Waiting for Dan Aykroyd to meet me in his mid-Manhattan office, I find myself thinking of John Belushi, Ayrkoyd's soul mate and career partner, who died of a drug overdose last March in Los Angeles.
It's hard not to. Evidence of Belushi, who shared the office with Aykroyd, is everywhere: favored photos, letters of tribute from celebrities and friends, mementos of the Blues Brothers--the Saturday Night Live routine that Belushi and Aykroyd parlayed into two platinum albums and a movie deal. A framed note from Sam and Dave, whose song "Soul Man" was their biggest hit, stands out. "John and Danny, you will always be soul men to us," it reads.
Other items conjure Belushi the joker, the wild man, the debauchee. A portrait of Mao Tse-tung, singned, "Your buddy, the Chairman," adorns one wall. A collage that might be called "Pig Out," composed of mutilated plastic knives, forks, credit cards and cigarette butts, is nearby. Ironically, a nutrition magazine lies on Belushi's old desk. "Why Won't They Tell Us About the Additives They're Putting in Beer?" it blares.
There is something weird, empty, in this atmosphere--the absence of Belushi's manic, disruptive energy, conjured as mere memory by so many relics. But it is quickly dispelled by Ayrkoyd himself, who hardly seems daunted, marching into the room in black leather motorcycle boots and fingering a stylish fedora.
"Welcome to the shrine," he says, sounding more sardonic than reverential, helplessly sardonic.
"What the fuck, I thought about moving out, packing it all up. But why? It all existed. It all stands."
Aykroyd sits down and rummages for a cigarette. "These helped kill John," he says, accepting one of mine. "He was smoking four packs a day when he died. John's capacity for consumption was much greater than mine," Aykroyd adds with a note of sad pride. "At 4 in the morning, when I would say, 'Man, I gotta get some sleep,' he would be ready to go until 10. If I had six beers, he would have twelve. If I, hypothetically, did three or four lines of coke, he would do twice, three times as much. John always took it to the limit of endurance. To the limit."
Aykroyd is suprisingly objective about Belushi, remembering him as an insecure man who presented a tough facade, a man who courted danger and ran away from those he needed and loved. Published accounts of Belushi's final days in Los Angeles depict him as desperate, out of control. Was he?
"John may not have had that Zen," concedes Aykroyd. "He may have been over the top. But you must remember, the people he associated with that last week were all being controlled by him. He was sitting in court having them come where he wanted them to come, bringing him the substances he wanted to have. He had it all under control at the end. The only thing he didn't have under control was the essential physical vessell. He lost control of that, and without that, of course, we're useless."
Aykroyd, who accompanied Belushi on more than a few self-abusive rolls, had planned to fly to Los Angeles the to join his friend the very day he learned of his death. Would things have turned out differently if he'd gotten there in time?
"If I had been with John that night it would have gone one of two ways, depending on how I might have felt that evening," he says. "I mean, I'm like a weather vane really. I like to test the wind and see which way it's blowing and go with the stream. That night, if I'd seen that things were going downhill and it was really heavy, I might've gotten rid of the stuff. But if it looked like everyone was having a good time and he was happy and enjoying himself and these were people he trusted--" Aykroyd paused, holding his breath, then continues quietly--"I might've joined in too. And who knowsif I might not've been lying there beside him. The pair of us might've gone out together, which would've been sensational--" Aykroyd laughs, a showman to the end, enjoying the effect of such an exit--"and much easier on me."
"The grief has been tough to take. I miss him. But I have to be practical. There's no point in taking out the Ouija board. I'm just privileged to have been so close to him. Obviously, there are times when I--well, I still think about him all the time..."
I had expected Aykroyd to speak of Belushi with difficulty, if at all. During Belushi's funeral, Aykroyd looked haunting, bizarre, dressed in outlaw biker's gear, a tight bandanna around his head accentuating a freaked-out, disbelieving look in his eyes. None of that is evident now.
Aykroyd looks great, his soft, subtle face free of tension, unmarked by even the finest lines, his eyes sparkling, relaxed. Occassionally, a faint, bittersweet sadness drifts across his face, but also, and more frequently, a kind of born-again dreaminess. Aykroyd talks about Belushi easily, peacefully, as if he has absorbed the fact of his death so completely that it has dissolved into a newfound sense of life. He is obviously feeling good again.
"There's no reason I should feel happy," Aykroyd says, looking faintly sheepish. "My partner dies before I turn 30, just as the future has opened up for us in incredible ways. I went through the wringer with grief, but somehow I was able to pop up and bloom through it. I really am very happy right now."
Professionally, at least, Aykroyd has been in perpetually in bloom since the mid-seventies, when he was asked to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. A native of Quebec, Canada, Aykroyd was plucked from the ranks of the Toronto branch of the famed Second City improvisational troupe by Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who had once worked with Aykroyd on a TV variety special in Canada, and knew talent when he saw it.
Aykroyd, it quickly became apparent, was a real find, responsible, as much as anyone for Saturday Night Live's phenomenal, long-shot success. The show, which came out of nowhere to define hipness in the seventies, proved to be the perfect showcase for his multifaceted gifts. His range, as both writer and performer, embraced the topical and surreal. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. His Julia Child bled to death, after a kitchen accident on her recipe show, clucking dizzily all the way. His Jimmy Carter, vastly enlarged by radiation contamination from Three Mile Island, announced his engagement to the only other contaminee, a black cleaning lady, his plastic, born-again smile unchanged. His chain-smoking, hopelessly dopey Tom Snyder asked Ray Charles, "What are the blues sir, and how does one get them?" All of Aykroyd's Saturday Night Live conjurings--from Coneheads, to the Swinging Czech Brothers, to hyper pitchmen like Crazy Eddie ("I really am crazy. I'm giving everything away!")--were radar-perfect, spooky almost, in their warped-yet-true realization. One gets the sense that that impersonations, for Aykroyd, is barely voluntary, a kind of second nature set in motion by anything and everything that made him laugh.
Aykroyd doesn't deny it. Impulse impersonations, while walking the street, or watching TV or mingling at a party, are a regular part of his day. Five minutes before we met he was trying on for size the Russian cabbie who drove him over form his downtown pad.
"I couldn't help it, the guy was so sullen," he says, laughing now as he must have laughed to himself while in the cab. "I mean, it was like the guy was still in Moscow and an informant for the KGB."
Aykroyd's sense of humor is ticked contstantly by his perception of the swarming theater of life. New York is a dizzying stimulus ("I always come back here, but I can't handle it for more than a month at a time"), but he doesn't need the urban burlesque to set him off. Aykroyd is a guy who loved his college clerical job in a Canadian penitentiary because of the laminated badge he got to wear; a guy in a constant state of connectedness with life, with the inner charm and cartoon kick of situations public and solitary--whether it's riding in a cab and wobbling out with Russian or Israeli or Brooklyn on his tongue; or riding his cycle like a speed demon through the desert; or making love.
"Sure, I laugh in bed," he says. "You have an orgasm and it feels so good, it's funny."
And yet, despite the constant percolation and fun, Aykroyd is not at all hyper--or on, performing compulsively, riffing and mugging at every turn. His handshake is soft, his energy sweet, gentle. His cheeks are lifted lightly, ready but not driven to partake of a laugh. The only sign of a strangly tuned sensitivity is a curious squint, like a blimp on a radar screen. Despite much animation and many loud laughs, our conversation had the laid-back feel of a dining-car friendship on a train.
Although he has starred in several movies since leaving Saturday Night Live (including 191, The Blues Brothers, Neighbors), and currently has four others in various stages of development (Dr. Detroit, in which he portrays an absentminded professor forced into the guise of a mythical superpimp, will be released this spring), it is likely that Saturday Night Live will always be the touchstone of Aykroyd's career. How does he assess that work after the interval of three years?
"It's what I'll probably be remembered for. And it's work I can die proud saying I did," he promptly replies. "I get nothing but goodwill from people when they come up to me," he adds, sounding lucky, almost tenderly proud. "That's not always true with celebrities."
"I live on Martha's Vineyard and one afternoon Robert McNamara, the secretary of war during Vietnam, was riding a boat, and a veteran on board recognized him and grabbed him and started choking him and tried to throw him off a boat." Aykroyd propels the words out with a sudden, keely felt laugh, digging the idea of McNamara's karmic plight.
"Now here's a public figure who, for the rest of his life, unless he's with his buddies at the World Bank, is gonna be set upon by people who have all this bitterness about his administration during the war. Here I'm a public figure and they want to buy me a beer. I feel good in comparison. I'm never approached with any kind of negative energy or malice, you know. People come at me with cameras. They're not shooting guns."
Does Aykroyd ever think about the kind of material he and the other old Saturday Night Live regulars might be doing if they were still on the show?
"Oh, the news today is bigger than ever. There'd be lots to do, lots to do," he says, looking faintly nostalgic. "The whole shelf-tampering thing, for example. I'd love to do, you know, something like Gatorade--a scene where you drink Gatorade and 10 seconds later your asshole falls out."
Aykroyd is on his feet, improvising the scene, as one imagines he might have done in the writers' sessions for Saturday Night Live.
"Or poor John DeLorean. We'd be all over him." Aykroyd giggles at the comtemplation of such fertile ground. "I don't know what they've done on the new show, but you can be sure we wouldn't leave him alone, and there'd be a scene in a room, with the tapes being read, and instead of DeLorean saying, 'This is as good as gold,' we'd have him say, 'Heyyy, what is this stuff? I was expecting baking soda. Who, who sent me this? Get this stuff outta here'".
It's a long way from the drawing board of Saturday Night Live to the Catholic grade school Aykroyd attended as a child, but the image of him getting into a routine isn't much different. Known as "The Mouth" because of his incessant wisecracks and imitations, he was in constant disciplinary trouble with the nuns who ran the school and who finally expelled him because of his nonstop comic barrage.
"I was the Bad Student," he says, accenting the word in his peculiar, character-conjuring, scene-animating way. "Everything a teacher said was something that had to be explored as a way of possibly getting a laugh out of the class.' I couldn't resist an open face--you know, 'Hey, this guy, he wants to laugh.' No one had told me what school was about. I went into it like a virgin, cold, and made of it what I wanted.
"Eventually, when I went to college I stopped. People were pretty serious there." Aykroyd laughs. "'Who the fuck is this jerk in the back of the lecture hall, filled with 800 people, sailing airplanes?' I didn't want to be that person."
Indeed, Aykroyd applied himself, majoring in criminology, of all things, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, working at the post office on the side, figuring to eventually settle down into a civil service job--never dreaming of getting any more laughs that those to be had with his friends on the job. If it hadn't been for a singing girlfriend who got him to do a little stand-up in clubs, he might still be there now. Would he be miserable?
"No way. I was somebody back then. I was the guy who delivered the mail, and that was enough for me. the theater in that was great. Or the theater in working at the Toronto Airport, going out onto Runway 006 and saying, 'Alright, please close all air traffic, we're bringing the trucks in now.' Or lying on the runways at night and taking readings on how much they sank, hearing all the traffic, the whole world of aviation. That was exciting, that was big stuff.
"Then going up north and being a road surveyor and slogging through swamps with fucking hip guards up to here and mosquito nets and gloves and a survey rod and my crew chief going, 'Aykroyd, somebody's gotta go into that mud and find out how deep it is.'>
"Of course I would volunteer. I couldn't resist is. I would've done anything for the job, to get the gold star, you know, for the fun, and to hear the other guys go, 'Look, he's going into the puddle--his head, it's disappearing.' Tripping out on the fact that here I could die for the job, and their reaction.
Aykroyd is on his feet again, enacting the scene, his eyes shining with affection, affection for the bit and the life that offered it, as satisfying as any on television or film. More, in a way, because of the working-class camaraderie that went along with it, a salt-of-the-earth buoyancy that is still very much a part of who Aykroyd is.
"I feel most comfortable with working men," he says. "Blue-collar people. People hungry, struggling, working. I don't like people who've made it. They don't know what to talk about. The next Degas or gold-plated pistol to buy. The guys I came up with when I was in the post office and those other jobs, that's a network of friends I've never said goodbye to."
Indeed, Aykroyd credits those friendships for giving him the balance and leverage against success and fame that Belushi apparently lacked.
"They'v helped me shape my perception of the world," he says. "I accept mankind and feel a part of mankind, not above or below it. I feel part of the stream, the mainstream of life somehow. I really feel linked to the world."
More linked than he might prefer at times. Aykroyd's inner, psychic world is teeming with visions and sounds. Diagnosed as schizophrenic at 12 ("I had nervous ticks. I was shaking and wild like a cat on too much catnip.."), he is constantly turning out voices, conversations, signals from his own head.
"I'm afraid of that. If I really let go and opened the lid, it would mean full-blown schizophrenia with Thorazine treatments. If if really wanted to zone out, I could hear different languages, known and unknown. I wouldnt know who I was, whose voices I was hearing. I'd have to do acid to find out. Maybe it's time again for a good skull purge."
God, if only Hollywood could film that.
On Saturday Night Live, it was well known that drugs were around, and I have to say that I was a willing participant," he states. "But I don't crusade for the high. I think it's important for people to make their own choices.
"My philosophy now is, we are placed here in a pure organic vessell. We can live it pure and unadulterated and enjoy the organic highs, or we can inject toxins and enjoy the stimulation from that. I'm trying to split the difference these days, but I'm leaning toward health."