The Heart of Candy

This is my John Candy story. I only have one, but it’s a pretty good one and this is it. It takes place in early 1993, which was an exciting time for us, ‘cause we were up in Calgary doing final re-writes on our first movie and staying in a fancy hotel and just doing that screenwriters getting their first movie made showbiz thing, which feels real nice when it comes along. Now when I say “us,” I mean Golds and I. You need to know a little about Golds if I’m going to tell you the John Candy story.

You need to know there was a sweet Philly kid named Michael Goldberg who had a strange, almost mathematical gift for how stories work. He also had an open face with big pores and this red-brown ponytail that made him look like the Jewish Thomas Jefferson, and kept a pen around his neck on a leather thong. It was there at all times in case he had to take emergency script notes. He was like a St. Bernard and that pen was his cask of brandy. Golds never wrote a word. In fact, he couldn’t even type, but we were writing partners to the core, and he was very excited about what was going on with us and this movie.

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Now, I also have to tell you that in 2000 Golds got brain cancer, and they gave him three months to live. He died last year, fourteen years after his diagnosis, and those fourteen years were rough on the golden one and all who loved him. I remember when he had the surgery on his first tumor, which was in his sinuses, and the surgeon told him, “Think of your tumor as a table in a room. I’m not going to take out the table, I’m going to take out the room.” Well, I guess they should have taken out the adjoining room too, ‘cause a few months later the cancer had spread to his brain.

Dawn Steel was the producer on that movie. She was the first woman to ever run a major studio, and she died of brain cancer too, but the cases were unrelated. Dawn was a tough broad, and I got some good stories about her too, but this is my John Candy story and she’s not really part of it. But I will tell you that I once saw her lash out at her assistant, screaming at him with no self-awareness or irony, “You stupid fucking piece of shit, you forgot to tell me about the self-esteem workshop I was supposed to give yesterday!”

As I said, we were up in Calgary on our first movie and these were exciting times. But our success, though we enjoyed it, had a little shadow over it because I was a heroin addict at that point (and for a good time after that point), and nobody knew it but Golds, and that wasn’t fun for him. Anyway, that’s some background or context on the general situation, so let’s get to the action.

It was really late, like two in the morning, and I was in the bathroom up to no good when the phone rings. Now, it’s our first night in Calgary and we’re already jumpy because we got stopped at customs, and thought we might be in a great deal of international trouble due to the narcotics in my luggage. But it turned out to just be a work visa issue, as they were unable to accept us into the country as screenwriters, and instead let us in as circus performers. Anyway, the phone rings and it’s that weird, jarring 90’s synthetic hotel smoke detector chirp, and that didn’t help our jumpiness, and besides phone calls at two in the morning are never good. Okay, at this point I should mention that by “our” jumpiness, I mean the jumpiness belonging to me and my wife, now ex-wife, who was up there with me, and was in bed watching Canadian TV and eating these incredibly delicious Irish butter cookies that came in a green canister from the mini-bar and served as the springboard for a two-year butter cookie obsession that couldn’t have been good for our health, but probably not as bad as the heroin.

After two creepy chirps the phone stopped ringing. There was a short pause, and then Karen (my wife now ex-wife’s name) came into the bathroom, looked at me and said, “It’s John Candy.”

I sat there for a moment in my somewhat compromised state (needle in arm, vein not wanting to comply), trying to digest this piece of information.

“It’s John Candy?” Karen nodded. I took a moment, went into the bedroom and picked up the phone.

“Hello.”

“Tommy, it’s John Candy. Get your partner and come to my room.”

And he hangs up.

It was a single, quick, hushed monotone breath, but it was definitely him. I was sure of that, because I’d been hearing him that whole afternoon at the “read-through” where he had played the affable, generous movie star. In fact, he was almost perversely generous, passing out gifts to all and promising everyone tickets to the Toronto Argonauts, a Canadian Football League team of which he was part owner. In fact, he was wearing a very large blue letterman’s jacket with white leather sleeves that had the Argonauts patch on the front and “Toronto” in big red letters on the back, and I think there was a little maple leaf flag sewn on there too. And when I say he was wearing a very large letterman’s jacket, I mean he was wearing a doublewide trailer of a garment, capable of keeping a buffalo warm.

As for the read-through, it went pretty well, except for one unfortunate moment when Golds, unhappy with the enthusiasm the four actors were showing for our version of the Jamaican bobsled team song, started singing along like a camp counselor to inspire them. I cringed, but Dawn Steel took it a step further, and shot him a look that said, “you stupid little shtetl Jew, knock it the fuck off, now.” He got the message. I will say in the actors’ defense, the tune, which I wrote, was corny as hell and the song which Malik Yoba, the actor playing Yul Brenner, ended up writing was a vast improvement.

Anyway, I have taken us a little off topic, so let’s recap: it’s two in the morning, and I am in the bathroom of my room at the Fairmont Palliser in Calgary, Canada. I have managed to sneak a decent but not ridiculous amount of white powder heroin over the border of our neighbor to the north, and I am trying to convince a small portion of those drugs to enter my bloodstream when a very fat, beloved, and at times brilliant comic actor calls me on the phone and requests the presence of my partner and I in his chambers. I buckle down, get the medicine in me and go to fetch the golden one… But first I call and alert him to the situation. He answers the phone in a dead sleep, expecting me to be locked up in the hoosegow, I’m sure.

“John Candy just called me. He wants us to come to his room.”

There was a pause. “What?”

“John Candy just called. He wants us to come to his room.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“Golds, John Candy wants us to come his room, now.”

“He does not.”

“Golds, he just called me, I’m not lying. Karen, tell Golds Candy called.”

“He called,” she mumbles loudly with a cookie in her mouth.

“John Candy just called your room?”

“Yes.”

“And he wants us to come to his room now at two in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Just get fucking dressed and meet me in the hall.”

I pulled on my pants, shirt and shoes, and went and gently knocked on Golds’s door because his girlfriend, soon to be his wife, also named Karen, and not a junkie but a sweet, though slightly jappy chick from Encino, was there with him and I didn’t want to wake her up.

Golds opened the door halfway wearing a very short crimson kimono, and a green facial mask for his very big pores. He’s got the Thomas Jefferson hair down loose around his shoulders.

“Candy did not call you.”

“Dude, what is your fucking problem? He called me.”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“I am not full of shit.”

“Okay. If John Candy called you go knock on his door.”

“Fine. Come with me.”

“I want to see you knock on his door.”

“I heard you. Come on.”

“Fine.”

And he steps out into the hall.

“Maybe you should change and take the mask off.”

A minute later he was back, mask off, but still in the short kimono, and off we go to Candy’s room, Golds in his bare feet with his pupik showing, chirping the whole time, “Go ahead, knock on his door. I want to see you knock on his door.”

I just walked down the hall with this wonderful sense of confidence, like betting on a horserace you already know the outcome of.

And up to Candy’s door I marched, Golds a few steps behind me. I calmly but firmly knock three times. You should have seen the Golden one’s face when I did that.

After a few seconds, the door whipped open, and there he stood, rumpled but still fully dressed, a very thin, long cigarette in hand.

“Good. You’re here.”

He waved us in with his giant paw.

I turned and looked at Golds, who, suffering the shame of the doubter, pulled the tiny kimono down over his nut sack, and gathering as much pride as he could, walked on in.

To say the energy in Candy’s room was unusual would be an understatement. It was a whole other galaxy in there.

“Sit down, sit down, I’m glad you guys came.” Candy’s room wasn’t a room like ours. It was a suite and we were in the living room, which I remember as being very small, though it may have been his intense manic energy that made everything seem so claustrophobic and compressed. I sat in a chair on the side of the room closest to the door and Golds took a chair on the far wall, causing him to cross the room in his kimono. Candy, pleased with our arrival, plunged back down on the love seat with a 1000 g’s of force, hitting the cushions like an Apollo rocket splashdown before spreading across the entire width of the little sofa. Yet somehow, he did it all with a Gleason-esque nimbleness, totally in control of his massive girth… Actually, let me take that back or at least revise it. You saw hints of that nimbleness, but at this point he was two Jackie Gleasons at least, and shaped more like a huge stack of hay with a head than a human being.

“You guys want a drink?”

Golds shook his head no, and his Thomas Jefferson hair shook with it. I didn’t want one either.

“Hey guys, look at this, look at this… Eugene is really funny here… Watch, watch, watch Eugene.” Golds and I turned our heads toward the very old-school 19-inch hotel color TV which had been on since we walked in, and to which Candy had hooked a rather large industrial VHS machine. He was watching tapes of old episodes of SCTV. Now, if you don’t know what SCTV is, it is basically the Canadian “Saturday Night Live,” and though it was short-lived, it produced a group of brilliant comic stars including Candy, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, and Eugene Levy, who is the Eugene that John was telling us to watch.

And so we watch with slightly forced, now almost three AM smiles on our faces. I try to make believe I am enjoying this fine example of classic sketch work but what I’m really thinking is, “Holy fuck, me and Golds are up in Calgary to do final rewrites on our first movie, and now have somehow found ourselves beckoned at 3 AM to the room of our star, the beloved John Candy, who having downed almost an entire quart of vodka and smoked 2000 very thin white Eurotrash cigarettes is sitting in his hotel suite watching videotapes of himself on SCTV like Norma fucking Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.”

“Watch, Eugene, watch, Eugene… Watch… He’s funny here.”

Candy leaned forward on the couch, and pulled so hard on his thin, long cigarette it seemed as though he was sucking out its soul, the already lean white cylinder looking even skinnier between his massive bratwurst fingers. He had some kind of chunky man ring on that was so big around it could have functioned as a cock ring for half the men in the world. It had a big glittery stone and engraving, and looked like a class ring, but it turned out to be his CFL championship ring, more specifically a 1991 36-21 Grey Cup victory over the Calgary Stampeders.

“You sure you guys don’t want a drink?”

We silently smiled another “no,” as John poured some more vodka over the ice in his glass. There was a finger’s worth left in the bottle, and not one of his fingers.

“Fucking Moranis, Jew still has every dollar he ever made.”

The sketch with John and Eugene was over and now Rick Moranis had come on the screen.

We turned to look at Rick Moranis, but as we did the TV clicked off.

“Guys,” he said.

We turned back toward him. His energy had changed.

“I need this thing to be really good. Understand? I need it to be really good for me. I need it to be really, really good.”

He talked slowly and clearly, as if this was information we very much needed to understand.

“I need this one to be really good, understand, this one has to be really good.”

He paused and looked down. And after a long beat continued--

“I’m nobody. I’m nobody in this town… I’m nothing… I’m nobody. I’m dog boy. I’m dog boy in this town… My agent died of AIDS, he didn’t even tell me he had it… He didn’t even tell me… I had to find out through my publicist and when I went to see him in the hospital he was on life support, and I couldn’t even say goodbye.”

He wasn’t kidding. And I don’t just mean about the agent, I mean about the pain. The dude was in real pain and the booze and the cigarettes and the food, and whatever pills or coke or he might have been adding to the mix, none of it was helping.

“You guys got to make this good for me. We got to make this really good.”

And he looked at us with a tragic, last chance to make it right pleading in his eyes. As if we held not just the fate of his career in our hands, but his entire cosmic worth. It was all on the line, everything. He had become, in his mind, “nobody” and had decided that this co-starring part as the tarnished coach in a medium budget Disney movie could make him somebody again.

Now, I don’t know if he decided this when he took the part or at the read-through or if it came to him in a fit of inspiration fifteen minutes before, as he glugged down Stoli, and watched himself on TV, but come to him it had, and so he picked up the phone to rouse the troops and summon the muse, but in the middle of his big we have to make this movie special pep talk, things had taken a dark turn.

“Dude, people love you, you’re John Candy.”

“No, I’m dog boy. I’m dog boy.”

We didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and only later realized he must have meant the part he played in the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs, where he was a Brooksian lampoon of the dog-like character Chewbacca named Barf. Clearly it had not sit well with him, and at that point Spaceballs was just another one of the not as good as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein Mel Brooks movies and not the wildly beloved video classic it has since become.

It was such a wild thing to say. So wild, I don’t really remember much after it. I’m sure we must have discussed how to make the script better and what his concerns were, and that Golds probably grabbed a pen and pad from the hotel room desk and excitedly scribbled things down, but the “I’m nobody, I’m nothing, I’m dog boy, my agent died of AIDS and didn’t tell me” rant is so burned into my brain, it’s all I really remember.

What really bums me out about the whole thing is, at that point, I didn’t even realize then how truly gifted the guy was. I hadn’t seen JFK, where he plays that wild, hep-cat lawyer with the shades and tells Kevin Costner over a plate of crab meat, “Is this off the record daddio, because if I answer that question you keep asking, if I give you the name of the big enchilada, then it’s bon voyage Deano, and I mean permanent, I mean like a bullet in my head, you dig.” I hadn’t seen that yet, so I wasn’t able to tell him how much I dig that flick and him in it, or how great he is in Planes Trains and Automobiles—But the truth is it wouldn’t have mattered. He was way past the panacea of a few kind words. And besides, what he did in JFK couldn’t touch what he was doing now. That was just film; this was live. This was a one-time-only performance of Dog Boy, starring everyone’s favorite funny man, John Franklin Candy.

Poor guy was a mess. The devil had grabbed him by the scruff of his massive neck, and wasn’t letting go. He was in withdrawal. He had gotten strung out on the Hollywood love juice, and now his dealers were cutting him off. The big offers had dried up. There were no longer well-dressed men and women all over town trying to put together the next John Candy vehicle. Only someone who has experienced that kind love and adoration can so deeply feel its absence. Heroin is strong, but the swirling cabal of fame, love, respect and money is a whole other category. And if you started out as a weird little fat kid from Newmarket, Ontario, you better really watch out.

But at least he had done it. He had used SCTV as a launching pad, and climbed that mountain all the way to the top. But now he was coming down the other side of that hill and picking up speed, and when he looked in the mirror, all he saw was a fat, washed-up fuck that no one gave a shit about. And so he called us in the hope that he could slow things down a bit. The pretense was the script, but our real role was as co-priests in this hotel room confessional. We stayed till about 5:30, when we finally went back to our rooms in a pre-dawn daze, to see if we could grab a few hours of sleep before a scheduled breakfast work session.

The movie came out in October of 1993; by March of ’94, John Candy was dead. It happened down in Durango, Mexico where he was working on a western spoof called Wagons East. His weight had topped out at 375 pounds, and they were having trouble finding a horse that could hold him. For forty-three years he had neglected, abused, and abandoned his big, beautiful, fat boy heart, and it had finally had enough and “attacked” him. On his final night he made a big lasagna dinner for some of the cast and crew, went to bed, and woke up dead.

In my perfect world he calls us into his room that night and says, “Guys, I need this to be really good for me because I need love.” And I say, “Yes! Yes, me too, John, me too. I need love. I was in my room shooting drugs trying to get some when you called. You’re not the only one with a broken heart, I’ve got one too. Golds does too. We’re nobody too.” I don’t know if that would have helped him, but it would have helped me and I needed the help ‘cause I kept shooting dope for fifteen more years until my heart attacked me and I had to have open-heart surgery and was at death’s front door with a big red bow on.

Candy came off great in the film, but nothing we discussed that night had any bearing on that. The truth is we just caught him at the right time. The character he was playing was a fallen hero, full of shame and doubt, with a great big heart underneath. It was perfect casting. And it didn't hurt that he was funny. He was sweet, and he was broken, and he was funny. And that’s my John Candy story.