STARDUST AND ANGEL DUST: THE TOM HANKS CONNECTION
Bereft of talent, discipline, or fine motor skills, Conan O’Brien’s ascent to stardom seems inexplicable. So how did O’Brien get his big Hollywood break?
O’Brien’s post-Tehran years were murky, with no fixed address and little documented activity apart from his brief tenure as a staff writer for the short-lived Showtime action comedy “Dickwad and the Leech.” One of the few photos of O’Brien from this period show him wild-eyed and unshaven, sporting a t-shirt that read, “Ask Me About My Priapism.”
Desperate to join the staff of “Saturday Night Live,” O’Brien would feverishly pace outside of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, handing anyone who looked like they worked there his “Benson” spec scripts and immediately launching into his impression of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to little effect.
The key to unlocking the mystery of Conan O’Brien’s hiring by “Saturday Night Live” is a familiar one in the entertainment industry: hard drugs. It is important to recall that O’Brien was the largest PCP dealer on the East Coast at this time in the late 1980s. O’Brien owed his popularity in this capacity to his abysmal math skills, in particular miscalculating the conversion from metric “kilos” to the imperial “pounds,” leading to bargain-basement prices for his customers.
Hollywood star and frequent SNL guest host Tom Hanks is, of course, well known for his insatiable appetite for PCP, which also goes by the festive name “angel dust” on the streets. Even screen legends enjoy a bargain, and Hanks wanted his New York source as convenient and cost-effective as possible, so the “Forrest Gump” star used his influence at SNL to get O’Brien hired to write for the show, where O’Brien was easily reachable to provide Hanks his PCP fix at a price that was practically giving it away.
And as long as the angel dust kept flowing, O’Brien was set up to succeed.

