Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night? Not exactly.
What a trooper Drew Barrymore was to host Saturday Night Live on the same weekend that the anthrax scare hit the NBC Studios in New York where the show originates, right?
Reports have suggested that the Riding In Cars with Boys star went through with the traditional Saturday late-night performance broadcast live from the studio headquarters in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center despite the fact that’s also where NBC Nightly News is lensed. This after news broke Friday that an assistant to anchorman Tom Brokaw had been exposed to the dangerous anthrax virus there.
Yet on Saturday afternoon, a very reliable source told me Drew and her bizarro hubby Tom Green had just been spotted grocery shopping at a Los Angeles-area Ralph’s–putting them about 3,000 miles away from the SNL stage with only a few hours left before the “live” broadcast.
Another of my highly placed sources confirmed to me that because the fear factor was so understandably high at NBC after the anthrax scare, a decision was made to let the superstar return home to L.A. ASAP. The show’s dress rehearsal was videotaped and substituted for the live broadcast, and Mr. and Mrs. Green were whisked home to SoCal.
So Drew was only acting when she uttered the”live” portion of the famous show-opening phrase. But what was she was doing telling ABC News that she did indeed stick it out through Saturday, inspired by Rudy Giuiliani’s earlier appearance on the show? Hmm….
AA-List Star?
Which intense, well-known character actor (with a famous star sibling) recently showed up at a press junket to pump his latest film while visibly three sheets to the wind?
While speaking with journalists and drinking what looked like coffee, the actor’s slurred words and erratic behavior made the assembled journalists first wonder if he wasn’t a little loopy on painkillers.
Alternately surly and silly, the thesp cracked jokes only he found funny one minute, stared down reporters asking innocent questions about his movie the next. At one point, I wondered if he was more likely to hug one of us and break into a pub tune, or launch across the table and pound the crap out of one us who had somehow offended him.
Every time the star opened his mouth to speak, his manager–looking hangdog in the back of the room–winced and hung his head even further.
After the star finally exited, some of my colleagues seemed unsure of what they had just witnessed. Any lingering questions were erased when we were joined by the contingent of college student journalists who had just had their own encounter with the actor and–despite their presumed familiarity with excessive alcohol consumption–were a bit traumatized by the experience.
“His cup reeked of Jack Daniels!” squealed one co-ed. “So did his breath!” agreed another.
I’d reveal the name, but I have to take the fifth–before our actor friend drinks it all.
Slappy and Tickle
Guess which hot Hollywood comedian-slash-actor, known for his blisteringly funny and trenchant commentary, checks into hotels using the name “Slappy White?”
Melvin “Slappy” White, for those of you too young to remember, is the name of a pioneering black stand-up comic who came up on the so-called “Chitlin Circuit” and was teamed with Redd Foxx from 1951 to 1955. With his race-conscious and sometimes very “blue” material, White eventually broke through to bigger and bigger mainstream audiences and released popular off-color albums, appeared in Las Vegas, Foxx’s series Sanford and Son, 1970s blaxploitation films and movies as recent Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night before his death of a heart attack in 1995 at 74.
So he’s sort of a spiritual godfather to the contemporary comic, who is even more outrageous (and profane) than White. But just to cause trouble, the modern funnyman sometimes amends the name on the hotel register to “Slappy Whitey.”
