Dan Aykroyd had a plan to change John Belushi's life. The United States Navy had invited the two actors to come aboard a Seventh Fleet ship which was going on a week of maneuvers in the Pacific. Apparently, the ship's commanding officer regularly showed their movie The Blues Brothers aboard the vessel. The officers and crew knew all the songs and loved this pair of soul-energized comedians. Aykroyd was convinced that seven healthy days at sea would revitalize Belushi.
"John, I want you to do the solemn favor of your life--" He told Belushi on Wednesday, March 3, 1982. Aykroyd was in the offices they shared in New York; Belushi was in the bungalow he had rented at the Chateau Marmont Hotel above the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Over the telephone, Aykroyd recognized the tension in Belushi's voice. ("I knew he was getting into something. The vermin were out there. He was running with bad people, and I knew that he had to just relax and cool out and let the pressures of the business off and get away from whatever substances were being pushed.")
"--You've got to come with me on this navy cruise," Aykroyd insisted, his resonant, baritone voice full of energy. "We'll go on seven days of Navy regimen. We'll clean out. We'll get ready for the next push, the next season. This is just what we both need..."
A transcontinental pause. Then the reply came back in a shocked, tight, almost robotic voice: "That would be impossible to do," said Belushi.
("Now half of it," says Aykroyd, "was that he was afraid of being seasick, 'cause he didn't like boats too much. But I think the other half was that--there's-no-turning-back-for-me-now kind of thing. I sensed that in his voice. But these were my instincts: to take him, put him on board a ship where there would be nothing--completely clean him out. He had the will to be clean. He wanted to be clean. Later I heard from our agent, Bernie Brillstein, that after John had hung up with me he talked with Bernie and said, 'Well, I guess Danny's right. That's right. That's what we need--a navy regimen. I'm gonna do it.' So he'd made the decision to do it. And it's so sad 'cause he would have done it. We would have been on that ship the next week. Monday we would have sailed.")
Two days later, Dan Aykroyd was suddenly on his own. His best friend was dead of an overdose of heroin mixed with cocaine. Aykroyd felt as if he had lost a brother. Gone was the business partnership, and the strong friendship which had provided, for both men, an emotional support system as well as a permanent base from which they had launched their careers in tandem. Together they had swiftly risen from obscurity to the stratosphere of American comedy. Together they had earned millions of laughs and dollars. Together they had shared their twenties, and had talked of growing old together. It had been, in Aykroyd's words, "a full friendship. There was no dimension of it unexplored, except the sexual one. This was friendship between two young me, two young Turks, young rogues. We really succeeded and thrived in an interlocking sense, in a true business joint venture."
Like two other independent young rogues--Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--Aykroyd and Belushi understood that romance was the secret of friendship. The romantic sensibility they shared became the invisible bond of a highly visible, multimedia, comedy team. First it was the dangerous medium of late-night, live, national television on which they created folklore wrought from comedy, and formed an intimate, weekly relationship with a whole generation of young Americans. Next came records, concert tours, high-budget motion pictures, and the manic film personae of two down-and-out rhythm-and-blues hipsters who called themselves The Blues Brothers. Drawing from their own fraternal relationship, Aykroyd and Belushi remade themselves as Elwood and Jake Blues. The result was an original comedic duo whose deadpan humor, lovable crudity, and destructo-escapades projected an image of mutual protectiveness and, most of all, intense loyalty. Set against the backdrop of black rhythm-and-blues music, theirs was white men's comedy; yet the friendship from which it sprang was so affectionate and universally recognized that it made a deep impression across racial and ethnic lines. Peter Aykroyd, Dan's younger brother, recalls a conversation overheard on a train shortly after Belushi's death: "There were these two black guys talking real loud about this and that. They started talking about movies and one guy said, 'Man, you know, I'm really bummed-out about John Belushi. Shit, I really miss him man. I miss him. You know what I loved about him? Him and his buddy man, they were so tight. Really tight.'"
They had been tight from the start. They met each other in 1973 at the Second City improvisational theater in Toronto. Belushi, who had made a name for himself in the Chicago Second City troupe, came up to Toronto to recruit talent for the new National Lampoon Radio Hour and the Lampoon road review, Lemmings. He had heard about Aykroyd's work with regional dialects and characters in the Toronto company, and Aykroyd had heard about Belushi's knockout performances in Chicago. After watching the show and joining the cast for the last improvisational set, Belushi went backstage where he was introduced to Aykroyd. Belushi was twenty-four; Aykroyd was twenty.
There was a mood of long-lost brothers finding each other at last. "It was kind of like love at first sight," Aykroyd remembers. "The friendship was almost instantaneous. Clearly here was someone who understood me and someone whom I understood. I made sure that he didn't leave my side during that entire time in Toronto."
Aykroyd showed Belushi around his stomping grounds. The first stop was on Queen and River streets, home of Club 505, an after-hours speakeasy that Aykroyd had been managing for three years. Patronized from midnight to dawn by artists, rock musicians, old blues singers, and underground types, the club had a funky, low-rent odor. It was furnished with old, mossy couches, a rickety barber's chair, a beat-up bar, a cloudy fish tank, and a toilet whose plumbing had once produced a live, scrabbling, sewer-slime rat at the same time that Aykroyd was perched upon the bowl, reading. Aykroyd took proprietary pride in the squalid, go-to-hell atmosphere of his establishment and in the high-quality bootleg booze he poured behind the bar ("I'm proud of being a bootlegger--it's my illicit thing in life.". To Belushi, the place seemed perfect. He felt right at home. As they stood behind the bar, tossing back shots of Aykroyd's illegal booze, they discovered a mutual fascination with the first of many romances they would share--the gritty, all-night, low-rent romance of blue-collar squalor.
What Aykroyd knew of blue-collar life he had gone far afield to learn. Growing up Catholic in Quebec and Ontario, he had been a troublemaker in primary school, and an impious seminarian at the St. Pius X Minor Preparatory Seminary, from which he was expelled for favoring acts of minor deliquency and vandalism to acts of contrition. At Carelton University in Ottawa, he developed an interest in crime and punishment. His studies in criminology, deviant psychology, and correctional policy happened to coincide with his discovery of the Ottawa underworld in which he made the acquaintance of skilled and unskilled criminals, car thieves, hoodlums, soldiers of fortune, acid dealers, bootleggers--men with names such as Ray the Green Beret and George the Thief. But perhaps because his grandfather had been a Royal Canandian Mounted Policeman, and because his father was the assistant deputy minister for research and development at the Department of Transport in Ottawa, Aykroyd managed to find equal enthusiasm for both sides of the law. He was as intensely fascinated by cops as he was by robbers. The joke, later started at Saturday Night Live, was that Aykroyd's ideal fantasy was to commit a crime and then arrest himself.
His passion for criminology led him to a summer job working at the penitentiary facility in Ottawa, where he wrote a manual on personnel placement. And there were the blue-collar jobs that he loved so much: He worked as a warehouseman, a railroad brakeman, a mail driver for the Royal Mail, a dial reader on a runway-load-testing unit at Toronto International Airport, a road surveyor in the Northwest Territories (where he observed local tension between the Blackfoot Indians and the Royal Canadian Mounties, and learned to like squirrel roasted on a stick). "I explored a lot of different careers," Aykroyd recalled. "That's what I liked about John--he had the blue collar in him, too."
Belushi at several times during his youth in Chicago, and in Wheaton, Illinois, had been a warehouseman, a trucker, a janitor, a cleaning man, and a busboy in one of his father's restaurants. The eldest son of Albanian immigrant parents, he was an outstanding athlete--the Athlete of the Year at Edison Junior High School, and a star linebacker and captain of the football team at Wheaton Central High School where he was elected Homecoming King in 1967, his senior year. Like Aykroyd (who took up blues harmonica at sixteen, and jammed on drums with Muddy Waters at an Ottawa nightclub called Le Hibou), Belushi gravitated toward music, playing drums in various rock 'n' roll bands throughout high school. But what he really wanted to do was act, and to make people laugh. With his Wheaton friends Tino Insana and Steve Beshekas, he started an improvisational theater company, known as The West Compass Players, and was soon playing improvised comedy to a packed coffeehouse of college kids and hippies in Chicago. His impersonation of the spastic manner of British rock star Joe Cocker became a show stopping performance that earned him a spot in the company of Chicago's Second City troupe. A year later, Aykroyd auditioned with a straight flush of talent--five characters in five minutes--and earned a place in the cast of Toronto's Second City. The names of Aykroyd and Belushi, and of the comic characters they were creating, began to pass back and forth between the two companies like electric signals.
A tape recorder placed between the two actors when they were finally joined together in Toronto would have picked up the sound of authentic kindred recognition. "That first night was great 'cause we just connected immediately and knew that we were kindred spirits," Aykroyd remembers. "It wasn't as if we told jokes to each other, although John was a great joke teller and raconteur. I can't do it. He appreciated the gift that I had for voices, dialects, and characters, and I appreciated the same gift he had. Our humor fit perfectly together--perfectly!."
It also fit in with an eruption of new humor that was beginning to crack open the landscape of American comedy. The seismic epicenter was New York and The National Lampoon, a large-circulation humor magazine founded in 1970 by a pair of young Harvard graduates named Doug Kenney and Henry Beard> Written by a team of, mostly, lapsed Catholics, the Lampoon seemed to be convincing just about anybody under thirty-five that the Devil--not God, nor Jewish psychoanalysts, nor Polish mothers-in-law--was the preeminent force in the Universe. The magazine's success with black humor and scalpel-sharp satire was soon expanded into a weekly Radio Hour and the Off Broadway review, Lemmings. But if on the printed page Lampoon humor was subversive, audacious, erratic, and somtimes so smart it was dumb, then it needed for translation the stage a peformer who was visually capable of unleashing every dark impulse man had ever repressed. It wasn't Chevy Chase, ir Gilda Radner, or Brian Doyle-Murray, or Bill Murray (though, in Lemmings, each proved to be a versatile improvisator). It was John Belushi who embodied the darkest essence of Lampoon comedy.
Soon after meeting Aykroyd in Toronto, Belushi called the Second City troupe to ask Aykroyd and Gilda Radner to come to New York to join the Lemmings cast. Radner went; Aykroyd declined. He had his hands full with Second City, the Club 505, and a starring role in the Canadian Broadcasting Company's new television series, Coming Up Rosie. Nevertheless, Belushi persisted. ("John was a leader, an operator, an organizer, a finagler, a wizard--his intention was always to get me into a group.") Eventually, Aykroyd went down to New York for a social visit. In helmet and leather, he arrived outside Belushi's Villlage apartment at 376 Bleecker Street, and gunned a greeting with the engine of his old Harley-Davidson motorcycle. From the window, Belushi let out a war whoop, and came down to inspect Aykroyd's prize hog.
Aykroyd loved machines. He was of a particular species of motorcycle fanatic--a Harley man, devoted exclusively to the All-American hog, the big black chopper favored by state troopers and counterculture outlaws. He had the arms of a blacksmith and the build for long-distance, high-speed hot rodding. Tall, strong, and beefy (nicknamed by Belushi "the Canadian Oak"), Aykroyd handled the hog with law-enforcement heft. Belushi, evidently, was not ideally suited for the bike. Short, portly, unevenly muscular (nicknamed by Aykroyd, "the Albanian Oak"), he was shaky behind the handlebars when he took off for a neighborhood spin--an outing that made Aykroyd extremely nervous. With his anxiety divided between the safety of his friend and the safety of his bike, Aykroyd ran around the block beside Belushi, yelling intructions over the engine roar, and holding out a protective arm. It was a role Aykroyd would take on more and more often, in different ways, as their friendship developed.
For the moment, though, there was simply high-voltage attraction between them--the kind of interactive electricity that occurs at the beginning of a friendship between two young funny men who illuminate one another's best talents and become each other's best audience. Each was necessary for the other's self-definition as a comic actor. Aykroyd was "nice," mild, and internal; Belushi was "mean," wild, and external. Aykroyd softened Belushi's hardness and Belushi polished Aykroyd's rough edges. Aykroyd made Belushi vulnerable and Belushi made Aykroyd look tough. The chemistry was combustible. During those first days, in the process of finding out how to make other people laugh, they made each other howl. "I don't know what made us laugh," says Aykroyd, "but Jesus, we'd roll on the floor. We couldn't talk we were laughing so hard. There were always laughs with John. He just exuded humor and warmth and the vulnerability that made you just want to hug him."
From then on the excitement they were beginning to share, intellectually and emotionally, intensified for each of them in different ways. "For John, Danny was a wonderful person to find and love as a friend because Danny was so intensely loyal," says Timothy White, a young Rolling Stone writer who became acquainted with both men through a mutual friend. "Danny was an inspiration for John about what a great friend is. Danny epitomized the archetypal great friend. He's really a man's man. He's like a character out of a the movie Gallipoli. He's a true, loyal friend, and he has a strong sense of romance about that. Anyone who's ever been a friend of Danny's is still a friend of Danny's. Above all, he esteemed John, which was a good reason for John to walk around feeling pretty great." On Aykroyd, the impact of the relationship was visceral: "I'm not a homo, and neither was John, but when I saw him come into a room, I got the jump you get when you see a beautiful girl. It was that kind of feeling. It was that adrenaline--that pit-of-the-stomach rush. He was always exciting to be around. One knew that something was going to happen, even it was just a matter of taking a walk. Being with him was electric, really electric."
The following year, Aykroyd was about to open in the Pasadena, California, company of Second City when he received a telephone call from Lorne Michaels. A Toronto-born, thiry-year-old veteran comedy writer, Michaels was going to produce a ninety-minute television comedy-variety show that would be broadcast live from NBC in New York every Saturday night. The show, which was to be Saturday Night (to disinguish it from ABC's variety show, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell), would feature comedy sketches performed by a resident company of actors and a weekly guest host. Michaels had received a sixteen-show commitment from the network, and was now selecting the cast. Chevy Chase (later to join the cast for the first season) had been hired as a writer. John Belushi and Gilda Radner were under consideration. Michaels wanted Aykroyd to come to New York for an audition.
Aykroyd had doubts about the show. For one thing, there didn't seem to be a future in live television comedy; it hadn't been done since the fifties--it just didn't exist anymore. For another, who wanted to make risky comedy in a broadcasting company that was a slave to Nielson ratings. Aykroyd didn't wish to screw up his career with some live show that would probably be a dead show after three nights of dismal ratings. At twenty-two, he was doing just fine, thank you very much, without television and without New York; he had just received his first part in a Canadian motion picture. "I don't know about this late night kind of comedy you're gonna do," he told Michaels. "I don't think it's gonna fly, pal."
There were a few more calls from Michaels; Aykroyd continued to stall. Then, there was Belushi on the phone, madly persuasive, talking him into coming to New York for the auditions at least. Belushi was adamant: They were actors, man, so they wouldn't give an inch to television--the kind of pretaped, canned-laughter, comedy factories on prime-time network TV. No way, Jose. He had already met with Michaels, and told him that he thought television was garbage. But supposedly, this show of Michaels's was going to be a new kind of television, inspired by improvisational theater and spontaneous comic acting...
After a few minutes of arm twisting, Aykroyd couldn't say no. (Looking back, Aykroyd sees that his own initial reluctance, and Belushi's forceful persuasiveness, were constant characterstics of their relationship: "I'm always so reluctant to jump in. He got me to do things I didn't want to do all the time. Joining Saturday Night was just one.") Though confident of his own talents, Aykroyd was emboldened by Belushi's fearlessness and dazzled by his audacity. According to Michaels, "Danny absolutely idolized John's nerve. Danny has great respect for courage and bravery, and is, of course very brave and courageous himself, but he stood in awe of John's nerve."