Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (4 page)

How did I know I was home? Besides the fact the university was home to Hart House Theatre and Robert Gill, who had directed me as a child and was still the resident director? One day as I was walking through the small foyer of our residence house, a voice called out from the common room, “Do you believe in God?” Surprised, I turned and hesitantly admitted that I didn’t. “Well, come on in!” The voice was that of second-year student John Woods, who would later be a philosophy professor at U of T and president of the University of Lethbridge. Soon I was in the company of older students whose brilliance and curiosity inspired me for life.

It is astonishing for me to discover that now university residence is limited to first or sometimes second year students. Exposure to senior students in a residence setting was one of the highlights of my educational life.

My life had turned a corner. I was in an intellectual and artistic home.

Getting Started

The Sir Daniel Wilson Residence at University College, one of the four arts colleges in 1955 making up the University of Toronto, was a modern yellow brick building on St. George Street at what was then the western edge of the campus, and was to be my home for the next four years. Prior to its opening in 1954, university college men lived in two residential houses. Of course, men and women were not in the same residences. After all, they had different needs and rules. The men needed maid service and were free to come and go at all hours. The women made their own beds in Whitney Hall and had an 11 p.m. curfew on weeknights. No one seemed to find these arrangements strange at the time.

The college clung to other traditions perhaps not fully appreciated by the students. Dinner at Sir Dan was intended to be a formal affair with a high table, the saying of grace, and waiter service. The students all arrived at 6:15 wearing the prescribed academic gowns and ties and entered the hall together. But what actually is a tie? Does a shoelace around the neck count as a tie? We followed the letter of that rule far more than the spirit. And sad to say, the quality of the food seldom matched the pretension of the occasion. It was not unusual to finish dinner, return to the house, ditch the gown and tie, and head across the road to the local greasy spoon for an edible meal. This was in the days before McDonald’s and Burger King, when you could still buy a decent meal at a low price in a family run local restaurant. Paradoxically the local greasy spoon was named McDonald’s.

The students from the old 5 Wilcox residence had all moved into Jeanneret House, one of the six houses of the Sir Daniel Wilson Residence. They brought with them a sense of community and an intellectual curiosity that I was fortunate to share. Each student had a small private room. It was the common room on the ground floor that provided a focus for the house. I think I learned almost as much in the common room as I did in the college next door. If you had to watch television there was one in the basement. No one did, except during the World Series.

I remember our don, Ian MacDonald (who later became president of York University, which did not then exist), saying that if he were starting a university the first thing he would do is provide a library. The second thing would be a common room. And only after that would he add classrooms and teachers. Of course, we young men talked about sex a lot, but we also discussed philosophy, religion, politics, and science. Senior students mixed with freshmen. It was a lively time.

Many years later, in the heyday of
The X-Files
, I did speaking tours of North American universities. I was astonished and distressed to see how universities and university life had changed. For one thing, no one studied what we studied: English, philosophy, history, mathematics, science. I would ask students what subjects they were taking. Communications, women’s studies, air conditioning — subjects that didn’t exist in our day. One business school I spoke at even had a course in golf. Apparently the golf course is where business is really done nowadays. No wonder I stayed in the arts. The last time I played golf I shot 120 — for nine holes. Recently at a convention in London, the lovely PA who was assisting me mentioned that she had two university degrees. Wow, she didn’t seem like the academic type, so I asked her what her degrees were. Public relations and cultural management. Good for her. She will probably find work in the new economy, but her university life must have been very different from mine. We couldn’t care less about preparing for a job market; we were there to learn, to think, to be “better people.” It’s not for me to say whether universities have improved over the intervening decades, but they certainly have changed. Does anyone still say, “They were the best years of my life”?

The common room, that focus of my student world, seems to have disappeared altogether. And residences are generally limited to first or sometimes first and second year students. But my education came from the senior students I lived with. Well, I guess the job training is better now.

The Christians in Jeanneret house had the hardest time. At least, the serious ones. We were, after all, a group of high-minded intellectuals with no room for faith. As I had discovered in Aurora High School, agnostics and atheists were a rare and suspect breed in Ontario in the mid fifties. It would be a long time before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett made nonbelief respectable. We became a support group for our questioning minds. Christians were wimps. Heck, they didn’t even smoke.

Imagine my shock to discover that John Woods — who would one day be president of Lethbridge University, our lead atheist, the one who would sing anti-Christian songs in the middle of the night on Bloor Street, who had more arguments for the nonexistence of God than I had ever imagined — returned to the Church. At a lovely dinner with John Woods and his charming wife Carol in 2008, he told us he had returned to the Catholic Church. Carol had taken instruction so their marriage could be accepted. And he no longer smoked. On that, we agreed.

But, truth to tell, I did not register at the University of Toronto for its common rooms, and not primarily to study philosophy and psychology, which I did. I went to the University of Toronto to become an actor. That may seem odd now. In Canada now there are acting schools everywhere one looks. Anyone who can speak English or French, and even some who can’t, can get into an acting school somewhere in Canada. But in 1955 there were no acting schools in Canada. None. Some people became actors just by finding a way to do it, the John Drainies and Christopher Plummers; some went to foreign lands, usually England; and others, many of us, came to the University of Toronto to work with Robert Gill at Hart House Theatre. My generation included Donald Sutherland, Fred Euringer, Jackie Burroughs, John and Marielaine Douglas, Meg Hogarth, and directors Leon Major and Kurt Reis.

Having worked for Gill in my cousins’ summer stock company I was sure I had an in. No sooner were auditions announced for the first two plays but I was there, ready to go. Gill did four plays a year and I fully expected to be in all four. Well, well, shrink that head of yours, Bill. Not only did I learn that no one did more than two plays with him a year, but I was not cast in either of the first two.

What was I to do? I suppose I could get an education, but that didn’t seem like full-time work. After a time I did land the small role of the valet in Sartre’s
No Exit
, which Kurt Reis was directing for the University College Players’ Guild. As it happened
No Exit
, exited before it began. I don’t recall why it was cancelled. Perhaps a play about two lesbians trapped in hell was considered inappropriate for the Women’s Union Theatre, the small attic theatre that was home for the UC Players.

Kurt Reis, then spelled with a
C
, was not to be denied, however. In January the university would hold a one-act play festival. The UC Players’ entry for that year was a Tennessee Williams one act called
The Purification
. Kurt cast me in the showy role of Rosalio. Also in the play was a dynamic young actor who would later play the leads in my first directorial efforts, Ray Stancer. One can’t help wondering. Had there been a National Theatre School in the fifties would Ray Stancer now be a world famous actor instead of a Toronto lawyer? He was an impressive talent. At any rate, my university theatre career had finally begun.

And, finally, Robert Gill cast me as Horatio in
Hamlet
, his final production of the year. The production was a touch wooden and I’m not sure I helped bring it to life. I believe the
Globe and Mail
drama critic, Herbert Whittaker, described me as a “piping Horatio.” People were beginning to wonder if Gill had lost his touch. But perhaps he had just lost that wonderful cohort of talented and determined actors from the post-war years. I was to do only one more play with Gill, Ferdinand in
The Tempest
the following year.

A solitary bachelor, constantly nervous with a perpetual shake and an ever present cigarette, Gill continued to be magnetic even as his talent retreated. I had known him when he was a major force in Toronto theatre, but now the sun was setting on a disappointing career. He died a few years later at the age of sixty-four, alone in his apartment, not discovered till some days after his death.

But if the production of
Hamlet
did nothing else, it introduced me to Catherine Cragg, who would eventually be my first wife. More than a foot shorter than I, Catherine was a second-year student playing a small role. Having been two years ahead of my class and several inches taller than I knew how to control, I was always impressed when an attractive woman found me desirable. They certainly had shown very little interest in high school. Catherine and I would be an item for the next four years.

One great advantage to academic life at U of T in the fifties was that we didn’t have to work very hard. Or to be fair, we didn’t have to work very hard until February or March. During the year there were essays of course, but no mid-term exams. Some of my brilliant colleagues in Jeanneret House boasted that they didn’t “crack a book” until February. And then they went on to stand first in applied mathematics. We were able to get by by going to lectures (sometimes), doing our essays, talking and listening and reading, but not really studying until spring. For me this meant an active life on campus, as actor, director, scene designer and builder, debater, and campus politician. And still able to do fairly well academically.

By 1956, my cousins had given up the Straw Hat Players, their summer theatre in Ontario cottage country, to focus their attention on the Crest Theatre, their resident professional theatre in Toronto. For reasons still unclear, the Crest has seldom been given its due credit as a major influence in the development of theatre in Canada, or Toronto at least. It operated from 1954 to 1966 with a full season of professional productions of a great range of plays. One comment from critic Nathan Cohen was that they never developed a unique purpose or style, a criticism which could be levelled at most of our current regional theatres. In some ways ambition and hopes were higher in the fifties than they are now. At any rate, like regional theatres now, the Crest tried and did provide a broad range of dramatic fare. As the only professional theatre in the city, it took that to be its mandate.

The theatre building itself put the company at a disadvantage from the start. A converted cinema, the house was long and narrow. Audiences now are used to being much closer to the stage. By today’s standards the audience numbers they needed were large indeed. The theatre seated 800 and the company needed 400 a night to break even, a number that would thrill many theatre managers in Canada now. Location was a further problem. Situated in a residential area far from downtown, not only were there no good restaurants nearby, but that area of the city was “dry.” In “Toronto the Good” in the fifties, alcohol was hard to come by and in this area of the city, impossible. Anywhere in Toronto in the fifties would be a challenging location. When we were playing at Hart House in downtown Toronto, getting a drink after the performance was only slightly easier than at the Crest. We had to rush to the Chez Paris and order food. Only then were we allowed a drink after 11 p.m. The only place worse in my theatre travels was Dundee, Scotland. In Dundee in the early sixties the pubs closed at 9 p.m. We had to drink at lunchtime. I recently finished reading Christopher Plummer’s wonderful memoir,
In Spite of Myself
. He seemed to drink endlessly after performances. Things must have been different in Montreal and New York.

What a different business model the Crest was. When it began it was a stock company: not just in the sense that it presented a season of plays, but it was a private company owned by its stockholders. Subsidy for the arts was still something only communist governments did. Like any private company the Crest hoped to make a profit. It never did. The deep pockets of the Davis family, derived from their tanning business in Newmarket, propped it up several times. When subsidies finally did become available in the sixties, its history as a family business limited its eligibility. I was in England when the project finally unravelled in the early sixties with none of the accolades it deserved. While Donald continued to have a terrific career as an actor, Murray never recovered. He did some voice teaching for me at the National Theatre School, but by and large he retired to his farm near Collingwood, Ontario.

But here I was, finally getting down to studying for my first year final exams at U of T and wondering what I would do for the long summer, much longer than a high school summer. My colleagues all seemed to have plans to make tons of money somewhere or develop their skills in some interesting internship, though that was not yet a term in regular use. My cousins could no longer provide me with a play or two to do, and the undergraduates who were now running a summer company in Muskoka had not invited me to join them.

My father, bless him, said that I didn’t need to have a job. He suggested I could develop a reading list and spend my summer quite productively. Yet it seemed de rigueur to have a job. And so, following my love for horse racing, I answered an ad and was hired by the newly opened Woodbine race track. The job turned out to be in the bowels of the building. I don’t think I ever saw a horse. At any rate I was fired after a few weeks, my first, but not last, experience of being terminated. How do you tell people you have been fired? How do you go home in the middle of the day — I was living at the family home in King at the time — and explain that you are a failure? True, they fired half the staff that day and probably only hired us to help get the new track open, but at age eighteen it was my first rejection since Jerry Campbell (female) stopped sitting with me on the school bus. And what was I to do now? Well, as it happened, rescue was at hand.