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.
I am grateful to the following for their memories of Dan Aykroyd: Peter Blais, Lynn Blin, Rex Bromfield, Greg Chitovas, Linda Dompierre, Will Dunlop, Jayne Eastwood, Trevor Evans, Joe Flaherty, Al Franken, Guy French, Jim Girling, Linda Goodwin, John Gribbon, Mitzi Hauser, Rick Henderson, Ricky Hollingsworth, Beth Kaplan, Frank Kenny, Dianne Lanoue, Linda Nolan Leeming, Don MacKinnon, Blaine March- and, Mark McGowan, Mike McNamara, Edward Myers, Laraine Newman, Glenn O’Brien, Gay Osler, Gerry Potter, Catherine O’Neill Salki, Curtis Schnobb, John Stocker, Rudolf Stussi, Doug Tansley, Sharron Timmins, Pej Vong.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
Profile Books Ltd
29 Cloth Fair
London
ec1a 7jq
Published in association with Wellcome Collection
83 Euston Road
London nw1 2be
Copyright © Daniel Tammet, 2024
Typeset in FreightText by MacGuru Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 80081 111 9
eISBN 978 1 80081 112 6
