Chapter 15

TOUCHDOWN FEVER

Brian J. Cooper, an accountant from New York turned sports promoter, received a startling call at his Toronto office from Bruce McNall one day in the fall of 1990. McNall had become acquainted with Cooper through their mutual ally Wayne Gretzky, whom Cooper had known for a decade. Now Gretzky and McNall were turning to Cooper for advice about the idea of buying the Toronto Argonauts football franchise in the Canadian Football League.

As owner and president of Hollis Communications, based in Toronto, Cooper had a number of large corporate clients, such as John Labatt Ltd. and Seagram Canada. He also organized Gretzky’s annual celebrity tennis tournament. Since Gretzky’s move to Los Angeles in 1988, Cooper had been introduced to McNall and had spent some time hanging out with the two of them.

McNall had already talked to Cooper about looking for opportunities in Toronto, especially the possibility of a National Basketball Association expansion franchise, but Cooper was taken aback when McNall called to ask what Cooper thought about the Argos.

Harry Ornest, the hugely unpopular owner of the Argos, was sick of fighting with officials of SkyDome, where the Argos played, about restaurant concessions, and he put the team up for sale. The Argos had been troubled since moving to the Dome in 1989. They were drawing on average only 32,000 fans per game.

Cooper gave McNall something less than a ringing endorsement for the purchase of the Argos. He knew the market-place, and he knew the problems; he had seen what had happened, or failed to happen, in recent years. But McNall was confident he could turn a losing franchise into a profitable one through a little razzle-dazzle, just as he had done with the L.A. Kings.

McNall pushed ahead aggressively, insisting the team was a good buy. The next thing Cooper knew, he had a call telling him McNall and Gretzky had decided to go ahead and buy the Argos, and were bringing John Candy into the deal as a third partner. The price was five million dollars. Candy put in one million dollars and became a twenty per cent owner. McNall was the majority owner.

“Well, if you’ve made the decision, we’ll have to see whether we can make a go of it,” said Cooper. “This is a fickle marketplace. You’re going to have to invest.”

The way Candy told the story, he had phoned his friend McNall to congratulate him on buying the Argos. Instead of accepting Candy’s good wishes, McNall replied: “I want you to be involved. Get out your chequebook.”

Candy got excited but then had to persuade his own financial advisers it was a good idea. “I have accountants who think I’m insane,” he joked in a TV interview with Valerie Pringle on CBC’s “Midday.”

As for Wayne Gretzky, he and Candy genuinely liked one another. Gretzky was very appreciative of Candy’s raucous sense of humour. They liked to hobnob, swapping hilarious yarns about their adventures on the road, and they sometimes played golf together. Each was flattered by attention from the other. The Argo deal gave them an excuse to spend more time together.

Soon Candy was needed in Toronto for the first of countless public appearances to promote the Argos. Brian Cooper, who was hired as chief operating officer of the Argos, had set up a press conference for the three new owners.

McNall, Gretzky and Candy rolled into town, trying to sweet-talk the press with promises of reversing the fortunes of the woeful Argos and even rejuvenating the entire Canadian Football League. They wanted to get the community interested in the Argos again; they wanted to attract families to the Dome and make sure everyone went home feeling entertained. They promised fun, good times, and lots of glitter.

Candy, who had started to grow a beard for his next movie, Once Upon a Crime, set to work on advertising, including TV spots, to stir up more interest in the Argos. And, he told the press, he planned to call on some of his celebrity friends, including Dan Aykroyd, for help.

*   *   *

Once Upon a Crime, Candy’s last starring role for the next two years, was another one of those movies Candy should have said no to. But the picture was being touted as a big career opportunity for Candy’s friend Eugene Levy, making his directing debut. Candy felt he had to do the picture for Levy. It would be the fifth and last movie they made as a team (not counting two made-for-TV films).

Produced in Europe by the Italian-born mogul Dino De Laurentiis, Once Upon a Crime was a remake of a 1960 Italian farce about six tourists who have come to Monte Carlo to make money at the casino, only to become suspects in the investigation of a murder. None of them has committed the crime, but they all act guilty.

Frank Yablans, a prominent Hollywood producer and former head of Paramount Pictures, had called De Laurentiis to request the rights to remake it as an American movie.

The reply: “Thanks for the idea, it’s a good one.”

After seeing the film, one has to wonder: Was it really such a good idea?

According to De Laurentiis, “The moment we saw Levy we knew his style was exactly what the piece needed.”

The only problem was convincing Levy it would be hard enough to direct the movie without being one of the main actors. Levy settled for a cameo role as a casino cashier. De Laurentiis told Levy to make a fast-moving film and not take it too seriously.

“Pressure is one thing I never allowed myself to feel,” said Levy at the time. “Thinking about the responsibility of doing a major movie with big stars could bring a grown man to his knees—so I didn’t think about it.”

Candy gets top billing, but his role as a compulsive gambler seems minor compared to those of Richard Lewis and Sean Young as an unemployed actor and a woman recently jilted. Also in the cast: Cybill Shepherd, Giancarlo Giannini, James Belushi and George Hamilton.

The script, by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers, is a flimsy contraption that relies on such plot devices as a lost dog. It’s meant to be a delicious romp in the manner of a Pink Panther comedy, but it has no style or rhythm. There must have been a lot of people in the audience who felt Richard Lewis was expressing their sentiments exactly when he delivered the line: “When is this thing going to be over?”

Once Upon a Crime is the sort of idiotic bad movie Candy and Levy used to spoof unmercifully in their SCTV days. The SCTV version would have cost a lot less and been a lot funnier. Candy appears to be on automatic pilot throughout the proceedings. At least the movie gave him an excuse to spend some time in Rome and Monte Carlo. Afterward he told a colleague he should have known better, and this was the last time he would ever make a movie as a favour to a friend.

While he was still in Rome finishing Once Upon a Crime, Candy started to work on TV and radio spots to promote the Argos. By the time he arrived in Toronto, there was already an outbreak of Argo fever. That’s because the new owners grabbed newspaper headlines by signing the hottest player in U.S. college football, Notre Dame’s Raghib (Rocket) Ismail for $18 million (including $4 million up front).

The idea was to create a frenzy of hoopla building up to opening day. McNall was trying to repeat the success he had bringing Gretzky to Los Angeles. But there was a big difference between Wayne Gretzky and Rocket Ismail.

“The trick Bruce did with Wayne,” notes Brian Cooper, “was using a star to turn everyone in L.A. into a hockey fan. He wanted to try the same thing with Rocket. But Wayne was the athlete of the decade, whereas Rocket was just an unproven collegiate talent. And Rocket had a personality that wasn’t really amenable to being put on public display.”

Candy may not have realized what he was getting into, but in fact he was abandoning a major Hollywood career in order to become a glorified cheerleader for his home-town football team. Some of his Hollywood friends thought it was a form of career suicide.

Whether he was conscious of it or not, this seemed to be Candy’s way of turning himself into a clone of Bruce McNall, and at the same time becoming Johnny LaRue for real—the party-loving big star come home to run the football team, drive around in limos and entertain friends in the palatial club owner’s box at the Dome.

Psychologically Candy and McNall had a few things in common. Both had powerful yearnings, going back to painful experiences they had in high school, to be macho heroes on equal footing with star athletes. Both had such a strong need to be well liked that they put great effort into being extravagantly generous and saying what they felt other people wanted to hear. And both had a strong capacity for self-delusion.

However there was one huge difference: Candy was ethical where McNall was crooked. But Candy was too eager to go along on McNall’s joyride. What he failed to see—perhaps because he didn’t want to look too closely—was that McNall’s affairs were already mired in corruption when Candy went into business with him. Though he claimed assets of $133 million, McNall was just a simple-minded salesman who depended on clever accountants to cook up shady deals so complex even the experts at Merrill Lynch and the Bank of America couldn’t understand them. Little did the bankers or John Candy realize that within the walls of the sleek Century City office of McNall Sports & Entertainment, McNall and his top employees were taking millions in perks and payoffs out of the company coffers even while negotiating newer and bigger loans to make the payments on the old ones.

In a way, McNall’s story was a modern re-enactment of the Wizard of Oz. Because he was thought to have superhuman powers, people projected onto him their yearnings and aspirations. McNall’s mystique would eventually turn out to be merely smoke and mirrors, but for a few years, his aura had suggested the wealth and splendour of Oz. The yellow brick road was crowded with people who wanted to meet him, hoping a little of his magic would rub off on them, and some of them were people with very big names.

McNall’s baronial style set the tone for the new football regime in Toronto. The Argos spent $250,000 doing over the box, and Candy brought in his interior designer from L.A. to work on it. The chairs were king size, in the Candy/McNall manner. There was room to accommodate twenty-five or thirty guests.

McNall and Gretzky flew in and out of Toronto hastily, but John Candy lingered and became the heart and soul of the Argos. He engineered a deal with the CBC; in exchange for plugging the Argos, the CBC would get Candy plugging CBC shows.

Candy became so carried away in his enthusiasm for creating Argo promotion that he was seriously talking about bringing in a film director from Los Angeles, as if a thirty-second TV spot were an epic on the scale of Lawrence of Arabia.

*   *   *

Before the season started, Candy went to New Orleans to play one of the lawyers in Oliver Stone’s much-ballyhooed political thriller JFK, which advances the view that the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a political conspiracy, not the act of a lone gunman. The school year had already ended, so Rose, Jennifer and Christopher all went to New Orleans for a couple of weeks.

Candy knew he needed to spend more time with Jennifer and Christopher. Having lost his own father at a young age, he felt he had no script for being fatherly. And he was away from home so much that Rose had to do much more than her share of parenting. He tried to make up for his absence by bringing his own irresistible exuberance to occasions like birthdays. When he was away from home, Candy talked to his children on the phone a lot. When the family was together in Toronto or L.A., he enjoyed taking them to sporting events. But there was no question that his commitment to the Argos would take him away from his family to an even greater extent than his movie career had.

Candy had just a small part in JFK, but he was nervous about it, as it was a dramatic role in a serious movie. In fact, Candy comes across well in a wonderful scene with Kevin Costner, who plays the fearless hero, Jim Garrison (the investigator who challenges the Warren Report and makes a personal crusade of uncovering a conspiracy). Hiding behind sunglasses and devouring a plate of crab, Candy depicts Dean Andrews, a drawling good-ole-boy lawyer who pretends to know a good deal less about the plot to kill JFK than he actually does know. Candy demonstrates a relish for acting here, but given the fact that this was a controversial movie with an all-star cast and a marathon running time, his fine performance was lost in the crowd and mostly overlooked.

Indeed, it was almost cut out of the film. A trailer with Candy in it had already been released when Oliver Stone decided to edit Candy out. Candy was devastated when he heard about this. Stone’s decision also upset Costner, who argued vehemently with Stone and persuaded him to put the scene with Candy back in. In the end, Candy received a handwritten letter of apology from Stone.

*   *   *

Candy came to the Argos’ opening hoopla straight from New Orleans. He even wore his JFK outfit—a 1960s suit with hat and sunglasses—to a blast-off party for four hundred guests at the funky Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto the night before the first game of the season. The idea was to create a media frenzy with a celebrity-studded event to publicize the Argos. A high point of the party was a performance by the Blues Brothers featuring Candy’s pals, Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi. Among the celebrity guests were movie director Norman Jewison, SCTV alumni Martin Short and Dave Thomas, and Candy’s Delirious co-star, Mariel Hemingway. (Belushi and Hemingway had been flown in for the occasion on McNall’s private 727.)

Bret Gallagher, an engaging young sports and film promotions consultant hired by Cooper to line up exciting half-time entertainment for Argo home games, wound up being Candy’s assistant as well. Gallagher was supposed to be booking stadium anthem singers, arranging liaisons with the corporate world and generally revitalizing the stadium atmosphere. But a big part of his job became arranging Candy’s media blitz and accompanying him on his rounds.

Gallagher often found himself taking Candy to radio stations, sometimes at five o’clock in the morning, not only in Toronto but also in Winnipeg, Regina and Edmonton. Why? The strategy was to raise the level of interest right across the league.

One morning when they were on their way to a radio station, Candy told Gallagher: “I hope none of the movie chiefs are watching, because I don’t promote my movies this much.”

In fact, Candy gave up more than a year of his movie career for the Argos. Why did he care that much? Well, he had done more than forty movies and a lot of TV shows. But running a football team seemed like exciting fun, and a novel experience. And it appealed to the boyish dreamer in John Candy—the kid who had played football for the Neil McNeil high school team and sat in the stands at Exhibition Stadium to cheer for his beloved Argos.

Besides, Candy wanted to do something for Toronto and become the toast of the town; above all, he wanted to be taken seriously—to be regarded as a man who could make things happen rather than just a funny guy.

For the opening game, 41,000 fans turned out, and were treated to more than a football game. The Blues Brothers, with Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi, performed at intermission. John Candy and Mariel Hemingway also got into the act. There was lots of glitter and noise to liven up the Dome—marching bands, special effects, Hollywood stars on the sidelines.

Unlike his two partners, Candy did not disappear after opening day. “John was the most generous man you could ever meet with his time and money,” recalls Brian Cooper. “He was wildly creative, and for a while he seemed to be practically running the CFL. He would devote endless hours, attend almost every game, go to meetings of the board of governors. We’d go to Edmonton on a small private plane. He’d try to break the blackout rule, he’d do a media blitz like you would not believe, and he’d be with the players during meal breaks, offering encouragement.

“Then after we’d won the game, we’d wind up at a restaurant until four o’clock in the morning. John had such a sharp wit, he would provide entertainment for everyone in the place. All he had to do was raise an eyebrow and the whole room would be in hysterics. Finally he would go into the kitchen, drink in hand, and take over making dinner so the cooks could take a break.”

Candy would also cook pasta feasts for the Argo inner circle at his Newmarket home. Watching Candy push meat into the pot, Cooper was reminded of Clemenza in The Godfather.

Kelvin Prunester, one of the Argos’ tackles, became Candy’s personal trainer. Though Candy worked out, he did not combine exercise with diet. During his time with the Argos, Candy’s weight moved beyond 300 pounds, possibly as a result of compulsive, nervous eating linked to stressful problems he was going through during this period. Sometimes, especially when moving through a crowd, he would be unable to catch his breath and would have to stop for a rest.

Throughout that first season, Candy was ever-present—waving to the crowd, talking to fans, giving pep-talks to the players, driving around town in a limo with pennants sticking out of the back of the car, turning up on one talk show after another. The Argos, a franchise previously known for drowning in mediocrity, put on a show every game. And on the field, with the help of the Rocket and star quarterback Matt Dunigan, the Argos became the Cinderella team of the year—and went on to win the Grey Cup.

Yet even during this triumphant season, not everything was great in the front office.

“We were winning but we were paying big-time,” says Brian Cooper. “We all assumed Bruce had very deep pockets, but there just wasn’t enough money coming in. I got tired of ducking creditors. Once when I was out at a restaurant, I was confronted by a printer from Scarborough who said, ‘You owe us five thousand dollars.’ I know how to juggle money when necessary, but we were running all the time at a negative cash flow. It got to the point where I had to put my foot down and insist on some equity from the owners. Bruce put a little bit more money in after that, but it was never enough.”

Meanwhile, even while cheering the Argos on during their march toward the Grey Cup, Candy was increasingly beset with anxiety. While his movie career was on hold, Candy left his long-time agent, John Gaines, and signed with Guy McIlwaine at International Creative Management, a much bigger talent agency.

The announcement was coupled with news that Candy would co-star with Rick Moranis in a comedy called Going Fishing for Disney’s Hollywood Pictures. But the movie was never made, and Candy’s stay at ICM lasted less than a year. The defection of Candy was a major blow to APA, which had a small list of clients. In the fall of 1993, Gaines’s partner, ex-Montrealer Marty Klein, had a fatal heart attack. (Candy attended the funeral.) Gaines died of AIDS three weeks later.

*   *   *

In October, Gallagher accompanied Candy on a swing through the rubber-chicken circuit of the CFL. Candy was a special guest, helping to draw crowds at a series of fund-raising dinners for individual CFL teams. This was all part of the strategy that to strengthen the Argo franchise it was necessary to bolster the whole league.

Gallagher did the advance work—figuring out how to get Candy in and out of each venue, where he was going to sit, and so on. He was also careful to make it clear to the local organizers that there would be no autographs. According to Gallagher, if Candy started signing them, the result would be bedlam because everyone in the place would want one.

But during the Blue Bombers dinner at the Winnipeg Convention Centre, while Candy was sitting at the head table, the radio disc jockey who was chosen as emcee announced to the crowd of two thousand fans that anyone who wanted Candy’s autograph should start lining up. Gallagher knew Candy hated to say no to his fans, and he could see that Candy was sweating, so he plotted a quick getaway, enlisting the help of security police and busboys to whisk Candy away just before the stampede of autograph-hunters.

In November, when the Argonauts played the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the CFL’s Eastern Conference play-off final, Candy was not able to attend the game. But he had arranged to watch the game at his Los Angeles home via a special satellite hook-up.

On the Friday before the game, Martyn Burke was at home in Santa Monica when he got a memorable phone call from. John Candy. They had been estranged for more than a year since Burke took Candy aside to express concern about his weight. Now Candy was calling to attempt a reconciliation.

Candy made some flattering comments about Ivory Joe, Burke’s recently published novel, and told Burke the two of them ought to find a way to work on a project together. Then he issued an invitation.

“You’ve got to come over on Sunday. Wayne and Janet Gretzky are coming to watch the game with Rose and me, and it’s going to be great. We’d love you to join us.”

Burke could tell that Candy had been drinking, and he knew that after a few drinks Candy was prone to become sentimental and brood about rifts he felt badly about. Burke also knew that Rose Candy was less forgiving, and wondered what she would say when John told her about these plans.

After hanging up the phone, Burke recounted the conversation to his companion, Laura Morton, and told her: “John will probably call tomorrow morning and cancel.”

Around nine-thirty the next morning, there was an awkward and embarrassed call from Candy. All the arrangements had been changed. The invitation for Sunday was off. “We’ll have to do it some other time,” said Candy before abruptly terminating the conversation.

As soon as the Argos won the Eastern final, trouncing the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 42 to 3, Candy began preparing for Grey Cup weekend in Winnipeg. He and his family could have arranged more luxurious accommodation, but the players were staying at the Sheraton, so that’s where Candy insisted on staying, along with Rose, Jennifer and Christopher.

“It was a blast,” recalls Bret Gallagher. “We had a ton of events planned. But John couldn’t attend the Grey Cup gala the night before the game, because we knew he would have been there all night signing autographs.”

During the big game on Sunday, November 24, Candy was beside himself with excitement—and the Argos did not disappoint him. On a snowy field they capped their miracle season by beating the Calgary Stampeders 36-21 and winning the Grey Cup for only the second time in forty years. It was a highly emotional day for John Candy—the fulfillment of one of his most fervent dreams.

“When we won the Grey Cup, everybody loved everybody,” Brian Cooper remembers. “There were tears in John’s eyes. It was like something out of a feel-good movie: The famous comedian buys a football team in his home town, and in the first year they go out and win the league championship. Only this wasn’t a movie—it was real life.”