He's Still Chevy Chase (And You're Not)

THE START OF 'TROUBLE' Schaffer ridicules Chase

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''My first impression of Chevy was that he was really good-looking, but kind of mean,'' says Laraine Newman, who worked with Chase during his time at ''SNL'' and has been friends with him since. ''He teased in the way that a big brother would, [aiming for] exactly what would hurt your feelings the most. I say this as someone who loves him. And loves him a lot.''

''He's a Philip Roth character, except that he's not very Jewish!'' laughs Buck Henry, who also met Chase on ''SNL.'' ''Even when he's giving you a compliment you just want to kill him. It's very strange and it's out of his control, not unlike Tourette's. It just made you shake your head.''

So when Chase fell in the late 1980s, he fell far, fast, and onto a bed of rusty nails. Truth be told, the quality of his work had been declining for a long time. Whereas once he saw the best scripts and got the juiciest paychecks -- complete with perk packages and stipulations that his name be at 75 percent the size of the title on screen -- by 1988 Chevy Chase was the kind of actor who'd star in junk like ''Caddyshack II,'' ''Christmas Vacation,'' ''Nothing but Trouble,'' and ''Fletch Lives.'' It wasn't that he wasn't funny anymore. Or even that he didn't know how bad the movies were. He just didn't have any options -- or goodwill -- to draw from.

''I'd say I've done only five movies in my life that were any good, but that was a particularly bad time,'' he says over a cabernet in a gloomy corner of the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. ''There was a whole slew of ''Cops and Robbersons,'' just films that didn't measure up, that didn't stand for anything comedically. They were purely for a paycheck. So I thought, 'Ah, let's try something new.' So I went to Fox with this late-night show.''

''The Chevy Chase Show'' would become a cautionary tale of legend. The show that Chase pitched to Fox was actually pretty interesting, inspired by one of his heroes, 1950s television pioneer Ernie Kovacs. What he had in mind was a variety act, something branded by spitting nastiness and sly sketches, featuring only the occasional guest. The debut episode, for example, was supposed to have seen the host get bitten by a rattlesnake and nearly die within the first five minutes.

Slowly, though, those kinds of ideas were peeled away. First Fox nixed shooting on a soundstage, claiming they didn't have enough parking for a studio audience. Then they secured a theater in L.A. and furnished it with a set that looked remarkably like the ones used by Leno and Letterman. The programming team scheduled Chase's show at 11 p.m. on the rationale that it would give him a jump on the competition, but also conveniently placing him opposite the evening newscasts. And then? Then they advertised, plastering the country with gigantic pictures of their grinning star with a huge space between his two front teeth -- an obvious challenge to David Letterman -- complete with the tagline ''Ready to Fill the Late Night Gap.''