Louise Lasser's SNL 'Breakdown' Was All Part Of The Plan
If you weren't alive during the 1970s or don't have a particularly strong connection to the era, you may not recognize the name Louise Lasser. For a few years in the mid-'70s, Lasser was as popular and ubiquitous a TV star as Mary Tyler Moore or Carol Burnett. But unlike those comediennes, Lasser's unique blend of comic wit, ingenue charm, and unfathomably deep, ponderous melancholy hasn't had as much lasting power in the cultural psyche.
That may have less to do with her impact as the star of the boundary-breaking, ahead-of-its-time soap opera satire "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," and more to do with what the stress of producing five episodes a week per season did to her. "Mary Hartman" centered on an insecure, terminally cheerful yet chronically depressed Midwestern housewife who's never even encountered the concept of depression. The show was developed by Norman Lear as a kind of canny, psychological confrontation with the effects that hyper-consumerism was having on the American public, as seen through the gradual, searing deterioration of a golden-hearted housewife played by Lasser.
Part of the legend of Louise Lasser is the way that during the run of "Mary Hartman," Lasser and writers Ann Marcus and Gail Parent incorporated aspects of Lasser's notorious public life into the character she played on TV. When at the end of shooting the first season and suffering the delirious effects of a flu, Lasser was arrested while trying to purchase a dollhouse; the following season opened with Mary refusing to leave a shop until they sell a dollhouse to her daughter.
More comfortable than most slipping into the space between fiction and reality, Lasser brought the same experimental daring that made her a star to a guest spot on "Saturday Night Live" in 1976. But things didn't go quite as planned.
Reality and fiction blur
In her opening monologue for the July 24, 1976 episode of "SNL," Lasser appeared on stage dressed like her character in "Mary Hartman." She began to dawdle in a stream-of-consciousness slur like Mary, but spoke in a way that indicated it was actually Lasser, perhaps struggling to distinguish between herself and her character. She eventually runs backstage, the cameras in pursuit, and locks herself in her dressing room. Only Chevy Chase dressed as Landshark manages to coax her out.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Toast conducted in 2013, Lasser recounted the events that led to what has gone down in history as a real, live mental breakdown. "Oh, well that was on purpose," she began. The monologue in which Lasser and Hartman appear to be at a battle for psychic supremacy was "performed as written," according to Lasser. The real conflict behind the scenes came down to all the other material. "They wrote sketches for me and I didn't want to do them, because they were salacious," she explained. One bit to be performed with Gilda Radner revolved around "the size of guys' organs ... I just couldn't imagine performing it in front of my parents," Lasser explained.
Lasser's refusal to perform certain sketches led some cast members to grow angry with her, and prompted head writers Michael O'Donoghue to call her "clinically berserk." Lasser disputes the rumors that she was the first host to be banned from the show that persist to this day. Though the backstage strife had to do with everything but the monologue, it was the (deliberately) unhinged monologue that branded Lasser a liability in the press. It was the only sketch performed exactly as planned, and it was evidently so convincing that it wound up hurting Lasser in the long run.
Ahead of her time
According to Lasser, the "SNL" writing team "had a lot of meetings in my house in California, and they told me I'd be allowed to write, and none of that was true." Lasser was a co-equal creator of Mary Hartman with Lear and the show's writers. In the interview, Lasser recalled how difficult it was to "get" the Mary Hartman character when she first encountered her on the page. "Mary is just this big hole of blankness. Now I realize I didn't get who she was because I was in there and I couldn't see myself in there. If you stand out here you can see what fills it in." There were times Lasser remembered feeling like she was "gradually morphing into" Mary.
"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," is something like a cross between a John Cassavetes film and "The Donna Reed Show." Piercing in its psychological intensity yet hitting all the same comedic beats as a standard American-as-apple-pie sitcom. That kind of balance takes extreme care, and when the "SNL" writers tried to take what Lasser had so intentionally created and play it for simple laughs, she refused to go along with it. "They were so resentful because of the notoriety around me," Lasser said, and also uncomprehending that she wouldn't lighten up and agree to some raunchy sketches.
Lasser was misunderstood in her time, and her cultural memory now lies largely dormant. Shout Factory released the first-ever box set of "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" in 2013, which acquainted some younger people with the radical show for the first time. Decent rips of each episode also exist across YouTube, DailyMotion, and the like. But if you're at all curious about Lasser, watch the SNL monologue. It's hard not to be compelled by her sheer intensity and audacity.