Meantime, Judith’s friends decided they wanted their house back, so with some help from my father who released some inheritance funds to his four sons, Francine and I became home owners, purchasing a three-bedroom townhouse just west of High Park. The funds provided the down payment — a cute custom that seems to have been abandoned in the modern sub-prime market — but there was still a hefty mortgage, taxes, and all those other bills that relentlessly cross a homeowner’s desk. With the arrival of our first child, Francine had morphed from an ambitious professional actress into an equally ambitious stay-at-home mother. No help on the financial front there, but, in fairness, I was happy she was so attentive to the baby. As a committed father also — a matter of some debate in the much later divorce — I did not want to leave town for extended periods, limiting our financial possibilities further. And thus began a trail that would meander its way to a starring role in a hit TV series.
Fans of The X-Files will know that despite rising to fame as the Cigarette Smoking Man, I did not, at that time, smoke. Sometimes they would rationalize this contradiction by noting, incorrectly, that I didn’t inhale on the show. On the contrary, when director Kim Manners struggled to find the right phrase to explain to the actor playing my son how I smoked on the show, he finally said, “When Bill smokes, it’s like . . . sex!” I loved smoking — ever since I was twelve years old puffing on stolen cigarettes under the bridge in Forest Hill. Cigarettes were a symbol of adulthood; more, they were a necessary attribute of the alpha male. Any number of insecurities could be hidden behind a cloud of smoke as one lit up in front of a new cast on the first day of rehearsal. Whether impressing colleagues, displaying to a new female, or imagining oneself as the great long-suffering North American novelist, a cigarette was an essential prop. Remember that in the late seventies one could smoke almost anywhere, in restaurants, bars, rehearsals, lobbies, offices, planes — except during take-off and landing — oh, the agony of waiting for the plane to be airborne and for the seatbelt sign to be turned off so one could finally light up. But in 1979, at the age of forty, I gave it up.
How did I manage this? On the strength of a lie.
Like many of my era, I started smoking as a teenager. After all, both my parents smoked. All their friends did. Movie stars did. Nine out of ten doctors smoked Camels, according to the ads. How could I be a grown-up if I didn’t smoke? Ever reasonable, my mother made a rule. We could smoke when we earned our own money and could buy them for ourselves. She hadn’t counted on my becoming a child actor and actually doing that, earning money. So when I pulled out a cigarette in the living room at age fourteen, the rule suddenly changed. We could smoke when we were sixteen. Of course when I was sixteen and was no longer earning money the rule changed back again. Still, we smoked. Everyone knew. We just didn’t smoke in front of our parents.
At university my smoking increased. After all, only wimps and Christians didn’t smoke. And when I started directing, well, smoking was de rigueur. And so it went, my consumption of cigarettes continuing to increase the older I got. Even when I started ski racing I would put a cigarette in my wind-shirt at the top of the course so that I could light up at the bottom. By my late thirties I was smoking two and a half packs of Rothmans a day.
I had tried many times to quit or at least cut down. Veronica and I tried to quit when we were living in England. We had worked out that if we both quit we could afford to buy a car. We didn’t make it to noon. Even much later when I dated Judith, a nonsmoker, I lacked the simple courtesy to smoke less. Smoking, after all, was the default. It was up to those who didn’t to adjust.
But then someone, I don’t remember who, or if I read it somewhere, told me that it only takes three days to break the addiction. As long as one doesn’t smoke at all the addiction can be eliminated in three days. I’m glad they didn’t also try to sell me swamp land in Florida. I’ve believed a lot of dumb things in my life. A retired doctor once told me that the arthritis in my shoulder would improve if I just put a magnet on it regularly. My shoulder just got worse from the weight of the magnet. Anyway, I believed the smoking story.
How hard could it be to endure three days? If I could reduce my stress levels to close to zero for at least two days I figured I had a shot at making this work. And so, lying, I told my family I didn’t want to inflict myself on them while I did this. The truth was I didn’t want stress from them. And so one fall, before the ski season, I went alone to the ski cabin in Collingwood for a weekend, with no cigarettes.
That was the longest drive to Collingwood of my life. I had always smoked on the drive. I remember seeing the lights of Barrie and thinking, my god, I’m only halfway there. Still, I made it to the cabin. When I unpacked I found Francine had done a really smart thing. She had put a box of chocolate Turtles in my bag. I devoured one instantly. I ate hundreds of them over the next few months.
The next afternoon I was killing time outside and put my hand in the pocket of my jacket that lived at the cabin. Inside was half a pack of cigarettes. I could have surrendered right then. But no, it’s only three days, remember, and one is nearly over. Later that day, I went shopping for a woodstove, but I was so spaced out I couldn’t concentrate. I could barely drive back to the cabin.
I returned home Sunday night. Two days gone. Only one to go. Somehow I got through the third day at work waiting for the magic moment when the addiction would lift and I would be a nonsmoker. Needless to say, the magic moment never came. There would be six months more of struggle and torture that only gradually lessened. But I wouldn’t and didn’t go back.
I didn’t touch another cigarette for seventeen years when I would become famous for what I had worked so hard to stop. But I was never a smoker again. And in the meantime my older brother, Ashe, died of lung cancer.
Now if someone had told me that quitting would take six months . . .
And so now I was a nonsmoker who would become famous for smoking. Of course, I didn’t know that then — I would have laughed out loud if someone had foretold such a future for me. I was a director out of a job. Not that I considered it, but my tenured position at Bishop’s had long since been filled. Freelance directing gigs were not immediately presenting themselves. My teaching résumé was pretty good, maybe that was the way to go — for now at any rate. As I had been away from teaching for a few years, I applied to the Canada Council for a small grant to give me the time and means to look at the work of other acting teachers, both in Toronto and New York. I sat in on classes given by a variety of teachers, the most interesting being Carol Rosenfeld, Rosemary Dunsmore, and Kurt Reis — yes, that Kurt Reis. A small decision though had a big impact on my future career. I thought it might be a good idea to actually take some of these classes, not merely audit them, to experience the teaching methods as a working actor in the class. It was almost twenty years since I had spoken a line of dialogue in a scene. Had I learned anything for myself after twenty years of telling other people what to do?
Yes, it seemed that I had. A buzz started going around that Davis was a pretty good actor — for a director/teacher at any rate. Gradually an economic life was piecing itself together. In addition to having a number of part-time teaching assignments, I thought, what the heck, let’s see if an agent would take me on for acting. Two things I’ve always hated about acting: makeup and curtain calls. I hate having junk on my face though I mind it less if someone else puts it there, and I find taking a bow in front of an audience duty-bound to applaud quite embarrassing. Who else expects to be applauded for their work? Certainly not the clever person who fixes my car, not even the clever doctor who fixed my cataracts. My first job on returning to acting was some kind of promotional film where I didn’t need makeup and of course there would be no curtain call. Not so bad, this acting, after all. No one warned me that years later I would be in the makeup chair for several hours so that the Cigarette Smoking Man could not only be old and ill, but could smoke through a hole in his throat. Or that eventually I would return to the stage and
have to endure those excruciating curtain calls. For now I was putting together enough acting and teaching to keep the family afloat. And soon that became easier when Humber College offered me a full-time teaching position.
Once again I was in a position where I might have stayed for the rest of my working life. But Humber did not have the appeal of the university community or the charm of a small Quebec village. Humber was a dull concrete building northwest of Toronto in a what, subdivision, no, a mall, no — really it was nowhere at all. But I stayed there for three years until an acting opportunity conflicted, and Humber and I began the slow process of separating ourselves from each other, after which I once again needed a job.
Next stop: Vancouver.
Go West, Young Man
I had been to British Columbia on Canada’s West Coast a few times, directing at the Vancouver Playhouse twice, several trips on the National Theatre School audition tour, and more recently as part of my duties for CBC Radio Drama. With the ocean on the doorstep flowing inland through deep fjords, a ski hill larger than Osler Bluff right in the city, and Whistler, one of the great ski mountains of North America, a mere two hours away, Vancouver had seemed a spiritual home, the place where I ought to live. Imagine a snow ski season that begins in November and goes until June and a water ski season that begins in March and goes to November. Apart from the challenge of what to do when, what skier could ask for more? So when the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School advertised for a director, I threw my hat in the ring.
I did, after all, need a job. At least I thought I did. In truth, I was putting some food on the table with freelance teaching and acting gigs in Toronto. My first feature film role was as the Ambulance Driver in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone. Shot on the shores of Lake Ontario in temperatures hovering around thirty below zero Fahrenheit, I figured I had the best job on the set as I could retreat into my heated ambulance after every take. Having almost no idea what was going on on a film set, I said my one line with enthusiasm whenever I heard my cue. I was a touch surprised when the lead actor, Tom Skerritt, I think, replied, “Fuck off.” I guess he was off camera at the time. I still get fan mail from time to time praising a number of my film roles including The Dead Zone. Well, if they could find me in the film they have better eyes than I; as far as I could tell my role ended on the cutting room floor. But if I wasn’t setting the film world on fire I was at least making a name as an acting teacher and doing a few stage roles in summer stock and small theatre in Toronto.
In 1975 the Playhouse Theatre Company in Vancouver created an acting school, a two-year program where students would have the opportunity to work in a professional theatre company while participating in an intensive training program of their own. The company would benefit from being able to present larger cast plays by using students in smaller roles, while the students would benefit from serving an apprenticeship on the mainstage. It seemed like a win-win situation, but turned out to be an idea better in principle than practice. The aforementioned Powys Thomas — “think of the Welsh fire” — was the original Artistic Director of the School, giving way in a short time to David Latham, later director of theatre training for the Stratford Festival. Latham was leaving to take an appointment, in Australia I believe, and the position was coming open.
At the time the Playhouse School was thought to be, or had ambitions to be, one of the two leading acting schools in Canada, rivalling the National Theatre School on the other side of the continent. While the job did not pay well, it seemed it might be a boost to my flagging résumé to be, or to have been, the Artistic Director of both of Canada’s leading schools. With my father’s recent death, a small portion of the Davis leather fortune had flowed to me, allowing me some independent means to supplement the meagre offering from the Playhouse. After some considerable discussion with Francine on the feasibility of moving our now family of four to Vancouver, we decided to accept the offer when it came. And so, in the fall of 1985, we hitched our secondhand boat to our secondhand car and drove across the country.
Unfortunately, Latham had decided to leave his position after he had auditioned the next class. As a result I inherited a class of twelve students chosen for someone else’s vision, and they were saddled with me for two years. Of course, it was all expected to get on track in two years time when I would audition the next class. But of course it did not get on track. Why not? Well, the person who hired me, Walter Learning, the Artistic Director of the company, decided to leave. Are you getting bored with this movie? I am. When the top person leaves, everything is in flux, and particularly so with the Playhouse School. For months the very future of the school was in question. Finally, at the eleventh hour, under new Artistic Director Guy Sprung, they decided to continue the school — but not with me.
It was never clear to me why Guy made that decision; we had seemed to have good professional relations for some time before he arrived in Vancouver. It may be that he was influenced by my reputation as an experimental teacher in the sixties with my emphasis at that time on creative development, for when we finally discussed his decision he referred to the students “rolfing” prior to a presentation. Good gracious. Rolfing was a psychotherapeutic technique in the sixties involving deep muscular massage with the intention of releasing repressed emotions. Even I never dreamed of using that technique with acting students. Even in the sixties. One of the teachers in the program, movement or voice, I’m not sure which, had encouraged patting each other’s backs as a warm-up. Likely this was the worrying exercise that Guy had observed. At any rate, he made his decision; perhaps two alphas were one too many for him.
As it turns out his stay at the Playhouse was even briefer than mine. Following a tradition of doing things in ‘the provinces’ that you wouldn’t do in Toronto, Guy’s opening production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream required Titania and Oberon to sing their roles. Guy is reported to have had a heated discussion with the theatre publicist. Finally he burst out with, “That is the worst fucking press release I have ever read!” To which the apt reply was, “That was the worst fucking production I have ever seen.”
Me bitter? Never.
By some irony, serendipitous no doubt, Scott Swan, under whose leadership Festival Lennoxville died, took over the school and within two years it too had passed into the annals of history.
From the Ashes
What to do? As it happens my second, and last, year at the Playhouse School, included quite a rush of film work, as well as directing a production on the theatre’s mainstage. The children were in school; we had a nice house; inertia dictated remaining in Vancouver. Once again I was back to freelance teaching and acting, hoping to keep the bills paid, the children in classes, and me on the ski slopes and lakes. And so I embarked on a challenging path that would lead not to The X-Files but to Xena: Warrior Princess.
The William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study is now a fixture in the city of Vancouver, but in 1989 it was not even a gleam in my eye. In the bitter divorce from Francine she implied that I had sacrificed income for the family to pursue my personal dream of founding an acting school. I wonder what she thought my options were at age fifty-one with a degree in philosophy. Certainly it would have been easier to be a movie star or a professor of philosophy, but those jobs were not on offer. Nor indeed was the artistic directorship of the Stratford Festival or even the Manitoba Theatre Centre. No, if I wanted to make a living, to support a family, I had to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.
Out of work actors do this all the time, hang out a shingle, call themselves an acting teacher and supplement their erratic actor earnings by teaching classes. Unlike the competition I did have real credentials as an acting teacher, both in training and experience, perhaps in talent and skill as well, but I will leave that to others to say. Like the famous British director Peter Hall, I often used to wonder if I would be found out. I think I was almost seventy when I finally said to myself, ‘Dammit, I really am good at this.’
In the beginning I had no inten
tion of starting a school; I just needed a few classes to supplement my income. And so, for one night a week, I rented studio space from a local theatre company and advertised for students. Meeting with some success I began to rent some other spaces and expand the offerings. It is remarkable that it was not so long ago that to teach a class in film acting one had to lug a large camera, a tripod, and a full-sized television set to each class. Where was the digital revolution when I needed it? Undaunted by such challenges and rewarded with some success I began saying mostly in jest and often to the rolling eyes of the students, “When I get my own space . . .”
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 23