He had plenty of reasons to dislike the Big Apple. The crowds. The red tape. The dog-eat-dog world. To say nothing of the loud and frilly clothes; New Yorkers seemed obsessed with their clothes. He had no time for stuff like that; most days he’d throw on his motorcyclist’s black jacket that he teamed with black boots and gloves.
But whenever Danny saw the blue-collar streets reminiscent of his native Hull, the rust and brick and dives and flophouses, his attitude towards the city softened. He admired the phantoms of rising steam above manholes that caught his eye. And the energetic beggars, some legless, yet amazingly swift on their wheeled boards, with whom he rode the subway. From there he went on to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the elevator carried him up eight floors to the NBC studio.
What did New York make of him? Hard to say. A wacky youngster (he was twenty-three) from the Canadian sticks, perhaps. Or one of those ingenious freaks big cities attract and spit out every now and then. He raised eyebrows when he passed TV executives, smelling of motorcycle leathers – Danny, not the bigwigs, who I imagine gave off an odour of cologne. To his greater discredit he wouldn’t schmooze. He could just disappear on you, in the middle of a party, amid a showbiz who’s who, without a word to anyone. Some in the industry were already calling him Frosty the Robot, because he could come across as impassive off the air, insensitive without his lines and cue cards, that and his stilted way of talking.
But his flair, the magic that was his when he called up the farthest-fetched comic characters to vanish inside, was undeniable.
A character had come to him one suppertime when he was eating with the show’s producer Lorne Michaels and cast mates at a friend of a friend’s apartment. He said that a funny thing had happened once long ago at his Aunt Helen’s lake house in the Laurentides. The visit in question would have gone by like all the others there during his boyhood, without leaving any particular trace in his memory, had Danny, that evening, not wandered into the kitchen just as his aunt was finishing the preparations for supper. She was holding a great big fish away from her by the tail, the belly flashing silver with scales, the useless gills gaping, the glassy eye watching him. Dropped into a blender, the fish dissolved instantly in swirls of white-pink mush.
‘Wha-what happened to the fish?’ he heard himself stammer. His aunt turned away from her Cuisinart and looked at him.
He asked why the bass had been blended, scales, bones, gills and all. She answered that it was for a bouillabaisse she was making. Then she exclaimed his name: ‘Daniel!’ she said, perhaps to reassure him, or to admonish his walking in on her, and repeated the word bouillabaisse as though it were explanation enough.
All the while Danny reminisced, he made fish-dropping gestures and imitated Aunt Helen’s face and her voice as she said ‘Daniel!’ and ‘bouillabaisse’. His host that evening, Paul Simon, the popular singer, unruffled by most things, nearly gagged on the laughter which had been rising in him as Danny spoke.
Danny thought, if I can get a laugh like that out of Paul Simon … and he wrote up his skit soon afterwards and produced it on the show.
He received mail from viewers after the Bass-O-Matic sketch. A letter in angry-looking handwriting left him especially agitated. ‘Last night’s show,’ said the viewer’s letter (as best as I can reconstruct it), ‘was an outrage. How anyone could think to treat a fish like that is frankly beyond me.’ To which Danny answered with a missive of his own, long and digressive, on the properties of mass and matter, a point-by-point, even painstaking, reply that he could have summed up in a sentence: ‘Dear viewer, fish or humans, we are all living on borrowed atoms.’ Over four seasons he ate and drank and breathed these TV sketches, each a week’s consuming labour of writing, rehearsing, cutting and polishing, performed live between commercials for laxatives, pantyhose and Timex watches, and generally applauded by the critics. And quoted still, and savoured by fans, half a century later. Some of the best stuff the show ever put out – some of US comedy’s most enduring creations. He played an old-movie cop, a psychiatrist, an extraterrestrial in suburbia. And then there were his sketches based on the most arcane minutiae: the schedules of American freight trains, the finer mechanics of military bomber planes, the callipers and armatures on mail-sorting machines.
There were days it could be hard for Danny to keep it together, the viewing figures stakes ever high, the long days in the studio claustrophobic, the metronomic constancy of rehearsals both reassuring and intimidating. The occasional loss of self-control visited on him by the stress could prove spectacular: a fire alarm smashed to shards, holes that yawned in walls where he’d thrown them repeated punches.
Rehearsals could be exhausting. He would often find something amiss. He fussed over the most ordinary of props – in one scene, a typewriter on its desk. If the typewriter prop was electric (preferably an IBM), if its keys could all clack in proper typewriter fashion, if ink to turn out a good few sentences was present, if a spotlessly blank sheet of paper was set and ready, then and only then might the rehearsal proceed. This thing on the desk he thought an insult, unworthy of the sketch, something to be swept aside. Which is what he did, swept it crashing to the floor.
To cool off he’d retreat to his dressing room and dip into one of the heavy books, on computing, or history, or some manual, he was forever reading.
Some nights he’d ride out for hours on his Harley-Davidson Police Special. He loved driving on a back-country highway on a quiet night with the mist rolling off the fields, smelling the thickness of the manure spread on the land, hearing the ping of insects striking his helmet. It brought him back to the times in college he’d be taken out at midnight in a friend’s car and ask the driver to open the sunroof and stand and feel the wind whip and surge around him.
Other nights he and a cast mate would catch a movie, nothing too touchy-feely, with plenty of car chases and at least one shootout. And afterwards he would tell anyone who would listen that the, say, Smith & Wesson 36 revolver shown resembles the Smith & Wesson 38, which has a shorter barrel, and the K-22 Masterpiece MRF, which has a similar checkered-walnut stock.
His name was increasingly known by then and he got offered his first movie roles – it was during this time that Danny starred in Love at First Sight. A no-budget Canadian film shot in nineteen days by Rex Bromfield, a friend’s brother; Danny played a blind man who elopes with his sighted sweetheart to Niagara Falls. The excursion to the Falls made up for the poor showing at the box office, and the reviews which were mixed. The green water steamed and churned and roared and stilled the flow in Danny’s head. Between takes he’d recalled admiringly the tightrope walker in the nineteenth century who strolled aloft many times here. Much like himself, he thought, ever stepping out without a net in sight. He liked to remember the walker’s exploits: the perspiring accomplice piggybacking on the walker’s shoulders, the egg fried and eaten in the centre of the wavering rope. He aimed for the same gravity-defying poise.
Reporters started to wonder where this wacky Danny guy had come from. But they had trouble reaching him. He refused to leave an address or number with the channel’s PR. He spurned interviews for TV, for the radio, for the papers.
He had no gift for introspection. Pinned down on set, he would offer the bare facts of his background, give an honest reply to the hack’s questions, and shake hands as he left. That much he did. But he wouldn’t open up.
✲
Danny’s starring in Saturday Night (soon renamed as Saturday Night Live), his subsequent fame and fortune, might never have happened – he might have wound up, say, in an Ottawa Police uniform – had it not been for his unlikely friendship with one Valri Bromfield.
This is how the two came to meet. Sometime in the fall or winter of 1967 or thereabouts he performed a prank too many at Pius. He was thrown out. The headmaster told his father, ‘This isn’t a school for clowns. There’s a school for clowns in Moscow.’ He did not go to Moscow. He went to his third (by my count) local all-boys Catholic high school, St Patrick’s, and one day, strolling down the warm stretch of underground tunnel connecting St Patrick’s and the theatre on Notre Dame’s campus, he caught the ear of a girl in rehearsals for the theatre’s latest play. The girl was a recent Notre Dame alumnus, three, four years older than Danny, meaning that she was nineteen, and Danny fifteen.
As she got closer, Valri saw a thinnish lad with a monobrow and a mop cut, a lad rapt in his thoughts, a lad who appeared oblivious to her and the other students he passed. He seemed to be conversing with the walls of the tunnel, telling them formulae and facts and all sorts of Latin-sounding words. She listened closely to him, savoured the curious music of his words, let their strange power sink in. This kid is something else, she thought, a brain like that doesn’t come along very often. She approached him, typically bold. He hadn’t noticed her presence; she walked right up until he stopped and looked at her and fell silent.
They hit it off. Not in a boy-meets-girl way, for Valri made no secret of being attracted to girls; more a meeting of minds. She had his knack for imitation and his outsider’s edge, and though their friendship was no older than the school’s tunnel was long they talked there, underneath the classrooms, as if they were the only two people there.
They lost no time performing together. Danny played Schlegel the circus master to Valri’s Rosalie in a high-school production of Carnival, and at the end they came out and bowed to the applause of the full house, or perhaps of the half-full house, or at least of the scattered teachers and parents present.
Comic sketches they kept to themselves, at least to begin with. She made fun of netball coaches and lissom Miss Popularity types, and he made fun of truck drivers and gun-toting cops, and both made fun of the old. The older, the funnier.
Some days, after class, Danny and Valri rehearsed together in a neighbour’s living room, or at the Bromfields’, at a safe distance from any antiques, where for an hour or more they bounced imitations off one another, non-stop, all manner of gestures and accents (French, German, Irish, you name it) that Danny had overheard on the streets or lifted from a TV or radio show, shows like Hogan’s Heroes, references that any North American might catch. They brainstormed oddball situations, swapped gags, refined a sketch – at home he was filling his notebook with alternative punchlines.
They’d be the next Nichols and May, she sometimes daydreamed, getting first billing on Broadway, An Evening with Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield, and releasing an album of their sketches: Danny Aykroyd and Valri Bromfield Instruct Teachers or some other title like it.
Destiny. That might have been Valri’s or Valri’s and Danny’s thought – a class roll call would have placed them side by side: Aykroyd. Bromfield.
They were always together. They seemed inseparable. But Valri was older, and before long she felt her feet itch. She wanted to see the world. She was done with studying and with student productions. Perhaps she promised Danny she would write, and perhaps she did, during her time overseas as an au pair, then a Digger Pugh circus girl, postcards wishing he were there and postmarked Mayfair, London, and other cards or letters, with Spanish stamps.
She wasn’t abandoning him. She would be back, sooner than he knew, and turn his life upside down. Danny never would have guessed. It’s over, he probably thought, I won’t ever see her again.
In any case, Valri went to Europe and Danny went to college.
✲
The year was 1969. The university was Carleton, in Ottawa. Long-haired, bell-bottomed students met in each other’s digs to remake the world. They pulled the American troops out of Vietnam, impeached Nixon, buried imperialism. Danny didn’t fit in with the revolutionaries. For one thing, he hardly looked the part: bowl cut, tie and jacket and horn-rimmed specs. When he talked politics, he detailed the ins and outs of British Columbia’s Social Credit Party platform. Or he referred to ten-year charts of Canada’s prison population, the flow of recidivists, the sociological theory of illegitimate means – all things he was studying. And while he was ‘on’, all intensity and statistics, the students might invent or remember some appointment to run along to. Only the more intrepid, or less adept at making excuses, feigned patience.
He found the night more welcoming. Just across the river from Ottawa, Hull’s nightlife was more or less a disproportionate number of watering holes awaiting the 1 a.m. crowd, the drinkers who crossed the border from stricter, soberer Ontario, some spoiling for a fight and others looking for company, some slaking their thirst and others shaking on under-the-table deals, the terms of which remained entirely verbal.
Other nights found him at a coffee house called Le Hibou, or The (Night) Owl, a favoured haunt of blues-loving students and government workers, and from behind a table spread with a red-and-white chequered cloth and an empty bottle of Chianti for a candlestick, he listened to the musicians up on stage (who called him up once to keep the beat in the drummer’s absence), their plaintive sax and vibrant strings and songs of hard knocks, of lost men trying to find their way, of lovers trying to fathom a lady’s heart, songs which, in his state of mild inebriation, mellower for the two or three quarts of placid beer inside him, moved him deeply.
