio conversation about Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live with Susan Morrison.

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Lorne Michaels was in LA in the late 1960s. He got a job on Laugh-In, a TV show from the late '60s, the early '70s, just a wacky variety show. Can you explain what the comedic landscape was like in the late '60s for TV?

Susan Morrison: It was an interesting time in television. Lorne showed up in LA from Toronto with an idea that he really wanted to radicalize television. He knew that the movies were really forging ahead. You had directors like Robert Altman and Scorsese and Terrence Malick breaking boundaries. In music, you had rock and roll. You had the Stones and David Bowie. He found that television, when he got to LA, was somehow stuck in the 1950s. There were these very cornball variety shows. He worked on one, which was Perry Como's Christmas Special. He worked for one called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.

Almost exclusively these places, as well as Laugh-In, which he went to next, were staffed and written by men in their 50s and 60s, guys who had started out working in radio. Suddenly, he just felt like, "Oh, my God, I'm in this backwater." Television is a cul-de-sac. On The Phyllis Diller Show, there were guests like Ernest Borgnine, and Phyllis Diller would play her saxophone at the end of the show. It was just very corny.

He had this idea that he wanted to take the variety show format. Music, sketches, blackout jokes, and update it, filling it with the concerns of his generation, sex and drugs and rock and roll. He used the term, "I want to make new wine in old bottles." He liked the structure, the format, but he thought that all the material was just for people 20, 30 years older than he was.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Laugh-In, and we can talk about it on the other side.

Speaker 1: Boris and I have the most violent political arguments. He thinks the Democrats can do no wrong, and, of course, I'm for Johnson. [laughter]

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Speaker 2: It is said that the man who soweth the oats in the garden of his neighbor, perhaps he has not a pot to plant in. [laughter]

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Speaker 3: Raquel Welch may look exciting, but man cannot live by bread alone. [laughter]

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Speaker 4: It's not that I'm against marriage. I'd get married in a minute if I didn't have to live in. [laughter]

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Speaker 5: Actually, there've been a lot of successful show business marriages. Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds. Eddie Fisher, Liz Taylor. Eddie Fisher, Connie Stevens. [laughter]

Alison Stewart: At Laugh-In, he was considered one of the young guys. What did their humor look like next to the old guys, the old radio guys?

Susan Morrison: There's an old Catskill vaudeville style of Joke that's called like a blackout, which is just a one setup and a quick punchline, a real ba-dump-bump sort of thing. Laugh-In really specialized in that. Its creator, George Schlatter, compared it to a pinball machine. It was just really fast one liners, gag jokes, people sticking their heads out of holes in a psychedelic wall, shouting a punchline. Lorne was much more interested in a cerebral, almost high concept kind of comedy that closer to the kind of jokes that Woody Allen was doing.

He liked the idea that humor could reflect really what's going on in somebody's real life, in somebody emotionally. Laugh-In, even though it was modern, or mod, as you'd say, psychedelic graphics, politically, considering it was the late '60s, it was toothless. One of the head writers was a crony of Richard Nixon's. There wasn't going to be any criticism of the Vietnam War. There wasn't going to be any tough politics on the show.

Lorne could never get a Nixon joke on that show. A standard. The extent that they went at Vietnam, it was Goldie Hawn in a bikini confusing the Viet Cong for King Kong. It was a dumb blonde joke. They really didn't want to go anywhere near politics. Lorne at that point felt that humor, he was messianic about humor. He wanted it to be smart. He wanted it to be able to change the world, as he put it. They were watching Watergate all the time. He really thought that humor should be dealing in just those kinds of issues.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book that several people think that Laugh-In was a progenitor of SNL. What do you think?

Susan Morrison: As I said before, Lorne took little bits and pieces of everything that he encountered on his journey to SNL and used it to stoke SNL. It is true that Laugh-In has bits and pieces that remind you of SNL, but it didn't have musical guests like SNL did.

Other examples of people who said SNL came from here is Lorne's camp buddy, Howard Shore, who would become SNL's first music director. He thinks that SNL was born on the plywood stage of their summer camp, Camp Timberlane, where Lorne and the others put on something called the Fast Show, which was a variety show with sketches and jokes and music. Rosie Shuster thought that the show came from her father's den. That so much of what Lorne learned from her dad really filled in all the blanks at SNL.

Hart Pomerantz thought that SNL came out of the Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, which was a variety show that the two of them did for the CBC, which also had a lot of similarities to SNL. It was this concept that it took root in his mind early on and he just refined it and refined it and refined it over time.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Morrison. We're talking about her book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. It's our choice for Full Bio. I want to mention two female comedians that were very important to Lorne Michaels. Rosie Shuster, who you've mentioned, and Lily Tomlin. Let's start with Rosie Shuster. They've been friends since they were kids. She was his first wife. Her dad acted as a mentor to him. That describes her personally. How would you describe her professionally and her impact on Lorne?

Susan Morrison: I think she had a huge impact. One of the pleasures of writing this book was giving her her due in his formation of his comedy instinct. She said that growing up in that household, just the comedy rhythms would get in your blood. It was a birthright to her to be proficient at comedy and to be a funny woman with a quick comeback. I think that partly because she grew up in a house in a comedy household, professionally at first she wanted to distance herself from that. I don't think she thought immediately that she wanted to grow up to be in the comedy business.

It might be for that reason and also just for reasons of women in the '50s and '60s not feeling comfortable putting themselves out there, that I think for the first years of their relationship, as Rosie put it, she would whisper funny things in Lorne's ear and then he would say them out loud. It was second nature to her to be a handmaiden, to stay behind the curtain, to not take credit. Even when she did start writing for other comedy shows, she always used a pseudonym.

When I was talking with her more recently, she said something. I can't remember exactly what her words were, but she said that she just had this instinct to be self-effacing and not to step forward and take credit. I think that through years of adulthood and therapy, she's now recognized how great it is to get credit for your work. Anyway, as I said, it's been a real pleasure and privilege for me to be able to restore some of the credit to her.

Alison Stewart: Lily Tomlin is the other person I wanted to mention. Lorne Michaels worked for Lily Tomlin on her series of specials. They won an Emmy for the show. She wanted to do thoughtful comedy. At that point in his career, could he do that?

Susan Morrison: He had been bouncing around LA, pitching this show in his head to anyone who would listen. No one was interested. It wasn't until he met Lily Tomlin that he found somebody who was on the same wavelength as he was in terms of wanting comedy that expressed interior states of being. Wanting comedy that would play to what he called the TV generation. He and Lily were in the first generation to have grown up on tv. They also wanted to make fun of tv. They recognized that it had shrink wrapped the culture, and they saw it as a big target for satire. In all of the comedy that both of them did, there are parodies of television commercials, parodies of talk shows.

TV was just a big fat target waiting there. No one had really gone after it. I think she really enhanced. He described the kind of work she did as a comedian's lib. That she liberated comedy from the punchline, from the seltzer bottle, from the ba-dump-bump rim shot. She wanted to write things that were almost like little plays that explored people's characters and what was just the odd humorous strangeness of being a person in the world. She also, for the first time, really wanted to include women's experience.

A lot of the sketches in the specials that Lorne worked on with her, some of them written by him, really shone a light on women's experience and it's really a breakthrough. As I said, I spent a day with her in LA and I came away from there thinking, I don't know if I'm going to do this, but someone has got to write this woman's biography because she was really, really world-changing.

Alison Stewart: That was Susan Morrison, author of Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll learn about the early days of SNL.