In the spring of 1972, Candy signed on with a children's touring troupe, the Caravan Theatre, which had a small LIP (local initiatives projects) grant from the federal government. The Caravan was presenting two plays. Some days the shows were presented at the Poor Alex Theatre on Brunswick Avenue in Toronto; on other days the plays were also put on at outdoor venues, often in city parks.
Most of the cast of six had already been chosen before Candy was hired. One member of the company, Valri Bromfield, wanted her friend, Dan Aykroyd--who was also her partner in a comedy act--to take the parts Candy eventually played. But Aykroyd regarded himself as a comic, not an actor, and certainly not an actor in children's plays. He turned down the gig. To fill the void, the director, Stephen Katz, suggested someone who was unknown but in Katz's view very talented. This is how John Candy came to spend the summer of 1972 playing toadstools and blocks of wood.
It was Valri Bromfield who introduced John Candy to Dan Aykroyd. Bromfield and Aykroyd had recently moved to Toronto from Ottawa. Bromfiled told Aykroyd she wanted him to meet this big, funny new friend of hers because, as she put it, "he's just like you."
Aykroyd was a rebellious child of relative privilege. He grew up in Ottawa, where his father was a deputy minister in the Canadian government. But perhaps in reaction to the burden of family respectability, Aykroyd developed a combative, subversive wit and a rowdy lifestyle. And unlike the essentially shy, insecure Candy, Aykroyd was full of self-confidence.
Aykroyd (who was working for the post office as well as peforming comedy) was walking along Yonge Street past Bromfield's apartment one day when Bromfield leaned out of a window and called him. She wanted to come up, because John Candy was visiting her, and this was her chance to introduce them...
Aykroyd and Candy--destined to be lifelong friends--hit it off because they had similar senses of humour. They drove around town and hung out at parties together. Aykroyd introduced Candy to his friend Marcus O'Hara (brother of Candy's future Second City colleague Catherine O'Hara). O'Hara lived with his girlfriend, Gilda Radner, a performer from Detroit who had landed a major role in the Toronto production of Godspell that summer. O'Hara and Aykroyd jointly ran a sleazy but hip after-hours club on a down-and-out stretch of Queen Street East. The premises also doubles as living quarters for a few people, including Aykroyd.
Early in 1973 Dan Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield got word that Second City, the legendary Chicago revue comedy troupe, was planning to open a Toronto branch. Searching for local talent, Second City brass were coming to Toronto to hold auditions. The rules of the game: each aspiring performer had to present five different comedy characters to the adjudicators.
"We were all kind of scared of the audition," Aykroyd recalls. Knowing that Candy would be more terrified than anyone, Aykroyd took drastic action. Candy was invited to have lunch with Bromfield and Aykroyd, then accompany them to the audition.
"Unbeknownst to me," Candy claimed in an interview later, "Dan and Valri put my name down on the list. My name was called. They pushed me into a room. Sweat was all over me."
According to Aykroyd, it wasn't so much Candy's material that astonished judges as his presence and personality.
"As soon as they saw him on stage, they were thrilled," Aykroyd recalls, "more thrilled, in truth, than they were with Valri and me."
The audition that Candy was taken to by Dan Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield was essentially designed to scout local talent for the Toronto branch of Second City...Among the performers recruited were Gilda Radner and Gerry Salsberg (both then appearing in Godspell) and Jayne Eastwood (who had been in the Toronto-made film Goin' Down the Road two years earlier) as well as Aykroyd, Bromfield and Candy. Among the hundreds who did not get chosen were Eugene Levy (also in the cast of Godspell and Martin Short.
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 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 brilliantly satiric sketch "You're Going to Be All Right, You Creep, Leaving Home and All, Eh?"...Second City was a voracious machine that devoured performers, so there was a constant need for new talent.
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's shop rather than at 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.
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 scedule 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 Hennessay and John Stocker.
Candy would have had an ongoing role, but because he was going to Pasadena, Evans replaced him with Dan 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.
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 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 inevitabley 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 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.
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 Macambo club, Candy took Belushi out on the town. Later Candy joined the 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 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.
Around the time the Disney deal was being made, Ivan Reitman, who had hired Candy for Stripes and Heavy Metal, offered him a key role in his next movie, Ghostbusters, working alongside Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the magnificent Sigourney Weaver. Things progressed so far that Candy even appeared in a Ghostbusters video. But Candy demanded a fee of $350,000, matching his Disney price. Reitman balked, and they had an unpleasant parting of the ways. Candy would never again work in an Ivan Reitman movie.
Candy's salary soared to two million dollars for Armed and Dangerous. The project had been around for six years, and there had been about fifteen versions of the script. At one point it had been a vehicle for Belushi and Aykroyd, then Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, then Aykroyd and Candy (with John Carpenter to direct). When Aykroyd and Carpenter dropped out Candy was left with a contract and no movie.
In retrospect it's clear Candy would have been better off if Armed and Dangerous had been cancelled. Ironically, it would have stayed in limbo if Candy hadn't insisted on pushing forward when the project was all but dead. Candy had arranged to rent a house in L.A. and take Rose and the children there for the summer of 1985, and he was upset at the prospect of cancelling his plans. If he had accepted the collapse of the film, he could have had a quiety summer with his family at their farm outside Toronto. But Candy was so upset by the loss of work that he made it clear to Columbia Pictures he was prepared to enforce his contract with legal action...Candy ignored all the danger signs that should have alerted him to the obvious. Armed and Dangerous had "disaster" written all over it, and he should have counted himself lucky to get a chance to escape from making it.
Candy came to the Argo's opening hoopla straight from New Orleans. He even wore the 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 Muriel Hemingway. (Belushi and Hemingway had been flown in for the occasion on McNall's private 727.)
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 Muriel 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.
Excerpts from Laughing on the Outside: The Life of John Candy
By Martin Knelman
Transcribed by L. Christie