Art originals.

This is an iHeart original.

On October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, Connie Crawford did what a lot of college students were doing every Saturday night.

I was in my first year at college, and every Saturday night, every party shut down and we would all go.

There was only one TV and every dorm, and it was usually one of those big console, old fashioned TVs, and everybody would gather around and watch Saturday Night Live.

That's Connie that year.

She was a freshman at Vassar, a liberal arts school in Poughkeepsie, New York.

As you might imagine, parties were frequent.

It took a lot for students to pass one up in favor of watching television, but SNL managed to lure them in.

It was hip, irreverent, it spoke to them.

The entire cast, from John Belushi to Gilda Radner to Bill Murray, were becoming some of the most famous comic actors in the country.

Connie, however, was a fan of one cast member in particular.

Well, they were all great, but I had a crush on dan Aykroyd, and when I was in high school, I think in the first year Saturday Night Live came out.

I wrote him a fan letter, and he sent me back a picture of him on a motorcycle and in crayon underneath.

Because I think he thought I was a child.

He wrote Connie Let's Ride to Nicaragua Together Loved Dan.

As Connie and her friends watched the episode, something a little strange happened.

There on screen was Lourene Michaels, the creator and executive producer of the show.

Michaels was making an offer of sorts to the audience, and it wasn't a bit.

SNL was holding a contest that any viewer could enter.

The winner would be flown to New York City and enter thirty Rockefeller Center on Saturday, December seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven for the Christmas episode.

That person would be the first, and to date, the only civilian to ever get one of the most coveted assignments in show business, hosting Saturday Night Live.

Entries came pouring in, well over one hundred thousand of them, with everyone from aspiring performers to housewives to at least one governor vying for the spot.

Some people showed up in person and only partially clothed.

But was it really possible for anyone to host SNL.

Could an amateur hold their own against the likes of Belushi, Hurry and Radner?

Or was SNL setting itself up for an epic disaster?

Welcome back to Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast.

I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is live from New York.

It's your grandmother.

Welcome back to Very Special Episodes.

I am one of your hosts, Jason English.

There's a famous tweet that reservices during every Olympics.

It goes something like, in each Olympic event, there should be a normal person competing for reference, just to show you how phenomenal the actual Olympians are.

Today's Very Special episode is the television equivalent what would a chaotic sketch comedy variety show look like if you just picked somebody or somebody's grandma off the street.

I will let Dana tell you in a minute.

First, a quick housekeep announcement.

We are all hard at work here behind the scenes on our next full batch of Very Special Episodes.

We'll be back to our regular weekly cadence later next month.

We're talking about adding in a second, still pretty special episode on Saturdays.

This spring.

We'll keep working on that and I'll give it back to Dana.

When Lauren Michaels launched Saturday Night Live in the fall of nineteen seventy five, he knew he wanted a different guest host each week.

Watching a famous actor or comedian or athlete get thrown into the choppy waters of live sketch comedy is what helped give SNL its reputation for being dangerous, and it was also good for ratings.

Was just not to be missed.

You know, whatever else you had pends on Saturday night, you wanted to get home by eleven thirty so you could watch this show.

And I mean it just spoke to me.

The idea was to blow up the convention of the variety show with the sketch show.

That's Bill Carter.

Bill is a longtime television critic who's covered Late Night for The New York Times since nineteen eighty nine.

He's also written several books, including The Late Shift, a definitive account of the war for Johnny Carson's chair at The Tonight Show in the early nineties.

His coverage of SNL actually dates to the very first episode, a time when SNL was less a pop culture phenomenon and more of a what the heck is this thing?

So I was right on top of it when it started.

And my own situation was pretty interesting because the NBC affiliate in Baltimore, WBAL, did not originally carry the show.

They did not sign on to carry Saturday Night Live when it started, so I had to watch the first I don't know how many four six episodes something on your old antenna TV and trying to get a picture through snow from the Washington and affiliate Baltimore.

Soon caught on, and so did the rest of the country.

SNL was unlike anything television had produced up to that point.

There had been variety shows like The Smothers Brothers and laugh In with sketches and special guests, and even politicians like Richard Nixon spoofing their own image.

But SNL took it further, much further.

It was an incredible breath of fresh air to me, and it was aimed toward me.

I mean, I was recent college graduates.

You know what else did I want?

I watched some of those shows, but it wasn't like they spoke to the generation I felt like I belonged to, and this show did.

It had the vibe of the stage show.

Had been done called Lemmings, which I had actually seen an off Broadway show, and interestingly, it had both Chevy Chase and John Belushi in it.

So when Saturday Life came out, I had seen them.

I'd seen them on stage doing this kind of antique kind of stuff, and I was very open to it.

I really responded to it, and I think they just hit it.

They hit the mark so well from the beginning.

The humor was born out of the Lemmings, Second City, National Lampoon, all institutions where edgy comedy was thriving.

Performers like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Jane Curtin and others were coming out of those improvisational troops and becoming major stars.

They got the cover of New York Magazine.

There were drugs and rock and roll and movies beckoning.

SNL became the cool hangout.

Mick Jagger might have been too big to perform on the show, but he was more than willing to show up and watch.

But one thing SNL did, rather something it almost had to do, was very uncool.

It was the time tested publicity stunt, something out of the norm to stir up the media or to drum up ratings for sweeps weeks when networks try to grab big ratings so they can charge more for advertising.

They were still becoming sort of part of the network while they were, you know, kind of the underground part of the network, and Lauren, who's very skillful at managing up and always was, I'm sure, was able to sort of wrangle this, you know, and say it'll be different, let's just try it.

And as time went on, they didn't really need to do that anymore because they got tremendous leverage and they just got this following that wasn't gonna all of a sudden kick up wildly because they went to a different location.

But in the early years they weren't above a ratings stunt.

In the show's second season, NBC arranged for the show to air its first and only on location broadcast.

Think of it as a very special episode of SNL.

The cast and crew headed for Marty Grass.

The idea came from Lorne Michaels, who thought sketches based in and around the celebration would add a different flavor to the show.

Cast member Jane Curtin and comic actor Buck Henry would anchor the parade itself, commenting on the sites.

It aired at the more reasonable time slot of nine thirty and on a Sunday, and almost immediately things went south.

A pedestrian was struck by one of the cars in the Bacchus parade, which brought it to a halt and messed up the show's timing completely.

Guest star Cindy Williams, who was supposed to appear with her Laverne and Shirley co star Penny Marshall, got lost on the way to the shoot.

Unlike the studio audience in New York, this one was made up of mostly drunk college kids who began throwing gold coins, beads, and beer cans at the cast.

The episode never really recovered.

Michaels found out SNL could never be a traveling road show, but he wasn't done experimenting.

The next season, he made a rare on screen appearance, speaking directly into the camera and with a perfect straight man's delivery, he promised members of the fractured Beatles a certified check for a whopping three thousand dollars.

If they agreed to reunite on the show, they could give ringo star less of a cut, it was up to them.

The joke was picked up by the media and has endured over the decades, and it came with a punchline of sorts.

Well two George Harrison actually showed up on a later episode to pick up a check for three hundred and fifty dollars.

Paul McCartney would later say he and John Lennon were actually watching SNL the week after Michaels made his offer.

They talked about taking a taxi to thirty Rock just for the hell of it.

They never did, but the skit was notable for another reason.

It presented Michaels as an on screen persona something he had once flirted with early on by considering casting himself in the role of co anchor of Weekend Update.

Well, Loin was a performer, you know.

He was in a comedy team that performed in Canada before he became a writer producer, and he was comfortable with performing for sure.

He obviously has a very big ego to be running a show like this, but I don't think he felt like all the attention had to be on him so he had to also be on the show.

But I think he realized he can't possibly do that and run this crazy machine that was going on.

But you know, his occasional appearances would only happen if he wanted it that and so he definitely wanted it to happen for sure.

Michaels wasn't done experimenting, because the show itself wasn't yet set in stone.

In its third year, and practically every year since, critics and viewers wondered if SNL's best days were behind it.

Chevy Chase had left shortly after the second season to begin to pursue a film career.

John Belushi was filming movies and seemingly had one foot out the door.

There were critics said, too many recurring characters.

No one looked at it and said, well, this thing will still be on the air in five decades, not even Michaels himself, whose contract with NBC expired at the end of the season.

Michaels was getting tired of the grind, saying quote, I can't work eighteen hours a day for the rest of my life, or I'll die.

But before his possible departure, he had another idea, although arguably one just as potentially disastrous as the Marti Gras Debacle, the show would hold a contest, not a spoof contest or the appearance of a contest, but an actual contest.

On October eighth, nineteen seventy seven, the second show of the season, hosted by actress Madeline Cohn, Michaels appeared behind a desk and he said, how many of you out there watching the show right now are saying to yourselves?

You know, Madeline con is pretty good, but I think I can do a better job than that.

Well, here's your chance, because now anyone can host Saturday Night Live.

Michaels called it the Anyone Can Host Contest, and the premise was simple.

Instead of being a famous star or comic or singer, any viewer could potentially be the host for the show's Christmas episode in December.

No performing experience was needed to be considered for the contest.

Viewers could mail in a postcard and explain in twenty five words or lie us why they should be chosen as the guest host.

Send it to box seven to two radio City Station New York, New York one ero ero one nine by midnight November first, nineteen seventy seven.

If they were one of five finalists.

They'd be flown out to appear on a November show so viewers could vote for their favorite.

The winner would host the Christmas episode and receive the then standard hosting fee of three thousand dollars.

Put another way, they'd get paid as much as the Beatles.

Michaels believed the contest was more than just a stunt in a meataway.

He thought he could demystify the idea of being an entertainer, that it was reserved only for a chosen few.

He joked that quote, comedy is much too important to be left to professionals.

There was the pressure too of SNL getting predictable.

If roping in an amateur host was dangerous, that was the point, and he offered very few guidelines, say for stressing that anyone caught approaching him or a cast member in person to make their case would be disqualified.

I didn't know if it was for real at first.

You always have to wonder when they do things like that, And then I thought, Okay, they're basically saying, this is how confident we are that we can do this show with anybody, You know.

What I mean.

Amateurs had appeared on SNL's stage before.

Fran Tarkenton, a quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings, hosted, so did Ron Nelson, the White House Press secretary under Gerald Ford.

These non performers gave the show a different feel and energy.

So they had to really write around that.

So they didn't do it just because they thought, oh, this will.

Be a blast.

I think they did it as part of what they were doing overall there, which is just we're just shaking up all the conventions.

This is another convention we're going to shake up.

We're going to have a host that nobody'd ever heard of.

But even those hosts were recognizable.

The winner of the Anyone Can Host contest could be well anyone.

The question was just how many people wanted to host SNL and what lengths would they go to in order to do it.

Millions of people watched Michaels make his contest announcement, but you didn't have to be watching the show to hear about it.

Many major newspapers covered the contest.

It was, after all, a chance for literally anyone to headline the hottest comedy show in the country.

Within weeks, NBC had gotten one hundred and twenty thousand responses, with people using their allotted twenty five words to make their case.

According to Barbara Burns, a talent coordinator for the show who was overseeing the contest, a surprising number of entries were actually threatening in nature put me on the air or else.

Those, she said, went directly in the garbage.

There were a lot of nude photos with some people apparently hoping to seduce their way onto the show.

Those two were discarded, and so were entries begging for the three thousand dollars host fee.

And despite Lorne Michael's cautioning against personal appearances, some did show up At thirty Rock.

One man came as a people card instead of a postcard, dressed in a postal sack and boxer shorts.

He didn't win anyone over.

There were even celebrity entrants of sorts.

Bella Abzig, a former congresswoman, sent in a submission, so did Al Goldstein, the widely loathed publisher of an adult publication titled Screw Magazine.

And then there was Connie Crawford's submission.

Connie, you'll remember, was a freshman at Vassar who had a standing offer to run off to Nicaragua with Dan Akrid.

What could she say in twenty five words or less that would make her postcard stand out from the thousands of other entries.

It was something she carried with her everywhere, her Vassar student identification card.

And so my friend and I were like, this sucks, and what is this ID?

And you know without this ID, we can't eat.

Without this ID, we can't go into certain places.

This ID rules our life.

And so I was like, Okay, that's it.

The id's stage a revolution.

My ID and my friend's ID go to the local holiday inn and my friend staples my ID on a holiday in postcard and I wrote, free me, and that's what I sent in.

And of course I don't know if anybody got the backstory, it doesn't matter.

I think it was more that it was my actual college ID stapled to a holiday and postcard in the words free me.

Connie sent it off and waited.

Meanwhile, SNL still had shows to do.

Al Goldstein never hosted, but one of his peers did.

Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, hosted the third episode of the season.

Charles Grodin was next, and then musician Ray Charles.

By this point SNL's staff had come to a decision.

Out of the now one hundred and fifty thousand entries received, the finalists had been selected, and shortly Connie Crawford's phone rang, or more accurately, the phone at the dorm rang.

And this was Vasser and these are old dorms, so each of these phone booths had those folding wooden doors, and you'd go in and you'd sit on these little wooden things, and it was old school, even first seventy seven.

And the way you would get messages is they would call the dorm and the person at the front desk would write down a little message on a piece of paper, fold it up and put it in your little slot.

So that's how I found out.

I got a message saying, Barbara Burns, the casting coordinator, wants to talk to you about the contest.

So of course I was really excited.

And there was an initial interview which I did in one of those little wooden booths, and I think it was mostly to just see am I crazy?

Or you know, really, who the fuck am I?

At first?

Connie remembers being told she was one of twenty five finalists and being asked to send in a photo, but quickly she was one of the final five.

Connie and four finalists had just a few days to make their way into Manhattan.

This was surreal.

Just days Connie was in class.

Now she was at SNL, getting a chance to see the stage, the audience seats, the cameras, and the sheer energy of preparing for a live sketch comedy show.

Cast members ran around half dressed, moving from one sketch to the next in a dry run before the live broadcast.

I mean, you got to understand, they brought in these five people and they're in the middle of doing their live show and they're running around.

They were busy.

Bilda Radner was very sweet, and the others were all polite and everything.

Connie also got exposed to Bill Murray, who was not yet the full force of nature he would become.

This was Murray's first full season as a cast member.

He was always on in terms of what I saw, which was just moments here and there.

So I kind of felt like he's the new guy.

He's got this amazing of Billy to just riff and he's both experimenting with riffing.

You know, he's practicing and he's doing it all the time, which maybe that's him working on his craft.

Maybe that's him trying to get material, or maybe that's just him how he works.

I don't know, but brilliant, clearly brilliant, because even his little riffs with the costume person were just extraordinary.

But one person seemed to stand out even among this group of performers, John Belushi.

As a fan of the show, Connie got to see some of the sketch rehearsals.

In one, Belushi reprised his highly popular Samurai, a man in a top fun who delivers rapid fire gibberish while struggling to adapt to modern customs.

He often did the sketch with Buck Henry, a frequent host who made for a good straight man for Belushi's wild energy.

In those studios, you know it's a great big room, it's actually quite small, and then they have all these little modular sets.

So they were in one set, and as you know, people who do tech are working and they don't get sucked into the vacuum of acting because they see a lot and they have work to do.

Well, Belushi, in one of the rehearsals, he just started riffing and improvising, and Buck, of course went along with him.

And he must have gone, I don't know it.

It felt really long.

I mean, I would say it was at least twenty minutes for an original.

I think the skets like two or three minutes.

And it was so funny and so brilliant that every person in that whole studio stopped what they were doing and gathered around this little modular set.

The more people who watched, the funnier he got.

I mean, it's one of the greatest performances I've ever seen.

On both their parts.

Belushi was also generous with Connie.

She recalls he was the only one to try and settle her nerves.

I was sitting around and he came over and just started chatting.

And he was drinking a beer during the day, so we just started chatting.

And he also did something that was really kind, which was so they did on Saturday.

They run through the show once for a studio audience, and then there's a little break and then you do it live.

And after the first run through of the show, he came up to me and he said, just let it go.

He said, just pretend you're talking to some of your friends at school, and you know, nobody else said anything to me.

The director nobody else you know, basically told me to relax, calm down, and I just really appreciated that.

Connie also met the other finalists, and they were a highly eclectic bunch.

There was deb Blair, an employment counselor and mother of three from Peoria, Illinois, who wrote that quote, my three sons only listen to people on TV.

Please let me host Saturday Night.

There are a few things I need to tell them.

And there was David Lewis, a bearded twenty year old college dropout from McMinnville, Oregon, who sent in seventy five different entries.

In the one selected, he wrote that quote, I'm so bored in the town where I live.

I know all the vending machines by name.

David, more than anyone, seemed to have a big appetite for show business.

He told reporters he aspired to get into comedy writing, but he didn't seem to make a big impression, at least not with Connie.

The guy from Oregon.

I don't even really remember him very much.

Weirdly, there was then current Governor of South Dakota, Richard Neap, who wrote that quote, being host could be my big breakthrough.

In showbiz.

Otherwise it's probably back to selling automatic milking machines wholesale.

Like before I was governor, Connie actually had spent time in South Dakota, which made for an easy camaraderie with the governor.

Yeah.

It was really funny because in between some of the shoots, they said, okay, and one of the other finalists here is the governor of South Dakota.

And I looked at him and I went, oh, my god, I have spent the happiest months of my life in South Dakota.

And he said, oh, I love you, know, And so we just immediately hugged and became really good friends.

And finally Connie met an eighty year old grandmother from New Orleans named Miskel Spelman.

I'm eighty years old and need one more cheap thrill since my doctor has just told me I only have twenty five years left to live, Spelman wrote.

The contest was her first visit to New York and her first time on an airplane.

And of course the grandmother was completely charming and sweet and just such a great sport.

And just like that, the final five were set.

They all settled into stereotypes that made them more palatable to both the viewers and the writers.

Connie, of course, was the comely co ed.

I think given how little time there was, the writers don't know who we are.

You know, we're all stereotypes.

That's how they selected us, you know, the dropout from Oregon, the Vassar co ed, the ninety year old grandmother from Louisiana, mother of three from Peoria, and the governor of South Dakota.

You know.

So they don't have enough time to know who we are to build something.

It was now up to America to figure out which, if any, they liked.

On November nineteenth, nineteen seventy seven, SNL opened with Gilda Radner and Garrett Morris talking about the contest finalists in a locker room, as though the cast were a sports team about to go out and play, and in a sense, they were.

They came out to meet America dressed in blue and white varsity sweaters.

After the opening credits, they were joined on stage by the host of the episode, Buck Henry.

Henry acted as a kind of MC.

He called them quote five amazingly brave people and let each of them speak before reminding viewers they had until November thirtieth to vote for a winner using a form found in TV Guide.

Each one had a letter on their shirt ABCD and E in an attempt to make voting easier.

We were moving props more than anything.

They would just sort of shuffle us into a scene and shuffle us out, so we weren't really performing.

It was more like furniture.

And I don't mean that like, uh, treating me like pieces chair or something.

No, it was more like, Okay, you five are gonna come in here and stand here.

Then you're gonna go sit over there, and next set, you know, you'll be in here and you'll do this.

Later in the show, Henry appeared with each finalist in a pre taped bit under the pretense of each trying to convince Henry to pick them.

The governor told Henry he could give him something from his state's gold mines.

Debbie Blair, the mother of three, went for the guilt trip, saying she needed the three thousand dollars hosting fee to give her kids a nice Christmas miscl Spilman cautioned she might be dead before in New Year's Eve, and as the stereotypical comely co ed, Connie's role was to try and seduce Henry.

So I go into this hotel room and there's a little lounge area with the sofa, and they introduced me to the other contestants and they say, okay, so each one of you is going to try to bribe Buck so you can be the host.

And it's so telling.

So I was.

Eighteen when this happened, and when it came my time to shoot, they said, okay, you know what to do, and I knew what to do, which was try to seduce him, and so we just improvised it and they used the first take.

Aside from the contest, the episode unspooled like a normal SNL entry.

There were coneheads with Akroyd and curtain playing aliens with elongated heads and clipped speech and weekend update, and John Belushi as a retired world class athlete disclosing that his secret to premium performance is cigarette and chocolate donuts.

The five returned at the end of the show to me one final plea.

Connie said that by winning, she could flunk every other course but at least pass drama.

Governor Neepe admitted he didn't really want to win, that he was just doing the show for his staff and kids, and not to vote for him.

He later said he thought the week needed to rehearse the show would be too much of an imposition.

Afterward, Connie got maybe the second best perk of appearing on SNL getting to attend the vaunted after party.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a party.

And there were all these amazing people there, like Eric Idle was there.

I mean that to me was huge.

And I had a little book and I had people autograph stuff, and Paul Simon was really snotty to me and everybody else.

Yeah, it was fun.

The show was about to take the next few weeks off, giving staff enough time to prepare their two shows in December.

The second would feature the winner, who would America Pick.

People began tearing out the form from their copy of TV Guide and scribbling down a letter.

Then NBC and SNL staffers tabulated the votes after counting viewers had decided the next host of Saturday Night Live was the letter e and the only contestant who had been born in the nineteenth century.

Watching the Finalists episode of SNL, one thing becomes immediately apparent.

The studio audience loved Miskel' Spilman, while the other contestants were typically met with silence.

Anything Spilman said was greeted with laughter.

Anything even dead panning that she was old drew a big reaction, and so when votes came in, Miskel was the overwhelming favorite, beating second placed finalist David Lewis by over fifteen thousand votes.

One letter said, we cast our votes for the eighty year young gal.

She is a peach.

Come on, Granny, do your thing, wrote another.

At least two people claiming to be President Jimmy Carter wrote in endorsing her, making at least one of them a fake.

Even Governor Neepe said he voted for her America at least the America voting for a Saturday Night Live host wanted to see an eighty year old interact with the not ready for primetime players.

That was something Connie Crawford picked up on pretty quickly.

Oh well, there was no question from the beginning that she was going to win, because she was ninety years old and from Louisiana, and she had this little sparkle about her, and just the fact that she was willing to do this and that she did it with such grace and again.

Spark Okay, so miss gal Spellman wasn't quite ninety.

She was born in eighteen ninety seven, generations removed from the counterculture vibe of SNL, Yet she was an ardent fan of the show, which she watched religiously, including Lauren Michael's announcement for the contest.

Her birth predated the invention of television itself.

If both comedy and drama come from conflict, what could be better than someone like miscal thrown into the hippist show on the air.

That was evident from the first day.

I mean, the Governor was splashy, but she was the way I saw it as like, oh, she's the special one, because you know, this was a time where the generational gap was still pretty strictured, and here was this ninety year old woman coming onto the subversive show and she was from the Deep South.

In looking at the coverage of the contest, it's fascinating to see how reporters didn't really get curious about Miskell.

Out of the five sweeping characters, the co ed, the Governor, the dropout.

She was a grandmother stereotype.

One article mentioned in passing she had been a widow for twenty years.

Someone with her maiden name of Weatherby once worked as a telephone operator for a local rotary club.

In nineteen fifteen, she was commended for fielding two hundred calls in just forty five minutes.

While we can't say definitively that was our Miskal, it probably was.

Yet her work, her life, none of it seemed relevant so much as the idea of an octagenarian was going to host snow And while her age was a big reason people voted for her, not everyone was certain she could do it.

Miskell's son Otis was quoted as saying he was unsure about the idea that his mother may not have the stamina for live television.

I think it would be too much for her, he said.

SNL was taking a risk too.

They were banking on a woman who had never before been on an airplane or in New York, much less on television before her finalist appearance, here's Bill Carter again.

So that was the risk for the show.

Actually, the show was taken a risk because imagine if she had frozen on stage, how bad that would look.

That they kind of put this woman in that position.

So you know, they did take a risk pushing her out there in front of millions of viewers.

It turns out that Miskell had plenty of energy.

During the finalists show, a reporter noticed Miskel was the only one of the five who didn't seem all that nervous to be going on live television.

The rest were smoking, pacing, or inhaling donuts.

The week before the show, escorted by her granddaughter Janine, Miskel boarded a plane from New Orleans headed for New York.

When she arrived, she was given a warm reception by Lorn and the cast.

Writers plotted how best to utilize her, which was made easier given how natural she had been in front of the camera during the finalists show.

But there was still a loose cannon quality to miscal As charming as she was, as comfortable as she seemed, she was still an amateur, and amateurs can freeze up or lose their mark on stage, So Michaels decided to give Miskell an on stage escort.

Buck Henry Buck, as you'll recall, hosted the five contenders in this era of SNL.

He was a kind of all star, a bit of a nerdy vibe, very suburban dad, but with a bit of a dark side.

He was also reliable.

He was enormously admired and respected by the cast and by Lorne.

He was a veteran writer performer.

People loved his writing.

He could handle anything.

You know, he could handle anything.

You know.

When Belushi cut his head with the sword at one time, you know, he handled that.

So they had great confidence in him on stage.

It's hard to know exactly what people were thinking or hoping for when they switched on their televisions at eleven thirty on Saturday, December seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven.

Were they hoping Miskell proved adept and witty?

Were they anticipating the cast would have to think on their feet to cover up her mistakes.

The show opens with John Belushi and Lorraine Newman in the cast locker room.

They discuss Miskell's age, and Belushi makes an eerie joke about how he'll be dead before he's thirty.

The comment got a laugh then, but given his death from a drug overdose at thirty three in nineteen eighty two, hits differently now.

Belushi, trading on his party boy image, tells Newman that Miskell seemed nervous, so he gave her a joint to calm her down.

The show leaned hard on two tropes this episode, Miskell's age and the idea of getting a grandmother high.

Yeah, that's right, that was in the show.

Yeah, that kind of humor never hit me well anyway.

I mean I was like drug joke.

Come on, I can do better than that.

After the opening credit sequence, Buck Henry walks out to the stage with Miskell on his arm, and Miskell does a very good job of pretending to be stoned, telling buck Henry she can see colors.

From that point on, Miskell Spilman is deployed very carefully.

She appears sitting next to Jane Curtin as curtain reads a holiday story re enacted by Belusi and Gilda Radner.

In the story, Belushi gifts his girlfriend a kidney and she gives him a watch chain.

Miskell nails her lines, and then it's onto the requisite hosting duty of introducing the musical guest ladies and gentlemen, Elvis Costello.

She then appears briefly in a sketch as Bill Murray's mother while Murray's character robs a bank, but her real star turn is in the next segment, when Belushi returns home from College to greet his parents played by Dan Ackrod and Jane Curtin.

He wants them to meet his new girlfriend, whom he's brought home for the holidays.

The audience can sense what's going to happen next, and they go crazy when Belushi ushers in Miskel his new flame.

Akrd and Curtain try to make sense of it before accepting their son has found true love Harold and Maud style.

But before the show is over, the worst thing possible did happen.

Warren Michael's lost control.

It just wasn't Miskle's doing.

During his set, Elvis Costello, who had just released his first album in the Uba, stopped the song he was playing, less than Zero and told his band to move into radio radio instead.

For Michaels and SNL, this was verboten.

Musical acts didn't just decide on the fly what they were going to do.

As rebellious as SNL was, it still had NBC's censors and the FCC to contend with.

And for all its seeming spontaneity, SNL was planned down to the second that Bill believes is what really set Michaels off.

This show has to basically end ninety minutes, so he has to have a clock going in his head.

So if someone comes in and does something like changes the song, well the song's gonna be maybe a different lane, so that may mess up the whole next whatever the pattern is after that.

So yes, if somebody does something that he doesn't expect or he didn't plan, not obviously an ad lib, that's fine.

If it's funny, that's fine.

But to change the structure in some way, that's not going to go.

And he doesn't like people messing with his show.

Michaels was furious.

He allegedly gave Costello the middle finger from offstage, and again allegedly Costello was banned from appearing on SNL for a decade, and just like that, the show was over.

Miskel joined the cast on stage to wave goodbye in a missus clause costume while the credits rolled for a publicity stunt.

It worked spectacularly well.

The Miskel Spilman episode of Saturday Night Live drew a staggering fourteen point five million viewers, the highest rated episode of the series up to that point, drawing more attention than the season premiere with Steve Martin.

They had this tremendous publicity, So it doesn't surprise me that much that it did extremely well, because beyond everything else was a curiosity like, oh my gosh, what is I gonna do?

The record wouldn't stand for long.

Chevy Chase, returning to host in February nineteen seventy eight, got twenty five million viewers.

Chase also got into a fight with Bill Murray backstage in an apparent clash of egos, which is something else Miskel Spilman couldn't brag about.

What she could lay claim to was being the coolest of customers in a pressure cooker.

You could tell she was game.

She was game for it, you know what I mean.

She wasn't intimidated.

She was Okay, whatever I'm supposed to do, I'm going to do it.

And I think people really admire that.

You know, she as an eighty year old person did not fit naturally, but I think they embraced her, and that's why it worked.

The Miskel Spilman episode remains a remarkable chapter in the history of SNL.

She wasn't the oldest ever host of the show, not even then.

In the second season, actress Ruth Gordon hosted at the age of eighty one, and decades later Betty White would set the record at the age of eighty eight, but Miskel Spilman remains the winner of the first and only Anyone Can Host competition.

No one in the forty seven seasons to follow hosted who was totally unfamiliar to the audience, plucked from obscurity to entertain a pet theory of Michael's.

The closest SNL ever came again to this grand experiment was in nineteen eighty three when Brandon Tartikoff head lined an episode.

While he wasn't all that well known or much of a celebrity, he did have one thing going for him.

He was the president of NBC's entertainment division.

Miskel was the only true civilian to ever do it.

It was in the B range for me, As I recall, I haven't gone back and looked at it.

I thought she was cute and occasionally adorable with what they were doing with her, it didn't stand out.

I mean, if I went back and looked at it, maybe a sketch would stand out to me, but it wasn't overly memorable.

And I think the most notable thing about it is that they never did it again.

They didn't really have to.

As the years went on, SNL grew from a counterculture maverick to an institution.

There were some interactive segments.

Who could forget Eddie Murphy imploring viewers to call in and vote to spare the life of a lobster he wanted to boil in nineteen eighty two, But for the most part SNL had tenure.

In nineteen eighty four, syndicated columnist Bob Green caught up with Miskel to ask about her experience.

She said it had been the most thrilling night of her life.

She said her granddaughter was scared she might have a heart attack, but that she didn't feel nervous at all.

She recalled how nice John Belushi was to her, how Bill Murray and Gilda Radner invited her and her daughter out for dinner, where they all talked until four o'clock in the morning, how she and Radner had remained pen pals, writing letters to one another for years.

Afterward, Miskell was also gifted a signed scrap book which congratulated her on winning.

Lauren Michaels signed it along with several of the writers, so did Bill Murray, John Belucy, Jane Curtin, dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and of course Buck Henry Inside were many of the letters sent in that voted for her.

As late as nineteen eighty nine, she was still watching the show, admitting she had to take a nap to stay up that late.

Her favorite cast member at that time was Dana Carvey, and like most fans of SNL, she thought the show wasn't as good as it used to be.

In nineteen ninety two, Miskell's Spilman, SNL's only civilian host, died at the age of ninety five.

You know what she says.

She had a line in the show where she said they had to give to me because I may only live another twenty five years or something.

Like that, and damn she lived.

She lived fifteen, She lived fifteen more years.

She was ninety five.

The fate of the other contestants is largely unknown.

Richard Neepe died in nineteen eighty seven, but Debbie Blair and David Lewis, who were part of this strange chapter in show business, aren't easily found.

They were candidates for a grand experiment.

Michaels had set out to prove anyone could host SNL and he did well, maybe he found out miss goals.

Bilman could host, But could anyone?

Could you host SNL?

Stand on stage in front of millions of people and not panic?

It's not easy.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to do.

As I said, if you don't have a level of confidence to be out there in front of that live audience and on camera, you could really freeze up and have nothing.

So I don't believe anyone could do it.

No, And I admire the fact that she did it well.

I think there was no built in reason why she should have pulled that off, even with the writing they had, etc.

You see people try to get up and just talk at a PTA meeting and they can't do it.

Could Bill Carter?

Hell No.

The idea of standing in front of an audience and getting them to laugh and the idea of not getting them to laugh is like, you know, facing a crocodile.

For Connie Crawford, the Anyone Can Host contest was meant to be a fleeting thrill.

After Vassar, Connie went on to Juilliard, the prestigious acting school, and got involved in theater, including the improv group, the Groundlings.

She now teaches acting and directing at Brown University.

She's never gone back to look at the episode where she was able to stand next to a legend cast she had revered on television.

After all, it's called Saturday Night Live.

I've never seen it, and I've made a point of not seeing it just because it was so much fun.

I don't want to watch it and go oh, or you know, I don't want to poison the memory because it was live.

I mean, that's the whole thing.

That's kind of hard today to have people understand the how ethereal it was.

If you missed it, you missed it, and that's it, and you would never see it.

That was kind of the magic of it.

And so that was the fun of it for me.

You know.

Then I go back to school, and you know, I just have this kind of happy memory, and I've just chosen to keep it that way because it was really special and silly and and it was a great show.

No oh, she didn't wind up running away to Nicaragua with dan Akride.

It was so disappointing.

He didn't love me, no, But by that point I wasn't in love with him anymore.

Uh No, I mean at that point, if I had wanted to, it would have been Blue Shie.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.

Jake Rowson wrote today's episode.

Jake also wrote last week's episode, Super Streaker, and if you want to dip into the archives, check out E T and Me, another Jake special about a suburban kid who helped Steven Spielberg make his most ambitious movie to date.

Our producer, as always, is Josh Fisher.

The show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and Jason English.

Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering by Chris Childs.

Original music by Alice McCoy, Show logo by Lucy Quintonia.

Our executive producer is Jason English.

If you'd like to email the show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.

Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.