The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “Tommy Meyer?”

  She shook her head. “Tommy had terrible stage fright. Couldn’t get up in front of an audience. He wanted to be a serious playwright. He and Marty were always working on some play. The rest of us were constantly improvising sketches together. We’d laugh and laugh. These days, if you’re funny, you break in by doing stand-up on the comedy club circuit. In those days, you cut your teeth in an improv group. Like Second City in Chicago, which produced John Belushi, Danny Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, half of the original Saturday Night Live people. There were improv groups all over the country then. In L.A. there was The Committee. In Boston there was The Proposition, which Jane Curtin came out of. Typically, they’d perform a few standard sketches. Then they’d take audience suggestions and come back after intermission and have at them. Sometimes they paid off, sometimes they didn’t. It was live. That gave it a real edge. To a degree, that’s what has made Saturday Night Live work to this day … Anyway, that’s the sort of thing we talked about doing. We developed a stable of characters. Lyle’s best was Commander Fuck, who was the self-styled Liberace of professional wrestling. He and Steve had a whole ring routine they did together. Marty did a bartender who turns into a rooster every time someone says ‘on the rocks.’ Tory did a reporter from Rolling Stone who is conducting an interview with Johnny Puke, the oldest living Grateful Dead roadie. I did this sadistic school nurse, Nurse Hertz, who lived to inflict pain on little girls with menstrual cramps. Oh, and Lyle and I did Katherine Hepburn and John Wayne dropping acid together for the first time on the set of Rooster Cogburn.” Fiona craned her neck, a là Hepburn. “Dahling, your teeth. They’ve become worms. The most dahling, dahling worms.” She let loose with Hepburn’s cascading trill of a laugh. It was a drop-dead imitation. Her John Wayne wasn’t bad either: “And you, Katie, are the spitting image of a Comanche warrior name of Howls-at-the-Moon, with whom I once had anal intercourse one cold night along the banks of the Missouri.” Fiona let out another laugh. Her own this time. “It was really silly stuff, but we were kids. Lyle would try anything for a laugh, and he’d get one as often as not. He was quite clearly our star.”

  “And your leader as well?”

  This seemed to amuse her. “I’m sure he feels he was. He’s always felt he carried us. But Marty’s really the one who put it all together. It was Marty who approached St. James Infirmary, this basement jazz club on Hudson, and talked them into letting us go on on Sunday and Monday nights, when the musicians were off. There was no cover, just a two-drink minimum. We got a split of the take, which was maybe fifty dollars a night for all of us at the beginning. Later on, when we’d developed a following, we each made about two hundred a week. Not much, but we could survive, which was more than a lot of performers could say.”

  “How did the character of Chubby Chance come about?”

  Her face turned to stone. “I’d rather not get into that.”

  I tugged at my ear. “You were there, weren’t you?”

  “I was just along for the ride,” she said, turning vague. “Talk to The Boys. They’re really in the best position to fill you in.” She broke off, gurgling. “Lyle was far and away the neediest member of the group. He had this insatiable hunger for the audience’s attention. If there’s one thing you should understand about Lyle as a performer it’s this: He was in it for love. For him, the audience was there to give him the love he was denying himself from Herb and Aileen. To dote on him, fuss over him, adore him. He was so desperate to impress. That’s what drove him as a performer. I think, more than anything, he was just very immature. He had to be the center of attention, onstage or off, like a spoiled child. If we had people over for dinner, say, and the subject turned to something he didn’t know anything about, like the war or Vonnegut or the new Albee play, he’d get really restless and surly. Don’t forget, he never went to college, and he had a very limited range of subjects he could talk about. His favorite was him. He loved to talk about how talented he was.”

  “He still does,” I observed. “What else did he want? What was he after?”

  She glanced down at her cuticles. She’d drawn fresh blood. She lunged for a Band-Aid on the coffee table and began dressing her finger. “He worshipped the National Lampoon crowd, which was the hot, hip crowd of young talent in New York. They did the magazine. They did National Lampoon Radio Hour, featuring people like Billy Murray. They did Lemmings, the satire of Woodstock that Tony Hendra put together off-Broadway. Belushi was in that. So was Chevy Chase. Lyle desperately wanted to be a part of what they were doing. He used to hang around the magazine offices trying to pitch them ideas for articles and radio scripts. But it was a very closed, very elitist group, and he couldn’t crack it. It took something very extraordinary for that to happen. It took Saturday Night Live, which positively exploded on the scene. That was in the fall of ’75. John and Chevy became instant stars. Huge stars. And it so happened that Lyle could do an absolutely uncanny impersonation of John—particularly John doing his samurai warrior bit. It was truly devastating. So we worked it into this insane sketch about the day John Belushi flips out and becomes the samurai warrior while he’s at the doctor for a prostate examination. Marty played the doctor. It was totally over the top—”

  “Or bottom,” I suggested. “As the case may be.”

  “But the audiences went crazy over it. And before long word reached John that there was this kid down in the Village who did an incredible imitation of him. One night, he and a few of his friends came down to see us perform. After Lyle did the bit, John jumped up there onstage with him, totally bombed, and pretended he was going to sue him. I’ll never, ever forget the look on Lyle’s face when he realized John Belushi liked what he’d done.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “It was triumph,” Fiona replied. “It was as if in that moment, on that stage, Lyle had been born. After the show, John asked Lyle to join him for a drink. They ended up partying through the night, and from then on John kind of took him under his wing. He put him on Saturday Night Live as the Warrior of Christmas Past in the Samurai Christmas Carol. He was Lyle’s best man at our wedding. He even insisted on springing for our honeymoon. John … John was this crazed master of disaster, a drugged-out wild man, a night wanderer. He’d go from club to club to club, never wanting the party to end. For him, Lyle was a new partner in crime. Someone who’d drink and smoke and snort with him until dawn. He was also someone who hero-worshipped John, although John was every young comic actor’s idol in those days. Because he was a volcano of talent and because he was living out every show-biz fantasy imaginable. John wanted to be a movie star, so he did Animal House. John wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll star, so he and Danny invented the Blues Brothers. John was on the cover of Newsweek. John was blazing the trail that Lyle hoped to follow. I saw less and less of Lyle once the two of them became friends. John would just call up at three in the morning and say …” Swiftly, she became Belushi—busy eyebrows, gruff bellow, the works. “ ‘Hey, is Lyle there?’ “ She was a singular mimic. Just as swiftly, she reverted back to herself, shudders and all. “He treated me like I was Lyle’s mother. Lyle would grab the phone from me and say, ‘I’m there,’ and out the door he’d go. I wouldn’t see him for two days.” Fiona shook her head ruefully. “It’s probably a cop-out to say that John Belushi ruined our life together, because it wasn’t working out too well anyway. But he certainly didn’t help.”

  “Why wasn’t it working out?”

  “Lyle was the world’s worst husband,” she replied, with rising anger. “He absolutely refused to deal with any of the day-to-day realities of adulthood, like paying bills, buying groceries, cleaning house. He had a real rock ’n’ roller’s view of life—he regarded its mundane details as something for other, lesser people to worry about. People like me. He expected me to clean up after him, wash his clothes, feed him. Well, I wasn’t his mother and I told him so, but it just never sank in. With Lyle, if there was a problem I was the one who had it, not
him. As far as he was concerned, everything was cool. He had zero respect for me and zero comprehension of my feelings. None. He did whatever he felt like doing, whenever he felt like doing it. We could be in the middle of a romantic evening at home together, making love in front of the fire, and if John called him—wham—he’d be out the door. He treated me like shit, Hoagy. He did really mean things to me.”

  “Like sleeping around?”

  She flushed slightly. “Again, as far as he was concerned it was totally cool behavior. He couldn’t believe I was being so uptight and possessive.” She shook her head. “It was hopeless. It really was. We saw less and less of each other. Our schedules were so different. He’d party all night, sleep all day. I was never a big partier. And then we hardly saw each other at all after the Suburbanites split up.”

  “Why did you?”

  “It was time to end it, that’s all,” she replied offhandedly. “We were each getting involved in our own careers. Marty and Tommy had full-time jobs in advertising. I was playing an ambitious little slut on Guiding Light, and then I did a Sam Shepard play for Joe Papp, Curse of the Starving Class.”

  “Did that play make any sense to you? From the inside, I mean.”

  She frowned. “Not really. Why?”

  “Just checking. And Lyle?”

  “Lyle got picked by CBS to be one of the performers in Nuts, their rip-off of Saturday Night Live. They launched it with great fanfare—Fridays, after the late news—and cancelled it after three weeks. Their affiliate stations refused to carry it.”

  “Too controversial?”

  “Too stupid. But Lyle went right from that into the sitcom version of Animal House that ABC did. He played John’s part, Bluto. That took him out to L.A., so I didn’t see him at all for a couple of months. He did come back to New York when it got cancelled, only by then I was leaving town to be with the national company of Chapter Two. So we were apart again. When Chapter Two finished up its run in California, my agent suggested I stay out there for a while. She thought I could get some sitcom work. I asked Lyle to join me, but he insisted there was too much happening here in New York. Actually, he sounded thrilled that I was staying there. It meant he was free to snort coke until all hours and sleep around without me there to nag him. I got some guest shots right away. I played Judd Hirsch’s love interest for a couple of weeks on Taxi. And then Jim Brooks hired me to do his new sitcom pilot. Michael Keaton and I played newlyweds. That’s when Lyle changed his mind about coming out. Not that I had anything to do with it. John and Danny were doing 1941 for Spielberg, and John said to him …” Again with the eyebrows. “ ‘Hey, come on out and be a movie star with me.’ Lyle had a tiny part in it. He played a traffic cop. All I ever saw was his suitcase. He was on the set all day with John, and hanging out all night with John. And then …” She gave a spasmodic shudder. “One night I came home from the studio after rehearsal and there he was in my bed with some teenage punk floozy. There was coke and tequila on the nightstand, and the whole bedroom reeked of sex. I—I freaked. I’d had it. I was not going to be treated that way by anyone. I threw his clothes out onto the front lawn and told him to get out. I never wanted to see Lyle Hudnut again. I came back here a few weeks later when my pilot didn’t get picked up. Lyle stayed in L.A. until John went to Chicago to do the Blues Brothers movie. That left Lyle all by himself in L.A., and broke. So he came home to Mommy. Begged me to take him back. I did, of course. Because I had such a low opinion of myself, and because I still loved him.”

  “And how did it work out?”

  “Perfectly,” she replied. “We never saw each other.” She let out a sad laugh. “I went back to the stage, which I guess is really my first love. I did A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, which gave me a chance to work with Tommy Tune. I really had to polish my singing and dancing, so I was busy all the time. Lyle got picked by Lorne Michaels to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as one of the replacements for John and Danny. So he was at Thirty Rock around the clock. Sunday was the only day we had together, only he was usually unconscious after partying all night after the show. Angry, too. Saturday Night Live was just an extremely painful and disillusioning experience for Lyle.”

  “I can’t remember—did he do Uncle Chubby in it?”

  She glanced away uncomfortably. “He did his wrestler, Commander Fuck, who he had to rename Commander Buck, and very little else. That’s because he had to compete head-on with Billy Murray and the other stars for airtime. It was a very competitive, very political kind of creative environment, and Lyle didn’t do well in it. He didn’t get along with the writers—I understand he once even punched the head writer, Alan Zweibel. And he didn’t like playing straight man for anybody else. He’s not a team player. Lorne dropped him after one season. I think, in the long run, it proved to be a valuable experience for Lyle, because it taught him how important it is in television to have clout. But it was a bitter and demoralizing experience for him. He went into a deep, deep funk after he was dropped. Convinced himself he was a failure. Convinced himself he’d never succeed. It was always somebody else’s turn to break out—Billy Murray, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, John Candy, Martin Short. It was never his. I kept telling him to be patient—your turn will come. Only it didn’t. In fact, the phone had stopped ringing. His career was stalled. Mostly, he just got stoned a lot. He’d sit there in the dark by himself for hours staring at cartoons, not talking, not eating, not sleeping. He was like a zombie. Very down. It went on for weeks, months. I was worried about him. I couldn’t get through to him, couldn’t reach him, couldn’t help him. I—I felt so powerless. It was truly awful. It was John who finally pulled him out of it—by dying. If John Belushi hadn’t OD’ed out in L.A. in ’82, I honestly don’t know what would have happened to Lyle. His death really shook Lyle. Snapped him out of whatever he was in. Gave him a renewed sense of purpose. He even promised me he’d become a better husband.”

  “And did he?”

  “I told you—he’s a born liar, remember?” she retorted bitterly. “What he did do was get back in touch with Marty and Tommy. They’d gotten very successful writing commercials, but they were bored with it and looking for a diversion. And a diversion is one thing that Lyle has always been. The three of them took to sitting up nights together drinking coffee and shpritzing, like in the old days. The upshot of it was that Lyle began to test out the Uncle Chubby character as a stand-up act at Catch a Rising Star. He’d come out on stage as Chubby, sweater and all, and start telling these filthy bedtime stories. The audiences loved it. So did Lorne, who decided to give Lyle a second chance as part of The New Show, a prime-time comedy hour he was launching for NBC with Dave Thomas, John Candy, and a bunch of the others. Marty and Tommy took leaves from the agency to write for it. The show … it was a disaster. It had zero concept. But it was the best thing that ever happened to Lyle. It launched Uncle Chubby. From there he did Carson and Letterman. He did the HBO special, the album, the concert tour …” She trailed off, sighing. “And the old behavior patterns staged a roaring comeback. The staying out all night, the coke, the women, the whole Belushi rock ’n’ roll star fantasy. On top of which he started to get incredibly nasty. You know, the ‘I’m hot and you’re not’ syndrome. He told me I was a real drag. He told me I was holding him back. I said fine, Lyle, I’m not going to hold you back anymore. And we split up—this time for good. I went back out to L.A. to get away from his aura and to heal myself spiritually. I did six weeks on St. Elsewhere playing a woman who thinks she’s a cabbage moth—they nominated me for an Emmy for that. I did a sitcom pilot with Nell Carter where we play twins who were separated at birth. I fell in love with a writer for a while. …”

  “I’m truly sorry to hear that.”

  “I’d been back in New York for a few weeks when Lyle phoned and asked me to do this pilot with him. My initial reaction, I must confess, was no way. But the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking I was letting my emotions get the best of me. Not many sitcom
pilots get taped here in New York, and this one had a real shot at getting picked up as a series. He and The Boys had even written Deirdre with me in mind. So I said yes, even though I was afraid it meant I had some neurotic, self-destructive need to be victimized by Lyle.”

  “Do you?”

  “It was pretty horrendous at first.” She was, wringing her hands so tightly I was afraid she’d crack a small bone. “Not the show, which was a huge hit from day one. But Lyle was just coked to the gills. One week he got so bombed on tape day that he couldn’t make it out of his dressing room. We had to send the audience home. Happily, Noble had come into my life by then, and he helped me to draw the line between my professional and my personal selves. I learned to just do my job and leave. Not get involved. I looked upon Lyle as my director and my costar, not my ex-husband. And Marjorie Daw made things a lot easier for me, too. It was she who now had the privilege of playing mommy for him. Only, Lyle misjudged her. Marjorie’s no marshmallow. That day when he passed out in his dressing room, she refused to cover for him. She got right on the phone to God and told him all about it. God went ballistic. Told Lyle if he didn’t clean up his act he’d shut him down and sue him for breach of contract. Lyle, to his credit, toed the line after that. But he never forgave Marjorie for putting her own career first—ahead of him. As far as he was concerned, that was unforgivable. He still hates her for it.”

  “He keeps referring to everyone around here as his family. Does he genuinely believe they are?”

  “He does,” Fiona reflected. “Because they give him what he requires of a family. They’re devoted to him. They laugh at his jokes. Feed him when he’s hungry. Wipe his nose when it runs. They need him. The only thing they can’t give him is love. Which is terribly sad, because that’s the one thing Lyle wants most out of life. Except you can never love Lyle enough. There isn’t that much love. If you ask me, this isn’t so much his family as it is his asylum. All that’s missing is the cure. He’s not getting any better.”