Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  The delivery date came and went.

  Elaine never stopped. She couldn’t. The sole indication of the world outside, the front door of the suite she kept open throughout. At two in the morning one night, she and Kahn were engaged in conversation at the KEM when she sensed, behind them, a disruption. A man was sitting in their cutting room, watching comfortably from a chair.

  “Pardon us,” Elaine said. “We’re working.”

  “No, no. I’m sorry. Don’t mind me.”

  “Well, this is sort of private. I know you’re a guest of the hotel—”

  “No, I’m very happy watching.”

  “Well,” she said. “Then take off your pants.”

  He left immediately.

  Precious few she allowed in, including hotel maids. She thought twice about the maids.

  Exceptions she made for Falk and Cassavetes and of course, Mike Nichols. When in town, he would swing by the hotel and urge her to break for dinner, not in the lobby or at the KEM, but outside those physical extensions of her mind, at a restaurant, for a bite of real food instead of the candy and kefir she snacked on almost daily. She would accept Mike’s invitation. Yes. For Mike she would take the time.

  To buy herself more time, and more money, Elaine approached another ally, Paramount’s Frank Yablans, with a highly plausible explanation. It was the sound. Falk and Cassavetes’s dialogue she had recorded on two separate tracks—a strategy intended to provide her yet further variations in the editing room—but all these months later, she claimed, they still couldn’t get the tracks to sync to picture. Yablans accepted Elaine’s story, set a new delivery date, and allowed her to keep cutting, away from the studio, as was her preference, into the summer of 1974.

  Of course there were rumors. Elaine, they said, was dive-bombing for disaster and taking the studio down with her. She was getting her revenge on Paramount, they said, for crib-stealing and mangling A New Leaf; they said that without the nonimprovisational checks of Walter Matthau on her first film and Neil Simon on her second, she had no one to rein her in, as Mike Nichols had in their act; they said she had lost control, that she had been working on this story too long, and the characters and actors, her friends, were too close to her for her to observe clinically. One rumor was certain fact: on Mikey and Nicky Elaine May had exposed more film than had been shot for Gone with the Wind.

  Popping into the Sunset Marquis for a visit, cinematographer Victor Kemper had to see for himself. He was aghast at what he observed. Rather than narrow her focus, with more time to cut, she had amassed, incredibly, even more film in the editing suite. “She had printed the outtakes,” Kemper said. It raised the question, had she scavenged tiny treasures from the scraps, or was she, returning to the drawing board, second-guessing her instincts? From Kemper’s perspective, these outtakes had been abandoned for a reason. He said, “I thought her choices from a photographic point of view were off.” But watching her work, he could see her intentions were earnest. If indeed she had lost control, as industry gossip stipulated, Elaine’s eyes did not show it. “I think she worked,” Kahn guessed, “twenty-four hours a day.” Inspiration struck her physically; she would knock over an ashtray and keep talking.

  “Vic,” she asked Kemper, “do you remember that shot we were doing at the grave?”

  “Of course I do.” Who could forget it? They had run out of film.

  “Well, I can’t find some footage and it’s critical to making this scene work.”

  “Elaine . . .”

  “Have you any idea what could have happened to the film? I have no idea where to look . . .”

  As she looked, Frank Yablans left Paramount, and when October 1, 1974, rolled around, Barry Diller had replaced him. Among his first orders of business: put an end to Elaine May’s immunity once and for all.

  11

  1974–1975

  Daniel Edward Aykroyd, purveyor of spirits and human miscellany, started bootlegging as a kid, back in his parents’ basement. He kept a little bar for his friends and their friends, the cops, ex-cons, bikers, truck drivers, pole dancers, and undertakers of Canada’s blue-collar underground. They knew, after the taverns closed for the night, the way to enhanced convivial deviance was down Mr. and Mrs. Aykroyd’s coal scuttle to Danny’s place. More even than booze, Aykroyd loved their company. As much as their company, he loved their expertise, their jargon, accents, accessories, firearms, uniforms, gadgets, the springs and gears of those gadgets, and the provenance of those gears.

  If you didn’t know Danny, you knew someone who did. Marcus O’Hara met him early in the decade at Toronto’s Global Village Theatre, where, before the arrival of Second City, Andrew Alexander produced sketch revues and Marcus and his then-girlfriend, Gilda Radner, were ticket-tearers for the Aykroyd and Bromfield show. A college dropout nearing twenty, Aykroyd, O’Hara said, “had greasy hair, a chain wallet, the dirty fingernails of a guy who worked in a garage, and glasses with a bandage in the middle like a nerd.” O’Hara—himself an actor, partygoer, and host to all—couldn’t bottle the profusion. His new friend dressed like a punk, but he sounded off like a manic mechanic, like an instruction manual read at warp speed, and if you didn’t know he was talking about carburetors and catalytic converters and discontinued locomotive technology, you could mistake his concatenations of industrial prose for the music of a bebop drummer. He had the verbal horsepower of a salesman, and the beneficence of a priest, but went with the Blacktop Vampire motorcycle gang—who, by the way, didn’t ride motorcycles—and he believed in ghosts, but also in particle physics. Aykroyd’s friends—i.e., all of Toronto—joked that his idea of perfect happiness was to commit a crime and then arrest himself.

  The hangout à la Aykroyd was pitched at the awesomely nonviable and pathologically fast—always fast—like the time, soon after they met, when he raced Marcus through the moving subway, heaving open door after door to the very last car, then hurling his midsection over the guard chain to dangle inches above the tracks, his arms thrown back in flight. Holy fuck, O’Hara thought, what a maniac. What a character! “Jesus Christ!” Aykroyd yelled, pushing himself upright. “Marcus, get off at the next stop!” he instructed as he leapt off the subway and disappeared down the tunnel, only to reappear beside Marcus as planned, at the next station, thirty minutes later. “Why the fuck did you do that?” “I dropped my glasses,” Danny said.

  John Daveikis, Marcus, and Danny—“the Gentlemen Three,” Aykroyd christened them—moved into 505 Queen Street East, a three-story storefront a quick trolley ride from Second City, back in the Adelaide days when there was nothing good to drink. Sobriety was tough on the patrons, but denying improvisers the sedative effects of alcohol—or fill in the blank—was like trying to put screaming children to sleep without a bedtime story. You couldn’t just leave the theater and say goodnight to your friends, the funniest improvisers in Toronto and maybe the world. You needed to come down. But without access to an all-night bar—this being Toronto—the Second Citizens of Adelaide Street, at an inconvenient distance from 1063 Avenue Road, were in need. Knowing they had an ace bootlegger in Aykroyd, Adelaide’s Jayne Eastwood approached the men of 505 Queen with five hundred dollars and a proposal. “I’ll give you this money, if you guys open a bar,” she said. “You don’t have to pay me back, just make sure, when I come, I have waiting for me a glass of Canadian Club and a cigarette.”

  The Gentlemen Three obliged their beloved Jayne and opened the 505 Club on the first and basement floors of their storefront home, seven nights a week for dollar drinks served in glasses they stole, a little at a time, from Second City’s kitchen, and if you didn’t have that dollar, not to worry, as long as you were a friend of Danny’s, and everyone was, and as long as the golden light inside the 505 gleamed onto the street between one in the morning and breakfast, which Danny, Marcus, and John took around lunchtime, the 505 would be open for you. “The 505 was unimpeded happiness,” said 505er Bob Dolman, “encouraging everybody to do whatever calls you, and th
e place shook when the streetcar crawled by.” On a great night, the 505 accommodated over a hundred illegal drinkers, improvisers, garbagemen, firemen, mailmen, and cops. “Hey, Marcus,” the chief of police asked one night. “How do you get away with running this place? Isn’t this a speakeasy?”

  Yes, Officer, a speakeasy on one of the most trafficked streets in Cabbage­town, one of Toronto’s most questionable neighborhoods, and flagrantly visible to passersby. Walled in glass from back to front, the 505 was designed to be a three-dimensional X-ray transparent from all sides, so that you could smoke out by the sixteen-foot marijuana plant in the backyard and see, across the party inside, to Queen Street out front. Signs of a bust, therefore, could be glimpsed from any vantage point, and just as quickly deterred. “Dan greeted the cops with such a friendly and welcoming confidence, they immediately softened and, if I recall, joined the party,” said Dolman. “Such was his charm and his self-honed authority.” Even the basement bathroom was glass, but Aykroyd shadowed the downstairs in dark lights suited to dancing and other clandestine sports. For Halloween, they trucked in hundreds of cubic feet of fallen maple leaves, and poured them in up to waist level, the perfect height, they agreed, for doing backflips. “We had tremendous evenings of fun there,” Aykroyd said. “Cold, cold winter nights where we would sit and reminisce about the things we had just done onstage, and plan our futures.” Regarding those futures, the 505 was home to a barber chair, regularly occupied by Lorne Michaels, a Second City fan, fellow comedian, and comedy writer.

  Barreling through the 505 in driver’s cap and bomber jacket, a baronial white scarf trailing behind him, John Belushi made for the proprietor, his friend of about three hours, Dan Aykroyd. They had only just met before the show that night, and though they enjoyed each other backstage in the Fire Hall’s greenroom, it wasn’t until they got up and improvised that John and Danny clicked into a single organism. “We took one look at each other,” Aykroyd said. “It was love at first sight.” Their fusion was instantaneous, complementary—John dangerous and loose, Danny loquacious and mannered—and, as with all natural duos, gave the impression of years of shared history. Of course, each knew basically nothing about the other, save for the lightning flash that had just struck them onstage, but that was enough for Belushi; he knew now that Aykroyd would be a great fit for The National Lampoon Radio Hour. The question was, was Aykroyd interested?

  They took up stools at the bar and got down to it.

  Radio Hour? What was that?

  A comedy radio show produced by the magazine which Belushi was casting with improvisers of his taste, poaching from the best of Second City Chicago and Toronto. What’s that music?

  Curtis Mayfield. Who else was in?

  Harold Ramis, definitely, there was no one better with a joke, and he actually wrote things down; Joe Flaherty, the ombudsman; Gilda, if Belushi could get her; and Brian Doyle-Murray, maybe the strongest actor of them all. And Christopher Guest and his friend from Bard, Chevy Chase, carryovers from National Lampoon’s stage show, Lemmings. Crucial to Belushi, as he recruited his all-stars, was the prospective hegemony of Second City–style improvisation. Wait. Who’s that now? (Muddy Waters.)

  With Lemmings, a sinister Woodstock parody tangled in improvisatory sensibilities as oppositional as Guest’s laconic hyperrealism and Belushi’s theatricality, the producer in Belushi had learned a lesson. There were species of improvisers. If, interbreeding them, they couldn’t find a common technique to bridge their disparities, then individual difference would damage the collaboration. Second City style—the aggregate of Viola Spolin, Del Close, and Bernie Sahlins—was one such technique. If the majority of the Radio Hour’s ensemble shared a language, Belushi could restore the camaraderie he enjoyed in Chicago and, so far, had lost in New York. It was, as ever, a family of friends Belushi was after. “That guy’s voice. Who is that guy?” he asked Aykroyd.

  “That’s Hock Walsh, and Donnie Walsh, of Downchild, the preeminent blues band of this city and of Canada. That’s the real stuff right there.”

  “Blues, huh? I don’t listen to too much blues.”

  “You’re from Chicago. You should know about the blues.”

  That the Chicago blues and the mind of Viola Spolin, wellsprings of improvisation, incubated only blocks apart—the former in the culturally diversified Maxwell Street Market, the latter in Hull House, where she mixed together the immigrants of Maxwell Street with her burgeoning theater games—lends credence to a prevailing theory of jazz as the American sound of spontaneous inclusion or, in the parlance of improv comedy, “Yes, and.” “The real power and innovation of jazz,” Wynton Marsalis explained, “is that a group of people can come together and create art—improvised art—and can negotiate their agendas with each other. And that negotiation is the art.” For the first half of the twentieth century, at the Maxwell Street Market—at its height, the largest open-air market in the country—negotiation was essential to cohabitation. “Put quite simply,” wrote folklorist Alan Lomax, “the Maxwell Street district is a living monument to American creativity, the site of some of the most profound social and cultural transformations of this century.” Over fifty overlapping languages could be heard on a Sunday afternoon on Maxwell Street, where greenhorns became Americans, literally everything was for sale, and every indigenous music played—like the blues, brought up from the South with the Great Migration. With an estimated two cops per twenty thousand Chicagoans, vendors went unregulated, and as such flourished and multiplied as they never could in New York City, for instance, where the limitations of space and the efficacy of law enforcement seriously curbed the parameters of the cross-cultural hangout.

  “Well, I’m not into blues,” Belushi said. “I’m into grand funk and heavy metal—”

  “That’s all from the blues.”

  To prove his point, Aykroyd put on John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Jazz musician Howard Shore, drawn by the sounds, joined Aykroyd and Belushi at the bar. Aykroyd and Shore watched Belushi physically absorb the rich, raw vocals and cool yearning of the electric guitar. He looked like he had just seen his first naked woman.

  “You guys should start a band,” Shore suggested when the song ended. “Call yourselves the Blues Brothers.”

  There was a time, before Belushi brought his friends to New York and the National Lampoon, when he felt terribly alone in Manhattan. It surprised him. Growing up in Chicago, he had always imagined New York to be a peppy achievement machine, the conveyor belt to destiny, but arriving in 1972, encountering in the Lemmings a comedy ethic of competitive one-upmanship, and a social scene fractured by constant distraction—in Chicago, they simply hung out all night in each other’s apartments, crashed on couches, and went to Lum’s for scrambled eggs the next morning—Belushi was not at home. “The contrast with Second City was striking,” Judy Belushi said. “Second City provided a home for the cast. Here it was cold and impersonal.” John got into cocaine and for a short time quaaludes. Though Del advocated chemical enhancement, you couldn’t get away with drugs as easily at Second City; for the most part, ensemble work, and improvisation’s cabaret-sized audiences, wouldn’t permit psychic alienation. But alienation was New York’s mid-1970s chic, and the Lampoon sensibility—pitch-black, mercilessly offensive, slathered in sex and death—was the perfect excuse for damage. “We used humor as a weapon rather than a shield,” said Lampooner P. J. O’Rourke. Crossing the line? At the Lampoon, there was no line. Second City, at its best, satirized, and mostly the right; the Lampoon, first in print and then onstage, gleefully massacred taboos with the indiscriminate “bad taste” of intelligent frat boys. If Second City was jazz, the Lampoon hit comedy with rock ’n’ roll, the outraged dry hump of a country betrayed by Watergate, disabused of peace and love. To that end, they had the perfect front man in John Belushi, almost. He brought the unexpurgated Fuck this, but he needed like-minded improvisers to thrive.

  Before Second City infiltrated the Lampoon, the maximalist in Belushi an
d the minimalist in Christopher Guest stuttered their theatrical collaboration. Remarkably, their systems coalesced in “The Perfect Master,” an improvised Radio Hour interview Guest’s Indian swami conducts with Belushi’s American teenager. In their tone—a low-key ramble reminiscent of Nichols and May—they found common ground conducive to Guest’s zero-joke threshold and a new Belushi, sounding like himself, talking with uncharacteristic ease. It was this conversational quality that appealed to Christopher Guest, who shared with one of his idols, Mike Nichols, an intelligence attuned to the slightest modulations of voice and sound. For Guest, a character began with the voice. It always had. “My first remembrance of being connected to what I thought was funny,” he said, “was when I was quite young, 8 or 10, looking out the window and imagining the voices of the people I would see—this was New York City—on the street, and doing those voices.” Finding a voice, he would cross the apartment to the bathroom, where the acoustics gave him a little echo, and discover more about his new person in front of the mirror. (“Christopher?” his mother worried behind the closed door. “Are you okay?”) Radio Hour gave a stage to Guest’s ear, namely his musical parodies, which he performed not as parodies but from the unironic point of view of seemingly real characters. The whiff of exaggeration or comment that was crucial to the Second City style had no purchase with him. “If you’re playing a gay character,” he said, “and there’s some unconscious, subliminal message that . . .—‘This isn’t really me, I’m straight, wink wink . . . but he’s gay’—you’re dead. You’ve got to be the guy.”