Carradine was a troubled soul
Jim Slotek remembers the 'Kung Fu' star from his appearance at The Canadian Rock Awards
By JIM SLOTEK, SUN MEDIA
Actor David Carradine, who starred as the wandering monk in the long-running "Kung Fu" television series, was found hanged in his Bangkok hotel room, Thai police said on June 4, 2009. He was 72. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/Files As troubled as he obviously was in general, David Carradine was particularly so during the time he spent in Toronto filming Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.
The worst kept secret was that he drank, prodigiously — a characteristic I saw close up in November 1993, when I was head writer on something called The Canadian Rock Awards, a onetime event which was syndicated across Canada.
It was a dog’s-breakfast of an award show, with two terrific but oddly matched hosts — Weird Al Yankovic and Jeff Healey — who could hardly make themselves heard in the enormous, packed Toronto airport-strip nightclub that was the show’s venue.
The Rock Awards were plagued with bugs from Day 1. On the day of the awards, Carradine had already had to deal with Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach being held at the airport for mouthing off to Customs. (Stuff like, “Do you mean to say I have to kiss your ass to be allowed back into my own country?”)
I also remember cluelessly remarking to Healey about how beautiful the women broadcasters in a Russian film crew were, and him agreeing.
But when I’ve run into Weird Al since then, it’s Carradine’s “state” he remembers most vividly, mainly because the actor had dispensed with the script, wandered from the podium, leaving his Kung Fu co-star Chris Potter (currently of CBC’s Heartland) to carry the award-presenting part of their appearance, and delivered a kung fu kick at Yankovic that missed his head by about an inch.
Not long after that, Carradine’s condition worsened, and he was less than ambulatory. Finally, a couple of us more or less carried him to his limo.
The events of that night were on the front burner in my mind a few months later when Carradine was charged for kicking in a door at the Rogers Centre (then SkyDome) during a Rolling Stones concert. He claimed he did it to escape being “mobbed by fans.”
Did he get his act together? In 1996, Carradine showed up on the cover of Alternative Medicine Digest, with a story that began, “For 25 years, David Carradine has been known as the kung fu genius, Kwai Chang Caine, but his friends know him as a sensitive master of alternative medicine.”
Said Carradine in the piece: “I’ve always been into things like health foods, vitamins, holistic healing — you are what you eat — long before these ideas were picked up by the general public.”
Amazingly, the article did not once use the word “alcohol.”
If he had cleaned up, it might explain the grouchy version of Carradine that Sun Media’s national entertainment editor John Kryk encountered at Roy Thomson Hall on a first date with his now wife Melinda, just as Kung Fu was wrapping up a four-season run. Rushing for a cab, Kryk made a grab for the passenger door, only to see Carradine grabbing for the other door. “The look on his face said, ‘If you open that door, I’ll rip out your throat,’” Kryk recalls. “I said, ‘Y’know what? I’ll just wait for the next cab.’”
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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