My parents have a photo of Dan when he was about three and I was just a small protein unit, and in the picture he's riding a small motorcycle, carrying a machine gun, and wearing a cowboy hat. In other words, even then he had at least three characters going at once.--Peter Aykroyd, Dan's funny younger brother.
Easter Sunday 1978, 7:30 p.m.: "Now what in the hell am I supposed to do with these claws?!" Portly, pissed off John Belushi stomps down a gloomy hallway at NBC's Saturday Night Live studio in New York after rehearsing a skit due to air this evening called "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave." Dressed in washed out jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, with large floppy green claws covering his hands and feet, Belushi is as disgusted as the suburban couple (Jane Curtin, Bill Murray) he torments in the skit. Grunting a hello, he lumbers into his dressing room, plops down and bites a banana. Then he simultaneously swallows the fruit and spits out the peel. "I'm not gonna wear these stupid claws, they're too weird, make no sense," he pouts., pulling them from his hands and throwing them against the door as Dan Aykroyd steps into the room. Dan is wearing a collarless, candy-striped shirt with elbow garters, red apron, and straw hat. Tonight he will do one of his bizarrely credible pitchmen segments, in this case hawking a new fast-food treat: barbecued bunnies.
"Hello there, Thing," he calls out afffectionately. The appearance of Aykroyd is a welcome relief; with his bright, twinkling eyes, boyish face and courtly manner, he's obviously the saner of the two. As Belushi beings to bitch with great resonance about the raw deal--"bullshit money, no points, but I'm gonna be a fucking star anyhow, those cheap bastards"--he got for starring in some forthcoming film called National Lampoon's Animal House, Danny and I have a pleasant chat about each other's plans for the holiday
I move further away from Belushi as he begins spitting pieces of banana peel at the Animal House poster taped to his mirror--Sploff!! "Ha! Those motherfuckers!" I'm about to broaden the range of my discourse with Aykroyd, who's been leafing idly through a magazine, when he suddenlty comes upon an article on the penile transducer, a Clockwork Orange-inspired bit of hardware used in the treatment of sex criminals.
"Aversion therapy!" Aykroyd shouts with sufficient glee to knock his own hat off, then delves into the text with salacious enthrallment. I glance from one man to the other, increasingly unnerved as Aykroyd whoops at each psychosexual revelation and John twitches his claw feet and vents his anger with mounting velocity. I steal away, convinced that both actors are off the beam, but finally deciding that from the claws up, Belushi is, pound for pound, the more alien of the two.
Until I later learn about Aykroyd's feet.
It seems the man has more in common with the Thing than meets the eye, by which I mean that, well, I don't know how to break this to you all but there happens to be this thin membrane of tissue that connects his toes, specifically the second and third toes. Of each foot. As Danny phrases it, he's a "genetic mutant," but that sounds a trifle indelicate. Let's just say that Dan Aykroyd, the handsome, talented star of TV's Saturday Night Live, the hero of millions and an inspiration to youth...has webbed feet.
John Belushi is everyman's superstar; Gilda Radner is America's sweetheart; Bill Murray is the oddball's celebrity's celebrity, but Dan Aykroyd is a precise blur, moving slow enough to be recognized but too fast to be categorized.
Think about it. For more than 120 Saturday nights he's come into our homes and made acting on live television look easy. A comedic Lon Chaney, this Funny Man of a Thousand Faces has mimicked with unerring accuracy some of the greatest figures of our time. His Jimmy Carter sendup captures the president's ineptitude-making fascination for folksy banality and quasi-hipness with an unctuous schoolboy drawl and a Chesire cat grin. Still, the more devastating are his impersonations on Richard Nixon, each nervous facet of his broken-down Cro-Magnon crook sharpened to a cutting edge, from Dick's apelike shoulder roll and phlebitic shuffle, to his chomping, jowl-quivering monotone and his mail-chute smile.
"I look at him as a bird of prey, with that hawk-lipped way about him," Dan asserts. "Tremendous magnetism. God, he's charismatic."
"Most comedians or actors will try characters out on you from time to time to see if they work," explains Michael O'Donoghue, a former Saturday Night Live writer/performer. "But with Danny, they just seem to leap out of nowhere. It's utterly startling because you think he can do anything; he can just make it up, fully realized, on the spot."
Aykroyd's night gallery of alter egos is voluminous, including such difficult subjects as Elliot Ness, Orson Wells/Citizen Kane, Julia Child, Clark Gable, both Scotty and Bones from Star Trek, plus regional adn/or dialect characters as curt southern state troopers, randy midwestern rubes, proud Aberdeen Scotch guards, mincing French waiters, and snobbish British theater critics--not to mention creations like Beldar Conehead, sleazy cable-TV personality E. Buzz Miller, and his Jorge Festrunk to Steve Martin's brother Yortuk in the "Czeck Brothers" routines.
"I had no idea the 'Czech Brothers' would be as popular as they are," says Aykroyd. "Steve had a character called the 'Continental Suave Guy'; I saw him do in his act one night and I really enjoyed it. I went backstage afterward and I said 'Listen, I do this Czech architect'...I'd noticed a tremendous similarity in the rhythms of Steve's character and I said, 'Let's put them together as Czechs who wear polyester shirts and everything!" It didn't work that well with the studio audience the first time we did it on the show, but then we got so much feedback from people who wathced it on TV. Phew! Really blew me away!
Just as popular as the "wild and crazy guys" are the Coneheads. "The Coneheads were originally a drawing of mine," says Aykroyd with a low chuckle. "I was watching these heads on TV one night adn I thought, 'Fuck, wouldn't it be neat if they were four or five inches higher?' I put the whole Remulak thing together with one of the writers, Tom Davis.
"We were gonna call them pinheads, " he adds soberly, "but we decided no 'cause we didn't want to offend anybody who had encephalities."
When Aykrody wishes to offend, he does so masterfully, as with his huckster spiels for useless appliances like the Moth-Masher or the electric blender that liquefies fish called the Super Bass-O-Matic. It's no accident that he's adept at duplicating the machine-gun doggerel prose of TV-commercial pitchmen, having worked as one for a cable-TV station in Toronto, CITY-TV's Channel 79.
Aykroyd's most off-putting guise is that of Irwin Mainway, a crass, oily entrepreneur with a pencil mustache who possesses all the moral fiber of a doorknob. "He's the ultimate urban businessman--the true hawker," says Aykroyd in admiration. "Have you ever been to one of those joints where they auction appliances off the street? The guy has a mike around his neck and he talks a five-dollar clock radio up to thirty-three bucks? This is how Mainway started. He was one of those barkers and most his goods were hot. Now he's evolved into a business executive and he goes on talk shows for publicity and to push and defend his really bad, harmful products; fur coats made from near extinct animals, a kid's toy called Bag 0' Glass..."
Mainway recently turned up on the consumer awareness program, On the Spot, hosted by the aggressive Jane Face (Jane Curtin). The discussion concerned the unusual menu for his school-lunch catering service.
FACE: "Mr. Mainway, isn't it true that on last April 18th, the school children of this city ate a hot lunch composed entirely of pureed insects?"
MAINWAY: "Hey, come on, gimme a break. I gotta find out what dese kids like!"
The same canny respect that informs Aykroyd's Mainway illuminates his stunning Tom Snyder. The rumpled tan leisure suit is there, and the volcanic horse laughs, aimlessly waving arms, and smug, pseudo-absorbed slouch. But Aykroyd also captures the desperation of Snyder's pursed-lip cigarette puffing,, and the empty-headed "by gosh" and references to "the boys" that the perpetually ill-prepared Tomorrow host employs to buy time.
Snyder himself is so rattled by the way Aykroyd nails him that he once attempted to confront the caricature by inviting an NBC page on his show to try to top Danny; and when that fizzled, Tom leapt in and sought to imitate Aykroyd imitating him with a bumbling compulsiveness that was as pathetic as it was spellbinding.
Aykroyd's ability to mirrow and then expand on any character he chooses--prominent or not--borders on the soul-snatching power of obeah. Thanks to Dan Aykroyd, we know things about Nixon, Carter, and Snyder that they themselves could not have shown us. And poor Tom; if he wanted to retaliate (i.e. save face), what he should have done was attempt to mimic Dan Aykroyd. But the Funny Man of a Thousand Faces is also the Man in the Shadows. Quite simply, none of us knows who the devil Dan Aykroyd is.
Born in Ottawa, Canada, and raised in Hull, Quebec ("where Montreal sends it's old gangsters to cool out"), twenty-six- year- old Daniel Edward Aykroyd is the son fo Samuel Cuthbert Peter Hugh Aykroyd, a Canadian government official of English-Anglican descent whose lineage traces back to a fourteenth-century constanle of Wadsworth, England, and Lorraine Gougeon, the Norman-French daughter of a farmer who also served as a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman.
Described by younger son Peter Jonathan, 23, as a "seasoned bureaucat," the senior Mr. Aykroyd rose from a middle-echelon post in the policy-making Privy Council to assistant deputy minister of transport for research and development. Careerwise, Danny headed in the opposite direction from his strait-laced father, cutting a footloose swath through various fine school in Quebec and Ontario, among them the St. Pius X Minor Preparatory Seminary for boys and Carlton University in Ottawa. Both Aykroyd boys maintained an abiding interest in comic acting, and Peter followed Danny into Toronto's improvisational theater company, Second City. Danny's pre-Saturday Night Live break was the role of a "Jackie Gleason antagonist-type janitor in a Canadian Broadcasting Company TV comedy for children called Coming Up Rosie.
Upon meeting Dan Aykroyd, one is impressed with his gentleness, his deference and, where his various hobbies (motorcycles, architecture, armaments, aeronautics, almost anything involving intricate machinary) and profession are concerned, an overwhelming intensity.
This intensity is best illustrated by the on-location proceedings during Aykroyd's first day of shooting with Coming Up Rosie. Aykroyd arose on the morning fo Friday the thirteenth and dutifully reported to the Rosie offices at CBC-TV, despite a killer flu and a temperature of 104. The first scene called for foreign secret agents to scurry through a car wash, and Danny, wearing a black hat, did so without hesitation. When he emerged from the other end--coughing, sneezing and sopping wet--much of the hat's indelible dye had been transferred to his face.
Undaunted, the black-faced Aykroyd completed the morning's shooting without complaint and then came back for more in the afternoon, the day's chores culminating in a key rooftop chase scene in which the tireless foreigners run an adversary around a skylight.
Overzealous to the last, Aykroyd decided to ad-lib a spectacular five-foot leap over the skylight. Regrettably, he sailed short of the mark and plunged through the wired glass to a warehouse floor some twenty-five feet below, hitting two light standards on the way down and landing on his ass.
The cast and crew were horror struck, with much shrieking and hysterics all around. Rushing to the shattered skylight, the cameraman peered in to see an unhurt, twenty-two-year-old Dan Aykroyd screaming back up to them, "Hey guys! Did you get the shot?!"
After flying into San Francisco for the Blues Brothers show at Winterland on New Year's Eve, I was fortunate to learn that Belushi and Aykroyd were also in town for the event, the two taking a break from the L.A. filming of director Stephen Spielberg's work-in-progress, 1941 (in which they play a pilot and a tank commander, respectively). I take a room--along with my cohort Miami--at the Miyako Hotel where John and Danny are staying and arrange to interview Aykroyd for a separate profile. He gives his tentative consent and then...nothing. He successfully evades me thereafter--until I persuade Belushi to intervene on my behalf.
"He's a little hard to pin down," explains John as we sit together in his suite, "and he's very suspicious of the press, but you'll have no problems now."
Sure enough, there's a brisk knock at the door and in hastens Dan Aykroyd, dripping wet and clad only in an orange bath towel. Nonetheless, his mind is now clearly made up. He pops are beer and props his webbed feet on a room service cart, calling happily for the first question.
"Say, I hear you've been playing a mean harmonica since your early teens," I begin.
"Since I was sixteen," he nods with zest. "I jammed with Muddy Waters once too-- but that was on drums. He was fuckin' great! It was at a club called Le Hibou, which means 'the owl.
"Incidently, John is the Owl too," he informs with affection, "and he's also the Bear Man, and the Black Hole in Space, and the Thing, and I also like to refer to him secretly as...the Black Rhino."
Belushi, presently engaged in a heated phone converstation, cups the receiver and roars with considerable annoyance, "Did he say I was the Black Rhino? Don't you listen to him!"
"I have a company now called Black Rhino Enterprises," Aykroyd beams, suddenly speaking in a clipped, business-like fashion. "Part of it is a T-shirt marketing thing...Where the Black Rhino comes from," he confides, "is that I had a dream one night that I was living way up on this cliff in Canada, overlooking this snow-strewn waste. There was this snorting rhino chained in the backyard. And I looked at it and the face started to look a lot like Belushi," he gigles. "And he was snorting hard and ripping up the back yard and I went out and tossed meat to him. I placated him, helped him and I realized {his eyes glaze over goofily}, I need this force in my life.'"
But doesn't someone else share the same nickname?" I ask. "As I recall, Jake Bl-".
"Belushi is also the Black Hole in Space," he overrules, "because you'll notice, if you ever lend him a watch or a lighter or something, it goes through him into another dimension. You ask for it back five minutes later and it's gone and there's no way you can find it. Really.
"He's like a hurricane!" Danny proclaims with a ringmaster's flourish. "He's the Black Hole in Space."
Belushi, still on the phone, makes an ugly face that dissolves into a big, sloppy grin.
Watching the two friends go at each other in their Frick and Frack relationship also incorporates Abbott and Costello, antic patroleman Gunther Toody and Francis Muldoon of Car 54 Where Are You? TV fame, and a slightly stoned out Huntley and Brinkley.
Usually Belushi pretends to be blase about Aykroyd's ribbing, but actually he revels in it. When Belushi is in an especially ornery or obsessive mood, Danny will creep along behind his corpulent comrade as they go through the day's activities, Aykroyd making loudly whispered explanations to onlookers like, Sssh! The Thing is feeding!" or "Behold, the Bear Man Rests!"
Belushi usually gets his licks in when Aykroyd isn't around--or when Danny's manic meticulousness backfires. "Here's the difference between us," John tells me later. "See, I never carry any ID, no driver's license, no passport when I travel, nothing. I couldn't care less. He always carried this big ID wallet, big as a purse, that he kept chained to his belt at all times. When he lost it I was laughing my ass off.
"He's Mister Careful and I'm Mister Fuck It . I can't always figure him out; but whenever I'm around him I feel safe.
Actually Aykroyd is that and more, a batch of contradictions forged into a willful, dependable whole. But it wasn't always thus.
"My brother and I were hellions," Aykroyd says with a smile, picking at some leftover Japanese food scattered upon the room-service cart. "Incorrigible. All through school there were discipline problems, with me particularly. I was a chatty little sort. The Fat Mouth in primary school. I've had a solid relationship with my father for years, even though there was a lot of corporal punishment there as a kid. Many belt whippings. We deserved it.
"You know how parental units are," he laughs. "My mother always had friends that she wanted me to see: these prim, nice little girls and correct-speaking guys. Eventually I found out these people were as delinquent and corrupt as I was. When you got down in the basement with them, they wanted to crack open a bottle of whiskey same as you."
Young Dan Aykroyd's first memorable brush with alcohol and deliquency occurred while he was in the seminary.
"One night we blew down to Massena, New York, near the thousand islands area, 'cause you could drink in New York at eighteen. But, uh, I was fourteen at the time. We bought this vodka, went into this field, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there was the ringing of shotgun shells. This farmer was running us off his land. So we jump back into the car and go to a hamburger joint. The fucking place was full of cops with their guns out and they grab us and take us to jail. My parents thought it was over for me at that point."
They weren't far wrong. Shortly thereafter the seminary superiors tired of his "late-night vandalism, skipping mass, fucking off" and expelled him. He completed his high-school education in a coed Catholic school in Ottawa.
"My friend, there were much better men than me there to serve the Lord," he clucks. "We were all supposed to be little angels, little priets. But we'd put on our polka dot mod shirts, Wildroot creme oil, Beatle boots, and cut loose.
"In my main years in high school I was a flattop, butch-waxed, with no hair on the sides. Then I got into the Beatle phase; went through a light greaser phase and then finally long and unwashed--my hair and me."
And things got even hairier when Aykroyd reached college. "He and his friends--a gang called the Blacktop Vamps--lived in old houses in Ottawa and it was just like Animal House", says his brother Peter. "They used to have parties and they'd go into the same shopping plaza every weekend with beer cartons, order filet mignon from the meat counter, slip them past the girl at the cash register and leave."
During this period the multifaceted Aykroyd played harp in several bands, notably Top Hat and the Downtowners.
"In its day, the group was like Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks," says Danny. "I was into jazz at first, Art Blakey, Erroll Garner, Mingus and Thelonius Monk. Then I started listening to blues and stuck with that. I don't really have broad tastes for modern music and I don't like disco too much, although 'Le Freak' by Chic is nice. My tastes are narrow, see. The first record I ever bought was Hymns of the Army, Navy and Air Force..
"But I liked playing in the Downtowners. I had a great friend who was an acid dealer. He always had bundles of hundred dollar bills."
Apparently, Aykroyd has had many such companions.
"The guy who put my life on a different path was my friend Dave Benoit. I love him dearly. He's a low-class sea merchant--by his own admission. He turned me on to music, let me smoke my first joint, introduced me to a woman I had a little thing with when I was fourteen, and awakened me to the hip scene around '67 in Ottawa, this whole underworld I never knew existed. I decided I was dropping out and never looked back.
"The most profound night of my life, the turning point, was the night we went out in a stolen Cadillac with this guy called Ray the Green Beret. Ray was an ex-Green Beret who'd ripped off thid Cadillac off in Wisconsin and driven it north. I got high that night and met George the Thief, a crazy French Canadian, and ultimately I must started to hang out with these people.
"I yam a teef! I yam a teef!" That's what George used to say, and that's all he used to do. You could always obtain any amount of fenced goods through him. I still see these people and probably will associate with them fro the rest of my life."
Up until his college years, Aykroyd's dad did his best to divert his sons from a life of slovenliness and iniquity. "Industry--the old man was big on that, ya know?" he tells me. "I mean, for my twelfth birthday I got an electric lawn mower to do the lawn for my father. That was my present, with a bow on it and everything. Thank you very much Dad, thank you very much.
He had me out at thirteen, working. I worked as a warehouseman, a brakeman on a railway. During college I drove a Royal Mail truck. But I'm glad I did that blue-collar stuff. My father would pull strings for me. He always knew somebody somewhere and he'd hear about these weird jobs.
"Iwas a dial reader on a runway load-testing unit. I almost got killed one night at Toronto International Airport when a DC-8 took off and grazed the station wagon I was riding out to this site in. Man, it was heavy.
"The best job was one I took at seventeen in the Northwest Territories surveying a road. We were up in an isolation camp. It was heavy work but you could really enjoy the territory: the crows, white wolves, bears. We used to skin and roast ground squirrels on a stick and they tasted just like chicken. A fabulous little rodent. Soootasty. Whenever we were low on Spaghetti-O's we had no choice.
"I was up there in the wilderness with Indians: Cree, Blackfoot. Jeez,it was a great summer. But it gets tense up there. The drinking was heavy. Mounties up there don't wear uniforms 'cause it's so far north nobody's going to check on them. And there was this one young cop up there, a real eager beaver we'd see when we'd come in to drink with the Indians and local townspeople of Fort Simpson. This young cop, he'd dance with all the Indian girls and hang out, wearing a corduroy suit and cowboy boots, and then half an hour before the dance was over, he'd go back to the RCMP detachment and put on his hat, bring a fuckin' paddy wagon back and bust the drunken Indians, evrybody. He was just the worst. You know, actors and sheriffs, for centuries, have never gotten along."
With one notable exception.
"My buddy Marc O'Hara and I, for three years we ran the best bootleg booze joint there ever was in Canada, the Club 505 in Toronto. This was on Queen and River streets, and some of the cops we met on that beat who'd come in and ask us what we were doing we still know today as friends.
"You could drive by on the street and look in and see all these people drinking and we were just protected and covered for three years by whatever karmic umbrella.
"I'd work at Second City at night and run the bar from one a.m. on. The 505 Club was completely furnished with old Forties-style couches and plush armchairs, a barber's chair. All scavenged and scrounged. We slept in lofts above whatever crawled on the floor at night. It bordered on serious squalor at times.
"I remember I went down to the 505 once to take a shit. I sat down on the toilet and was reading and I heard this scrabbling in the bottom of the bowl, this slushing-about. I thought, 'Must be flushed water going from the back of the tank into the plumbing syste,' so I continued reading. Finally, I looked down into the excrement that lay there and a rat was clawing its way up the side of the bowl, its jaws just inches from my vital parts.
"Lorne [Michaels, executive producer and creator of Saturday Night Live] and I had met at the 505 one quiet night when it wasn't open. He sat in the barber's chair by the fish tank and he talked about what he hoped the show would be."
When the cast was being chosen, Michaels asked Danny to come to the auditions.
"I came down from Canada with this guy named Dan Hennesey who was working on Coming Up Rosie with me. We were gonna sing this song we'd written about Jimmy Hoffa for Lorne, but the audition was a real cattle call with 200 people. I spent a minute and a half in the room, saying hello to Lorne, and then a friend of mine and I took off to California. Lorne called me and said 'Come on, ya gotta come back!' And that was it."
"It's always been my understanding," I object, "that Michaels was very skeptical as to whether he could tame you and Belushi."
Well Lorne wasn't sure about John and I" Danny admits. "I met John in Second City, and we were a little cocky and thought we didn't need it [the show]. I was cutting out a good wedge in Canada and I had the bar going, which was important to me and quite prosperous. Life was comfortable."
Since that time, Aykroyd has remained comfortable, although he's sometimes made things uncomfortable for the higher-ups at NBC.
According to one of his writing collaborators, Aykroyd got pretty infuriated with an NBC executive in 1977 for not paying him as both an actor and a writer for his work on a SNL special. "Danny took it as a point of honor; he was always fighting the NBC people. So what he did--he was angry at them--was get nails and paint and stuff, and outside of this guy's office and door he nailed and printed stuff onto the wall which had references to the cabala, psychic numbers and stuff. The phrases he made up were the things that some subway psycho would scrawl on a wall.
"He must have worked for hours on this thing; the place was a mess. He really terrified that whole wing of NBC. And really, it was just Danny figuring out what would scare people the most. God, I thought it was funny. I'd like to see him do more of that kind of thing on the show. It was a monstrous practical joke.
"It was not a joke," Belushi later tells me. "They took $400 out of his paycheck--money he should have gotten--and didn't tell him beforehand. You don't do that with Danny. So being a really smart guy, he thought up this thing to fix 'em real good, and he wrote, 'I am the Devil, I am Beelzebub!" on the walls in red and all this very Satanic stuff, just to freak them out. And it worked. He was mad at them and they deserved it.
"They couldn't understand why he would do something like that, but I could understand it. And they'll think twice," John sniggers sardonically, "before they take money out of his pocket again."
Another thing Belushi says he can understand is Aykroyd's unfrivolous interest in UFOs, mysticism and psychic phenomenon.
"When Danny and I drive cross-country, we always look for UFOs, and I've gone up to his dead grandpa's farmhouse with him to wait for his ghost. Danny said he had seen it before, and I believe him. We used to turn the lights off and wait. He said it started as a green glow..."
"My grandparents used to have seances," says Peter Aykroyd, " and our dad passed that interest along to Danny and me. In our house it was jsut something that was accepted and viable. We never had seances but they were very regular at my grandparents' house when my dad was in his twenties, and my grandfather had a whole accounting on paper of his seances, who came through and what was said. He had photographs of people who appeared in the room.
"Our fatehr still has an interest in mysticism. He definitely rubbed it off on us, and we were always very interested."
As to the notion that his older brother is an excitable boy, Peter merely feels that Danny's sensitivity is miscomprehended.
"He's a real approachable guy in his own way, you know? And he really creates relationships quick with people because he has a way of, like, interrogating, like a cop. When you answer all the questions about yourself, you suddenly get the feeling: 'Gee, he knows me, therefore I know him.'"
