Musician and actor Mickey Stanhope was working as an extra on Delirious when he met John.
“I started out doing extra work in 1988, working on Coneheads, I got to know a lot of the comedians and did a lot of extra and stand in work. Delirious was just a couple of days of extra work, I got there and found out it was a John Candy movie, I had worked with Mariel Hemingway before on a TV show so I knew her going in but it was great to work with John.”
The first day Stanhope was there, they were all standing around in tuxedos ready to film a party scene with Raymond Burr. “I started talking to Raymond who was very effeminate and he giggled like a girl, which made me laugh and John would crack up, he would fall over with laughter.”
Stanhope was from Chicago and John had lived in the Old Town when he was training at Second City. “He said to me, ‘You know where I lived? I lived on Curly Way.’ He started telling me about his love for Curly from The Three Stooges and then he started doing impressions. We just reminisced about Chicago a lot and how much we loved Old Town. I told him about my band (White Lighting, The Litter) and he said I remember you guys. We just hit it off, the spark between us, we were similar sort of people, we could just talk for days.”
Regardless of how the film did at the box office (it made just over US$5.5 million and cost around US$18 million to make), the cast and crew certainly won the prize with Delirious. Everyone was treated with the utmost respect, it was very low key and everyone got what they wanted. Mankiewicz was such an accommodating and a jovial director that his positivity just trickled down to everyone on set. At the end of every night’s shoot they would all bundle in to a trailer, drink and listen to the stories Mankiewicz would tell them. John thoroughly enjoyed himself.
Forty
On 31st October 1990, John turned 40 years of age. He rang his agent Catherine McCartney and said “I made it”, as he never thought he would, McCartney had lost her dad at a young age too, so they had discussed in length their worries. He always thought he wouldn’t make it past his 30s, like his dad didn’t, and yet here he was, a famous movie star, happily married with two beautiful children - living the dream.
John had lived his whole life like he was a ticking time bomb, saying ‘yes’ to nearly every job in order to bankroll money for his family just in case something was to happen to him. He wanted to be sure he could look after them even if he wasn’t around. Capital, savings, residuals from work - every dollar would help his beloved family. He went out a lot, lived a lot, loved a lot, just in case he didn’t get to forty, so for John, this was a massive achievement and relief.
However with relief, after all those years of having that fear gnawing at the back of your head, anxiety can sneak in. Now I am not saying John never had anxiety before this stage, but certainly this is where it became a bit more overwhelming and he started having panic and anxiety attacks. In the 90s, mental health was still a taboo subject, however John, being as real and as human as he was, actually talked about his experiences of these attacks in several interviews. He also talked about seeing an analyst - which would be more commonly known as a therapist or counsellor - advocating them, saying he thinks everyone should have one and that he wished he’d seen one as a child.
John really wore his heart on his sleeve, warts and all. I think that’s just one of the reasons why the general public and everyone he came into contact with just loved and related to him so much. It was ok, not to be ok.
As much as the anxiety crept in, I get the feeling that in other ways, with age and experience on his side, John was more confident. There is a wisdom that arrives when you turn forty, and certainly for John, new things were on the horizon.
Nothing But Trouble
Ahhhh. So, if you haven’t watched this film, theoretically it should have been a box office smash. John, Chevy Chase, Demi Moore, Dan Aykroyd are the lead characters. Originally entitled ‘Valkenvania’, written by Peter Aykroyd (Dan’s brother), Dan Aykroyd screen-adapted the script and directed the film. With this amount of talent it should have been a recipe for success, surely? Aykroyd’s directing debut, Nothing But Trouble is a weird horror comedy, very much of its time and one of those films you either love or hate. You might get a feeling of which way I lean as you read on, actually hate is strong word, maybe bizarrely bemused would be a more accurate description.
A chance meeting in a hotel between bored financial publisher, Chris Thorne (Chase) and lawyer, Diane Lightson (Moore), leads to a road trip that goes wrong, when Thorne decides to take the scenic (or not so scenic) route, running a stop sign and speeding their way through the sleepy, creepy, town of Valkenvania. Chased and caught by the local cops, Dennis Valkenheiser (John Candy) and his cousin, Miss Purdah (Valri Bromfield), they are escorted to Dennis’ 106 year old eccentric Grandfather, Judge Alvin Valkenheiser (Dan Aykroyd).
I get the feeling John did this film as a favour, he did that quite a lot, he would always help a friend out. He didn’t just play Dennis in this film, he also played Dennis’ mute sister, Eldona who was desperate to marry the lead character, Thorne.
Valri Bromfield remembers her time with John on set, “We had so many good times together. He was always fun to work with and he made me laugh so hard. When he was dressed in drag he hated it. I have a photo of us from Danny's movie Nothing But Trouble. John's in drag and I'm the dyke dressed like a cop - pretending to be his butch mate. John hated doing drag but he was so damn pretty. So, when I look at this photo I remember he had just been telling me he hated doing drag but in the photo he is smiling and doing the whole girl thing. He did it for the photo.
“When we shot that film we each had a cop car - his all tricked out on the exterior and mine, the deputy, just a plain cop car. But we shot in Valencia CA in the summer and it was about 120 in the shade. My car, by some miracle, had AC and his did not. He assumed, by the look of my car that I did not have AC either. So when I saw him sitting in his car, waiting to do the drive-through shot he was drenched in sweat. In my car the AC was blasting and my car temp was about 50. So I got out and walked up to his car and very seriously said "are you hot?" and he had a big reaction. I told him that I meditate to cool my body and that it worked. He touched my cool arm and was amazed. So I returned to my car and watched him. He was sitting in his car, his eyes shut, trying to cool himself, sweat streaming down his face. Then, he got out of the car, almost overcome with the heat. I motioned him over to my car, rolled down the window and he felt a blast of cold air. He did that thing where he would make a sound and lunge for you. It was so much fun to mess with him.
“John was great to work with. Generous. He never thought of himself as a star. But he was tough when somebody needed protecting. In Nothing But Trouble I had to shoot guns and rifles, and they kept sticking so the guy who was in charge of them started berating me for my inability to make them work. John gave the guy a kind of "make my day" speech. He just quietly stepped into the space between us, got in the guy's face, leaned down close, and spoke very softly to him. When he stepped away the guy looked like he had soiled himself and was extremely apologetic to me.”
Typical John, looking after the people he loved.
In Tom Mankiewicz’s book, My Life as a Mankiewicz, he talks about going to visit Dan and John on the set of Nothing But Trouble. Of course Mankiewicz had directed Aykroyd in Dragnet and John in Delirious and was good friends with them both. When he got there Aykroyd was exasperated.
“I walked on the set about two weeks in. Danny said to me, “I’m having some problems”. Immediately, I saw what one of the problems was. All the actors had their own video screen. So they would look at their own takes and decide whether they wanted to do another one. Please! You can’t do that. Danny said ‘This is crazy. If I could quit, I would. Everybody wants to know everything. Two hundred questions a day: Is this okay? Do you like her hair that way?’ ”
I think the fact Aykroyd wasn’t enjoying himself portrayed onto the screen. In fact watching it, I’m not sure anyone was really hav
ing a blast. However as I say, audiences either love or hate it. It was obviously a huge plot, with plenty of detail (maybe a bit too much detail), a massive budget, US$40 million in fact! With the prosthetic makeup for Aykroyd, making him appear elderly (and someone must thought it was funny to give him a nose the shape of a phallus), the “Mr Bonestripper” roller coaster ride - where the unwilling participants have been judged worthy enough to meet their demise for their crimes (less of a rollercoaster - more of an abattoir conveyor belt where all that is left at the end of the ride are the bones of those who rode). The crazy castle where the wrinkly, eccentric judge lives, to the scrap yard out the back where his two deformed adult baby grandchildren reside, Bobo and Little Devil (they kind of looked like Jabba the Hutt if he had legs). Bobo was actually played by Aykroyd too, they are in fact the reason why Chris and Diane actually manage to escape the hell hole - only to report them to the authorities and then realise the police were actually in cahoots with the judge. Confused? You will be. Oh did I mention 2Pac turns up part way through, with his band, Digital Underground, they had been pulled on a speeding charge, but they end up jamming with the judge?
But here is the thing. You win some and you lose some. I can see what they were trying to do, but I think everything just had too much detail and the detail lost the plot along the way. However, the film was certainly better for John being in it.
Hauled across the coals by critics, Aykroyd was awarded the Worst Supporting Actor Razzie at the 12th Raspberry Awards, John was nominated Worst Supporting Actress for his role as Eldona.
Good to know that things don’t always turn out for the best of them, you just wipe the slate and carry on. That’s the beauty of being creative, you just carry on with the next project.
Only the Lonely
Only The Lonely, written and directed by Chris Columbus saw John in another leading role with more of a romantic dramatic setting.
John plays Danny Muldoon, a thirty-something Chicago cop, still living with his mother, Rose Muldoon (Maureen O’Hara), who is loving but oppressive and does not want to let go of her adult son. When Danny finds love in a painfully shy, funeral parlour make-up artist, Theresa Luna (Ally Sheedy), Rose tries to do everything in her power to sabotage the relationship.
Until working on Only the Lonely O’Hara had retired from her acting career twenty years previously and was determined she would never go back. However Chris Columbus had written the role of Rose Muldoon especially for her. It took a while for Columbus to track her down and convince O’Hara she should read it, luckily for us she eventually did. She agreed to do the film if she met and liked Columbus as a director, and John who would be playing her son. It took her only a few minutes of meeting them in Chicago to decide, she loved them both straight away and she turned to John and said "All right, I will be your mother".
O’Hara remarked in her autobiography, T’is Herself, "The depth of John Candy's talent did surprise me. I didn't expect it to be so great. It didn't take long for me to see that his reservoir of emotion was deep, and that he was not only a comedic genius but an actor with extraordinary dramatic talent. I'm sure that even he didn't fully understand how good he really was. He reminded me a great deal of Charles Laughton."
The love and respect was mutual, John was thrilled to be working with such a huge Hollywood star, you can see in every interview they did together just how much John adored Maureen, and they remained good friends for the rest of John's life.
Jim Belushi who was co-starring in the film, always recalls the story of John’s and O’Hara’s trailer. Basically John had a huge trailer, O’Hara was given a honey wagon. A honey wagon is tiny, and certainly in John’s eyes, an insult to O’Hara. John went to discuss this with the production team - he was told that they couldn’t afford a large trailer for O’Hara as they wanted the money “on the screen”. John couldn’t believe this - O’Hara was in The Quiet Man!, John’s reaction was to give O’Hara his trailer and he took the honey wagon - the production team were mortified and after a few days managed to find the money to accommodate both stars in the manor they should be accustomed to.
That was just so John.
Colleen Callaghan who is in her 80s (and still working in Hollywood as a hair stylist because she loves it that much) was brought in to do hair for Only The Lonely. “If anyone asks me who was my favourite actor or actress to work with in my whole career I always say John Candy. I never have a doubt about who is my favourite.
“I was told by this girl who recommended me to him (sic), she told me he was a hopeless case because he sweats so profusely that no matter what you do to his hair by the time he gets through the first five minutes he is going to be soaking wet. So I can’t stand things I can’t overcome. I did research before I even met him on every antiperspirant that I could find that had absolutely no residue hangover, no powder, no oils. The only one I found was something that they don’t make anymore and I brought so much I still have some, it’s the Clubman. When I first met him he said ‘I know it is going to be pretty depressing for you, my hair is going to go wet immediately but do your best’. I soaked his head with Clubman, I sprayed it once and blew it dry, saturated his whole head again with the Clubman and blew it dry. Then I put my product on and blew it and did my thing.
“I was taught way back in the beginning of my film career by George Hamilton that a man’s hair is as important as a woman’s and he showed me everything he did to create that image that he had. So I started on John’s hair and gave it all the volume I could possibly do.” Much to her surprise John slept through the whole thing. “When he woke up he looked in the mirror he said ‘Oh my God, oh my God that’s how I dream of my hair looking but it’s going to go limp oh I wish there was a way it wouldn’t’ and I said, ‘Well let’s just see’. That night I went in, he came and said to me ‘Listen, I hope you don’t mind but I put you in my contract’ and I said ‘John I don’t do that anymore’ and he said ‘what do you mean?’ For the first 18 years of this business I was in eight contracts and I felt like an entourage. I’m from Broadway, I am a performer myself and I like to be a designer of the whole thing not just follow the instructions of one person, which is what you do when you are personnel, that person is the boss. I have had to go against what I know is right for the period because of what the actress wants because she owns me during that period. The first movie I did after I gave up being personnel was Broadcast News and I thought I had died and gone to heaven, I never worked so hard in all my life and that’s what I loved and I have been doing it ever since. He said ‘OK I understand, you can do everybody just do me too.’ I said, ‘Well if it is under those circumstances, OK’ and that’s how I worked with him after that.”
John was so thrilled with his hair, Callaghan remembers, “It was so cute he said ‘Colleen I woke up and I saw my dream come true and it’s lasted me through the day, you can’t take my dream away’. I have never forgotten that he was so sweet.”
One thing that struck Callaghan about John was how he could be funny without being insulting or mean. “Comedians can use their comic ability to be very vicious, and that was absolutely taboo with John. He was the kindest person, comedian, I have ever known because it is so easy to use that gift to be edgy. He was very generous to other actors on the set. I can’t even picture him saying something negative about somebody.
“I met John’s family because he had a table at the Kennedy Center, we all flew to the Kennedy Center and his wife and the children were there. Very sweet, very quiet, the children obviously totally adored him. His wife, I felt, was so at one with him, it was very interesting, there was no show stuff, so many people put on a show but there was none of that. She was very grounded and definitely avoided the limelight, in fact I think going to the Kennedy Center was unusual for her. She stayed at home and took care of her children.”
After the first week of filming of Only the Lonely, John showed up in an extended limousine with his staff to pick up Callaghan, he took her to her first e
ver hockey game in Chicago. Every single one of them was treated like celebrities, not just John. Once John trusted you, he would treat you like royalty.
Working on security for the film were two sisters who were full time police officers, Marie Ferrero and Patricia Ribaldo Ferrero (I’ll refer to their first names so not to be confusing). In the 90s most police officers had to take a second job to make ends meet, often in private security. The firm that they worked for secured the security contract for Only the Lonely. They were filming in a very rough part of Chicago and the sisters would split 24 hours taking 12 hours each. They covered various locations including the front of the funeral home where Sheedy’s character worked and lived, and the bakery where Sheedy’s character spots the wedding cake she wanted.
Marie remembers, “The one building was supposed to be the bakery (where Ally Sheedy’s character sees her wedding cake) and it was the most rat-infested building and the front was made to look like a bakery. When we worked the overnight shift it was the only access we had to a toilet and we would have to get out of the car and go into this building in the pitch black, it was horrible. It looked so beautiful in the movie, but behind that shop front it was a little scary, it was like condemned!
“But we both worked when they were filming, because we were protecting the equipment they had left there. They had various dollies, lifts and things like that.
“My personal experience with him (John), my most memorable time, was seeing him and how he would interact with the kids.
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