Playboy Interview: Chevy Chase

More than a decade ago, when NBC's "Saturday Night Live" was still being regarded as anything from "sophomoric" to "subversive," one of the cast's resident loonies took it upon himself to make his presence on the show even more bizarre. "Good evening," he began his weekly mock-newscast segment, "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not." Then, with the slightly off sobriety of a Dan Rather on acid, he would deliver a smug, hip rundown of the week's top news stories.

Conceived and largely written by Chase himself, "Weekend Update" was one of many segments on "Saturday Night Live" that offered a brand of political satire not seen before on network television. But even though the irreverent sketches spotlighted each of the other talented cast members as well, there was something about the TV clown's preppie-hip persona that tickled viewers' funny bones. No matter what he did—artfully pratfalling in mimicry of the accident-prone then-President Gerald Ford, or gingerly picking his nose on camera—he became the show's mainstream favorite.

Within a few weeks of its premiere, "Saturday Night Live" was a runaway hit, but by October 1976, after just one season, Chase got restless and left the show to write, produce and star in a series of specials for NBC.

Inevitably, Chase decided movies were the way to go. Paramount signed him to star opposite Goldie Hawn in a romantic adventure-comedy called "Foul Play," in which he was cast as a San Francisco police investigator. Although the reviews were mixed, the movie did well at the box office, grossing about $45,000,000. It was followed by "Caddy-shack," in which he played a wealthy but strange country-club golfer. That, too, was a hit, and suddenly Chase—dubbed by some media pundits as "the new Cary Grant"—was Hollywood's most sought-after leading man for light comedy.

Then something happened: By the early Eighties, the heady momentum of his meteoric career hit a snag. A series of mediocre pictures—"Under the Rainbow," "Modern Problems" and "Oh! Heavenly Dog"—caused many critics and fans to question whether Chase had sold out to Hollywood. Reviews were generally scathing and, to add injury to insult, "Under the Rainbow" was a box-office turkey. In the midst of all that, he was beset by a series of personal tragedies, including the breakup of his second marriage and the deaths of two of his closest friends, Doug Kenney and John Belushi. He turned to drugs and alcohol, put on weight, mouthed off on talk shows and became a popular target among tabloid journalists.

Then came "National Lampoon's Vacation," in which Chase portrayed the bumbling but enthusiastic Clark Griswold, a typical middle-class family man who takes his kids and wife on an ill-fated car trip across America. A box-office smash (it earned about $63,000,000), "Vacation" put Chase back on top and "Fletch," which came out two years later, won over his critics, who dubbed it his comeback film. Here, finally, was a movie that best took advantage of his good-natured charm as well as his agile comic characterizations. "Fletch" did well and, for the first time in his erratic movie career, Chase was getting spectacular reviews.

His next three films—"National Lampoon's European Vacation," "Spies Like Us" and "¡Three Amigos!"—were not greeted with as much critical enthusiasm, but that didn't seem to faze the film industry's business machinery: Today, Chase is one of a handful of leading men able to command more than $5,000,000 for a picture.

Although he became famous announcing that he was Chevy Chase and we were not, he wasn't Chevy Chase, either. He was born Cornelius Crane Chase in New York City on October 8, 1943, but while still a newborn, his paternal grandmother started calling him Chevy—perhaps after the Washington, D.C., suburb, though no one is quite sure—and the name stuck. His father, Edward Tinsley Chase, a writer and book editor, taught him the singular importance of a sense of humor, while his mother, a concert pianist, gave him an enduring interest in music.

Growing up amid comfortable middle-class surroundings, Chase attended a number of prep schools (where, not surprisingly, he developed a reputation as a class cut-up) and entered Bard College with the class of 1967. There, he took up music—mainly jamming on drums—and teamed up with two fellow students to write and perform "Channel One," a satirical stage revue that lampooned all aspects of TV—including commercials, kiddie shows, newscasts and documentaries.

After graduating from college, Chase wrote spoofs for Mad magazine and appeared as a white-faced mime in public television's "The Great American Dream Machine." He made his theatrical debut in "National Lampoon's Lemmings"—an off-Broadway musical revue satirizing the foibles of rock-and-roll culture—and later wrote and performed on the "National Lampoon Radio Hour," the cast of which included John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray.

In 1974, Chase moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote material for comedians Alan King and the Smothers brothers. It was during that period that he got the big break. Standing in line to see "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," he struck up a conversation with producer Lorne Michaels, who was putting together the first cast and crew for "Saturday Night Live." Michaels was so impressed with Chase's impromptu patter, he offered the 31-year-old comedy writer a job as the new show's head scribe.

To illuminate the twists, turns and pratfalls of Chase's career, we sent free-lance writer John Blumenthal (who had co-conducted the "Playboy Interview" with the cast and writers of "Saturday Night Live" in May 1977) to talk with Chase following the completion of his 14th film, "Funny Farm." His report:

"The last time I interviewed Chevy, he had just left the cast of 'Saturday Night Live' and was about to embark on a new career. At that time, he seemed a bit uncertain as to whether or not leaving the show had been the right decision. He was an articulate interviewee then, quick with the glib repartee, outrageously funny and not shy with acid-dipped put-downs. I was curious to see, 11 years and millions of dollars later, if he were still the same Chevy Chase or if film stardom and family life had altered his perspective.

"Our first meeting took place just before Christmas. Chevy, his wife, Jayni, and their two daughters, Cydney, five, and Caley, three, live in a modern security-gated complex in Pacific Palisades. The house is not a mansion—just a simple, well-appointed, conventionally comfortable dwelling, mercifully free of the usual Hollywood trappings; the sort of place Clark Griswold would buy if he won the lottery.

"Chevy greeted me on the front lawn and led me inside. I noted that the intervening 11 years had not aged him much, though he pointed out a few gray hairs at his temples. We strolled through the kitchen—which was alive with pre-Christmas hubbub—managed not to trip over either of his children and took a tour through an elaborate recording studio that had recently been installed in his guest house. Admitting that he had no idea whatsoever how to use the studio, Chevy sat down near a gargantuan Christmas tree and began talking.

"Over the course of our conversation, it became apparent that Chevy had mellowed. Although still sardonic, the years had softened the outrageous, sassy edge. He seemed mistrustful of the press and, at times, guarded, occasionally even conservative. Nevertheless, I found him to be candid about his mistakes and weaknesses, eager to refute some of the negative legends and more than a little self-deprecating about the ups and downs of his checkered film career.

"Since he had just come off the set of his 14th movie, a retrospective look at his films seemed like an appropriate place to begin. But first, we had to clear something up."

Playboy: What's the biggest misunderstanding about Chevy Chase?

Chase: A lot of people think I'm shorter than I am, and that has always bothered me. Most people think I'm around 5'10?.

Playboy: And instead?

Chase: I'm actually 5'11?.

Playboy: A serious problem. And the second-biggest misunderstanding?

Chase: I think I've gotten a bad rap from people who think I'm a smart-aleck, a wise guy who doesn't care about other people's feelings. But it's quite the contrary. Actually, there aren't too many deep dark secrets about me. I'd also like to state here that I am not a bimbo.

Playboy: Noted. With all your popularity as an actor, there are very mixed feelings about your movies. If you were reviewing a Chevy Chase film festival, which ones would you like best?

Chase: The first Vacation movie was a great picture in many ways. A very funny picture. Fletch was a good picture.

Playboy: And your least favorite?

Chase:Modern Problems was awful. So was Under the Rainbow. To this day, I haven't seen Oh! Heavenly Dog in its entirety.

Playboy: Let's review the rest, briefly. What about Caddyshack?

Chase:Caddyshack was great fun to make, but every time I see it, I think it's worse. I just don't understand my performance. I went in thinking I was the funniest man in the world and could do anything. But when I saw Caddyshack, I realized I couldn't act.

Playboy:Deal of the Century?

Chase: A piece of shit.

Playboy:Seems Like Old Times?

Chase: Mediocre.

Playboy:Spies Like Us?

Chase: I liked it, but a lot of funny stuff was cut out by the director, John Landis, which pissed me off.

Playboy:¡Three Amigos!?

Chase: Very funny, but again, a lot of the funny stuff was cut out and replaced with scenes of lots of Mexicans shooting guns.

Playboy: But most did well at the box office. Why is your audience so faithful?

Chase: Beats me. I can't figure it. No matter what I do, they keep coming. And I don't know for sure who my audience is.

Playboy: You don't?

Chase: Well, children are a big audience for me. Ten-year-olds. Which is great, because as I get older, they get older and they'll stick with me. And I suppose there's still a band of people who remember me from Saturday Night Live who enjoy the stuff I do. So there's a broad base. I'm not sure I understand why, but it just may be that my audience expects a certain thing from me and they usually get it. Even though they didn't get it in Modern Problems or Deal of the Century and those did well at the box office, too....

I do know this: I've met a lot of the big movie stars—the Jack Nicholsons and the Warren Beattys. Before I met them, I always wondered, What makes them such great actors? And the answer is that what you get on the screen is pretty much what you get when you spend time with them. In other words, they are all pretty much the same in real life as they are on the screen. So whatever draws you to people like that may be an intrinsic part of what they are: No matter how much they act the crap out of something, no matter how much makeup or how many hairpieces they put on, it's something about them that's coming out, their individual charisma. And that may be why, regardless of what I do, my audience keeps watching me.

Playboy: You didn't include your first picture, Foul Play, in the Chevy Chase film festival. Any particular reason?

Chase: I was embarrassed when I first saw that picture. The audience liked it, but I was embarrassed.

Playboy: Why?

Chase: Because I hated seeing myself try to act. At the time, it didn't feel natural. What felt natural to me then was Saturday Night Live, writing sketches, appearing live, winging it and having fun. Playing a character who was supposed to be able to shoot a gun and know about detective work—actually acting—was a horrible thought to me. It was very tough. There was a line in that movie that I'll never forget, where I had to say to Goldie Hawn, "You have the most beautiful green eyes I've ever seen." And as I said it, on the close-up, my mouth would twitch; I was so frightened. I was thinking, God, how do I do this? How do I pretend to be something I'm not?

I felt embarrassed that I wasn't doing the heady, edgy, hard-hitting stuff I'd been doing on S.N.L. Instead, I was doing an easy, romantic role that maybe I could fall into doing for the rest of my life, and I was thinking, God help me if that's what it is and there's big money in it.

Playboy: That's what we're getting at: Why haven't your movies reflected more of the "heady, edgy, hard-hitting stuff" you started out with on Saturday Night Live?

Chase: If you think that I could do in a motion picture what I did on Saturday Night Live, you're nuts. It's a different audience, a different medium, a different form of expression. The very topicality of a show like Saturday Night Live changes the approach. It was politically oriented and it put the medium of television down. I can't do the same things in movies.

The point is, there's no way to know what quality is. It's a subjective question. I can't tell you that the quality of my work on Saturday Night Live was better than the quality of my work in Oh! Heavenly Dog. By what standards?

Playboy: Let's put it another way. There's a kind of movie that someone like Tim Conway does and there's a kind of movie that someone like Albert Brooks does. There's a difference.

Chase: Sure, there's a difference. But people don't go to the theater to see what a Tim Conway movie is about or what an Albert Brooks movie is about. They go to see Tim Conway or Albert Brooks. The personality and charisma are stronger than the subject of the movie itself. And it happens to be the same in my case.

Incidentally, Tim Conway and Albert Brooks are two of the funniest guys in the world. In fact, Tim Conway probably gets me laughing harder than Albert Brooks ever will, but whenever I'm asked who I think is funny, I always forget Tim Conway and end up mentioning Albert Brooks.

Playboy: Most of your movies have also been criticized as being relatively safe. Have you made a conscious decision to stay away from certain topics?

Chase: I've made a conscious decision to stay away from movies that call for nudity or the use of foul language or drugs. But that has to do with my private life. I have two little girls and a wonderful wife who are going to see these pictures. Why take the chance that you might hurt the people you're closest to by taking your pants down and showing off your body like, let's say, Richard Gere? On the other hand, if I had Richard Gere's body, I might well take my pants off.

Playboy: How do you decide which pictures to do and which ones to turn down?

Chase: It depends. I picked ¡Three Amigos! because I had always wanted to work with Steve Martin. And I did Spies Like Us because I had always wanted to work with Danny Aykroyd. Interestingly enough, I didn't find Danny as good an actor in movies as he was in Saturday Night Live. Acting doesn't come easily for him. But I wanted to work with him, anyway.

Playboy: What about Under the Rainbow?

Chase: God knows why I decided to make that film. I read the script and thought it was hilarious. Incidentally, it was supposed to be a 55-day shoot, but it turned into a 110-day shoot, because it was all little people, midgets.

Playboy: Why would midgets double the time?

Chase: They're half the size of normal people, so everything takes twice as long. It takes twice as long for them to run across the set in a chase scene.

Playboy: We'll take your word for it. How do you feel about making sequels—such as the Vacation movies?

Chase: The trouble is, I loved the first Vacation and hated the second one—European Vacation. I thought it was awful. It was poorly written, the performances weren't particularly good and the directing was crap. As for a third one, we have to come up with something particularly funny and different, and the only idea we've had so far is something [Monty Python actor] Eric Idle came up with. He thought it might be funny to set a sequel in Australia. That Paul Hogan movie, Kangaroo Dundee, had just come out——

Playboy:"Crocodile" Dundee.

Chase: Right, and it sounded like it might be fun to do a Vacation movie in the wilds of Australia—until Eric started describing what funnel-web spiders can do to you.

Playboy: What can funnel-web spiders do to you?

Chase: Apparently, if a funnel-web spider bites you, you have just enough time to say, "Excuse me, I have to leave the room." And then you're dead. It seems they have a tremendous number of poisonous animals in Australia. But unless the script is hilarious, I don't see it happening. On the other hand, should my career suddenly plummet, you can be sure that I'll be back doing as many sequels as possible.

Playboy: What about Caddyshack II and Fletch II?

Chase: It looks like I will be doing another Caddyshack, but it will just be a cameo appearance, as an accommodation to the studio. As for Fletch II, I don't know; it depends on the script. Fletch feels very much like me, so he's easy to play.

Playboy: How is Fletch like you?

Chase: There's a certain tongue-in-cheek, cynical attitude about Fletch that is me in many ways. The way in which he handles people, the way in which he talks, the way in which he performs are not unlike the way I am with people.

Playboy:Fletch was one of your few critical successes. In fact, a lot of critics called it your comeback film. Did you see it as that?

Chase: I never really understood what they meant by that. There hasn't been a picture for which my salary didn't go up a million bucks each time. And most of them have been hits. So when they say comeback, I'm not sure what they're talking about.

Playboy: We assume they meant it in terms of the film's critical acclaim.

Chase: In which case, it wasn't a comeback; it was actually my first picture, because I've never had critical raves. I've never been treated well by critics.

Playboy: How do you react to that?

Chase: I don't particularly care for critics. There's an ad running now on one of the local L.A. stations promoting a movie critic—Steve Kmetko—and it shows him sitting back and saying, "I can't write, I can't act, I can't sing, I can't dance, so I'm a critic." And it's supposed to be funny and charming. But basically, that's the way I see it. These are guys who can't do it, so, instead, they bust down a guy who spends two years of his life making a picture. In two minutes, on television!

The critics I do like are the ones who write the best. For example, I'll read Pauline Kael on occasion and I'll find that she's completely off the beam, but she writes beautifully. Lovely writing.

I remember saying something about another critic, Rex Reed, on David Letterman, but I asked Dave to delete it and he did. It was a typical Chevy Chase–ism.

Playboy: What's a typical Chevy Chase–ism?

Chase: Something better left unsaid on national television.

Playboy: You want to tell us what it was?

Chase: No, because it's better left unsaid in Playboy, too. It was thoughtless and it was silly and I'm glad it didn't come out.

Playboy: But it's fair to say you don't care much for Rex Reed?

Chase: Frankly, I don't know why Rex says the things he says. He's hurtful. He's always saying things about my movies, like "I don't know what they're smoking out there, but Jesus Christ!" He's generally been personal about his affronts and has said on many occasions that he can't understand how anybody could like a guy like me. I don't understand how a guy with that kind of power can abuse it so thoroughly.

Recently, I saw Rex Reed. I was getting out of a cab somewhere. I hadn't seen him in years and he knows there's something going on between us. Anyway, I was with Steve Martin and his wife, Victoria, and Jayni, my wife, and Jayni said, "Look, there's Rex Reed." In my heart of hearts, I was thinking that what I'd really like to do is pick him up with my left hand and slap him across the face with my right hand, the way Rod Steiger slapped the guy in In the Heat of the Night. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. That was my thought. What, in fact, I ended up saying was, "Rex, I think you're going to like my next movie a lot better." And I think he will. But I also think that I understand why there has been so much bad criticism.

Playboy: Why is that?

Chase: Because the more I see good actors and good movies, the more I understand there has to be an element of truth in what you do on the screen. And what I've been doing on the screen is mugging, getting laughs. There's nothing wrong with that; it's great entertainment. But there's another way to go. I could, for instance, learn how to act. That would be nice.

Playboy: Surely, you're not thinking of doing a serious film?

Chase: Not in the near future, but in my new film, Funny Farm, I don't do any of the traditional pratfallish, mugging things that I'm known for doing in my movies. And it changed my view of acting, because the movie is funnier because of it. It'll either ruin my career or give me a new one.

I just saw my dog walking up the street. He shouldn't be out there. He's a puppy. OK, he's dead; that's it.

Playboy: Our condolences. What about your career as a writer? You began by writing all your own material. Aren't you interested in writing a movie for yourself?

Chase: I'm not sure I can. And I'm not sure I have the time. I don't know how to use a computer. I have children, a family, and I try to spend most of my time with them. Also, I just don't have any major film in my head that's bursting to come out. I'd probably die trying to finish a script—I'd be holed up somewhere writing and thinking, This is terrible; this is terrible.

Playboy: You wrote the original "Weekend Update" scripts on Saturday Night Live. Don't you miss doing that kind of political satire?

Chase: Yeah, I miss it a lot. Back then, in 1976, it was an election year and you couldn't have had better material than Gerald Ford and all the other guys who were running.

Playboy: This election year has had its share of comedy. Have you followed it?

Chase: As closely as I can. I was trying very hard to like Gary Hart, after he came back into the race. I watched him on 60 Minutes and Nightline and he didn't impress me. It was like watching a kid who's not telling the truth. The way he second-guessed the question before it came, the way he would get ready to not quite tell the truth. Then there's Michael Dukakis. I like his eyebrows. Everybody does. But, in fact, I feel sorry for the guys who are running this year.

Playboy: Why?

Chase: Because a precedent was set with Hart, then with Biden. The press wouldn't have touched those personal things years ago; they'd just have stayed out of it. Now they go after anything. Look at Robert Bork—he was probably more qualified than he was given credit for, but the media came down on him and he lost. Of course, he didn't look like the kind of guy you'd want on the Supreme Court. That Ahab-werewolf beard didn't help any.

Playboy: Isn't your criticism of the media ironic considering your career as the "Weekend Update" anchor, during which you savaged practically everybody?

Chase: No. I think that's good fodder for a satirical television show, but as the "Weekend Update" guy, I wouldn't have gone out and followed Gary Hart around to find out who he was screwing. What I did was read the newspapers and make funny remarks about the news. So it wasn't exactly an investigative situation for me.

The problem is, nowadays anybody can be raked over the coals on television. Anybody. Except Ronald Reagan, for some reason. You can't rake over the coals a guy who has lost his prostate and half his nose. He's a granddad. He's a nice fella. But I don't think it ever occurred to him that he might be running the country.

Playboy: Have you met him?

Chase: Actually, I did once. Jayni and I met the Reagans at a Kennedy Center awards ceremony. We went through a receiving line. It seems to me that that is all those guys do, stand in receiving lines. So by the time we got to him, he was pretty much asleep. It was up to Nancy to say hello. I think there's an element of senility creeping in there.

Playboy: Did you talk with him?

Chase: Yeah, a little. It was the Christmas season and there was a Christmas tree and I made a comment about the big, nice wooden choo-choo train that was going around the tree and how it reminded me of a childhood nobody I knew had ever had. He was gracious enough, but I don't think he had the slightest idea who I was. Later, when I was performing up on stage, he laughed a lot. He was sitting next to Bob Hope and when I looked at him, I think Bob was trying to tell him that I was the comedian who had made fun of Jerry Ford. I don't think he really remembered, but that's all right. It's hard enough for him to remember where to go next.

Incidentally, I've gotten to know Jerry Ford over the past few years, and I find him to be an honest person, a terrific guy. Not a lot of bullshit there. In fact, I'll never forgive myself for some of the things I said about him on Saturday Night Live.

Playboy: Such as what?

Chase: Like when I said that looking into Ford's eyes was like looking into 15 milligrams of Valium. Actually, that was one of Michael O'Donoghue's lines, but I said it on "Weekend Update." It was a funny line, but making fun of Ford was easy cheap-shot stuff. In some cases, I think it might even have hurt his feelings, and it had little to do with his effectiveness as President. It was really just comedy, easy cheap-shot comedy. Having met the man and gotten to know him and his family somewhat, I regret some of it, because it's kind of embarrassing to see him now. He's very sweet, almost grandfatherly. On the other hand, I loved doing it and would probably do it again.

By the way, O'Donoghue was also the writer who gave me the Professor Backwards line that got me in a lot of trouble.

Playboy: Refresh our memory.

Chase: It was a "Weekend Update" item that Michael wrote about this guy named Professor Backwards who was killed, shot to death. I had never heard of Professor Backwards, but apparently, he was a night-club entertainer who could speak backward. And Michael wrote that his last words were "Pleh! Pleh!"

Well, I thought that was fucking hilarious. I said it on the air, and the next thing I knew, I had letters up the wazoo, saying, "How could you do this to this man's family?" I went to Michael and said, "You mean he was a real guy?" So I had to send out a form letter apologizing to everybody whose feelings I'd hurt.

Playboy: That wasn't the last time you got in trouble for something you said on national television. There was also the time you called Cary Grant a "homo" on the old Tomorrow show.

Chase: Now, there's an example of some fine thinking on my part. It was a typical wise-ass remark that was misunderstood.

Playboy: So he sued you for $10,000,000.

Chase: And I don't blame him. It was a stupid thing to say, and I could easily have had it cut out of the tape, but I thought maybe he'd laugh. I certainly have nothing against being gay and it wouldn't have bothered me one iota whether or not Cary Grant had been as gay as the day. It didn't have anything to do with that.

Playboy: How did the subject come up?

Chase: Tom Snyder asked me a question that I'd been hearing repeatedly from interviewers for the past two or three years, and the question was, "Has anybody ever told you you're the next Cary Grant?" So I simply told Tom that nobody's ever going to be Cary Grant. I emulate him, but I'm nothing like him. Then, for the laugh, I said, "And I understand he's a homo." And it got a big laugh, such a big laugh that when Tom said, "Let's edit that out," I said, "No, let's leave it in; he'll laugh." Had I picked anyone else, he would have laughed. I unfortunately picked a man who, I guess, was once thought to have been gay. It hadn't really even occurred to me that that was an issue, but apparently it had been an issue in his life and a rather hurtful one.

Well, somebody showed Grant the tape—and this man was relatively litigious, anyway; always had a lawsuit going—so he sued me. And he kept it alive for about three years. Once he realized I felt awful about it, he should have forgiven me, but he just kept it going. Ultimately, I paid somewhere in the vicinity of $100,000 as a settlement.

Playboy: Did he ever ask for a formal on-air apology?

Chase: As a matter of fact, he did. It was supposed to be part of the settlement that I make a public apology. Which I've never done. I always thought that that was a very strange request. I mean, why would he want me to remind everybody on national television that I'd said he was a homo? I kept wondering, How would I do that? Would I go on The Tonight Show and say, "By the way, Johnny, there's something I'd like to say. Recently, I called Cary Grant a homo. I'd like to take it back"? What would that do for Cary Grant? Anyway, I never did it. But I hereby formally apologize. Here it is, on paper, at least.

Playboy: Did you ever meet him?

Chase: At the deposition. It was very funny, actually. The lawyer asked him, "Mr. Grant, what were your feelings when you saw the tape and heard Mr. Chase say that he understood you were a homo?" And Grant replied, in his Cary Grant voice, "I felt I wanted to sue."

In retrospect, I don't think the whole mess ingratiated me much with the gay populace. So my films don't do great in San Francisco.

Playboy: Here's a question that should ingratiate you with the heterosexual populace: Have you ever gotten romantically involved with a co-star?

Chase: Actually, the only one who stands out is Goldie Hawn. We were infatuated with each other. I fell absolutely head over heels in love with her. And I don't think she would take offense if I said that she felt almost the same way about me.

Playboy: Any other romantic flings?

Chase: Yeah, Gregory Hines. It really began very innocently. We were dancing and he put his hand down the back of my pants. It was a big surprise to me. And I found it to be surprisingly delightful. Greg and I went out together for a while, maybe two or three years.

Playboy: Sounds as if you're trying to win back that gay audience. That's it for romances on the set?

Chase: No. There was Benji, of course, but I don't really want to discuss that relationship. Filthy little mutt. All I can tell you is his mouth was very small.

Playboy: Onward. Do you still watch Saturday Night Live—the current version?

Chase: Yeah, sometimes.

Playboy: Are you surprised that it's still going strong?

Chase: No, I'm not surprised. I thought it was in the dumper after just one year. I still think that the quality of the material and the writing were never as good as they were the first year. There were some interesting characters, some better actors, some very funny moments, but it just got weird. It wasn't as edgy. And, basically, it had done what it had set out to do in the first year, which was to parody television. That had a real part in my deciding to leave. To this day, I've not seen any "Weekend Update" that I've liked as much as the ones we did the first year.

On the other hand, I think that the present cast is the best one since the first year. Phil Hartman is a genius. Jon Lovitz is brilliant. And the two girls—Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn—are better than any of the girls we ever had.

But I think the writing has suffered. It's not as good, and I'm not sure why. Maybe Lorne Michaels is not as excited by the show as he used to be. It's old hat for him, and I don't think he spends as much time in the area that he's best at, namely, editing and rewriting material. So the material simply isn't honed the way it used to be. Plus the staff is too big. You go to a staff read-through now and there are 50 people in the room and the material is chosen on the basis of how many of them laugh.

They're also missing the kind of weirdness that people like Aykroyd and O'Donoghue and Belushi gave the show in the old days.

Playboy: There has been some controversy recently about the old days at S.N.L. In a book titled Saturday Night: A Backstage History of "Saturday Night Live," published last year, the authors devote a chapter to you and they don't paint a very pretty picture.

Chase: I cried when I read that book. I literally cried! There were things that were said about me in that book that were just total bullshit!

Playboy: Such as what?

Chase: I don't remember the specifics. If you'd like to refresh my memory....

Playboy: The authors claim that your early fame turned you into an "obnoxious egocentric," that you bragged about how much money you were making, used cocaine heavily, tried to attract attention to yourself by riding around in convertibles, took over the show——

Chase: All lies. First of all, I was not making more money than anyone else. So there was nothing to brag about. I was not a heavy cocaine user. That first year—1976—none of us were making enough money to be heavy cocaine users. Sure, cocaine was there sometimes and some of us liked it, but we were pretty moderate in our use of it. I understand that after I left, it became horrendous.

As for the other accusations—how can you try to attract attention to yourself when you're already getting so much? It's just not true. One thing I do recall is that Belushi used to have his own limo, and sometimes after the shows, he'd ride around with the windows open to see if anybody would recognize him. But Jesus Christ, I was spending most of my time in the studio or the offices. As for the "obnoxious egocentric" business, I'd like to know exactly where they got that quote.

Playboy: It's unattributed.

Chase: Right. The authors obviously talked with people they could get some spice from, people who had been fired or who were jealous or who couldn't get their work on the show. Those guys weren't there. They have no idea. I'd love to see them in a dark alley. And I'd like to have a large pair of pruning shears with me.

The fact is, that year was one of the happiest times in my life. And I was never an "obnoxious egocentric." Just the opposite. I was very sensitive to the fact that I was saying my name every week——

Playboy: "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not"?

Chase: Right, and that it was a name people could easily recognize, more easily than the names Belushi or Aykroyd, which were rarely heard and hard to remember. I was very sensitive to their wants and needs and to their egos as actors. And the fact is, they were better actors than I was. So I may even have been overly cooperative. In my writing, I would consistently put other people into my news items and sketches, people who had less to do on the show. So it hurt me to read shit like that.

Playboy: The book also implies that Belushi resented being upstaged by you.

Chase: Which is really a put-down of Belushi, the worst kind of put-down. John wasn't like that at all. He tended to be bellicose about everything, but we all had that in common, being arrogant young sprouts at the time. But John was never loud about my stardom, unless he was being satirical or sarcastic about it.

Playboy: How did he feel when you left the show?

Chase: I think he was probably delighted, gratified because he would get more attention and maybe a little bit frightened that he would have to live up to something. Which I think he lived up to. Danny, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less. He was upset because he loved me and I loved him, but he wasn't as ambitious as John. John was clearly, at the time, ambitious. In a very natural, human way. There was nothing mean or bad about John.

Incidentally, it was O'Donoghue and I who pushed Lorne Michaels into auditioning Belushi for Saturday Night Live. Lorne didn't really think he wanted John on the show, because John had made some remarks about hating television or something and Lorne was afraid he would be a downer. I don't think he knew how funny John could be.

Playboy: Did your relationship with Belushi change after you left the show?

Chase: After I left, I moved to California, got married and attempted to start a new life. John was still in New York, so we didn't see much of each other. When I did see him again, he was finally getting his share of the fame and was pretty high on the hog.

I remember one time I went to see him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was just after Animal House came out, and he was quite famous. He had a bunch of his cronies around him and I could barely get into his hotel room. Those guys were huge Hell's Angels types with beards, pusher types. And when I finally got to talk with John, I found him to be a little upset with his fame.

Playboy: How so?

Chase: It was funny, really. He said, "Jesus, Chevy, when people see you on the street, they go, 'Hey, Chev, how ya doin'?' When they see me, they hit me." It was funny to me that people just considered him to be a human punching bag.

John also got more deeply involved with drugs than I did. As involved as I was during that period, it was to a lesser extent and with a different crowd. So we didn't really have much of a relationship after that, though there were a few occasions when he visited me and my wife and was distraught over his use of coke and said that he wanted to get off it but didn't know how. I felt that he had a real problem.

But at the time, I was taking it and I didn't feel that I had a problem. By the time you think you have a problem, you're half dead.

Playboy: There were rumors that during that period you were doing $4000 worth of cocaine a week.

Chase: That's ridiculous. I never spent that kind of money. I took it in small increments, a little at a time, over a period of years. At the time, we didn't know it was addictive. We just knew that we had money to spend and that it was a great high.

And there were other reasons—I was pretty badly shaken over my separation and divorce and I tended, during that period, to take drugs to dull my feelings. I didn't know at the time that that was what I was doing, but basically, I was keeping my feelings from being seen or felt. And it always seemed that I could drink more and do more drugs than anybody else and still appear to be straight.

John, on the other hand, was always over the line when it came to taking any kind of drug. He was like a brick. He could take more than anybody and still, somehow, remain upright, like some sort of Bozo doll. Once in a while, we'd have to carry him around, but he was about the same height lying on his side as he was standing on his feet, so it didn't matter.

Playboy: When was the last time you saw him?

Chase: A couple of months before he died. He had a bodyguard with him, a guy named Smokey, who had been one of President Ford's Secret Service guards. John had hired him to keep him off drugs and get him in shape for a new movie, a romantic comedy called Continental Divide. It was, incidentally, a script I had turned down.

Anyway, whenever John and I got together, we were very warm and loving. But whenever there were other people around us, he tended to be more jealous, more anxious, more sarcastic, sometimes even a little pushy. Quite frankly, over the last couple of years of his life, he was an asshole. And I think a lot of his friends were put off by it.

I remember one time, I went back to New York to see one of the shows and there was a party afterward in the Village. It was around the time Animal House had become a hit. John was in a bathroom stall and he was yelling to me something to the effect that he now made more money than I did. It was a little strange for John, but I wrote it off at the time, figuring he was just on a cloud. Not necessarily from drugs but from all the attention he was getting.

Playboy: What were your reasons for not going to his funeral?

Chase: I was against going to his funeral because I thought it would become a media event and a shambles, which I found personally distasteful. I cared too much about him. I loved him. And I did not want camera shots of me and other Saturday Night Live people shedding crocodile tears.

Playboy: Another one of your close friends Doug Kenney [cofounder of The National Lampoon and one of the writers of Animal House], died two years before Belushi.

Chase: That's right. Doug was the first of the casualties. To this day, no one's really sure exactly how he died. A lot of people think he committed suicide. But I just don't believe that.

Playboy: What's your theory?

Chase: Doug and I had gone to Hawaii to dry out. I left Hawaii and Doug stayed on. I got a call from him a couple of days later and he sounded sad and depressed. I don't know why. But the last thing you'd have expected Doug to do was to take his own life. There's a possibility that it was an accident, that he fell. That makes a little more sense to me, because if you stepped too far out on that cliff, the dirt would give way. And that was the explanation the police had given us, that the dirt had given way.

On the other hand, if I recall correctly, his shoes were apparently still at the top of the cliff. Which is a little odd, because I remember a joke I'd pulled on Doug at the Hyatt Regency on Maui before I left. I was on the balcony and I had my cowboy boots on. He was in the other room and I just went "Ahhhhhhhhhh," like I was falling, and he rushed out to the balcony. I was hidden behind the curtains and all he saw were my boots. So it looked like I had jumped out of my boots. So, naturally, I wondered if Doug had pulled some incredibly strange suicide joke, but as I said, I can't believe that he was ever that unhappy. So I tend to doubt that. Which leads me to the conclusion that maybe somebody gave him a push. I have nobody to accuse of it, but there's the possibility that he got mixed up with the wrong kind of people.

Playboy: Pushers?

Chase: Maybe. We met some strange types on Maui. And Doug was not afraid of meeting people like that. So it's not unfathomable that he might have wanted to buy something and someone took his money and pushed him. On the other hand, I have no evidence to support that. I just can't believe he committed suicide. I mean, what did he do, take his shoes off and walk through the briars to the edge of the cliff?

Playboy: You've been fairly open about your problems with coke and alcohol, but you also became addicted to painkillers.

Chase: That was a few years later. I got hooked on psychoactive drugs—Percodan and Percocet—which I was taking for my back. As you know, I've spent much of my career pratfalling without padding up or taking any other precautions. Over the years, I've really worn myself down, so I have an illness called degenerative-disc disease, which once you have, you can't get rid of, and which is rather painful. And I got hooked on painkillers.

Playboy: When did you first realize you had a problem?

Chase: At Gerald Ford's Humor and the Presidency Seminar in 1986. It was one of the worst times I've ever had.

Playboy: How so?

Chase: I was a nervous wreck. I was having panic attacks and I couldn't stop sweating. I was scared to death. I was shaking in my boots. At the time, I couldn't understand what it was. And what it turned out to be was withdrawal from the painkillers I'd been taking. I had run out of pills. The problem was, I was hooked.

When we got home, Jayni got me and my doctors together one afternoon. We were ostensibly all going to play tennis, but only one of my doctors had his tennis clothes on. The other one was in a suit. And I had this strange intuitive sense that something was going on, some sort of "intervention." And that's exactly what it was. Jayni appeared in the room in tears, and then they were saying, "Chev, we think you've got a problem with prescription drugs and there's only one way to get out of it. We know a place, the most private place in the country...."

Playboy: The Betty Ford Center?

Chase: Right. Only it's not the most private place in the country. Far from it. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if everybody there is on the National Enquirer's payroll. I got there and registered under my doctor's brother's name, and within an instant, there was a photographer outside my window. The next day, Jayni was followed by two reporters from the Enquirer.

Playboy: How had they found out you were there?

Chase: Somebody called my home, my private line, pretending to be Tim Hutton and saying he needed to get in touch with me to wish me a happy birthday or something. I hardly knew Tim Hutton—I'd met him once on a plane—but Jayni didn't know that. So she got conned into giving him the Betty Ford Center's phone number. He asked if I was there, they said yes and he hung up. And the next thing I knew, it was all over the papers.

Playboy: What was the therapy like?

Chase: We called the therapy "God-squadding." They get you to believe that you're at death's door, that your family is at death's door, that you've ruined it for everybody, that you're nothing and that you've got to start building yourself back up through your trust in the Lord. Lots of (continued on page 162)Chevy Chase(continued from page 65) lectures and harsh reassessments of your life. It's a horrifying experience and you end up coming out of it so raw, you can never have any self-respect again. On the other hand, I must admit it worked for me, and I was there only two and a half weeks.

Playboy: It's hard to imagine you playing it straight and obedient for two and a half weeks.

Chase: I wasn't. I started raising hell. I was a little like Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. I didn't care for the scare tactics being used there. I didn't think they were right. So I became kind of a rabble rouser, getting on their cases for the way they were talking to the patients and the amount of blame they were shoveling out and the amount of crying they were making people do. They used the phrase "Thank you for sharing that with us" so much it made me go nuts.

Playboy: Were you the only celebrity there at the time?

Chase: As far as I know, it was just me and Madonna. Just kidding! Seriously, though, you'll never see me back in one of those places again. Never. You could put one of those pills in front of me right now, and I'd say, "No, I don't want it." [Pause] You don't, by any chance, have any on you, do you?

Playboy: No, sorry. Your wife, Jayni, was a top-class pentathlete, wasn't she?

Chase: Yeah, she's great. She's still fast as hell, a great sprinter.

Playboy: Has she inspired you to become physically fit, now that you're cleaned up?

Chase: I've always been physically fit.

Playboy: What do you play?

Chase: The piano.

Playboy: Hmmm. Moving right along, were you always a funny kid?

Chase: I was never the class clown, but I was funny in a subversive way. There was always a class clown who would make loud remarks and stuff, but I would do things the teacher never knew were happening.

Playboy: What things?

Chase: Like getting everybody in study hall to cough at the same moment, stuff like that. So all of a sudden, 50 guys would cough and just about give the teacher a heart attack. Or I'd walk into study hall and keep dropping things on the floor, making a lot of noise. But I'd do it with a straight face, so there was no way I could be castigated. I was always trying to do things to screw up the people in authority.

Playboy: Where do you think you got your sense of humor?

Chase: My father. I was once asked to write a school essay on the most valuable quality of human behavior. When I asked my father what he thought that was, he said, "A sense of humor." He explained it as a sense of perspective, of priorities.

And to this day, he's the funniest man I know. He funds just about everything funny. He's a well-respected book editor, an editor emeritus at MacMillan, 68 years old, a man who wears pinstripe suits. But he's the kind of person who will walk down the street and suddenly stop by a hydrant and lift his leg.

Playboy: You come from a family with money and social standing, don't you?

Chase: Well, Mom's a plumbing heiress. Her adoptive father was a guy named Cornelius Crane, whose father was one of the founders of the Crane Valve Company. They made all their money in World War One by making valves for ships and for many of the toilets that, to this day, we stand in front of. Although some of us stand to the side.

Anyway, when Cornelius died, he had a lot of money, a hundred and something million bucks. But he had already remarried and was no longer my mother's mother's husband. And his new wife—some Japanese woman I've never met—encouraged him to disown all of his former friends and family, and when he died, he left all his money to the Zen Buddhist Foundation. My mother got crap. A lot of people think I come from a rich family, but we never saw any of that money.

Playboy: But your upbringing was at least comfortable, wasn't it?

Chase: Yeah. Up and down. I went to P.S. six in New York for a while, but then I went to private schools after that. It seemed to me we were always struggling one way or another, but there was always some money somewhere. So we were never poor.

Playboy: Your college years were 1963 through 1967, the beginning of the protest era. Were you involved in radical politics?

Chase: To a degree. I went to a few marches, but I was never with SDS or SNCC. I didn't affiliate myself with anybody in particular. But I suppose I was as radical as the next guy. I never took any drugs in college either, which was strange, since Bard was pretty well known for drugs. But I was scared to death of pot and acid in those days. It wasn't till later on that I took acid, and it made me paranoid and afraid. I was led to believe that I would get to know myself better, but I always felt that that was a load. All it meant to me was that you got to know what you were like as a psychotic.

Playboy: Did you avoid the draft?

Chase: Yeah. There was this jazz pianist named Soyce who used to hang around the Bard campus a lot. He was a nice guy, but he was generally considered to be mentally deranged. So just before my induction physical, I studied Soyce, figuring I'd try to be like him at my physical, sort of incommunicado. His tongue would hang out of his mouth and he'd stare at the ground and he wouldn't say anything to anybody and his head would sway back and forth.

So I showed up at my physical acting like Soyce. Also, I'd been drinking a lot of strong coffee and I hadn't showered in three days, so I was just a teeming nervous wreck, sweaty and stinky. On top of that, I'd put about a tube of hair grease in my hair. Basically, I looked like the kind of person you wouldn't want anywhere near you. When they made us take off our clothes, I kept my wallet over my balls, as if I didn't want anybody to see them. So I was definitely not giving the appearance of somebody you'd want to spend a lot of time with in the barracks.

Next came the written exam. There were questions like "Have you ever wet your bed?" and "Have you ever had headaches?" and so on. I'd taken that same exam at my preinduction physical the year before and checked "No" for all the answers. This time I checked "Yes." Hell, everybody has wet his bed at least once. Everybody has had headaches. Everybody has had homosexual tendencies—the way I saw it, beating off with a friend at the age of 13, just to learn how to do it, could legally be considered a homosexual tendency.

So this time I checked "Yes" to all of the above and I was immediately ushered into the office of a shrink, who turned out to be—I'm not kidding—the typical Germen psychiatrist with a goatee. And he said, with a German accent, "Mr. Chase, I see there's been a tremendous change in one year. How do you account for this?" And I didn't say anything; I just shook my head and let my tongue hang out. "Do you like girls?" he asked. "Yeah." "Do you like boys?" "Yeah." "Which do you like better?" I said "Boys," meaning, of course, that most of my friends were guys. I never had a problem liking men's genitals, but I'd be the last guy in the world who'd want to have mine anywhere near another guy's.

So they gave me a card that said 4-F and I was out of there.

Playboy: What if your act hadn't worked? Did you have a plan B?

Chase: I probably would have started kissing the guy next to me on the bus to boot camp.

Playboy: After college, you moved to Los Angeles.

Chase: That's right. I was encouraged to move to L.A. by a William Morris agent. He said L.A. was the place to be if I wanted to work in TV, which I did. Of course, I went straight onto the unemployment line for six months.

Playboy: What was your initial impression of L.A.?

Chase: I hated it. I saw myself adapting like a cockroach. I felt that my brain was going to slowly wither away and I wouldn't even know it. And, of course, that's exactly what happened.

Playboy: But at least you got yourself off unemployment. You mentioned earlier that your acting fee has gone up by $1,000,000 with each picture. That would put your salary around $14,000,000 per movie.

Chase: That's right.

Playboy: That's what you make? Fourteen million dollars per movie?

Chase: No. I meant it has gone up after every picture. I have a price—it's anywhere from $5,000,000 to $6,000,000 a picture. Plus a ten-point gross.

Playboy: Do you handle your own finances?

Chase: No, my wife does, with a little calculator.

Playboy: You're kidding, right?

Chase: Right. Actually, I have people who do that for me. I don't know where the money goes. I keep seeing people who make less than I do who appear to be much wealthier than I am. I'm pretty frugal and careful with my investments. I don't have a lot of stocks. I invest in land. And I'm trying to build up a huge pension plan for my kids, so that everybody's taken care of when I pop off.

Playboy: If you suddenly became box-office poison, what would you do?

Chase: I'd move in with Elliott Gould and we'd open a pig ranch together.

That's a terrible, frightening expression—"box-office poison"—and I'm sure my blood pressure shot up as soon as you said it. Frankly, I have no idea what I'd do. It may happen. But I have to believe that I'm good at what I do. There's obviously some longevity here. A lot of people have come and gone since I came onto the scene. That's not necessarily to say that the quality of my work has stood the test of time. I'm sure someday people will grow tired of me, and God knows, I wouldn't blame them. I'm just hoping my family won't.

Playboy: Chevy, any ideas for your epitaph?

Chase: Yes. "Dig him up and give him CPR."

Playboy: Any other hopes for the future?

Chase: Yes. I'd like to live long enough for everyone who reads this interview to have forgotten it.

Playboy: Anything else?

Chase: Yes. Can I put my clothes back on now?

"I felt embarrassed that I wasn't doing the heady, edgy, hard-hitting stuff I'd been doing on 'S.N.L.'"