Chevy Chase Would Have Stayed at ‘SNL’ Had Lorne Michaels Said That He Loved Him
Arguably the most dramatic incident in the early days of Saturday Night Live — with the possible exception of the time an elderly host got hammered during the show — was breakout star Chevy Chase’s departure at the end of the first season.
There have been multiple theories floated as to why exactly Chase left the hit show when it was in its infancy, a decision that he later came to regret. The most prominent explanation is that Chase wanted to pursue a film career, which he alluded to when he facetiously told David Letterman in 1980 that he quit SNL in order to “get the big bucks in Hollywood.” But then Chase more seriously explained that the hectic schedule had left him “exhausted,” and he felt as though his time at the show had run its course.
In more recent years, Chase has offered up a slightly different, more personal reasoning for his premature exit, telling Today in 2007, “I left for a girl that I was in love with. It had nothing to (do) with lucrative film deals awaiting me. I didn’t make a movie for three years. It was just a lot of bunk ... I was very much in love with a girl who just would not leave California.”
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The girl in question was his first wife, Jacqueline Carlin. He elaborated on just how disastrous this decision was during an appearance on WTF with Marc Maron in 2023. “I somehow promised her that I’d leave (SNL) after one year and come to her and all this shit. Which is the worst choice in the world. And Lorne wasn’t happy about that.”
Now it turns out that he may have reconsidered his decision to leave, had a certain executive producer been less reserved about expressing their platonic love.
Lorne Michaels was recently profiled in The New Yorker by writer Susan Morrison, with material drawn from her soon to be released biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. The piece contains info about Michaels and Chase’s relationship, including their first meeting while in line for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Michaels, who was attending with their mutual friend Rob Reiner, was impressed by Chase’s “elaborate pratfall.”
“I knew instantly that Lorne was a funny guy,” Chase told Morrison. “He wasn’t an initiator of humor as much as a believer in humor.” But when discussing his sudden withdrawal, Chase suggested that he would have actually stuck around had the reserved Michaels made more of a bromantic gesture. Keeping Chase at SNL “wouldn’t have fucking taken much! All he had to do is tell me he loved me, basically,” the actor revealed. “But his nature is to be above it in some fashion.”
Why didn’t Michaels offer an emotional plea to keep Chase around? Chase thinks it may have been “insecurity,” confessing to Morrison, “Frankly, I always felt back then that I was smarter than him, that I was really the guy who got the show going, not Lorne.”
To be fair to Michaels, it’s hard to fault anyone for not expressing any warmth toward Chevy Chase.
