- IMDb Mini Biography By: We debated against each other when I was going to the quite academically superior Jesuit school in town, St. Ignatius, remembers Anson, and I had very dismissive feelings about Gilmour and anyone who went there. But she too had to return to work. To the notables who passed through the portals of the garish "castle," though, the Lampoon's larger purpose was to be a social club, replete with black-tie dinners every week. A couple of bumbling, out-of-work musicians, accidentally witness the St. Valentines Day massacre. He seemed terrified to be alone. Webkathryn walker doug kenneywhat is the indirect effect of temperature on orcas. From there, he either fell to his death or jumped. "There was one guy who kept walking by and talking to me, and he was there after everybody left," says Murray. If you need help, a bed for the night, an introduction at a studio, see Doug. A year before, without fully knowing why, he had gotten married to a woman he had known at Radcliffe. When filming finally got underway at Rolling Hills Golf & Tennis Club in Davie, Fla., and at nearby Boca Raton Hotel & Country Club, it quickly turned into an orgy of late-night partying. Sitting across a deskor, more typically, propped cross-legged on ithe was not so much a boss as the old coach, gently schooling the initiate in the fine art of comedic lobs and smashes. In all, the Kefauver High Kaleidoscope sold more than a million copies. Every idea he had was anti-establishment. "Animal House" -- the raucous tale of a disenfranchised college fraternity that memorably features the late John Belushi imitating a zit -- was shot for $2.8 million. One thing she was not was funny. Unannounced, he simply turned up in New York one day, a half-finished manuscript under his arm, tanner and skinnier than the day he left. And no one laughed.". Kenney's work was gentle by Lampoon standards, etched with nostalgia and scenes of mock domestic bliss. the line went. Simmons had decided that a movie was the answer. One thing everyone knew: Doug Kenney was funny. Besides, noted Emily Prager, "Matty liked to see these Harvard kids coming to him for money. "I said, 'It is a hit in my book. From December 19, 1946, until his death on August 27, 1980, he was in a relationship. They swam. For a year, they worried over it. In another life he might have wound up as an investment banker or, given the gravity that perpetually knitted his brow and weighted his shoulders, an Episcopal bishop. "Some people can do drugs and be integrated," says Emily Prager, a former girlfriend of Kenney's who wrote for Lampoon and is now a novelist and columnist in New York City. Then he ran away again -- this disappearance resulting in a months-long stay in a tent on Martha's Vineyard. The man is 27-year-old Doug Kenney, and the magazine he had co-founded, National Lampoon, is a runaway success. Now she and Peter were mommy and daddy. In desperation a new art director was brought in and told to change the look of the book. Beard, no less tired than Kenney, urged him to slow down. I could see it," says Beard, "but there was nothing I could do about it. A happily-married, middle-aged husband and wife strain their marriage while serving as trial lawyers. Go to tennis camp, he said, get in shape, then fly out to Hawaii for a few weeks on the beach. I had trouble getting mad at him. The Murray brothers remember Kenney as a producer who could tweak little things in a scene without leaving fingerprints. His share from the Lampoon proceeds, for instance, came to just under $3 million. Chevy suggested they take a rest. He then went to the house where his friends Peter Ivers and Lucy Fisher were staying. Dougs favorite was fighting mock cap-gun battles in the Hollywood Hills. The day the film premiered in New York, Kenney turned up drunk at a press conference. Kenney and Beard worked seven-day, 90-hour weeks. During an argument with Orion production chief Mike Medavoy and executive producer Jon Peters over Caddyshack's promotion, he lunged at them and tried to knock them to the ground. They included some of the biggest names in comedy, the new wave, the new movement he had helped to create. Beard was fascinated by what he dryly termed Kenney's extraordinary perception of middle-class America," a terrain as unfamiliar to him as the Metropolitan Club was to Kenney. More than once, his friends noticed, there seemed to be tears in his eyes for no apparent reason. From the time he was 11 until he left for college, Doyle-Murray caddied at Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Ill., and his father, Frank, once caddied for U.S. Open and U.S. Tolkien's "Lord of The Rings" called "Bored of the Rings" -- it sold 750,000 copies and was recently republished in the U.K. Some wondered. Then he passed out. The "punk kid," as Doug described himself, could only stand in awe of him. The pathologist who did the autopsy said it was likely Kenney died on impact because his ribs were broken and his skull fractured. "We were lovers, but not in a homosexual sense," says Chase from his home outside New York City, where a large photo of Kenney hangs on the office wall. He had always liked being alonehis "quiet time," he called itand a while more would give him time to scout locations for another movie. I think about Doug a lot. Kenney didn't like to talk about it. One had it that he had gotten into acid. Kathryn Walker is a 79 year old American Actress. Gilmour was small and it was smug, and by all accounts, Doug the day student was miserable. The date on it was four months old. A crusading district attorney investigates the murder of a Jewish man. Doyle-Murray remembers Kenney for never missing a call. Doug had ceased trying to explain. You have to learn to roll with the bullets, he joked. But it would do so without Doug Kenney. "He had a loaded gun," he says. The word most used to describe it, including by Kathryn, was stormy. They fought, seemingly, about everything, from Doug's frenetic life-style to the fact that Kathryn, a Wells College graduate, hadn't gone to Radcliffe. Instead, Kenney only sped up. Drugs were rampant on the set of the 1980 Bill Murray movie Caddyshack which Kenney co-wrote with Ramis. Still a third said that he was at work on the novel everyone knew was raging within him. "The golden boy," they called him; a comet lighting up the sky. What actually went on during the time on Martha's Vineyard, or why it came abruptly to an end, no one ever really knew. He just happened to be the first one to stop us. He left no fingerprints.. Daniel died of kidney disease when Doug was still in high school, leaving a void that would never be filled. It also brings to mind Doug Kenney, one of Ramiss co-writers on Animal House (Chris Miller is the other). The buy-out had drained the Lampoon's resources, and an infusion of fresh cash was urgently needed. There, page after page, was the whole awful, wonderful saga of middle-American adolescence, right down to the requisite dedication to the martyred John F. Kennedy ("You who might as well have said, Ich bein ine Kefauver Senior"'). Later, he added a pool. ), "Doug was terribly handsome, with blue eyes and blond hair," says Simmons. A few months, he told friends, and the movie would come together. When he was not drinking, he was smoking dope, doing his best to get stoned. But the final cut left Kenney disappointed. I thought, Holy Christ, this guy has gone over the top, Miller told Karp. Everything changed after 'Animal House.' He was not actively looking to kill himself. Dressed in a bucket hat, khaki shorts and a faded polo shirt that was always untucked, Kenney kept score conscientiously (unlike his alter ego, Ty Webb), despite recording mostly 7s, 8s and 9s. "It brought people in -- made them feel comfortable." After several days, Kathryn left. "He apologized that 'Caddyshack' wasn't the big hit he thought it was going to be," Doyle-Murray says. The National Lampoon, which he co-founded, became one of the biggest success stories in publishing. "What's the difference between David McClelland and a pizza?" Maybe Doug Kenney didn't jump. "He was like Marilyn Monroe in that way. Henry was Henry Beard, one year Kenney's senior and many levels his social better. He spent most of the 1970s in Manhattan, where he co-founded the Lampoon. Kenney was the heart of the enterprise. That is not how Hollywood saw him. The awards that came to himthe Merit Scholarship, the forensic championships, the memberships in this society and thathe shrugged off as if they were his due. "I remember turning around and looking at all the faces," he says. ". "We were about to get into an accident. "No one thought to ask him.". Increasingly, he trailed off in the middle of sentences. But the sex-and-drug-laden script was a bit too racy to be set in high school, so they brought in Lampoon's resident collegiate expert, Chris Miller, and set the thing in a college frat house instead. videos, While vacationing in Hawaii in 1980, the National Lampoon magazine co-founder and OG of snark walked past a warning sign and strolled to the edge of a 30-foot-high cliff. Kenney called Walker, sounding cheerful, and promised to be home for a party he was to host on Labor Day. A gaggle of upperclassmen had gathered in the otherwise deserted auditorium; they were going to have fun with the freshman. Even by Hollywood standards, the 11-week shoot was a wild scene where, according to a biography of Jon Peters, "debauchery reigned every night.". Men thought him brave, loyal, and true. They were a quirky group, even in the best of circumstances. Instead, he wrote comedy and in the process created an art form that influenced a generation. He had smoked grass and used acid and cocaine in Manhattan but in L.A. his drug use spiralled out of control. "He was a pretty delicate mechanism," she says, haltingly. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Cast:Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith. He may have gone there with suicidal thoughts, decided against it and fallen anyway. He spent most of the 1970s in Manhattan, where he co-founded the, John Belushi, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray. When a favor was asked, he did it. The deal he, Beard, and Rob Hoffman had struck with Simmons had stipulated a complex stock buy-out after five years. Soon rumors began to drift back to the Coast that a "coke film was in the making, and Orion braced itself for the result. As he neared his destination, Kenney turned left and struck out on his own path. Amazingly, nothing happened.". In fact, none of it was true: not mom, not Main Street, not the gang at the soda shop, and certainly not Doug. When he tried a magazine, it became one of the great publishing success stories of recent times. But it was never so simple. Then one day a postcard arrived from California. They played tennis. And he was right.". "He was very good at concealing his pain," says Ramis, sitting on a leather couch on the second floor of his Ocean Pictures office in Highland Park, Ill.