Funnily enough John would soon be fired from his job. There were 40 salesmen and he was number 40 on the list. His boss at that time said to him, “I knew I shouldn’t have hired an actor”. To John this sparked something in his head and he was overjoyed, someone actually thought he was an actor!
In 1972 John met another very important lady in his life, Valri Bromfield.
Bromfield met John in a store, at that time she was doing a children’s theatre production performing for children in camps and hospitals. “We were making about CAN$25 a week...I swear. So when I met John I just thought he was the sweetest, smartest, funniest guy I had ever met. He has always been warm and extremely affiliative. He made friends very easily and everybody seemed to feel loved. Well, that's the first impression of John that I recall. I told him about the theatre company and that we needed another performer. I told the director about John and very soon he had auditioned and traded in his money-making job for this fly-by-night profession. And it was hardly a profession at that point. We had a blast working together.”
John joined the Caravan Theatre children’s touring troupe after Dan Aykroyd turned down the role, considering himself as more of a comic.
Shortly after that John met Aykroyd through Bromfield.
“I don't recall that I introduced them but maybe I did,” she told me. (She did – Aykroyd has confirmed this in interviews) I loved them both. We were all friends in Toronto at the time. All the people in theatre and television seemed to know one another. We had great parties. I lived in a store front for a while - 505 - then Danny rented it when my girlfriend and I moved out and he turned it into a speakeasy.”
Little did John know that his new friends Aykroyd and Bromfield were going to bring even more opportunities and fate into his life.
John was in a few different plays around this time, he worked on several with Monica Parker, one that sprung to Parker’s mind was when they were both playing scout leaders in a show, “I think that was the first time we worked together. John was really mischievous and funny in many ways, he was sort of really open, he loved a good laugh he loved to make people laugh, those early years with John were just delightful.
“He would always get to the theater at the last second, literally 10 minutes before we were due to go on stage we would be like ‘where’s John?’, he would arrive just in time. He would come in laughing and you would forgive him - because he was John!”
1972, elsewhere in Toronto, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, there were future members of Second City acting in the cast of Godspell, with Paul Shaffer directing. Everyone in Toronto was very sociable, especially those that were in the arts, they tended to meet others in the same industry very quickly. Funnily enough John wasn’t in Godspell, which was probably just as well as he absolutely hated it. Thereafter, every party where they had the ex-cast of Godspell; Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Martin Short, Andrea Martin would all sing songs from the show and John would always chastise them for it. Aykroyd joined John with the mocking and it would become a long-standing joke between them all.
Second City
Since God was a boy, well maybe not that long ago, but certainly since the late 1800s, Chicago has been known as “The Second City”, only being surpassed by New York for a larger population.
On 16th December 1959, a small capacity cabaret on the North Side of Chicago opened for its first night. There were eight unknown performers complete with props, performing improv. The first Second City comedy troupe was born. I expect that day, the performers did not realise they were setting something up that would be revered and very alive to this day, nurturing hundreds and thousands of performers and helping bring to the stage some of the biggest comedic players of our time.
In Spring 1972, Second City decided to open a troupe in Toronto that was to be based on Adelaide Street. Joyce Sloan, Bernie Sahlins and Del Close who were running Second City went to audition potential cast members.
Akroyd and Bromfield had already travelled to Chicago to meet Sahlins and Sloan and to audition for the troupe. They advised John they were going down to the auditions and he should too. John was too nervous to put himself forward, “every big player in Toronto was auditioning, people from Godspell, people from the TV, I didn’t think I’d stand a chance”, but John agreed to meet them at the auditions and have lunch with them both for moral support. At the time John was in a children’s theatre performance of Rumplestiltskin.
John remembered that day, in an interview taken from The Second City by Sheldon Patinkin;
“I was invited by Dan and Valri Bromfield to join them for lunch. And they’d put my name on the list to audition, unbeknownst to me. And while I was standing around waiting for Dan and Val to finish their work there, my name was called. They pushed me into a room.
“I said, ‘Aw, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you for doing this to me’. And I went into this theatre, and I was scared. They said ‘Go up on stage there. This is a department store exercise. You have to do this game. That’s all we want from you’. Sweat was all over me."
During John’s audition Close turned to Sahlins and said instantly that he wanted John for Second City, Close pestered Sahlins all day until Sahlins broke and said “If you want him so much, take him to Chicago”.
“Two days later they called and said, ‘Would you move to Chicago?’ It took me about five seconds to get my mouth open. They said ‘You’ll be there for a couple weeks.’ I ended up living there for about a year and a half”, John recalled.
John thought he was going for a very short time, so literally packed for a couple of weeks, he had never left Toronto before, he was by himself going out into the world at the age of 22 and thought “well, here we go”. Not realising he needed a visa, John arrived in Chicago and was pulled aside by customs, who thought he was a draft dodger! Talking to Brian Linehan in a later interview John said, “So they pulled out this big book and they started going through the pages. And now I am frightened, I had people waiting for me, Joyce Sloan, it’s been 45 minutes and I have no way of getting to them and I don’t know what these people are doing. Eventually three supervisors came over to me and they were eye-balling me, the hockey playoffs were just happening, and one of them says ‘who do you like, The Blackhawks or the Canadians?’ I said ‘Blackhawks’ and they gave me a stamp and let me through.“
In 1973 the initial Toronto group was Dan Aykroyd, Valri Bromfield, Gilda Radner, Jayne Eastwood and Gerry Salsberg, (Eugene Levy and Martin Short auditioned but they didn’t get in the first time around). Joe Flaherty came over from the Chicago troupe to mentor them along with Brian Murray-Doyle (Bill’s brother). In terms of comedy, the group gelled, unfortunately due to not being able to get a liquor licence, business was failing - the iced tea and Coca-Cola on offer was just not attracting the crowds. At that time in Toronto, it was almost impossible to get a liquor licence unless you were also serving food. Shortly after opening, a bailiff turned up and closed the venue down.
John on the other hand had gone to Chicago and was being shown round by fellow troupe member, Bill Murray. Bill said to John, “this is my town and this can be your town too!” He took John everywhere, as John remembered in an interview, “He took me all over the city, showed me every landmark. We’d have a hamburger at the original McDonald’s, a pancake at the first International House of Pancakes. We went to every weird, seedy area imaginable.” Murray also took John to his first Cubs game at Wrigley Field, where John also experienced sunstroke for the first time!
Chicago was quite the culture shock, John went from Toronto where alcohol was only served in restaurants or illicit speakeasies, to Chicago where the bars were open till 5am. John took advantage of this and like any young adult living in a big city for the first time, to say he thoroughly enjoyed himself would be an understatement.
John lived on Curly Court, which he found amusing as Curly Howard was one of his favourites from The Three Stooges, (later, Jennifer, John’s daughter, would actually stay in the s
ame apartment block when she joined Second City). After the Second City shows, John would invite the cast back to his place to watch movies. He literally knew everything about every movie, every actor - he was so knowledgeable about movies and TV shows, he just loved and respected the medium so much.
Sheldon Patinkin was an Artistic Consultant for Second City (he was SC alumni from 1959), when he first saw John up on stage it was like John was lost, he kind of melted into the background, which was really down to his lack of confidence. Patinkin told me, “We spent time on building his belief in himself, and by reassuring him that something not working but you tried, is a lot better than not knowing whether it would work or not - by not trying it, (we got him to overcome his lack of confidence) by telling him to cut out the bullshit and quit being an asshole. All because we really believed in how good he was and could be.”
Patinkin moved to Toronto to help out with the troupe as an Artistic Director. His words about John may have sounded a little harsh however he was renowned for saying “It’s better to be an asshole than a chicken shit”, he just called things as he saw it. (Sadly Patinkin died in 2014 but I am so grateful I had the chance to converse with him.)
Turns out John would be in Chicago for over a year, before they sent him back to Canada where Second City Toronto had just been bought for CAN$2 by a man called Andrew Alexander. Alexander was born in London, UK, his family emigrated to Canada in 1951. He had a background in cab driving, journalism and the arts and was working at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago when he met Bernie Sahlins. After hearing of the Toronto troupes financial difficulty, he negotiated with Sahlins to assume the Toronto theatre’s debts in exchange for the right to operate The Second City in Canada, he paid Sahlins CAN$2 and took out a CAN$7000 loan from a friend.
Alexander opened the doors in 1974 at a new location, 110 Lombard Street, Toronto, the venue was a 19th Century fire house called The Old Fire Hall. He put together package deals where people could have dinner upstairs and then go to the show afterwards, hence they got their licence to serve alcohol. At this stage John was sent back to help, he was reluctant to leave Chicago, but it turned out to be the best move he could have made.
Initially John was sent to Pasadena to start up a new Second City there, in the cast was Betty Thomas, Doug Steckler, Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty, it didn’t do so well and closed within a month. Dave Thomas at that time had started working with the Second City Toronto troupe, so when John came back to Toronto, Thomas was thrilled to be working with him. Thomas remembers, “Oh my god, he was like a big kid. People who like comedy and love to laugh have that kid aspect in them”. I had so much fun with him on stage and I bonded with him immediately. We had similar sensibilities could make each other laugh. We just had a really great time.
“John, when he improvised, had a thing that he described as his room and all the props and books and bookcases and guns and things like that, that were all mime and imaginary, were always in the same place. So if you did a lot of scenes with John you knew where everything was and that made it really fun because the audience at that time were returning patrons so they knew where the stuff was too. So when you went for it there would be this delightful moment of recognition with John and me on stage, and him and the audience would all share. Some of those things got really crazy and were a lot of fun.
“John was very heavy-set but he was very physically strong, he wasn’t a pudge-ball. One night when Danny (Aykroyd) came back to visit the show, John picked up Danny and me at the same time like horizontally one on each shoulder and spun us around the room, until this day I can still see Danny’s face sideways going round and round as John spun him. Danny and I were laughing, cos Danny wasn’t a little guy and I was 180 pounds myself, that’s a lot of weight to pick up! So I used to use this with John, cos John was so strong, I could run at him on stage, flip into the air and tuck my legs under like a ball and John would catch me and he would barely rock on his heels. So we would be able to do things that were physically fun. Then we would do the reverse of that, where John would let me pick him up with two fingers by his lapels, like he is pinned against the wall, and John would go up on his toes and it would look like I was lifting him with two fingers. He loved to do those kinds of things and so did I.”
“Another night with John,” Thomas recalled, “Our idols Peter Cook and Dudley Moore came to the show. They were both drunk and it was odd the way they were playing. But Peter said he wanted to do a scene where John was a priest and I heard them talking about it backstage and then I saw Peter get down on his knees and he was praying or something cos I was working and discussing another improv scene I was going to do. There was just John and Peter in the scene, Dudley was not in it, John goes out there with Peter. They start the scene and Peter drops to his knees and mimics giving John a blow job. Now no one laughed, the audience was shocked and it was really kind of appalling. I watched for a couple of seconds and thought ‘Jesus Christ I have got to enter this scene and save John because he is dying up there by himself’. John was just trying to laugh it off, trying to push him away, he was as stunned by the silence of the audience as I was. I ran around from the house to backstage, when you enter a scene you have to enter with a joke, I don’t remember what the joke was, but I knocked on the door and I looked at John’s face and there was just the sweetest look of relief. Then the scene built and more people entered in. The way Dudley was playing it that night was kind of cheesy I thought, he would run in, do a line, get a laugh and run off. That’s not fair, in improv you owe the scene more than just running on, getting your laugh and exiting. He did that multiple times in a scene where he would run on do a joke and then run off. He was kind of annoying, like a gnat. We both admired these guys, we know how talented they are and we were fans of everything they have ever done. I remember afterwards I was discussing it with John and he was really bummed out that your idols had feet of clay, first of all that they were that drunk and secondly that the actual level of work was that horrible. We wanted to get into the calibre of stuff that we loved in Beyond the Fringe and it was just awful.”
John was still doing some children’s TV work whilst he was performing at night at Second City. He guested as a weatherman dressed up as a superhero, in a show called Cucumber (Children’s Underground Club of United Moose and Beaver for Enthusiastic Reporters), about a moose and a beaver living in a tree-house learning how to report on educational topics. He was also in the cast of Dr Zonk and the Zunkins, a children’s series that also starred Gilda Radner, Rosemary Radcliffe, Dan Hennessey and Robin Eveson. Eveson played the main character, a young boy called Billy Meek. In each episode two puppets, the Zunkins, called Zooey and Dunkin would come to life out of the pages of a comic book and have adventures. The puppeteers that controlled and voiced Zooey and Dunkin were Nina Keogh and John Stocker. Aired from 23rd September 1974, three afternoons a week on CBC Children’s TV, the show only lasted one season and morphed into more of a teenage show, Coming Up Rosie.
Keogh remembers “At the time the show was my segments with the puppets and we would do our bit with the kid we were working with, and then they would go to other segments with the comedians - the characters didn’t really interconnect but we were all on set at the same time.
“I just remember coming in to the studio and being in the studio with them all. I hung around when they did their segments, you had such brilliant talent right in front of you, John, Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd. Danny and Gilda were going out at that time.
“He (John) was very sweet, he didn’t have another side to him at all. I hung out with Rose, she was really supportive. Sometimes you work with people and there is some little edge to people, John never had that, he was like perfection of a human being. He was always gentle and kind and funny as hell. He was sweet and honourable and he really loved Rose. They were very respectful of each other.”
Once Dr Zonk and the Zunkins finished, most of the cast went into Coming Up Rosie. Rosie Tucker, who was an aspiring documenta
ry maker living in the same building as the rest of the characters, was played by Rosemary Radcliffe. Dan Aykroyd also starred as Purvis Bickle, Catherine O’Hara was Myrna Wallbacker, John played Wally Wypyzypywchuk (pronounced Wippa-zippa-chuck) and John Stocker, no longer in a puppeteering role, played the elevator clerk, Dwayne Kramer.
Stocker told me, “We had a year of working together. Wally and Dwayne were the two goofballs in the show, the crazies, and that kind of translated into being good friends. For two years we were pretty much inseparable. If you were looking for John, you found me.
“He was the most gracious giving guy I’ve ever been in contact with. You couldn’t buy him a drink, this guy he could drink, but you couldn’t put your hand in your pocket, he would just override you with a great big smile.
“John had some dark moments, but he would never show them. He was the centre of attention just because he wreaked of personality and warmth in a good way. We got to a stage where we had to make a deal, ‘if you buy the beer, I’ll buy the scotch’. People he didn’t know he would say ‘I’ll get that, what else to you want? Make it a double!’.”
Around this time John was also playing bit parts on The David Steinberg Show and starred in a satirical comedy anthology film called Tunnelvision. A weird watch, set in the (then) future of 1985, it’s about a channel that is completely devoid of censorship.
Searching for Candy Page 4
