Chapter 8

IT CAME FROM EDMONTON

In Stripes, a 1981 Hollywood comedy about U.S. Army dunderheads who accidentally turn into great national heroes, John Candy landed the best role of his movie career up to that time. As an oversize recruit named Dewey Oxberger, known as Ox to his buddies, Candy drew laughs just by waddling across the screen.

There’s a bit of autobiographical truth to Candy’s lines when Ox tells the other recruits why he decided to enlist.

“You might have noticed,” he remarks sarcastically, “I have a bit of a weight problem.”

Then he gets a determined look on his face and vows: “I’m going to walk out of here a lean, mean fighting machine.”

Candy couldn’t help remembering his own experience when at age eighteen he had been rejected by the U.S. Marines.

Stripes gave Candy a chance to play out on celluloid his own old chubby teen fantasy of macho redemption, and at the same time to be reunited with an old Chicago Second City friend, Bill Murray, and a former SCTV cohort, Harold Ramis.

Murray and Ramis were co-starring in this comedy concocted by Canadian expatriate Ivan Reitman, the scrawny boy mogul from Hamilton’s McMaster University who had already become one of Hollywood’s wealthiest producers thanks to Animal House, and still had his biggest success, Ghostbusters, ahead of him. The same summer Stripes was playing, another film produced by Reitman went into release.

Heavy Metal, a Canadian production directed by National Film Board veteran Gerald Potterton, was a full-length animation feature based on the monthly magazine. It featured an anthology of hip sci-fi stories, rock music and the speaking voices of well-known actors. The episodes are of highly variable quality, but John Candy was involved in two of the funniest. First he plays a deprived suburban teenager who finds sexual opportunity on another planet. And then he’s hilarious as a squeaky-voiced robot having a wild affair with a voluptuous human, female and Jewish, who resists his proposal on the grounds that mixed marriages never work.

Reitman took on the job of directing Stripes as well as producing it, with a script by Reitman’s long-time collaborator, Dan Goldberg, and Goldberg’s partner, Len Blum. Shrewdly, Reitman gave the film the feeling of a Second City escapade not only by casting Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and John Candy but also by including entertaining cameo turns by Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty.

Thomas plays the ringmaster of a porn mud-wrestling attraction, and Flaherty is one of the thick-headed Russian guards outsmarted by Murray and Ramis.

At the beginning of the film, there’s a scene about a basic-English class for immigrants that has the stamp of a Second City sketch. Though it lasts for less than a minute, it helps set the tone of the movie—which is wittier than previous Reitman movies like Meatballs. The Second City touches save Reitman’s comedy from seeming mindlessly boorish.

Bill Murray’s droopy eyes, vacant expression and delayed reactions add up to an out-of-it quality that helped make Meatballs a hit. In Stripes, the role of John Winger is tailored to Murray’s narcoleptic manner. Winger is a drifter whose life is such a shambles that he joins the army out of panic and for lack of anything better to do. Murray plays the part with the kind of charm that is so laid back it almost lapses into a coma.

With glasses that seem too old and wise for his baby face and a mild, good-boy demeanour that is played off against the hidden streak of lunacy in his personality, Harold Ramis has more than a fleeting resemblance to that earlier Harold, legendary silent comedian Harold Lloyd. But silence would not become Ramis; verbal stings are his secret weapon. In Stripes Ramis does for Bill Murray what Bob Hope used to do for Bing Crosby in Road to Zanzibar and the other Road movies in an earlier movie era; he provides the crackle that saves lazy charm from becoming limp.

Candy’s role is secondary to those of the two stars, but nobody who saw Stripes could forget he was in it. It would prove to be a valuable advertisement of his potential for big screen comedy. Yet the making of Stripes was an agonizing experience for Candy. In fact, when he first read the script he was reluctant to do it—as was Bill Murray.

“The original character didn’t look like much,” Candy explained to the Toronto Star’s Ron Base. “But Ivan said we could change it and I could do some writing. Everything fell together and we realized it could be a lot of fun.”

However, filming sequences in which Ox kept falling into mud—both in the field and in a bar where he competes against six women in a wrestling match—were anything but fun for Candy. He found the experience so painful that some of Candy’s Toronto friends received late-night calls from him.

“He was very worried about the character he was playing, and questioned what he was doing,” recalls George Bloomfield. “He wondered whether he was doing the right thing by participating in the mud-wrestling scene. He was afraid it might make him come across as a pig in mud. He felt degraded.”

Indeed, from the time he first read the script until the week the scene was filmed, Candy campaigned hard to have it changed.

“I was fighting right up to the end to get out of it,” he told Ron Base. “It was so painful, and we spent three days doing it. If you’re going to mud-wrestle with six women, you want to do it in private. It’s somewhat inhibiting when there are three hundred people watching.”

Even when Stripes was about to be released, and was clearly going to be a hit, Candy felt wounded when he was described as “the elephant” in an unflattering review.

“Jerks like that are obvious,” Candy grumbled to a reporter from People magazine, referring to the reviewer. “I’m sensitive about my weight. I’m the one who has to look in the mirror, and after a while it begins to eat at you.”

Encouraged by his friend John Belushi, who had recently lost forty pounds, Candy said he was hiring an exercise coach to help him do the same. Like Ox, he was determined to turn himself into a lean, mean machine.

*   *   *

Just before Stripes opened in hundreds of theatres all across North America, John Candy became the most sought-after free agent in television comedy. He was up for grabs in the spring of 1981, after the failure of “Big City Comedy.”

Andrew Alexander was negotiating with NBC to get a spot for “SCTV” in the elusive promised land of network U.S. TV. Meanwhile Candy was getting overtures from “Saturday Night Live”—the show that had made stars of Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy.

By this time Candy had parted company with Garry Blye and hired Claire Burrill—a Sunset Boulevard lawyer with a special interest in show business—to sort out his messy business affairs. One of Burrill’s mandates was to get rid of people who had previously been involved in managing Candy.

This was to become an oft-repeated motif in Candy’s career. He would typically bring in new people to dispose of other people he had formerly put his trust in. Since Candy hated confrontations, he was never the person giving the bad news to those about to be fired. More likely they would learn the axe was about to fall when they heard from third parties that Candy was making stinging comments about them behind their backs.

Burrill became one of the most prominent examples of Candy’s capacity for turning against those once trusted, and also of Candy’s capacity for seeking reconciliations with those he had cut off. The higher Candy’s star rose, the more pronounced this pattern became. In the mid-eighties, Burrill would become one of those Candy decided to purge. But in late 1988, there would be a reconciliation, and Burrill would be brought back to run Candy’s production company—only to be dumped a second time a year later. This sort of reversal became a familiar occurrence in Candy’s business life.

In the spring of 1981, Candy counted on Burrill to help him reach a larger audience on TV than he had managed so far. That agenda placed Candy at the centre of a bewildering internal war within NBC.

At one point, NBC was seriously thinking of cancelling “Saturday Night Live” and replacing it with “SCTV.” Instead a decision was made to try to resuscitate “Saturday Night,” and the show was given a new executive producer—Dick Ebersol. Even before accepting the job, Ebersol had mentioned to Brandon Tartikoff, who was then running NBC, that he was thinking of bringing in some of the performers from “SCTV.” Unbeknownst to Ebersol, another NBC executive, Irv Wilson, was about to sign a deal with Andrew Alexander to have “SCTV” fill a late-night Friday spot (following “The Tonight Show” at 12:30 a.m.) which had opened up with the cancellation of “The Midnight Special.”

Ebersol was enraged, and tried to enlist the support of Tartikoff to stop Wilson from foiling his plans to raid “SCTV.” When word of this battle leaked to the press, reporters began calling Candy to ask whether he was planning to join “Saturday Night” or return to the SCTV fold.

Candy was embarrassed about being in the middle of a controversy, and there was nothing he wanted to do less than face an interrogation by journalists. Media questions made Candy nervous; he brooded about critical comments in the press or cracks about his weight, and in interviews he was nervous lest he say the wrong thing and be made to look like a fool.

The way Candy handled the media curiosity about his discussions with “Saturday Night Live” was to go into seclusion at his family farm near Newmarket, north of Toronto, and refuse to answer the phone.

Candy had heard, along with a lot of other people, that “Saturday Night Live” was a viper’s nest compared to which the tensions at “SCTV” seemed as benign as a Sunday picnic in the country. Moreover, the cast of “SNL” was so large that it was harder for any one performer to make a mark. Besides, Candy had a strong sentimental streak, and after the stresses caused by his defection to “Big City,” he was eager to be reconciled with his former SCTV colleagues and heal any wounds.

In the end, Candy opted to sort out his differences with Andrew Alexander—which involved royalty payments for previous SCTV shows—and return to “SCTV” now that it was going to be seen on NBC. Alexander found himself in the role of the bad daddy who had been defied and repudiated but was now being offered a chance to acknowledge the true worth of his prodigal son and woo him back.

Contract negotiations were especially tricky because the SCTV stars were writers as well as performers, and the deal was being made while the Writers Guild of America was on strike. Burrill played a key role in sorting out the glitches.

Ebersol settled for signing two other performers—Robin Duke and Tony Rosato—who had been appearing with “SCTV” during the first year of its production in Edmonton.

*   *   *

Part of the price of returning to “SCTV” was that Candy, along with his colleagues, would have to spend four months of the year in the showbiz wasteland of central Alberta. But Edmonton proved to be surprisingly conducive to creativity, perhaps because there were few distractions. Everyone was living away from home, occupying a hotel room or a rented house (as in the case of John and Rose Candy) and so there was a stronger need for bonding.

The playing field had changed drastically from the one Candy had known during SCTV’s days at Global’s Toronto studio three years earlier. Because of the NBC deal the show had a budget (about $475,000 per episode) that would once have been beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. But there was also more pressure than there had been previously.

NBC needed a ninety-minute show, which meant sixty-five minutes of sketch material every week. The network preferred certain kinds of material, and parachuted in its own producers to promote its viewpoint. NBC wanted musical groups to appear on “SCTV” (for a while, they did), and also had some strong opinions about the order in which sketches would be scheduled. In NBC’s view, skits with drug themes could be counted on to improve ratings, especially if they were placed at the beginning of the program.

“SCTV” had more stars than before—seven. Catherine O’Hara returned to the fold at the same time as Candy, and Rick Moranis, who had been recruited during the absence of Candy and O’Hara, stayed on when they returned. This inevitably led to more rivalry over who was getting the best material and the best time slots.

Facilities and equipment in Edmonton had certain limitations. “SCTV” could never tape on Wednesdays and Saturdays—because those were the nights of televised Edmonton Oilers hockey games. And in this part of the universe, nothing generated more excitement than Wayne Gretzky and the Stanley Cup. This charming bit of inside detail about working conditions in the hinterlands was always good for a chuckle when one of the cast appeared on a talk show in New York or L.A.

In fact, though, production values were better than ever, and the new, more expensive version of “SCTV” set higher standards in such areas as costumes, hair-styling and make-up—giving the performers greater opportunities to go further with their creation of characters.

“The sophistication of the make-up team opened doors for the performers and allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do,” explains Jason Shubb, an associate producer brought in by NBC. “People like Beverley Schectman and Judy Cooper Sealy were geniuses in their field. The process was very labour intensive. One of the performers might have to spend four hours a day in the make-up chair, and it was exhausting. But everyone on the show was young and creative, and willing to work extremely hard. We all felt we were breaking new ground.”

One of the most triumphant combinations of make-up and costume wizardry with performing brilliance occurred when Candy appeared in drag as Divine. And when Candy played Luciano Pavarotti, he looked as if Pavarotti’s face has been superimposed on his own. There was a gleefully wicked perfectionism to this impersonation—confirming how shameless Pavarotti could be in his rabble-rousing pyrotechnics.

As Candy portrays him, Luciano is in the wings at the Metropolitan Opera, talking to the TV audience while the opera audience is wildly cheering his latest triumph. And what is he doing on TV? A commercial for chewing gum.

“It lights up my mouth,” explains this inflated tenor. “The only thing I like in my mouth besides a beautiful aria is a beautiful piece of gum.”

Candy’s most popular character, Johnny LaRue, returned to the air in better form than ever. In one of the most memorable LaRue sketches, the great publisher, producer and all-around bon vivant holds court in pink lounging pyjamas at a Hugh Hefner-style party.

“He’s a big man getting bigger all the time,” comments Geraldo, played by Joe Flaherty.

As that most obnoxious of all Vegas-style entertainers Bobby Bittman (Eugene Levy) puts it: “This is the side of Johnny everybody loves—the parties, the broads, the booze.”

Meanwhile Johnny sits surrounded by bunnies, boasting about his wine cellar, looking down from his penthouse at the common folk and telling Geraldo: “You see all those people down there, Geraldo? They look like bugs. I could squash them if I wanted to.”

*   *   *

The CBC, which was carrying a one-hour version of “SCTV” on Fridays (and airing it almost an hour earlier than NBC), had its own requirements, and to that end Thomas and Moranis created those one hundred per cent Canadian dummies, the McKenzie Brothers. The McKenzies were originally intended to fulfil a Canadian-content requirement, but ironically this send-up of thickheadedness in the Great White North became phenomenally popular among U.S. viewers. Mocking the notion that the show wasn’t Canadian enough, these parka-wearing, beer-guzzling bumpkins would use their imaginary talk show to discuss such pressing issues as the shortage of parking spaces at doughnut shops. And their ultimate putdown, “Take off, eh?” became a codeword greeting craze among fans of the show.

Thomas and Moranis became almost a separate wing, and their partnership provoked a rift with others in the group. Moranis was an upstart and the only member of the team who had not come up through the Old Firehall stage show. There was so much friction that at one point Joe Flaherty told me that if Thomas and Moranis were returning to the show, he wasn’t. In fact, Thomas and Moranis left at the end of the 1981-82 season—they made a McKenzie Brothers movie, Strange Brew—and so did Catherine O’Hara.

“The problem was Rick and Dave became a team within the show,” Flaherty explained at the time. “They wanted more control, they wanted to produce the show, and when they found out they couldn’t, they wanted out. Rick was very high strung, and things could get antagonistic. They probably just needed to get away for a while.”

If Thomas and Moranis had the McKenzies, John Candy and Eugene Levy developed their own hilarious brothers act. It was while they were in Edmonton that Candy and Levy happened to catch a polka show on a local TV station, out of which came one of their most successful collaborations—the Shmenge Brothers.

Candy remembered that his Yiddish-speaking friend Stephen Young was fond of the word “shmenge,” as in his frequent admonition: “Don’t be such a shmenge.” Candy didn’t know what it meant, and he was afraid to ask.

Therein came the name for Yosh and Stan—two irresistibly square immigrant Leutonians who both have monotone speaking voices, prominent facial moles, and a reverence for cabbage rolls. The Shmenge Brothers would prove to be so enduring that Candy (the clarinet-playing Yosh) and Levy (accordion-playing Stan) would bring them back for one farewell hour-long special (“The Last Polka”) a couple of years after “SCTV” had ceased productions and gone into reruns.

*   *   *

Even after their reconciliation, Candy continued to regard Andrew Alexander with a suspicious eye. In Candy’s view, Alexander did not show enough respect for the many people who were giving everything they had to the show. Throughout his life Candy felt it was his obligation to protect those who were less powerful than himself, and defend them from exploiters. This ongoing drama reached a crescendo of sorts one night in Edmonton when the crew, after working punishing hours, were offered a meal that was, in Candy’s view, not up to the demands of the occasion. Candy expressed this view by hurling a container of Swiss Chalet chicken into a wall.

Candy was by no means alone in his attitude to Alexander, who had a continuing battle with the cast over the slowness of royalty payments. Alexander claimed he had a cash-flow problem even when large sums of money began coming in from NBC. The show’s $475,000 budget exceeded the combined fees coming from NBC and the CBC, and Alexander had to pick up the deficit. Of course he knew his big payoff would come later, when the show went into daily syndication—it would make him a multi-millionaire—but in the meantime he was crying poor.

Waiting for cheques to arrive and often hiring lawyers to protect them, the performers enjoyed one big advantage over Alexander. They could score points against him on the air on his own program. Needling Alexander with private jokes that few of their viewers would fully comprehend, they turned him into an ongoing satiric target—specifically in the person of the slippery, blatantly self-serving Guy Caballero, the station president portrayed with gleeful malice by Joe Flaherty.

“There’s no question Guy Caballero is an Andrew Alexander figure,” says Jason Shubb.

Caballero—a curmudgeon who zips around in a wheelchair—is forever cutting budgets, bullying writers, cancelling shows and stabbing SCTV employees in the back. And in a lengthy sketch that has to be considered startlingly vicious even by SCTV standards, Caballero became a stand-in for the disgraced Hollywood mogul David Begelman, whose cheque-forging was exposed in the book Indecent Exposure (and who would later become, like John Candy, a business partner of Bruce McNall).

In the SCTV version, Caballero’s cheque-forging goes to hilarious extremes, but the board of SCTV gives him a vote of confidence, and Caballero goes on the air to beg forgiveness from viewers—without offering to give back any of the money.

Of course everyone knew Alexander was no criminal, but because they felt he was using his control of the purse-strings to take unfair advantage of them, the performers took pleasure in trashing him. They didn’t expend a lot of energy worrying about whether they were being unfair to him. They were playing a kind of game in which Alexander was the guest of honour at a never-ending celebrity roast. And if his transgressions were outrageously exaggerated for comic effect, the barbs were not entirely without affection.

According to Shubb, the negative feelings some members of the cast had about Alexander were balanced by their recognition that he was a man who made things happen, and who was responsible for giving them the great opportunity they were now enjoying.

“When they were upset with him,” says Shubb, “it was in the way you might be upset with a parent.”

*   *   *

Because he had been consumed with “SCTV,” 1982 was the only year in which Candy did not have a movie coming out, except for It Came From Hollywood—a forgettable anthology of clips from amusingly dreadful movies about aliens. Candy was one of the narrators, along with Cheech and Chong, Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd. Candy’s main contribution was to make jokes putting down that prodigious director of cheap, amateurish movies, Ed Wood. But the jokes seemed every bit as tacky as Wood’s movies.

In March, 1982, about a month after production of “SCTV” moved from Edmonton back to Toronto, John Candy got some shocking news from Los Angeles. His friend John Belushi had been found dead of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

As an overweight comedian who had served his apprenticeship at Chicago’s Second City club and then graduated from television to movie stardom, Belushi had been a kind of role model for Candy. They were both close friends of Dan Aykroyd. When Belushi visited Toronto in the mid-1970s, performing with the National Lampoon touring show at the El Mocambo club, Candy took Belushi out on the town. Later Candy joined the supporting cast of two movies Belushi and Aykroyd were starring in, 1941 and The Blues Brothers.

Beyond that there was a special bond between these two guys who were not only both fat and both funny but were also known and loved for their excesses. Suddenly Belushi’s death became a warning sign of the price that might have to be paid for excess.

John Stocker, Candy’s friend from the days of CBC children’s shows, remembers that Candy was so devastated by Belushi’s death that he sank into a black depression, refusing to go out or even talk to anyone on the phone.

Dan Hennessey, another old colleague from “Coming Up Rosie,” recalls that when Candy did emerge from seclusion, it was clear what kind of impact Belushi’s death had on him.

“It was like a bad Woody Allen joke, and he saw it as a kind of message,” says Hennessey. “John knew it was time to go home, clean up and get his career in order.”

A few years later, Candy let friends know he was proud of himself for kicking his cocaine habit.