Mr. 'Saturday Night'

Lorne Michaels, who created 'Saturday Night Live' three decades ago and who tomorrow night will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, plans to stay on as producer of the show: 'If it's up to me, at least another five years.' (Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

"My first loyalty is to making the show itself as good as possible, but I don't see that as being in conflict to being loyal to the network."

Lornie, Lornie, Lornie! What happened to the restless revolutionary who may not have given drugs to John Belushi but certainly smoked plenty of pot with him? That's just it. Michaels has always been a practical revolutionary. In pot-smoking, he exercised moderation, old friends say, and never got all that silly. When, in the earliest months of the show, he'd stay at home and pout all week, refusing to attend rehearsals because NBC brass had refused to cave in and give him the sound man he wanted, he was exercising the power of showbiz egomania, not political subversiveness.

And he won virtually all those arguments.

He's also cultivated legends about himself, which are good to have if you're in a position of power in show business. He's famous for sleeping until noon in his lavish apartment on Central Park West and then sauntering into the office at 3. He's infamous for making appointments and then letting his guests sit waiting for hours on a leather couch in the 17th-floor outer office (he has another office on the ninth floor, overlooking Studio 8-H). He is immaculately fashionable without looking as though he gives a moment's thought to clothes, and he has Old World manners and style. Gracious to a fault unless he thinks you hate him, Michaels is revered by such longtime cronies as the legendary Bernie Brillstein, Michaels's manager and the man who, a few minutes before the first show went on the air, became panicky when he saw that the band members weren't in "their tuxedos" yet.

Bernie has maintained a passion for Tab, the Coca-Cola Co.'s venerable saccharin-sweetened soda, even though it has all but disappeared from supermarket shelves. In a small refrigerator outside Michaels's ninth-floor office, thanks to the diligence of an unusually attractive band of assistants known as "The Lornettes," a few cans of Tab are always waiting in case Bernie comes by.

Though he may indeed be keenly aware of his image and style, there is almost nothing about Lorne Michaels that comes across as manufactured or appropriated. He is, in an environment where "business" increasingly eclipses "show," a true original, an authentic eccentric and, supremely, a showman.

"I am very happy that my life worked out the way it did," Michaels says. "I'm very happy that I got to do the work I got to do." Michaels could be seen as a combination of the overworked producer in "42nd Street" and the old man played by Lewis Stone in "Grand Hotel" who complains that "people come, people go" and nothing ever happens.

What hurts Michaels, even after all these years, is that people do go.

"To have the depth that we have, where people can step up and shine -- and also because we're almost everyone's first job -- I think people by definition want to go and see what's on the other side of the fence, even though I tell them it's big and scary. They don't listen.

"At one point in everyone's career it's the biggest thing that ever happened. And then interviewer after interviewer asks 'What's next?' and 'Well, I guess movies,' and then the snake is loose in the Garden of Eden because they can't think about it in the same way: 'Now I've got to start to plan a career.' And their managers tend to say, 'You can't stay in high school. You've got your whole life. You've got to move on.' It's a process that I'm resigned to, if not entirely happy about."

So we are back to the idea that "What's next?" tends to "ruin the present." And yet whether one speaks of past, present or future, Lorne Michaels seems to have things mastered, producing a near-perfect life, of which "Saturday Night Live" is only a part.

Tom Shales is the author, with James Andrew Miller, of "Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live," published in 2002.