Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir

by William B. Davis

  It was 1946. We had never heard of cap guns.

  Summers in Muskoka were free of such terrors. The Davis family had been cottaging since the early 1900s on Lake Muskoka at St. Elmo, a peninsula jutting out into the lake near the mouth of the Muskoka River. Family and servants in tow, they used to travel to Gravenhurst by train, take a steamer to an anchor spot near the cottage, and then travel by small craft to the cottage itself. Before long, they built a steamer dock on the point so that the steamer could actually land, which it did on a regular basis, bringing mail and supplies. My great grandfather’s cottage was built at the head of the point near the dock. In the twenties, three other Davis cottages were built, one by my grandfather, one by a great aunt, and another by Murray and Donald’s father (Uncle E.J.). And finally, my parents built their cottage around the corner of the point from the other Davis houses, my mother stubbornly insisting that there had to be a road to her cottage.

  Ashe and I were inseparable in the early years. Our structured day in Muskoka would begin by tiptoeing from our bedroom at the end of the cottage to the outside door near our sleeping parents’ bedroom, walking along the outside path to the kitchen door and into the kitchen where the housekeeper, Bea, would give us breakfast. We might stop to water a tree on the way. After breakfast we headed to our rock houses to play. Our rock houses were stretches of bare granite beside the lane that led to the cottage. Mine was a sloping two level affair while Ashe’s, separated from mine by twenty yards of fairly open bush, was flatter and quite broad. As I write this both are overgrown and barely visible, but in the forties they provided inspiration for a range of imaginative games, the most successful being the Timothy Game. In this game I played John, a grown-up boy of sixteen who was in the Mounties, while Ashe played the quintuplets, all five of them. They were much younger than John, but Timothy was the lead quintuplet and quite smart. Jonathan was number five and quite stupid. To this day I can’t take anyone seriously with the name of Jonathan; I keep hearing Ashe’s rendition of a mentally challenged boy with a lisp. We created and acted out endless stories built around these central characters. Soon it would be time to return to the cottage for lunch, summoned often by a large cowbell. Mother would join us for lunch, my father also if he were not in the city or away in the army. After lunch it was time for our Rest. We weren’t required to sleep, but we were expected to lie down in our bedroom and be quiet for an hour or so. I still don’t know if the reason for this had to do with our upbringing or with giving my parents an uninterrupted hour in bed, it still being the “ten good years.” But once we got through that we were rewarded by the best part of the day. Time to go to the Beach. The lake front for our cottage was rocky and not very suitable for small children, but Uncleej (E.J. Davis Jr.) had a small sandy beach by his boathouse and we would head over there most afternoons, a ten minute walk through the woods or a short ride by boat. We swam and played water and sand games until it was time to return home for drinks — ginger ale for us — before dinner. I don’t remember what we did in the evening, possibly because we were sent off to bed so early there wasn’t much of an evening. I do remember that Ashe, being older, got to stay up and listen to Alfer Lanky on the radio, the story of a Lancaster bomber. It wasn’t until I was an adult I realized the title was L for Lanky.

  For reasons Ashe and I understood at the time but now I can’t fathom, Ashe and I felt we had to keep the Timothy Game secret. Perhaps we felt young boys should be doing more masculine things: playing ball or hunting squirrels. For several summers when my mother would ask what we had been doing we would find some way to avoid a direct answer until finally we could equivocate no longer. We told her the story of the game. I don’t know what we expected. To be laughed at or mocked in some way for not being ‘real’ boys? Anyway she responded as if what we had been doing all these years was perfectly normal. What a relief.

  The pattern of the days changed somewhat when Rolph and Tim, known in the household as “the babies,” stopped being babies and began to join in. The games became less imaginative, but more sophisticated. We played car racing and horse racing by flicking the toys with our fingers up and down the long hall. I know this doesn’t sound very sophisticated, but each of us had a stable and kept detailed records. Every race was a claiming, or an allowance, or a stakes race, and we kept track of earnings. We bought, sold, and claimed horses. To the bemusement of my mother, when I returned from Britain in 1965 at the age of twenty-seven, the first thing Rolph and Tim and I did was get out our old horses, get down on our knees, and restart the races.

  We had different games in the city. Besides playing baseball in the backyard and destroying the flower beds or bombing Germans from our upper bunk, we invented a game we often thought later we could have marketed and made our fortunes called Flick Hockey. We found a way to emulate a real hockey game using pictures and cards of hockey players, a marble, and goals made of blocks. Of course there was no way to keep this game secret from our parents — it could be pretty noisy — but we never shared it with anyone outside the immediate family. As “the babies” got older they joined in, but I don’t think we ever told anyone at school about it much less encouraged them to play. We had friends we would play traditional games with, chess or baseball, but flick hockey and horse racing were private.

  My life changed dramatically in 1952 when we moved from the city to the country, a twenty-seven-acre estate named Memory Acres that my father inherited from his father. A mile and a quarter west of King City and a half-mile east of the new highway just completed, now known as the 400 but then as the Barrie Highway, Memory Acres was the site of the original Davis leather tannery before it moved to Newmarket in the early 1900s. Not that I had a lot of friends in Toronto, but I had even fewer in this farming community. Oddly enough one of the few I did have, Rod Woolham, was the son of the manager of the Davis leather tannery now losing money outside the family.

  Country life had its compensations. I was able to buy two horses from my earnings as a radio actor and I cut some of the narrowest ski trails in the world through the wooded hill on the west side of the property, so narrow that I broke my leg on one of them one year. But mostly I waited to be sixteen.

  Lots of boys, and girls too I suppose, want to be sixteen. There could many reasons for this: to be more grown up, to smoke in the house, to have sex. But I wanted to be sixteen so that I could go to the Track. In 1954 children were not allowed at a horse racing track even in the company of an adult. By age fifteen, partly I suppose as a result of having horses of my own, I had a passion for horse racing. I studied form charts and made imaginary bets. I would sit in school with a racing form under my exercise book pining for the day I could actually go to the Track. Strangely, the minimum bet in 1954 was the same as it is now, two dollars; who knows what that bet would be worth in today’s dollars. The day I could go finally came. Rod and I took a bus to Toronto and a streetcar to the old half-mile Dufferin Park Track at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin, and my days as a punter began. Some of my happiest days in the next few years were sitting in the open upper deck of the old Woodbine Racetrack on Queen Street.

  The babies, no longer babies, followed in my tracks, as it were. While Ashe never took to horse racing, Rolph and Tim both did. After the new Woodbine track opened outside the city, I would take Tim to the track. Since he was only eleven or twelve at the time and forbidden entry, I would park him outside an entrance gate where he could see the races. Between races I would go down to where he was and he would pass his bet through the gate to me and I would place it for him. Occasionally we would get strange looks from the guards, but what could they do?

  Over the years my interest in horse racing has waned and it pretty much vanished when I went to Britain in 1961. Not so for my brothers Rolph and Tim. The two of them get together every year wherever they happen to be to watch the Breeders’ Cup. And Rolph is now an owner himself with a stable of real horses at Woodbine.

  So how did I become an actor?

 
What’s in Your Basement?

  or A History of Canadian Theatre, Part One

  I don’t know what was in your basement, but in mine, when I was ten, was a summer theatre company, one of the few professional theatre companies in Canada at the time. They didn’t perform in the basement, but they rehearsed in our house in Toronto for several weeks before heading to cottage country to perform for cottagers and tourists.

  My cousins, Murray and Donald Davis, a half generation older than I, formed a summer stock company, The Straw Hat Players, in 1948. Composed largely of university students and directed, more or less, by the University of Toronto’s professional director, Robert Gill, the company played in Gravenhurst and Port Carling, resort towns that bookend Lake Muskoka a hundred miles or so north of Toronto. Limited by contractual agreements with a theatre in Woodstock and with U of T, Gill was not able to be the official director or to travel to Muskoka with the company. Nonetheless, he conducted the majority of the rehearsals in the basement of our Toronto home. It took some time for the neighbours to understand the shouting and screaming coming from our house did not indicate a dysfunctional family or necessitate calls to the police. In the 1940s actors acted full out all the time. The concept of starting slowly and allowing one’s characterization to grow was still in the future.

  A word needs to be said about theatre in Toronto in the early post-war years. With Toronto now boasting a number of thriving theatres, contemporary readers may be surprised, astonished, to know that there was almost no professional theatre in the city. The stock companies of the twenties had succumbed to the joint pressures of the Great Depression and Hollywood. In the late forties the Royal Alexandra Theatre served as a prestigious roadhouse for touring productions, but only occasionally were professional productions mounted in Toronto. One of the centrepieces for theatre in the city was the four play season, directed by Robert Gill, at Hart House Theatre in the University of Toronto. The actors were all university students — not even drama students as there was no drama department at the university — who were studying other subjects and doing theatre on an extracurricular basis. And yet theatregoers in the city at that time subscribed to the season and discussed the plays as if they were attending the latest offering from a major theatre company. Mind you, these were no ordinary university students. Many were returning veterans from World War II, often on special post-war programs and more mature than your average student. Because of this influx the student body was a double or triple cohort as we would now say; or in sport terms, it was a very deep draft. Also, the extracurricular program run by the very professional and talented Robert Gill was not only effective in itself, but its existence attracted talented actors to the university. Some of those actors included Charmion King, Donald and Murray Davis, Eric House, Ted Follows, Araby Lockhart, Lloyd Bochner, Kate Reid, Don Harron, and William Hutt.

  Of course at age ten I had no idea that the birth of Canadian theatre as we now know it was happening in the very basement of our house. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. The actors in our basement, and in our living room, and on our phone, included many who would go on to forge substantial careers.

  The first Straw Hat season, 1948, went by in a blur as Ashe and I were sent off to summer camp and learned of it only through letters from my mother saying things like, The Drunkard was sold out, whatever that meant. But the next year my cousins asked my mother who asked me if I would like to act in one of their plays. If it meant I didn’t have to go back to summer camp, why not?

  The play in question was a thriller called Portrait in Black. As I recall, my mother in the play, Charmion King, was in some kind of triangle with two men, played by my cousins, Donald and Murray. Murray’s character tried to kill Donald’s when he was driving, but missed because Donald’s character reached for the emergency brake. Doesn’t that date the play? A gun went off sometime during the play and so scared my youngest brother, Tim, whom my mother had brought to see me act, that she had to spend the rest of the evening in the parking lot calming him down while he kept insisting that he was “never going to Portrait in Black again!” He would have been five at the time. I’m not sure if he has been to the theatre since. Certainly, he was never tempted to follow in my footsteps.

  Why did they cast me in this play? They needed a young boy, but why me? It’s a funny thing, but in all the years that followed I never thought to ask. I was handy. After all, I only had to go downstairs to get to rehearsal and I had excellent marks in school for oral reading, a subject I am sure no longer exists. But I don’t know if they knew that. A mystery, but one that changed my life.

  I don’t recall being nervous about any of this. I think I was too young to appreciate that I could embarrass myself in front of an audience or die in a car crash on the treacherous road to Port Carling driven at competitive speeds by the young actors in the company. I was much more comfortable acting in a play for the first time than trying to figure out how to hoist a sail at camp. I did get nervous once. I was sitting backstage waiting for my first entrance when a member of the company came by and asked if I was nervous. I was probably reading a comic or something. Assuring her that, no, I wasn’t nervous at all, she proceeded to explain that nervousness was a good thing, that an actor should be nervous. By the time I went on stage I was in a near panic because I wasn’t nervous.

  I must have acquitted myself satisfactorily in Portrait in Black as I was asked to appear in one play a season for the next several years. The next year I had a small role in Goodbye Again, but the year after I played the large role of Ronnie Winslow in Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, and the year after, Taplow in Rattigan’s The Browning Version.

  Of course, like all Canadian boys of a certain age, I still really wanted to be a professional hockey player. But if that wasn’t going to work out maybe I could be an actor. What to do? Perhaps I should take acting classes. So, back in Toronto, I signed on to take classes from Josephine Barrington, who had taught my cousins. She herself was a graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and performed in community theatre as well as some of the rare professional productions in the city. She had a studio in her home a few miles from our house in north Toronto.

  My mother drove me there for my first class. It never occurred to her or to me that she should ever drive me there again. Nor did she ever drive me to school. Nor to the CBC when I started working there a year or two later. What’s with the present generation? They don’t know how to take a bus? Or ride a bike? It was quite a trek to Josephine’s studio, either two buses or a half-hour bike ride, but after that first class I happily went on my own. I think I remember more about the bike trips than I do about the classes.

  I remember little of what Josephine taught. Some of the classes were private and some were with one or two others. I remember quite a bit of talk about the diaphragm, which I also remember having to unlearn when I studied with Iris Warren years later. But as well as her classes, Josephine presented plays every Christmas at Hart House Theatre: Josephine Barrington’s Juveniles. I played the lead in Aladdin one year and the lead in The Snow Queen the next. My ‘costar’ in The Snow Queen was Michele Landsberg, later to become a noted journalist, Officer of the Order of Canada, and wife of Stephen Lewis who will appear later in this story.

  It was Josephine who suggested that I try my hand at auditioning for CBC Radio.

  A Lost World

  or Canadian Radio Drama, 1949–1952

  In 1950 CBC Radio was the centre of the universe, or so it seemed at the time. Housed in a four-storey walkup on Jarvis Street in Toronto, a building formerly owned by Havergal School for Girls, radio drama was the sine qua non for a professional actor in Toronto. And there was a ton of it. There were two major anthology dramas each week: Ford Theatre on Friday nights and CBC Stage on Sunday nights. There were regular series, school broadcasts, and children’s programs. And there was the pièce de résistance, CBC Wednesday Night, which produced drama as well as music. As a boy I re
member listening to the full Shakespeare history cycle on CBC Wednesday Night.

  Just up the street from the CBC Radio building was the Celebrity Club, Toronto’s answer to Sardi’s; across the road was Lorne Greene’s acting school (yes, that Lorne Greene) and the offices of ACRA. Perhaps you have heard of ACTRA, the Alliance of Canadian Television and Radio actors? In 1950 it was simply ACRA, the Association of Canadian Radio Actors. Down the street from the radio building was the hooker capital of the city. Was it Shaw who once said the only difference between an actor and a prostitute was the price?

  The building itself was at once welcoming and intimidating. Anyone used to entering a modern CBC building would be astonished to realize that in 1950 one could simply walk into the building through any door, wave at the receptionist if so inclined, and go wherever one liked. Security? What’s that? There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, of men entering the building in broad daylight and walking out with a grand piano. Getting into the building was one thing, but seeing a producer quite another. The producers, who might now be known as directors, all had offices flanking a wall on an upper floor of the building. In front of each office was the desk of the production assistant, the keeper of the gate. The PAs protected their producers with their lives. No wonder the actors would prowl the halls hoping for a chance meeting, “Anything for me this week?”

  It was tough for newcomers, but for regulars life was simpler. Casting was often done like this. I’m walking down the hall when producer Norman Bowman sees me and calls out, “OK for Sunday, Bill?” Without pausing, I call back to confirm. Casting complete. No audition. No call to the agent. No agent. Of course, this practice encouraged a good deal of loitering. Actor Murray Westgate, who would rise to fame later as the Esso Man on Hockey Night in Canada on television, ate all three meals in the cafeteria. Lots of casting opportunities that way.