Chapter 7

AT LARGE

By the spring of 1979, “SCTV” had earned enough of a following that John Candy and the other performers were in a strong position to demand much higher fees than they had been getting. At the same time, more money was needed to enhance the production values of the show. But Andrew Alexander was unable to negotiate an acceptable budget increase with the Global network, and in one of the most questionable decisions in the history of Canadian TV, Global decided not to pick up “SCTV” for the 1979-80 season. Many people in the broadcasting industry and the media believed this turn of events spelled the end of “SCTV,” though Alexander was working hard to find a new partner and get the show back on the air.

To some members of the cast, the apparent demise of “SCTV” must have seemed like a catastrophe, but for Candy—who was already looking forward to a film career in Hollywood—it presented an opportunity to try his wings. More than any of his cohorts Candy was regarded by insiders as a movie star of the future, and if his big-screen breakthrough was imminent, then perhaps putting “SCTV” behind him wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Although “SCTV” would eventually have a reincarnation and Candy would return to the show within two years, in 1979 both those developments seemed highly unlikely. In the meantime, Candy would discover that landing roles in high-profile movies was one thing, but getting the chance to make any impact in them was quite another.

In 1978 Candy appeared in one of the rare Canadian-produced movies to reach an audience outside Canada. The Silent Partner, directed by the gifted Vancouver film-maker Daryl Duke, was a nifty thriller starring Christopher Plummer as a flamboyant crook with a taste for dressing up as Santa Claus, and Elliott Gould as a bank executive who gets drawn into his scheme. (Candy’s friend Stephen Levy, who under the name Stephen Young had acted alongside him in The Clown Murders, was one of the producers of The Silent Partner.)

Toronto’s Eaton Centre—a kind of contemporary clone of Milan’s Galleria—provided a sleek setting. And the movie earned good reviews and several Canadian Film Awards. But Candy was stuck in the minor role of a polite, reliable bank clerk. The movie offered no chance at all for Candy to show off his penchant for creative wackiness; he played his part conscientiously, as if vying for a good citizenship award.

The next year Candy appeared in Lost and Found, a Hollywood comedy directed by veteran writer-director Melvin Frank and filmed mostly in Canada. It wasn’t as good a film as The Silent Partner, but it made better use of Candy. Toronto had become a favourite location for U.S. producers seeking lower costs along with good crews and technical facilities. Usually the stars of the movie would be American but for minor roles, local actors would be cast.

There were reasons for Toronto actors to be ambivalent about the opportunity this development afforded. On the one hand, it was possible to make more money doing an easy job for a few days than you might earn for playing a hugely demanding role on a Toronto stage for two months. On the other hand, there was something demeaning about an environment in which the greatest of all possible rewards went to whoever was chosen to play, say, Mary Tyler Moore’s best friend.

Lost and Found—a wisecracking romantic comedy that reteamed Glenda Jackson and George Segal after their success with A Touch of Class—provided work for a number of Toronto actors including Barbara Hamilton, Hollis McLaren and Sandy Webster. For most of them, this brush with Hollywood was merely a passing windfall. But for John Candy it was more like a rite of passage along the way to the eventual Hollywood stardom that he and his fans felt certain was his due.

Candy’s role in Lost and Found is small, but it does demonstrate his gift for comedy. Though Candy was still in his twenties, Melvin Frank cast him as a fifty-five-year-old French used-car salesman. As Candy recalled a decade later in a TV interview with Brian Linehan, at their first meeting Frank leapt across the room, grabbed Candy’s cheek and said: “I love this baby fat. How do we age this baby fat?”

Candy had to grow a beard and dye his hair black. (To his embarrassment, before returning to its natural colour his hair turned purple.) The plot has Segal and Jackson meeting in hospital after almost killing each other on the highway in the French Alps. Candy is obliged to inform Segal that the letter Jackson has written in French—supposedly admitting her culpability in the mishap—actually says quite the opposite.

It’s just a tiny scene, but Candy’s witty sensibility peeks out of it. Years later, he would joke about how unconvincing he was as a middle-aged Frenchman, but unlike most of the other movies Candy had appeared in, Lost and Found offered a glimmer of his comic talent.

*   *   *

The word was getting out that John Candy was someone to watch. The SCTV group spent some time in Los Angeles in the spring of 1978 in order to work on scripts with Harold Ramis for what turned out to be the show’s third and final year on Global. When they finished writing shows for their next season, the group gave a huge celebration party. Hundreds of guests turned up—including Steven Spielberg.

Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had already made Spielberg the hottest young director in town. His next picture, 1941, was to be a partly satiric look at the hysteria that engulfed L.A. after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and he was in the process of casting it.

The party was full of aspiring actors who would have given anything for a chance to work with Spielberg, but Candy was the one Spielberg approached with the suggestion there might be a role for him. Candy didn’t take the offer seriously.

“I was under the influence of a lot of rum and coke,” Candy explained afterward. “I said, ‘I appreciate your interest but I know this is a party, and we’ve all been drinking.’”

Then Candy looked around the room, full of fawning wannabes, and advised Spielberg: “Anyway, there are any number of leeches around here who want the job more than I do.”

To Candy’s surprise, when he returned to Toronto, there was a follow-up call from Columbia Pictures officially offering him a role in 1941. It made a strong impression on Candy’s SCTV cohorts that he was being courted by Hollywood’s reigning new genius.

In his chat with Candy, Spielberg described the project—a period comedy written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale and conceived on an epic scale—as a cross between Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Robert Altman’s A Wedding. Given Candy’s strengths, the comic ambition of the film must have been tantalizing. So was the prospect that, playing one of the frantic young men in uniform, he would be in the company of such rising stars as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Tim Matheson.

Watching the film that finally arrived on the big screen, it’s hard to believe Candy spent every day for more than half a year turning up for work on 1941. The film has too many stories intertwined, and Spielberg’s method was to film much more material than he could use and then hope to impose a shape on it in the editing room. Most of what Candy did wound up on the cutting-room floor, and what’s left (less than ten minutes of screen time) is not especially funny. The most Candy gets to do is deliver such lines as: “You see the mess in the streets? Well, I’m not taking the rap for that.”

The film’s release was delayed by re-editing, and there was so much gossip about 1941’s problems that by the time it opened, the media were gunning for it. The reaction could be summed up as “You see the mess on the screen? Well, Steven Spielberg is going to have to take the rap for that.”

And so 1941 turned out to be the first big slip on a banana peel in Spielberg’s career—though it was far more imaginative and engaging a film than that suggests. Spielberg’s miniature recreation of Hollywood Boulevard at night was truly memorable, and there was a great buzz of energy to the USO jitterbug number he staged (with Candy’s buddy Joe Flaherty used effectively as the bandleader).

But the movie was accused of being obscenely overproduced (the costs climbed steadily to the then astronomical figure of $40 million) on the one hand and racist on the other. It became that rarity, a Spielberg film that failed commercially. And for Candy, who had hoped this movie was going to be his ticket to stardom, 1941 turned out to be a long, aimless ride to nowhere in particular.

He had a good experience making it, meeting a lot of stimulating people and learning a lot about Hollywood, but later he decided something had gone awry in the editing, and what reached the screen was not the movie Candy thought they had been making. Yet even if he was critical, he resented the way the movie was being dismissed.

“I think people reviewed the price tag,” he observed. “The underlying attitude seemed to be, ‘You wasteful kids, look at what you’re spending!’”

When the picture opened in the fall of 1979, Candy was so depressed by its hostile reception that, he later revealed, he didn’t go out for a week.

*   *   *

On a personal level, 1979 had been a good year. In April, after a courtship that had lasted most of the decade, John Candy married Rosemary Margaret Hobor at St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church in midtown Toronto.

The woman he called Rosie and everyone else called Rose was regarded by many of their friends as a stabilizing influence and an anchor—quiet, sane, patient. And she was undazzled by showbiz glitter.

As recalled by Second City founder Bernie Sahlins, the wedding had certain resemblances to a Second City sketch.

“When John lived in Chicago he’d met a hippie designer lady,” recalls Sahlins. “He decided she should make his wedding suit. I don’t think she had ever made a suit before.”

Sahlins and his wife, Jane, who were about to travel from Chicago to Toronto for the wedding, got a call from the groom asking if they would bring his suit.

Sahlins asked: “John, you mean you haven’t tried it on?”

“Oh no,” said Candy. “Don’t worry. It will be fine.”

On the morning of the wedding, Bernie and Jane Sahlins dropped by Candy’s house on Avenue Road just north of Eglinton. (John and Rose had lived there since 1976, and the house had a long Second City association; Eugene Levy and Martin Short were among its former tenants.) Sahlins rang the bell but nobody answered. The door was open, so he and his wife walked in and left the suit.

“John came to the wedding in this thing,” giggles Sahlins. “It looked as if it had been made out of sacking. We were sitting in the church next to Sheldon Patinkin, who used to live in the same house as John and Rose. As Rose was coming down the aisle, she said to Sheldon, ‘Any mail for us?’ During the ceremony when Rose was asked ‘Do you take this man?’ there was a long pause. It was very funny.”

*   *   *

Despite the disappointment of 1941, Candy was more determined than ever to take Hollywood by storm. It was clear he was going to need some expert help. Candy discussed strategy with Catherine McCartney, who was one of his closest friends as well as his agent and then his manager. They came to the conclusion that Candy needed a manager in Los Angeles, and she recommended Bernie Brillstein.

Candy had a meeting with Brillstein, but he was afraid of getting lost in the shuffle because Brillstein had so many other clients. Shortly after that, Garry Blye got a call from McCartney. Blye was a Canadian in Hollywood who had worked with Brillstein and had also known McCartney and Candy for years. He had been involved on the production side of “The David Steinberg Show,” on which Candy had played a continuing role. Although Blye had worked in the past as an agent and manager, by this time he had moved into production. But McCartney persuaded Blye to take on managing Candy, because he needed special handling.

“John Candy was like a man on a train that was clearly going somewhere,” Blye recalls. “At the end of every project, he always had the sense that there was something better just around the corner, and he was in a rush to get to it. He wouldn’t spend more than a week without work of some kind.”

During the making of 1941, Candy made plans with Spielberg to develop other projects together, but after the film’s disappointing reception, those plans were dropped, and they never worked together again. (However, at the time of Candy’s death, he had agreed to appear in a Spielberg film.)

Candy was offered a major role in the next film by 1941’s writers, Zemeckis and Gale. Used Cars, a screwball comedy about mendacity and crookedness in middle America, was directed by Zemeckis and produced by Gale, and it’s one of the more entertaining studio movies of its period. But Candy felt it wasn’t right for him. (Years later Zemeckis would make the Oscar-winning hit Forrest Gump.)

Instead Candy accepted a role backing up Aykroyd and Belushi in The Blues Brothers, conceived as a new style of musical combined with slapstick comedy based on sketch material that Aykroyd and Belushi used to do on “Saturday Night Live.” The sketches, which evolved from Belushi’s fond fascination with old-time blues musicians, featured Belushi as Jake Blues and Aykroyd as his brother, Elwood. Both looked like mobsters, in sunglasses and black suits, and worked hard at being hip.

As directed by John Landis, The Blues Brothers has a lot in common with 1941, being a hugely expensive, overproduced demolition derby hurtling along with cartoonish frenzy. The story has this super-cool rhythm-and-blues duo chasing all over Chicago to round up their band so they can raise money to pay the taxes and save the orphanage where they were raised. Along the way they run into Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, James Brown and John Lee Hooker—who get a chance to show why they are legendary performers.

Yet the film-makers wind up treating all these great musicians as if they were strictly also-rans compared to Belushi and Aykroyd. The audience might well wonder why, considering how little musical aptitude these two dudes demonstrate. Cast as a hash-house waitress, the great Aretha just about blows everyone else off the screen when she sings “Think.” But afterward she simply disappears from the movie without explanation—as if the producers had no idea how electrifying her presence was.

As had happened the previous year on 1941, Candy wound up spending months working on a movie in which he barely seemed to exist, apart from kicking in a door and running into a truck. Candy plays a parole officer who pursues the heroes all over the state of Illinois. Once again Candy’s scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. Still, there was one major difference between 1941 and this movie. Despite less than glowing reviews, The Blues Brothers turned out to be a huge hit. For a change, Candy was associated with a box-office winner, which was bound to boost his career even if the movie wasted his talent.

*   *   *

Candy had been spending so much time in L.A. that he had rented a house in Sherman Oaks. While he was in Chicago doing The Blues Brothers, he sublet it to Blye. When Candy returned to L.A. after finishing the film, “SCTV” was still in limbo. But whether or not the show would ever go back into production, there was still a struggle about royalty payments to the writer/performers for reruns.

Blye had attended a meeting at which Candy—who was more aggressive than his colleagues about pressing Andrew Alexander for money he thought was owed him—appealed to the other performers to take a united stand so they could all get a fair deal.

Candy had been set to star in a Canadian movie in the fall of 1979. At Large, which was to have been directed by Rex Bromfield (brother of Candy’s friend Valri) was a comedy about a society in which being overweight is against the law. Candy was cast as the rebel hero who is sent to a fat farm, and escapes. The Toronto producer Peter O’Brian (who later made The Grey Fox and My American Cousin) had the support of Telefilm Canada, and—this being the era of tax-shelter incentives in the Canadian film industry—had lined up private investors. O’Brian had paid Candy a fee to guarantee his availability.

Both Candy and O’Brian had married that spring, and they happened to be neighbours, so the two couples even got together for a barbecue in O’Brian’s backyard during which both men enthused about their impending project. But in September, O’Brian learned that a crucial piece of the financing had been withdrawn, and he was unable to replace it. As a result, when Candy finished filming The Blues Brothers, he was truly at large.

However, Candy was full of ideas for a new TV comedy project. He and Joe Flaherty (who was listed as Joseph P. Flaherty in the credits of 1941 and Used Cars) had cooked up the idea of doing a satiric show from the floor of the U.S. political conventions in the summer of 1980. Blye got involved in negotiations with Viacom, but according to Blye, the idea had a bit too much edge for the Viacom executives, and they backed away from it.

Instead Candy was drafted to star in a new comedy show involving his former Second City mentor, Bernie Sahlins. Sahlins was in partnership on this venture with NBC and a producing company owned by the family of Donny and Marie Osmond, which had a vast TV production facility in Utah, of all places, and not a whole lot to produce in it.

According to Toby Roberts, who was then president of the Osmond organization, there was an opportunity to provide a half-hour comedy show to be shown on NBC’s five owned-and-operated stations in an early-evening time slot before network prime time. (In other markets, the show would be sold to independent stations.) Several performers from the Chicago Second City company had been lined up, including Ann Ryerson, Tino Insana, Tim Kazurinsky and Audrie Neenan. But the show needed a host. It was Sahlins who suggested Candy.

Perry Rosemond, who had hired Candy for “The David Steinberg Show” a few years earlier, got a call from Carolyn Raskin, an NBC executive he had worked with, inviting him to go to Utah to direct the pilot.

“Carolyn and Bernie recognized the success of ‘SCTV,’” recalls Rosemond, “and they thought they could develop another hit show using some of the Chicago-based performers. I remember there was a bit of a rift between the Toronto branch of Second City and the Chicago branch. The producers of ‘SCTV’ took the position that when John left the show, he couldn’t take the characters he created for ‘SCTV’ with him; those remained the property of ‘SCTV.’ So for the new show he had to come up with different characters.”

That’s why a clone of Johnny LaRue was named Johnny Toronto (the nickname Candy had been given by his Second City friends in Chicago in 1973).

For some performers, according to Rosemond, there are inherent problems in making the transition from the stage, because they can’t stylize on TV, and they can’t improvise on TV. “John had the rare gift of lifting material off the page. He had progressed from being a sketch comedian to developing real acting skills.”

The group assembled in Provo, Utah, in late 1979, and Rosemond recalls that while the pilot was in pre-production the mandate changed. Instead of doing a single one-hour show, he produced three half-hours.

*   *   *

By early 1980, the quarrel between Candy and Alexander—over royalty payments—was becoming more public. Alexander was working on plans to get “SCTV” back on the air, but Candy told Sid Adilman of the Toronto Star that he had no intention of being part of it.

On the contrary, he was looking forward to being the host of the new comedy series, which would be called “Big City Comedy,” thus avoiding any battle with Alexander over use of the Second City name. NBC executives had committed to a series of thirteen half-hours of “Big City Comedy” to go on the air in the fall of 1980.

Candy was afraid the competition between Alexander’s show and “Big City” could be destructive. “It certainly hurts friendships,” he told Adilman. “Everyone could suffer.”

Candy had not enjoyed being marooned in Utah, where there was nothing to do but look at the mountains, and he would not have been pleased if the whole “Big City” series had been taped there. At one point there was talk of doing the show at the NBC studios in Burbank. But in the end the Osmonds made a deal with CTV, and the shows were produced during the summer of 1980 at CFTO, the network’s flagship station, just outside Toronto.

That same summer, “SCTV” got back into production after Andrew Alexander accepted an offer from the Allards, whose family broadcasting business, ITV, was based in Edmonton. The Allards became the show’s principal investor, and “SCTV” was produced in their studios in Edmonton. In the absence of Candy and Catherine O’Hara (who also left the show and later returned) the performing ranks were temporarily shored up by Tony Rosato and Robin Duke. During the 1980/81 TV season, “SCTV” and “Big City Comedy” were competing half-hour shows in the syndication market.

On “Big City Comedy,” Candy was being paid better than he ever had been on “SCTV,” and he was being showcased as the star/host rather than being just one of an ensemble group. But brilliant as he was, his name was not yet big enough to draw a mass audience. That was one reason each week’s show had a guest star. Among them were Rita Moreno, Jimmy Walker, McLean Stevenson, Conrad Bain, Betty White and Billy Crystal.

According to Carolyn Raskin, there was never enough money to do the show the way it should have been done. Candy was often frustrated because he would come up with great creative ideas—and then be given the reason why the show couldn’t afford to do them.

The quality of the sketches was uneven, and none of the other regular performers made much impact. But Candy was at the top of his form and did some of his best work. He exuded energy and confidence. He also looked great. And the week that Betty White was the guest star, there was a glimpse of why the summer of 1980 might have been an unusually happy time in Candy’s life.

Jennifer Candy, who was only a few months old, made her TV debut in the arms of her father and under the gaze of Betty White. The premise of her appearance was that Rose Candy had some errands to do and had asked John to look after Jennifer for a while. Probably Candy was so full of paternal pride he couldn’t resist introducing the audience to his wonder child.

Unlike “SCTV,” which has been in perpetual rerun for years, the tapes of “Big City Comedy” sit unwatched in the archives. That’s a shame, because the show boasts some classic Candy sketches.

In one of the most hilarious, Candy impersonates Orson Welles in a black suit and grey beard, regally dining alone at a formal restaurant until he is joined by an unwelcome guest—Billy Crystal as an insufferable autograph hound known only as Willie.

Later in his career, Candy would become extremely touchy about fat jokes, but here he seems to relish it when Crystal/Willie tells Candy/Welles he looks even fatter in person than he does on TV, and compares him to Shamu the Killer Whale.

“Willie, you are the most ignorant man I have ever encountered,” sniffs the autocratic Orson. “Be gone. You’re taking up my valuable air.”

But when Willie asks for his autograph, Orson is only too happy to comply. Willie is perplexed when he examines it. It seems he thought he was talking to Raymond Burr.

On one episode the guest star is not an American entertainer but Margaret Trudeau, estranged wife of Canada’s prime minister at that time. Ms. Trudeau had begun working as an interviewer on a daytime Ottawa TV show, and in one of her sketches with Candy, she demonstrates her killer journalistic techniques.

We see her being perfectly sweet to her guest before they go on the air. Candy says he feels vulnerable and uncomfortable; she tells him not to worry, they’re friends. Then they go on the air and she turns into an assassin. When he gets out of answering a question by saying he’s forgotten because he had a couple of martinis, she zeroes in for the kill: “How often do you have these alcoholic blackouts, Mr. Candy?”

As he whimpers and recoils into a fetal position, she keeps up the abuse, alluding to his “wild night life” and “druggy friends.”

“You promised me this would be off the record,” he squeals, by now reduced to a quivering wreck.

If you watch this sketch years later, what’s striking is how dangerously close to home Candy was willing to go for the sake of good material.

Unfortunately, these memorable satiric high points weren’t enough to keep “Big City Comedy” on the air. The public was hardly aware of the show’s existence and barely had time to discover it before it had run its thirteen weeks and expired. “Big City Comedy” had too many strikes against it—including the fact that its material was more suited to late-night than to the early-evening time slot it actually had in most markets.

Candy was rattled by “Big City’s” demise. He remarked ruefully that a lot of promises had been made to him, and few of them had been kept. “It was the old story with the old excuses,” he said wearily. “I learned a few things—don’t go near certain people, and never pay attention to verbal agreements.”

Once again, fame and success had seemed tantalizingly close, only to be snatched away at the crucial moment.