Crane (32 page)

We had heard negative things said before and even had objects like batteries thrown at us during sporting events, but the posse always stayed together, kept moving, and laughed. Not that night. John stopped, looked up, spotted the wiseass, and returned to street level. “What’s your problem?” John growled, getting in the retreating weasel’s face.

The guy said something under his breath while trying to leave, but John’s arm shot out, grabbed the guy by the throat and pinned him up against the brick wall, cartoonlike, the man’s feet dangling a couple of inches off the pavement. I stood there, shocked. I had never seen John react like this.

“John, let him go, let him go, it’s not worth it!” O’Meara and I yelled.

John stared into the man’s eyes and slowly released him. The heckler slid slowly down the wall to the ground as O’Meara and I shepherded John toward the club entrance.

Twenty minutes later, as John and I imbibed (O’Meara did not) and listened to the music in the club, the guy from outside reappeared, walking toward John with his right hand tucked inside the left breast of his jacket. O’Meara’s radar immediately went off. The man produced his right hand in a revolver simulation, pointing his finger at John and pulling an invisible trigger. “I could’ve got you,” said the smirking Travis Bickle wannabe.

O’Meara jumped up, grabbed the guy by the collar, and shouted, “We’re going upstairs!”

By the time John and I followed, O’Meara had the man cuffed and up against the wall on street level. He had also called in a favor from his Chicago PD buddies. A paddy wagon appeared within ten minutes and the man, despite his protests and profuse apologies, was whisked away to be booked for disturbing the peace and to reap the pleasure of spending an all-expense-paid evening in the Cook County Jail. That scumbag could brag to his cellmates that he had scared the shit out of the big man, the movie star, but he still had to spend the night with at least one eye open. In today’s Twitter/iPhone/YouTube/TMZ society, cell phone footage of “Comedian John Candy on a rampage attacking a fan during a wild night clubbing in Chicago” would have instantly gone viral. I’m pleased that that footage doesn’t exist.

30

Chinese and Jewish calendars notwithstanding, Planet Earth was now in the 1990s. Richard Romley came to bat as the third Maricopa County district attorney since my dad’s murder. On January 30, 1990, Romley declared that a new team of investigators and prosecutors as well as an appointed review panel would reexamine the many volumes of files pertaining to the unsolved case. My new best friends became Jim Raines, an investigator with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and Barry Vassall of the Scottsdale Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Bureau. This was the very same Barry Vassall who on June 29 twelve years earlier had turned around in his seat in the unmarked police cruiser and told me my dad was dead.

Raines and Vassall conducted multiple telephone and in-person interviews with my stepdad, Chuck, and me during 1990. We turned over the audiocassette recording of a telephone conversation I’d had with Carpenter in the weeks following the murder. I told Raines and Vassall that at the time Chuck and I had mentioned the recording to police detectives Dennis Borkenhagen and Ron Dean and to Larry Turoff of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, but they weren’t interested.

Raines, Vassall, and Captain Page Decker of the Scottsdale Police Department were encouraged by a new laboratory technique using deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. The Scottsdale PD sent the small blood sample found in John Carpenter’s rental car and a more substantial sample of my dad’s blood to Cellmark Diagnostic Lab* in Maryland for comparison. They were hoping to conclusively connect the two blood samples to the same human being, my dad.

Unfortunately, the minute size and comparatively old age of the sample taken from the car prevented Cellmark from making a definitive pronouncement;
the new DNA technology couldn’t prove conclusively that the specimen was my dad’s blood. DA Romley refused to speculate whether a blood match would have led to the arrest of Carpenter, but he continued to be encouraged by all the newfangled science and his modern investigatory team. He was determined to finally solve the crime, to disperse the dark cloud that had been hovering over his office for more than a decade. To that end, he laid the Crane case in the lap of the incident review board he had assembled months earlier. The board, consisting of fifteen prosecutors and investigators, had already discovered fresh findings in two other unsolved murders in Maricopa County.

Every investigation requires a bloodhound—someone with a tireless motivation to endure and to overcome missteps, false leads, dead ends, lies and deceptions. Someone able to keep his or her nose to the trail and follow the real scent. County investigator Jim Raines was the alpha dog of the new team assembled when Richard Romley assumed the DA’s role in 1989. Perennial prime suspect John Henry Carpenter’s Beverly Hills attorney, Gary Fleischman, could not imagine what new evidence they’d have after so many years. “There must be a statute of limitations somewhere in this case,” he commented to the press. There wasn’t. The crime of murder has no such statutes.

Through dogged tenacity and a quirk of blind luck, Raines unearthed long-forgotten color photographs of the interior of Carpenter’s rental car from 1978. They were found in a box in a storage room in the Maricopa County Courthouse. Besides the three-inch trail of type B blood near the top of the padding on the passenger door, there was a one-sixteenth-inch speck of what was possibly human tissue visible on the same door panel. The Department of Public Safety, whose photographer had documented Carpenter’s car on film, hadn’t preserved that speck, didn’t possess the film negatives, couldn’t recall the photographer’s name, and was unable to produce any records that noted the possible tissue because, in 1988, all of its reports regarding Carpenter’s rental car had been destroyed. Public safety indeed.

*The Cellmark Lab was made famous by the O. J. Simpson trial.

31

With the Two Johns (Candy and Hughes) enjoying another box office hit with
Uncle Buck
(which would turn out to be their last film together as actor and director), John envisioned big things for his Frostbacks Production. The rapidly filling slate of projects necessitated a move out of a two-bedroom condo cum office in Brentwood into a real working space. John’s attorney/business manager at the time, Clair Burrill, informed the landlord, actress Shelley Fabares, that Frostbacks was on the move. That was the same Shelley Fabares who had worked with my dad on
The Donna Reed Show.
Frostbacks moved its shingle less than a mile away, morphing at the same time from a minor league production company to a major boutique production house. Candy would now pay $10,000 a month to his new Japanese landlord, Brentwood Pictures (a company that never produced a film while we were in residence in its building), to occupy the ground floor of a two-story 1960s building on San Vicente Boulevard across the street from the antediluvian Veterans Administration complex.

Frostbacks was at least five thousand square feet. From the broad reception foyer the hallway described a rectangle around the interior of the building with offices on either side; John’s was in the back corner and big enough for the king of the castle to feel comfortable. There was a conference room, a kitchen, bathrooms, of course, a fully equipped recording studio, and, when the hallway made the last turn back to the entry, the bar room.

The landlord never quite understood the significance of his tenant’s company name, Frostbacks Production. John Candy, born and raised in Toronto, traveled the tundra to make his way to the US of A, where fortune and renown awaited. He thought of himself as the northern version of a wetback. Frostbacks was also a tongue-in-cheek salute to his fellow expats Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Martin Short, Dan Aykroyd, Paul Shaffer, Catherine O’Hara, and Rick Moranis, who had also crossed the
border to make more money than they could ever have imagined growing up in Hamilton or Thunder Bay, Ontario.

I became John’s in-house publicist. I coordinated campaigns for his films with counterparts at Universal and 20th Century Fox. I arranged interviews with television and radio-segment producers, articles with newspaper and magazine editors. My medium-sized office housed shelf upon shelf of stills, posters, promotional kits, lobby displays, hats, bags, and buttons from many of John’s films. I could have dubbed my office Bob’s Candy Shoppe. The
Uncle Buck
kit included pancake mix, a spatula, oven mitt, and apron, devised for the sake of nudging media scribes and critics to write and speak about this latest product. I read and organized thousands of autograph requests sent in by fans and by collectors who were trying to make a different uncle buck. I noticed that most of the mail was from the U.S. Midwest, Australia, and Germany. John always took an interest in the return addresses and dutifully signed every request himself—either a still from a film (predominantly
Stripes, The Great Outdoors,
or
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
), his own headshot from the
Armed and Dangerous
period, or a new full-length shot from a Harry Langdon photo session, reminiscent of Carol Reed’s
The Third Man
in its style and slightly skewed angle. I was the Frostbacks’ gatekeeper nearly everyone had to talk to before reaching John. John, on the other hand, just had to yell down the hall to get my attention.

Saturday morning television programming has always been the provenance of children, and John wanted to participate in that, not only for the sake of his kids, Jennifer and Christopher, but also for the Frostbacks coffers via the swift-flowing revenue stream that sponsors for kid products produced. NBC was happy to work with John again after the
SCTV
days of the early ’80s, so the network brought in two major animation houses, Saban and DiC, to work with Frostbacks to create a series called
Camp Candy.
The scripts revolved around themes of friendship, telling the truth, and the principles of right and wrong, topics John thought important for preteens. The light comedy also gave camp counselor John an opportunity to perform vocal work with mates like Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Valri Bromfield, and Bob Costas. The Frostbacks’ sound studio was the weekly location for laughter and fun as vocal director Ginny McSwain led her cast through the pages, some of which were provided by the Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
cowriter Jack Mendelsohn. I became John’s voice outside the studio. I read all the
Camp Candy
scripts, made notes
and suggestions, kept John in the loop, and made sure he was pleased with the direction of the show. I was becoming his Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ right arm, the guy who wound up running their company, Apple. I was becoming the person I had always wanted to be. Instead of being the eyes and ears of everything good and bad regarding the Fab Four, I was working for the Fab One.

John continued his multimedia blitz with a syndicated radio show,
Radio Kandy.
Doug Thompson, a radiophile from Toronto, put that deal together. John would host a weekly two-hour program with guests and music that would air over three hundred stations across North America. Thompson produced, wrote, and directed the project, booking guest musicians like Clarence Clemens and Levon Helm.

So Frostbacks Production, employing ten people, served as Candy’s tax shelter on movies while actually generating weekly television and radio product and revenue. The in-house recording studio was also rented out for commercials and creative endeavors like Rabbit Ears Radio, the children’s storytelling company from Connecticut, which recorded John narrating “Stormalong” with music by NRBQ. Disney producer Thomas Schumacher moved in for weeks and recorded John as Wilbur the Albatross for
The Rescuers Down Under.
On any given day, the likes of Mel Gibson, Michael Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg, Elizabeth Taylor, or Harry Nilsson might walk through Frostbacks’ front door headed for the recording studio.

One day it occurred to me that my steady employment meant the “A” publicist, Paul Flaherty, was on his way out. The youthful vibe at Frostbacks better suited Candy’s personality. Except for Burrill, we were all under forty, with John being the oldest of us youngsters. After a round of golf Flaherty would often show up at Frostbacks to throw back a few while trying to capture an hour or two of Candy’s time. The old duffer didn’t bother with me anymore. He was a relic of the old studio system like those publicists I’d dealt with at Columbia, and his ship was sailing into the sunset.

There was no comparison necessary since I was performing his duties in addition to wearing multiple hats at the company. John recognized my value and, appropriately, gave me a raise. I brought enthusiasm to my work while becoming a set of rabbit ears to John’s ups and downs, professionally and personally. It was at this time that he appeared in a spate of loser films like
Who’s Harry Crumb?
and
Speed Zone.
John performed
nobly and gladly accepted the multiplying zeroes on his paycheck to support his family in Los Angeles, a nonworking farm north of Toronto, and various relatives who needed a handout. His brother, Jim, two years older and unemployed, was set up in a small house in East York, Ontario, across the street from his and John’s mother and aunt, ostensibly to keep an eye on them. John’s father, Sidney, had died at thirty-five of a heart attack and John, since the age of five, had been variously playing the roles of son, brother, and breadwinner to his side of the family.

While my extended work and play schedule meant a nice salary bump, the downside of it was spending more and more time away from home and Kari, even when I was at Frostbacks’ office in Los Angeles. Our work-day and wind-down time usually translated into fifteen-hour days. Luckily, the after-work retreat was just down the hall. It was John’s proudest creation, jokingly called the Frostbacks Bar and Grill, a place to unwind and meet with agents, hangers-on, L.A. Kings’ players, and team executives as well as film and television personnel working on projects that often had Frostbacks’ participation. John’s accountant, Gary Kress, found a seventy-year-old curved mahogany bar, complete with brass footrests and glass shelving for bottles and drink ware in an old St. Louis joint gone bust that truly became the centerpiece of the Frostbacks’ office space. There was a jukebox, pinball machines, air hockey, TV—it was the first modern man cave. When the day’s work was finished we migrated to the bar where, with music blaring and Heinekens in hand, we watched the world go by on San Vicente Boulevard from behind our pub’s one-way glass. It was John’s infinitely superior rendition of Belushi and Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers Bar from
Saturday Night Live
days. It was a place where he could fire up a Marlboro, enjoy a rum and Coke, and delay going home. He could play air guitar to a Rolling Stones tune, pretend he was Bob Costas announcing a sporting event, or recite Gary Oldman’s dialogue as Sid Vicious in
Sid and Nancy.
It was John’s personal playground, and he felt safe there.