Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Sports made an indelible impression on Scott, stirring deep emotions in him even as a youth. He can still recall listening to the 1926 Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. When Dempsey lost the dramatic battle, Scott, all of eight years old, went to bed weeping uncontrollably. As he wrote in his autobiography, “It was something about defeat, any defeat, that got to me.”

  The impetus to write came by way of Scott’s high-living uncle Jack Paterson, a dashing figure who traversed the rowdy logging camps of British Columbia in search of material for his lusty short stories and magazine articles. “Uncle Jack’s freedom inspired me. He’d fall out of the sky with his beautiful blond wife and eat, drink and tell stories. You’d walk into a room and he’d have a drink in one hand, his elbow on the fireplace mantel, and everybody would be spellbound by the stories of the North.”

  Buying a $48 Remington typewriter on credit in 1936, Scott began to submit work for publication, earning his first byline (and $3) from the Winnipeg Free Press for a short article on an old black shoeshine man. This led to a job as copyboy for the paper, and by the end of the year he had fallen into the sports department, covering local hockey.

  Scott was—just as Neil would be—lucky, adventurous and driven to the point of mania. On an early live assignment covering the escape of German prisoners from a POW camp, Young sneaked into the encampment by railway handcar, eavesdropped on soldiers through a heating grille in his hotel-room floor, found booze in the middle of the wilderness to loosen officers’ tongues and was even threatened with arrest by gun-toting officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. All this in search of “news that other people didn’t have,” as he puts it in his autobiography. “I certainly admire Scott’s tenacity,” said Trent Frayne. “He used to say, ‘Just open up a vein and let a little blood come out.’”

  Another product of the Depression, Frayne lived with Young and a gaggle of other struggling writers at 55 Donnell Street in what Trent’s wife, author June Callwood, calls “a magnificently awful boardinghouse.” Some of the writers Young met there would remain lifelong friends, and the group would eventually expand to include such notable Canadians as Farley Mowat, Robertson Davies and Pierre Berton. Most were discovered and brought into the group by Young. As Callwood said, “Scott moves effortlessly into other milieus. He is such a charming, ingratiating man. A lot of doors open for Scott.”

  With his wavy hair and wide, warm smile, Scott was a lady-killer. Birdeen Laurence, a young raven-haired knockout, was torn between Scott and another writer in the boardinghouse gang, Ralph Allen. Allen was nowhere near as dashing as Young, but his career was happening faster, and when Birdeen sought Scott’s advice on the situation, he told her to go with the sure thing. Birdeen slid a heartbreaking farewell note under Scott’s door, declaring him “noble,” but friends saw it as a tragedy. “Her heart was with Scott,” said June Callwood. “But he didn’t put in a strong enough bid. I think they both regretted it all their lives. I think Birdeen Allen was the love of Scott’s life, and both Ralph and Rassy were always conscious of that. It drove Rassy up the walls.”

  So did Merle Davies. Davies was another beauty who haunted the Canoe Club. Because she was from Montreal, and because of her interest in Scott, Rassy called her “that damned foreigner”—even, ironically enough, after she married Scott’s brother, Bob. At times, Rassy must’ve felt surrounded. Scott seemed to fall for women frequently and passionately, causing complications throughout his life. In his autobiography, Young relates how he once overheard a woman friend telling Birdeen Allen how Scott had asked her to marry him. “So what?” quipped Allen. “He asks everybody to marry him.”

  When I asked Scott if he saw any of himself in Neil, the subject of women came up first. “I’ve got an idea that Neil has some of my attitudes about women. As far as I know, neither one of us is bucking for the job of patron saint. I used to ask everyone I ran into to marry me. A fella told me once that I was a ‘marryallator’—meaning that I worship women and don’t exercise any kind of proper judgment when I’m faced with somebody I really like. But I’ve given that up.”

  As his brother, Bob, quipped, “Scott’s attitude was ‘love ’em and leave ’em,’ but Scott never left ’em and he kept on lovin’ ’em. Scott left a trail. He had a lot of my father in him in terms of being attractive to girls. They thought he was the real thing, y’know?”

  Apparently Rassy Ragland thought so, too. Over the protests of her friends, she broke off a previous wedding engagement to marry Scott on June 18, 1940. * They were both twenty-two years old. “We were children,” said Scott, recounting his proposal during a passionate visit at the boardinghouse. “In the heat of the moment, I said, ‘Maybe we should get married.’ Rassy immediately bolted upright and said, ‘When?’ It was characteristic of both of us that Rassy had decided she was gonna marry me and I was not gonna fight it.”

  Rassy and Scott were a lively match, both possessing sharp minds and strong wills. “Rassy was quite different from Scott,” said Pierre Berton. “Scott was very easygoing, never got very upset—Rassy could hit the roof easily and come right down again.” Rassy saw Scott’s manner as a little restrained for the hot-blooded Raglands. “Mother hated Scott,” she said. “Thought he was too English.”

  Rassy would stop at nothing to get her way. Scott tells how he got into an argument with her over inviting one of his old flames to the wedding. After a long battle, Rassy finally acquiesced, but months later Scott found the woman’s unsent invitation hidden under some catalogs. “There’s more than one way to win an argument,” he said, chuckling. “Rassy brooked little interference, and if you opposed her, it was a real federal offense.”

  “Rassy would not be intimidated by anybody,” said Neil’s brother, Bob. “She treated authority with disdain—her authority was the only authority that mattered. My father, on the other hand, came from abject poverty and sort of climbed his way out, and was never comfortable confronting authority.”

  Still, Scott continually stood up for Rassy, even under the most difficult circumstances. Rassy had a reputation as a gossip and once spread some information that was particularly damaging to one of the couple’s female friends, much to the dismay of the other women in their circle. “Birdeen and June, I don’t know who else, ganged up on Rassy,” Scott recalls. “They wanted her to come to a meeting, if you can imagine that. I wrote a note—carbon copies to every woman involved—and I told them to fuck off.”

  Thirty years later, when writing about his family in Neil and Me, Scott remained respectful. There was no discussion of Rassy’s shortcomings, and Scott disparaged only himself in frankly revealing his numerous affairs—which perhaps has helped to further damn him as the father who left. Even Rassy’s friends thought he was a little too easy on her in the book, but it didn’t surprise them. “Scott’s gallant with women,” said June Callwood. “He doesn’t speak of their failings.”

  Unlike her two sisters, Rassy would have no career other than that of being a wife, and domesticity was a duty she didn’t take lightly. “She was passionate about Scott, so she put everything into being the most wonderful wife and support,” said June Callwood. “Rassy put all her creative energy into being the world’s best cook—nobody will ever forget her duck, and the kids used to say about her cakes, ‘Hold it down or it’ll float away.’ She made her own drapes and slipcovers to save money … everything was perfect. She organized her home to create shame in every woman in the country. It was all to hold Scott, as I saw it. Because Scott had a roving eye all his life.”

  This couldn’t have been easy for Rassy; nor was Scott’s reserved manner. While she was blunt about speaking her mind, her husband wasn’t always the easiest individual to read. “I always think of Scott as somebody who avoids confrontation at all costs,” said his niece Stephanie Fillingham. “So when things got tough, he just kind of backed away—and his women spent their whole lives trying to catch him.” As Rassy put it, “How can you fight
with somebody who won’t talk?”

  Scott Young was, in his own subtle way, as intricate an individual as Rassy, and freelance career struggles only exacerbated his idiosyncrasies. “As I was often told, in times of financial stress I was not easy to live with,” Scott writes in his autobiography. He worked at home, and his insistence on absolute quiet was extreme even to other writers. “Scott was hysterical about noise,” said June Callwood. “Rassy used to say, ‘I can’t run a vacuum cleaner, I can’t wash dishes.’ It had to be total silence in the house.”

  Yeah, it was quiet around the house when Daddy was up there writing—until a certain time and then you could be noisy. He’s a real writer. That’s what he does. He’d force himself to do five pages—some days they came real easy and some days it was like pullin’ teeth. That’s what he told me.

  I can still remember goin’ up the steps, up into the attic. He’d be on the typewriter and I’d just walk right up and stand there looking at him—my head was just a little bit higher than his desk. He never, never got mad at me. It was always “Nice to see you.”

  —Your brother, Bob, might’ve gotten a different reaction.

  Maybe, yeah. He was a pretty mellow guy—with me. I think somethin’ about me made it a lot easier to get along….

  Whatever people’s criticisms of Scott, in the early days of their relationship, Rassy wouldn’t hear them. “She was loyal to a fault,” said June Call-wood. She typed all of Scott’s stories (“Everything had to be in triplicate,” muttered Rassy, rolling her eyes), kept away anyone who disturbed Scott’s concentration at the typewriter and generally battled the world on his behalf. As Scott writes in Neil and Me, Rassy was “with me all the way, never complaining about my quitting a job, selling house after house, moving from places she had decorated (and, boy, could she paint, as she herself used to say).”

  For their first Christmas together—which Scott would immortalize in a short story entitled “Once upon a Time in Toronto”—Rassy decorated the tree with red paper roses and a note to her new husband: “This is our first Christmas. We don’t have much except each other, but I have cut up little bits of my heart for you, to put on our first tree.” This was Rassy. When it came to her husband, it was till death do us part.

  And Scott obviously loved Rassy, although those close to him felt he was driven by forces beyond his control. “Scott had ambition,” said his brother, Bob. “He had a pretty clear view of what he was gonna be, what he was gonna do, and he was bloody well gonna do it—and Rassy helped, but win, lose or draw, with Rassy there or not there, it wasn’t gonna stop him.”

  “Christ, we lived all over hell’s half-acre,” said Rassy. “I moved sixty-seven times during my married life.” An exaggeration, but Scott’s career machinations did have them relocating often. After their marriage, the couple remained briefly in Winnipeg, then moved to Toronto in November 1940 when Scott got a job with the Canadian Press. On April 27, 1942, a son, Robert Ragland Young, was born, and the couple spent much of the next three years apart, as Scott was sent to London to cover the war, then enlisted in the navy: “I no longer wanted to be in the war as a bystander.” Rassy and Bob lived with Scott’s relatives in Flin Flon until Scott returned home for good in 1945.

  “I know the exact time when Neil was conceived,” Scott writes, describing a romantic snowbound night at a friend’s Toronto apartment during one of his infrequent leaves from navy duty. Needless to say, Rassy contested this as she did just about everything her ex-husband remembers. At any rate, Neil Percival Young was born at Toronto General Hospital at 6:45 A.M. on November 12, 1945. *

  “Very open, very honest, very naïve” is how Elliot Roberts defines Canadians: they don’t seem to burn out, just get more eccentric. They are the oddest breed I’ve ever run into, but I’ll let Neil Young exemplify that. He’s never renounced his Canadian citizenship.

  Canadians? They’re very resolute about some things. They’re conservative, they’re liberal. People speak out, say what they think to a great degree. They don’t seem to be quite as worried about how they look or what people think about them.

  It’s my roots. I really don’t have a yearning to return to Canada—although I might someday. To me, Canada is my family, where I grew up, memories of bein’ young and bein’ open to ideas. And then tryin’ to get outta Canada because it was limiting. At sixteen, I was already goin’ down visiting the consulates, finding out what you had to do to go down to the States, to legally go down there. Once you get there, you find out how beautiful Canada is and what it has to offer—natural resources that are awe-inspiring. So I’m proud to be a Canadian—but I don’t let it hold me back. Part of the planet, not part of the nation.

  I wonder if some Canadians resent the fact that I left Canada. They probably do.

  —Filmmaker, and Canadian, David Cronenberg feels there is a tendency to consider all sides of the story to the point of paralysis: “It’s a Canadian thing, this balance. Up to a point it’s virtue, beyond that it’s neurotic.”

  I agree with that. There’s something in Canada that teaches you that you always gotta look at both sides. See how other people could figure out why what you’re saying is wrong before you’re so sure you’re right.

  —Songs like “Rockin’ in the Free World” or “Change Your Mind”—you think there might be something Canadian in the ambiguity of those songs?

  Yeah. That’s all it is, heh heh.

  I don’t really have the confidence to stand behind things that I say—because I really don’t think I know that much. I’m not confident that I know what I’m talking about. That’s better than somebody who’s confident that they know what they’re talking about and they’re sure—because that leads them down a path. I never believe what I know is good or not, so I’m always scanning. Even the things I believe in the most, I doubt. And so when I see something that I’ve said, or hear it—it makes sense to me that I might not feel the same way the next time. Because that’s the way I am.

  “Neil was funny as hell,” said Rassy. “Great big eyes, yards of black hair and fat—my God, you could not fill him up. He ate and ate and ate. Wide as he was high.” While still in diapers, Neil—or Neiler, as he was to be known—exhibited a musical bent any time his mother played an old 78 of Pinetop Smith’s “Boogie-Woogie.” “God, he loved that record! Just leap up in his playpen, hold on to the railing and jig away.”

  The family moved into a three-bedroom bungalow at 335 Brooke Avenue in Toronto, Bob and Neil sharing a room so that Scott could have an office. He worked as an assistant editor for Maclean’s magazine, supplementing his $4,000-a-year salary by selling short stories to magazines throughout Canada and the United States. By 1947 the family was solvent enough to buy their first car, a feisty ’31 Willys-Knight that Rassy drove, as Scott had no license. The Youngs continued to relocate, living in rural areas outside Toronto, first at the Lake of Bays, then Jackson’s Point.

  Raising children was an area where the couple clashed, according to Scott. “I used to infuriate Rassy when she and the two boys would be arguing—I would say, ‘Now children, now …’” Looking back, Scott said, “I think there were more battles between Rassy and the kids than between the two of us.” Bob Young described his mother as “aristocratic. When I look back at it now, she was obviously caring, concerned, put a lot of effort into it. She had the presence of mind to make sure we were introduced to books and music at a very early age.”

  June Callwood, who visited the family in Jackson’s Point, saw Scott and Rassy as too absorbed with themselves—and their tangled relationship—to concentrate fully on their two very different children: outgoing Bob, nervy and full of bluster; Neil, withdrawn and solemn. “Neil was a sullen, fat, dark-eyed little baby. Not a happy baby, not a smiler, not a joiner. Not getting much. Neil got good primary care, but he didn’t get affection, hugs, from either of his parents. So he became a little watcher.”

  The cover story of the Toronto Telegram for September 9, 1950, concerns a
small country village called Omemee, and not far from the headline OMEMEE KIDS LIKE SCHOOL is a large photograph of a jolly-looking four-year-old with spiky black hair holding a whopper of a fish and smiling for the camera. The picture was faked; the fish was frozen and procured for the picture. Somehow it seems appropriate that an artist as media-savvy as Neil Young would make his earliest known public appearance learning the con. Still, it’s an appropriate image—most people’s earliest memories of Neil involve him either carrying a fish nearly as big as himself over his shoulder or dragging an oversized snapping turtle through town in his wagon, blissfully unaware of the small army of hungry cats and dogs following close behind.

  Omemee is a town conjured up in the first line of one of Young’s most indelible songs, “Helpless,” and as his brother, Bob, states, “I think Neil would probably agree if there’s anywhere either of us would point to as home, it would be Omemee.” In the summer of 1949, Scott Young bought a three-story turn-of-the-century house on five acres right in the center of town for $5,400, and for the next few years, Neil would lead a Huck Finn existence there.

  Young urged me to visit Omemee. As he put it, “They remember me like I don’t.”

  “Dummy died,” said Jay Hayes, a Gaelic lilt to his voice and a twinkle in his sad Irish eyes. “His brother came down to see Lester Markham—that’s the undertaker—and he says, ‘Les, I want you to come and get my brother and bury him, he’s dead.’ Markham says, ‘I can’t go and get him. You hafta go and get a doctor.’ The brother says, ‘Jesus, I don’t need a doctor, the guy’s dead—he hasn’t moved in three days!’” The barest hint of a smile crept across Jay’s friendly face. “Typical,” he muttered. Scott Young and I, sitting across from Hayes in the kitchen of his comfortable old house, chuckled appreciatively as he recounted tales of some of Omemee’s more memorable characters.