Anne Beatts on SNL's First Women, John Belushi's Veto Power, and the Hospital Bed She Negotiated Into Her Contract

John Belushi would walk into Lorne Michaels’s office and tell him to fire the women. Regularly. This is not rumor or revisionist grievance. Anne Beatts says it plainly, almost cheerfully, the way you talk about an old inconvenience once you’ve won. She didn’t exactly win, not in the way Belushi probably imagined losing meant, but she survived five seasons, negotiated a hospital bed into her office, and left with her name on the Todd and Lisa Nerds sketches, which exist partly because Belushi refused to be in them. Comedy is funny like that.

Beatts came up through the National Lampoon the way a lot of women got into rooms in 1970: she was brought to editorial dinners by a boyfriend, she kept pitching ideas anyway, and eventually the men had to let her write because the ideas were hers. She was at the Lampoon from its first year through 1974, moved into writing for the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and met basically everyone who would end up on the first season of SNL before Lorne Michaels ever called. When he did call, she turned him down. She had a book to finish.

I got into comedy the same way that Katherine the Great got into politics, on my back, because I was brought to New York by a guy who knew these two guys from Harvard who were starting a magazine.

Lorne lied to her. Told her the show wouldn’t be that much work and she could do the book too. She could not. She spent the entire first season of SNL sleeping on a green vinyl two-seater couch, waking up with the imprint on her face, and eventually decided she’d had enough of that. So she asked for a hospital bed. Not a cot. A hospital bed, the kind with the push-button adjustment, installed in her office on the 17th floor. They said yes. This is either a story about how bad the working conditions were or how good Beatts was at negotiating, probably both.

What Belushi Wouldn’t Do

The Belushi anecdotes are the ones that land. Beatts and her writing partner Rosie Schuster created the Nerds, Todd and Lisa, for Belushi and Gilda Radner. Belushi refused. So Bill Murray played Todd opposite Radner, which turned out to be one of the great recurring chemistry experiments in the show’s history. The hard-hat sketch with Lily Tomlin, where women practice catcalling a male model? Written by Beatts and Schuster. Belushi refused that one too, so they put Dan Aykroyd in it. There’s a whole shadow history of early SNL that runs through the stuff John Belushi wouldn’t do.

John Belushi used to go to Lauren all the time and tell him to fire the women and he wouldn’t be in anything that we wrote.

Beatts is not bitter about it. She’s drier than that. She mentions, almost as a footnote, that she and Schuster felt an obligation to write for the women on the show because nobody else particularly would, and that whenever a male producer pushed them to write something for Garrett Morris, they would push back. The show had a hierarchy. Beatts knew exactly where she stood in it and wrote around it anyway.

Square Pegs, and the Ratings Girl Who Asked for a Job

After five seasons, everyone left. Lorne wanted a hiatus, the network didn’t want to give him one, Jean Doumanian took over, and almost the entire staff walked. Beatts had a pilot to write. Square Pegs came from a suggestion by her agent’s partner, an older gentleman who had been Frank Sinatra’s first manager and who told her, correctly, that CBS wanted a show for young people. The two central characters were Beatts and her best friend from high school. She wrote the pilot on her lawn in the Hamptons with an electric typewriter and a long extension cord.

I almost felt like there were little voices that would be in my head, they would be saying things, I knew what they were going to say because they were like these little people in my head that would talk to each other.

The show got cancelled after one season, beaten in the ratings by Monday Night Football, Little House on the Prairie, and eventually The A-Team, which ABC moved back an hour specifically to land on top of Square Pegs after CBS tried to save it by changing nights. A 12 share killed it. The woman Beatts called for the overnight ratings delivered the number and then asked for a job. Beatts’s comment: timing like that, she should be in comedy. She is not wrong.

She told me that it was a 12 and then she asked for a job and I want to go like, with timing like that, stand out of comedy.

Beatts now teaches character analysis at Chapman University, and her thesis is essentially that character is the only thing that matters in writing. Once you know who these people are, you’re just taking dictation. It’s a generous theory, and she’s earned the right to teach it. She also notes, without much fanfare, that women in comedy are still countable on both hands in most writers’ rooms, and that the very fact people still ask about women in comedy is proof it hasn’t actually been solved. That’s the kind of observation that sounds simple until you realize it’s been true for fifty years.