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Al Franken: Even Worse Than You Think

By Jonathan V. Last
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Anyone who has followed the career of Al Franken should be unsurprised to learn that he was a jerk to Leeann Tweeden. Because if you go back to Live from New York, Tom Shales’ brilliant oral history of Saturday Night Live, Franken appears as a lying, drug-abusing (and distributing), jackass.

A couple choice excerpts—remember, this is an oral history, so they’re from the primary sources:

Al Franken: There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn’t have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff. People used to ask me about this and I’d always say, “No, there was no coke. It’s impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs.” And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs.

So Franken liked to tell funny lies about not using drugs when he wasn’t writing a book castigating Republicans which was titled—this is so great—Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Maybe now when he says that he “doesn’t remember” his encounter with Tweenden the way she describes it, this is a funny lie, too.

And by the by, what sort of drug user was Franken? Was he just some low-level pothead doing it on his own and not hurting anyone? Have a look at Dick Ebersol’s account:

Dick Ebersol: My office was on the fourth floor. The writers basically never got there before one o’clock in the afternoon—ever. We had so little space. Herb Sargent was back in a corner. In the hallway to Herb’s office were like Franken and Davis and Alan Zweibel, the three apprentice writers. Al and Tom had bought their first-ever cocaine, and they had it all out on the desk. First time they were ever able to buy any. As apprentice writers, their pay was, I think, $325 a week. So they have the cocaine on the desk, they’re like literally staring at it. I’m off in the distance. I’m in a tough place because I’m supposedly the executive, but I decided it wasn’t my job to play the policeman. Suddenly this figure comes roaring through the room. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had a straw in his hand. He gets to the table, and he has half of that stuff up his nose by the time they knew who it was: Belushi. They didn’t know whether to be thrilled that Belushi had just done this to their coke or be absolutely decimated, because that represented about half the money they had in the world at that time.

Ha-ha. So funny. Boys will be boys and besides, it’s all just a harmless little thing.

But my favorite Franken story in Live from New York is this one, which encapsulates his self-righteousness, his jerkiness, and his dishonesty, all in a single paragraph:

Al Franken: I had heard Spiro Agnew was going to be on Tom Snyder’s show, so I just wanted to meet him and harass him a little bit. I brought a tape recorder and went down to their studios on six. Agnew was in the makeup room, so I sat down in the next makeup chair as he was getting made up and I said something like, “You called student protesters bums, and aren’t you the bum?—I think that’s what I said—”because you took money?” And he just said, “I never called them bums. That was Nixon.” It was like beneath his dignity to address this kid with long hair and to spend too much time on it. I thought I’d pressed the button to start the tape recorder, but I didn’t. I’d had it on and turned it off or something. So I didn’t get it on tape. And then I also felt stupid because I checked it out and I was wrong: Nixon had called students bums. At least I did get to say to Agnew that he was a bum.

I mean, sure, Agnew fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded a Bronze Star. And yeah, I guess it’s true that as governor of Maryland, Agnew repealed the state’s laws against interracial marriage. But you know, he was a double-plus bad Republican and Franken was a coked-up, 20-something comedian in New York. So he really showed that guy.

And that’s not even getting into the time that Franken, in the writer’s room, spitballed a skit with Norm MacDonald playing Andy Rooney in which Franken would drug and rape Lesley Stahl.

Al Franken isn’t the monster Harvey Weinstein was. But he should never have been let into American public life, either. Having him lose his seat over what he did to Leeann Tweeden would be like getting Al Capone for cheating on his taxes.

Which is to say: It’s not the main problem with him, but we’ll take it.

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