The Zen of Danny Noonan

Caddyshack is among the most beloved of comedies. It’s endlessly quoted, referenced and parodied, its array of colorful goofballs embedded in our collective consciousness. But who’s the film’s main character? It’s not Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler, Ted Knight’s Elihu Smails, Rodney Dangerfield’s Al Czervik or Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb. No, the man who drives the action is actually Danny. 

You remember Danny Noonan, the young caddie trying to make some money and maybe get laid. Amidst Caddyshack’s crazy, vain or smug weirdos, Danny comes closest to resembling ordinary human behavior. He’s not trying to murder gophers. He’s not making inappropriate comments loudly in public. Danny is just a poor local kid navigating a comic minefield of rich idiots. The actor who played Danny did such a good job that you tend to forget him. But as the film celebrates its 44th anniversary, Michael O’Keefe continues to hear from the movie’s fans. He’s appreciative but still a bit mystified all these years later.

“​​If I was rating films by the worst acting I’ve ever seen,” he tells me with a laugh, “I would say Caddyshack goes into my top five — and I would put me at the top of that list. Which is not to say it’s not funny. I was at this golf club in Canada about a year ago, and they brought me up for one of these events and they screened the movie. I hadn’t looked at the movie in a while, but I watched the last 20 minutes and I was like, ‘I suck in this movie. Everybody else sucks, too.’ Somehow, that doesn’t get in the way of it working.”

O’Keefe is now 69 and living in Woodstock with his wife Emily and their tween son Aidan. He’s been acting steadily since the mid-1970s, and when I speak to him over Zoom in mid-June, he’s in the midst of shooting a series with Jon Hamm, who plays his son. “They’re filming in Westchester where I grew up,” O’Keefe says. “The first location was at a house around the corner from the Westchester Country Club, which is where my parents had their wedding reception. My brother and my nephew are still members. My brother’s 60th birthday party was there last year at Thanksgiving.” He laughs, adding, “And it’s across the street from my high school girlfriend’s house. I had to resist the urge to go knock on the windows and say, ‘See, I told you I was going to be an actor!’”

As a kid, O’Keefe had been anxious to escape his family — especially his father, who O’Keefe once described as “a domineering, self-absorbed chauvinist who destroyed the childhood of his seven children and crushed the spirit of his wife.” 

“When I was 15 years old, I was very clear that I had to get the fuck out of dodge,” he recalls. “These people were crazy. Thankfully, I started getting roles in commercials, which were paying quite well back then. In 1970, I did a Colgate tooth commercial, and I made $30,000. I stayed until I graduated high school, and then I did move out — and I never really looked back.”

O’Keefe has a boisterous, wisecracking energy. He’s got a dozen stories to tell and an engaging way of telling them. He’s devoted his whole life to acting — as well as writing and poetry — and he takes his passions seriously. And if you get him talking, he’ll tell you about his journey to Buddhism, an offshoot of his interest in transcendence that started when he was a teenager. But those seeds were also planted by Caddyshack, in which his character is pestered by self-satisfied scion Ty Webb, who offers Danny seemingly bizarre mantras of life while on the green. Those lines were dreamed up by Doug Kenney, the beloved co-founder of National Lampoon who was one of Caddyshack’s writers. O’Keefe still misses his friend, who died in August 1980 at the age of 33, just a month after the film’s release.

“Doug had a kind of country-club thing about him, because his dad was a country-club tennis pro,” says O’Keefe. “He went to Harvard, so he kind of assimilated into the elite world, and he was a freak in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. His hair was down to his ass, but when he cut his hair short and put on a suit and a tie, he looked like one of those guys at the bar in the country club that you go hang out with after a round of golf. That was his M.O. He was the one (writing) all those Bashō references (in Caddyshack): ‘A flute without holes is not a flute. A donut without holes is a Danish.’ That’s really funny, but he had to read all of those Zen poems in order to get there. He had to read Bashō and all those masters — all those death poems, all that stuff.”

O’Keefe was already nearly a decade into his career when the opportunity to play Danny came along. Caddyshack was only O’Keefe’s third film — his second earned him his only Oscar nomination to date, for Best Supporting Actor. In 1978’s The Great Santini, he played Ben, the son of a strict fighter pilot (Robert Duvall) who tries to bring his military training home, leading to a battle of wills. O’Keefe drew from his own childhood. As he puts it, “I love my father, but I got cast in The Great Santini for a reason.” After that film’s success, though, he was dying to do something lighter. Maybe a comedy about some wacky golfers at a country club? Not that everyone in his circle agreed with that decision.

“The (Oscar) nomination came out on Santini before Caddyshack was released,” he recalls. “So a couple of my friends, they were like, ‘What you got coming up next?’ And I said, ‘Well, I did this comedy with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, and it’s these National Lampoon guys.’ My friends were like, ‘Why would you do that?!??’ I was like, ‘Are you out of your mind? What do you think, I’m going to be going toe-to-toe with character actors that are assholes for the rest of my life? There’s other things to do.’”

Somewhere, the original version of the Caddyshack script exists — the one in which Danny is really more of the central figure. O’Keefe doesn’t remember much of anything about it, though. “It’s so long ago,” he says. “I only probably read (it) twice — once when I was auditioning, once when I was preparing. None of Bill’s part was written, so as soon as Bill started doing his thing, they threw that script out. And then I just grabbed onto their coattails.” 

It’s true that he thinks Caddyshack’s acting is terrible, but he thinks Chase, Dangerfield, Knight and Murray are all really funny in it. “None of those characters had the place in the (script) that they have in the final version,” O’Keefe says. “But very quickly (on set), within a week, it was so clear that Rodney was going to hit home runs every time he opened his mouth, and that Ted was absolutely insane in the right way in the role, and that Chevy was going to bring a lot to the table. And then once Bill came, he started doing his thing. That’s when they realized we’ve got to abandon this ‘Danny Noonan grows up and learns his lesson’ (plot).” 

He may have wanted to be part of a film that was less searing than The Great Santini, but he quickly grasped that he couldn’t compete with his Caddyshack co-stars. And it wasn’t simply because he was younger than them. “I have a good sense of humor, I’m a funny guy, I can get laughs,” O’Keefe says. “But I can’t get anything like the kind of laughs that Bill and Chevy and Ted and Rodney got in the movie and have gotten in their careers. I don’t know how to do that — I instinctively knew that. I might’ve been cocky and arrogant when I was young, but I wasn’t stupid.”

But if his role shrunk along the way, he got to see how these comedy superstars did their thing — and how co-writer Harold Ramis, making his directorial debut, kept all those egos in check. “Harold’s great skill was organizing Bill and Ted and Chevy and Rodney into a coherent ensemble — and I use the word ‘coherent’ loosely.” Asked if he felt intimidated by those four actors, O’Keefe replies, “There was a part of me that was intimidated, especially when they got competitive. It was never really Rodney or Ted who got competitive — it was the other two knuckleheads.”

Of course, Chase and Murray were famous for not getting along back in the early Saturday Night Live days. Did O’Keefe witness their continuing feud while making Caddyshack? All O’Keefe will say is, “Those guys, Chevy and Bill, they don’t have technique — that’s not what they’re about. They’re not schooled in that collegial thing that creates an ensemble of people who have a mutually-shared goal. They were schooled in the ‘get a laugh or die’ thing where they were going to get pushed in front of an audience trying to break in at Second City in Chicago.” 

That’s how Murray found his calling, but O’Keefe remembers as a high-schooler seeing Chase as part of the National Lampoon show Lemmings in New York. “He played the Hell’s Angel biker who got upset at the peace-freaks that touched his hog — he reamed out someone every night, with a leather jacket and his hair down to here. He actually singled me out the night that I saw it — I was in the first row of tables. First, I was shitting my pants I was laughing so hard, which made him just get more and more angry with me: ‘You fucking peace-freak, you touched my fucking hog, I’ll fucking kill you!’ I was laughing, he was screaming, and the audience was loving it.”

Over the years, the legend of Caddyshack’s making has grown. (In 2018, film critic and author Chris Nashawaty wrote a book about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans.) It was an era of rampant drug use, and Caddyshack wasn’t immune. As O’Keefe puts it, “I (tell parents), ‘I really don’t think you should let your kids see Caddyshack until they turn 40 — it’s age-appropriate at that point. Until then, I would not let them watch it.’” He can joke about it now. He couldn’t always. He was 12 when he first got drunk. He had to battle alcoholism and drug addiction. But now he’s worked his way through that — he’s raising a son who’s about the age he was when he started drinking. He’s open with Aidan about his past. And he doesn’t want to lionize that part of Caddyshack’s backstory.

“If you took cocaine out of the equation … those guys are funny and they didn’t need that to do the movie,” O’Keefe tells me. He pauses and then continues. “I think it’s okay to talk about this now because, from my point-of-view, there’s a certain amount of transparency that’s needed. Doug Kenney is a real victim of the drug culture. There’s no doubt that he was one of the comic geniuses of his generation — absolutely no doubt. And there was no doubt that he was addicted to cocaine, and there was no doubt that he committed suicide because of it. Even though, at Doug’s funeral the joke was, ‘Doug didn’t commit suicide — he tripped and fell when he was looking for a place to commit suicide.’”

When Caddyshack became a hit when it was released July 25, 1980, O’Keefe was 25 years old and part of an acclaimed Oscar-nominated drama and a crowd-pleasing comedy. That’s rare air. “In 1980, there was a list in Variety of the top five young actors,” remembers O’Keefe, “and it was Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and me and then two other people I don’t remember — someone that was a ‘bankable young movie star.’” I don’t even have a chance to ask the follow-up question before he answers it himself. “Three years later, that was over for me,” he says. “(After Caddyshack) I made three films that were progressively less-interesting, one of which I referred to as a film the entire family can miss. Then it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to have to become a working actor if I want to do this — I’m going to have to find a niche.’”

It wasn’t just the films he said yes to but also the ones he passed on. He turned down Splash, convinced he wasn’t right for the part. “A lot of people, when I was younger, (would say), ‘You could have been as big a star as Tom Hanks.’ And I’m here to tell you, no, I could never have been that star, because I’m not an affable person. He is so affable, and I mean this as a compliment. He is one of the most likable, accessible, thoughtful guys on camera of his generation — it has been proven over and over again because of his longevity and the interest people still have in watching him parse out a role. I was never that guy — never. But they offered me the role in Splash first, and that was his real breakout role. When I read it, I knew I would not be able to score in that part because it was the romance and because it required that light touch. You know that old chestnut about ‘Dying’s hard but comedy’s harder’? That’s true — you have to really know that space.”

Instead, he signed up for duds like The Slugger’s Wife, although it sure seemed good on paper. (Directed by Hal Ashby? Written by Neil Simon? That sounds like a hit.) He’s philosophical about those post-Caddyshack stumbles. “I’ve turned down some movies that were pretty good in retrospect,” he says. “So I have to accept that aspect of my journey as an actor as my learning curve. A lot of what I did — my approach when my career tanked — was to take it as a character-development opportunity. An opportunity to learn about myself and learn about my character — my personal character — and what needed to be changed, what needed to be improved.”

It was around this time that he got serious about Buddhism. “I’ve always had a spiritual bent — I’ve always felt that way about things,” he says. Even as a teenager living in New York City after leaving home, he’d find himself at a bookstore, his attention turning to the shelves that had guides to Zen. Plus, he wrote poetry and studied Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In fact, in his 30s, O’Keefe studied with Ginsberg. “He liked my poems,” O’Keefe says with pride. “Didn’t like anybody else’s poems in the workshop.” Not that every one of his poems was a winner: “I read one poem at a reading with him while we were there. He was like, ‘That poem sucked.’ I was like, ‘Oh, thanks, Allen — thank you for your support.’” In his 50s, O’Keefe earned an MFA in writing from Bennington: “I’m actually getting more serious about my writing now as I get older,” he says.

But that greater spiritual dawning happened when O’Keefe was 30, almost by accident. “This buddy of mine, he was Leonard Cohen’s bass player for a while, and for my 30th birthday, he said, ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ We were neighbors on the Upper West Side at the time, and he said, ‘You got to be at my apartment at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning.’ I literally said to him, ‘Man, there better be a bag of cash for me at your apartment at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning. This better be something.’” The friend drove him to a Zen Center to give him an introduction to Zen practice. “I remember the monk who led it, his name is Lou Nordstrom. He’s still a teacher in the lineage that I studied in for years. And then I never looked back. I started doing retreats with those guys.”

He was ordained as a Zen priest in 1994, crediting his practice for helping him with his addiction issues. But he also saw how Zen Buddhism could help make him a better actor. “With Caddyshack, what is it all rooted in? Is it rooted in behavior, or is it rooted in an idea — and the idea being, ‘This will be funny’?” 

To O’Keefe’s mind, acting rooted in behavior is the better way to go. “Now, I’m not saying (acting rooted in an idea) is wrong — I’m just saying I don’t aspire to that. That’s not who I am. You can’t act an idea. You can act behavior, you can act relationships, you can take action. Which isn’t to say you (can’t have a situation) where you’re listening and just there — you need that, too. That’s one of the things that’s appealing about Zen or any kind of meditation for actors — to have a meditation experience, you don’t have to have a religious experience. There’s plenty of secular and/or atheistic traditions of meditation that are as sophisticated and as well-developed as any religious one. But for actors, stillness is the source of movement. That’s a really big thing — you have to find a still place inside. And if I was to go back and look at my role in Caddyshack, I would say my still place inside was not exactly of great depth. I would say it was a tad shallow.”

What’s funny is that part of what makes Caddyshack work is that Danny Noonan is the film’s still center. “I’m the stable part,” O’Keefe acknowledges about his character, “which is different than my internal stillness. But I’m the one that those fucking knuckleheads are acting out around. In that way, I’m the audience — when you watch the film, you identify with me, hopefully, because that’s the way into the movie. You’re certainly not going to enter the movie thinking, ‘That Carl Spackler guy is just like me!’ I don’t think that ever happened.”

Recently, O’Keefe renounced his priesthood, writing a moving piece about his decision for Tricycle. Zen had been part of his life for decades, but he felt he needed a change. “One of the things that happened for me that made my desire to abandon Buddhism clearer was that I met a Daoist priest up here where I live,” he tells me. “I got into it because I was studying tai chi and qigong and yangsheng and different kung fu martial arts. I was looking for teachers and sampling all the different teachers up here for that.” 

Ultimately, his path led him to study in a sect that combines Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. “They absorb this awakened truth from each of those traditions and then they use it to enhance their own tradition and their own personal and sect belief system about Daoism and what it’s about,” he tells me. “When we had moved up here, which was 10 years ago, I was already leaning away from Buddhism for my own reasons — I was just losing the juice. I didn’t feel compelled to practice as much — I was looking for something else. When the student’s ready, the teacher appears — that’s a cliché because it’s true.”

His acting résumé is impressive, including stints on Roseanne, Homeland, Masters of Sex and Sneaky Pete. But he’s modest about his career. “I think part of the reason why I succeeded…” O’Keefe stops himself. “I’m smiling, because I think my success is still in question. Even though I’m 69, I’m still waiting to grab the brass ring, if you know what I mean.” 

Occasionally, he teaches acting. I’m curious if he’s ever shown Caddyshack to his students. He hasn’t.

“If I was going to, I would say, ‘The thing to emulate and the thing to appreciate and what everybody here does — myself included — is to try to risk everything. Just throw it out there. Don’t be shy. Throw the spaghetti on the refrigerator and see if it sticks.’”

In the past, he could have a difficult time when fans came up to him wanting to talk about Caddyshack. Of course, he was grateful for their enthusiasm, but couldn’t they ever bring up anything he’d done, you know, this century? But he has come to enjoy the attention for a film made so long ago, back when he was still trying to figure himself out.

In Caddyshack, Danny Noonan gets himself into a bizarre situation and has to make the best of it. You could argue Michael O’Keefe did the same when he signed up for that film. He’s been married for more than a decade. He loves being a dad. He’s an in-demand actor. He gets invited to conventions to talk about Caddyshack. It’s a good life, and a lot of it came about because of a movie filled with — to use O’Keefe’s go-to term — knuckleheads who basically made it up as they went along. If he’s right and the film’s performances are technically terrible, how did they pull off a comedy landmark?

“If I really knew the answer to questions like that,” he replies with a laugh, “there would be a path beaten to my door.”