It was well known around Saturday Night Live that Aykroyd was devoted to Belushi, and vice versa. They expressed their affection for each other in different ways. In front of mutual friends and colleagues, Aykroyd was often more demonstrative than Belushi. Whereas Belushi's love for Aykroyd was understated or expressed directly to Aykroyd, Aykroyd broadcast his affection for Belushi. "Danny could go on and on about John," Lorne Michaels. "His affection came out as praising John in front of John, somewhat backhandedly at times, but always with very high regard and an enormous amount of love. Danny is a very emotional guy and a very affectionate guy. He used to say, 'I love to serve.' he loved to be in a position of the keeper, the trainer: John was the talent and Danny was the self-effacing Angelo Dundee, and everybody knew it wasn't true, including John, of course, and that was the joke. That was what made it all acceptable." Aykroyd also showcased the bond he and Belushi shared by acting as an admiring explainer of Belushi's more idiosyncratic moods--a devout, humorous medium through which the Belushi spirit could be passed to others. "Aykroyd was like the high priest who could interpret Belushi for everyone else," says Jim Downey. "He would get really big and he'd say: 'The man...is...a...god! He is a living media god. We must worship him. We are fit only to stand at his gates...longingly...and to flee when he chooses to...set...his...dogs...upon us.' Danny would get into these weird rants, and I know that Belushi was twenty percent a comedy prop to him and eighty percent a genuine god. And Belushi needed him too."
For Belushi, Aykroyd was a source of equilibrium. The force of Aykroyd's personality, his diligence, and his integrity were counterbalances in Belushi's life. Where Belushi was erratic, Aykroyd was systematic. (Before air time each Saturday night, Aykroyd took a one-hour nap.) Compared to Belushi, Aykroyd was organized--in the manner of one who derives existential pleasure from the state of being in control. Belushi rarely carried a wallet, and if he did, lost it; Aykroyd often kept his chained to his belt. (In 1976, during their second cross-country drive, Belushi was triumphant with laughter when Aykroyd was stopped for speeding in New Mexico and could not find his wallet or his driver's license--"I never lose my wallet," Aykroyd kept insisting as the cop wrote out the ticket.) Aykroyd's fame-proof, disco-proof work ethic counteracted Belushi's monstrous fondness for revelry prolonged beyond the exhaustion, say, of dawn--seen three mornings in a row. Aykroyd had vices, too, but his carousing usually took him in a different direction: While Belushi would disappear in Manhattan for three nights with his friend the Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, Aykroyd would disappear into the country for three days on his motorcycle. Aykroyd loved the sensation of speed. Belushi loved sensations; he was a man of long nights and huge drinks. His excessive consumption of Vantage blue cigarettes, whiskey or cognac, and a variety of drugs was often more than a nocturnal companion could sustain. Aykroyd was not always on hand for the Long Night of the Wild Turkey.
During one such night, Belushi persuaded Timothy White to come over to his house to kill a bottle of Wild Turkey at 2:30 A.M. White's best friend, Mitchell Glazer, was a good friend of Belushi's; the conversation turned to friendship, a subject that Belushi had a sudden, great compulsion to grasp. He seemed to need to understand what made friendships between two extremely different men, like himself and Danny Aykroyd, work and endure. "I can't always figure out Danny," he told White. "But what I love about him is that he makes me feel incredibly safe." Even more urgent was Belushi's desire to know about the dynamics of White's friendship with Glazer. As he turned the inquisition on White (who was, by now, around 5:30 A.M., weary with whiskey), a mean, arrogant, competitive tone came into Belushi's voice, as if he wanted to bully his way into becoming the best friend that had ever walked the earth. "I wonder if you've ever figured out friendship," he demanded of White. Wouldn't you say I'm a better friend of Mitch's than you? Wouldn't you?" White began to cry. "John, don't do this to me," he said. Then, Belushi burst into tears. Ashamed, he hugged White fiercely and said, "God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm such as asshole. I'll never make you cry again as long as I live." Soon, Belushi was crying harder than White; the balance had shifted and White found himself comforting Belushi. Looking back on that night now, White says, "It gives me goosebumps thinking about the way John said Danny made him feel safe. The gratitude in John's voice was overwhelming."
With Aykroyd, Belushi felt protected; with Belushi, Aykroyd felt protective--for good reason. Belushi had a way of walking without ever looking behind him or to either side. Crossing a city street, for instance, Belushi simply charged ahead. More than once, Aykroyd steered him out of the path of an oncoming vehicle. ("He's Mister Careful and I'm Mister Fuck It," Belushi once told Timothy White.) Only once did Aykroyd submit to occupying the passenger seat of a car driven by Belushi, and then only to offer instruction: "Shoulder-check-to-the-right." ("John always remembered that, too," says Judy Jacklin Belushi, who also recalls that "John's first step into Colorado was out of the car and down a mountainside: he was sleeping, I woke him up, and he stepped out of the car and plunged out of sight.") Although Belushi was agile and weirdly graceful on stage, later when they began acting in motion pictures together, Aykroyd was always on alert for Belushi's accidents.
During the filming of Steven Spielberg's 1941 (in which Aykroyd played a U.S. Army 10th Armored Division tank sergeant, and Belushi played a crazed National Guard airman), Aykroyd watched helplessly as Belushi stepped backward off the high wing of a grounded P-40 fighter-bomber--an unintentional fall which finally wound up in the movie. When The Blues Brothers was in production, Belushi fell off a skateboard and hurt his knee. ("John just got on some kid's skateboard," Judy Belushi recalls. "It was typical--'No, don't do that!"--and he steps on it.") While production was held up for two days, co-star Dan Aykroyd telephoned Belushi and fabricated a story about how he himself had fallen off his motorcycle and hurt his hip. " I did that to make John feel better," Aykroyd later explained, "and to alleviate some of the guilt he felt for stopping this multimillion-dollar production. It was like: 'I'll jump in there with you and be injured too!"
Aykroyd's dedication to Belushi was reciprocated with generosity and affection expressed during the few comparatively calm, private moments they could share in the increasingly pressurized, public life of live television comedy. According to Aykroyd, "John would talk about our friendship. He talked me up all the time--how much he depended on me and my support, and how we were partners. He always said we were partners. And this just made me glow."
Although Aykroyd and Belushi were the dominant performers on Saturday Night Live during the second, third, and fourth seasons, the configuration of their personal friendship was probably not recognized by most television viewers as an on-screen partnership until April 1978. Individually, they had both earned cult followings of varying intensity--Belushi for his slashing samurai routines; Aykroyd for his Jimmy Carter caricature and his interplanetary creation, Beldar Conehead, anong many other characters through which Aykroyd diverted attention from himself. ("The Nazis could get hold of Danny and he wouldn't break character," Lorne Michaels once said of him.) Aykroyd was often seen in tandem with Bill Murray as the shoot-first-ask-questions-later cops, or with Steve Martin as the Czech Brothers Festrunk--"two wild and crazy guys." Belushi, even in ensemble pieces with the whole cast, had achieved singular superstar status.
Few sketches exclusively paired Aykroyd and Belushi. "It wasn't easy to write two-character sketches for them because they were different kinds of performers," explains Jim Downey. "Aykroyd lost his personality in characters; he was cool and brilliant, a thinking man's performer. To the audience, Belushi was more accessible and warm, because there was always something of Belushi's own personality in everything he did, and in some cases, it was mostly Belush." Aykroyd agrees: "That's part of the secret of his charisma and his stardom: He opened up part of his soul a little bit and let you see what was really inside. With me, it's a strict character. I put on a disguise when I go out there."
Then came the Blues Brothers.
For the first time, they were together in deep disguise. Not only were they sheathed in darkness--black suits and ties, midnight fedoras, and Ray Ban No. 5022-G15 sunglasses--but they were unrelentingly in character and incognito. At first, their act was startling, and not a little confusing. In comedy-variety terms, it trumped both both an ordinary music number and ordinary comic sketch. It drew laughter in three dimensions. Viewers were mesmerized: Belushi singing the blues? Aykroyd on harmonica? ("When Danny first played blues harp on the air," Lorne Michaels recalls, "I don't think peopel even knew that it was him playing--that's how subtle it was.") No one knew how to respond. Was this musical satire? A takeoff on the white man's fascination with the irresistably cool, all-black cultural medium of rhythm and blues music? No, these guys seemed strangely serious. One couldn't tell what was going on behind their very dark shades, but apparently they believed that they actually were a pair of blues musicians--two incrediblty soul-energized white brothers named Jake and Elwood Blues. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi had vanished.
Considering their fraternal affection for one another and their romantic admiration of the old Blue Collar Squalor, it was not surprising that Aykroyd and Belushi chose for their alter egos the identities of two juvenile delinquent brothers from Chicago. Jake and Elwood allowed them to act out fantasies they had had sense early youth. As Aykroyd dreamed up the details of the Blues Brothers' background he was finally able to unleash all his knowledge of criminology, Catholic education, recidivism, police procedures, and general human dereliction. Belushi was at least able to be what he'd wanted to be all his life--a singer.
The musical dimension of the brotherhood had begun during the fifth show of SNL's first season. Appearing in bee costumes, Belushi sang the blues classic "King Bee" and Aykroyd played harp. But after the excitement of that first night he had worn off there seemed to be no medium in which to develop the act further. Then, one day in 1976, in the process of looking for an old car to revive, they began reviving old blues tunes: Here they were, out on Long Island, being shown around an automotive graveyard on a misty, foggy afternoon. Belushi spotted it first: a 1953 Oldsmobile 88 with the most beautiful chrome graphic he'd ever seen--an "88" with a rocket roaring through both numerals. "Wow," Belushi said, "look at that." Aykroyd ran his hand over the chrome. "It's a Rocket 88, man. Don't you know that James Cotton song? 'Step in my rocket, baby/ Don't be late/ Gonna take a little ride in my Rocket Eighty-Eight/ In my Rocket...'"
Belushi had never heard that, but he loved it. They bought a 1967 Dodge Monaco, which they painted black and dubbed the The Blues Mobile. Soon they were riding around, putting together a repertoire of blues classics which they performed to warm up the Saturday Night Live studio audience before air time. "It was the perfect synthesis," says Lorne Michaels. "They were two of the greatest comedians of their time, and they both got to do the things they loved most. John got to come out and do cartwheels, and Danny got to come out with the briefcase and the handcuffs. And then, when Danny finally danced it was the most exhilarating thing in the world because you'd never seen him move."
Passionate about the music itself, both knew they weren't superior musicians. Aykroyd called himself "the George Plimpton of blues harmonica." He had no anxiety about the quality of the humor they would scare up onstage, but he was doubtful about his own musical nerve. "John opened up that whole stage to me. He gave me the gift of being able to jump up onto a stage with any band in the world, and sing 'Kansas City.' He really made me play the harp. That's one thing he forced me to do, 'cause I would rather have just stayed the thinker, the writer."
"Don't worry--this is gonna be great," Belushi kept telling a reluctant Aykroyd after the mixed reactions to their first professional gig with Roomful of Blues at the Lone Star Cafe in New York in June 1978. "We're gonna get our own band, a great band. It's gonna be great. We're gonna have a great time. We're gonna have a great audience."
"I don't know, man," was Aykroyd's constant refrain up until the night they opened a show for Steve Martin at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles in September 1978, and then recorded their first album on Atlantic Records, Briefcase Full of Blues, which went straight to the top of the record charts and eventually sold over three million copies.
The Blues Brothers act was more than an ideal outlet for their professional partnership; it also deepened the sense of brotherhood which had been growing in their friendship. They were now spending more time together than ever before, and they both became involved with each other's families. Elwood and Jake Blues orphans, but Aykroyd and Belushi were not. Whenever Belushi was on the telephone, talking to his mother, he would put Aykroyd on the line, and Aykroyd would do the same when he was talking to his mother. "John's mother is kind of soft for me and my mother soft for John because we really were brothers in a sense. We would have always had that with each other's mothers. With John's mother, Agnes, I'll always feel a closeness just 'cause she was John's mother. My mother just loved him, and that was great."
When Dan first brought John up to the farm in Canada to meet his parents, John stepped out of the car and executed a running somersault in front of Peter and Lorraine Aykroyd, as it to say: "Here I am! I'm Danny's friend! If you're his parents, I love ya!" Magnanimous and irresistible, John was loved by all the Aykroyds. "John had a lot of time for everybody," recalls Dan's younger brother, Peter, who was then twenty-two. "Dan and I were pretty close, so John immediately bacame close to me." As an auxiliary brother to Danny and Peter, John was ready and willing to take part in any and all activities--swimming in the lake; robbing an Ontario marina (as it turned out, they didn't steal anything, but Aykroyd was touched that Belushi would go along with any caper, no matter how crazy, as an act of friendship); and spending the night in an old farmhouse on the Aykroyd property, waiting for spirit entities which had been known to appear in ectoplasmic form during the formally documented seances that had been regularly conducted there by Grandfather Aykroyd. (None appeared for the new generation).
After the vistit, Aykroyd was sorry that Belushi never made it back to the farm. He always wanted John and Judy to come together. The three of them--John, Judy, and Danny--had been growing ever closer since the days when Aykroyd had slept at the foot of the bed. Judy, an award-winning graphics designer and a warmhearted woman who had the patience and soul of an angel, was involved in both the personal friendship and the professional partnership. She accompanied them in every Blues Brothers venture, giving the general business inspiration, and designing each of the album covers and a book titled Blues Brothers: Private. Just as Belushi had brought Aykroyd into his marriage, so, too, did he bring Judy into his friendship. "It was a wonderful thing," says Aykroyd. "Here I had a friendship with this man, but his wife was not excluded at all. That's very rare in male-to-male friendships. Extremely rare. I told Judy everything that was going on, and I used to talk her up to him when they went through their domestics--periods of personality estrangement, alienation, whatever. The woman is often excluded in male-to-male bonding, and it just didn't happen in this case because we would have been shortchanging ourselves, both of us, if we had done that."
Although Belushi wasn't always fond of Aykroyd's girlfriends ("which wasn't really a problem," says Aykroyd, "because I just told him, 'John, I'm sorry, I'm with this woman--there's nothing you can do'"), Aykroyd was--and is--intensely fond of Judy: "She was sort of a surrogate wife/mother to me, as well. That's one of the gifts John gave me--a friendship with her that will last forever."
Dan also had a special fondness for John's brother, Jim, who was then beginning his acting career at Chicago's Second City troupe. When John was too busy for a phone call to his brother, Dan would keep in touch with Jim, and John would do the same with Dan's brother, Peter. John took an interest in Peter's career as an actor, musician, composer, lyricist, rock guitarist, and lead singer, giving active support as the drummer in Peter's two rock groups, The Stink Band and The Mini-14s. "John changed my attitude toward my little brother," Dan Aykroyd would later recall. "I've always loved Peter, but I've always felt that he should not have gone into show business because it's so hard. I thought he would have more potential doing other things--and John was the same way about his brother Jimmy. But John encouraged Peter to do his music. When I had no time for my little brother, John always did. Theirs was such a tender friendship, and it warmed me so much. It was such a love, such a valuable thing. It made me so happy. That's the one thing that makes me cry now--that my two brothers got along so well."
After four seasons of successful television comedy, Aykroyd and Belushi decided to leave Saturday Night Live together in 1979. Aykroyd had considered staying with the show for another year, but when production dates for filming The Blues Brothers had been set, his allegiance to his script and his partner won out. Though Belushi's mind had already been made up, there must have been some relief in knowing that he wasn't going alone. "Chevy's departure in 1976 had been a trauma for us all," Lorne Michaels recalls. "John had seen Chevy leave, and had seen the the perception of Chevy in the press be that he was leaving his friends for Hollywood and for bigger things, which was, to a certain extent, true. So I think John was uncomfortable about leaving by himself, particularly after the cover of Newsweek, and Animal House breaking all the box-office records, and then with the Blues Brothers record at number one."
The success of National Lampoon's Animal House (the largest-grossing comedy of all time) paved the way to Hollywood. The studios, particularly Universal Pictures, were now willing to risk millions of dollars on comedy epics--the more outrageous the better. The generation, now in their twenties and early thirties, that had subscribed to The National Lampoon and religiously tuned in to Saturday Night Live was just as eager to shell out their dollars at the cinema box-office if there was comedy from the same sources inside. On the cover of Newsweek as the toga-clad, eyebrow-arched Bluto Blutarsky, Belushi had become a mascot for this generation. For Universal, he was a national emblem of the lucrative new genre of destructo-comedy on the big screen. So it seemed logical that with Belushi, Aykroyd, and Animal House director John Landis signed up, Universal would invest over $30 million in The Blues Brothers, one of the most expensive movies ever made. By the time Jake and Elwood Blues appeared on the cover of People magazine on August 4, 1980, they had become literally (and facetiously) "part of the Gross National Product."
The new headquarters for Aykroyd and Belushi's joint ventures was a suite of offices on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Set up by Judy Belushi, ably manned by Karen Krenitsky, this new tree house unified the personal as well as professional aspects of their friendship. The two were now practically inseparable, and thus, Phantom-Black Rhino Enterprises, Ltd. was born. Here they discussed career decisions and gave each other daily support. Belushi became the organizer and promoter of their post-television partnership. Distrustful of the ways of Hollywood, Aykroyd was sometimes uncertain about their new projects. "John made me write The Blues Brothers. I didn't want to do the movie. The script was three hundred pages of images and thoughts. John made me go to Hollywood adn deal with John Landis, and he made Landis deal with me; there was friction between us immediately. John made us work together on the script. He turned the key that made it happen. He did that with all our projects."
Increasingly reclusive, Aykroyd holed up in his apartment when he was working. To obtain privacy during the writing of The Blues Brothers, he hired an assistant to screen all telephone calls and intrusions. Once, the assistant threw up the screen when Belushi called and it drove Belushi crazy. He later told Aykroyd that it the assistant was going to work on the production of the film, he, Belushi, would not. "We have to have complete, two-way communication," he insisted. Yet Belushi recognized that Aykroyd also had to have complete privacy. "John did depend on me for support," says Aykroyd, "and I on him, but him a little more 'cause I was able to be alone much more than he. I'm an ex-seminarian, and I'm used to Catholic retreats where they lock you in a room alone for two weeks. I like that solitude. John respected that about me. He never taxed that. He knew he could come to my apartment any time of the day or night, but I don't think he ever came over more than three times. I would go to him and spend time with him in his sphere. He knew that I loved being in my home alone."
Belushi loved to have people around him. He was a generous host and companion; his status and incoem as a movie star enabled him to indulge himself and his friends in a variety of nocturnal activities, including Courvoisier and cocaine. Aykroyd's indulgences were comparatively prosaic; he was more often happy with a six-pack of Moosehead Canadian Lager and maybe a joint or two. Unlike Aykroyd, Belushi gravitated toward friends in the fast-paced bicoastal world of show business. Aykroyd was more comfortable with a different breed of coastal men--fishermen, lobstermen, merchant seamen. He was also more comfortable with anonymity. ("Danny had more fun being Belushi's biggest fan than in being himself," says Jim Downey.) Though cheerful and generous if stopped by a fan in public, Aykroyd was genuinely pleased not to have the kind of notoriety that had become Belushi's burden.
After 1978, Belushi was recognized wherever he went. Yet lurking by his side on the street, Aykroyd often escaped recognition. ("I was able to just stand there and look like the Secret Service," Aykroyd recalls. "That was the one thing that was really fun about the relationship. I could really protect him. I always observed him. I was always one step back from him 'cause I didn't want to be too close to the flash. I wanted to see the whole picture.") As they would exit the stage door after a Blues Brothers concert, Aykroyd often walked literally a step or two behind Belushi. The fans screaming--"Jawn! Jawn! Hey, B'lushi!"--presumed Aykroyd to be some kind of rough-trade bodyguard. Naturally, he acted the part flawlessly. ("When someone is as flamboyant as John was, you have to be around it or do it yourself, to know how vulnerable that makes you," says Lorne Michaels. "Part of the nerve of being John Belushi was that there could always be great humiliation and failure with it. And Danny, who was sensitive enoug, and astute anough to know that--to know what it was to be that vulnerable--would naturally protect him.")
Yet no matter how talented Aykroyd was at playing the bodyguard, there were limits to the protection he could offer Belushi--from the world, from himself, from those who would make drugs available to a star of Belushi's stature: "The people who were giving him this shit--they thought they were doing him a favor," Aykroyd would later say. "Just from a pure business and insurance standpoint, the company should have protected him more. He shoud have had two or three bodyguards, the way a Saudi prince does, because the enterprises that John was involved in--more than three hundred million in gross sales already. The Blues Brothers--gross sales of one hundred and twenty million; sales of the records at six million; Animal House is over two hundred million; which is not to say that other people weren't responsible. But here he was part of a team that was just a money-making charger."
To alleviate the pressures of public life and the tensions of their expanding role in the motion-picture industry, Aykroyd and Belushi sought private surroundings. In New York, they could retreat to the Blues Bar, their private clubhouse in a dilapidated building on Dominick and Hudson streets where the faces were familiar, the whiskey unlimited, the juke box stocked with the best R & B tunes in town. And when New York was too frantic, they could retreat to the new locus of their friendship--Martha's Vineyard.
In 1979, Belushi bought a house near Vincent Beach which had belonged to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Judy Belushi negotiated the purchase (for approximately $435,000). Meanwhile, she telephoned Aykroyd to tell him about another property that was for sale (for $500,000) nearby. Aykroyd said he wanted a house that was up high, with a good view. The view was the important thing. Judy told him that there were lovely views--three of them, in fact--one on each side of the house. "How lovely are the views?" he wanted to know. She told him that they were the loveliest she had ever seen.
"Three of the loveliest views, eh? And John's moving there--well, okay then. Sure. Fine. No problem."
He bought the house, views unseen. "I knew," Aykroyd says of his investment, "that here was a friendship and a professional relationship that was forged for years to come."