Caddyshack still plays on a loop in every clubhouse, man cave, and VFW hall in America.
But the kid who carried the bags at Bushwood stayed mostly quiet for decades about how that picture really got made.
And Michael O’Keefe just described one line in the movie’s budget that Hollywood accountants never meant for anybody to read.
What Danny Noonan Says Was Hiding in the Books
Michael O’Keefe played caddie Danny Noonan in the 1980 comedy, sharing the screen with Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight.
The 71-year-old actor sat down with Page Six recently, and Fox News picked up what he said. O’Keefe claimed cocaine ran so freely through the production that somebody wrote it right into the movie’s budget.
He didn’t wave a ledger around. What he offered was this: “there was some miscellaneous item.”
That’s one actor’s memory from nearly half a century back, and the reports carry no paperwork to back it up. Still, O’Keefe didn’t mince words about the mood on that set.
“It was the 70s,” he said. “That’s what was happening back then. People were just treating it like it was toothpaste, and you had to do it twice a day to stay healthy.”
Toothpaste.
The cast shot the picture in 1979, and it hit theaters the following year. Anybody who has watched Bill Murray mumble his way through the Cinderella story bit has probably wondered what kept that crew going.
And O’Keefe put himself right in the middle of it. He admitted he used cocaine before the cameras rolled on certain scenes.
He isn’t proud of it. Watching those scenes now, he told Page Six, “it was not my favorite memory,” and he said he is “not too happy about them.”
Fans will spend the next month trying to guess which scenes he means. He didn’t say.
The Death That Scared a Young Actor Straight
But the party ended fast for O’Keefe.
“But I can report to you that right after that movie, during that movie, was the last time I ever did anything like cocaine,” he said. “I realized that it was a terrible thing to get involved [with], and like so many things in the drug world, it looked like fun, but in reality, it wasn’t.”
A funeral drove that lesson home. Doug Kenney co-wrote and produced Caddyshack, and he died at 33 in 1980 after falling from a cliff in Hawaii.
O’Keefe described Kenney to Page Six as “one of the most affable, intelligent, funny people in the world . . . Was strung out on cocaine, got depressed, and committed suicide.”
“It was truly a result of drug addiction, and that was a huge wake-up call,” he added.
One point of fairness belongs here. Kauai police classified Kenney’s death as an accident, according to the Daily Beast, which also reported that some people close to him never felt sure about that. O’Keefe is giving his own belief about a friend, and readers should take it as exactly that.
Either way, a 33-year-old man with a hit movie in theaters never came home.
Hollywood’s Favorite Lecture Leaves Out This Chapter
Here’s where the story gets bigger than one golf comedy.
Hollywood has spent decades telling the rest of the country how to live, how to vote, and what to feel guilty about. And by O’Keefe’s account, the same industry treated an illegal drug like an office supply, something a production could tuck under “miscellaneous” next to the coffee and the gaffer tape.
Ordinary Americans who got caught with that stuff in 1979 didn’t get a line item. They got a court date.
But credit goes where it’s earned. O’Keefe didn’t dress the habit up as a wild, harmless good time, which is how Tinseltown usually sells its own history. He called it “a terrible thing,” and he tied it straight to the death of a friend.
That’s a rare thing to hear from an actor. Most of these behind-the-scenes confessions come wrapped in a wink, as if the damage were part of the charm. And the damage was real, because the drug that fueled all those laughs helped wreck one of the funniest writers of his generation, if O’Keefe has it right.
Maybe that’s getting a step ahead of the facts. Nobody can say for certain what happened on that cliff, and the police reached a different conclusion than O’Keefe did. But nobody disputes the drug problem, and that part alone is ugly enough.
O’Keefe has more on his resume than Bushwood. He earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for The Great Santini, later appeared in Ironweed and Frozen River, and currently plays Jon Hamm’s father on the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors.
And for years, being Danny Noonan forever rubbed him a little wrong. “We always talk about how we got lucky young, and didn’t know what we had,” he told Yahoo in 2020. “As actors, we don’t want to be pigeonholed, so while I was always glad to be in ‘Caddyshack,’ I sometimes wished that people would acknowledge my other work.”
Then a wardrobe designer told him a story. “But then I had this one experience with a wardrobe designer who told me that her father died of leukemia and for the last six weeks before his death, they would gather as a family and watch ‘Caddyshack,'” he said.
“That really changed my feelings about what the movie means to people and what it means to me to be a part of it,” O’Keefe said.
That family in the living room is the audience Hollywood forgot it had. Regular folks loved that movie because it made a dying father laugh, and they never needed to know what the crew was up to between takes.
Expect more of these confessions as the stars of that era hit their 70s and 80s and decide the truth matters more than the legend. The movies will hold up fine. Hollywood’s reputation for moral authority may not.
Sources:
Fox News, “‘Caddyshack’ star Michael O’Keefe claims cocaine was budgeted on set, admits filming scenes high”
Page Six, “‘Caddyshack’ star Michael O’Keefe claims cocaine was ‘budgeted’ on set, admits filming scenes while high”
Yahoo Entertainment, “‘Caddyshack’ at 40: Michael O’Keefe revisits the controversial sex scene that wouldn’t be allowed today”
The Daily Beast, “Doug Kenney: The Odd Comic Genius Behind ‘Animal House’ and National Lampoon”