Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (3 page)
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Authors: William B. Davis
By 1952, my days as a child actor were coming to an end. My family moved to the country, limiting my access to the CBC and other venues in the city. I didn’t make a successful transition to television at the time, perhaps hindered by being the tallest child actor around. And soon my voice changed, the end of the road for a boy actor.
What a stroke of luck. Imagine being close to the American theatre in the fifties, living in Britain in the first half of the sixties, as well as visiting London in 1957, and being in Canada in the late sixties and early seventies. For all three countries, these were classical eras and I was fortunate to be present for all of them. While there have been interesting individual playwrights in all three countries since, Edward Albee and David Mamet in the United States, Michael Frayn and David Hare in England, and a scattering of Canadian writers, how do they compare to the giants of earlier eras? Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge on Broadway in the fifties, to say nothing of the great musicals,
West Side Story
and
My Fair Lady
; Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Robert Bolt, and Samuel Beckett in Britain; Michael Cook, George Ryga, and James Reaney in Canada. What unites these giants aside from their talent? I was there.
Imagine a different sequence. Suppose I had been in England in the fifties. Yes, there was Terence Rattigan and Christopher Fry. But they were continuing a tradition that had become stale. It took the angry working-class writers and the Theatre of the Absurd to kick-start the British theatre. Suppose I had been in the United States in the early sixties. I could have seen a lot of stale musicals and the odd play by Edward Albee. Or in Canada during either of these periods I would see little but representations from other countries. In cultural terms Canada was still a colony. Lip service was paid to plays by Lister Sinclair, John Gray, or Mavor Moore, but we didn’t really believe we could create serious art in our own country.
I didn’t see original productions of
Glass Menagerie
,
Streetcar Named Desire
, or
Death of a Salesman,
but living in Ontario, I was aware of these theatrical events. And we all saw the film of
Streetcar
when it came out. We wondered how an actor like Marlon Brando could get away with mumbling all his lines or why Arthur Miller chose to tell the salesman story backwards. But the energy and life of this time was palpable. I did see the original production of Tennessee Williams’
Sweet Bird of Youth
with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. And the original production of
West Side Story
. It’s funny how vital and original that musical seemed at the time and how cliché and stiff it seems to me now.
I visited London in 1957, returned there for theatre school in 1961, and remained in Britain until 1965. I didn’t realize what a historic time this was for the British theatre. I assumed British theatre was always like this.
Look Back in Anger
opened in 1956 and was still running in 1957. The play may be flawed, but it was a dynamo and its effect on the theatre world electric. I was present as the audience split over
The Caretaker
; half fell asleep and half were riveted. We regularly trekked out to Stratford East to see Joan Littlewood’s work. We puzzled over
Waiting for Godot
and my moribund tear ducts came alive again at
A Man for All Seasons
. It wasn’t just the writers who were giants. The older generation of actors was still going — Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, and Alec Guiness — but a whole new generation was making an impact: David Warner, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, and Ian Holm. And then the directors: Peter Hall, Tony Richardson, Michael Elliott, John Dexter. What a time to be a young Canadian director in Britain.
While Canada in the late sixties and early seventies couldn’t boast a single writer to match the Brits, it was still an exciting time to be in Ontario and Quebec. Money was pouring into the arts through the Canada Council and a variety of other funding sources. The young baby boomers were stretching their limbs and starting theatre companies. New works were coming from mature writers Ryga, Reaney, and Cook, and younger writers George Walker, Judith Thompson, and Sharon Pollock were getting performed and seen. And the collective began, led by Paul Thompson at Theatre Passe Muraille. Theatres were springing up: Tarragon, Factory, Free in Toronto, Centaur in Montreal, regional theatres across the country, and my theatre, Festival Lennoxville in Quebec.
Yet the promise of all three great eras, America in the fifties, Britain in the sixties, and Canada in the seventies, seems never to have been fulfilled. Why? Certainly the money in film and television lured much of the talent away from the theatre. Will Robert Bolt be remembered more for the stage play,
A Man for All Seasons
, or for the film,
Lawrence of Arabia
? Yet all great theatre eras seem to be shortlived. Elizabethan theatre had paled long before the Puritans closed the theatres. Restoration drama. Then what? Almost another hundred years before Sheridan and Goldsmith and then little until Ibsen another hundred years later. What can I say? For the first part of my creative life at least, I lived in interesting times.
or A History of Canadian Theatre, Part Two
Not only did the Straw Hat Players of the late forties rehearse in our basement before the season started, they hung about our cottage after the season opened. E.J. Davis, Murray and Donald’s father, used to invite the company to his cottage on Sundays. As the only road into St. Elmo stopped at our cottage, they had to park their cars at our place and trek through the woods to get there. Somehow it seemed they spent more time at our cottage than his. Perhaps our house was more relaxed and the alcohol more free-flowing.
And so began a tradition of theatre people hanging out at our cottage, a tradition that continued even after Murray and Donald transferred their energies in the early fifties from summer stock to their newly formed theatre in Toronto, The Crest. After the Stratford Festival opened in 1953, other noted artists visited, William Hutt for instance, Frances Hyland, and the Stratford designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch.
Of course, as well as hanging out on the fringes of this social life, I went to see all the plays. Theatre was magic for me then. On the way home after a performance Ashe and I would sit in the back seat of the car, astonished that my parents in the front would criticize the production we had just seen. What was there to complain about? It was all wonderful!
And the actors were wonderful also. A highlight of each summer was the annual corn roast held on our swimming rock in August. We would pick corn at a local farm, build a fire on the rock, and cook the corn in a huge pot. The whole Straw Hat company would be there and some of their friends. But sometimes a young kid gets in the way. After one of these shindigs, the actors stayed and stayed on into the night. There came talk of a midnight swim. Sounds great, I thought — I can even lend cousin Murray a bathing suit. How was I to know it was supposed to be a nude swim? All these naked actors and Murray and me in bathing suits.
What did I absorb about theatre by being around all this activity? We helped the producer with the poster run. We heard Eric House say he couldn’t stay with Straw Hat because Stratford offered him so much money. Even though we also heard Donald say he had raised salaries, to thirty dollars a week I believe. I met the directors they brought over from Britain: John Blatchley, Pierre Levebre, and Peter Potter.
I have a vivid memory of waiting for Nathan Cohen’s radio review of the opening of the second season at Stratford. All the critics had raved about the first season and we were primed to hear even greater enthusiasm for the second. We gathered around the radio at the cottage in anticipation — people did that in the days before television. Cohen’s review began like this, “There are two stars still shining at Stratford. . . .” The first was the design of the theatre. The second may have been Shakespeare. He went on to slam pretty well everything else. Even though I had no direct involvement with Stratford, I feel shell-shocked to this day.
Meantime, the tradition of my acting in one play a summer with the Straw Hat Players continued, the final two being
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
directed by the British director and teacher John Blatchley, and
Ten Nights in a Barroom
, a melodrama directed by Robertson Davies. The first rehearsal of
Dream
revealed a number of changes that were happening in the theatre at the time. Blatchley began with what seemed to a boy of fourteen to be an endless talk about Shakespeare and the play, its themes and place in Shakespeare’s development. Directors did not normally talk about the play in summer stock; they got on with it. Of course, now I would love to be able to go back and hear his talk. Conflicting approaches to the work emerged during the first read of the play. While some of the actors continued with the old-school method of acting full out at every opportunity, others, George McCowan in particular, read in a flat monotone, waiting I presume for inspiration to move him later.
George McCowan should have been Canada’s first truly major director. Expert in almost everything he touched, he could drive the Port Carling road at breakneck speed without ever hitting a bump, parallel park a canoe, and excel academically. A friend once asked him to write his French exam for him. George was a little hesitant as he didn’t take French, but in the end, agreed. He read over the texts the night before the exam, went in the next day, forged the signature, and wrote the exam. All would have been well except that he got such a high mark that suspicions were aroused and he was soon outed. Suspended from university for a year, he went to teach at Pickering College, a prestigious boys’ school north of Toronto. He was weak in only one area of activity. He was not a very good actor. So what did he do? He decided to be an actor. Within a few years, though, he turned to directing, doing a wonderful production of
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
at the Crest, as well as work at Stratford. But soon television took him and he ended a too-brief career directing episodic television and drinking himself to death.
I could sense my career as a boy actor coming to an end at the first rehearsal for
Ten Nights in a Barroom
, directed by the soft spoken, gentlemanly Robertson Davies, long before his rise to fame as the author of
Fifth Business.
When he called for the young boy — I forget the character’s name — he gamely hid his distress as I stood up, and up, and up. Murray had not warned him that I might be a shade taller than he would have preferred. But he remained kindly to me throughout, even when I sang flat in the company song. We would work together again years later when we presented his play
A Jig for the Gypsy
in Lennoxville.
Despite all this summer activity these were the dark years of my life in the theatre. After the move to King City — an ambitious moniker for a hamlet with two general stores, a bank, a couple of churches, and a gas station — my father commuted to his law office in Toronto, and I suspect he had the road pretty much to himself. Meanwhile Ashe and I travelled to the Aurora District High School each day, an hour on the bus in each direction. A fish out of water? A square peg trying to fit into a round hole? Whatever, my three years in King/Aurora were disappointing, to put it kindly.
Schools in Ontario were still municipally rather than provincially funded in those days. We went from the well-supported and high-end Forest Hill education system to a rural high school. My younger brothers even went to a one room elementary school, where, lucky for them, they had an exceptional teacher. Our high school teachers were not exceptional but, in fairness, they had the serious challenges of large classes, mixed abilities, and variably motivated students. Artistic pursuits and philosophical discussions were rare, though there was a good band. Cadets and football moulded the male tribe. I hated cadets, and being two years younger than my classmates I was too light for football. NHL hockey was a common interest, though I was on my own on the school bus defending Maurice Richard against the legion of Gordie Howe fans.
Not only was the school an artistic wasteland, but I was isolated from the city, always dependent on a driver. We did a couple of one-act plays with the Latin teacher — yes, we took Latin — and I was always asked to read in Shakespeare class, but that was about the sum of my theatrical efforts during those three bleak winters.
Not that drama was entirely lacking. One day our history teacher asked the class about the Reformation. This was the same teacher who had whacked me on the head earlier in the year when the textbook I had ordered had not yet arrived. (I understand schools now provide textbooks.) Attempting to show up our ignorance of the Reformation he said to the class:
“If you had been living in the fifteenth century, you would all have been Catholics. Right?
(Pause)
“Anyone here who wouldn’t have been Catholic in the fifteenth century?”
To be honest, I didn’t remember when the Reformation was, but I still didn’t think I would have been Catholic. I timidly raised my hand.
“What? You wouldn’t have been Catholic in the fifteenth century?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Come up here. Stand here.”
He demanded I stand beside his desk at the front of the room.
“You know all Christians in the fifteenth century were Catholic?”
Lying, I said, “Yes, sir.”
“And you wouldn’t have been Catholic?”
“No, sir.”
Astonished, he replied, “Aren’t you a Christian?”
“What do you mean by a Christian, sir?”
Well, that did it. He began to splutter and foam at the mouth.
“Well . . . well . . . well, someone who follows the teachings of Christ.”
“I guess you had better count me out.”
I returned to my seat.
Well, talk about letting the cat among the pigeons. Many of the female students took pity on me and tried, unsuccessfully, to save my soul. “Don’t you believe in God?” they would ask. I didn’t really know whether I was an agnostic or an atheist in those days, but I did know I wasn’t a Christian. Our English teacher had made it clear that the opposite of a Christian was a pagan, but I didn’t think I was that either. But whatever I was, I was an even stranger presence in the school than I had been before.
But suppose I had told my half crazed history teacher that I was a Christian. Would anyone ask where my Christian belief came from? Yet from the point of view of science or reason, wouldn’t that be a better question? Surely nonbelief is the default. A religious belief, or myth dare I say, is an add-on, something one learns from one’s elders. I did learn one similar myth as a child and was devastated when I found there really was no Santa Claus. But the myth of a personal god never really took with me. After all, where is the evidence?
Or maybe, unlike Mulder, I just don’t want to believe.
We mocked our history teacher and others of his generation. What fools they were! In the arrogance of our childhood it never occurred to us to ask why they were like this. Why was the history teacher marginally insane? The rumour was that he had a plate in his head from the war, but that only added to our sense of his ridiculousness. What he may have been through in that war was not only beyond our comprehension, it wasn’t even something to be wondered about. No one suffered in the war movies or radio plays, which made war seem more like a football game. We never wondered about the women either. Why was Mrs. Cameron, the French teacher, so abrasive and erratic? It never occurred to us to ask what happened to Mr. Cameron. The war years were a secret held close to the chest by those who had been there, a gulf between them and us. Had they been more forthcoming about their experiences, would their descendants have been more reluctant to lead us into war after war?
I was to catapult out of Aurora High School on the strength of a lie. I was told, and believed, two lies that changed my life. One might even have saved my life.
I was not much of a student at Aurora High School though I did accidentally stand sixth one year. “Tends to let work slide” was a charitable criticism on many report cards. I did what I had to do, but that was about it. Grades were very different in the fifties than they are now. A first class mark was 75 and over. A B was 66 to 75. If one had an average of 66%, one didn’t have to write the final exam. I was pretty good at getting 67%. Occasionally I would misjudge and have to write a final.
But I knew this would all have to change when I got to Grade 13, a grade that no longer exists in Ontario and never did exist in the rest of the country. Grade 13 had roughly double the volume of work of the earlier years. One needed nine courses to pass. And the entire mark was based on one departmental exam, while the marks one received during the year from one’s own teachers mattered not at all. I loved this system. It was fair, it was clear, and the teachers were now on my side. They were my coaches, not my judges. Of course, that’s all changed now. My history teacher, the one who whacked me on the head because I didn’t have my textbook and taunted me for not being a Christian, gave me a 66 at Christmas. I scored 95 on the departmental exam. The chemistry teacher gave me the course syllabus. What a novel idea. Tell the student what he needs to know. I worked through the syllabus and scored another high first. The geometry teacher, and principal, who had belittled my proposed reforms when I ran for Head Boy and got forty votes to my opponent’s 350, had surmised I would be lucky to pass. Another first.
So what was the lie? Grade 13 is really hard.
Many students take it in two years and most never make it through at all. If you hope to pass in one year you will have to work very hard. Well, I took this to heart. I knew I could goof around in the earlier grades, but when I got to Grade 13 I would need to be disciplined and keep up with my work. And so I did. When we got our first marks back at Christmas I held my breath hoping that I had passed most of my courses. My jaw nearly fell off my face as the marks came in. The marks, except for history, were amazing. Not only was I passing, I was in scholarship range. Keep it up and I would win scholarships to university. I did and I did.
Now if someone had told me Grade 13 was pretty easy . . .
What was the second lie?
It takes only three days to quit smoking. Well, if you believe that you will believe lots of weird things, like aliens abducting humans for example. More on that later.
At any rate the three years of isolation in the wilds of rural Ontario would soon come to an end. There was light on the hill and I was approaching it. I could see it, fear it, and long for it. And in the fall of 1958, I entered it, the University of Toronto. I didn’t realize it as I entered the door of the Sir Daniel Wilson Residence, but I would soon enough. I was home.
