Kenney, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray knew all of this as honor-roll students of comedy. But acting on screen wasn’t the same as getting up in front of a nightclub audience and doing twenty minutes of self-written material. Could he actually stand in front of a movie camera and do what came so naturally to him on Carson’s stage? It was a little late to ask him, at fifty-seven, to learn such a daunting new skill. “Rodney was a complete crapshoot,” says Trevor Albert. “No one knew what we were going to get.” That would turn out to be a serious understatement when Peters invited Dangerfield to his office on the Warner lot for lunch.
“We brought him in and he comes to the studio in a big black limo,” says Peters. “He comes into my office in this aqua-blue leisure suit and takes out a plastic bag and does two lines of coke on the table. He sniffs the coke, undoes his shirt, and says, ‘Where’s the pussy?’” It was a hell of a first impression. Dangerfield would end up getting $35,000 for his role in Caddyshack. And though he would always graciously credit the film for launching his movie career, he would often do so while complaining that he actually lost $150,000 on the film, since he had to give up a month of headlining in Vegas to shoot it.
* * *
Ted Knight had been nominated for six Emmys during his seven-season run on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s difficult to fathom how he only won twice. As Ted Baxter, the show’s cluelessly pompous, word-mangling anchorman with a mane of impeccable silver hair, ice-blue eyes, and a chin seemingly carved from granite, Knight made egomania and stupidity oddly lovable from 1970 to 1977. The key to the character (aside from Knight’s impeccable timing) had always been that beneath his confident gasbag veneer, Knight’s Baxter was nothing more than a grown-up child—desperate for approval, easily wounded, and unwilling to come clean when he was wrong. It was that very complexity that made him the perfect candidate to play Caddyshack’s often-apoplectic presiding club majordomo, Judge Elihu Smails.
Tadeusz Wladyslaw Konopka was born to a Polish immigrant bartender and a housewife in Terryville, Connecticut, on December 7, 1923. On his eighteenth birthday, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, so he dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army. During WWII, he earned five Bronze Stars and was one of the first American soldiers to enter Berlin. After the war, he enrolled in a Hartford drama school and eventually landed jobs on the fringes of show business as a radio disc jockey, a ventriloquist, and a puppeteer. In the ’50s, he moved to New York, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing. Throughout the decade and into the ’60s, he was rarely out of work, whether on TV or in film, but fame eluded him (despite a small role in one of the greatest movies of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho). He was a working actor, but not a well-known one.
He officially renamed himself Ted Knight after arriving in LA in the late ’50s—a name he’d once used hosting a kiddie show in Providence, Rhode Island. “When I was young, I was frequently cast in grade-B war movies as Nazis,” Knight once said. “You know, the uber-lieutenant who had ways of making the underground heroine talk. Then the guerillas would attack the Gestapo headquarters and beat me to a Nordic pulp.”
In the spring of 1970, at the late-in-the-game age of forty-seven, he auditioned for a new CBS ensemble comedy about a single working woman in a male-dominated profession. He was so desperate for a part on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he came in to read for the role in clothes resembling those of a small-market newscaster’s that he had purchased from a thrift store. As he tested for the show’s producers, it was impossible to tell where Knight’s insecurity began and Baxter’s ended. He came back for three more auditions before he was given the role.
The irony is, Knight was so convincing as his dim-witted television alter ego that he lived in constant fear audiences believed he, too, was just an empty suit—that the two Teds were inseparable in the public’s mind. When The Mary Tyler Moore Show finally ended, in 1977, Knight was so desperate to break out of his gilded cage of dopiness and land a starring role in a feature film that he probably would have paid Orion. What no one knew was that Knight had been diagnosed with cancer just two years before Caddyshack. He was convinced that working on a movie set would be the best medicine. “Ted was on my list of people who could do the part,” says Nicita. “He was an iconic television comedy actor playing a straight-ass. He was this guy. It wasn’t the most creative casting I’ve ever done.” It’s been rumored over the years that Jason Robards was also considered for the part of Judge Smails, but Nicita swats that notion away. “That would have been so tonally odd.”
* * *
As Nicita was casting Caddyshack, whenever she got close to zeroing in on the final two or three candidates for a particular part, she would put their head shots up on the wall of her office. It’s an old trick she learned from her former boss. “That way you can physically see how their colors work with the other actors; it’s like a painting in a way,” she says. “It gives you a good map of how the movie’s going to look.” When it came time to cast the lead role (or at least what was considered the lead role at that point in the process) of Danny Noonan, she found herself staring at two photos: those of Michael O’Keefe and Mickey Rourke.
“Mickey made sense in a way because he was Irish,” she says. He was also a little intense and Method-y for a giddily debauched country club comedy. “We were really leaning toward Mickey Rourke to play Danny,” echoed Ramis. “He was great! He was young, he was cool, a very natural actor—not Hollywood at all. He seemed like a real person. Maybe too real for the movie. Michael O’Keefe seemed like a really good boy. Plus, he was a scratch golfer. Mickey Rourke was much more complicated.”
O’Keefe was also someone that Orion was high on. The twenty-four-year-old actor had just wrapped another picture for the studio, The Great Santini, in which he played the sensitive son of a domineering, hard-ass Marine pilot played by Robert Duvall. The executives at Orion had been knocked out by O’Keefe’s performance, especially in a scene in which Duvall bounces a basketball off of O’Keefe’s forehead trying to make him either break down or fight back. He possessed a boyish vulnerability and sort of conflicted inner toughness. Orion knew that soon other studios would be after him. Why not grab him now before the secret got out? O’Keefe would ultimately earn a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Santini (and would lose to Timothy Hutton for Ordinary People).
O’Keefe, who had grown up in Larchmont, New York, began acting at fifteen when he appeared in a Colgate toothpaste commercial. He’d trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in their teen program and had appeared on such TV shows as M*A*S*H and The Waltons. He made his feature film debut in 1978’s Gray Lady Down opposite Charlton Heston. O’Keefe had been a hard-core National Lampoon fan as a teen, and had even gone to see Chase and Belushi in Lemmings when he was an undergrad at NYU. “The Lampoon totally shaped my sense of humor going back to the ‘If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog’ cover,” he says. “During the audition process Doug Kenney and I sort of bonded. He had this combination of innocence and cynicism that somehow would move around within him depending on what internal winds were blowing. He was immediately like a big brother. He just engendered that kind of feeling in people. Doug wanted to be a rock star and he wanted to garner the attention of literary critics, and that’s not so far from where my head was at back then.”
During his first audition, O’Keefe lied to Ramis and told him that he’d been playing golf for years. “After I got the part, I thought, I’m in a lot of trouble now. I guess I have to get my shit together and get a golf swing.” O’Keefe’s father knew some of the members at the Winged Foot golf club in Westchester (O’Keefe had even caddied there as a teen) and pulled some strings to get his son some lessons with the club’s pro, Tom Nieporte, who had won the Bob Hope Desert Classic in 1967. O’Keefe played golf every day for six weeks before the film started. When asked if he was aware that he had been competing against Rourke for the role of Danny Noonan, O’Keefe admits that he was.
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��This was the early, young, hot, relaxed Mickey Rourke,” he says. “He was as compelling as Marlon Brando in a way back then. I can see why they would have given him some serious consideration. But I’m a little more easy on the eyes than Mickey. Clearly, it would have been a much darker movie.”
* * *
Since the Caddyshack script had been largely cobbled together from the teenage recollections of Brian Doyle-Murray, he knew early on that he wanted to be more than just a writer on the film. With his years of Second City training and time on stage with the National Lampoon Show and skits on the Radio Hour, he was a more experienced actor than most of the stars they were casting in the film. So Doyle-Murray dug deep into his past and pulled out one of the most memorable oddballs he’d ever met in his years as a caddie to play in the film.
Doyle-Murray’s Caddyshack character is Lou Loomis, the gruff, put-upon caddie master. The inspiration for the character was actually Lou Janis, the caddie master at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka. Janis was a crusty golf course lifer with a fondness for drip-dry polyester clothing and who drove an old Ford Falcon. He would become a mentor of sorts for several of the Murray boys, giving them their first bitter taste of the working world. He was also a rabid gambler with a weakness for making insanely random wagers. Bill Murray, who also worked for Janis, would recall, “Louie was a gambler; he’d bet on anything—whether a member on the putting green would sink one or two of his three three-footer warm-up putts, whether or not a guy would pick up his tee after his opening drive, just about anything.” Murray helped him pick which college football games to bet on. Janis also ran his own racket on the caddies, letting them charge food and refreshments against their earnings. He kept a running tally on a board outside his office in the caddie shack showing how much each kid owed him—a gag that ended up in the film.
Doyle-Murray had another reason to want to be on the Caddyshack set every day. He’d begun dating Sarah Holcomb—the young actress who would play Danny Noonan’s Irish rose, Maggie O’Hooligan. The twenty-one-year-old actress from Weston, Connecticut, had made her feature film debut in Animal House, where she got to know Kenney. She had played Clorette, the underage daughter of Mayor Carmine DePasto, who goes to the Delta House toga party with Tom Hulce’s Pinto and passes out, blackout-drunk. Although Ramis wasn’t the one who cast her in that film, he thought she was so lovely in the movie that he wanted to work with her again. The only hitch was that they wanted Maggie to speak with a heavy Irish brogue. She had been written that way because all of the teenage girls who worked at Indian Hill during the Murray years had come over from Ireland on work visas. After she got the Caddyshack role, she and Doyle-Murray took a working vacation to Ireland as “research.” “We were trying to be faithful to the Murrays’ experiences, so I kind of stuck her with this awful Irish accent,” said Ramis.
By the first week of August, most of the main roles in the film had been filled. But Orion was pressing for one more big-name star to join Chase, Dangerfield, and Knight. Golf loves a foursome. So Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray reached out to someone they’d always been able to rely on—even if no one else could: Bill Murray. Meatballs had hit theaters two months earlier and immediately established Murray as SNL’s heir to Chase and Belushi—the next cast member most likely to make a successful jump from the small screen to the silver one. But Murray was already overextended. After the fourth season of SNL ended, on May 26, he flew out to Los Angeles and quickly began starring in a Hunter S. Thompson biopic for Universal called Where the Buffalo Roam.
The Thompson movie was loosely based on the gonzo journalist’s 1977 Rolling Stone article, “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat.” And it had turned into a fully immersive, Method-acting experience for the SNL star. During filming, Thompson had moved into the guesthouse of Murray’s rented home in North Hollywood. During one break in shooting, the two went to Thompson’s ranch near Aspen, Colorado, and got into a heated argument after a long night of drinking about who was the better escape artist. Thompson then tied Murray to a chair and threw him into his swimming pool. Murray almost drowned before Thompson jumped in and rescued him at the last minute. As chaotic as his daredevil high jinks with the Good Doctor were, though, the production would end up being even more so. Murray would have only the smallest of windows between when Buffalo wrapped and when he was due back in New York to start the fifth season of SNL.
His older brother Brian assured him they’d somehow make it work, even if it was just for a week. What Doyle-Murray forgot to mention was that the character Murray would be playing didn’t quite exist on the page yet. They’d figure that out, too. Next, was the question of Murray’s salary. He was a star now—or at least well on his way to becoming one in the new Hollywood calculus. “I think I was kind of an afterthought,” says Murray. “I got into the movie because of my brother Brian. I don’t know how long they were at this thing. But between the time they started writing it and the time they started shooting it, I’d gone from being an unemployed actor to paying my rent and then being able to rent cars. Suddenly, I was on TV and then I was in the movies, and I had just done a movie that did surprisingly well. But I think the real reason why I got the job was because I was reasonably priced. I think they just wanted to toss me in because they could get me cheap.”
Actually, it wouldn’t be that cheap at all. On September 21, shortly after filming on Caddyshack began, The Hollywood Reporter ran an item about Murray’s salary on the movie: “Could this be a typo by an eager press agent? For his starring role on Caddyshack, Bill Murray’s salary will be $250,000 per week! If true, Murray will be getting more per week than he gets for a whole year on Saturday Night Live.” As far as the filmmakers were concerned that was now Orion’s problem.
“With each new cast member that was hired, there was a sense of celebration around the office,” says Jon Peters’s underling Rusty Lemorande. “It was like, Hey, we got Ted Knight! Yay! Hey, we got Rodney Dangerfield! Hey, we got Bill Murray!” Now Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray just had to come up with some lines for their latest star … or not.
* * *
Before Murray would end up joining the Caddyshack cast, there were smaller but still-vital roles that needed to be filled in the ensemble before shooting would begin in September. They were racing against the clock—and not just because the casting director, Wallis Nicita, was pregnant. On July 16, Nicita placed a casting notice in Variety seeking actors to play the following parts: “Lacey Underall, 17, slim, beautiful, long blonde hair, tan, athletic, sexy seductress; Tony D’Annunzio, 19, tough, street-wise, good-looking, well built, hip caddy, womanizer; Dr. Blaine Beeper, middle aged, attractive, rich, snobbish surgeon; Spaulding Smails, 17, overweight, aggressive, spoiled, obnoxious, arrogant … SAG talent send photos and resumes to Wally Nicita (c/o The Burbank Studios Producers Bldg. 5, 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank 91522). No phone calls or deliveries.”
Most of the remaining parts were hashed out in a series of seemingly endless casting sessions held in Nicita’s small office on the Warner Bros. lot. “I got thousands of submissions,” says Nicita. “Doug and Harold would come to the casting sessions, and I’d read with all of the actors. Doug and Harold were smoking weed all day. I mean, I don’t think they were ripped all day long, but once in a while they would do that.” There was one occasion, though, when Kenney decided that he would read with one of the hopefuls.
Although the part of the fast-and-loose seductress Lacey Underall was written as being seventeen years old, Cindy Morgan was twenty-four when she read for the part. Born Cynthia Ann Cichorski in Chicago, Morgan had been a communications major at Northern Illinois University and quickly began working her way up the small-market broadcast food chain until she made her way to the Windy City. “I was the morning-drive disc jockey at WLUP 97.9 FM in Chicago,” Morgan says. “I had just come from doing the weather in Rockford. I was making $135 a week. They wouldn’t let me do commercials, so I said, ‘To heck with you guys, I’m going to LA.’ They said I’d n
ever get a job.” But within a couple of months, Morgan was the new face of Irish Spring soap.
With ambitions of becoming an actress, Morgan began studying improv with Harvey Lembeck—an acting teacher who had worked with Robin Williams, Penny Marshall, and John Ritter. “I got the script for Caddyshack and thought, Well, this isn’t me. Twelve years of Catholic school, I was far from Lacey Underall. But I thought, I’ll give it a shot, I have nothing to lose.” Jon Peters’s assistant Trevor Albert remembers the day that Morgan came in. “She was running late and she was nervous as hell,” he says. “But something special about her struck me.” Morgan hadn’t been their first choice. In fact, she hadn’t even been on their radar. Nicita says that she was hoping to get Michelle Pfeiffer for Lacey, but the actress had been put off by the nudity required for the role. Peters, meanwhile, was thinking of another beauty whose hair he used to cut: Bo Derek. But no one else wanted her. This was right before she would become the biggest sex symbol on the planet with Blake Edwards’s 10.
Morgan admits that she was terrified when she went in to meet with Nicita for the potentially career-making part of the film’s scene-stealing wanton sex kitten. But she told herself that whomever she was reading with—and hopefully it would be a guy—she had to make him sweat. When she walked into Nicita’s office, Kenney volunteered to read with her. The scene she auditioned with was the one where she reads Danny Noonan’s palm and slowly, teasingly licks it. Morgan went for it. When she was done, she saw a little trickle of sweat come down the side of Kenney’s face. “That’s when I knew I got the job,” she says. She’d been in LA a mere eight months.
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