Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (9 page)

But of all the things we should have had and didn’t have, likely the most important was air conditioning. Not until our final season in Peterborough, when we converted the upper floor of the Empress Hotel in Peterborough into a theatre, did we have air conditioning. And summers in southern Ontario could be hot. It was not unusual for the temperature in the Port Carling Town Hall to reach ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The only way we could moderate the temperature at all was to open all the doors and windows and run a large fan, but the fan, being noisy, had to be turned off during the actual performance. And opening the doors would sometimes attract bats which would swoop over the shrieking terrified audience. Our Business Manager, Peter Hicks, became quite accomplished at hitting and killing bats with a broom, always to a generous round of applause.

The weather had to be just right for us to have a successful season. If it was too sunny and hot people stayed at their cottages. If it was too cold and rainy people stayed in the city. We needed Goldilocks weather; it had to be just right, not too hot, not too cold — and just a little cloudy.

Yet we survived all that. Travel was our Achilles’ heel. In hindsight we should have spent the extra money and rented a truck and a car, rather than using Behemoth and my old Mercury, Gwendolyn by name. It was still acceptable in the fifties to give one’s cars women’s names. Behemoth was indeed large enough to load the full set of one play and transport it to the other location where it was unloaded and the set for the other play loaded and brought to the first location. Problem was, Behemoth frequently broke down. Trust me, there was no time in our schedule for breakdowns, no time to shop around for an inexpensive repair, and if another truck had to be rented in the middle of the night, well, so be it. As for the car which was used for poster runs and business trips as well as transporting actors from one location to another, the Mercury didn’t do much better. I was in the middle of rehearsal one afternoon in Peterborough when one of our assistants who had been doing a poster run came into the rehearsal hall and handed me the gear shift. He thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened. I didn’t.

Keeping to a 1959 lens, remember that we had no cell phones, internet, or email. The only way the location in Port Carling could communicate with the one in Peterborough or vice versa was by long distance telephone, which was expensive. And with unreliable transportation communication was doubly important. We dealt with this by a series of codes posted beside the telephone in each theatre. One forgets how archaic the telephone system of the time must seem to a modern reader. It was not possible to direct dial any long distance call. All calls other than local calls had to be placed with a real live operator. There were two types of calls one could make, station-to-station or person-to-person. There was only a charge if the call was actually completed. In a station-to-station call the charge began as soon as the call was answered at the other end. But in a person-to-person call the operator would ask for the person designated by the caller. If that person did not come to the phone there would be no charge. We made all our calls person-to-person and they were never completed. For instance a person-to-person call for John Driver meant ‘Has the truck left yet?’ The answer might be, ‘He’s around somewhere but I can’t find him,’ i.e., they are still loading the truck, or ‘He left an hour ago,’ meaning the truck was on its way. We had similar codes for informing the other theatre how large the house was or other matters of interest. I doubt if we fooled the operators, but they indulged us and we were not charged for the calls.

But I had another more serious problem to deal with. Not only was it unwise of me to marry at so young an age, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Cathy was not the right woman. It might have been easier for me if I could have faulted Cathy about something, anything. But she was a really good person, intelligent, warm-hearted, and peaceful. We weren’t incompatible. The issues were mine, not hers; I just wasn’t ready to be married. But I feel badly for Cathy, as she
was
ready to be married. Worse, I didn’t know how to get out of it nor was I completely certain that I should. Still haunted by Sylvia and becoming increasingly attracted to yet another leading lady, Nancy Kerr, I just stopped tending the relationship, hoping perhaps that it would go away. It was easy enough to hide behind my busy schedule, but Cathy wasn’t fooled and one day she just up and went back to the city with emotional support from David Helwig who writes about the incident in his memoir,
The Names of Things.
It would take a few more months for the marriage to fully unravel, but the stitching was coming undone.

Had my confidence in marriage been affected by my parents’ marriage? I don’t recall the year, but one fateful evening while I was at university I returned unannounced to the family home in King to find my parents in an intense emotional scene. Now, in my family an intense emotional scene did not involve yelling and throwing things. In fact, at first glance nothing was amiss. They were both sitting in their usual places, my mother on the couch and my father in his armchair. However it soon became apparent that they both had consumed even more alcohol than usual and the topic of discussion was their marriage and the wreck it had become. Whether a result of their discretion or my myopia, I had no idea their marriage was in trouble. In truth, I am not sure I had ever given the matter much thought.

But I was to give it a lot of thought on that long night, for once I was in the house they each took a turn, a long turn, to unburden all their frustrations on me. I was to learn many things that night: that the marriage had been a shell for years kept together for the sake of the children; that my father thought my mother had had an affair with Blatz years before while he was away in the army; that my father had not been involved with “any wenches,” that my father still loved my mother but she did not love him, that my mother loved the first ten years of the marriage but that it had gone to pieces after the war, that my father had become such a severe alcoholic she feared for a house fire from his chain smoking, that my father had been asked to leave his law firm for drinking, that my mother had been having an affair with a good friend of the family but the man’s wife had put a stop to it, and that my mother wanted a divorce but my father wouldn’t give her one or any money if she left.

Almost as surprising as my parents’ pain was my innocence of that pain. How could I not have known or at least suspected? Was I just so engrossed in my own life and career that I had paid no attention to the people closest to me? Or were their performances as normal husband and wife so perfect as to defy detection? Whatever the past, the future was changed irrevocably both in their relationship to each other and to me. Although my father and I soon retreated behind a comfortable superficiality, my mother and I were to be much more candid with each other for the rest of her life.

But what were they to do? If all this had happened forty years later I expect my mother would have divorced my father, taken fifty percent of the assets and lived comfortably in Toronto, possibly keeping the summer cottage in Muskoka. But family law was less mature in the late fifties and my father could indeed say that if she left she could take little with her. I don’t believe he said this to be cruel; he loved her so much he would do whatever he could to keep her. At my suggestion, or so I like to remember it, a compromise was reached. My mother would rent an apartment in the city — she was working at the Institute of Child Study — and spend three or four nights a week there, returning to King on the weekends. Was the compromise sufficient? It solved many problems, a degree of independence for my mother while allowing her to keep her place in King, which she loved, and a continuity and public face for my father. It is hard to imagine how my father would have coped if he had been left completely alone.

Something strange happened in the fall of 1959. I was an out-of-work theatre director. Having graduated the previous spring and been immediately immersed in the summer season, I was now for the first time in my life confronted with no set plan. When the season closed I returned to the flat that I shared now rather hesitantly with Cathy and looked for work. Fortunately it wasn’t long in coming. I was asked to direct two productions at the university, this time with pay. I acted in one play at the Crest and did the lighting design for another. Combined with my father’s generosity — he gave each of us a small allowance for two years after graduation to help us get started — I had enough income to make ends meet and enough artistic challenges to keep growing.

First up was a production of
The Crucible
by Arthur Miller for University College and St. Michael’s College. Once again the large number of female roles influenced the choice of play and indeed we found a strong female cast including Nancy Keeling (Helwig) as Mary Warren, Kathleen Kelly as Rebecca Nurse, and to my personal risk yet again, Sylvia as Elizabeth Proctor. Casting the men was more challenging. We decided to bend the rules a bit and cast a graduate, James Mainprize, as Danforth, but we still couldn’t find a Proctor, the central male role. Somehow we stumbled on Ken Pogue, a powerful young actor in the city, who had been working with some bizarre European director who was developing a new form of theatre, which to this day no one has heard of. Eager to join us, Ken was perfect for the role and did a terrific job.

The acting technique known as the Method, or at least Lee Strasberg’s version of it, confounded by a now outdated sense of Freudian psychology, had so glorified the personal emotional release of the actor that the ability and willingness of an actor to cry on stage has become the sine qua non of the actor’s toolkit. Not so for Ken Pogue. Years after we did
The Crucible
I directed him as Jamie in
A Long Day’s Journey into Night
at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. Decades after that I bumped into a very sozzled Ken Pogue at an agency party where Ken was still fuming about another actor in that production from decades earlier. “He cried at the wrong time!” he kept shouting. And so he likely did, rendering it impossible for Ken to play his role truthfully.

Over the fairly long rehearsal period in the fall of 1959, all pretense between Sylvia and me dropped away. We were in love, or so we believed. My flirtation with Nancy Kerr in the summer had not been enough to shake me out of the marriage, but my feelings for Sylvia certainly were. And so, one night I moved out and drove Gwendolyn to the family home in King, leaving Cathy the Volkswagen. My mother expressed remarkably little surprise at my arrival in King. Never one to interfere in my life, she was, nonetheless, a careful observer. Of course, Sylvia and I knew our relationship was a non-starter and I imagine we were drawn together more intensely by the very forces that held us apart. It is likely no accident that
West Side Story
was my favourite musical at the time.

How
does
one deal with the tension between romantic and married love? We pretend they are the same thing, but we know they are not. We imagine that romantic love will flow into married love and never resurface. But we know it does. And not with the original partner. I remember as a teenager reading the comic strip,
Mary Worth
, when she gives wise counsel to a young couple, “Marriage is a year of joy and a lifetime of contentment.” But what if one wants more than a lifetime of contentment? Perhaps I dreaded that outcome as much as my parents’ tortuous relationship. At any rate, I left the marriage and rented a furnished apartment in the north end of the city until Cathy and I could sort out our separation, after which I rented an unfurnished, more centrally located apartment.

Meanwhile we continued rehearsing and finally opening what we believed was a dynamic production of
The Crucible
and possibly my best work yet. So excited were we about what we had achieved that Sylvia and I stayed up all night to get the
Globe and Mail
review in the morning. We parked outside her residence at St. Joseph’s College, making out in the car, more or less, and waiting for morning. Need I remind you that the residences of the time were all separated by gender and visitors of the opposite sex were not allowed, particularly in the Catholic residence? Herbert Whittaker had raved about my last two productions; he would have trouble finding the superlatives for this one. Wrong. To our astonishment he didn’t much like it. He found my production overwrought, possibly even melodramatic. Whether he was right or not I still don’t know, but now, when least expected, I had my first taste of harsh criticism. Rereading his review now I discover that he actually liked some of my work on the play, but in my typical fashion I remembered only the negatives.
The Varsity
gave us a rave, but until researching this book I had forgotten that altogether.

Until Nathan Cohen burst on the scene as the critic for the
Toronto Star
, Herbert Whittaker was the only major drama critic in the city. Rose MacDonald wrote for
The Telegram,
but it was to Herbie that the profession turned and on whom we relied. Balding, with large horn rimmed glasses, Herbie was a slim, modest man. A bachelor, possibly a well hidden homosexual, he didn’t drive; out of town theatre companies had to provide his transportation. As a director and designer himself there was always an apparent conflict of interest. But I believe he was more compromised by what he felt to be his higher calling, the promotion and growth of theatre in Canada. He often tailored his reviews to that end and we were left wondering what he really thought. He had watched me start out as a boy actor and turn to directing as a young man. He thought that was where I should be. I know that because he told me so years later; he would have been even more surprised than I by my later fame as a television actor. Maybe my first two university productions weren’t so great as all that, but he wanted to encourage me down this path. Now, by the time I did
The Crucible
and was firmly established as a director it was time to start guiding my career. I mean, who really knows? It was always a guessing game. What did Herbie mean? With Nathan Cohen there was no such ambiguity. He hated everything. Well, almost. Fortunately, Cohen didn’t review
The Crucible
or I might have given up the theatre right then.

But there was little opportunity to lick my wounds. It was time to prepare the next university production, an original musical,
Katy Cruel
by David Helwig with music by Michael Rasminsky. Mike was a talented musician who went on to a successful career in medicine. During auditions, Mike would give each candidate an ear test; he would play a few notes and they would be expected to sing them afterward. To my horror, he kept threatening to give me the test. Ever since my discomfort with ‘that tenor part’ in
Ten Nights in a Barroom
I knew that singing on key was a challenge for me. Interestingly, when I met Mike some thirty odd years later while I was playing in
Copenhagen
at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal he had no recollection of the ear test issue, clearly a lighthearted banter for him but a deep-seated threat to me.

With
West Side Story
and
Threepenny Opera
fresh in our minds, many of us thought that musical theatre had turned a corner, that the serious, dramatic musical would replace the light Broadway and West End musicals of the period. It was in this hoped-for new tradition that we thought
Katy Cruel
would fit. Based on a folk song,
Katy Cruel
was the story of a vagabond woman whose arrival in a traditional East Coast fishing village wreaks havoc on the community. According to
The Varsity
, “. . . under the direction of Bill Davis . . . [the company] brought to the stage a thing of great beauty, brilliance of production and, in short, a work of art.” The major dailies were positive as well.

Alas, the serious musical has never really emerged. Yes, in the nineties came the big blockbuster musicals with dramatic stories, but they are more in the tradition of nineteenth century melodrama than the human drama of
West Side Story
or the social comment of
Oh, What a Lovely War!
In any event, I did not proceed much farther along this path. My next musical would be a British pantomime.

Probably out of sympathy, my cousin Murray offered me the small role of one of the ancient firemen in Pinero’s play
The Schoolmistress
, at the Crest. Originally Murray was to direct it himself but for some reason he passed the main duties on to Jean Roberts, who had been a production manager and would later head CBC Television Drama. She and her partner, Marigold Charlesworth, had been running the Red Barn summer theatre in Jacksons Point, Ontario, on Lake Simcoe. On the first day, before the rehearsal began, cast members kept coming up to Jean and asking her if she was nervous, it being one of her first productions as director. And she kept admitting that she was. I was astonished. It had never occurred to me to be nervous on the first day of rehearsals. Opening night, yes, but on the first day? But even if I had been nervous I certainly would never have admitted it. But perhaps, at least at that time, a male director had to be the alpha, but a female could have a different relationship with the cast. We had all read Moss Hart’s book,
Act One
, in which he argued that a director should never admit to a mistake. Of course, that’s a mistake in itself, but the odd thing is, it didn’t seem so at the time.

My part was so small I was not often in rehearsal, but one day Murray was giving notes and talked about the difference between farce and burlesque, a speech I wish had been heard by many other directors whose work I have seen. In burlesque, Murray said, the actor is commenting on the character while in farce the actor is working from the truth of the character and extending it. In short, one is artificial and one is real. I repeated that mantra many times in the years following. His other excellent note was that pace is the illusion of speed, not speed itself. We have all seen plays that go so fast that we have no idea what is going on. The result is boring and to the audience slow. It may be that the production has to be a bit slower so that it pulls the audience along and feels much faster. I have never been a fan of the Italian rehearsal, where actors run lines at double time. Saying lines without thinking is a pitfall actors need to avoid, not seek out. A play speeding along on automatic pilot is not what an audience pays good money to see.

The other fireman in
The Schoolmistress
was Bill Frederick, an accomplished working actor. While Bill would later establish himself as a documentary producer under the name Bill Whitehead, he is perhaps better known for his role as the life partner of the novelist Timothy Findley. Tiff, as Findley was nicknamed, started life as an actor, and a good one, but between his alcoholism and his raging homosexuality — he even grabbed my privates one night at a party — his early life was challenging, erratic, and likely dangerous. To the amazement of us all, one day he married Janet Reid, a talented actress noted for her promiscuity. The marriage lasted about a day. I remember Tiff saying some time later, “If everyone knew it was such a bad idea, why didn’t someone say something?” But two things changed Tiff’s life dramatically: writing and Bill Whitehead. Bill put aside his own career to manage Tiff’s; Tiff became an award-winning novelist and respected man of letters until he died in his early seventies. Without Bill, who knows what would have become of Timothy Findley.

It was during the run of
The Schoolmistress
that the wheels were put in motion for my divorce from Cathy. Meantime, my relationship with Sylvia was gathering momentum and we began to face its harsh realities. Since I had been married and since the Catholic Church did not recognize divorce, the only way we could ever marry was through a curious loophole known as the Pauline Privilege. If I were to become a Catholic my first marriage could be annulled on the grounds that I was not in a ‘state of grace’ at that time. I guess it’s a tribute to the power of love that a person who had found acceptance at university on the basis of his nonbelief would actually consider converting to Catholicism. Of course, Catholics all over Quebec and France now simply live together without marrying, but that was not an option in 1960, particularly when the Catholic woman is the daughter of an internationally known Catholic philosopher.

But perhaps someone who could find arguments to defend Orval Faubus and the Smoking Man on
The X-Files
could also develop an argument to defend the Catholic religion, and so I began to ‘take instruction’ from a priest who Sylvia recommended. I’m not sure I had more than one meeting with the kindly gentleman before I found excuses not to continue for the time being. There are various ways to avoid the clutches of organized religion. Mine turned out to be to move to England.

I had one more theatrical assignment before the next Straw Hat season. I had been designing the lights for all the productions I directed and even when reviews might be mixed for my directing, they were universally favourable for my lighting. So one day I persuaded my cousin Murray to let me design the lights for a production at the Crest. Murray was happy to give me a shot provided no fee was expected. To my great pleasure the play I designed was
The Seagull
by Chekhov. It was directed by the British director Roysten Morley with a spectacular cast: Charmion King as Arkadina, Bill Job as Treplev, Powys Thomas as Sorin, Mervyn Blake as Dorn, and a young actress out of Carnegie Tech, Martha Buhs, as Nina. Martha soon changed her name to Martha Henry and went on to become the grand doyenne of the Canadian theatre.