“Millie” Hall, an early boss of mine, as Maria in Twelfth Night
Theatre now began running out of money. I was down to two suits (to be used in every production—and fifty more roles to play—Jesus! I got cunning, thrifty, wore my shirts back to front when portraying clergy, slept in my nicely pressed suit to crumple it up for geriatric parts (hated playing my own age, much better at crumbling decrepitude). As an ancient vicar (The Passing of the Third Floor Back), I gave my best, unrecognizable eighty-three one dreary matinée when the assistant stage manager (ASM) whispered a man named Plummer wanted to see me backstage after the show—Christ! It must be my father! We’d never met, never even seen each other! Hot damn! He must have been having a stroke out there watching his prematurely decayed offspring, an old bent wreck of a crone with white hairs, looking years older than himself!
We met—hemmed, hawed and shuffled in embarrassment as I feverishly smudged away the filthy greasepaint to reveal my seventeen years. Much relieved, he managed to stammer a few incomplete sentences—the suspense was awful—I felt so sorry for him. God! It took guts to show up! I took him to the unglamourous beer hall for supper. Things looked a little better, except, still nervous, I started to get diarrhea of the mouth. Now it was his turn. He fed me tidbits of Plummer family history I knew nothing about, assuring me I was not the only thespian in the family. My cousin Sir Michael Bruce (baronet and journalist), who resided in Vancouver, had a brother called Nigel, my second cousin. Nigel was that well-known character actor, hugely entertaining as a bumbling Dr. Watson opposite Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes films. Nigel “Willie” Bruce was also a member in good standing of the so-called Hollywood Raj in British-dominated Tinseltown of the thirties and had made heaps of movies, among my favourites Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek.
It appeared the Plummers and the Bruces were old mining families in Britain and Canada, and Michael and Nigel with their highly coloured Bruce tartan careened directly back to thirteenth-century Scotland and King Robbie the Bruce himself—not exactly an anemic bloodline! At this knowledge, I downed a few more—in fact, we both got a tad tiddly. I think he started to have a good time. He was a nice guy really—I was beginning to quite like him—another time, ah well—it was all too late and we both knew it. Our paths would cross once or twice again in our lifetimes and then no more—no big deal, no sweat.
On rare breaks I took the train to New York to “second act it” at most of the shows and caught some late nightlife. Armed with an introductory letter from his aunt I met fellow Montrealer Robert Ward Labatt Whitehead, who had become a big hotshot Broadway producer (at that moment presenting Julie Harris and Ethel Waters in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding). Kindness itself, he showed me his plush offices, presented me to his partner Oliver Rea, told me he had nothing to offer me, sent his love to his aunt and showed me the way out. Later I became attached to Oliver and his warm, delightful wife, Betty, and of course Robert, or “Ratty,” as he is now affectionately nicknamed, was to be a lifelong ami-propre. Always dapper, handsome, replete with old-world charm and a ferret nose for business, his expression every so often took on a sudden faraway look of longing as if yearning to break loose—very much a characteristic of the Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, hence “Ratty.” I left the then-mighty formidable Ratty and snuck off with Marian Seldes to watch Maurice Evans and Edna Best in Rattigan’s The Browning Version which we would do back in Ottawa in two weeks time—me causing a small stir as the old professor simply because I cheated disgracefully by giving a direct and rather accurate imitation of Mr. Evans, if I may say so myself!
Some saint called Southgate saw to it we pull through financially for a while longer. Amazingly the loyal little audience still supported us—they’d got used to us by now. Also it was way below zero Fahrenheit in Ottawa—maybe they just came down to the academy to snuggle up with us and keep warm. I fell in with a crinkly loveable curmudgeon, Budge Crawley of Crawley Films, a true pioneer of the cinema, who gave me my first film part in one of his “short” subjects. Crawley had started his career with another great camera pioneer, Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and had since garnered an Oscar or two for his courageous documentaries, one of them The Man Who Skied Down Everest. He also fathered the National Film Board. I was thankful for his belief in me, but ungraciously and stupidly, I shunned celluloid and adopted toward it a repulsively snobbish disregard.
Robert “Ratty” Whitehead, Broadway producer extraordinaire, handsome dog, a friend and fellow Montrealer
Anyway, I was frightfully busy now—sorry, my time was not my own. You see I was having my first real serious love affair—not smooth! She was married—and what’s more, her husband was always around. She was several years my senior. She was also the leading lady, so sometimes we met only onstage. God! I was hooked! I now knew what jealousy meant. When she went home to him at night, I paced up and down outside the house for hours, mumbling abusive threats, sobbing loudly like some mooncalf, vowing that I’d kill myself. I actually was plotting how best to kill him! When we were together, though, in private or public, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—it was so urgent, so new—we touched all the time—oh the pain of it! Of course, we “did it” everywhere, anywhere we could—in the dressing rooms, backstage, in public conveniences, at the back of cinemas and cars, even at parties. One night, at one of those large dress-up soirees, she was on my lap and I was inside her, her evening dress spread out over us for concealment when her husband walked in! We stayed exactly where we were, having the pleasantest of chats, the three of us, he none the wiser, while she and I slowly, gently, carefully moved our imperceptible way toward an absolutely expressionless, silent but nonetheless blinding climax! A grim lesson in underplaying. He still none the wiser, or was he? I guess I’ll never know.
Lover now discovered her life was with hubby, went back to him. I was desolate, though not for long. The pain was amazingly brief. It was not the end really—the world was a big place, so I threw myself back into the arms of Thespis, the only real therapy I knew. The company was running out of money again; the saints began to scrounge. My suits were worn out and my contract was up so I took my leave of Bytown, not such an innocent little town after all, with perhaps a touch more stage savvy, considerably less virginal and gripped with the shattering revelation that the gap between Theatre and Life is remarkably infinitesimal.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages.
—CYMBELINE
Fyodor Komisarjevsky vas vun beeg feesh and Rose-Pose Todd had caught him. “Komis” or “Kommie,” as he was known to his intimates, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential theatrical gurus. The famous Russian director-designer had begun in his very own theatre in St. Petersburg in the early nineteen hundreds and soon became head of the Imperial and State Theatres of Moscow. He then immigrated to Paris and London where his massive staging of operas and his presentations of the plays of Chekhov and Shakespeare were controversial and legendary. This visionary had breathed a refreshingly new and vivid life into the classics and treated them with the same sort of revolutionary irreverence with which Tyrone Guthrie was to treat them decades later. But he got there first! He had produced most of the top classical stars of the time—John Gielgud had called him “perverse, but the most contradictory and fascinating character I have ever met.” He designed London’s Phoenix Theatre and introduced Chekhov to British audiences at the little theatre in Barnes. His leading actress on these occasions was the young (Dame) Peggy Ashcroft, whom he subsequently married.
Fyodor Komisarjevsky of Moscow’s Imperial Theatre and London’s Old Vic
All his life he had remained in direct opposition to the Moscow Arts and the methods of Stanislavsky. Now I am not one to denigrate and criticize the hallowed Method, dear Lord no! It is extremely useful to actors who are lost and floundering in their interpretations and need a private source of expe
rience to draw from but Kommie made a great deal of sense when he wrote, “An imaginative actor needs no naturalistic copies of the environment of his personal life to help him to act as he is able to transform any object before him into anything he chooses to make it. If it were possible for an actor to act by means of pure remembrance, his rendering of a character in any play other than one written by himself for himself would be a complete distortion of the work of the playwright.”
Kommie had just completed his Broadway production of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which starred John Gielgud and was produced by Ratty Whitehead and “O.” Rea. He quite clearly missed his Shakespeare, which he hadn’t presented for some time, so Rose-Pose, taking advantage of this, had the whopping great chutzpah to lure him into our midst. Here he was then, quite literally, in our neck o’ the woods, up to his ears in flora and fauna and eager Montreal talent. A pixie of a man in his midseventies, he looked and behaved like an aging faun—his perpetual sly grin gave the impression he could and would, at any moment, play some wicked practical joke. His celebrated power/magic combination had, I imagine, diminished with age but even an untutored eye such as mine could detect the odd flash of creative madness that had made him such a force and a legend.
Rose-Pose had engaged him to launch her Open-Air summer season with a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline with which quite obviously he had a field day. For some curious reason he set the not-too-frequently staged opus about ancient Britain smack in the middle of pre–Second Great War, and among many a controversial piece of stage business in this never dull production he ended the unwieldy play with the entire cast tramping up a little hillock and disappearing over the other side, singing full out, “We’re off to see the wizard!” I had the good fortune to be cast as the leading juvenile Posthumus. I remember Kommie saying to a chap playing one of the kings, “You don’t hyave to ect kink. You do notting, pliz. I vill hyave everyvun roun’ you make you look like kink!” (One of those early useful zingers!) Rose-Pose gave us an Imogen full of piss and vinegar and the part of Cloten was played by Kommie’s favourite of all—un autre comédien Montréalais comme moi, William Shatner.
The future Captain Kirk and I “beamed up” together in many a production in our hometown after that and particularly on radio in both French and English. Even this early, Shatner showed great promise with his versatility and light touch. Our competition for all the key principal roles was a wondrously powerful young tragedian of Latvian descent by the name of John Colicos. His voice could shatter glass and its range was unimaginable! In years to come he would play a twenty-two-year-old King Lear at London’s Old Vic (their youngest Lear ever) to sensational press, and would eventually emerge as one of the theatre’s very finest classical actors. But we were riddled with envy and admiration back then as he continued to steal all the cream! Radio, of course, was where the money was and bilingual radio was a thriving art industry in those days—with weekly hour-long dramas, musical extravaganzas, and at least ten soap operas a day. Can you imagine an actor—and a teenage actor to boot—actually complaining that there was too much work to handle?! But there was! Shatner, Colicos and I were regulars on Rupert Caplan’s weekly Bible series plus special two-hour-long Wednesday night dramas such as The Trial by Kafka and dozens of similar classics. Great stars such as Paul Muni would cross the border and play leads for us. I was in an English soap called Laura Ltd and once had the pleasure of appearing briefly on the top French serial, La Famille Plouffe. The little boy with the cracked voice I had listened to I don’t know how many times was to my astonishment played by one of the most beautiful of dark-haired demoiselles, the French actress Ginette Letondal. She would one day be my “princess”—onstage, of course.
John Colicos as Lear, age twenty-two at London’s Old Vic
I became busier than a bird dog doing several other soaps for the French network, and was making pretty good money, but still dear Mum was stuck with most of the bills. She had always given me so much rope but by now she had come to the end of hers. I vowed that as soon as I’d acquired sufficient capital, I’d buy her a house. Instead of hanging out with my usual racy friends, she and I would do the town together—she’d be my date. She wouldn’t have to work anymore. I’d look after her for the rest of her days. Fortified by this resolve I threw myself into my work with renewed vigour, but the excitement of it all got the better of me and my good intentions were soon forgotten.
There was a time when I was in so many soaps in both languages all at once, my calendar became so confusing that I’d forget to show up. I was enjoying a lengthier lunch than usual, one day, when it hit me in the face like a bunch of icicles that I had completely missed an entire episode in French. It was too late to run for the studio as the show was already on the air! My evil friends couldn’t wait to turn on the restaurant’s radio and force me to listen. I sat in dumbfounded horror as I heard my fellow actors (improvising frantically, of course) inform the listening and, I hoped by now, mourning public that I had tragically been killed by falling down some old deserted mine shaft! The sad thing about that scene was that it was “off mic”—I never got to play it. My timing was obviously so bad I had missed my own death.
Radio was everywhere then and it had to be, for apart from the two railroads (CPR, CNR), it was up to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which was founded in 1936, to connect our oversize country and bring it closer together—and bring it closer, it did. It was the medium of the moment—how I loved it and how I miss it. I began to commute to Toronto. Now Toronto in the late forties was about the dullest city on this planet. You really did have to go to Buffalo to have fun. Not now, of course, for present-day Toronto is one of the finest of modern North American metropolae. But then it had nothing in it save a bunch of complacent Presbyterian-Protestant Babbitts who lived by a set of rules familiar only to the Roundheads. There were also so many bigoted bylaws and drinking restrictions one couldn’t possible remember which to obey.
“Dry Toronto,” Stephen Leacock had called it, or “those who live in Central America … Dry Tehauntepec.” Leacock writes, “I found it impossible that night—I was on the train from Montreal to Toronto—to fall asleep. A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me [and] the other passengers as well…. I could distinctly hear them groaning at intervals. ‘Are they ill?’ I asked … of the porter as he passed. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘they’re not ill. Those is the Toronto passengers.’ ‘All in this car?’ I asked. ‘All except that gen’lman you may have heard singing in the smoking compartment. He’s booked through to Chicago.’” Leacock was right, and even when I arrived in the much later forties, the town still smelled of Prohibition. Toronto did have one thing, though—one redeeming thing. It had, quite possibly, the very best radio drama in the world!
For years the CBC had been thrust into war reporting and very little else until suddenly in 1944 the Stage Series hit the airways and Canada, at last, had its very own homegrown entertainment. Under the supervision and direction of an absolute master called Andrew Allan, a small exclusive group of brilliant young writers and talented character actors (boasting at least twenty-five different voices each) had begun by making extraordinary magic over the airways and sustained it for at least a decade. As one writer put it, “They managed to shatter the awful silence that characterizes Canada.” They had successfully burst the bonds of nationalism and had gained recognition way beyond our borders.
Andrew was a civilized creature, stylish and urbane, and it was just the moment in our history when someone with these qualities was sorely needed. He wasted no time in organizing with Val Gielgud (head of BBC Drama and John’s brother) an exchange arrangement with the “Beeb’s” Third Programme. His guest artists were legendary, but for the most part he stuck to his little “team”—that homegrown ensemble that was nonpareil, unbeatable. Writers such as Lester Sinclair, Len Petersen, Harry Boyle, Jo Schull, Reuben Ship; actors Lorne Greene, Frank Peddie, Bernard Braden, Tommy Tweed, Bud Knapp, Lloyd Boc
hner, Don Harron, Mavor Moore and a gem of a talent, John Drainie. Orson Welles took me aside many years later when he learned I was a Canuck and pronounced stentorially that John Drainie was the best radio actor in the world. He was right. John had the gift of making his characters jump right out of the wireless and grab you where it hurts. His were documentary performances of stark reality—his hayseed farmers; his high-camp Restoration buffoons; his dry, tough contemporary heroes; and his heartbreaking Richard II all still live on in the Temple of the Ear.
There were always new works as well as classics to listen to—original productions could range from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Conrad Aiken’s Mr. Arcularis to Reuben Ship’s The Investigator (the well-known satire on Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt). John Drainie’s superb mimicking of McCarthy cross-examines Socrates, Milton, Spinoza and Luther and finds them all guilty. Then the episodic broadcasts—Dickens’s complete Nicholas Nickleby and Pickwick Papers accompanied by a full orchestra playing Lucio Agostini’s specially composed and incredibly descriptive music. His witty, bubbling score for “Christmas at Dingly Dell” was as close to the true spirit of Dickens as any music can get.
The productions had a vitality, style and urgency that never slackened; there was an ever-present sense of occasion about them. In a desert of stifling impotent conservatism where the natives wasted every waking hour wondering if they were “Brits” or “Yanks” it was an oasis of originality and daring creativity. Many Canadians had been seeking a cultural liberation from their British heritage for years and it was Andrew’s sensitivity to this plight that gave us for the first time in the lively arts a real personal identity of our own—he had changed Canada’s cultural scene forever.
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