I'm still haunted by Belushi
Sean O’Hagan www.theguardian.com
<p>Dan Aykroyd believes in ghosts. And even now, 21 years after the death of his Blues Brothers co-star, he can't forget...</p>
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the Guardian
It is a short walk from the Intercontinental Hotel to the Four Seasons in downtown Toronto. On this sunny Saturday afternoon, though, there are a few diversions. The first is a Christian protest march against same-sex marriages. 'Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve,' reads one placard. The second is Dan Aykroyd, who causes jaws to drop as he strolls past. Motorists smile at him from passing cars, pedestrians nudge their partners. You can see them mouth the words: 'It's Dan Aykroyd.' In Canada, even celebrity spotting is a restrained rather than hysterical affair.

'I guess that's just the way we are,' he says when we have finally settled on a sofa in the corner of the hotel lounge after he has posed for a photo with a bunch of awestruck girls on a hen weekend, signed an autograph for the waiter and charmed everyone within a mile with his contagious goodwill. 'When I first moved from Ontario to New York, it was a total culture shock - the accents, the ethos, the attitude, the abrasiveness. It was the first time I felt my Canadian-ness so acutely.'

Onscreen, too, for all Aykroyd's facility at playing ordinary guys in extraordinary circumstances, there is a sense that he does not quite fit. It's not just that he is a big physical presence or that he does not spring to mind as a romantic lead or action hero. It's more that there's something unfathomable about his onscreen persona, a hint of something deeper and darker that he never fully gives vent to.

It's there in his cameo in Stephen Fry's directorial debut, Bright Young Things, a somewhat over-egged adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1930s satirical novel, Vile Bodies, which opens next week. Aykroyd plays Lord Monomark, a character Waugh based on Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian and the original autocratic press baron (in the first draft he was called Lord Ottercreek). Aykroyd occupies the role with quiet authority, exuding that odd mix of charm and implied threat that certain media moguls share with true tyrants.

'Dan is playing the most powerful man in the British Empire,' elaborates Fry, 'and he has the authority to pull that off. He knew all about Beaverbrook, and responded so instantly and so well. Plus, he's one of those actors who connects and permeates your consciousness. He's a Blues Brother. He's a Ghostbuster. Those two films alone were enormous in one's late youth. He's not a star the way Tom Cruise is a star, but he has an almost iconic presence all the same.'

I ask Aykroyd how it felt to play the most powerful Canadian ever. 'It took me 75 seconds to say yes to Stephen,' he replies, sailing off into the first of many similarly constructed monologues that give the strange impression that they have partly been learnt by rote, but this is simply the way Aykroyd talks.

'The fact that it was based on a Waugh book was perfect for an Anglophile like me. Then I get to play a character based on Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian who helped found the worldwide press we know today, who was born Max Aitken in New Brunswick, who managed the aircraft production that enabled the Hurricanes and Spitfires to defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

'This was the guy,' he continues, pausing only for a sip of wine, 'who produced the aluminium and tungsten, and all the things rubber that were needed to put those planes together.'

I nod, impressed, but also slightly disconcerted by the 'all the things rubber' bit. He is in full tangential flow now, though. 'My mother actually met Beaverbrook. She worked for the Canadian Ministry of Transportation during the war, and she can still tell you the difference between a Spitfire and a ME109 just by the silhouettes. 'All the omens were good,' he says, in conclusion, 'so, boy, did I want to get involved in this movie.'

In person, Aykroyd comes across as a strange mixture of showbiz pro and ordinary Joe but has an eccentricity that undercuts both. His interests outside of film are both mundane and exotic: blues music, the paranormal, motorbikes and law enforcement. He has combined the last two in his transport of choice, an Ontario Provincial Police motorcycle. The first two he has pursued to extraordinary profit in his best known films, Blues Brothers (1980) and Ghostbusters (1984), which he co-wrote using his insider's knowledge of paranormal jargon.

He recently hosted a television series, Psi Factor, on the same subject. He describes himself at one point as 'a pretty straight-up guy with an anarchist streak', which just about hits the mark.

He married actress Donna Dixon in 1983 and has three daughters - but he once made up a whole other family for Who's Who, fibbing that he had married one Maureen Lewis in 1974, and had three sons. 'It's such an elitist rag,' he told an interviewer back then, 'and my socialist tendencies bridled against it.'

In his spare time, he collects police badges, sometimes rides shotgun in squad cars, and even holds an advisory commission with the police in Payne City, Georgia. 'Right now, I'm without my creds and my badge,' he says without a trace of irony, 'so I really feel naked.'

Today, though, Aykroyd has brought along his pal-come-security chief, the wonderfully named Walter High, an ageing and avuncular biker. Walter nods a lot but says little. Dan calls him 'Scary Biker'. They met in a bar in 1973. 'I wanted to see a real biker on my Harley,' Aykroyd explains, 'so I let him ride it home. He's been around ever since.'

When Aykroyd goes to the loo, I ask Walter what his boss is really really like. He gives the question some considerable thought. 'He's just the nicest guy,' he says, finally, 'but he ain't no turkey. If he was a turkey, bikers wouldn't hang around him.'

I'm still pondering the logic of that last remark when Aykroyd returns. 'I'm in town with the House of Blues Motorcycle Escort,' he tells me, adding: 'that's Escort, not gang. We wear a robe, not a vest. It's not colours or a patch on the back, but a corporate logo. We're not,' he adds, in case I haven't got the message, 'wannabe Hells Angels.'

Aykroyd is a part-owner of House of Blues, a chain of lucrative music bars where you can hear the kind of ersatz blues the Blues Brothers once made. He also tours and records with Jim Belushi, brother of the late original Blues Brother, John Belushi, in a revue called Have Love, Will Travel. 'Goddam, those Albanian Americans really know how to sing the blues,' he says.

The blues, in this instance, is a raucous, utterly sanitised set of tropes, blues for beer-drinking white guys, in fact. Still, he loves the music dearly, and has said it helped heal his soul after a dark period of binge drinking in the early Eighties. The biker obsession, too, allows him to indulge his anarchist streak, albeit in a strictly law-abiding way. It stems from his student days, when he studied 'deviant psychology'.

'I actually wrote a paper on biker gangs,' he says, proudly. 'I still have a lot of respect for bikers. They apply the same discipline in their club rules as cops or the military do. It's just that I don't agree with the way some of them make a living - selling speed and exploiting women. I'm fascinated by them, though.'

Aykroyd's grandfather was a Mountie. His great grandfather was a dentist and a mystic, who immersed himself in the spiritualist writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky and Arthur Conan Doyle. 'All that stuff was lying around the old farmhouse I grew up in,' Aykroyd tells me, 'so I was kind of steeped in it.'

So he believes in ghosts? 'Hell, yeah. Absolutely. Don't you? You're from the isle of ghosts and, as you know, there are ghosts walking around all over the place over there. Loads of people have seen them, heard a voice or felt the cold temperature. I believe that they are between here and there, that they exist between the fourth and the fifth dimension and that they visit us frequently.'

Surprisingly, given the unearthly voices and sudden fluctuations in temperature, his childhood in the family's haunted farmhouse in Ontario was a happy one. 'I grew up with dump trucks and bulldozers,' he says. His father was an engineer, then a policymaker for Pierre Trudeau's government. He sent his son to a Catholic school where the priests almost convinced him to become one of them. 'I went to the seminary,' he nods, 'and it was a strange time. I did the whole anti-authority trip, though, getting drunk, taking girls back to the dorm. I used to sneak out in commando gear to watch the drive-in.' Unsurprisingly, he was asked to leave.

At 15, he was arrested for public intoxication. He had crossed the border into New York, where the legal drinking age was 18, not 21. 'Me and the Dwyer boys. Seven of us in a Vauxhall Viva, all strapping country boys. We bought a couple of bottles of vodka and a case of Fanta, drove into a field and drank until we were hallucinating.' When they staggered into a local hamburger joint, they were in such a state that the waitress called the cops.

Aykroyd's father reacted by putting him to work as a surveyor for the Department of Public Works. He worked 'way up in the Arctic', repairing heavy machinery. 'There were white wolves, grey wolves and black wolves,' he says, an edge of wonder still in his voice. 'And grizzlies. I saw a white raven. That is an incredible omen.'

Soon after this, his fortunes changed dramatically. At 19, he was paying his dues on the still fledgling Toronto stand-up comedy circuit, appearing at Café Andre in a revue called The Pickle in the Dell . 'Old school,' he says, breaking suddenly into song. '"We love ya/ We love Ya/ We're always thinking of ya."' Ran for three nights. By the third night, we were playing to a couple, and the couple were having this major argument. The pits.'

As part of Toronto's now famous Second City comedy troupe, from which Bill Murray and John Belushi also graduated, he was scouted by the National Lampoon Radio Hour, who had sent Belushi back to Canada in search of raw talent. It was, though he had no inkling of it back then, Aykroyd's appointment with destiny.

'I had a speakeasy in the city and we went back there for a late drink, John and me. He was into hardcore punk and heavy metal, so I played him some blues records as a kind of education. We came up with the Blues Brothers idea that very first night we met.'

Together, they lit up NBC's Saturday Night Live, Aykroyd playing the edgy straight guy to Belushi's gonzo-punk clown. That same double act propelled The Blues Brothers into cult status, then mainstream success, making them the most successful American on-screen comedy duo since Hope and Crosby.

All the while, though, the line between Belushi's persona and his everyday life was becoming increasingly blurred. Two years after filming The Blues Brothers, he died in a room in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, having injected a 'speedball' of cocaine and heroin. Aykroyd had lost not just a Blues Brother, but a soul brother.

I ask if his sense of discipline and respect for the law saved him from the excesses his partner succumbed to. 'Not really,' he replies, suddenly subdued. 'I was never into the powders or pills. I tried it all but didn't like that clenched-teeth feeling. I didn't like the "I'm a palpitating rabbit and I'm gonna solve the world's problems" feeling either. I drank some beer. I'm still here.'

The summer before Belushi died, Aykroyd had convinced him to move to Martha's Vineyard to clean up. 'Judy [Belushi's wife] and me took him out of the city and prevented a lot of people from seeing him. We put him in the hot tub, smoked some pot to ease him out. A beautiful summer. Soon as he got back to Hollywood, though...'

He shakes his head, takes another sip of wine. 'There was pressure about this movie, The Joy of Sex. They wanted him to wear a diaper. "Hey, we'll get Belushi to play the clown." A lot of money was being offered, and he was conflicted about that.'

Even now, 21 years on, there is an air of sadness and regret in Aykroyd's voice when he speaks of Belushi. 'I think about him every damn time I walk into a House of Blues,' he says, shaking his head. 'I think, "Why aren't you here, man, to enjoy all this?"'

When was the last time he saw him? 'He was getting into a limo with a bunch of strangers. They were feeding his habit. It was one of those moments when I was going somewhere, I couldn't stop. I had my own life to handle. It was,' he says, shaking his head, 'one of those situations.'

Since then, Aykroyd has thrived, building a successful house of blues on the foundations he and his partner laid back then. And he has made an awful lot of movies - 72 and counting - not all of them good. Refreshingly, this does not seem to trouble him in the slightest. He once said that Driving Miss Daisy, the 1989 film that earned him an Oscar nomination, was his peak, and that 'one reaches those peaks only once or twice in life'. I ask if he still feels that way about his huge body of work.

'That must have been a down day,' he laughs. 'Right now, off the top of my head, I'd go for Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, Trading Places, House of Mirth, Grosse Point Blank, as well as Driving Miss Daisy. But, you know, even when the material wasn't so good, I've gotten to work with the greats, and I've always given it my best shot. I'm satisfied with my work. I could stop tomorrow, and if Bright Young Things was my last role, I could say I tidied it up with dignity.'

Walter nods in agreement. I do, too.

· Bright Young Things opens next week

Aykroyd's progress

1952 Born 1 July, in Ottawa, Canada.

1967 Expelled from Catholic school for intoxication in public. Later studies psychology, political science and criminal sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa. Worked as a mail sorter for Canada's national postal service before he became an actor.

1980 The Blues Brothers hit the big screen, making instant stars of John Belushi and Aykroyd. 'The public holds those sunglasses in such affection,' he has said.

1982 Belushi dies, aged 33, after a lethal mix of heroin and cocaine.

1984 Stars in Ghostbusters and uses his extensive knowledge of the paranormal to help co-write the script.

1991 Directorial debut Nothing But Trouble, starring Chevy Chase and Demi Moore, flops.

1992 Opens a chain of restaurants called House of Blues. Customers include Smokey Robinson, Bruce Springsteen and Brad Pitt.

1998 Blues Brothers 2000, co-starring John Goodman, fails to rekindle the magic of the original.