Fall Guy

He is 32, looks like the boy next door and answers to the name of a Washington suburb. He is a graduate of a variety of Eastern private schools and has a degree in audio engineering, a mean rock-piano style and a reputation of sorts as a soccer player for Bard College. But it was not until last fall, when he stepped before the cameras on Saturday Night, that Cornelius ("Chevy") Chase discovered his full potential. He fell over. Slowly, gracefully and with complete abandon, Chevy's 6-ft. 4-in. frame crumpled to the floor, accompanied by the giggles, then laughs and finally roars of laughter from the studio audience.

"The fall is my favorite thing. I love making people think I've killed myself," says Chevy. He has been heading for that fall for several years.

The son of an editor at Putnam, an old New York City publishing firm, young Chase could not decide whether to be a writer, a pianist, a drummer or an actor. Says his father: "He was a quadruple threat." So Chevy did everything. In 1971 he wrote for and acted in The Great American Dream Machine, PBS's comedy series. Then he toured with several rock bands and spent a year writing for Mad magazine. In 1973 he combined all his talents, becoming music director, writer and actor on the National Lampoon Theater Company's off-Broadway revue Lemmings, which he helped create.

Last year Chevy was writing for the Smothers Brothers when Producer Lorne Michaels hired him for SN. Several of the show's writers were given brief on-camera appearances. But only Chevy--making vulgar faces behind the backs of his guest editorialists on "Weekend Update"--clicked. "I guess I just look so straight and normal," says Chevy, "nobody expects me to pick my nose and fall." Impressed by Chevy's instant popularity, Michaels began to use him more and more. Now Chevy often outshines the guest host. His success has not been wholeheartedly welcomed by the rest of the gang. There is some tension and jealousy. "But what do you do?" asks Anne Beatts. "Tell him, 'Don't be so good, hold back'?"

Actually, the pace is too fast at SN to allow much time for ego. "We literally live the show," says Chevy. "I no longer have a private life." Married at 24 and now divorced, he has a girl friend in California whom he has not seen in two months. NBC executives expect great things of him. Impressed by his bland cheekiness, which suggests the young Bob Hope, they are hyping him as a possible successor to another all-American boy, Johnny Carson. Nothing doing, says Chevy. "I have no desire to spend the rest of my life interviewing actors. That's what I'm trying to expose in my writing--all that glitter and pretension."

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