Chapter 5

KID STUFF

Trevor Evans—a senior TV producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto—was given a surprising challenge in the spring of 1974. The CBC wanted to create a new after-school show for kids that would be less earnest and “educational” than its traditional children’s programs. This was supposed to be the beginning of a new era in which CBC children’s programs would break out of the bounds set by such reliable and predictably wholesome programs as “Razzle Dazzle,” “Mr. Dressup” and “The Friendly Giant.”

The idea was to develop a funny, entertaining program that would win the loyalty of kids who might otherwise be watching commercial sitcoms on U.S. stations. That’s why the call went out to Evans, who was then at the helm of the CBC’s most prestigious adult comedy program, “Wayne & Shuster.” Determined to break new ground, Evans began searching for fresh young performers to help him deliver what the CBC wanted—kid fare with a sophisticated flair—on a limited budget.

It was inevitable that he would be drawn to the Old Firehall, because the new Second City show there had already started to create a buzz around town. Evans was dazzled by the Second City cast, but following democratic procedures, rather than hire any of them immediately, he invited them to audition at an open casting call for a new half-hour children’s comedy show which would eventually make its debut on the CBC schedule in a twice weekly after-school slot the following fall under the title “Dr. Zonk and the Zunkins.”

Scores of performers turned up for the auditions, and Evans brought various potentially humorous accoutrements (such as a stuffed pig) to the studio from the CBC props department. Each performer had fifteen minutes to improvise a comedy scene.

Three of the regulars Evans hired for “Dr. Zonk” were from the cast at the Firehall: Gilda Radner, Rosemary Radcliffe and John Candy. Another, Fiona Reid, had been in the cast the year before at Second City’s ill-fated first Toronto venue. The other regulars on “Dr. Zonk” came from outside the Second City family: Dan Hennessey and John Stocker, Bob McKenna, Robin Eveson, and the Zunkin puppets worked by Nina Keough.

Almost instantly, Evans recognized that Candy had the goofy overgrown-kid quality he was looking for. To Candy, Evans was a man he could trust; as a teenager, Candy had been a viewer of “Kiddo,” which Evans produced for the CTV network in the 1960s. The adoration of audiences at the Firehall was gratifying to Candy, but he yearned to reach a wider public. “Dr. Zonk” may have carried “not ready for prime time” overtones, but it was the kind of opportunity Candy was hungry for. He wanted to reach a much larger audience, and he was eager to make more money than Second City was paying.

“Dr. Zonk” was offering the performers no more than CBC scale, but that was still around $200 for each day of work, whereas Andrew Alexander was paying only $160 for a whole week of work at the Firehall. Of course the CBC gig was seasonal; an entire year’s batch of episodes would be produced in about ten weeks, working perhaps three days a week.

“Dr. Zonk” consisted of comedy sketches. Though Evans handed the cast a script, it was understood that the actors were expected to improve on it by improvising bits of comic business. In one enjoyably silly routine, Gilda Radner played the host of a kids’ help-line, and Candy played a slow-witted, long-haired teenager who has trouble eating spaghetti. She gets him using scissors to make the noodles shorter, which works fine until he accidentally cuts the telephone cord and disconnects them.

Like Candy, Gilda Radner was the kind of performer adored by audiences from the moment they encountered her. She was a sweet, ditsy girl from Detroit who, thanks to Godspell, had earned a following in Toronto even before she joined Second City.

Radner and Candy had great performing rapport, but their collaboration was relatively brief—less than a year. The two members of the Second City company with whom Candy would form more enduring bonds were Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy. Flaherty was rarely embraced by the public the way Candy was, but being nine years older than Candy and more of a veteran than the other performers, he had a godfather role. Candy respected Flaherty and regarded him as a kind of mentor.

Levy was more of an equal, and they had contrasting personalities which they were always playing off one another. Candy liked to say that he and Levy were like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver played by Jackie Gleason on “The Honeymooners,” and Ed Norton, the sidekick played by Art Carney.

“I’m wild and impulsive,” Candy would explain. “Eugene is slow and incredibly meticulous. He can drive you crazy just by the way he orders food. You can eat an entire meal, have dessert and get the bill and Gene’s still studying the menu.”

But the member of the Dr. Zonk troupe who soon became Candy’s closest friend for a time was neither a member of the Second City family nor destined for stardom.

“We were inseparable for a few years,” recalls John Stocker, who was known as a voice performer and had worked with Evans on “Wayne and Shuster.” Since Stocker was a head shorter than Candy, a Woody Allenish figure in horn-rimmed glasses, there was a Mutt and Jeff quality to the pair.

“We were just sympatico,” says Stocker. “We had the same sense of humour, and we laughed hard at one another’s jokes.”

Candy and Stocker—who each called the other “Johnny”—began hanging out together whenever they both had time off. Though Stocker was married and Candy had a girlfriend, they mostly spent their time without women, two high-spirited guys on the lam. The women in their lives regarded each of them as a bad influence on the other. Stocker and Candy would go out drinking in the afternoon, before a performance at the Firehall, or stay up most of the night—talking and drinking—after a Second City show. Candy was such a heavy cigarette smoker that his index finger was already the colour of an amber traffic signal.

“John always seemed bubbly and effusive, always up,” says Stocker. “At a bar, he insisted on picking up the tab for whoever was at the table. He partied hard, but he was a big guy, and he appeared to have the kind of metabolism that made it possible for his body to absorb a lot of punishment. After a while I began to realize that nobody could be that happy, that bouncy and that giving all the time. John did have a down side, but he didn’t like to let anyone see it. We would laugh and get loaded, and there were times when he would get sad, but he would never explain why.

“He was the opposite of me in that regard. If I got upset, I would tell complete strangers exactly how and why I was upset. The most John would ever say was: ‘It’s nothing. I’m just having a down moment.’”

Rosemary Radcliffe, who worked with Candy both at Second City and on “Dr. Zonk,” found Candy completely amenable and very generous as a performing colleague, but was still aware of his tremendous hunger for stardom.

“I swear he got up in the morning thinking about fame and went to bed at night thinking about fame,” says Radcliffe. “When you’re that driven, you may not know how you’re going to get there, so you try all the avenues.”

*   *   *

One of the most obvious avenues leading to fame was the movies. Candy had made his debut as an extra in a 1971 film called Faceoff (about a hockey player’s romance with a pop singer). And he landed a small part in Class of ’44, a sequel to the Hollywood hit Summer of ’42. It was shot in Toronto and used Canadians in minor roles. Candy played Paulie, the class dummy in the high-school graduating class of Hermie, the protagonist. While Hermie and his friends go on to college, poor Paulie goes off to fight in World War II.

But Canada was in the early stages of developing its own film industry, and in the summer of 1974, Candy got a chance to perform in a home-made movie. It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, directed by John Trent and produced by David Perlmutter, was a forgettable sex comedy with imported stars—Anthony Newley and Stephanie Powers. The script also featured a pair of bumbling detectives. In these roles Candy was paired with Lawrence Dane, an experienced actor who was older than Candy and had a tough, lean look. The chemistry between them was good, and they stole the picture—to the extent that the next year, their two characters were reincarnated in another Perlmutter/Trent trifle, Find the Lady, which had only a brief theatrical release before landing on TV.

Like many of the people who worked with Candy, Dane struck up a friendship with him. “I went to see him at Second City. He came across as a humble, gentle soul who really cared about how people perceived him and truly wanted to do the right thing. He was always gracious and deferential.”

This was the basis for the rapport between Candy and Dane, who perceived himself as shy and insecure. Dane, fourteen years older than Candy and not part of the wisecracking Second City crowd, noticed a side of Candy that gave him some concern. Even at that early stage, at the age of twenty-three, Candy’s weight was starting to balloon. And though he was good at taking care of others, Candy did not seem capable of taking care of himself.

“He celebrated too hard,” remembers Dane. “He opened up the faucet and it all came out. It was as if he said to himself, ‘My mortality is on a string, so I might as well throw caution to the wind.’ Unfortunately he attracted people who wanted to take advantage of him. And it seemed to me he was just terribly hard on himself.”

*   *   *

Later on, almost everyone associated with those early days of Second City would look back on them as some sort of golden age, when everyone was flourishing creatively and having a great time. But the kids in the show were under tremendous pressure to come up with funny new material. The improvisational sessions at the end of the show were crucial to the format of Second City, because it was the way new material was created. And some members of the cast found it hard to cope.

“I lived in terror of improvisation,” recalls Rosemary Radcliffe. “The more the crowds started to come, the higher people’s expectations became. I drank a lot—we all drank a lot—and it was hard on everybody.”

There was a feeling that the Second City players were a family. But at times they seemed like the hilariously dysfunctional family depicted in their brilliant satiric sketch “You’re Going To Be All Right, You Creep, Leaving Home and All, Eh?”

In an effort to make the group more cohesive, Andrew Alexander would arrange such activities as baseball games in which the performers would form a team and take on the employees of some radio station. This had the effect of making Radcliffe, who felt incompetent at all sports, feel more acutely than ever that she didn’t fit in. After a year of high stress, Radcliffe quit.

Second City was a voracious machine that devoured performers, so there was a constant need for new talent. After a while, Gilda Radner (who had financial freedom thanks to a wealthy father) decided she’d had enough and moved on. Catherine O’Hara, an aspiring funny girl from Etobicoke who had worked at the Firehall checking coats while doubling as an understudy for Radner and Radcliffe, honed her comic skills in the touring company, and then earned a chance to replace Gilda Radner in the main company. O’Hara soon became the perfect performing partner for Candy—a point that was perhaps most sublimely demonstrated when she played Katharine Hepburn to his Orson Welles.

When Radcliffe left, she was replaced by Andrea Martin—who had moved to Toronto in 1970 after growing up in Maine and landed a role in Godspell along with Levy and Radner. Another recruit was Dave Thomas, a witty kid from Hamilton who wrote radio scripts and spent several months in the replacement cast of Godspell. Thomas had decided to quit showbiz and was doing very well as a copy writer for a large advertising agency before he gave it up to join Second City.

In the spring of 1975, Candy was part of a splinter group that went to California to open a spinoff Second City show at a shopping mall in Pasadena. Sahlins had made the deal, but he persuaded Alexander to get involved in the venture. Most of the cast came from Chicago, but Sahlins needed a couple of reinforcements from Toronto.

Second City’s Pasadena show, presented at a shopping mall, was called Alterations While U Wait. It was a sign of how ill-fated the venture was that passersby, seeing the sign, thought they were at a tailor shop rather than a cabaret theatre. The cast included Joe Flaherty, Betty Thomas, Eugene Levy, Doug Steckler and Deborah Harmon.

Candy made several trips between Pasadena and Toronto in 1975. On one occasion he drove across the continent with Dan Aykroyd on a four-day odyssey. Years later Aykroyd would recall: “We played old music, sang and talked and focused on what we’d do when we got older. It was one of those great drives.”

As soon as they arrived in California, Aykroyd got a call from New York asking him to work for NBC’s new late-night show “Saturday Night Live,” which was preparing for its premiere that fall.

Candy had hoped that his chance to work in California would give him a chance to be discovered by Hollywood. He didn’t get the break he had hoped for, despite going to L.A. armed with a list of contact names and numbers. But he did appear in a zany, low-budget movie comedy that was one of the early attempts to transfer the new cabaret humour of the period to the big screen. The movie, called Tunnelvision, was written and directed by Neal Israel. Since it was scraped together with little money, the cast worked for hardly more than a handshake and a free lunch.

In a way, Tunnelvision anticipated “SCTV” by using TV itself as its satiric target. Israel, who had a job as director of on-air promotion for CBS, said the film was prompted by his anger at the industry’s emphasis on success at any cost, without regard to integrity.

In an interview with Harlan Jacobson published in Variety, Israel charged that he had been fired by CBS because of Tunnelvision. CBS claimed he was fired for other reasons.

Many of the comedy ideas in Tunnelvision fizzle, and in retrospect the film is most notable for featuring a number of performers who would later become well known—including Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. One of the few genuinely funny bits in Tunnelvision is a parody of a game show with Joe Flaherty and Betty Thomas (a graduate of the Chicago Second City company who went on to fame in the TV series “Hill Street Blues”). Candy appears only for a minute or two as a crime-fighter whose partner happens to be a disembodied head.

*   *   *

By the fall of 1975, the Pasadena club was forced to close for lack of customers, and Candy returned to Toronto. Trevor Evans, who had employed Candy in “Dr. Zonk,” was doing a follow-up show called “Coming Up Rosie,” which made its debut in the CBC schedule that fall. Unlike “Dr. Zonk,” it had a continuing story, about a group of low-life characters reminiscent of the Bowery Boys. The regular cast included several holdovers from “Dr. Zonk”—Rosemary Radcliffe, Fiona Reid, Dan Hennessey and John Stocker.

Candy would have had an ongoing role, but because he was going to Pasadena, Evans replaced him with Aykroyd. Barry Baldero was added to the cast. When Candy returned to Toronto, he did some guest appearances on “Coming Up Rosie.” And he became a regular in the show’s second and final season in 1976. He was also appearing in another show for kids, TV Ontario’s “Cucumber.”

Candy took a serious role in The Clown Murders, a drama about a caper that turned into kidnapping, written and directed by Martyn Burke, a young novelist and CBC documentary filmmaker. The story was inspired by a sensational true crime in rural Ontario that earned headlines in 1969.

What began as a prank at a Halloween costume party turned into kidnapping and murder when a wealthy young woman named Mary Nelles was abducted from the converted schoolhouse where she lived with her husband by six men dressed as clowns who held her at a hideaway while demanding ransom. (In the end, Mary Nelles came home unharmed, the ransom money was recovered, and the kidnappers were jailed.)

In the somewhat modified version of the tale devised by Burke, the part of the ringleader—the victim’s ex-boyfriend—was played by Stephen Young, a handsome actor who had been on the TV shows “Seaway” and “Judd for the Defence,” and was known as a globetrotting playboy. Lawrence Dane was cast as the unpopular husband.

For the role of Ollie, the sweet sadsack of the gang who is required to have a breakdown on camera, Burke was looking for a young unknown. Al Waxman, who was playing the sheriff, suggested Burke drop down to the Firehall to have a look at John Candy.

Afterward, Burke was introduced to Candy and told him about the role. “I told him this was not a comedy part,” Burke remembers, “and he seemed eager to try something different. I had the feeling he wanted to go beyond getting laughs and be taken seriously.”

Candy was the youngest actor in the film, and according to Burke, “John was the puppy dog on the set. He was an overgrown kid, and everyone loved him. He seemed very hungry for approval. Some actors go out of their way to gain the approval of the producer or the director in a professional way, but John seemed to want it on a personal level as well. He struck up a friendship with Stephen Young; you could sense he had tremendous respect for Stephen and looked up to him.”

As a movie, The Clown Murders was at best an honourable failure and a curiosity item. But it was the beginning of a three-way friendship among Candy, Burke and Young which extended into the late 1980s, when all three lived in Los Angeles and would go to hockey games together at the Great Western Forum.

*   *   *

In the fall of 1975, the Canadian producer Lorne Michaels scored a breakthrough with the debut on NBC of his weekly ninety-minute show “Saturday Night Live,” providing a vast new audience for some of the sharpest young talent coming out of comedy clubs in North America. It was through “Saturday Night Live” that Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, John Belushi and Chevy Chase began their ascent to movie stardom.

Among the Saturday Night players making their mark that first season were two of Candy’s recent cohorts at the Old Firehall—Danny Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. Excited as he was for them, this development inevitably raised a troubling issue for Candy. Some people from the Toronto Second City group were making it big, and John Candy wasn’t yet among them. In the next few years he would refer with increasing resentment to the lack of recognition he was experiencing.

In 1976, however, there was no lack of work—especially on television. Almost unbelievably, Candy made regular appearances that year on four TV shows and became a familiar face on all three of Canada’s English-language television networks.

When he joined Radcliffe, Stocker and the others on “Coming Up Rosie,” Candy created one of his most memorable characters—a security guard by the name of Wally Wipazipachuck who would turn up in slightly different form in the 1983 movie National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Candy also made a number of appearances on the CBC’s ambitious but ill-fated late-night talk show “90 Minutes Live,” with host Peter Gzowski, which was taped five nights a week before a studio audience. On one of the earliest episodes, Candy and fellow performer Jayne Eastwood flew to Vancouver while the show was doing a kind of try-out road tour. After performing a couple of comedy sketches, they chatted with Gzowski. Candy never seemed comfortable in this setting, and in fact after he became a movie star he still had an aversion to appearing on talk shows, even to plug his movies.

Candy also became the ringleader of a regular spoofy feature of “90 Minutes Live”—the Bargain Basement Talent Search. Candy’s role was to introduce bizarre novelty acts. It turned out to be less than a triumphant gig. The show’s staff enjoyed having Candy around but, owing to tight budgets and the pressures of doing a daily show, they were rarely able to take advantage of the ideas Candy came up with for creating episodes.

Perry Rosemond, a successful TV producer who had worked in Los Angeles before returning to Canada to create “King of Kensington” for CBC, left his new hit show after one year to develop “The David Steinberg Show” for CTV’s 1976-77 season. Steinberg and Rosemond had both grown up Jewish in Winnipeg and were roughly the same age. The format of the program was similar to that of the old Jack Benny show (which moved from CBS radio to CBS television in the 1950s), with Steinberg playing more or less himself and surrounded by a group of regular comic sidekicks involved in each week’s storyline.

Steinberg was a graduate of Chicago’s Second City. Both he and Rosemond were attuned to the young talent coming out of the Old Firehall. Among those chosen to be regulars on the CTV show were Candy and Martin Short. Short played an obnoxious lounge lizard named Johnny Del Bravo.

On the first few episodes Candy played Sven the cook at the Hello Deli restaurant, but he didn’t have much to do except yell “Coming up!” often. Recognizing Candy’s potential, Rosemond promoted him to the part of Spider the band leader. Spider was the sort of fellow who always did everything wrong but was so well-meaning that nobody had the heart to confront him with the error of his ways.

“The David Steinberg Show” was lively and entertaining, and consistently funny, but CTV dropped it after one season.

Candy’s big TV chance would turn out to be another show making its debut that same season. It was the one Andrew Alexander was developing around his performers from the Old Firehall.

One night John Stocker got a call from Candy at 1:30 a.m. He sounded loaded.

“Johnny, it’s Johnny. What are you doing right now?”

“Johnny, it’s the middle of the night. What do you think I’m doing? I’m sleeping.”

“Well, listen, we’re down at this sound studio in Yorkville doing some work on our new show, and we realized after a while we need an outside performer to do some voice work. I suggested you. Can you do it?”

“When would you need me?” asked Stocker.

“We need you right now. Can you come down?”

Stocker staggered into some clothes and drove to the recording studio. There he recorded a line which became a standing introduction for the series: “There were six people who loved to watch television but they didn’t like what they saw, so they decided to do something about it. They started their own network…”

“SCTV” was almost on the air.