They were not improvising, as they used to do, not then at least; their conversation was serious. Valri did most of the talking at the start.

I can’t see her sounding Danny out. That wouldn’t have been her style. She wouldn’t have said, Toronto might be a fun place to live. Instead, she would have said, ‘Ottawa’s no Toronto, Danny! What are we doing here? Too small. Too conservative. Boring. Boring. Boring. Toronto’s where the action is. A city with contracts to sign and fan bases to build.’

She had always known that her days in Ottawa were numbered. She was going places. Namely, Hollywood. She saw them both in a near future on the stage and the big screen, their names in lights. They’d be famous – did he hear her? Famous.

Hearing her talk like this, Danny was flustered and angry. He almost wished she had never returned. His home was here, his family was here. He was close to graduating. All her dreams of rising he countered with premonitions of a fall. Hadn’t she the foggiest idea how tough it was to ‘make it’? Didn’t she know how many wannabe comics and actors clogged every agency going? Countless youngsters dreamed of landing a movie or a TV series or a commercial or at least a walk-on part in some regional theatre production, precisely none of which panned out ninety-nine times in a hundred, you had to be realistic. Miseries they’d earn then, with nothing left for blues albums or motorcycle parts. Count him out.

Their argument lasted for days, until finally his resolve cracked and he fled from the house, out into the blowing snow, tearful and imagining he’d thumb a ride home though no car came.

So Danny quit his studies and followed Valri to Toronto.

✲

The summer after leaving Ottawa, Danny toured with his own satirical revue called The Pickle. A small restaurant-bar in Montreal hosted him and two other young debutants. Neither the flyers distributed nor the advert in the local press roused any great curiosity, much less a crowd. The first night, they were maybe a dozen, counting the three performers, to show up. The second night, the audience and slender takings were halved. The third night, Danny and his colleagues played to a single couple, whose attention quickly waned and who began fighting mid-show. There was no fourth night.

Between auditions he worked hard, adding mail truck driver and runway load tester to his CV of blue-collar jobs (he’d also been, at various times through college, a warehouseman, road survey crewman and rolling stock operator – inventorying had been his favourite part of the latter). He made enough to pay the rent and bills and put beans and beer on the table, and he could always scare up the dollars for a treat.

But there was more to it than the money. The roles. In a job, he was somebody. Somebody who knew just what to do and say when, for instance, at Toronto airport, he stepped out onto Runway 006 and said, ‘All right, please close all air traffic, we’re bringing the trucks in now.’

Valri and Danny were soon on stage in one of Toronto’s gay bars, joking their best to garner applause the way the drag queen before them – his name was Pascal – had done. They were still learning. Take pauses, a thing most people retreat from in ordinary conversation. Danny and Valri, improvising, learned to trust a pause when it came. Not to tread on it. Because that was often where the laugh was.

It was something Brian Gordon could have taught him: speak only when what you say improves on the silence.

When Chicago’s Second City improv theatre set up a Toronto branch Danny and Valri were both recruited for the troupe. (John Candy got in the same day.) The branch was a few blocks from their lodgings, an old fire hall where they now performed their late-night comedy. The hall had been converted not long before into a club and restaurant. They would do a set with the other members of the troupe, and then go out and improvise, ‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen, give us an occupation.’ Some guy yells out lawyer. ‘Okay, give us a place.’ Bathroom in a bus station. So they’d do a scene about a lawyer between buses taking a leak.

Some nights the audience would be small and tough, the type that sits on their hands – you might not get a snicker or a chortle out of them, forget about a good honest belly laugh. And some nights an empty seat would glare at them and a fumbled gag would throw someone momentarily off their game, but they would always pick themselves up and soldier on until the end.

Afterwards they would stay backstage and compare notes. Valri’s stony silence announced an imminent dressing-down. Danny, you stank tonight. You weren’t on, I don’t know what you were thinking. She lashed him with reproaches. He wouldn’t bristle, he wouldn’t shout back, he would just stand there, head hung, taking it.

The other comedians were impressed, though – Danny had the goods, he was the real thing. Lightning quick with an IQ way up there, ever ready to take a sketch fruitfully off-tangent. And who but Danny would imitate a deadpan radio man saying of a crop circle: ‘The cows had their lips surgically removed’?

But some had the impression that there was never any personal chemistry with Danny. He didn’t listen to his partners on stage as the others did; he fixed on specific words in a sketch, either written in advance or just that moment improvised, and on the flood of associations they set off inside him. And there were times, in mid-performance, he’d turn abruptly rigid. Besieged by a familiar anxiety, he’d look down at the boards and see only a choppy sea of molecules beneath his boots, no solid ground, and for a second feel dizzy. Then he’d slam his whole body down on the floor and make the boards groan reassuringly. ‘Good stage that,’ he might say. ‘Sturdy.’

It was common knowledge that Danny had meltdowns. Say or do the wrong thing and he could lose it, every modicum of his calm. Nobody wanted to be there when it happened.

The manager at Second City couldn’t help noticing that Danny did not observe the performers’ dress code; he was always in his poor excuse for a pair of jeans – from where he’d been knocking about with his motorcycle all day, they were frequently scuffed and dirty. That displeased the manager, who wanted Danny to think of the paying customers and smarten up.

Not wanting to make a big deal of it, he’d asked one of the comedians to pass on the message. Everything seemed to be going fine. But when Danny heard his colleague say ‘jeans’ and ‘management’, he turned red and trembled like he had a fever. Then he exploded. The manager knew where he could go and put his shirt and slacks. He paced about and blinked fast and shouted something about blowing up the building, and perhaps it was just as well the manager was out that day.

Still, the next time Danny went up on stage he wore a clean pair of trousers.

✲

505 Queen Street East, Toronto. A growly male voice was coming out of the jukebox.

‘What’s this?’ said the American.

‘A local blues band,’ answered Danny. ‘You’re from Chicago. You should know all about that.’

‘I’m more into heavy metal. Crunchy guitar riffs.’

‘Well, then, listen up.’

This exchange happened sometime in the small hours, a night in February 1974, at the counter of Danny’s bootleg joint (or illegal booze can, as he also called it). The place catered to the city’s night-shift waitresses, truck drivers and cops.

The American sat at the bar nursing the beer Danny had served him.

Danny pulled up a stool beside him, this squat American whose friend he had been for all of four hours, and observed him closely: the driver’s cap, almost hexagonal, and the white scarf he’d taken off once indoors, the white cable-knit sweater, like the sweater Steve McQueen wore so handsomely in The Thomas Crown Affair, the feet shod in sneakers – totally underdressed for Canada, Danny thought.

The two had met backstage at Second City. This new friend was scouting for talent for the National Lampoon Radio Hour and, in Danny, he had his guy. Danny demurred. It wasn’t that the show didn’t pay right, that wasn’t the problem. Danny was not a man to change course if he could help it. He had money here in Toronto, a stage, and this place to keep him busy.

The man warned him not to become complacent. He left Danny his number.

The rest was destiny, or so Danny must have thought after their successful TV audition in New York the following year. Destiny’s roll call. They were to be the best of friends, closer than Aykroyd and Chich, and Aykroyd and Bromfield. Aykroyd and Belushi.

✲

It’s 7 p.m. here in Paris, 11 a.m. British Columbia time, and I’m sitting at my living-room table, shouting at a blank computer screen. Danny Aykroyd’s first director, Trevor Evans, can’t get his webcam to work; and, now eighty-five years old, he is a little hard of hearing. But he can see me just fine, he says from his home in Penticton.

It was Trevor behind the camera on the afternoon Danny fell through the skylight. He rode in the ambulance with him, accompanied him home afterwards. He had first seen him at Second City, where he was searching for his cast. Coming Up Rosie would spend three seasons on Canadian children’s TV programming, the first one with Danny.

Before Saturday Night Live, the sitcom was Danny’s great experiment in front of a camera. The channel’s tapes were wiped and only seconds of footage survive online, but Trevor was able to locate several episodes in his personal archives to send me. Unseen in almost half a century.

Trevor told me that Danny repurposed his ‘Scottish Fedex driver’ character at Second City for the show, turning him into a screwy send-up of a by-law enforcing building superintendent. A stickler for rules. Inmates at the Toronto jail, having only two channels, tuned in, and Danny received letters from some of them in care of the studio. I’m guessing these letter writers spotted things that would have been lost on the other viewers, the preteens and their parents and even the cast and crew, up to and including Trevor – how, for example, the name Danny chose for his character, Purvis Bickle, was a nod to Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Motorcycle Song’ with its ‘pickles’ and ‘motorsickles’, so that the mere sound conjured up fast wheels, canyon leaps and the liberating smell of gasoline.

And I imagine the tenderness Danny felt towards these first fans of his, as he read their smudged and clumsily constructed sentences, the words following their own rules of grammar and punctuation and spelling, ‘goest’, say, for ghost, like something out of his father’s King James Bible.

‘Kids like to be scared,’ Trevor said, and he had encouraged Danny to make use of his special interest in the supernatural. One of the episodes he sent me was called ‘Mousetrap for McTavish’ and the plot was pure Danny. Purvis Bickle tasks one of the building’s residents with taking action photos of his pet hamster McTavish. The hamster escapes into the walls, where it scratches eerily and chews through the wires, causing the building’s lights to go out. In the near dark, Bickle consults a Ouija board but the result is Gaelic-looking gibberish. He mistakes a resident dressed in a chef’s whites, giving off puffs of flour, for a ghost. ‘Ectoplasm’ he says to describe the scene – probably its first use in broadcast history.

So very young, this Danny, but already verging on fame, the many names for himself – Beldar Conehead, Elwood Blues, Ray Stantz – he did not yet know he would make.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to all those who shared their stories with me for this book: Vaughan Bowen, Kana Grace, Warren Hines, Eve and Billy Megargel, Amanda Tink, Ayo Sokale.

And to the following whose public life and career have been a further source of inspiration: Naoise Dolan, Cédric Villani, Dan Aykroyd.

Ed Lake believed in Nine Minds from its beginning and I would like to thank him for his confidence and encouragement.

Fran Fabriczki and Seán Costello provided valuable editorial feedback, while Fran Barrie, Izzy Everington, Georgina Difford, Alison Alexanian and all the staff at Profile Books/Wellcome have worked hard to bring these stories to readers.

My thanks, as ever, to my agent Andrew Lownie.

Special thanks to my family and friends, near and far, and to my husband Jérôme Tabet.

Béatrice Bonhomme generously gave her time for the narrative portrait of her nephew Cédric Villani.

Laura Crane and Kara Rodano kindly corresponded with me for the narrative portrait of their colleague and friend Kana Grace.