Laraine Newman: The Shame of the Senso-Rings (Re-Release)

0:28Hello. Hi, everybody. Welcome back. Or if you're a first timer, welcome, period, to literally with me, Rob Lowe. Every once in a while doing this podcast, I get to do something really, really special for me. And that is meet someone on the podcast I've never met and always admired and felt like they're in my life, like in the DNA of my life from like some of my earliest memories. And now I'm finally getting to meet them and ask them everything I've ever wanted to know. And today is Lorraine Newman. And I cannot tell you, well, you know, if you listen to the podcast, what a huge Saturday Night Live fan I am, particularly of the glory years.

1:17I mean, I'm just having images of Lorraine in my head from those years, even as we speak. And she's got an audiobook out right now, which goes over all of it, which I'm going to be downloading immediately, called May You Live in Interesting Times. So enough with my blabbing. Let's get to, I get to meet Lorraine Newman. Yay! Every high school in L.A. has kind of a different reputation. What was Beverly Hills High School like when you were, because I'm from Santa Monica High School. Well, I don't know what kind of reputation Beverly had. I went there in the 60s. So it was the Vietnam War. And it was like the beginning of like the British invasion.

2:01And, you know, bands like The Doors and Three Dog Night played our high school. No way. Yes. My first girlfriend, my first love, you know, everybody has that first love, was the lead singer of Three Dog Night's daughter. Ooh. So Corey Wells, who was the lead singer of Three Dog Night, it was his daughter who was also named Corey Wells, go figure. Three Dog Night, they were so good. Their sound, I love their sound. To this day, I still love it. But the Doors also played your high school? Yeah. Was Jim Morrison like, love me two times, hey, you little girl in the poodle skirt? Not quite poodle skirts.

2:40No, we got to where, it was when the dress code was, let, you know, abolished so we could wear jeans to school, which was great. I loved that. But I, you know, I've lived a time, Rob, when you had to wear a skirt or a dress. Did they measure the skirts? Because my kids went to school where they had to have uniforms and they would come out and measure the skirts, like over the knee and stuff like that. Yeah, the girls would roll them up so they'd be mini skirts. And so were there famous people's kids in the school? Had to have been, right? Yeah. I went to school with Monty Hall's kids. Richard Hall was in my grade.

3:24He was class president. And his sister, Joanna Hall, who is now Joanna Gleason, is Monty Hall's daughter. I had no idea. Huh. Yeah. Wow. And, you know, she was in all the school musicals having, you know, a completely professional voice, you know, and performance style even then. I'm trying to think, you know, a lot of character actors, kids. Was the Candace Bergen, were the Bergen kids in there? She's quite a bit older than I am, but we lived across the street from her. Ah. And down the street from Kirk Douglas, we used to live across the street. We moved around a lot because my mother liked to design houses.

4:14And then when she was done, she'd be bored and we'd move again. So we lived in a lot of spots. And yeah, we lived across from Groucho Marx and stuff like that. Yeah. Did you see Groucho? Would you like wave to Groucho in the morning as he was getting his mail? He was at that point really too old to be getting around, you know. So, no, I did not say howdy, neighbor. Oh, I live next door also to one of the Bowery boys. I think it was Leo Gorsi. Jesus. And his sister. Yeah. His sister would hang out in front and they had like one of those white rock gardens in the front of the house. Oh, yeah. I remember those.

4:58And she was such a character. She was really like a female Bowery boy. And she talked like that, too. You know, quit taking those rocks, kids. Jesus. She was a character. Beverly Hills was, I just remember that those kids, as I was growing up, were way more civilized. We were like savages at Santa Monica High School, or Sam-O, as they used to say. Were you also near the beach? And that's kind of wilderness, pretty much. This was the urban jungle. Yeah, it was Rodeo Drive and the Daisy Club. The Daisy. Yeah. What was it else? It was Jax, J-A-X. That was a clothing store. I would see like Robert Culp in there shopping.

5:47And your listeners will not know any of these names I'm putting down. No, this is the best. I love the old school references. And I didn't, I mean, I knew you were queen of the groundlings, legendary, but I didn't realize you were in the establishing original of the OG groundlings. One of the OG, yeah, founding members of the groundlings when we were just a workshop, an improv workshop in a theater off of Vermont. And that was at the time when I hung out with my artist boyfriend and he would eat at this diner called Duke's, which was right underneath the Tropicana Motel. And it was, you know, family style seating.

6:29And at the time we became friends with our table mates and it would be people like George Memoli and, you know, Martin Scorsese and Don Simpson when he was still a writer before he was producing with Jerry Bruckheimer. And God, Iggy Pop and Tom Waits. I mean, they were just it was breakfast. Duke's was an amazing. I'm surprised. Well, once they tore the Tropicana down, I guess they tried to do Dukes on the Sunset Strip and it was never the same. Right. And it never caught on. I caught Dukes just at the end and Chasens. Really? Oh, my God. Yeah. And there's really never been anything like either one of those places ever.

7:08Dukes was always, I think everybody, well, listen, it was breakfast. So a lot of people were hungover. It definitely had a hungover vibe to it. Right. I don't know. If they did, I was oblivious to that. I can promise you Iggy Pop I had a hungover vibe Yeah, and Tom Waits for sure That's just a given And Martin Scorsese in the 70s I mean, he wouldn't have been hungover No I got to see a screening of Mean Streets Before he had the music on it So this was really super early Oh yeah, it was before Mean Streets was released So he was screening it for his friends And then I invited him to see a Groundlings show Before we were the Groundlings And Valerie Curtin was part of our group, and she had been in the San Francisco committee and then was in this group.

7:57And she was also writing partners with Barry Levinson, who was in a group called the Step Brothers at the newly opened comedy store, blah, blah, blah. But he saw her in our show and hired her for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. That was such a great era. Yeah. That was the era that made me want to be an actor. It was before corporations and big money found that there was potentially big money in this. Yeah, well, it was before the youth market in film. Certainly it was there for music and fashion. But the youth market had not quite attached itself to film yet. You know, you begin to have auteurs like, you know, making movies like Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice.

8:41and, you know, Elliot Gould as a private eye. Elliot Gould, the most unlikely movie star. I know. I agree. The most unlikely movie star ever. And MASH and then one other movie he had that was like he was the biggest star in the world. I know. Isn't that interesting? And that could only have happened at that time. Can you imagine Elliot Gould in a Marvel movie? Like in his prime. Elliot in his prime is a young man. He's the biggest movie star in the world. What would he like, Gould? Would he carry the hammer? Like Thor? Would that be his move? Oh, my God. He would be accountant man. He'll push a pencil up a mountain and find fraud.

9:21Although he was so good in Ocean's Eleven. There's one scene where he has a line where he's trying to talk in code in front of someone. And he says to George Cloody, you know, the thing with the guy in the place. And I never forgot that line. I always use it. He's so funny. So, Groundlings. Yes. So, we were a workshop and then we decided, well, we would do these scene nights. And here's the other people that were in our group. It was Tony Burton who played, he was in the first Rocky movie. He was one of the trainers. Pat Morita who was, you know, Mr. Miyagi. Jack Sue. Tim Matheson. I love Tim.

10:05Yeah, he's great. Yes, I have known him that long. And it's such a six degrees of SNL in the sense that, like, Valerie Curtin is Jane Curtin's cousin, you know. And Tim ended up playing the role that was written for Chevy in Animal House. It's just all connected, Rob. It is. So how did you meet the great Lord? Tell me, tell me, please, the first time you laid eyes on him. Well, we were doing our show at the Groundlings, and Lorne was producing a Lily Tomlin special. And they needed some people to fill out the cast. And so he and Lily came to our show. Wow. And they hired me from that. And that was amazing because I met people like Rosie Schuster, who became an SNL writer, and Marilyn Miller, who became an SNL writer, and Valerie Bromfield, who was absolutely brilliant and was Dan Aykroyd's partner in Canada, performing partner, and in Second City.

11:07So Saturday Night Live had, you know, it was so ahead of its time in so many areas, but one of them is how many smart, powerful women who were the backbone of the show. I mean, it was always a boys club. It wasn't. It just, it wasn't. Not from my perspective. You know, it was a meritocracy, and I think it still is. whatever's really working the best goes in the show, whatever's funny. So the only thing was a numbers situation where we had three women writers and 10 male writers. And, you know, people like Al Franken would make an effort to write like a female centric sketch, which I always admired.

11:52But it was just, you know, a numbers thing. So you just had more things written by men, but it wasn't that the women were edged out or anything or discouraged. Do you remember the first show? When Saturday Night Live came along, how was it pitched to anybody? Like, what was the description? He told me it would be a cross between Monty Python and 60 Minutes. Of course he said that. And this was in 1974, and Monty Python was not showing in Los Angeles. I had never heard of them. I never saw them. It's going to be a show you've never heard of, Lorraine, but one day you will. and, of course, 60 Minutes, which, as everyone knows, is hilarious.

12:32It's hilarious. It is hilarious. But, yeah, he had me meet him at the Chateau Marmont out of the pool, and he told me what this show was going to be, and it was going to be for 13 weeks with a five-year option, like that will ever happen, you know. And that was it. And I was really, I had no idea, and I didn't want to go to New York. God, did I know. And you're how old? You're how old, 21? I'm 23. I was 22 when I did The Lily Show. Okay. And 23 when I was hired for SNL. Jesus. And a very young 23, Rob. And I'm still a young 69, by golly. You are. The prospect of going to New York was not thrilling for me.

13:23I was scared, you know, and I didn't know anybody. and first night we were there. I mean, no, the third night we were there, the car was stolen. Welcome to New York. That we drove in with all my stuff and my written material and costumes for my characters. Oh, boy. Yeah, and, you know, Lorne wanted me to mount a show for the writers because he was the only one who knew what I did. He was the only one who had seen me at the Groundlings. So you just had to go out and find new clothes and write new stuff, or did you, I mean, you just did it. You had to. I didn't need the costumes, but what I did need was the actual material because I hadn't performed it all over the summer.

14:05It had been like three months. And I didn't have it memorized. I didn't have these things memorized. These were like character monologues that had been crafted and honed over a period of time. So, you know, I didn't have like the connective tissue that led me from one moment to another. And it was a terrible feeling. Oh, my God. And it was not my best foot forward, I can say. Modifying. I mean, it's not the same, but I once had a car broken and due. And one of the things that was stolen was the only copy of a screenplay I'd been working on. And that's the only reason that you've never heard of that screenplay.

14:47By golly, if it had only been. Is there anybody in that cast that you remember seeing the first time you saw them? because there are certain people in life like I've known forever, but I don't remember the first time that I met them or saw them and they're very, very important to me. And then there are others who I might not know that well, but I remember vividly. In fact, I'm wearing a shirt right now. For those of you who can see this on the podcast, I'm wearing a shirt of Chris Farley. And I remember the very first time I saw Chris. Was there anybody like that for you? Do you remember like meeting Danny Aykroyd?

15:16Do you remember Belush? I met them all. Let's trade Belushi stories. Okay. I'll tell you the first time I met John and only time I met John. And you tell me. Well, my story, I only have good experiences with John. He was like the Tasmanian devil. And I would go to the Blues Bar, which was a great place and always reminds me of that scene in Trainspotting where it says, this is the filthiest toilet in Scotland. No, the Blues Bar had the filthiest toilet. But, you know, John, every once in a while would drop over at my place and then fall asleep. And I'd have to call his wife, Judy, and say, can you come and get him?

15:56He's taking up some room in my bed. But he was so, I mean, I loved John. He was a really sweet guy. I mean, I know those words have rarely been associated with him, but he really was. I get that he was very, very sweet. This is the most convoluted and bizarre. This story sounds like a hallucination, but it's real. So, and I'm going to go through it very quickly because it's very Byzantine getting to the end of it, but it's worth it, trust me. It's the 1977 World Series. I'm there. It's Dodgers-Yankees. My brother's with me. He's much younger than me. He's wearing a Yankees hat and getting hassled at the hot dog, lying to get hot dog.

16:41Hassle, hassle, hassle. Guy comes up and says, hey, back off this kid. Leave this kid alone. We get to talking. He turns out is a member of the Muppets. and invites us to come to see the Muppet movie being filmed. We go to the Muppet movie being filmed. We meet all the Muppets. They're filming the Rainbow Connection sequence. And then they're like, well, Kermit the Frog is hosting The Tonight Show in two weeks. Do you want to come to that? And I'm like, The Tonight Show? I'm a young actor. I've never been in anything. I'm probably 13 years old. And we go to the Tonight Show. You know, obviously it's my mom, my stepdad, my brother and I.

17:25And Kermit is hosting. And I have this memory of him sitting on a little chair doing a monologue. And then he had guests and whatever. And then afterwards there was a party. And I was back there and Jim Henson was there and everybody was there. And I looked across the room and there was Belushi. And I was just staring at him. He was my hero. I mean, you guys taught me everything I ever knew about how to be funny. and I was just a pup and I watched every episode. And I mean, it was, I still think I kind of know more about those years of SNL than the people who made SNL. That's possible. Oh yeah, for sure.

18:02And I was looking at John and he was looking at me probably because he was wondering, what is a little kid doing at this party? I'm sure that's what he was thinking. And I kind of worked my, he was staring at me and I worked my nerve up and I went over to him and I held my hand and I said, I said, hey, my name's Rob. Hey, kid, how you doing? He was so sweet, so lovely. And he goes, what do you want to do? He asked me. That's the key to the story. Oh, that's neat. He asked me and I said I wanted to be an actor and his face clouded over. He took a very long time. He looked me directly in the eyes and said, stay out of the clubs.

18:37Yeah, at that time, clubs meant like Studio 54. And in that sense, I guess I get it. When I first heard you say clubs, I thought you meant like the comedy store and the improv. How would that have any bearing on his experience, let alone yours? No, even as a 13-year-old, I knew it was a euphemism for don't do what I've done. House of the Rising Sun. Right? Hold that thought. We'll be right back.

19:15If I have to think of my all-time favorite, I know you probably hear it all the time, but my all-time favorite vintage SNL runner got to be Coneheads. Let me tell you the story of Coneheads. Please. Before we went on the air, Lorne thought it would be a good idea to have us all do improv at his loft for the cast to bond. We did it twice. it never really kind of you couldn't achieve that in two you know two weeks so um but one of the improvs we did was an alien family and it was jenny jane and me we all assumed our roles we did i did the voice so we all did that voice then we all forgot about it and then danny came up with the cone heads and so the only thing that we really achieved from the improv was the voice and the family structure.

20:03But he created the, you know, he and Tom Davis created the Coneheads. And Danny, I think, has said that he was inspired by, you know, the statues from Easter Island and this planet Earth and this island Earth. That was the movie, this island Earth. People with big foreheads. Yeah, there's a whole thing. And there's a whole rabbit hole of people with giant skulls that may or may not have been aliens. I had never put that together with the Coneheads and who clearly loved beer and chips, consumables. They loved that. Yes, mass quantities. Mass quantities. And that's always amazing to me because during the pandemic, I've watched a lot of TV and I've watched a lot of Swedish television.

20:48And I've heard things like people say parental units in Swedish and mass quantities. And it just blew my mind. parental units became and i know this is this is another speciality of yours became valley girl um my parental units they said with no irony that became like it wasn't even referential yeah it might have gotten to the point they didn't know where it came from well for sure people for sure go oh the my parental units are around they have no idea that it's a conehead reference that's amazing to me i remember vividly when they found they found a sensor ring under your under Connie's bed.

21:26We're very upset about that. The shame. The shame of the censor rings. What people forget is Saturday Night Live is live. And what that means is the costume changes are the most fun, nerve-wracking part of doing the show, in my experience. How quick did you get your cone on? Well, it was always at the top of the show. All right. So we had time to put it on. And then we would just tear them off. But they were anchored right between our eyes and at our temples and the base of our necks. And to this day, Jane and I don't have any hair there. It just got ripped off so many times. But that was when I really thought, this is a great job.

22:11The day that they had us eating fiberglass and it was made out of cotton candy. I thought, yeah, I'm getting paid to do this. This is great. And that was a Danny, a Danny sketch. So Danny. I mean, there are so many things that, you know, you can just tell Danny's sensibility. There's a, in my book, I talk about my favorite ensemble sketches, but I also just talk about my favorite sketches in general. And one of them is Drool Bucket. And it was when Michael Palin was a - Aren't they on a ship, a pirate ship? Well, that was the Raging Queen. That was a different, it was the same character, Miles Cowperthwaite.

22:51But the first Miles Cowperthwaite sketch was Drool Bucket. And Danny played this, you know, daughtering old man who would have fits and drooled excessively. and he had this little tin cup attached to right below his lip to catch the drool. And, you know, Miles Kalpathwaite's job was to empty the drool cup into a bucket. And, you know, it was this like sloshing gray stuff. And the audience was so grossed out. We were pissing ourselves. But, you know, that's so Danny. I love Danny's Bass-O-Matic. In fact, I did it at my sixth grade talent show. There was that weird Saturday Night Live book that came out that had a green cover that was meant to look like a notebook.

23:37Yeah, the paperback. Yeah, you remember that? So I had that. And Bass-O-Matic is in it, the actual script. So I just memorized it and did it. And to this day when I run into people from Malibu Park Junior High School, they all remember Bass-O-Matic because it ends with, you know, the drinking of the blended raw bass. Mmm, that's good bass. Which, it was lobster bisque. It was cold lobster bisque. And then in the 40th anniversary, it was strawberry ice cream. Because it's a good job. But your book is an audio book, but is it in print as well, or just an audio book right now? It's not in print. It's just audio.

24:17You want an audio book from you with the voices. We want the voices. We want your voices. With the voices. You want the voices. Do you do voices? In the book, yeah. Are you the only person on planet Earth who knows Lorne that doesn't do a Lorne? I don't really do a Lorne. I do some of his expressions like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And, you know, you guys didn't know the Lorne that would say exactly. He had gone past that by the time I think all of you knew him. I remember I was at a dinner with Lorne and Roseanne Barr. And it was the height of Roseanne being Roseanne. and um Lorne's Berzan have you been to the Whitney to see Monet's haystacks they're breathtaking that's a great impression but I can't say I don't really do a Lorne you should get an award you're one of the best voice actors on the planet been there at the beginning and like I mean there are people that did one walk on on Saturday Night Live and make a career out of doing Lorne yeah I just end up sounding like Don Pardo I think what it is is it's you're so sophisticated and so good at it that you will not sully yourself.

25:31That's the reason that I don't because it's just if it's not 100 percent, I don't want to do it. What does it say about me that that voice kind of lights me up a little bit? Well, the Valley Girl that I did is kind of different than the ones that you hear today. but I bet you would recognize the one that I did, which was, you know, I noticed that like the I-N-G endings would be E-E-N. So it would be like, I'm going to them all, or I'm thinking, or I'm doing, or words, there's, it has a glottal L, so words like probably would be probably, and couldn't would be, you know, well, wouldn't be, would be want, and shouldn't would be shouldn't, And couldn't would be cunt.

26:18And tried to work cunt into a sketch for the 40th, but I chickened out. You know, I was already responsible for one time the censors came down on me for saying pissed off. How dare you use such a phrase? It was never said on TV before little old me. Wow. and um i did it in dress rehearsal and and the um the the sensor at the time was a guy named hermenio traviesis and he said you you cannot say that you know and lauren said just say it on the air and i was only too happy to do it you know because fuck the man yeah oh yeah and um but then i got in trouble you know they said we'll put you back on a five second delay which means you're not technically live.

27:08So I made myself very apologetic. Apologetic. Yeah, unctuous. Bend the knee. I bent the knee, yeah, but you know. To the censor. They had to know that I didn't, it wasn't an accident. Because if it was an accident, then they really were dealing with a loose cannon. I had to make it clear that it was a choice that I made. So it's amazing more of that didn't happen, really. In terms of language, you know, there's very little that is being left to the imagination. You know people are saying, fuck. How come you didn't sue Moon Unit Zappa for copyright infringement for Valley Girl? Well, because I didn't copyright it.

27:50Why didn't you copyright it? Because what did I know? I was so naive. And Frank Zappa actually wanted to do something with that character. He was fascinated by that character, but we just never got around to it. And, you know, I mean, it's why would I do that? It's like, you know, yes, I was the first Valley Girl and you're welcome. You know, it's not something you want to really own. There was a great episode on NDR about dialects and how they've, you know, migrated from their point of origin and how that their origin in the region that it comes from is a corruption of, you know, whatever British, you know, country that the immigrant came from.

28:39Yep. I learned that the Boston accent is an affectation. It's not a corruption of an original dialect. It is an affectation because they thought it made them sound classy. I swear to God. But they also were talking about the fact that, you know, the valley speaks, so to speak, is now all across the country. That there is so, it's so pervasive. Oh, yeah, for sure it is. That it's just been integrated, you know, everywhere. But I've also noticed people, there's words like instead of by accident, it's on accident. Yes. And that drives me out of my mind. I don't know why. It's like, get off my lawn.

29:19It's my accident. It's very important that if you do something on accident, that you say sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Say sorry is one word, right? Yeah. You say sorry. Yeah. I don't know what that is. I love that stuff. You and I need to do a series called Word Archaeologists. Ooh. Where we search down, you know, sorry, not sorry, on fleek. Can I tell you something? I would be so down with that. I'm not kidding because I'm obsessed with it. Wouldn't that be fun? Well, because all of a sudden it's like, where did this, what the fuck, where did this come from? Yeah. I'm gobsmacked and I'm thinking of the cornucopia of possibilities.