“Hello, Molly!,” the former “Saturday Night Live” star’s new book, recounts early family tragedy and a career of transgressive humor.
HELLO, MOLLY!
A Memoir
By Molly Shannon with Sean Wilsey
291 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
Some people break into show business; others burst. Like her famous character on “Saturday Night Live,” the nervous Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher, Molly Shannon was more of a battering ram, laying siege to the false-fronted structures of Hollywood with blunt, repetitive force. When you reach the part in her new memoir, “Hello, Molly!,” where the fortresses finally crumble for her, you want to get out the pom-poms and cheer.
Along with her genius for physical comedy and deadpan inflection — “don’t get me started,” she’d intone, as the mediocre stand-up Jeannie Darcy — Shannon has an uncanny knack for transgression in pursuit of higher truth.
Early in her career, she and a friend from drama school came up with something they called the Mamet Scam. They pretended to be assistants in the office of David Mamet, the notoriously Hollywood-averse playwright: arranging each other appointments with agents, casting directors and producers, drawing on their experience selling health-club memberships. (“Always be closing,” as Mamet wrote in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”) They ran this racket with energy for six months — Shannon getting a small part on “Twin Peaks” out of it — and were only busted once, by a talent manager for the Brat Pack.
Later, Shannon and another friend from an improv group called the Lumber Company created their own stage show, hiring musicians with money Shannon was making as a hostess at Cravings, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. They kept the show under an hour, with drinks, to tempt busy industry types. Shannon also invited restaurant diners, homeless people, her dentist. “There was nothing more important than packing the house,” she writes. “Pack it, pack it, pack it, pack it!” In front of those crowds, she developed another brilliant character, Sally O’Malley. In her stretchy red pantsuit, O’Malley is the patron saint of all 50-year-old women who refuse to roll over and become Norma Desmond but instead want to “kick, stretch and KICK!” (If you haven’t yet made O’Malley’s acquaintance, go watch the “S.N.L.” sketch in which she tries out for the Rockettes.)
Like many of her comedy colleagues, Shannon has already written a children’s book, “Tilly the Trickster” (2011). And her cadences in this memoir, worked out with her co-writer, Sean Wilsey, tend toward a Seussian singsong simplicity, even when dealing with very grown-up, dark subjects. Right after she met Lorne Michaels, the overlord of “S.N.L.,” she got mugged by a drug addict. “I was so excited that I’d just met Lorne that I didn’t even care!” she remembers. After she discovered her father, Jim, dozing off drunk with a cigarette in his mouth in a Florida hotel room, she writes: “I felt so mad I ran, ran, ran, ran, ran, ran as fast as I could down the beach.”
Shannon had reason to be plenty upset. (She’s also fond of italics.) In 1969, when she was 4 years old, Jim was driving the family home to Cleveland from a party and crashed their station wagon into a steel light pole. Shannon’s mother, Peggy, younger sister, Katie, and cousin Fran all died in the accident. An older sister, Mary, survived with Molly, as did their father, with injuries that required him to relearn how to walk. (O’Malley’s “surprise big kick,” Shannon writes, “is me wishing my dad could kick those braces off his legs.”)
The rest of “Hello, Molly!” describes how this devastated trio managed to go on. Parts are as plain and strong as Hemingway, with some internal monologues that are downright Joycean. Really. It’s very sad and very, very funny. Redemptive and uplifting and all those corny words.
Jim was a dapper, tempestuous, boundary-crossing man who turned out to have been deep in the closet, muffled by dust bunnies of guilt and alcoholism. He would pop Dexamyl to clean the house, play Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor movies, serve his daughters Stouffer’s meals boiled up in plastic bags. He encouraged rule-breaking and adventure, like cutting school or climbing over barbed wire to get into an amusement park for free — scratches be damned.
When Shannon was 13, she and an 11-year-old friend — “I think you’re going to have a lot of friends,” her mother had said prophetically — dressed up in ballet costumes to project innocence, sneaked onto a plane, rattled off a fusillade of Hail Marys and flew with terror and exhilaration to New York. There they visited Rockefeller Center, Shannon’s future workplace, dined and dashed, and stole T-shirts, “like two little con artists on a crime spree.”
She somehow makes a similarly rollicking three pages of a grim incident previously told on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” about the diminutive actor Gary Coleman from “Diff’rent Strokes” attacking her, a 22-year-old hopeful, in his hotel room at the Plaza. As she fended him off in bemused horror, her panoramic eye noted the dialysis machine in the corner (Coleman died in 2010).
Underneath any shenanigans in “Hello Molly,” there is bottomless pathos. As a small child Shannon had a “very dirty” neck, because it was difficult for her father, with his leg braces, to get upstairs to give her a bath. She luxuriated in other children’s mothers shampooing her hair before a school show. (I love her bitter, unrealized vision for a sketch about “Hot Cocoa Girls,” those more fortunate, self-coddling peers, who are “always chilly” and wrap themselves in fuzzy blankets.) Now a mother herself, when other people complain about parenting, she thinks: “There is nothing to be upset about. We’re alive!” There are few better mantras.
Shannon’s father’s deathbed sequence is an especial corker. “Small parts,” he instructed her. Shannon doesn’t have to chew the scenery, or hack it down like Mary Katherine Gallagher, to steal the show. Consider her appearance as an overweening mother-in-law in the recent HBO series “White Lotus.”
Like most of her roles, like this book, it packs a big wallop.
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