Despite Schmidt’s advice John tried to join the Marines. Even though he tried to talk John out of it, O’Mara went on that trip, “He said that basic training would trim him down and he'd get a life” (reminiscent of Dewey “Ox” Oxburger – a character John would play later in the film Stripes). So in March Break 1969, the friends travelled 140 miles to Buffalo, New York where John had an appointment with the recruiting sergeant, they wanted to see him the following day for a physical exam. O’Mara remembers, “The next day, we went back, having shared a bed in the motel, a la Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, a scene which was so similar to our experience that I think John must have had a hand in it.” Due to John’s previous knee injury he failed the physical and was told he “would never get past basic training.” That night O’Mara pulled John out of his depression by jollying him out of it and going to the movies, they watched Bullit and “later, we sat through three straight showings of Midnight Cowboy, a great, but depressing film, one which John made into an hilarious skit, him playing Joe Buck.”
Thank goodness for that bum knee.
Despite the loss of his father growing up there were a lot of happy times for John. The family were very social and liked to entertain. “We lived with my grandparents. My grandmother was Polish, so we had a lot of cabbage rolls and coffee. There was the North American diet and my Grandmother would cook that roast until it got good and gray. I never knew meat was pink until I was twenty three. Ooooo, what’s this? Pink. Ooooo send it back. Boil those vegetables down. In summer there’s always stuff from the garden. Take-out food. A lot of barbecues. It depends on the occasion. I guarantee you, no one ever walked into the house who didn’t get fed. There were some fine meals. I look back now and that house was so small. How could twenty people fit in there? We did. There were Christmas and New Year’s parties. It was great. Good memories.”
A responsible John took on the father role, something which was mirrored throughout his life, looking after people and in particular, being extremely protective over his family. He was surrounded by an adoring family, a good school and plenty of friends. Women played a big role. After the loss of his father, John’s Aunt Frances (Fran) lived with them for a while, his mother and her sister were inseparable, ‘Van and Fran’ as they were known. Surrounded by women and being a very respectful soul, John was very good at wooing the ladies, mainly because he was always unassuming and such a gentleman. O’Mara recalls “The ladies liked John because he was up for anything and very witty. He was tall and heavy set, which made smaller people, boys included, feel safe around him.” Once his elder brother Jim had moved out John was the head of the household and he took that responsibility very seriously. Ted Schmidt gives a lot of credit to Van and Fran for the way John turned out.
After his football and Marines careers were no longer an option John went to Centennial College in Scarborough. With no idea of what he wanted to do he enrolled on the journalism course “because it was easier than typing”, but he complained to Mr Schmidt that they were teaching him things he had learnt in Neil McNeil, so he later dropped out and joined the drama group.
As well as college John was still working part-time, now in Eaton’s College Sporting Department; little did he know that this was where fate was going to smile down on him in several ways.
Fate
In 1970 Glaswegian, Catherine McCartney (who had immigrated to Toronto when she was just 19), started an acting agency right across the street from Eaton’s College. Eaton’s had a cafeteria; McCartney had gone over for a takeout and was standing in line when a man literally ran into her, nearly knocking her off her feet. It was John. McCartney tells me, “He felt so terrible about that, he was so worried that he had hurt me and we started talking.” John and McCartney just clicked, they sat down together, chatted, and without knowing what that encounter would bring, became lifelong friends. John explained he had just finished school, was working at Eaton’s part time and was taking some acting classes. McCartney explained that was a coincidence as she had just started an acting agency, at that time there were only two or three agencies in Toronto.
“Then as these things happen, the day after I was over there, he saw me, he waved and then he came over to see how I was. I said to him ‘Do you still want to be in this business?’ and he said ‘Sure’.” McCartney’s agency had just got a breakdown for a TV commercial for Colgate toothpaste. The lead in the advert was a well-known celebrity, Art Linkletter, who was a Canadian born TV and radio personality, presenting several shows including House Party and Kids Say the Darndest Things. The production company wanted some young, high school football players to be in the locker room and McCartney thought John would be a good fit. As John wanted to be a football player in real life he was happy to be put forward for it, he had a picture that McCartney put in a cab and sent over for the casting team to see. “He went the following day and low and behold he got it. So that was the beginning. That was his first professional job.”
So John nervously went along to his first paid acting job.
Art was in a terrible mood that day and was quite a scary prospect for any young amateur actor. John later recalled how he hated doing that job, “it was horrible”. Art Linkletter had at one stage told John that he shouldn’t smoke, 6ft 3 John retorted by looking down at him saying “yeah, it will really stunt my growth”. Although not enjoyable the experience was good for John and he made another friend for life that day - Jim Henshaw.
They were both 21, John had been cast as a Lineman, Henshaw as a Running Back and there was another guy playing a Quarterback. They each had a line or two, but the main star was Linkletter, who, during the commercial would come into their locker room to explain that “Colgate protected your teeth the way helmets protected our heads”.
Henshaw elaborates: “The Quarterback had done several commercials, but this was the first time for John and me so we did the rookie actor thing of sticking close together, covering for each other and sharing whatever we separately gleaned of this new world.”
Linkletter was having a bad day and according to Henshaw the Linkletter he met that day would have had most kids screaming “Get me the f**k out of here!”
Who knows what was bugging Linkletter that day, but his mood did not improve throughout the shoot and he seemed to have a problem with everyone and everything. John had one line that he ended up saying 100 times for the amount of takes the advert took, that line was “Oh sure, Casanova!”. Henshaw recalls, “John and I had never worked with a BIG star before and tried to stay out of his way. But we still became the occasional focus of his dissatisfaction. As the day wore on and we sweated under the hot lights in our equipment, it felt like it would never end.”
To cheer each other and pass the time John and Henshaw talked about football. John told Henshaw how he had been a high school star player and how he had wanted to play for the Toronto Argonauts, Henshaw was a staunch Saskatchewan Roughrider fan so the banter and friendly rivalry kept them up beat.
Later that afternoon, as the crew were working hard to get everything ‘just so’ for Linkletter, John and Henshaw hung out in the locker room. “John and I lounged against our lockers. He wondered what really was making the man so damned unhappy. I remembered hearing that his daughter had died a couple of years earlier after dropping Acid and trying to fly out her apartment window.
“John took this aboard and said, ‘A couple more hours and we'll all be looking for windows.’ I cracked up. So did the crew. Even the Quarterback got it.”
Unfortunately so did Linkletter (they didn’t realise that their mics were on the whole time). Storming back in to the studio Linkletter demanded that both John and Henshaw should be fired, it was only when one of the production team stepped in and told him that he was going to miss his plane they got the rest of the commercial finished within 15 minutes.
Just a short time later, John and Henshaw would find themselves working together again as extras in their first film, The Class of ‘44. John played Pauly, t
hey only had small parts and although excited to be in a film, Henshaw told me “I don’t think any of us had more than a line or two in the movie. It wasn’t a great movie by any stretch. It was one of the first movies made in Toronto, it was being made because The Summer of ‘42 had been so successful, but the original cast really had no interest in being there. We felt like they were just being handed work and they didn’t seem happy about it and it confused us. We were just happy with our one line.”
John and Henshaw were even more excited when John discovered Henshaw was wearing pants that had been worn by none other than Frank Sinatra or as the label said ‘Francis Sinatra’ (they were period costumes brought over by wardrobe from LA). They also found two drink tickets for the Catalina Island Yacht Club in the pocket (a popular hangout for Hollywood Stars from the 1920s onwards); they each took one as a memento.
Frequently hanging out in Catherine McCartney’s office, things just kept falling into place. It was here John met a young aspiring writer, Lorne Frohman, they instantly hit it off and started writing together. John and Frohman used to have an office on Yonge Street which was above a strip club, it was one of the first generation of strip clubs that were more than burlesque in the region. Very often they would never make it to the office. “By the time we got up the first two floors of stairs we were so tired, and we smoked then and we would stop and go into the strip club. We were just like these two immature, vulnerable writers whose eyes popped out. We started at eleven o'clock in the morning and the club opened at eleven and we would never get up there, so that was a lot of fun.”
“We would sneak in and watch the girls” Frohman recalls, but they would never talk to anyone as they were too embarrassed.
When they did get to the office they wrote a lot, including a show. “We went to a place in Toronto that was called CFTO TV. John and I went to pitch a show, coincidentally enough it was a show like The Daily Show. It was called Eyewitness News and John and I thought we were television producers, performers and writers, we went in to pitch the show, we weren’t arrogant but we thought we knew everything. “
Pitching to Gerry Rochon, a Canadian Producer, they fast learnt they that actually didn’t know anything about television or the logistics of producing a programme. Rochon obliterated them. “He asked us what the budget was, how would we produce this, cameras and editors? We basically knew nothing of that, he just threw us out of his office, he said ‘do you know what? You guys will probably never amount to anything’. The funny thing is when I bumped into John later on in life after we had gone our own ways, John did two shows out of CFTO where he was the star, just as he was becoming well known. He would walk down the hall of CFTO and every time he saw Gerry Rochon he would raise his finger and would just make fun of him and it became a standard joke. That was really funny and Rochon didn’t do it as serious as it sounds, he had a liking towards us and really and truly we didn’t know what we were talking about.” Frohman found John very funny, especially as they came from very different worlds, Frohman was Jewish and John of course was Catholic. Frohman would pick John up every day, he drove a Jaguar XKE convertible and in Frohman’s own words, “Yes, I was spoiled. My father bought it for me to try and lure me into law school. Of course I never had the grades because I was close to an idiot but here we were driving around town in an XKE like stars and who knew we were just two jerks trying to get a break in show business which by the way, at that time, there was no show business in Toronto! I felt like a fake driving around, but Candy liked it.”
John started to focus on his acting career and featured in a few more adverts including one for Molson Golden Ale. During the next couple of years John would also meet a sweet art student, Rosemary Hobor, via a blind date. The couple hit it off straight away, he then asked Rosemary to help type a script for him and from that day they were together, always.
Setting the Stage
In 1971 John landed one of his first roles on the stage in a production called Creeps, written by David Freeman and directed by Bill Glassco. The play explores cerebral palsy from the perspective of someone who is affected by the condition. John was cast as one of the two Shriners, the other Shriner was Charles Northcote. To put that into context for anyone who is not familiar with the term, a Shriner is a member of the group ‘Shriners’ – originally called ‘Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine’ and is related to Freemasonry. They are known for charity work, especially for the ‘Shriners Hospitals for Children’. The hospitals are part of a network of non-profit medical facilities for children with orthopaedic conditions, burns, spinal cord injuries and cleft palates.
Northcote was at University and practicing drama at the Shaw Festival in Canada. Wanting to get into the acting world professionally, he asked the wardrobe mistress “Do you know of anything going?”, she advised him to give her friend in Toronto a call as they were just starting up a theatre there. Northcote put the call in and found himself at the Tarragon Theatre, which, as Northcote describes to me, is “now one of the best known theatres in Toronto, but at the time it was just starting up and the theatre was being built around us.”
Up until this stage, John and Northcote had both been amateurs picking up bits of work here and there. This was one of the first times they were being paid to act on a semi-permanent basis. They had three different scenes with time to kill in-between. Northcote told me “We were dressed as Shriners as it was the whole thing about charity and the how the characters disliked charity etc. John and I had these three scenes together and we were outrageous. I wore robes and in one scene, John had a Mickey Mouse mask where he would do a Jack Benny style take against his face with the mouse mask and looking back and forth at people. This play captured the imagination of Toronto, it was supposed to run for a couple of weeks but it kept on being extended and being extended.
“As it was extended all of us became a lot closer, the play lasted around 90 minutes so at 9.30pm we were free every night, at one of the local tavern’s, The Clinton Tavern we could get 5 pints for a dollar. We would go and we were making CAN$40 a week, or I thought we were making $40 a week each – later on when John was very successful I was visiting him, he said ‘you were making $40?, I only got $35!’ So I made $5 more a week than John in that first decade.”
Meanwhile Allan O’Marra was dating a lady called Julia, Julia happened to be a good friend of Rose and John as they all worked at Eaton’s together. O’Marra recalls, “The four of us went out together, on occasion for drinks and my first time seeing him as an actor was in the theatre production of the satirical review, Creeps, at the Tarragon Theatre, late in the fall of 1971 which I attended with Julia and Rose. I understood that he was thrilled and excited about his first theatre gig and I was highly impressed with his acting in the play, he appeared to be such a natural.” Like Rose, O’Marra attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto, he actually took early head shots of John for his acting resume and would later paint a portrait that the Candy family still treasure today.
The way the Tarragon Theatre was laid out there was only one spare room that served as a dressing room. As John and Northcote had three entrances in the play that were spaced quite far apart there was lots of time for them to chat and joke around. Northcote remembers, “Well John at that point is when John became ‘John Candy’. He was so funny, I remember him doing the ‘International Cow Convention’, held at the cow palace in San Francisco. All cows have the universal language – the monosyllabic moo – the cows from different countries had different accents. So I would interview him and I would talk to the Swedish cow – and John would ‘moo’ in a Swedish accent, the Hawaiian cow was called Moo-moo, the Polish cow was Oink, it was silliness. We would go to the bar afterwards and continue to celebrate really, we had fun every night, hell we were young, it was magic, we were being paid to act and we were in this hit show. So it really was a golden time.”
It was a great time to be involved in theatre as it had just started to take off in Toronto, and out
of that, a whole alternative theatre scene emerged.
Another memory Northcote has of John was that he was a major hockey nut. “We would watch ice time for his team – that was the first time I met Rose, his going to be wife. She, at that time was going to the Ontario College of Art, he adored her. So Rose and I would pack up thermoses of coffee etc. and we would always go from the theatre or the bar to an ice rink somewhere. It’s cheaper to book time in the off peak hours, so often it was midnight. Rose and I would sit in the stands, pretty much the only people in the stands, drinking coffee and watching John play hockey. He was remarkably light on his feet, he was fast on the ice.”
During that time he was working as a greeting card delivery and salesman. He would go to different stores that were on his route, check the cards and make sure that the stock was good. Northcote would sometimes go with him, “It was so funny to think after all these bizarre jobs that he ended up where he ended up, but the thing about John was he was always consistent – what you saw was what you got. He didn’t put on any airs, whether he was talking to a greeting card buyer or talking to a star. That was 1970, of course we kept in touch. In ’72, I got a break and I was cast at the Stratford and Shaw Shakespearean festival, John helped organise a surprise going away party for me and it was just so wonderful, a lot of friends that both of us had acquired over the two or three years, from the Creeps cast onwards, came to wish me well going off to Stratford, because that was a big deal.”
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