It was partly in response to John's troubles with Lorne that Dan Aykroyd began to assume the role of John's defender and protector. One of Lorne's assistants heard Danny talking to Lorne after one of John's episodes. "Stay out of it," Lorne told Danny. "Protect yourself."
But Danny didn't stay out of it. Many nights on the 17th floor he could be heard yelling at Belushi to stop the midnight rambles, to dedicate himself to his art and his talent. Danny left a note for John once that began, "John...Read this...We must formulate premises. We must work and think constantly." To those who heard Danny's pleas they were a touching display of friendship, especially because Danny was going through troubles enough of his own at the time.
Danny was working so hard and was so tightly wound in the first place that his frustrations increasingly erupted into violence. Fists through the walls of his office and dressing room were the least of it. He once came offstage unhappy about the way a sketch had gone and smashed his hand through the glass covering a poster outside the studio, cutting himself fairly deeply in the process. Another time he smashed a glassed-in directory by the elevator on 17 and left a trail of blood on his way to the NBC infirmary on the seventh floor.
He lost control one day when he discovered that his prized bong, a glass marijuana pipe, was missing from his dressing room. He stormed into the studio, shouting that he would kill whoever had the audacity to remove his bong. "I'll take his head off!" he yelled. Then he went back to his dressing room and annihilated it. Surveying the damage later, NBC's maintenance people found the ceiling tile ripped out, the tiles themselves crushed into little pieces, the support beams bent and broken, doors pulled off cabinets, the loudspeaker torn of the wall, a Barcalounger chair destroyed. Maintenance decided to leave it as it was until the end of the season.
The rampage for which Danny was most infamous within NBC occurred early in the third season. NBC's Rick Traum sent him a form letter demanding payment of some $400 in unauthorized expenses incurred during Saturday Night's second trip to the Emmy awards the previous May. Traum, who sent the same memo to several others on the show, considered it a routine dunning notice, but later he would admit it was a mistake sending one to Danny. He especially regretted circling the amount owed in red ink. That, Traum said, was like waving a red flag in Danny's face.
Danny had a thing about money. He was always cursing NBC for taking advantage of them, paying them peanuts while they broke their backs. No one on the show was happy about the situation,but more than any of them, Danny was incensed. "We're Class A humour mechanics," he'd say, spitting it out. So Traum's memo would have troubled Danny enough by itself, but he was also wrestling with other tensions at the time. He'd started a romance with Rosie Shuster, the boss's ex-wife, the woman he'd had a crush on since he was a teenager in Canada. Danny and Lorne's relationship was further complicated by the fact that by then they had the same manager, Bernie Brillstein, and the same accountant, Mark Lipsky. All this was filtered through Danny's growing conviction that Lorne shared some of the blame for exploiting the working classes on Saturday Night. Danny took one look at Traum's memo and it all exploded.
In an artistic burst of rage, Danny filled a wall near the elevators on 17 with venomous graffiti. He did so on a weekend when there wasn't a show, and those from NBC's maintenance department who discovered it said the hate-filled mural clearly took several hours to create. Using spray paints, a variety of felt-tipped and ball-point pens, and some sort of chiseling tool, Danny scrawled evil-sounding satanic incantations, among them "I am Beelzebub, I am the Devil." There were also more conventional threats and profanities, including "I will kill you, Rick" and, hacked into the wall in letters four feet high, "Fuck You."
NBC decided that the wisest response to the incident was to do nothing. "Just clean the walls and shut up," one executive said. "It was kept very quiet. There was no discussion, not even with Lorne. The fewer people who knew about it the healthier the situation would be in the long run." NBC's maintenance staff covered the corrider that weekend with brown wrapping paper. A couple of days later the walls were plastered over and repainted.
Saturday Night's Bully Boys were especially in their element in New Orleans. A sketch was written featuring The Bees as a motorcycle gang specifically so the boys would have an excuse to rent huge, Harley-Davidson motorcycles with NBC's money. It was a terrible sketch, but the bikes were great, the perfect vehicles for weaving in and out of the crowds on Bourbon Street at two in the morning. Belushi would sweep into bars filled with bikers, starting instant parties wherever he went, everyone buying him drinks and giving him T-shirts and rides on their choppers. All night long he and Danny careened around the French Quarter.
Danny Aykroyd's impersonation of the portly French Chef Julia Child, had to be one of the most outrageously funny moments ever on Saturday Night. She stood in her TV kitchen, preparing the usual elaborate dish, when she cut herself deeply, "I've cut the dickens out of my finger," she twittered in her peculiar soprano. She proceeded to bleed to death on camera, trying to carry on with her recipe as buckets of blood gushed all over the studio. By the end she was deliriously flashing back to her childhood, and finally she collapsed over the counter, blood still spurting everywhere.
Many of Saturday Night's famous friends brought along their retinues, and on the floor of the studio there were often dozens of guests milling around during the show, watching and getting in the way. When the show ended, many of them would sweep onto the 17th floor, and the exhausted troupe of writers and performers would find themselves surrounded by fashion models on the arms of dashing men-about-town. Once one of these visitors indulged in more stimulants than she could handle and keeled over in the hallway. Dan Aykroyd, standing nearby said, "If you can't handle MiGs, don't fly in MiG alley."
To escape the riffraff, John and Danny would retire to the Blues Bar, near Canal Street in lower Manhattan. It was a dark and grimy little place hidden behind a huge steel door; the Holland Tunnel ran thirty feet below its basement. There was a tiny stage with a few instruments on it for anyone who wanted to play and a jukebox stocked with vintage R & B. It was hipness beyond chic to be invited there after a show: Sometimes Rolling Stone Keith Richards or members of the Allman Brothers or the Grateful Dead would be there, jamming all night and serving beer behind the bar.
John, Danny, Judy Jacklin, and Rosie Shuster got caught once when they were on vacation together in a little lakeside resort town in Wisconsin. The plan was to have a peaceful weekend together, being, as Shuster put it, "regular people." They were getting ready to go out one night when they discovered a crowd had formed on the steps of their rented cabin. They waited awhile, hoping the crowd would dissipate, but it only grew larger. Finally they had to jump out the back window, dropping a fair distance into the bushes below, scraping themselves up in the process. They dashed to their car and drove off with John and Danny keeping themselves out of sight.
Jagger seemed to be the only one of the Stones really to understand what was going on with the show; during rehearsal he was overheard trying to explain it to drummer Charlie Watts. Jagger rehearsed a sketch with Dan Aykroyd in which Aykroyd, as Tom Snyder, interviewed Jagger, on the Tomorrow show, and once again those waching sensed an underlying current of competition. In the middle of the sketch Tom Snyder got up to show that he could dance like Jagger, and those watching Jagger, who remained seated, was clearly uncomfortable being upstaged.
If there was a battle of the bands that night, Saturday Night won it. Jagger did indeed pale next to Danny in the Tom Snyder sketch; Jagger's bravado didn't obscure the fact that this was Danny's arena, and against Aykroyd's energy Jagger couldn't help but seem fey by comparison. The highlight of the show was probably Danny's performance as the Norge refrigerator repairman in the Nerds sketch, when he defied Standards and let his trousers hang halfway off his backside.
Within Saturday Night there was some jealousy and some disdain for the Blues Brothers. The general feeling was that this was some sort of crazy fluke, nothing more than a comedy routine that had caught on somehow. People thought it ridiculous that John and Danny were taking it so seriously, more seriously than Saturday Night. Lorne felt that way more than most, many on the show believe, because the Blues Brohters existed outside his sphere of influence and because John didn't give him credit for having provided the platform that launched them in the first place.
So it was that as the fourth season went on another battle of the bands developed, between John's Blues Brothers and Lorne's Saturday Night. The Blues Brothers were John's show, a project he controlled, and he was immensely proud he'd pulled it off independent of Saturday Night. Lorne seemed to dismiss it. His friends think he found it hard to accept that John and Danny might have other interests that were more important to them than the show. Lorne spent many long hours on the phone arranging schedules so that John and Danny could film 1941, and he promised he'd make room for them to tour with the Blues Brothers, but he didn't acknowledge that anything had really changed with them, never deferred to their new status. Lorne's attitude, Bernie Brillstein said, was to acommodate but also to hold the line firmly. "It was always, 'Okay, Okay...but you gotta do the show, fellas.'"
John was outraged at that, and his patience with what he called "the Lorne Michaels show" began to run out. The fighting between the two of them grew more vehement. John scored one victory the week of the Kate Jackson show when he forced Lorne to book honky-tonk piano man Delbert McClinton, a favorite of John's, as the musical guest. It was a sweeps period and Lorne, more concerned with ratings than he used to be, wanted a bigger name. But John threatened to quit the show if McClinton didn't go on, and McClinton did.
Three shows later, John was unable to fly back to New York from Hollywood because of an ear infection. Again the attitude was conveyed, by Danny as well as by Lorne, that John was just goofing off. Danny told John he could drive across country if he really wanted to. John was, again, jurt and outraged. During the week he organized a little film to take his plade on the show. It was shot at Steven Spielberg's house by John Landis, who would soon direct the Blues Brothers movie, and it showed John floating in the pool surrounded by beautiful girls. "I'd really love to be there," he said.
There are those who suspect Lorne was probably relieved that John wasn't coming back, although others think Lorne never quite accepted the fact he wasn't. The real question, and the real battle of wills, was whether Danny would go with him.
Danny told Lorne that he would be back, but only as a performer, not a writer. He made that commitment "casually," friends of Danny's say, but Lorne clung to it, convinced Danny would return. Lorne says that he and Danny shook hands on the agreement, and that he based his decision to come back for another season in part on his understanding that Danny would be there. But John was relentlessly urging Danny to leave. Thus Danny was torn between his loyalty to Lorne and the others on Saturday Night and his loyalty to John, so that in truth for most of the fourth season he vacillated.
At times Danny grew frustrated with the show and talked about quitting, as he always had, but now he had movies to flee to instead of truck stops outside Toronto. "I don't need this anymore," he'd say. But a minute later he'd be thinking about the next show, asking the other writers, "Okay, what're we gonna do this week?" When the deal for the Blues Brothers movie came through, Danny started writing the screenplay. Sometimes he'd walk throught the hallways on 17 with a script for Saturday Night in one hand and a script for the film in the other. The movie script seemed to be growing like some fungus, filling Danny's office with pages upon pages of yellow legal-pad paper. The pressure of juggling the show and the film began to tell. Other writers would come to Danny's office, asking his help on a sketch as they always had before, but now he'd often brush them off. "Guys," he's say in his clenched stacatto, "I can't do it anymore. I have too much other stuff."
Neither was Danny immune to the overwhelming scale of the Blues Brothers' success, or from the enticements that came in its wake. He was the quieter partner in the projects John was developing, but not a passive partner. After years of feeling he'd been ripped off on Saturday Night and a hundred other jobs, Danny began to feel that here was the Main Chance, the opportunity to exploit rather than be exploited. He started talking about building an empire, a "megabucks show-biz empire." For periods of a week or two at a time he'd come into the office playing a new character, the Mogul, wearing three-piece suits and smoking cigars. "We're going to the moon," he said once. "We're going to Mars."
It wasn't until a few weeks before the fifth season started that it was known on the 17th floor that Danny wasn't coming back. For most of the summer, Lorne had thought Danny would return, although others say in retrospect there were clear signals to the contrary that Lorne chose to ignore. One such signal was when Danny failed to attend the party after the last show of the fourth season. He hadn't said anything to Lorne about not coming, and people could see the disappointment registering on Lorne's face when he saw Danny wasn't there. "Danny," one friend said, "pulled a powder. Forever."
The Blues Brothers movie started production in Chicago on July 1, Danny's birthday. From the beginning it fell behind schedule, and there was talk in New York of how Saturday Night could accommodate Danny's need to be on the set finishing the movie as the fifth season began. That talk ended when Danny finally decided once and for all he was leaving with John.
Lorne learned of Danny's decision in a phone call from Bernie Brillstein. Later, Danny came to Lorne's place in Amagansett, and they talked. "You gave me your word," Lorne says he told him. But Lorne knew it didn't matter what had been said: Danny's mind had changed, and Lorne had to accept it. When the news broke on 17, people wandered around the halls, gathering in quiet groups and muttering, "Uh-oh, it's happened."
Bernie Brillstein says Danny decided, finally, to leave when he read an article in People magazine in which Michael O'Donoghue talked about John's riding around in limousines with shoe boxes filled with cocaine. In a rage, Danny called Brillstein from a phone booth at Folsom Prison, where the movie was beign shot. "I want nothing to do with those people!" he said, meaning those people on Saturday Night.
As disappointed as they were, Danny's friends on the show say it seemed like the proper moment for him and John to go. It was plain by then that the Saturday Night engine was running out of steam, and it made sense to take advantage of the tremendous momentum they had going for themselves. The abruptness of Danny's departure and the fact that he didn't return in even a part-time capacity left little doubt that the battles between Lorne and John had something to do with it. The consenus on 17 was that Danny's loyalty to John simply won out "The feeling," said writer Jim Downey, "was definitely that John spirited Danny away from the show."
Even those who thought Danny had made the right move took exception to his manner of leaving. "The words that come to me," said one of the writers, "are 'slink away.'" Lorne told friends he felt Danny had "betrayed" him.
In their comments to the press, Lorne and Danny were generous toward each other on the surface but cool between the lines. "Lorne," Danny said in a written statement announcing his departure, "is a visionary whose guidance and friendship account for a great deal of my success. He supports his staff and lets each writer carry his or her scene through to air time. In effect this develops each one's production skills. For the most part this is not the situation of the videotape mills of Hollywood."
"Danny," said Lorne in an interview with Rolling Stone, "is a highly honorable man, and I think it pained him to make the decision to leave." Danny's relationship with Lorne thereafter continued to be, as an associate of Lorne's put it, "estranged."
Several of those from the show who attended John's funeral on Martha's Vineyard say it was a strange and emotional reunion. Most hadn't seen much of each other since the show ended, and Anne Beatts was not the only one who spent the occasion "getting blasted on anything anyone handed me" just to get through it. Dan Aykroyd put on a remarkable display of Bully Boy machismo, leading the funeral procession to the gravesite on his Harley. Some of the mourners,drunk, urinated in full view of the gathered press. Danny's friends say it took a long while to recover from John's death, if indeed he ever would completely recover. He has said in interviews that he sometimes talks to John in dreams.