“A lot of times they filmed really really late, one, two, three in the morning. Filming scenes with Ally Sheedy, walking down the street or going into what was meant to be the funeral parlour and all that. So it was all different times of the day and night. We were introduced to him, he had two people there that were hired as private security that followed him everywhere. Usually when you are a security officer on any kind of movie set they don’t really want you to approach the stars and we’ve worked a zillion movies, Mr Candy was just so friendly to us. He seemed like kind of a shy guy, which was kind of odd with his whole persona.
“The thing that stuck the most was one particular evening, it must have been two in the morning, he was practically in his trailer, this neighbourhood wasn’t the best and there were kids, some with parents, some without, it didn’t matter how late it was – you could tell he was really tired, when you watch these things being filmed you can see what a drudge it is, things being filmed over and over. He had a trailer down the block from where the hotel was and he was walking into the area to get there. He heard these kids calling his name, about five or six of them and he looked tired. Without even blinking an eye, and against his private security wishes, he turned around and talked to these kids for half an hour and signed every autograph. We are not talking about lovely little kids that live next door, we are talking about a very hardcore gang in the neighbourhood. He spent time with them, he signed every autograph, he never said no, I remember he signed shirts. Watching him, I was so impressed. I have seen major stars that wouldn’t give you the time of day let alone stop to talk to children.
“He seemed like a person that would fit in anywhere and get on with anyone. Every time we saw them (John and Sheedy) together they were walking next to the bakery, they did the scene several times. In their down time they seemed to communicate and talk and laugh. She was much more reserved in my opinion, but she wasn’t afraid at all, she didn’t have personal bodyguards, she seemed like a real ballsy girl. They were both kind of reserved and quiet but they seemed to get on really well. It was a really nice movie set, after working on so many others you could usually feel the tension. It was a really relaxed movie set, completely the opposite from what I had seen before. He was a real, gentle, nice man. He was a real gentleman.”
Of course working on opposite shifts the sisters could give me different stories. Patricia recalls, “We were filming on Morgan Street, his trailer was off to the side and I was doing security for the trailers. He had a big double wide, Maureen O’Hara had a big double wide and it was about 3am in the morning. Fans would keep their kids out there all night long. They were filming the scene where they all went out to dinner, where Ally meets Maureen O’Hara for the first time. Maureen O’Hara is a wonderful woman, she said it was nice to see women in jobs like mine, our guns were always showing. We filmed at 33rd and Morgan where the main buildings were. One morning they had lighting problems and they had them both in there for hours and hours and hours, whilst they were getting the lighting correct. He had been up for about twenty hours straight.
“One night I was out there, you could tell the man was exhausted, you could see it in his face. He had his bodyguards and he was stepping up into his trailer and he had one foot on the stairs, and literally a full Chicago city block away he heard this little boy (he couldn’t have been more than 9 or 10 years), and all of a sudden you hear this voice from down the block shouting, ‘Mummy, it’s him, it’s him!’ You could see the look in John’s face he was wiped out, he was like ‘Ah man all I want to do is go to my trailer and go to bed’. He stepped up into the trailer, the kid came running up the street with this colouring book he wanted autographing. John Candy gave this huge sigh and he stepped down off the trailer and spent at least fifteen or twenty minutes with this little boy. Whilst talking to him he signed whatever he wanted him to sign, he talked to him about being a comedian and he was so gentle with this little boy who was completely and utterly star struck by what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe he was meeting the real John Candy.”
To me this conjures up images of a child meeting the real Santa Claus - just magical, the kind of memory that you would tell your grandchildren about.
“I was so impressed as he was exhausted and 99% of the actors I have worked with would have just gone into their trailer and ignored that little boy. I worked on Backdraft, Next of Kin, Primal Fear, they would not speak to us other than through their PA. But Mr Candy, every time he walked past you he would have a nice word to say to you, we were technically not allowed to ask for autographs but I do have an autograph somewhere from him. He was a real gentleman.”
Patricia remembers watching O’Hara and John working together, “They seemed to have a very good relationship, they were always laughing and chit chatting. They would stand and talk and it was not the general movie set. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work that movie.
“The reason we were hired was because they had made these sets to look however they wanted them to look, and then by morning the gangbangers would have tagged everything off, spray painting. In that particular case it was the Latin Kings that would get out there, on Morgan Street anyway. On 33rd and Morgan, the building they made into a funeral home was an Hispanic banquet hall and we used to break up fights in that banquet hall once a week. It was a problem because they would tag the set every night, then they had to sandblast the paint off, repaint it, then do their filming, which is why they had hired us.
“It was the most pleasant experience of my life, anytime any of them came past, even Ally Sheedy who was very quiet and reserved, John Candy, Maureen O’Hara, always had a ‘Hello’, it was one of the thrills in my life. For me I grew up on Second City so for me to meet John Candy, you got the impression if you walked up to this man and spoke to him he wouldn’t complain about it, because he would walk up and speak to you.”
There is a scene in the movie, when Candy and Belushi’s characters lower a dead body out of a window down the side of a building with the fire hose. Part way down the fire hose runs out and the body drops to the ground. Patty remembers, “That is something that I have had to do in the City of Chicago, not from the height he did it. But the guy we had was 600 pounds and up several flights of stairs, without moving walls, it was the only way we could get him out of the apartment. I worked the streets for 20 years, I never took a desk job. The bottom line is, I have seen a really lot of horrible things in my time and then to leave my regular job and go and meet a man like John Candy who portrayed the Chicago police like a Chicago policeman. The humour they had to use around dead bodies, the humour is what gets you through it else you go home and cry. You see horrible, horrible things, there is nothing you can do about it so you either laugh about it or cry about it. He portrayed us with perfection! He could have been a Chicago policeman.”
Well the lovely stories don’t end there, Leo Crotty who was a Police Sergeant at that time, was also working on the film. I’ll leave you with Crotty’s story as it sums up this gentleman perfectly. “There were three features going on at the same time, there was Curly Sue, Only The Lonely and Backdraft all being filmed in Chicago. So I was working a lot, mostly on Only The Lonely. I’m a Sergeant so I was in charge of the police crew there, and one of the things that I do is make sure that the people in the movie are safe, so it’s my business to know who is who. There was this one kid that kept going in and out of John’s motorhome and he was there with, I assume, his parents. I asked one of the crew, I said, ‘Who is this kid that keeps going in and out of the motorhome.’ He said, ‘Oh he’s the star in the next John Candy movie and they want him and John Candy to get to know each other’. So I thought nothing more of it. Then later on that day I talked to the second assistant director, I said ‘I understand that this kid is going to be in John Candy’s next movie’, and he looked at me quizzically and said, ‘No not at all’. I said ‘Oh who is he then?’ He said, ‘This kid has cancer and he wrote a letter to John Candy and told him he was a big fan of John’
s and that he had cancer, and asked for a signed photograph of him’. So John wrote back to him saying that he’d like him to come over here and see him make his next movie, which was Only The Lonely. John said ‘I’ll fly you and your parents here and pay for your expenses whilst you are here’.”
This story has never been in the public domain before, it was never publicised because John was discreet and respectful, however I think it sums up his magnanimous spirit perfectly.
JFK
Later in 1991 John landed a role that would see him excel as a dramatic actor, he was cast in Oliver Stone’s legal conspiracy thriller, JFK, a film about President John F Kennedy’s assassination. John played Dean Andrews Jr, the eccentric attorney from New Orleans that Clay Shaw asked to represent the suspected assassin of Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. He co-starred alongside Kevin Costner who played the lead, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, who was investigating the assassination (as a side note, the real Jim Garrison actually played Earl Warren in the movie).
Go and find old footage and interviews of Dean Andrews Jr and then go and watch John Candy’s performance, John did an uncanny and outstanding job. He perfected Andrews’ dialect, persona and mannerisms to a T. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, John’s Daughter, Jen, told them
"He worked so hard on that. He had a dialect coach, and he worked night and day on that script. He was so worried about it, getting that accent down."
John wanted everything to be perfect for his role. Colleen Callaghan was working on Green Fried Tomatoes at the time, and recalled, “I won’t give a movie up for something else someone has requested me on as I have committed to the production. He was starting JFK and he phoned me, ‘Colleen I know you are working but can I send someone to pick you up in Georgia and take you to Washington to show the hair stylist exactly what you do with my hair?’ I said, ‘OK, if it’s OK with the hair stylist’, he said, ‘I have already talked to her it’s OK’. So I was picked up and flown there and I met Elle Elliot who was so gracious she said ‘I have been dying to meet you, thank you so much’, she ended up working with me on Benjamin Button where she was one of my co heads of department. It was a lifelong friendship that was created.”
Director Oliver Stone was interviewed for a documentary about John called To John With Love: A Tribute to John Candy. Stone said, “I think there is no question that he could have had a significant, dramatic career. He could have gone on and done bigger and bigger parts, he was excellent as Dean Andrews.”
Talking of dramatic roles, it was often rumoured that John had been approached to play Fatty Arbuckle in a biopic. Those rumours were in fact true, although he turned the part down. To me it was John’s way of being respectful to Arbuckle, he was worried about misrepresenting him - with great power comes great responsibility and to portray such a character it would have to be done right.
Rob Salem had chatted to John about this part and had more of an insight for me, "I wanted him to do the Fatty Arbuckle Story. I think he was afraid of it. I think he was afraid of where it would take him. Out of all the Second City people he got the furthest the quickest, so he didn’t really have the of comfort zone that they had - which was his precedence before them. So that whole fame trap, he was aware of that and very wary of that, and that is what killed Fatty Arbuckle. He told me he was afraid to go there."
To understand what John was afraid of I researched Arbuckle and I found his story heartbreaking. A naive and sweet man, made and ruined by Hollywood. The problem is people love scandal, whether it’s true or not is irrelevant to most, and although it’s seen as tomorrow's chip paper by some, it ruins lives and breaks hearts. So I get it John, but I am with Salem and I think you would have done Arbuckle justice with a phenomenal performance.
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That year, John moved Frostback Productions to a large office in Brentwood, it even had its own bar - not just a corner bar but a proper public house style bar!
You Don’t Get Glory If You Don’t Have The Guts
Back in the early 70s John said to his agent, Catherine McCartney, that one day he “would own the Toronto Argonauts”, McCartney thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
In 1986 John met Bruce McNall. McNall was the new owner of the LA Kings hockey team, he had fingers in many pies and was hailed as a very successful businessman and entrepreneur. Bowled over by McNall’s personality and status, John just loved hanging out with him and held him in great esteem. “John was a huge hockey fan and when I bought the LA Kings in 1986, he loved the team and he was a big star. One of my jobs was to make sure the celebrities were happy and came to the games and so we developed a friendship from there” McNall told me.
John had season tickets to the LA Kings and used to go regularly with his old friends Martyn Burke and Stephen Young. The three of them would go to the hockey games and have a lot of fun, but John would drive them absolutely crazy. There are three periods in a hockey game, each twenty minutes long and by the last ten minutes into the third period they would also get the feeling John would want to leave and they had an endless battle to keep him there. John however was the driver, he had a Mercedes and the other two had small sports cars so John was their ride, so when he wanted to leave they would have to go. Burke remembers, “We would get to about 18 minutes and John would say ‘It’s a one goal game’, we would protest ‘It could change’, ‘No, no nothing is going to happen’. We would head up to the parking lot and he would turn on the radio, all of a sudden the game had tied up and totally changed! Then you would have a Mercedes full of people going crazy - bitching and moaning. John would say this only ever happened one time, but it happened over and over again.”
The great thing about the old hockey games was no one in the crowd cared who you were, so John would be sitting in the stands, Tom Hanks would be in his baseball cap further up in the arena and no one would bother them because everyone was just there for the game and it was just a good fun time. Burke noticed that changed when McNall came on board with the Kings and he remembers the day they met, “John was sitting in the stand, Bruce came up in the middle of a game with his entourage and he almost pulled John out of his seat, he wanted John to become part of his group. From that moment John started being seduced by things I wish he hadn’t gotten in to. Bruce seemed like a nice, funny guy who seemed to be a guy who came up from nothing, hardworking, but it turned out he was a wonderful con artist. John wanted to become Bruce McNall, he wanted to be a sports magnate a sports empresario he started dressing a bit like Bruce, he started sitting in Bruce’s private seats, he no longer wanted to sit in the stands with us.”
John and McNall’s friendship progressed over time, they would see each other at games and if McNall was holding any events he would invite John. John attended the Rookie of the Year 1987 awards in Los Angeles and according to McNall he was the life and soul of the party. McNall recalls, “He was very comfortable around all the players and they were starstruck and he was quite starstruck by them, he was very open to the players, he was very funny and made everything very comfortable.” John was also made Celebrity Team Captain of the LA Kings which thrilled him no end. In 1988 John even did a series of funny ads for the Kings, “We had local television and John decides he is going to produce the ad. So he writes it up and gets a bunch of movie stars that would go to the games. He played himself and he would be in front of the camera and he would say, ‘Hi this is John Candy, we are here at the LA Kings game, all big stars come to these games now.’ And as he is saying this Tom Hanks would walk by, and John keeps looking around and says ‘Well I can’t see any right now’.”
McNall disagrees that John idolised him, he thought it was more of the case that John always wanted to be more than he already was, “No matter how good John was, he always wanted to be better”. He did admire McNall though, and wanted to dip his toe into the business world, something McNall could introduce him to. The pair talked about producing films together but nothing ever came fro
m it. The first time they really got into bed with each other was to fulfil another of John’s dreams.
In 1991 McNall was thinking about buying The Toronto Argonauts and asked John what he thought, McNall tells me “John was like ‘Oh yeah I love it, it’s phenomenal! I would love to be involved somehow’. He was all excited about it which of course gave me more enthusiasm, so I got excited about it as well. That’s when I said to Wayne (Gretzky), ‘Do you guys want a piece of this?’ and that’s what led us to buying the team. I don’t think I would have done it without John’s enthusiasm. It was impossible not to be infectious with him; if he got excited then everything was exciting.”
McNall was very aware he wanted John to be protected; in fact they both had the same lawyer at that time, Skip Brittenham. “When we were looking at buying the Argonauts, Skip and I discussed it, I was like I don’t know how much money this is going to take, so we decided to make sure John was capped at a million dollars so he could never lose more than that. So although it cost us much more than that, me and Gretzky ended up putting in millions and millions of dollars, John was always capped at a million dollars. In my mind we looked after him ok in that regards. Skip was very happy that he was taken care of.” They actually bought the team for CAN$5 million, John and Gretzky took 10% each.
For John it was a dream come true, he didn’t do much acting for the next couple of years, he had just finished filming Only The Lonely and took some time out to promote the Argos and the CFL.
Brian Cooper who had already worked with Gretzky, was introduced to McNall and John and appointed as Chief Officer of the organisation. For the next 12-18 months Cooper would find John working from his office for many days of the week. Cooper recalls, “As a Canadian and just a fan of comedy that is how I knew John. A client of mine at the time, Wayne Gretzky, partnered with John in co-owning the Toronto Argonauts, a team that had been around over a hundred years, they had a strong following. John grew up loving the team. They bought it and then asked me to come on board, I came on as Chief Officer of the organisation and John was partnered with Bruce McNall and Wayne Gretzky as the three owners.
Searching for Candy Page 16
