Chevy Chase

For other uses, see Chevy Chase (disambiguation).

Chevy Chase
Chase and his wife Jayni at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007
Born	Cornelius Crane Chase
Other names	Chevy Chase
Height	6 ft 4 in (1.93 m)

Chevy Chase (born October 8 1943) is an Emmy Award-winning American comedian, writer, and television and film actor. Born into a prominent family, Chase became a sensation as a cast member in the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live. He also hosted the Academy Awards twice (1987 and 1988) and briefly had his own late-night talk show, The Chevy Chase Show.

Biography

Early life and career

Chase was born Cornelius Crane Chase in Lower Manhattan, New York City, to Edward Tinsley ("Ned") Chase, a prominent Manhattan book editor and magazine writer, and Cathalene Parker Browning, whose father Miles Browning served a critical role at the Battle of Midway in World War II. His mother, a concert pianist, was adopted as a child by Cornelius Vanderbilt Crane, and took the name Cathalene Crane. Her mother was an opera singer who performed several times at Carnegie Hall. Chase is a 14th-generation New Yorker, and was listed in the Social Register at an early age. His mother's ancestors arrived at Manhattan starting in 1624. Among his ancestors are New York City mayors Stephanus Van Cortlandt and John Johnstone, John Morin Scott (General of the New York Militia during the American Revolution), Anne Hutchinson, dissident Puritan preacher and healer, and Mayflower passenger William Brewster. Chevy's paternal grandfather was artist/illustrator Edward Leigh Chase, and his granduncle was painter/teacher Frank Swift Chase.

Chase was named for his adoptive grandfather Cornelius, who lived at Castle Hill, Ipswich, Massachusetts, which was later used in the filming of The Witches of Eastwick. The name Chevy was a nickname bestowed by his grandmother. As a descendant of the Scottish Clan Douglas, who repelled an English invasion at the Battle of Cheviot Hills ("Chevy Chase") in 1436, the name "Chevy" seemed appropriate to her. Chase's parents divorced when he was four; his father remarried into the Folgers coffee family, and his mother was remarried twice. Both his parents died in 2005. His mother, who later married Juilliard professor and composer Lawrence Widdoes, is buried at the Artists' Cemetery in Woodstock, New York. He made recent claims that he was abused as a child by his mother and stepfather, John Cederquist.

Chevy Chase was a persistent class clown. He was expelled from private schools like New York City's Dalton School and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He did well at the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and attended Riverdale Country School in The Bronx. He was valedictorian of his senior class and entered Haverford College, but was expelled (or 'separated') from it after one semester. He then transferred to Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he studied a pre-med curriculum, dated actress Blythe Danner for several years, and graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of arts degree in English. An urban myth is that he was suspended from Haverford for leading a cow to the second floor of his dormitory, knowing full well that a cow will go up a staircase willingly, but not down.

Chase did not enter medical school; instead he played drums for a time with the college band The Leather Canary, headed by school chums Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. At the time, Chase called the group "a bad jazz band," but Becker and Fagen went on to success after they changed their band's name to Steely Dan. Chase is gifted with absolute pitch. He played drums and keyboards for a rock band called Chamaeleon Church, which recorded one album for MGM Records before disbanding in 1969. Before becoming famous as a writer, actor and comedian, Chase worked in many jobs including as a cab driver, truck driver, motorcycle messenger, construction worker, waiter, busboy, fruit picker, produce manager of a supermarket, audio engineer, salesman in a wine store, and a theater usher.

Chase began to branch out into comedy (he cited Ernie Kovacs as one of his biggest influences), making it a full time career by 1973, when Chase became a cast member of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, a syndicated satirical series aired on Sunday nights. (prior to this, he had been in an early underground comedy ensemble called Channel One which he co-founded in 1967, he had written a one page spoof on Mission Impossible for Mad Magazine in 1970 and was a writer for the short lived Smothers Brothers TV show comeback in the early 1970s among other things) The Lampoon Radio Hour also featured John Belushi, another future "Not-Ready-For-Prime Time Player" on NBC's Saturday Night. The two also appeared at this time in National Lampoon's off-Broadway production of Lemmings, a sketch and musical send-up of popular youth culture (in which Chase also played the drums during the musical numbers). He appeared in theaters in The Groove Tube which was directed by another co-founder of the aforementioned Channel One comedy group, Ken Shapiro.

Saturday Night Live

Chase was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live, NBC's late night sketch television show. He typically ended each episode's cold open sketch with a pratfall and the now-famous introductory line: "Live from New York, It's Saturday Night!"

Chase was also the original anchor for the Weekend Update segment, introducing himself with the catch phrase "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not" and concluding with the also well-known "good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow." It would be this opening and closing which Chase would be well known for, although he experimented with other openings to Weekend Update like saying "I'm Chevy Chase, and you can't" on one Update and "I'm Chevy Chase, and I love you all very deeply" on another. He also opened each Update with him engaging in sexual innuendo laden talk with his girlfriend on the phone, not realizing he was on camera until it was hilariously too late. Chase wrote some jokes as well for Update, like The News For The Hard Of Hearing where Chase would read (as a public service message in his words) the top story of the day, aided by Garrett Morris, who would repeat the story by basically shouting it at the top of his lungs. Chase claimed his Weekend Update would later be the inspiration for shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. He also had a recurring gag as the Landshark. One of his early, and most memorable trademark moves were his pratfalls during many of the show's opening skits, which often poked fun at President Gerald Ford. Chase opened most SNL shows with "The Fall of the Week," after which he would exclaim "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!". It was during one of these skits (during the second season) when he was injured on an unpadded podium, which bruised a testicle and forced him to broadcast two of the shows segments live from his hospital bed. His racially-charged "word association" skit opposite Richard Pryor from SNL's first season is frequently cited by television critics as one of the funniest (and most daring) skits in the history of SNL.

Chevy Chase at the private party after the premiere of the movie A Star is Born, on the third floor of Dillon's Disco, December 18, 1976

In a 1975 New York Magazine cover story which called him "The funniest man in America", NBC executives referred to Chase as "The first real potential successor to Johnny Carson" and claimed he would begin guest-hosting The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson within six months of the article. Chase actually never did guest host the Tonight Show during his early peak years of success, and in fact, didn't even appear on the program until 1978, when he was promoting a prime time special for NBC (his whirlwind success even got to the point where he was labeled "the next Cary Grant," a label to which he took exception). He was the first breakout star of SNL and was also the only cast member who actually identified himself by name in the first season, in the "Update" sketches, which only helped his immediate visibility. (The original show open only showed the names of the cast members on the same title card without their faces and without being introduced by Don Pardo by name). Chase was committed contractually to Saturday Night Live for only one year as a writer, not an SNL cast member. He had signed a one year writing contract and became a cast member during rehearsals just before the show's premiere. Nonetheless, he received two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award for his comedy writing and live comic acting.

Feuds

Chase was the first member of the original SNL cast to leave the show, in 1976, and has said that he regrets leaving after just a year-and-a-half. However, Chase was never friendly with most of the cast—a rivalry with John Belushi went all the way back to their work on the National Lampoon radio show. By the time he left, early in the second season, Chase couldn't even get along with Lorne Michaels, the show's creator and producer. After leaving SNL, Chase moved to Los Angeles and married his girlfriend, Jacqueline Carlin. Chase continued to make the cameo appearance here and there as the second season wound down; one of the more memorable ones was when he appeared on "Jeopardy 1999", a sketch in which the popular game show was set in the future (at that time, 1976) and hosted by Steve Martin, who was that week's SNL host. One of the questions on the show was "His Career Fizzled After Leaving Saturday Night". The punchline was that nobody could answer the question, because no one could remember who that person was whose career fizzled after leaving SNL, even the character played by Chase. SNL didn't stop there at poking fun at his sudden departure, an episode with Paul Simon found Simon outside the NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center to find Chase begging for change while strumming an acoustic guitar badly.

Eventually, Chase was replaced by Bill Murray, who got into a legendary backstage brawl with Chase moments before Chase's scheduled 1978 hosting stint on SNL. Witnesses report that Murray initially provoked Chase about his "hated" status on the show, leading Chase to make fun of Murray's bad skin condition (comparing it to the surface of the moon). Fellow Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Player Laraine Newman, discussing the incident for authors Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller in their history of the show, Live From New York, said Murray took a shot at Chase's reported marital problems. Newman quoted Murray as saying, "Why don't you fuck your wife once in awhile? She needs it." The two men were pulled apart by Dan Aykroyd and Belushi, whom some credit with angering Murray in the first place. Though the altercation occurred off the air, the story became so widely known that Chase and Murray duetted together during Chase's next hosting appearance, singing a "unity" medley including "We Write the Songs", "We Can't Get No Satisfaction", "We Shot the Sheriff" and "We Are the Walrus". Chase claims he and Murray have long since buried the hatchet on the incident, and appeared in Caddyshack together.

Chase also had a long running feud with Howard Stern prompted by Stern calling Chase's home and speaking with his housekeeper on the air. The segment was replayed on Labor Day, 2007 as a part of "Howard Stern's Tapes Blowout" special on SIRIUS Satellite Radio.

Hosting stints

Chase hosted SNL nine times after he left but was banned from ever hosting the show again after the February 15, 1997 episode, due to his verbal abuse of the cast and crew during the week. Chase's rudeness to SNL cast members became legendary, particularly after his 1985 remarks to openly gay cast member Terry Sweeney suggesting that a perfect skit for Sweeney would be one in which Sweeney would play an AIDS victim who gets weighed every week,however according to a recent Time Magazine Q&A this story is untrue. He admits to having gay friends all his life and that most of the stories you hear are untrue.[1] Although Chase has not hosted the show since 1997, he appeared on the show's 25th anniversary special in 1999 and was interviewed for a 2005 NBC special on SNL's first five years. He also made a cameo on three episodes: once in a Caddyshack skit (featuring that week's host Bill Murray), the October 25, 1997 episode with guest host Chris Farley, and as the Land Shark in Weekend Update during the October 6, 2001 episode hosted by Seann William Scott.

To this day, Chase admits that leaving SNL so soon was the biggest mistake of his career. He said as much when he appeared at the unveiling of Lorne Michaels's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To Shales and Miller he put it this way: "I'm still hurting, I still grieve for all those years that I could have had there." Chase clarified to David Letterman that the reason he left SNL was for his girlfriend, Jaqueline. He stated that he was "infatuated" with her and moved to LA to marry her, because she wouldn't move to New York where SNL was taped.

Film career

Among Chase's early film roles were Tunnel Vision, Foul Play, and Oh Heavenly Dog. The role of Eric 'Otter' Stratton in National Lampoon's Animal House was originally written with Chase in mind, but he turned the role down to work on Foul Play. Chase said in an interview that he chose to do Foul Play so he could do real acting for the first time in his career instead of just doing schtick. The role went to Tim Matheson instead. Chase followed Foul Play with the successful Harold Ramis comedy Caddyshack, in 1980.

Chevy Chase at the premiere of the movie Seems Like Old Times, December 10, 1980

Chase narrowly escaped death by electrocution during the filming of Modern Problems in 1980. During a sequence in which Chase's character wears 'landing lights' as he dreams that he is an airplane, the current in the lights short-circuited and arced through Chase's arm, back, and neck muscles. The near-death episode caused Chase to experience a period of deep depression, as his marriage to Jacqueline had ended just prior to the start of filming. Chase continued his film career in 1983's National Lampoon's Vacation, directed by Ramis and written by John Hughes. He married Jayni Luke in 1983, and in 1985, he starred in Fletch, the first of two films based on Gregory Mcdonald's Fletch books. Chase joined SNL veterans Steve Martin and Martin Short in the Lorne Michaels-produced comedy ¡Three Amigos! in 1986, admitting in an interview that making ¡Three Amigos! was the most fun he has had on a film. The trio hosted SNL that year, the only time the show has had three hosts on one show.

At the height of his career in the late 1980s, Chase earned around $7 million per film and was a highly visible celebrity. He appeared alongside Paul Simon, one of his best friends, in Simon's 1986 second video for "You Can Call Me Al," in which he lip-syncs all of Simon's lyrics. Chase hosted the Academy Awards in 1987 and 1988, signing on to the proceedings in 1987 with the memorable opener, "Good evening, Hollywood phonies!" Chase filmed a second sequel to Vacation, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, in 1989, which, thanks to its holiday theme, has become his most durable film, airing on NBC every December, and played saxophone onstage at Simon's free concert at the Great Lawn in Central Park in the summer of 1991. Later in 1991, he helped record and appeared in the music video "Voices That Care" to entertain and support U.S. troops involved in Operation Desert Storm, and supported the International Red Cross.

Later work

In 1980, Chase released a self-titled record album with cover versions of songs best known by Randy Newman, Barry White, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, Donna Summer, Tennessee Ernie Ford, The Troggs, and Sugarhill Gang. The album was co-produced by Chase and Tom Scott. Among "short people" Chase names in his version of Newman's "Short People" is his friend Paul Simon, who features Chase in the video of "You Can Call Me Al." The Beatles' "Let It Be" is recorded a la Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Chase's career took a downturn in the 1990s. Few of Chase's subsequent films have been able to duplicate the critical or commercial success of his early career. As fellow SNL personality Paul Shaffer later joked, "You made us laugh so much and then you inexplicably stopped in about 1978." In fact, Chase's film successes, Caddyshack, Fletch, and National Lampoon's Vacation, all were products of the 1980s. Chase had three consecutive film flops from his later period: 1991's Razzie award-nominated Nothing But Trouble, 1992's Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and 1994's Cops and Robbersons. The three releases grossed $34 million in the U.S., combined. Even the durable Vacation series ground to a halt, following 1997's Vegas Vacation installment, the only one without the National Lampoon imprimatur. Some of the more recent movies starring Chase (e.g., Vacuums, Rent-a-Husband, Goose!) have not been released in the United States.

In September 1993, Chase hosted The Chevy Chase Show, a weeknight talk show, for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The show was cancelled by FOX after only six weeks. Chase later appeared in a commercial for Doritos, airing during the Super Bowl, in which he made humorous reference to the show. He was Hasty Pudding's 1993 Man Of The Year, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994. He starred with Farrah Fawcett and many precocious kids in Man of the House, which immortalized the YMCA Indian Guides program in 1995, and received Harvard Lampoon's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.

In 1998, Chase was offered the lead role of Lester Burnham in the Academy Award-winning drama, American Beauty, but he turned it down, fearing that it would tarnish his family-friendly image. The role went on to win Kevin Spacey the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Chase visited Cuba in the late 1990s. Afterward self proclaimed former Cuban intelligence officer Delfin Fernandez said that Chase's room was bugged with both video and audio recording devices, a claim dismissed as false by Cuban officials. Later at Earth Day 2000 in Washington, D.C., Chase stated that mixed economies can work, stating, "Socialism works. I think Cuba can prove that". He was also investigated but not charged with using assets in countries where it is prohibited by the U.S. State Department. He was roasted by the Friars Club in 2002, but the occasion was notable for the near-total disconnect between Chase's career and the list of performers who agreed to appear. In 2005, Chase was the keynote speaker at Princeton University's Class Day, part of commencement activities for the graduating class of 2005. Though he mentioned that he "left his written speech on the corner of the bathtub at home," he spoke for about fifteen minutes about sense of humor and the perspective on life that it creates, while also proclaiming, "I strapped my dong down this morning," and discussing deleted scenes from the movie Dirty Work. Chase returned to mainstream movie-making in 2006, co-starring with Tim Allen and Courteney Cox in the comedy Zoom. Chase has begun "preliminary talks" with Lorne Michaels to return to SNL most likely Weekend Update, for the 2007 Fall Season. Chase says "it's a perfect political year" for him "to get in there and raise a little heck."

Chase is an active environmentalist and charity fundraiser. He raised money and campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1990s and John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential Election. Chase has harshly criticized President George W. Bush with comments like, "This guy in office is an uneducated, real lying schmuck... and we still couldn't beat him with a bore like Kerry." In the same speech he allegedly stunned the crowd at a People For the American Way benefit at the Kennedy Center, referring to the President as a "dumb fuck". Several Bush detractors present at the event distanced themselves from Chase's comments, with Norman Lear remarking, "he'll live with it, I won't".

Chase guest-starred as a murder suspect in "In Vino Veritas", the November 3, 2006 episode of Law & Order, which was apparently inspired by actor/director Mel Gibson's notorious arrest for drunk driving in 2006. Chase himself was arrested for drunk driving in 1995 with a blood alcohol level of more than double the legal limit.

Personal life

Jayni, Caley and Cydney

Chase is the father of three girls, Cydney, Caley, and Emily. He lives with his wife, Jayni, in New York. He took part in Amnesty International's The Secret Policeman's Ball in 2006.

Chase is also an avid fan of jazz music. He publicly made this known when he hosted the 2007 Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island.

Filmography

• Walk... Don't Walk (1968) (short subject)
• The Groove Tube (1974)
• Tunnel Vision (1976)
• Foul Play (1978)
• Oh Heavenly Dog (1980)
• Caddyshack (1980)
• Seems Like Old Times (1980)
• Under the Rainbow (1981)
• Modern Problems (1981)
• National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
• Deal of the Century (1983)
• Fletch (1985)
• National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985)
• Spies Like Us (1985)
• Three Amigos (1986)
• The Couch Trip (1988)
• Funny Farm (1988)
• Caddyshack II (1988)
• Fletch Lives (1989)
• National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)
• Nothing But Trouble (1991)
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)
• Hero (1992)
• A Century of Cinema (1994) (documentary)
• Cops and Robbersons (1994)
• Man of the House (1995)
• Vegas Vacation (1997)
• Dirty Work (1998)
• Snow Day (2000)
• Vacuums (2002)
• Orange County (2002)
• Bad Meat (2003)
• Bitter Jester (2003) (documentary)
• Rent-a-Husband (2004)
• Goose! (2004)
• Ellie Parker (2005)
• Funny Money (2006)
• Doogal (2006)
• Zoom (2006)

Further reading

• I'm Chevy Chase...and You're Not (The Authorized Biography) by Rena Fruchter. Virgin Books, 2007. ISBN 1-85227-346-1.
• Who's Who in Comedy by Ronald L. Smith. Pg. 102-103. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0-8160-2338-7.
• Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. Back Bay Books.

External links

• Chevy Chase at IMDb
• Template:Ymovies name
• The Chevy Chase Show - Jump The Shark.com
• Short Bio
• Interviewed by his daughter
• discography

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