Crane (41 page)

John’s memorial at St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood and funeral at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City were star-studded events. The
Los Angeles Times, People
magazine, the
National Enquirer,
and
Entertainment Tonight
were among the news organizations that sent reporters and photographers to scan the hundreds of attendees looking for familiar faces.
SCTV
was well represented by Martin Short, Dave Thomas, Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, and producer Andrew Alexander. John’s
Splash
and
Volunteers
costar Tom Hanks was there, as were
National Lampoon’s Vacation
cohort Chevy Chase and
Stripes
buddy Bill Murray. Jeff Bridges also attended, though I wasn’t aware that John and Bridges had ever even met. Perhaps Jeff was a fan just paying his respects. Wayne and Janet Jones Gretzky were there.

I was stationed at the front door of the church along with some of the other Chongos, making sure that the paparazzi and funeral crashers were kept out. Frankie Hernandez, Silvio Scarano, Kelvin Pruenster, and I were still guarding John, still watching his back. Also walking the parapet with
us was the sad sack Bret Gallagher, a new recruit to Frostbacks who had joined the ranks barely a week before John died. For his short tour of duty he received three months’ severance pay.

The hearse arrived bearing John’s coffin and was transferred to a gurneylike cart to be taken into the church. As John was rolled down the aisle of the full house of silent mourners, one of the wheels on the gurney squeaked loudly with every rotation. John would have gotten a huge kick out of that.

John’s
The Great Outdoors
costar Dan Aykroyd gave an emotional, Sunday-go-to-meetin’ eulogy. He bolstered Christopher and Jennifer, telling them how lucky they were to have John as their dad and letting them know that we were all going to watch out for them in their fatherless future. One person who truly did was Jim Belushi, who later took young Jennifer under his wing to work on several television and film projects.

The Candy posse had one final assignment—ensuring John’s safe arrival at his final resting spot, a crypt above that of actor Fred MacMurray at the Holy Cross Mausoleum in Culver City. The seventy-car procession left the St. Martin’s grounds and headed east on Sunset Boulevard and then south on the 405, the San Diego Freeway. On any typical Wednesday at noon in L.A., that seven- or eight-mile trip could easily take forty-five minutes, but this was not a normal Wednesday. The Los Angeles Police Department in tandem with the California Highway Patrol escorted the procession to the freeway; unbeknownst to us, they had closed off all the on-ramps along the route. I looked through the rear window of the car I was riding in and noticed that, aside from the cortege and the motorcycle cops, the entire southbound side of the freeway, all five lanes, one of the most heavily traveled roads in the world, was empty. A CHP car had all traffic stopped on the freeway under the Sunset Boulevard overpass. Cars were backed up in a standstill all the way to the Sepulveda Pass. Dozens of cars idled on the on-ramps waiting for the CHP officers on motorcycles to give them the go-ahead. I witnessed one irate driver looking for a reason for the delay. The officer mouthed, “John Candy,” and the driver’s frustration immediately dissipated. It was a show of love and respect by Southern California law enforcement for a man who had always acted as if he were a typical working guy, just like them. The sight of an empty freeway, midday, midweek, in the land of the car, brought chills to all of us. This freeway detail was the ultimate gift from the LAPD and CHP. Rose Candy was just as surprised and touched by the actions of the good
officers bidding farewell to their friend as were the rest of us. Gazing out the car window, I felt a kinship with the motorcycle cop holding off traffic for John right up to the end.

The morning after John’s funeral, I opened the front door at Frostbacks at 9:30. The space sat quietly, as if waiting for something to happen. The Frostbacks Bar and Grill was holding its breath. John’s mother, aunt, and brother were in town for the funeral, and they wanted to have a look around the offices. I watched John’s older brother, Jim, walk into John’s office and sit down in his chair behind his immense wood desk. He fingered the stacks of scripts, the letters and notes, as if trying to receive a message from his little brother. If a picture tells a story, this image was of a man searching for clues, for directions, from a brother he never connected with in life. Jim was jealous of my relationship with John, a friendship with no conditions. The Candy brothers had erected barriers between each other decades earlier, and I could see those memories playing out in Jim’s head now. Jim never had power or fame or even individuality. He was John Candy’s brother, subsidized by John, the caretaker of their mother and aunt. Jim sat in John’s swivel chair grasping for any signs of a common ground, but the gulf between them had no crossing. Van, John’s mother, led her sister, Fran, and her brother, Ken, on a walk-through of her son’s playground for the last time. The once-vibrant space felt like a museum on a Monday. Frostbacks’ cavernous office complex was now lifeless.

I felt as remote as Keir Dullea’s astronaut character in
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Every afternoon when I left the empty office, which reminded me of John every second I was there, I returned to my empty house, which reminded me of Kari even before I got out of the car. Her death replayed in my mind as I walked through the tall, wild grasses she planted, the rosemary she nurtured, the lantana and sages and lavender she babied. Kari was all around me, blooming, scenting the air, feeding the bees and the butterflies and the hummingbirds. When I got in the door I would listen to Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling towards Ecstasy” and James Taylor’s “Secret of Life.” I could see Kari’s untouchable face while I sobbed. Crying came easily and became a necessary therapy for me. Weeping at night was a way to dump all the emotion I controlled during the day. I cried more over Kari’s death than I did over my dad’s or anything else in my life. When the tears want out, you can’t keep ’em in. Kari’s death is the saddest moment of my life. I still love “Secret of Life,” but even now I can’t listen to it without welling up.

When you’re sick, it’s hard to talk to people who are well. I didn’t want to burden friends and family members with my dark, claustrophobic thoughts. I never looked for an escape or a crutch. I didn’t turn to religion. I didn’t turn to drugs. I have little patience for the latest celebrity or child of one who has died of an overdose or is habitually entering rehab. I didn’t have to turn to heroin, I didn’t have to turn to coke or prescription drugs or alcohol. I tapped into the inner strength that my mom and Chuck demonstrated everyday. My mom never crumbled, and Chuck had created his own blueprint for life—no one helped him. He built it himself, moved in, and lived it everyday. I followed their examples. I took care of what had to be done each day and didn’t rely on other people. I had to face myself. I had to do it alone. I derived satisfaction and strength from relying on myself. The more I did it, the easier it became.

In the mornings I would drive to John’s shrine and begin yet another day of sorting through the offerings. I was constantly receiving calls from the press asking questions about one of Canada’s fallen heroes. Plans were already being made for John’s playful face to adorn a Canadian 51¢ stamp and for his name to be chiseled into Toronto’s Walk of Fame, not far from Neil Young’s.

I also strapped myself in for another roller coaster ride, the television debut of
Hostage for a Day.
What would have prompted a raucous and celebratory viewing party in the Frostbacks Bar and Grill instead became a wake attended by a few former Frostbacks employees and the
Hostage
rewriter Peter Torokvei. I hoped Kari, John, and my dad were having their own party. The film was dedicated to Kari. Unfortunately, all the credits were locked in, so another dedication—to John—couldn’t be added. The few of us stood at the bar and watched the movie, knowing that this was the last social event that would ever take place at Frostbacks Production. Bittersweet didn’t half cover it.

After everyone left and I was closing up the office, I began to think of all the work John and Kari had accomplished, professionally and personally, helping people get through the private hell of their own days. I missed dealing with daily problems by sharing a laugh with John. I missed his thoughtfulness, generosity, and courtesy toward humanity. I smiled, knowing John’s tender and madcap performances would provoke laughter forever. I missed Kari’s resplendent ideas and visions for a better place in which to live. How many beautiful, colorful, climate-appropriate gardens will bloom year after year with the life Kari imbued in them? In John
and Kari there was light and warmth and a humanity that seemed to me to be in very short supply. My life was forever enriched for their presence and now irrevocably diminished with their passing. Friends and family all craved their company, but over time we’d reconcile ourselves to the harrowing reality that they had left our world. A search for substitutes would be futile.

40

In May, Maricopa County Superior Court judge Gregory Martin ruled that videotaped sexual encounters involving my dad, Carpenter, and various women, shot in different
Beginner’s Luck
tour cities, could be shown to jurors during the trial. Martin said, “They are relevant because they establish the relationship defendant John Carpenter had with Crane.” I shuddered at what was coming.

On June 1, two years after Carpenter was first arrested and charged with my dad’s murder, I, still referred to as “Mr. Robert Crane Jr.,” received a subpoena ordering my appearance on June 20 “to give testimony on behalf of the State of Arizona.”

On June 16, I received a letter from legal assistant Dick Strobel informing me that the defense “has filed a Motion to Continue the trial until late August of 1994, and the judge has granted that motion.”

On August 15, I received a subpoena “for your testimony at trial” re:
State of Arizona v. John Carpenter,
CR 92-04718, for September 6.

After the jury selection process was completed, the trial finally got under way. Judge Martin read the Willits instruction to the jurors which, in a nutshell, states that “any evidence lost or destroyed by the State of Arizona can be looked on by the jurors as a weakness in the prosecution’s case.” Court-appointed public defender Stephen Avilla planned to focus on “the slim physical evidence,” raising the notion that “Crane’s active sex life” gave “perhaps a jealous husband or boyfriend … or even the women involved” the motive for murder. Carpenter told the
New Times,
an alternative publication: “I never even had a fight with Bob. He was my friend. And he was the goose who laid the golden egg for me, in terms of meeting ladies.” Robert J. Shutts and the prosecution team would illustrate that fact by showing the court videotapes containing images of “Crane and Carpenter simultaneously having sex with the same woman.” They would concentrate their case on the point that my dad was ending
the friendship “that gave Carpenter access to women attracted by the actor’s fame … women that [defendant John Henry Carpenter] could never obtain for himself.” They would argue that Carpenter killed my dad with two blows from the missing camera tripod (and strangulation from an electrical cord). As evidence they had a three-inch blood trace in Carpenter’s rental car along with a “dark, irregularly shaped” one-sixteenth-inch speck of brain tissue.

Shutts argued that Carpenter “returned” to the scene of the crime by telephone, calling the afternoon of June 29 asking for my dad, but never asking why the phone was answered by a police detective instead. Carpenter also called the Windmill Dinner Theatre and spoke with employees Jenny Brown and Linda Hinshaw, asking where my dad was and if he would be in that night. Then Carpenter made the strange, almost noncall to me, followed by another call to my dad’s Scottsdale apartment.

Victoria Berry took the stand, the second of a hundred witnesses for the prosecution. She described her costar, my dad, as a “vain, sexually obsessed man” who “memorialized his sexual escapades” on videotape. She told the courtroom that “shortly after 2 p.m.” on June 29, 1978, she entered my dad’s apartment through the unlocked front door, walked through the dark hallway calling out my dad’s name, looked in a bedroom, and saw a person in the bed with “the head all smashed in … blood all over.” She said she was there to meet my dad to overdub dialogue on a videotape that “John Carpenter recorded three days earlier of Bob and I rehearsing our scene in the play.”

Next, Patricia Olson Ateyeh Crane took the stand. She told the courtroom that her husband’s extramarital sexual behavior never bothered her (“He often slept with and videotaped women he met while touring”), that their marriage never created “missed opportunities” for the “hobby” that “consumed him” (“He often filmed family events … as well as his sex acts with women”), that her husband’s video equipment (“including several camera tripods”) always went on the road with him, that his pornographic video library “was never an issue” in their marriage. Always the manipulator, Patti didn’t mind the jury thinking of her as compliant, just not complicit. She was playing the role of the good little hausfrau who couldn’t control the ravenous appetites of her colonel, not the scheming puppet master holding all the strings.