THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY SHANNON
Actor recounts comedy career, tragedy that changed her life in memoir
“It gives you a resilience. You’re able to jump over obstacles. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken that first chance if I hadn’t had those disadvantages.” — Molly Shannon
In her own way, Molly Shannon recently explained that life can take away but it also gives back. As a teenager, Shannon said she had applied to a selective private school — one whose acceptance might have put her on a track to an adulthood of influence and prestige, if not necessarily future roles on TV shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Other Two” and “The White Lotus.”
While she awaited the school’s judgment, she was also anticipating the arrival of her Sea-Monkeys, the brine shrimp sold to trusting children with colorful comic-book ads that depicted them as exotic pets.
And on the same day she learned the school had rejected her, Shannon said, “my Sea-Monkeys hatched.” She paused and added brightly, “So, you never know.”
That blithe attitude has been fundamental to many of Shannon’s best known characters, like Mary Katherine Gallagher, the maladapted but plucky schoolgirl who was her signature role on “SNL.”
Shannon, 57, is more knowing than her oblivious characters, but she shares their determination to forge ahead happily no matter the circumstances, and that spirit is vivid in her new memoir, “Hello, Molly!”, recently released by Ecco.
But before readers get to Shannon’s picaresque tales of her upbringing and career, they must first follow her account of one of the darkest days of her life and the automobile accident that devastated her family.
“It feels very vulnerable to open yourself for people, but I wanted to be brave and just push through it,” Shannon said in a recent interview.
On the night of June 1, 1969, when Shannon was 4, her father, Jim, was driving the family back from an all-day party to their home in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He had been drinking, and had taken a nap earlier that afternoon. About 90 minutes into the trip, he sideswiped another car and then swerved into a steel light pole. Although Molly and her older sister, Mary, survived with injuries, their younger sister, Katie, and cousin Fran were killed in the collision; her mother died later in the hospital.
Shannon lived with relatives while her father recuperated. When she returned home, school was a blur. “I was like, why is everyone so chipper?” she said. “They were like, ‘The wheels on the bus go — ’ and I was like, ‘I’m exhausted.’ ”
While the accident could have also ruptured the relationship between her and her father, Shannon said that they grew close in the years that followed. “Harboring blame or resentment or anger doesn’t do any good for anyone,” she said. “He pulled himself up and went on to raise two daughters. He did his very best, and he was proud of me. I admired him.”
After graduation, Shannon toughed it out in Los Angeles, working as an office temp and a restaurant hostess and occasionally landing appointments with agents by running a scam where she and a friend pretended to work for David Mamet. (According to
Shannon, she was only busted once.)
Although Shannon believed her future was in dramatic acting, she landed reliable representation and, eventually, her slot at “SNL.”
“I was looking for clients, and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Steven Levy, who became one of Shannon’s first agents and is now her manager. “She was literally bleeding. Her knees were bleeding, and her elbows were dripping blood. When she did Mary Katherine Gallagher, she was so committed that she threw herself into the wall.”
“Hello, Molly!”, which Shannon wrote with Sean Wilsey, goes on to recount her time at “SNL.” She joined the long-running sketch comedy show in 1995, and several of her hit characters — including the unapologetically over-the-hill dancer, Sally O’Malley — were in some way inspired by her father’s theatricality.
Then, as Shannon was preparing to leave “SNL” in 2001, she learned that her father had come out as gay in a phone conversation with Levy. Weeks later, in a private moment when Shannon thought that her father was about to share this with her as well, he
instead disclosed that he had prostate cancer.
More weeks went by before Shannon found the courage to ask him, “Have you ever thought you might be gay?”
She writes that her father answered without hesitation, “Most definitely.”
Jim Shannon died in 2002, moments after he had advised Molly to get married and have children and complimented her on her small role in the comedy “Analyze This.”
Molly Shannon, who married artist Fritz Chesnut in 2004 and has two teenage children, told me she found value in unfurling her personal story from the moment of the accident — a tragedy that dictated the course of her earliest years but which she would not let dominate her life.
“It gives you a resilience,” she said. “You’re able to jump over obstacles. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken that first chance if I hadn’t had those disadvantages.”
Shannon said the crash left her with a sense of loss that she will never fully be able to dispel. “I couldn’t believe that good things could last,” she said.
For example, she said, “When I first started at ‘SNL,’ I didn’t want to hang anything up in my dressing room. I was afraid this might all blow up. I always felt like disaster was right around the corner.”
Writer-director Mike White, who has cast Shannon in projects such as “The White Lotus,” “Enlightened” and “Year of the Dog,” said her book had a candor that is rare in show business memoirs.
“In a way that’s not didactic or earnest or preachy, she’s giving you the keys to how to live,” White said. “How do you move through loss and turn your life into something beautiful? It made me feel like I need to stop complaining about whatever bumps in the road I’ve experienced.”
Shannon will next be playing a star personality on a fictional home-shopping network in the Showtime comedy “I Love That For You,” which has its premiere April 29.