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  At one stop at UCLA in March of 1972, Kenney gave a rambling and often hilarious speech about the magazine’s success, some of its greatest hits, and the squares that didn’t understand his generation of longhairs. The students ate it up. It felt like a manic and (literally) half-baked stand-up routine. When asked by one UCLA student about his plans for the future, Kenney responded, “My plans are these: I’m going to stick around the magazine for two and a half more years and try to rip off as much money as possible. Then write a book, which should take about six months, called Teenage Commies From Outer Space, and then smoke a lot of dope.”

  Eventually, Simmons called Kenney back to New York, where his gonzo ideas and inimitable writing voice were needed, and where the iciness toward him had thawed a bit. The prodigal son dutifully returned. Briefly.

  In the fall of ’72, Kenney would disappear again. This time, no one was surprised. It was just Doug being Doug. True to his UCLA career forecast (although not its timetable), Kenney hightailed it to Martha’s Vineyard to work on his era-defining literary masterpiece, Teenage Commies From Outer Space. He predicted that it would be nothing short of “the best recollection of youth ever written”—a mix of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, but with a trippy sci-fi twist.

  Kenney camped in a tent on a remote piece of land in the woods of West Tisbury owned by singer-songwriter James Taylor. There he dropped copious amounts of LSD looking for inspiration. As winter kicked in, and tent living became unfeasible, he moved to a house on a windy bluff on the westernmost point of the island in Gay Head, where he toiled on his novel in total seclusion and rarely bothered to eat anything that didn’t come in blotter form.

  While Kenney was AWOL, three things happened back at the Lampoon: First, the magazine finally started to make serious inroads with advertisers. While it had been headquartered on Madison Avenue, it was never of Madison Avenue. The big ad agencies and their deep-pocketed clients had initially been put off by the Lampoon’s tasteless monthly orgies of anti-establishment grenade-lobbing and playground gross-out humor. Now, with circulation finally spiking past 500,000 copies per month, the magazine had moved out of the underground. Advertisers lined up.

  Second, Simmons was approached by RCA to come up with a National Lampoon comedy album—a genre that had suddenly become lucrative thanks to the hip “head” humor of George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, and the Firesign Theatre. Christopher Guest, a twenty-four-year-old musician-comedian with a knack for deadpan mimicry and a childhood friend of Lampoon publisher Gerry Taylor, was brought on board as a contributor on the strength of his hilarious, Xerox-sharp send-ups of sacred cows Bob Dylan and James Taylor. The resulting album, which was actually put out by Blue Thumb after RCA got cold feet from some of the record’s edgier material, was National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner, a freewheeling collage of savage song parodies such as the Beatles-inspired “Magical Misery Tour,” which sniped at rock’s most sanctimonious icons with marksman precision. Recorded in less than three days, it would go on to sell surprisingly well and win a Grammy.

  Third, on December 10, 1972, the Lampoon’s pirate’s ship of verbal swashbucklers was anointed by none other than the Newspaper of Record, The New York Times. In a feature written by Mopsy Strange Kennedy, the core writers and editors put on a manic show of canned wordplay and clever-boy shtick. It would end up becoming great PR. But if you quickly scanned the article, it would have been easy to miss the one person absent from all of the naughty, quip-happy mirth. At least, until you get to a parenthetical halfway through the piece mentioning that Kenney was currently on a leave of absence while working on a book. The wording almost made his desertion sound like it was officially approved—that there were no hard feelings (which was definitely not the case). Still, with the Times’s benediction, the Lampoon’s profile was soaring and its staffers were starting to walk with a swagger.

  A month later, with its January 1973 “Death” issue, the Lampoon would produce the most famous cover in its history. The idea came from Ed Bluestone, an occasional contributor and cranky stand-up comedian from New Jersey with a weakness for comedy that left a bruise. The cover would feature an adorable black-and-white mutt with a revolver pointed to its head next to the headline: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” It was shocking, sick, subversive, and cruel. It sold out in days.

  The Lampoon was doing just fine without Kenney.

  * * *

  After the success of Radio Dinner, the Lampoon’s record label was hounding Simmons for a follow-up album. They quickly settled on Lemmings—a send-up of the 1969 Woodstock music festival that lacerated both the generation of zonked-out, easily herded hippies who saw it as a heavy, meaning-packed pilgrimage, but also the greedy musicians who lined their pockets while paying blissed-out lip service to peace and love. One thing that the Lampoon always had a gift for was calling out hypocrisy, even within its own ranks. They could dish it out and take it. And they knew that baby boomers were a lot more materialistic and gullible than they copped to.

  Simmons believed that the concept would work better if the concert were performed in a live setting where you could hear people actually laughing rather than in a stifling and silent recording studio. So he booked the Village Gate, a cavernous cellar-level jazz club on the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets in New York, and handed Lampoon staffer Tony Hendra the directing reins while drafting Sean Kelly as his lieutenant. Since Lemmings would be loaded with rock music, Hendra wasted no time going back to Christopher Guest, his satirical songwriting ace (and future maestro of the mockumentary film genre). Hendra asked Guest if he could think of any other performers who might work in the cast of the stage show. If they knew how to play an instrument, even better. One person came to Guest’s mind, a former Bard College classmate with a funny name who’d once played drums with an early incarnation of Steely Dan.

  Cornelius Crane Chase was given the name Chevy in childhood by his grandmother on his father’s side. It’s unclear whether the nickname came from the posh Maryland suburb or the medieval English song, “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” Chase came from a privileged background. His father was a publishing executive and his mother a concert pianist who had been adopted as a child by her stepfather, the wealthy industrial heir Cornelius Vanderbilt Crane. Chevy grew up in a Park Avenue brownstone on the same block as New York mayor John Lindsay and attended a handful of tony private schools—most of which expelled him for acting up. After college, he worked for a time writing spoofs for Mad magazine and performing with an obscure underground video collective called Channel One (essentially a crude, shoestring forerunner to Saturday Night Live) that would go on to make a feature film comprising absurd skits, called The Groove Tube.

  Despite Chase’s lightning sarcasm and seemingly boundless confidence bordering on smugness, he always saw himself more as a writer than a performer. But Guest gave him the confidence to come out from behind the scenes. It didn’t hurt that Chase also possessed the sort of athletic, dimple-chinned good looks that would stand out on a poster outside the theater.

  Next, Hendra flew to Chicago to check out a twenty-two-year-old who he heard was burning up the stage with Second City, the famed improv troupe. John Belushi knew that the Lampoon scout was coming and he knew that he had to be ready. Ambitious and hungry for the break that would take him to New York, Belushi laid waste to the club that night, tearing up the stage like a barrel-chested typhoon. That sort of me-first showboating—hogging the spotlight, going for the selfish laugh at all costs—went against everything Second City stood for, but Belushi wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip through his fingers. He could apologize to his fellow performers later.

  Started in 1959, Second City grew out of a 125-seat cabaret on the Near North Side of Chicago. The space had previously been a hat shop and a Chinese laundry. There, a new kind of comedy was born. Rooted in improvisational theater techniques and built on an all-for-one foundation of trust, risk-taking, and listening to your scen
e partner and building off their ad-libs (their credo was “Yes, and…”), Second City quickly became an incubator for some of the sharpest minds in humor. It was comedy without a net, where off-the-cuff scenes could just as easily go disastrously wrong as electrically, hilariously right. The group was named after a condescending 1952 article by A.J. Liebling in The New Yorker, which dismissively referred to Chicago as a second city in contrast to New York. The troupe wore that mockery as an underdog badge of honor.

  The first generation of Second City performers grew out of the Compass Players, a brainy group of University of Chicago alumni that included Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And, in the early years, their performances were arch, buttoned-down intellectual affairs, with jokes about Freudian analysis, Beatniks, and the Cold War. But in the volatile late ’60s and early ’70s, as the political mood in the country started to tack right and the counterculture started to push back, a new generation of performers turned Second City into a vibrant, anything-goes forum for topical mayhem, druggie humor, and joy-buzzer flights of wild pop culture absurdity. In addition to Belushi, the Next Generation of satirists taking over Second City included Brian Doyle-Murray (a blue-collar, lunch-pail Chicago prankster with a voice like broken glass and a soft comic touch), Harold Ramis (a bookish-looking beanpole with owlish glasses, a big frizzy explosion of hair, and a taste for garish paisley shirts and bell-bottoms), and Joe Flaherty (a tall and gangly magician at conjuring oddball characters). “Back then, music was all that people were interested in,” says Flaherty. “No one did comedy. A lot of us didn’t like stand-up that much. They’d come on TV and be so corny. But the idea of getting a group of people together and improvising and creating scenes, it was an outlet. We wanted to say something, I guess. And we did that through comedy.”

  Belushi was the burly, bearded son of Albanian immigrants who had grown up in Wheaton, Illinois, where his father owned a pair of restaurants. He looked like a college middle linebacker whose off-season training consisted of eating hot dogs in front of the TV. He could be tremendously quiet and shy offstage, but he seemed to transform into an angry, cornered bull on it—an insane improv Jekyll and Hyde who threw his fireplug body around with no regard for either his own physical safety or the physical safety of his Second City partners. To him, comedy wasn’t cerebral; it was a back-alley brawl.

  Belushi joined Second City in 1971 and quickly eclipsed Ramis as the star of the troupe. Ramis might have been able to fire off more-highbrow references, but he was no match for Belushi’s feral magnetism, desperate bravery, and live-wire unpredictability.

  “John would start improvising, and everybody would look at their watches and say, ‘Oh, Jesus,’ and he’d be off,” said Ramis. “But you forgave it, because you liked him and it was funny. He made us all look good. John lifted us all and took us with him.”

  Tony Hendra knew the moment that he saw Belushi take ownership of the Second City stage that he had found the star of Lemmings—and maybe more. “What appealed to me was that nothing was sacred to him. He was saying even Second City isn’t sacred to me if I want something,” says Hendra. “Belushi was pure street gut. Here was the generation: raw energy and instinctive skepticism, naive and knowing, an animal well aware that there were rules but yet to be convinced that they made any sense.” Simmons would refer to Belushi as a “young Albanian hoodlum.” Hendra rounded out the Lemmings cast with a roster of rising talents who had both music and performing chops, including Paul Jacobs, Garry Goodrow, Mary-Jennifer Mitchell, and Alice Playten. They would all quickly learn that there wasn’t much room for ego or competitiveness in the show—Chase and Belushi already had that covered.

  Lemmings opened at the Village Gate on January 25, 1973. The first half was a scattershot series of shticky Lampoon skits that didn’t quite congeal. But the second half, which satirically focused on the fictitious Woodchuck festival, including cutting parodies of Joan Baez, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, and Joe Cocker, hit an exposed generational nerve. The mock concert was occasionally interrupted by Belushi’s kamikaze master of ceremonies, who invited the audience to commit mass suicide—a dark, gallows-humor rebuke to the era’s good vibes, curdling the Edenic notions of peace and love until they turned sour.

  The day after Lemmings opened, the New York Times critic Mel Gussow weighed in, saying that the first act was “a headlong, supposedly comic assault on sex and politics [that] suffers from a serious case of the puerilities.” But, he went on, “in the second act the show mercifully finds its wits for a wicked parody of the world of rock, spoofing the talented along with the pretenders, their absurdities, conceits, and affectations.” Audiences in their teens and early twenties ate it up. Even the rock icons who were made fun of, like Dylan and Taylor, showed up either out of curiosity or to publicly show that they could take a joke. Originally scheduled to play for just three nights, Lemmings would run for 385 performances.

  Belushi was hooked on his newfound recognition. It certainly beat doing eight shows a week at Second City back in Chicago. “I can remember coming out of my apartment on 13th Street and Third Avenue just after it opened, buying the papers and sitting down in a greasy spoon,” he later said. “I opened The New York Times and there was something like ‘new discovery, John Belushi.’ I felt like I was three feet off the ground.”

  Soon the Lemmings crew started to come around the Lampoon office in their free time. Simmons, now a newly minted off-Broadway producer in addition to a successful magazine publisher and Grammy winner, began dreaming up grandiose new ways to extend the Lampoon brand. He settled on a syndicated weekly radio show to be spearheaded by Michael O’Donoghue that would make use of not only the Lemmings actors but also the Lampoon staffers, who were now beginning to see the seductive allure of fame.

  Everyone agreed that the presence of the Lemmings performers around the office was a shot in the arm—a sorely needed jolt of new energy and enthusiasm after three years of grinding out a monthly magazine. But with them came a flaunting of recreational vices that had, for the most part, been indulged behind closed doors at the Lampoon office: marijuana, LSD, quaaludes, and occasionally cocaine, which was expensive enough to be considered a splurge. They weren’t just impersonating rock stars onstage, they were living like them off of it. “You walked into the Lampoon office and you got a contact high,” says Simmons. “Everyone was smoking pot. Especially when the show came, because Chevy and Belushi were heavily into drugs.”

  Kelly remembers sitting behind the typewriter in his office at the Lampoon, and like clockwork every afternoon, Belushi would poke his head in and say, “Get me high?”

  “John loved drugs,” says Kelly. “But he also loved alcohol and food and sex and acting. He was like an omnivore. He would smoke or drink whatever was available.”

  Doug Kenney would return to the Lampoon just in time.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1973, Kenney showed up unannounced at 635 Madison. It had been nearly a year since the wunderkind editor had gone missing. He was thinner, his hair longer, and he carried a half-finished manuscript under an arm. He went into Beard’s office and closed the door. Rather than make small talk or catch up with his old friend, Kenney handed him the stack of papers and asked him to read it. Beard was confused by the unfinished novel he was reading. Where was Doug’s genius? Where was the promised “best recollection of youth ever written”? Beard tried to be tactful, but Kenney could tell by the puzzled expression on his face exactly what he thought.

  “It sucks, doesn’t it?” Kenney asked. But he seemed to already know the answer. Beard gave it to him anyway. It was a mess. Kenney picked up his one and only manuscript of Teenage Commies From Outer Space and threw it into the wastebasket. It was the first time in his life that something creative didn’t come off easily and brilliantly for him on the first try. What now?

  The fortunes of the Lampoon looked very different from when Kenney bolted off to play Robinson Crusoe on the Vineyard. They had put out an album, mounted a hit stage show
, and become the fastest-growing magazine in America. Kenney was relieved that his unannounced departure hadn’t left everyone in the lurch, but maybe also a bit deflated that the Lampoon had thrived in his absence. With his divorce finalized, Kenney moved out of the brownstone he shared with Beard and got a place of his own on Bank Street in the West Village. Soon he would be spending more and more time hanging out with the Lemmings cast whenever they’d pass through the radio studio, especially Belushi, who often crashed on Kenney’s couch after a late-night bender. The two had an instant connection and a mutual fondness for getting high. The door to Kenney’s apartment was always open to him. Literally. He never bothered locking it.

  With Beard now single-handedly holding the editorial horsewhip, Kenney was able to stop worrying about being a leader (not that anyone would have followed him anywhere after his pair of vanishing acts) and just focus on writing. Simmons was eager to put his long-absent star back to work on his latest project: The 1964 High School Yearbook Parody. The assignment couldn’t have played to Kenney’s strengths better. After all, the 1950s and early ’60s were Kenney’s singular obsession. High school, in particular, seemed to have an especially strong psychological vise grip on him. It reached back to his lonely childhood in Chagrin Falls, the small, Norman Rockwellian Ohio town with a population of seemingly idyllic Ozzie-and-Harriet nuclear families with sons in varsity jackets and virtuous, virginal pom-pom-waving daughters. He had been an outcast there, but he knew its tribal rites and rituals in his marrow. Part of him seemed to long for its orderly Eisenhower-era simplicity (a time when his older bother was still young and vibrant and alive), and part of him seemed hell-bent on exposing its milquetoast conformity and middle-class hypocrisy and tearing it all down.