Autumnal, low grey-skied September in Toronto. With every minute that passes four o’clock, it looks more and more like rain. Not the best day for filming outdoors, but what can you do? At present the actors race and leap and hop along the roof, which is a good twenty or twenty-five feet above the ground, maybe higher, until, near the centre-edge, they stand and put their backs to the skyline and the cars nosing down Yonge Street in the direction of the weekend.
Only a few japes more to go, the director thinks, and there’ll be enough in the can to knock off too.
Now their heads are bobbing, ducking invisible rocks. And the director is happy, he is beaming, looking younger than his forty-odd years – much the same man as when he played the clown on a kids’ show in the early sixties. Because all the comedy resides in the actors’ energy: exuberant, zany, unpredictable. The camera is loving one of the biggest and youngest guys, the scene’s powerhouse. Danny. Daniel Edward Aykroyd to the province’s traffic cops, who will pull him over every now and then for speeding. See how he runs manic circles around the skylight! Watch the tall, burly whirlwind of his body as it gathers pace! Imprudently, he cuts across the skylight’s dirty glass.
The director shouts to him, ‘Keep off the glass,’ but the honks of cars drown out the warning.
Danny plummets, in shock and gasping. In his haste he did not give the glass – its thinness – a second thought. He stepped on the pane, feeling it burst into shards, the murky void beneath swallowing him whole.
What happens to Danny turns the others on the roof to stone. All that falling could be the death of nearly anyone. They stare at the skylight with a pane now missing on one side, they peer down, down, into the storage room which a moment ago housed only light stands, and then someone, John Candy or Gilda Radner or another of the actors, starts downstairs to call an ambulance.
Supposing he hadn’t collided with a water pipe on his way down, they will say afterwards. The pipe had broken his fall.
He is breathing, and his body is intact. The remains of the skylight glint around it, enormous shards like shark’s teeth. Presently sirens sound, and Danny when he is hoisted onto the gurney groans weakly, ‘Way to start my career in TV!’ Quick as a shot, the ambulance man replies, ‘You’re going to be a star.’ He pronounces this sentence in an accent of stunned certainty. ‘We can fix arms and hearts,’ he continues, ‘but not heads.’ To have come away in one piece from such a fall meant Danny Aykroyd’s head had to be something very special.
✲
The first time I heard Aykroyd and Asperger’s in the same sentence I had just been diagnosed myself. That would have been back in the early noughties, which doesn’t make either of us, Aykroyd or myself, any younger, but I still remember the interview well. It aired on National Public Radio, which I listened to on the show’s web archive. To tell the truth, I came across the interview by chance. Aykroyd hadn’t been in the news for a while by then, but when I saw the NPR link I recognised the name immediately. That goes without saying. For a period of about ten years, in the eighth and ninth decades of the twentieth century, he had been among TV and cinema’s biggest stars. Being a child of the eighties, I grew up on his movies. Like just about everyone else, I saw him in Ghostbusters (whose original screenplay he wrote), with Bill Murray, their lasers trained on the slimiest – and funniest – monsters you could ever hope to encounter on film. So I listened with interest as the comic actor answered questions on his life and career, and almost fell off my chair when he told the interviewer about his Asperger’s.
As a matter of fact, he hadn’t gone behind that microphone expecting to talk about anything quite so personal. The interviewer, Terry Gross, had more or less hypnotised him, as he explained it later, with her excellent preparation and gentle questioning. Gross, too, was a little thrown; she seemed almost not to believe that she could have surprised Aykroyd into so rare a confidence. She wondered aloud whether he was joking when he said the funny-sounding word Asperger’s, whether an interviewee like him, all alter egos, a jealous guardian of his private life, might only be teasing her listeners. But no. The word, which sounds like a bit of fun but turned out to mean what it means – mild, high-functioning autism – was uttered, it seems, quite sincerely. So that each time another interviewer would bring it up through the following years, almost in a whisper, as though it were a possible source of embarrassment, he replied in the affirmative. But he would not elaborate. The window on his mind had been tantalisingly opened, and just as quickly closed.
Upon embarking on this project in 2019 my idea was to speak with Aykroyd’s early friends, neighbours, classmates and first colleagues, to learn more about those parts of his life the media had mostly missed out, his formative years, the ones that had made his extraordinary mind what it is. I didn’t expect him to agree to talk with me directly. And so it proved. The way his cousin explained it to me, I got the impression that he found dwelling at any length on his inner life an ordeal, an ordeal like having his molars pulled. Which I could understand, even though I had never been reluctant to share my own experience of neurodiversity. As luck would have it, he grew up in Hull (as it was then called), Quebec, a place I know particularly well. In addition to Aykroyd’s past interviews, I combed the local press archives, in both its languages. I sent out enquiries. I chased leads. I made many calls. The people who answered were all generous with their memories. Vivid insights and recollections, forty-, fifty-, sixty-year-old stories, they shared with me. A composite Danny began to emerge.
✲
Peter Aykroyd had worked out west once. He had scouted locations for the National Film Board, in Manitoba, in Saskatoon, in Edmonton, weeks in advance of Princess Elizabeth’s national tour. That was why his wedding to Danny’s mother, Lorraine, took place out in Winnipeg, in September 1951. The king died that winter and in the summer Danny was born. Lorraine told her husband to get a proper job.
He worked then as a road engineer in Hull (and later behind a mahogany desk at the National Capital Commission). But Peter couldn’t resist sneaking some televisual oomph into the home, in the form of a Philco set. How wondrous the new medium was: ballet dancers one hour, a quiz show the next – it radiated culture throughout the country. Alongside some less mindful ‘entertainment’ which was just as well; its programming was magnanimous. Slapstick to kill an hour agreeably, and then Liberace for the wife. And all those weekday shows, episode after unrelenting episode, as though everything in the world exists to end up in a show.
In the evenings Danny sat and fidgeted in front of the porthole screen, and as the broadcaster read out the news the little boy repeated aloud every other headline. The Prime Minister John Diefenbaker … in Malton, Ontario, the Avro Arrow was rolled out for cameras … yesterday’s successful launch of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union … Lorraine and Peter listened without batting an eyelid – the telly always had an echo whenever Danny was present; there wasn’t an announcer, not a newsman, their son heard without mimicking the syllabic voices.
Adequately informed, Peter rose from his chair and switched off the set, and Danny along with it.
Lorraine would have much preferred to wean Danny from the screen; she would have preferred to see him outside, playing sports, like other people’s boisterous boys. But knowing his son, Peter couldn’t see that happening. He had another idea: why not make him a microphone like the one TV announcers use? A toy to occupy the small hands more pleasingly than, say, flapping. He sawed up a beat-up hockey stick he had, and wrapped the toe of the blade in a black ball of duct tape and then dropped a length of string from the heel, curly as wire, conducive to a little boy’s imagination.
Someone might speak to him, as he sat watching this or that show, and he would seem miles away. Even on a hot day he’d warm in his hand the glass of milk that his mother or, sometimes, his grandmother gave him. A grown-up’s commands to scrub dirty palms, comb hair or remake the bed, coming when they did from the other side of the little screen, he could blissfully disregard. He seemed to have ears only for the characters. He could have listened all day to the one called Friday, Sergeant Joe Friday, although the detective entered living rooms every Thursday (and later, Tuesday) – for the bright, clipped things he said. This and other voices too he absorbed, exhaled back, the better to merge himself with them, dissolve in them, become them. Light as a voice. And as free.
Only … sometimes the set resolved not to work, as all things electric are prone to do, and the static supplanted the voices then and would have left Danny in angry tears. His father consoled him with a bedsheet. Hung in the basement, it became a movie screen on which Peter projected rented reels. The Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope, and the Bowery Boys in Ghost Chasers. Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops. His father’s son, Danny goggled at the old square cars onscreen, how they vroomed and spun and knocked walls and barns, even themselves, gleefully to pieces. Cars, it seemed, could take all manner of liberties in this world. Oh, to live like a car!
✲
Every morning Peter drove his Ford Sedan to the heart of the capital, to the beehive of government offices.
He was very tall, prematurely bald and a snappy wearer of ties. Back in college, in Toronto, he’d been on every student committee going, and that same great sense of duty, or work ethic, kept him constantly caffeinated, prodded him to bring his work home in the evenings, stacks of paper reshuffled by the swing of his suitcase.
His suitcase saw many cities. He was much in demand as a speaker at Rotary Club dinners, and this champion of urban planning could have been a preacher, so impassioned was his every talk: Canada, land of green pastures and a future of peace.
The Aykroyds’ house stood apart from most other homes in the town, on the edge of Gatineau Park, whose new-built roads, cut from Precambrian rock, wended between the lakes and valleys, ferried visitors by the million every year, and owed their existence to Peter’s engineering. (Five years in the making, those roads, Danny’s preschool years.) Young Danny had his bedroom in the basement under the garage, waking to the engine rumble sparked by his father’s key in the ignition. It’s time, the always punctual key would inform him. Time for school. Get up. Danny gave a consenting groan, less obedient to the key than to the anticipation of warming oatmeal. So cold outside. And dark. His bleary eyes adjusting, shadows in the room turned to cowboy hats, plastic guns, comic books, model tanks – all competing for space with the biggest shadow of them all. With its Westclox clock and folders and colour pencils, the bedroom table had become homework territory, though he didn’t need to sit very long there. Probably he spent longer dressing for class in the morning than setting down right answers in the evening: fiddly pairs of socks and long johns and corduroy trousers, a thermal T-shirt underneath shirt and woolly sweater. The mitts, like the scarf coiled round his neck after breakfast, were woolly too. Mukluks encased his feet, a ski mask his face. Then he zipped up the garish snowsuit.
The light outside was weak when Danny left the house – big enough by the age of seven to fend for himself, so his parents thought – and he had brought along a torch, or perhaps a long twig, just in case. Behind the house stretched woods of pine and spruce, alive with wolves and bears. It was sleeting, the sough in the pines came clearly to him, and the pungent earth felt very near, recalling the dump trucks and the lumberjacks which his father had long supervised, and taken his son out in all weathers to see. Danny had heard the workmen and their tools before he could see them. The digging and the sawing and the motor-turning. Those sounds grown familiar soon entered his lexicon, and Danny when he set out now for school repeated them, here and there, to no one in particular, speaking in fluent spade and axe and chainsaw. Or as an engine revving.
First he skirted the woods and clambered down a steep slope of rock, and then he came to a clearing where there lay a creek, and under the narrow, wobbly plank that bridged it, waist-deep freezing water. Danny threw his knapsack across before negotiating the plank. He tried to put out of his mind the nipping memories of falling in. He stretched out his arms, for balance. Little, tottering steps.
Presently the trees thinned away and he followed a path across the highway to a neighbourhood considered bad. He was deep in thought, dominated by an incessant flow of ideas to the exclusion of everything else. Unaware of the figures that began to circle him, in an ever-decreasing circle. He was talking to his boots. Either that, or his rigid gait, or the cosseted dressiness of his clothing, had stirred up this pack of lads – and soon, through his snowsuit, Danny felt their calloused fingers jab his arms, ribs and chest. His mask they attempted to rip clean away. Holding fast to it, he fled into the school.
The plain red-brick building on the corner of Davies Street hasn’t changed much since Danny’s time. It is now a remedial learning centre for poor working-class adults, after being an elementary for mainly poor working-class children. Many of the children sounded as Irish or Scottish as their folks, McThis or O’That. Today’s pupils in this part of Gatineau (as Hull is now called) have inherited the names but lost the accents. They attend newer, gentler schools. They wouldn’t recognise a leather strap, or the spool or skipping-rope handle which in fact was a nun’s clicker, designed to quell a class. One click, open your readers. Two clicks, pick up your pens. Girls are no longer a separate species, stuck in their own rows and sergegreen tunics. Even so, the clannishness of children remains. The surveillance, the strict division of those deemed ‘in’ and ‘out’. Durable as any plain red-brick building.
So the school didn’t assimilate him, far from it. Everything reminded him of how strange he felt within its walls. The John Wayne swagger of the older boys. The incomprehensible drone of the Lord’s Prayer, like a TV’s glitchy audio. In the hubbub of the playground he felt his shyness like a deformity, like a misshapen head. The other children thought him a nerd, as Aykroyd would say years later, a geek, as he would say as well, although the kids in Hull, Quebec, would have put it differently back then. A drip, more like it, a square. A funny boy, their parents might have thought, and whether they meant funny ha ha or funny peculiar depended on their mood and perspective. Neither a friend-magnet, then, nor a teacher’s pet.
The women teachers at Our Lady of the Annunciation – for they were all women – were short and stout, wearers of talc and corsets and tortoiseshell glasses – in a word, matronly. The same firmness of curves, slowness of movements, blackness of hair, a suspicious black that seemed almost blue: so many emblems of their authority. No malarkey would any of them take. Nor sides; they bestowed their knowledge impartially, on the earners of gold stars and red marks alike, on those who talked dialect at home and those who didn’t, on the aspiring typists and future factory hands. And on Danny. He was in a category all of his own.
A head taller than the other children when they stood alphabetically in line for class, too conspicuous, not knowing what to do with his hands or feet or gaze. He wouldn’t necessarily meet his classmates’ eyes. And that was just the half of it. His sprawling, left-handed compositions read like nothing the teacher would have seen (if the first drafts of his future screenplays are anything to go on): long but ingeniously digressive, branching out into a hundred backstories, each scene and character more inventive and more surprising than the last. This was a boy who liked nothing better than to loiter in encyclopedias, who knew the insides of atoms and the capitals of all the provinces, who sounded like he’d swallowed his father’s civil engineering manuals: ‘shale’, ‘theodolite’, ‘lateral load’. And just wait until you got him on prime numbers or the solar system, talking so fast he would have made Sergeant Bilko proud, Lucille Ball smile. You couldn’t stop him then. His boundless inquisitiveness made him exhausting to teach. I don’t know if he was oblivious to an adult’s impatience, wanting to squeeze answer after answer out of the Miss, or whether he found some questions simply irresistible. In which case he could hold them back no longer than he was able to hold his breath.
How many people live in France? How many towns are there in France? Is Paris the size of Ottawa?
He was like the air-raid siren that sat over the girls’ side of the playground (the kind that, twenty years later, Aykroyd would put in a movie atop his Bluesmobile): you never knew when he might go off. And one day Danny went further and demonstrated his own powers of disruption. Picture the following. The teacher would have been explaining something to the class in her usual roundabout way, maybe tripping over some stat or date – she must have seen an impatient look come into his face – and then stopped and said, ‘What is it?’, and other disapproving words. The rows behind him put down their pens as he said, switching to his TV detective voice, ‘All we want are the facts, ma’am.’ From anyone else, it would have seemed to her the height of impertinence. Very likely she had not gotten the joke, and was unprepared for the children’s reaction. The boys, studious a minute before, fell into a laughing match. They laughed at the top of their lungs, unthinkingly, daringly, competitively. The teacher shouted over them. That’s. Enough. Out. Of. You. Young. Man.
Had it even been a joke? Had he known what he was doing? You couldn’t be sure, coming from a nature like Danny’s. The shifting voices and odd flights of fancy, next door to the shy bookishness, made him an enigma. Deliberate or not, the scene in the classroom altered Danny, so that he came into some new knowledge of his resources, the ways of diversion, attracting the pupils’ attention to characters put on and then slipped free from. And indeed for a while, maybe a few days at a time, the boys forgot to harass him at recess or to be cold towards him. They let him be.
The teacher, in turn, thought up her own harmless subterfuge. Her breath smelled of the humbugs for which she regularly dispatched Danny to the local sweet shop, thereby buying thirty minutes or so of peace for her and the classroom. In this way, Armand Monfils, the confectioner, relieved her for half an hour in the afternoon. Her desk drawer teemed with humbugs for as long as Danny was in her lessons. (Sometimes one of the other boys would be all sweetness and light until the humbug errand was his, the thirty carefree minutes away from class were his, and Danny, mightily peeved, knew he’d remember Ricky Hollingsworth till the day he died.)
Some days, when Danny could have been away at the sweet shop, he had to remain instead on the premises. Miss Nellie Bradley, the headmistress, would want to see him. He was a regular in her office. Miss Bradley, who was the aunt of the early-grades teacher Miss Sirois, and who sometimes asked her niece about the Aykroyds’ boy and heard her answer that he was quite a handful – a pain in the neck, Miss Sirois, who had a soft heart, did not say – Miss Bradley, though not herself exactly a laid-back lady, would pull in a few colleagues and have Danny entertain them. The cigarette smoke would get so thick as to sting the boy’s myopic eyes. Ask him to do Hilly, one of the ladies would whisper, and Danny would imitate so precisely their colleague’s tone and pitch that it was as if Mrs Preslawski weren’t at that instant several classrooms down, but standing there in person.
He could be quiet as well, when the circumstances required it, so quiet you wouldn’t even know he was there, all eyes and ears. During the last hour of lessons, for example, when he feared being held back, kept from his cartoons (though they were far from his mother’s idea of a good viewing habit – he’d catch them on the sly when she wasn’t around), and also when the school’s television set rolled into class. Danny was old enough by then to know not to echo back what he heard, so that the only voice in the room came out of the screen.
The boys in the school films looked and behaved nothing like him. They wore wrinkle-free plaid shirts in winter; horizontal-stripe T-shirts in summer. They bought thoughtful birthday gifts for their mothers; wrote friends in distant towns fountain pen-pal letters; watched pucks pushed and whacked across hockey rinks. Like his father and younger brother, they were invariably called Peter. He was a Danny in a world of Peters.
