I asked my followers on Twitter and Facebook to share their favorite Chevy Chase moments with me so I could shape their memories into a story. This is the result of that experiment.
Did you know that Chevy Chase hasn’t had a significant roll in a movie since 1998? What happened to the career of the star of some of the most beloved comedic films of the modern era? This story speculates that someone fell on Chevy Chase.
The Man Who Fell On Chevy Chase
There was a man, a man who fell, and while many men have fallen, very few have fallen so far and landed as well as the man who fell on Chevy Chase.
Though he was a natural at golf and would grow into a well-meaning, if incompetent, father, Douglas Otterburn was a teen during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He watched the pratfalls of his future landing pad every weekend that he wasn’t spending time with friends at the local arcade or playing in rock bands. While he might occasionally read his father’s paper or watch the news, most of the important stories seemed to come to him. Any he’d missed, would be covered hilariously by Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live.
“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not,” began each romping reinterpretation of the week’s headlines. This fact became all the more real to him when he met the comedian in ‘77.
Doug ran into Chevy in a pub in Martha’s Vinyard shortly after Chase left SNL for Hollywood.
Interested only in letting one of his heroes know how much he appreciated him, he approached the rising star.
Perhaps, he had downed one too many, but the man who was blazing a much-followed path from SNL to the silver screen was devoid of kindness and understanding when speaking to his fan.
“Mr. Chase” he said and paused to allow his target to refocus his attention, “I wanted to say that I’m a big fan.”
“Sounds like another Landshark,” Chase remarked and his friends had a big laugh. Afterwords, they mocked Doug and rudely interjected any sentence he tried to utter.
Unable to converse with his celebrity idol, Doug gathered his dignity and vindictively fired a parting shot before leaving the bar: “Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.”
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While Chase went on to great successes in Caddyshack, Fletch, and the National Lampoon Vacation franchise, Doug moved to Vegas and lived a quiet life in the hospitality industry. Even though he knew that the house always won, he gambled away the majority of his paychecks and never really got ahead in life.
He had fun jamming with local musicians and occasionally sat in on bass or drums for a lounge act. It’s how he eventually met his wife.
She always liked the battery members of bands. Most of them are a little shy and she loved how much mileage she could get just by paying them a little extra attention. After seeing Doug play bass in one band, and happening to catch him on drums in another act the following weekend, she was too intrigued not to sit next to him at the bar after his set.
She could tell he was younger than her: not too much, 3 maybe 4 years.
“I think I saw you last week,” she said. “Do you play bass too?”
“Yeah, I fill in on bass for Pocket Pair and, obviously, I drum with these guys.”
“What else are you into?”
“Well, I work at a hotel.” Doug decided not to mention gambling as his other hobby.
He tried to pay her more attention but he was starting to wonder if many musicians were gamblers. Is there some common thread between them? Do musicians and gamblers both value getting by on skill and intuition over perseverance and scholarship. Why am I thinking about this, he chided; there’s a perfectly good-looking woman talking to me.
She had ended up at the show with a friend, whose boyfriend ran lights, but she really wanted to catch the end of the Lakers/Jazz game. Both she and Doug agreed that those teams should swap names already. LA is practically a desert and there no significant Jazz scene in Utah.
“If I’m gonna be stuck here,” she said, “at least I’m stuck here with someone who has some sense in sports.”
An idea came to Doug, but should he dare to speak it?
“I have a car,” he said.
“What?” she said. She understood Doug’s words, but reflexively replied with a question since she was somewhere in between the moment of perception and the moment of cognition.
“I have a car. I guess I’m saying you don’t have to be stuck here if you don’t want to be.”
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, “and my name’s Melisande.”
“I’m Doug. Let’s go backstage, I’m closer to the loading door.”
Five hours later they were watching the sun come up over the Grand Canyon. Fast forward another ten hours and they were back on the the Vegas Strip. Two hours after that they were calling their parents: Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you for the first time, Doug and Melisande Otterburn.
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In 1997 Doug would see his high school hero again as Chase filmed his National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation. Leaning out the window of the Luxor Pyramid for a better view of the filming below, he lost his balance and slid down the glass seven stories to tumble into the famous actor.
Hearing the squeaking of wool and skin against the glass and the rough impact of a body hitting pavement, Chase turned his head just in time to see Douglas Otterburn’s hapless mass before it swept the actors legs out from under him.
“I think that was my line,” quipped Chase, bruised but not injured. Though Doug was hurt and would soon go to the hospital, he had the presence of mind to reply:
“I seem to have been watching your instructional tapes.”
For the remainder of the shoot that day, Chase would crack up as soon as he considered how preposterous that a man would stumble seven stories down the side of a hotel and bump into him.
Maybe he was feeling slightly guilty for the continual amusement Doug’s tumble had brought him, but the next day Chase developed an interest in how Doug was doing in the hospital. He decided to visit him after a morning shoot wrapped.
He brought an autographed headshot and a small bouquet of flowers with him as he entered the hospital.
“Surprise!” Chase said as he entered Doug’s room, but the surprise belonged to him.
Doug’s leg was suspended in a cast and he was a little hazy from medication, but he could tell the actor got more than he bargained for in this visit. Chase spoke first:
“Melisonde? Is that you?”
“Hi Chevy, it’s been a long time.”
“Steely Dan, wasn’t it.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Me too.”
“So I guess you met my husband.”
“He’s a lucky guy, but I thought that was just because he only broke a leg.”
“Ha! I think I remember telling you that once or twice.”
“Those were good times,” he smiled.
Doug thanked Chevy for coming to see him. Chase sat down and spoke with Doug and Melisonde at length: about Vegas, making movies, the differences in rock and jazz drumming, and how Melisonde and he dated a few times before he made it big. They had been married a few years at that point, and Doug knew she spent some time in New York City. He’d never pressed her for her dating history, but still, if your wife dated a celebrity you expect that she would mention it at some point.
Doug was charmed: charmed to the extent that he decided not to bring up the other time he met Chase in Massachusetts. “He’s not even the same guy anymore,” Doug thought to himself.
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The meeting with Doug and Melisonde in the hospital infected the actor with a gravitas never before seen in his personal life. This meeting with an old girlfriend and her husband caused the actor to reconsider many of the choices in his life.
Chase’s long career began to evaporate after Vegas Vacation. With nothing else on the horizon he looked at the script for Dirty Work. Upon reading it he discovered that not only does his character die, but he dies off-screen!
“Sure,” he thought, “it’s a good joke that way. The doctor’s death garners a single sentence, a passing mention, delivered in Norm McDonald’s trademark deadpan. I’ll be gone as quickly as the mother in Virginia Wolfe’s To the Lighthouse.”
“While part of me says, ‘That’s no way to kill a character played by an actor as famous as Chevy Chase,’ perhaps this is my fate. Maybe I’ve made my big noise. A drum resonates long after it has ceased to be heard, am I that drum? Perhaps it’s time for me to do the same. I can fade away, or I can just continue on with my work invisibly, off screen.”
While several of his peers like Steve Martin and Bill Murray are enjoying a career Renaissance, Chase languishes in obscurity.
Or does he languish? What if he is flourishing . . . off screen.
