THE LATE FRANEE LEE, a beloved Lake Worth Beach resident who passed away in 2023, is receiving a posthumous encore this week with the 50th anniversary of the debut of the comedy show “Saturday Night Live.’’
The first episode of “Saturday Night,’’ as it was called for its first two seasons, aired Oct. 11, 1975. (It’s the subject of a new movie.) And Lee, who worked on the show’s first five seasons and won an Emmy, helped make it happen.
That original “SNL” cast was known for outlandish sketches featuring characters that became pop-culture icons. The Blues Brothers, the Killer Bees, the Coneheads are known as much for their stage antics as for their memorable costumes, created by Lee.
“SNL” turned out to be a small part of a wider body of work for Lee, who designed costumes for plays, musicals and movies, dressing the likes of Angela Lansbury, Al Pacino, Paul Newman and Christopher Walken before moving to Lake Worth Beach in 2017.
But because it blossomed into a television institution, “SNL” represents her work that the general public knows best.
In 2021, Lee shared highlights of her career in a profile in ByJoeCapozzi.com. What follows are highlights about her "SNL" days.
Chance encounter with Lorne Michaels
In 1974, Lee and set designer Eugene Lee, her husband at the time, collaborated with Broadway director Harold Prince on “Candide.” Aside from Tony Awards for costume and production design, the show gave the couple a serendipitous career-changing reward.
Sitting in the audience for one of the performances was a Canadian television producer named Lorne Michaels. As Lee recalled, Michaels loved the look of “Candide” and asked the Lees to help him launch a new late-night comedy show for NBC.
The Lees were among the first hires for a creative support team for a cast of mostly unknown comics with sharp improvisational skills called “The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.” Franne and Eugene had never been in a commercial television studio until they walked into Studio 8H at Rockefeller Plaza for the first time in 1975.
In those early days of the show, expectations were not high. Each team member was given a six-week contract, which served both as a deadline and incentive to be as successful as possible.
“We only had six weeks to prove ourselves,’’ Lee said.
On a shoestring budget, she created the costumes and looks for characters played by unknown actors such as John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner.
“Lorne said everything had to be cheap,’’ she recalled. “It’s not easy to do a live show and make it work. This was more like theater. Only every week it was a different play.’’
Every week, Lee went on scavenging hunts for costume pieces in Manhattan, carrying lots of dimes so she could check in with the SNL team on payphones. Among her finds: the red sweater, polka-dot collared blouse and eyeglasses with the chains worn by Radner’s dim-witted Weekend Update commentator Emily Litella (“Never mind…”).
“Franne took the script that had maybe a couple of terms to describe what the character looked like, but she brought it to life,’’ said Alan Zweibel, a writer who won three Emmys for his work on those first five SNL seasons.
“Franne, the way she outfitted it, the way she designed the look and wardrobe for the show, had not been seen on a variety television before,’’ he said.
Belushi 'hated the bee costume'
For a skit about two detectives, she dressed Belushi and Aykroyd in black suits. During a rehearsal break one day, they started improvising and goofing off with the band.
The Blue Brothers were born.
“The Blues Brothers came alive spontaneously,’’ she said. “The TV cameras weren’t even rolling.’’
She made the killer bees costumes out of cutoff long johns painted with yellow and black stripes. The bee antennas were ping pong balls attached to headbands — with wire that Lee’s father, the late Marty Newman, engineered so the antennas danced as the bees moved their heads.
Belushi “hated the bee costume’’ and tried to talk Michaels into removing him from what he called “this stupid bee sketch,’’ she recalled.
Backstage during rehearsals, Belushi had a habit of not wearing underwear, which created some awkwardness for the wardrobe staff, she said. Making sure not to single out Belushi, Lee posted a sign on the wardrobe room door: “ALL CAST MEMBERS MUST WEAR UNDERWEAR ON SATURDAY. THIS MEANS YOU!”
For a 1976 show hosted by Raquel Welch, Lee was assigned to design a pair of oversized breasts for a science fiction spoof called “Planet Of The Enormous Hooters.” Welch was to play an alien refugee from a distant world where she doesn’t fit in. (“Look! Her breasts are so small!”)
Welch objected and the skit was cut.
“There is a false glamorization of ‘Saturday Night Live,’’’ said Lee, who noted that she was among some of the support staff who were older than most of the actors. “We thought some of it was a little sophomoric.’’
Mick Jagger 'beast' shirt a burden
A few times she helped dress the musical performers, including a memorable collaboration with Mick Jagger for a 1978 SNL performance by the Rolling Stones.
The band was going to play their latest hit, “Beast of Burden,’’ and Jagger asked Lee if she could find a T-shirt for him to wear during the performance — a shirt with some kind of a beast on it.
Lee dispatched assistants to Manhattan, but no beast T-shirt could be found. She sought help from her friend, painter Edie Vonnegut (daughter of novelist Kurt Vonnegut).
“I bought a bottle of wine and three plain T-shirts and we stayed up all night hand-painting beasts on the shirts,’’ Lee recalled.
The next day, the shirts were left in Jagger's dressing room. Watching the Stones rehearse later, Lee was horrified to see Jagger tear it off his chest at the end of the performance. She said he did the same thing two more times, during another rehearsal and after the live show, destroying all three shirts that Lee and Vonnegut had painted for him.
After the show, Lee approached Jagger to register a complaint.
“I said, ‘You know, Mick, you owe me big time. I worked all night on those shirts,’’’ she recalled.
A friendly bargain was struck: Lee was allowed to keep one of the giant “Some Girls” album covers that decorated the stage and the Stones autographed it for her.
Right place at right time
Lee enjoyed looking back at her time on SNL, the lifelong friends she made and the talented artists she worked with.
She said she took these photos of Laraine Newman, Jane Curtain and Belushi, who's relaxing in the hospital bed that he somehow managed to wheel into his dressing room.
But she said she had a few regrets about her contributions to the show.
She claimed Michaels refused to give her permission to file a patent on the Killer Bees headband and antennas she developed. In 1982, two years after she left SNL, a version of the antennas called “Deely Bobbers” were selling at stores and amusement parks across the United States after a Los Angeles inventor said he got the idea from the SNL skit.
And in the five years she worked on SNL she was a member of the United Scenic Artists union. Unlike the writers, NBC’s contracts with the local left out any possibility of Lee and others collecting residuals or royalties from syndication and reruns.
“I'm not happy about it. People are still making money from that show. And now that they are streaming those shows, the writers are making money off it,’’ she said.
Even though viewers rarely watch the show’s credits, Lee’s visual contributions arguably were as important as the characters created by the writers and the performances of the actors.
"Not only did she get the joke and provide exactly the right outfit to support it, whether she was dressing Jane Curtain as Tom Snyder's mother or outfitting Lily Tomlin in a skating outfit, she created looks that became indelibly part of the characters,'' the late SNL writer Anne Beatts once said.
"If no one can forget the Bees, the Coneheads, the Blues Brothers or Gilda as Lisa Loopner on her way to the prom, in large part it's because of Franne.''
Lee attended SNL’s 40th and 45th anniversary celebrations.
“I feel like I have been blessed with being in the right place at the right time,’’ she said in 2021. “Serendipity was always on my side.’’
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach, where he is among many residents fortunate to have called Franne Lee a friend. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.
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