Certifiable?

"We all go a little mad sometimes."
    - Motel owner Norman Bates

Juliette Lewis and Beverly D'Angelo appear in an ad for Old Navy

Rising above the flood of holiday sales ads this past Yuletide was a clever series of commercials for Old Navy clothing stores featuring Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as the Griswolds from the National Lampoon "Vacation" comedies, along with Juliette Lewis (Audrey Griswold in "Christmas Vacation").

Incidentally, in 2010, Super Bowl XLIV aired a popular commercial for HomeAway, Inc., a Texas-based online vacation rental marketplace, with the two actors as Clark and Ellen Griswold (above).

The highlight of the Old Navy spots was the living room scene reuniting a delirious cluster-bunch of assorted Audreys and Rustys, including (above) Anthony Michael Hall (the original Rusty from "National Lampoon’s Vacation"), Dana Barron (the original Audrey), Jason Lively (Rusty in "National Lampoon’s European Vacation"), and the previously mentioned Juliette Lewis, along with a pair of adorable tykes as "New Audrey" and "New Rusty."

A reunion of the original "Vacation" cast: Chevy Chase, Anthony Michael Hall,
Beverly D'Angelo, and Dana Barron

Among the no-shows was Rusty from "Christmas Vacation," Johnny Galecki, currently playing Leonard Hofstadter on the hit TV series "The Big Bang Theory." Audrey and Rusty from "Vegas Vacation," Marisol Nichols and Ethan Embry, are busy television actors. Sadly, Dana Hill, who portrayed Audrey in "European Vacation," succumbed to complications from a diabetic coma and paralytic stroke at the age of 32 in 1996.

Beverly D'Angelo, Jason Lively, Chevy Chase, and
Dana Hill pose for a "European Vacation" publicity photo

Obviously missing-in-action was Randy Quaid as the always shiftless, often creepy Cousin Eddie (below). Wikipedia currently refers to Quaid as a "retired" actor. In fact, after a number of legal problems beginning in the fall of 2009, coupled with increasingly bizarre behavior by both Randy and wife Evi (which they attributed to fear that they were targeted for assassination by a cabal of "star whackers"), the pair sought sanctuary in Canada.

A recent edition of the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary defined "La-La Land" as a noun referring "either to Los Angeles…or to a state of being out of touch with reality, and sometimes to both simultaneously." It goes without saying that Randy Quaid isn’t the first Hollywood celebrity to go one step beyond.

Vivien Leigh, who won an Academy Award for her performance as the tempestuous, occasionally scatterbrained Scarlett O’Hara in "Gone With the Wind" (1939), struggled for years with bipolar disorder. Frances Farmer (below), a beautiful leading lady of the 1930s and 1940s, was initially diagnosed with "manic depressive psychosis" before she was involuntarily committed to a California sanitarium, where she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given insulin shock therapy. She was later committed to a state hospital in Washington, where she received electroconnvulsive shock therapy (ECT). A year after she was released as "completely cured," she was re-committed to the same hospital. (Jessica Lange’s portrayal of Farmer earned her an Oscar nomination in the 1982 film "Frances.")

In 1961, the chronically troubled Marilyn Monroe, whose erratic behavior drove her costars and directors crazy, checked herself into a psychiatric clinic (an experience she later described as a "nightmare") before transferring to another medical center, where she remained for three weeks. Margot Kidder, known for her endearing portrayal of the often addled Lois Lane in the "Superman" movies starring Christopher Reeve, suffered from bipolar disorder, culminating in a much publicized manic meltdown in 1996 when she vanished for four days, existing as a homeless person in downtown Los Angeles until she was discovered filthy and battered in a stranger’s backyard and placed in psychiatric care. In 2007, Kidder announced that she hadn’t had a manic episode in 11 years.

Eight years before playing a teenager who enters a mental institution for an 18-month stay in "Girl, Interrupted" (1999), Winona Ryder, whose godfather was LSD guru Timothy Leary, checked herself into a hospital when she was 20, suffering from depression, anxiety attacks and exhaustion. Carrie Fisher (below), the feisty Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" trilogy and a longtime victim of bipolar disorder with a personal history of substance abuse, told late-night TV host Craig Ferguson in 2008 that she receives electroconvulsive therapy treatments every six weeks to "blow apart the cement" in her brain.

And don’t think that there is any shortage of unhinged personalities in today’s media. There are plenty of wingnuts out there. Look no further than at Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Donald Trump, and Gary Busey. And then there is the singular flight from the cuckoo’s nest of Randy Quaid.

Randy Quaid was a drama student at the University of Houston when director Peter Bogdanovich cast him in the acclaimed 1971 film "The Last Picture Show." Amid a talented cast including Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, and Eileen Brennan, Quaid made his screen debut as the unsavory Lester Marlow, who escorts Shepherd to a skinny-dipping pool party (above).

Randy Quaid in "Paper Moon"

Bogdanovich must have been impressed by Quaid because he put the actor in "What’s Up, Doc?" (1972), "Paper Moon" (1973), and "Texasville," the 1990 sequel to "The Last Picture Show" in which Quaid, as well as Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, and Eileen Brennan reprised their original roles.

Randy Quaid was nominated for a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award for his supporting role in "The Last Detail" (1973), portraying a hapless sailor sentenced to eight years for petty theft from a charity collection box. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young play the lifer Navy petty officers who are begrudgingly assigned to escort the pathetic youth to the Naval prison but grow to sympathize with their prisoner and decide to show him a good time before handing him over to the authorities.

"SNL" 1985: Nora Dunn, Danitra Vance, Randy Quaid, Robert Downey Jr.,
Anthony Michael Hall, Terry Sweeney, Joan Cusack, Jon Lovitz

Quaid took part in one of the oddest seasons of "Saturday Night Live" when producer Lorne Michaels returned in 1985 after a five-year hiatus for the 11th season of the show. The new cast of regulars featured actors, not comedians, including, alongside Quaid, Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Michael Hall (at 17, the youngest male cast member), Terry Sweeney, and Danitra Vance (the first black female Not Ready for Prime Time Player). This would be the one and only season for all of them. (It should be noted that the cast was rounded out by some newcomers, comedians who would survive for future seasons, namely Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, and Dennis Miller.)

Speaking of TV, Quaid won a Golden Globe award and was nominated for an Emmy for his uncanny portrait of future president Lyndon Johnson in the 1987 television movie "LBJ: The Early Years" (above). In 2005, he was again nominated for an Emmy, for his performance as "Colonel" Tom Parker in the miniseries "Elvis," featuring Jonathan Rhys Meyers ("The Tudors") in the title role.

The first publicized incident of the actor’s transformation into Bizarro Quaid came in the aftermath of his noteworthy role as Joe Aguirre (above), the hard-nosed sheep rancher in "Brokeback Mountain" (2005), starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as star-crossed homosexuals on the range. In March of 2006, Quaid filed a lawsuit which alleged that the production companies negligently misrepresented "Brokeback Mountain" as a low-budget, art house picture "with no prospect of making money" with the intention of roping in Quaid at a below-market salary. By this time, the movie had grossed more than $160 million, and Quaid’s lawsuit asked for $10 million, plus punitive damages. In May, the lawsuit was dropped when, according to the actor’s publicist, Quaid had been promised a bonus by the film’s distributor, a settlement which the distributor denied making.

In 2007, Randy Quaid played the lead role of Colonel John Falstaff in a Seattle stage production of "Lone Star Love" (above), a country-bluegrass musical reworking of Shakespeare’s "The Merry Wives of Windsor," transplanted to the post-Civil War American West. (One of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters, Sir John Falstaff was depicted in three plays as a vain, overweight, oft-intoxicated, alternately boastful and cowardly knight.) The musical was purportedly bound for Broadway before producers abruptly canceled it. Reportedly, all 26 members of the cast presented charges that Quaid "physically and verbally abused his fellow performers" and that the production was shut down instead of heading for Broadway due to his "oddball behavior." As a result, the Actors’ Equity Association, which represents stage actors, banned Quaid for life and fined him more than $81,000. Quaid, who claimed he had left the union before the musical even premiered, maintained, "I am guilty of only one thing, giving a performance that elicited a response so deeply felt by the actors and producers with little experience of my creative process that they actually think I am Falstaff!"

Randy Quaid and third wife Evi were arrested in his home state of Texas in September of 2009 on charges of defrauding an innkeeper, stemming from an unpaid Santa Barbara, California, hotel tab and the couple’s failure to appear in court. After missing subsequent court appearances, the Quaids were temporarily detained in custody in April of 2010. The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, although Evi Quaid pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge of defrauding an innkeeper and was sentenced to three years probation.

In September of 2010, the Quaids were confronted with burglary charges when they took up residence in a guest house of a Santa Barbara, California, homeowner. The Quaids insisted they had owned the property since the 1990s, while documents proved that the property was sold to the current resident in 2007 by the previous owner, who, in fact, had purchased the real estate from the Quaids years earlier. Accused of causing more than $5000 in damages to the guest house, Randy and Evi were booked for felony residential burglary. Evi was additionally cited for misdemeanor resisting arrest. After posting bail of $50,000 each, they were released, but in October, bench warrants for the couple were issued following a further failure to appear in court for a hearing on the burglary charges, resulting in their bail being raised to $500,000 each.

After being arrested at the U..S.-Canadian border in Vancouver, Randy and Evi pursued sanctuary under the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, applying for refugee status based on fears that their lives in America were in danger, stating that several actors who died under mysterious circumstances were actually murdered by "Hollywood star whackers." Following several days of custody as guests of the Canada Border Services Agency, they were released after the revelation that Evi is, in fact, a "prima facie" ("at first appearance") Canadian citizen, thanks to her Canadian-born father.

A July 2011 attempt by the Santa Barbara County district attorney to extradite the Quaids from their Great White North refuge to face the felony burglary charges was turned down by the U.S. Department of Justice, although should the couple re-enter the U.S., they face certain arrest.

Evi Quaid told interviewers in Vancouver, "We are refugees, Hollywood refugees. I genuinely feel like these people are trying to kill us." Convinced that agents, accountants and anyone who could be called be a businessman in Hollywood fit the profile of an assassin, the couple asserted that they were being stalked, had their cell phones tagged and computers hacked into by the star whackers. "It is very possible that Heath Ledger was murdered," Evi said, "and David Carradine. And Robert Blake was set up." She warned, "Lindsay Lohan should be afraid. Britney Spears…Mel Gibson, I think he was drugged. I think he was slipped a mickey." Randy pleaded, "We’re just trying to find some safety and security in this."

The couple’s psychosis was crystallized in prismatic clarity when Randy Quaid and a jerry-rigged backup band dubbed The Fugitives premiered his self-penned song "Star Whackers" (or "The Ballad of Randy Quaid" or whatever) live on a Vancouver stage in 2011 (above), an egotistical rampage bristling with paranoid, if not elementary school grade lyrics: "If they have the need for you to die / That will be a cinch easy as pie."

In the moviehouse, Randy Quaid’s personal and peculiar odyssey was eerily presaged by three characterizations of individuals who can’t quit the crazy.

1. Cousin Eddie

"I don't know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper. It does just fine by itself."

First and foremost among the certifiable wack-jobs is the inimitable Cousin Eddie, created by screenwriter John Hughes and introduced in 1983 in "National Lampoon’s Vacation" as the ne’er-do well husband of Ellen Griswold’s cousin, forever in need of a loan and desperately in need of social services intervention. Eddie’s precocious daughter, Vicki (below, played by a then 15-year-old Jane Krakowski, who would go on to prime-time stardom as Jenna Maroney on the hit sitcom "30 Rock") confides to Audrey Griswold, "I’m going steady, and I French kiss." When Audrey responds, "So? Everybody does that," Vicki comes back with, "Yeah, but Daddy says I’m the best at it."

Eddie and his family were absent in "National Lampoon’s Vacation" but did pull their dilapidated RV up to the Griswold’s front yard for a surprise visit in "National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation" (1989). "Can I refill your eggnog for you?" Clark asks Eddie. "Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?"

"Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!"

Like an albatross around the neck, Cousin Eddie shows up again in "Vegas Vacation" (1997), providing such tidbits of wisdom as, "I haven’t seen a beatin’ like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose," and, "Come on, Clark, the night is young…they’re givin’ away free hot sandwiches at the blood bank."

"Eddie," Clark says at one point, "has anyone ever told you you’re bad luck?" to which Eddie replies, "Those were my mother’s dyin’ words. But I guess if your body’s covered in third degree burns and your foot’s caught in a bear trap, you tend to start talkin’ crazy."

2. Peter Blunt

Not much good can be said about "Caddyshack II" (1988), the needless sequel to the much loved 1980 original "Caddyshack." Harold Ramis (who co-wrote the original "Caddyshack") initially wrote the script, along with his writing partner, Peter Torokvei, for Rodney Dangerfield, but when Dangerfield pulled out, Ramis, who described the sequel as "terrible," tried to have his name taken off the credits. During post-production, Chevy Chase, the only original cast member to reprise his role, purportedly told the director, "Call me when you’ve dubbed the laugh-track," before exiting in disgust.

Jackie Mason is no Rodney Dangerfield, Dan Aykroyd is no Bill Murray, and Robert Stack is no Ted Knight, but at least, Dyan Cannon is easy on the eye, the gopher is still cute, and Randy Quaid is a hoot as a bull-goose loony attorney named Peter Blunt, especially in his first scene as he calmly begins to explain the "Peter Blunt system" to a rival lawyer (above). "I don’t go in for lawsuits and motions and any of that legal stuff. What happens is that I find out where you live and then I come to your house. AND I BEAT DOWN YOUR DOOR WITH A F***IN’ BASEBALL BAT AND THEN I’M GONNA MAKE A BONFIRE WITH THE CHIPPENDALE, MAYBE ROAST THAT GOLDEN RETREIVER (WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!), THEN EAT IT! AND THEN I’M COMIN’ UPSTAIRS, JUNIOR, AND I’M GONNA GRAB YOU BY YOUR BROOKS BROTHERS PJ’S AND THEN I’M GONNA TAKE YOUR BRAND NEW BMW AND CRAM IT UP YOUR TIGHT ASS! Do we have an understanding?…I tried to sweet-talk ‘em, I don’t think they went for it."

3. Russell Casse

"Independence Day" (1996) was a wide-eyed, high-tech homage to the paranoia-spawned flying saucer genre of the 1950s, rebooted with then state-of-the-art computer-generated special effects, with Will Smith as a two-fisted fighter pilot, Bill Pullman as a gung-ho GI Joe of a U.S, president (coincidentally, Pullman is currently portraying the president in the comedy TV series "1600 Penn"), and Jeff Goldblum as the absent-minded brainiac with the plan to save humankind from the alien horde.

The film’s script, by director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin, giddily basks in shameless clichés. Randy Quaid, as a boozing crop duster haunted by recollections of an alien abduction years earlier, manages to keep a straight (and heroically tragic) face while uttering such cornball claptrap as, "I picked a hell of a day to quit drinkin’," and, "Tell my family that I love them very much," before he sacrifices himself in a blaze of glory, declaring, "In the words of my generation - Up yours!…Hello, boys, I’m ba-a-a-ck!"

"I’m not crazy," Randy Quaid once asserted. "I play a lot of crazy characters, but I’m an actor."

After Quaid was nominated for Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for "The Last Detail," his younger brother, Dennis Quaid, dropped out of the University of Houston before graduating to move to Los Angeles and pursue his own acting career with a breakthrough role in the coming-of-age sleeper hit "Breaking Away." On stage, the two Quaids made a dynamic impression in Sam Shepard’s play "True West" (above), playing estranged brothers - the younger brother a Hollywood screenwriter, the older sibling a drifter and a thief - who endure an intense reconnection.

On film, Randy and Dennis portrayed real-life brothers Clell and Ed Miller (above), alongside other Hollywood siblings James and Stacy Keach (as Jesse and Frank James), David, Keith, and Robert Carradine (as Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger), and Nicholas and Christopher Guest (as Robert and Charley Ford) in director Walter Hill’s 1980 western "The Long Riders."

In an April 2011 interview, Dennis Quaid said, "I love my brother. That’s all I can say. I love my brother and I miss my brother. That’s all I’m going to say."

Randy Quaid described his relationship with his brother as "a little tense the last few years, but I love my brother very much, and we have differences, but I’m concerned about him. I feel that he’s being victimized the same way I have been by the same people." Randy’s wife, Evi, chimed in, "(Dennis) is now on a treadmill of making movies that are garbage, and it’s unfortunate because he’s talented," at which point Randy told her to shut up.