Caddyshack

by Chris Nashawaty

  The Boston Globe delivered possibly the harshest verdict of all, saying, “Caddyshack represents everything that is wrong with contemporary film comedy. It relies on stock television characters and a stale sitcom style. It is an unoriginal pastiche of other slapstick farces such as Meatballs, and it presupposes an audience with the collective intelligence of a lobotomized ape.” Only Roger Ebert, in his two-and-a-half-out-of-four-stars review, seemed to get to the nub of what had actually happened during the making of the film: “Caddyshack feels more like a movie that was written rather loosely, so that when shooting began there was freedom, too much freedom, for it to wander off in all directions in search of comic inspiration.” The Zen-like Ramis seemed to take the negative reviews in stride, but he says that Kenney took them more personally.

  Despite the critical dog-piling, the audience polling firm CinemaScore gave Caddyshack a B rating on its generous A-to-F scale. Not surprisingly, it scored highest with male moviegoers under the age of twenty-five. During its opening weekend, from July 25 to July 27, 1980, Caddyshack made $3.1 million in 656 theaters, finishing in second place behind The Empire Strikes Back, which was still a juggernaut in its tenth week.

  After Kenney’s embarrassing display at the film’s junket, one of his concerned friends (no one recalls who) pulled Chevy Chase aside and suggested that he take Kenney somewhere where he could dry out and straighten up. With the second wave of reviews about to hit newsstands in the coming days and weeks, it seemed like a good time to get out of town. Chase understood the sentiment behind the suggestion. Part of him even agreed that it was a good idea to get Kenney the hell out of Hollywood. But he was hardly a role model for sober living at the time. “I was the last guy to ask!” Chase says. “But they knew Doug and I were close. And I could immediately see what they were talking about. The idea was to dry out, but why would that happen? Look at us at that age at that time, and the idea of me suddenly being a priest!”

  Chase and Kenney headed down to Vic Braden’s tennis camp, about eighty miles south of Los Angeles, for two weeks of exercise, healthy living, and blocking out the white noise of malicious industry chatter and the jabs of sharp-shivved critics. After that, they decided to fly to Maui for a few weeks. Said Ramis, “That’s when Doug went to Hawaii with Chevy, and Chevy came back and Doug didn’t.…”

  * * *

  Doug Kenney and Chevy Chase checked into the Hyatt Regency in Maui for their self-imposed period of relaxation and recovery. But their attempt at abstinence wouldn’t last very long. While in Hawaii, Kenney had become obsessed with tracking the box office numbers for Caddyshack. At one point, Chase said he couldn’t take it anymore and went back to his room across the hall from Kenney’s on the fifteenth floor. Chase placed his cowboy boots on his balcony and screamed as if he’d jumped. Kenney rushed across the hall, busted into Chase’s room, and looked in horror over the ledge. Chase was hiding behind the curtains and began laughing so hard that he gave himself away.

  It didn’t take long for Kenney and Chase to give in to temptation on Maui. When Kenney’s Three Wheel producing partner, Alan Greisman, joined them after a few days, he quickly noticed that there wasn’t much drying out going on. “Drying out? That is the exact opposite of what happened,” Greisman says. “They had a suite for two weeks and they never let the maid in once. I don’t think they were clean for a minute.” Dutiful assistants back in LA shipped cocaine to Chase and Kenney by FedEx, stuffing envelopes of white powder inside cut-out books and tennis balls. Getting drugs would prove to be a lot easier than giving them up.

  Greisman recalls taking a long walk on the beach with Kenney in Hawaii, where he opened up about how sad he was that Caddyshack didn’t turn out better. “He had this criteria of always being on the cutting edge with the Lampoon and then Animal House,” says Greisman. “I was shocked because it sure seemed like a success to me.” After a couple of weeks, Kenney’s girlfriend, Kathryn Walker, flew in having just finished shooting a TV movie in Newfoundland. She and Kenney seemed to be in a good place. They talked about their plans for the future. They were putting in a swimming pool at the new house on Outpost Drive and they’d ordered grown-up furniture, planning to live there together as a couple. They both seemed committed to making it work.

  In mid-August, Chase had to return to Los Angeles for work. Walker left a few days later so that she could be home when the furniture deliverymen arrived. Greisman would eventually head back to LA as well. But Kenney decided that he wanted to stay on a little longer to do some sightseeing and enjoy some time alone. He called Chase one night and asked him to come back, sounding lonely. He called Brian Doyle-Murray and apologized that Caddyshack hadn’t turned out to be a bigger hit. He wrote a chatty letter to John Landis about a movie idea he was working on for John Belushi to star in. Even Rachel Igel, Caddyshack’s assistant editor, got a postcard in which Kenney joked about the jacket he always wore that she made no secret about coveting. “He had this red jacket like the one James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause, and I really loved it,” she says. “The postcard said, ‘Me and the jacket are having a great time!’”

  Now alone, Kenney took a ferry from Maui roughly two hundred miles northwest to the island of Kauai. He checked in to the Coco Palms Resort in Wailua on August 26 and rented a Jeep. He intended to go off-roading on the island’s back trails and enjoy the views. He had told Walker that he would be flying back to LA in time for Labor Day weekend, which began on August 29. But the 29th came and went. Then the 30th. “I got a call from Kathryn saying that no one could find Doug,” says Greisman. “So everyone went over to his house to be with Kathryn. Eventually we called the police.”

  Kenney had pulled vanishing acts before, but for some reason it felt different this time, between the drugs and the disappointment of the film. “Peter and I were on Martha’s Vineyard, and we got a call from Kathryn saying that Doug was missing,” says Lucy Fisher. “The longer it went on, the scarier it got.”

  Soon, all of Kenney’s friends were holding vigil at his home. Then the call came.

  * * *

  The Hanapepe Lookout is an off-the-beaten-track spot high up in the southernmost hills of Kauai. It has staggering views of the lush tropical valley below. The quiet there can be almost deafening. The local police spotted Kenney’s rented Jeep abandoned by the side of the road shortly after receiving the missing persons call from the mainland. They walked slowly along a worn dirt footpath, through briars and brambles, and past a well-marked orange sign that reads: “DANGER: Do Not Go Beyond Guardrail.” For someone like Doug Kenney, that might have been a warning too tempting to heed. At the rim of the cliff, the police noticed a pair of shoes and a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses.

  Kenney had last been spotted at the Coco Palms on the evening of August 28. It was now September 1. As the police lowered themselves forty feet into the ravine, they spotted the twisted, sunburned body of a man wedged between two large jagged rocks. His skull had been fractured and his ribs broken. The coroner would later rule Doug Kenney’s death an accident, adding that he most likely died upon impact. He was thirty-three years old.

  Alan Greisman, the last of Kenney’s friends to see him alive, identified the body over the phone. “I asked if they found wire-rimmed glasses. They said yeah. Then I asked if the right-hand side of the glasses bent out all the way perpendicular to the lens? They said yeah.… It was Doug.”

  In the hazy, chaotic days after Kenney’s death, some of his friends thought that he had committed suicide. Others simply thought it was an accident. “Some people say he fell; some people say he jumped. I thought he fell looking for a place to jump,” said Ramis. “Anything’s possible. There were even people who thought he was murdered by drug dealers, but I kind of doubted that.”

  Ramis, who had become like family with Kenney over the previous four years closely collaborating on two films together, had the unenviable task of calling Kenney’s parents and breaking the news.

  * * *

  Chevy C
hase, Kathryn Walker, Alan Greisman, and Kenney’s attorney, Joe Shapiro, flew to Kauai the next day to retrieve the body. They drove out to Hanapepe Lookout to try and fill in the tragic picture of what might have happened to their friend. Greisman remembers looking down and thinking: This is not the kind of place where you jump to kill yourself. In his mind, it was settled. Doug was probably high and slipped. He was clumsy. He liked to step over the line. Still, that didn’t make the pain any easier to deal with or the task they were about to embark on any less surreal.

  They went back to Kenney’s hotel room. There, they found two things that only added to the mysterious nature of Kenney’s final days. The first was three words scrawled in soap on the bathroom mirror: I Love You. Was it a suicide note, or just the self-affirmation of a depressed man? Maybe it was even a note he’d left for Chase, who had still been flirting with the idea of coming back to Hawaii. The second was a notebook filled with stray thoughts. It included some ideas for a movie, a couple of random jokes, and one enigmatically composed sentence: “These are some of the happiest days I’ve ever ignored.”

  Like Kenney himself, it was cryptic, clever, and hard to pin down. “I thought it just sounded like he was unable to appreciate the fact that he was with friends in a beautiful place and that he otherwise should be happy,” says Greisman. Adds Landis, “That was just Doug, just sort of an Algonquin Round Table kind of witty line. He was full of brilliantly witty remarks. It’s like that Dorothy Parker line: If all the girls who went to Vassar were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s the kind of smarts Doug had.”

  After Kenney’s friends identified and collected his body, they headed to the airport to return to Los Angeles. Chase insisted on taking an earlier flight because he couldn’t stand the thought of being on the same plane as his best friend’s coffin. According to Greisman, as they were approaching LAX, Walker, devastated by grief, began to have a severe panic attack. As soon as they landed and Kenney’s coffin was loaded into a waiting hearse, they drove her to the emergency room at UCLA. The hearse with Kenney’s body inside sat parked in the hospital’s short-term garage.

  “It was just insane,” says Greisman. “You have to remember, we were a generation who avoided catastrophe. We avoided the war in Vietnam; we were upper-middle-class kids who were blessed in one way or another. And Doug’s death was the first hint of mortality that any of us had ever experienced. Nobody knew what to do. We were like helpless little kids.”

  17

  Welcome, Kenney Mourners!

  THE SIGN HAD APPARENTLY BEEN HENRY BEARD’S IDEA. On the roadside marquee in front of the motel where the attendees of Doug Kenney’s funeral were staying, it said: “Welcome, Kenney Mourners!” Beard thought his old National Lampoon partner would have appreciated the pitch-black sentiment. Kenney’s funeral Mass and burial took place on September 8, 1980, in Newtown, Connecticut, not far from the home that he had purchased for his parents. They had made all of the arrangements. They were burying their second son in just over a decade.

  The funeral Mass was held on a rainy Monday morning at St. Rose Church, which was filled with four hundred friends from Harvard, the National Lampoon, and Hollywood. Joni Mitchell was there. Michael O’Donoghue had arrived in a pink Chevy convertible. Bill Murray cut short a vacation in Bali and showed up at the motel in a wet suit. They all came to pay their respects, in their own way, to the first of their generation to go. Only Kenney, the charmer, the cutup, the chameleon, could have brought these three vastly different worlds together. Murray was one of the only people in the church who knew the Catholic catechism by heart. His brother Brian, along with Harold Ramis and Chevy Chase, was among the pallbearers. People who had not seen one another—and in some cases had refused to speak to one another—in years, sat together in quiet disbelief. “He was like our young fallen prince,” says Brian McConnachie, who still grows quiet recalling that afternoon.

  The funeral procession slowly snaked through the quiet New England town’s streets to Village Cemetery. It pulled to a stop at the base of a hill that overlooked a duck pond below. Chevy Chase delivered a eulogy, barely intelligible through his tears and quavering voice. One of Kenney’s closest friends from Harvard, playwright Tim Mayer, followed with equally subdued remarks. “The best thing that happened was Michael O’Donoghue saying that the biggest tragedy of this was that Doug wasn’t holding hands with Chevy at the time,” says Lampoon staffer Sean Kelly.

  As the coffin was about to be lowered into the ground, Peter Ivers, Kenney’s best friend from college, pulled out his harmonica and played a plaintive blues version of “Beautiful Dreamer,” then collapsed to his knees and howled and sobbed as the casket was lowered into the ground.

  “Everybody was devastated,” says Michael O’Keefe. “Doug was the casualty of the high-risk lifestyle and a wake-up call for everybody. It was like, ‘Okay, do you still want to go to the party? Because this is what can happen.’”

  Harold Ramis said that for years after Kenney’s death, his friend would appear to him in his dreams. Ramis would always ask him: “Doug, where have you been?” Kenney would just flash him a knowing look and not respond. Alan Greisman says that ever since Kenney died, he’s had a nagging, unshakable feeling that he didn’t really die—that he went away because he couldn’t stand the craziness of Hollywood. “I’ve had that same dream for thirty-six years,” he says.

  At the reception, some of Kenney’s friends started a halfhearted, Animal House–style food fight in his honor. But nothing seemed funny. Everything felt forced and strained. It was one thing to joke about death as Kenney had done so many times at the Lampoon, but in the end, death always got the last laugh. Two years later, John Belushi would be gone, too. On March 5, 1982, Belushi’s naked, dead body would be discovered in a room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—the result of an overdose of cocaine and heroin after a night of partying with Robin Williams, Robert De Niro, and a drug dealer and former consort of the Rolling Stones named Cathy Smith.

  Kenney wouldn’t live long enough to see that Caddyshack wasn’t the disaster he’d feared, not even close. It would go on to make $39.8 million at the box office (roughly $124 million today). But its legacy goes far beyond mere numbers. Kenney never got to hear the film’s lines—his lines—become part of the pop culture vernacular quoted by everyone from professional golfers to US presidents. He never got to see how it helped to revolutionize American comedy for more than one generation of stand-ups and satirists, bringing the underground into the daylight of the mainstream. He never got to see his friends continue to thrive and succeed on screen and off, becoming Hollywood’s next era of comedy superstars. He never got to see the long shadow that his “failure” cast, or the rabid devotion it inspired—and continues to inspire—nearly four decades later. He never got to see the end of his Cinderella story.

  “Years after Doug died, my wife took me to a medium,” says Chase. “Now, I don’t believe in that stuff at all. But I said, ‘I’ve never known how my best friend died.’ I never gave her more than that. And her feet immediately started going up, sort of raising off the floor where she was sitting. And she said, ‘Slipped … slipped.’ Then she said, ‘He’s standing right there.… He says it was the stupidest way he could have ever died.… And he left you a present.’ I said, ‘What do you mean “He left me a present”?’ And she said, ‘His glasses.’ Well, Doug’s penny loafers and glasses were left at the top of the cliff in Hawaii. I mean, whoa! That conversation absolutely convinced me that Doug’s death was an accident.”

  Chase pauses for a moment in retelling the story and exhales long and deep. For a few silent seconds, he seems to be searching for some sort of silver lining, but fails to find one. “You know, it’s really a shame. If Doug were alive today, he would’ve seen that Caddyshack became a big deal. I miss him for a lot of other reasons, but that would have been really nice.…”

  Epilogue

  CHEVY CHASE returned to the Lampoon fold as the clueless suburba
n patriarch Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and its three sequels. In the mid-’80s he checked in to the Betty Ford Clinic to kick an addiction to painkillers that he claimed was the result of years of pratfalls and punishing physical comedy. For the remainder of the ’80s—in such films as Fletch (1985) and Three Amigos (1986)—he remained one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood before a career downturn in the ’90s. From 2009 to 2013, he was a regular cast member on the NBC sitcom Community.

  RODNEY DANGERFIELD went on to have an unlikely second act on the big screen in the wake of Caddyshack with such hit comedies as Easy Money (1983) and Back to School (1986), the latter of which was cowritten by Harold Ramis. His self-named New York City comedy club continued to thrive (even after the disastrous Caddyshack press junket) and remained a vital launching pad for several generations of young stand-ups, including Jim Carrey. Dangerfield died in 2004 from complications following heart surgery at age eighty-three.

  BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY continued as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live until 1982. He and his distinctively gruff voice have appeared in dozens of television shows and movies, including Scrooged (1988), Groundhog Day (1993), and the long-running ABC series The Middle. Doyle-Murray and his five brothers run an annual Caddyshack charity golf tournament and, in 2001, opened a Caddyshack-themed restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida.

  SARAH HOLCOMB walked away from the industry shortly after Caddyshack. Having appeared in four films by the time she was twenty-two, she stopped acting and retreated from the public eye altogether.