When that party trick ran its course, I sent away for an easy book on easy guitar playing for dumber-than-toilet-bowl soldiers with no talent for fighting, picked up a third-hand guitar, learned four chords, and amused them with my impersonations of Bing Crosby, Vaughn Monroe, the Mills Brothers, and the Ink Spots – singing all the parts wasn’t easy – and my pièce de résistance, Hank Snow. This was my greatest crowd-pleaser until Hank Snow himself showed up at a concert at the camp, and my fellow grunts quickly discerned that Hank Snow sounded more like Hank Snow than I did, so I had to drop him from my repertoire!
Of course the very idea that I wore a uniform was ridiculous. I had lived in my own world of play-making for so long, at the movies or in the family woodshed, that when times came up when I was going to be truly embarrassed, or badly hurt, I would immediately feel that I was the only person on earth to feel this way, and for the least reason I would go over the hill if I felt like it, rather than face the captain.
I was an artist, for God’s sake! So they put me in a little shack at one point, doing artwork for signs. The fellow who was with me was a wonderful illustrator who liked to do illustrations of ideal girls and boys in compromising positions. And we were both caught. I was caught looking at them, and they thought that I had done them. And I said No, no, I can do much better than this! But we were both called up on the carpet for it. And suddenly I was a schoolboy again, afraid to raise my hand. Because the loneliness of that moment was overwhelming.
I was tempted to go over the hill that day. Because we were sent to the brig for punishment, which was unfair, because we deserved to be in that shack. We had the talent. I just wanted to do my little signs. All the others could do was put bullets in guns and hit targets. Hit the target? Are you joking? I was playing at being. Yes, playing at being, the acting thing. It never stopped. Let’s see – was there anything else before moving on? Oh yes. My circumcision, by an army doctor type. Why did I have this done? Because someone else had, and it was cheap – nothing, in fact – except for a fair amount of embarrassment, and pain, of course. Pain out of character for circumcision, I thought. The initial unwrapping of it was … unwinding … and then that last tug, which might have brought people out of comas. Other reasons: The circumcision took place in Windsor, and I’d never been to Windsor. Plus, it got me out of a Colonel’s inspection. Still, I carried myself like a soldier who had been in the army for forty years, and had always wanted to be, because I was determined to look experienced. Looking experienced was an acting technique that would serve me very well down the road, when I started actually getting paid for it.
I had done the same thing in childhood, starting school after everybody else but acting like I knew all there was to know about it, or at least all there was that was worth knowing. Starting a year back, I was always playing catch-up, always wanting to be able to compare notes with the kids who were in the grade ahead of me.
Which has more than a little to do with that great speech from Troilus and Cressida:
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O’er-run and trampled on …
(Act III, Scene 3)
Oh yes, they’ll go right by you on horseback if you let ’em. And they won’t get hurt, either! They may fall off, but they won’t get hurt.
So my life in the military continued to play out like one of those black-and-white comedies Donald O’Connor made for Universal-International.
And then one day everything changed.
The lists were up on the board for people to go to Korea. The Second Battalion had been formed. I was in the First Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment. The training was at Petawawa, the Regiment’s headquarters – training the new ones and re-training the fellows who had served in World War II, so they could go as well.
We went out on the training field, where everything was set up – ten separate mortar stations all in a row, about six or eight feet apart. I was number five.
We all got down behind our guns, stretched out on the ground, and the trainers, those of us who were doing the training, were kneeling very close behind our men, leaning over their shoulders.
I was a trainer, not because I was so good at it but because I had done it before. (I mean, I didn’t want to excel at it – I might get a stripe out of it, and then actually have to be responsible for something.)
All our trainees were holding the barrels with their left hands, leaning in so they could reach to the right where they had a row of maybe six bombs. And they would take the bomb and slide it down the chute, and away they’d go.
This particular time, down went the bomb, and everything turned black. The bomb exploded inside the barrel, and went in every direction. I was number five, and the man in front of me was killed.
From number five to number one – there were between eight and ten people killed in all – the blast went just one way. A piece must’ve gone by my shoulder, past me, into him, because of the way we were positioned. And of course you can’t really see how much damage has been done until it’s all over. There was this terrific blast, and everything turned black, and I fell backwards. And they immediately started to count off the people on the line, asking us to call out our names, and I was still flat on my back, and I heard someone say, “Pinsent’s got it!” The force of the blast had showered me with a whole lot of dirt. And when I rallied I couldn’t hear anything, not a thing, and I saw that the fellow in front of me was dead, and other fellows had started to apply first-aid and bandages. The fellow next to me, Puddicombe, was supposed to be getting married the next weekend. His clothes were blown off from halfway down, and his arse was bare, and I remember seeing this big hole in him, with blood settling in it. And I was thinking My God, it’s like drawings, it’s like artwork. It was the strangest sensation, this disaster. I remember looking at Puddicombe and practically crying. I was shaking, trying to help as best I could with the bandaging, and the padre arrived almost immediately and started administering last rites on the field. The sirens were still going, but he conducted a service right on the spot.
Our ears were still ringing, but they ordered us to get down behind the guns again, so it wouldn’t be a problem for us later on. So we had to shoot off some bombs ourselves. After that, we sang a hymn, I think, and then back we went, piling into our trucks to return to the barracks. I remember telling some fellows in the barracks what had happened, because they hadn’t heard even a whisper about it. And then, a bit later, we heard that the cause was faulty ammunition.
To me it was a shattering experience, an epiphany. At eighteen, faced with shocking, sudden death, you are strengthened because it wasn’t you. The first thing I thought of, or close to it, was that yes, it was real, all this blood and pain, and guys blown apart, and you still had that shiver, that shock in your head. That would be there for a while. But at the same time, what was being done was done. And you were not part of it. So it couldn’t have been you. And you might still live to be a million years old. So that represented victory. Because I can live to tell the tale. And there’s the guilt, of course, feeling guilty because you thought, I’m glad it’s not me. Home of the Brave.
But what a fresh start. What a fresh outlook.
One of the things I remember most, getting off the truck and walking into the barracks, was the sweetness of the fresh air. Fresh air! It was as if some page of my life had been finished, completed. It was a very particular thing. And, coming quite unexpectedly, a feeling also of pride. Later I could never understand when people accepting awards would say, “I’m proud of my work in this most of all.” I could never say that. (“Proud” was a word that your grandfather hit you over the head for.) But in a peculiar way I
was proud of being part of that experience. I was no longer a novice, no longer a rookie.
I volunteered to go to Korea, but they wouldn’t send me. The popular assumption that had been going around was correct. They wouldn’t send me because I was First Battalion, training for parachute jumps, and they had already spent a considerable amount of money on us. So they sent straight infantry instead.
I said, Well, send me somewhere, for Christ’s sake! So they sent me to Fort Churchill, Manitoba, to another group of earth-bound fighting men. And happily for me the guys at Fort Churchill hadn’t seen Hank Snow in concert. So back into my musical kit bag he went.
shall we dance?
PRIVATE G. E. PINSENT WAS DISCHARGED IN NOVEMBER, 1951 – in Winnipeg, which seemed somewhat counterproductive to my grand scheme to take Broadway by storm.
As we celebrated our found-again freedom one of my fellow dischargees, a soldier named Billy Reid, invited me home for dinner. Billy was a buddy, a great guy, and while we were enlisted he had persuaded me (with very little coaxing) to become pen pals with his sister Irene.
After months of flirting via Canada Post, Irene and I had finally met, under somewhat unusual circumstances. Since our unit was training at the Rivers, Manitoba, base, we were called in to help with sandbags and evacuations resulting from the Winnipeg flood in 1950. There was a bridge spanning the Red River near the suburb where Irene lived with her parents and, as it so happens, her dog. It was Irene’s dog who insisted on jumping into the river, and in a foolish romantic moment I boldly followed suit. I was sure I looked every inch Beau Geste as I made my way out to retrieve her barking pet. I couldn’t swim but her bloody dog could, so it was the dog who brought me ashore. And yes, it would be cruel of you to ask me if I still would have waded in for the mutt had she not been standing there. But she was, and I did, and in no time at all we had fallen in love, and in no time at all we were married.
Getting married seemed to be a step other people were taking. Oh, I’ll follow that. I followed trends, everywhere in life. I had always copied what other people were doing. So, okay, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do next.
Irene’s family were good, solid working-class people. They worked. And of course there was I, thinking that I would be going in a different direction. I would try to be the proper husband, and good house builder. But at twenty-one I still couldn’t get my mind off the arts, and a whole other lifestyle.
Soon we had two children, Barry and Beverly, and I was a working man, going from one lacklustre gig to another: Manitoba Telephone System, meter reader, streetcar ticketer, sign painter, commercial artist. Got the last two jobs when I went looking for work as an illustrator. Never had any training, of course. Didn’t know there was such a thing. I thought if you had it, you had it. Which is not entirely true. I ended up painting signs and doing artwork in a place called Display Industries in St. Boniface. And later, much later, when I was acting on stage, I would do the posters. If I had any cocksuredness it was because I knew I could do these certain things to a certain point, whether it was acting or drawing or this or that. With that in mind I used to get up in the morning feeling pretty good about myself. But I was nowhere near as ready as I thought I was.
Most fun, for me, was becoming a bona fide ballroom dance instructor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, which were thoughtfully located one flight up from a personal loan company – just in case you needed to borrow some cash to continue your lessons. Especially after basically untrained teachers like me had assured you of your above-average potential.
I found the whole group of people at the Arthur Murray studio in Winnipeg to be very … well … odd. And oddly enough, I found that very appealing. They seemed to me to be very New York-y, or at least what I imagined New York people might be like: Not at all like the rest of Winnipeg.
Dance studios were common in the fifties, but the two most popular were those franchised by Fred Astaire and my boss once-removed, Arthur Murray. Murray was a brainy U.S. entrepreneur who made a hobby (and ultimately a fortune) out of social dancing, at a time when dancing was still regarded as romantic. For guys it was a chance to hold a girl in your arms. For girls it was a chance to dance with tall, dark, and handsome strangers, just like the ones who swept fair maidens off their feet in the love stories published in magazines like Redbook and McCall’s.
Murray was a brilliant promoter. He sold dance lessons by mail, spent a lot of money on advertising, and sold his first franchise to a businessman in Minneapolis in 1938. A few years later Betty Hutton and Jimmy Dorsey made a big noise on the hit parade – remember the hit parade? – with a tune called Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry, and by 1946 there were more than seventy Arthur Murray Dance Studios in the United States By the time I arrived in Winnipeg, Arthur Murray was a household name, thanks to his television series. Murray had bought airtime on a major American television network in 1950 to launch an elegant and entertaining weekly infomercial before that word had even been coined. As host he installed his wife Kathryn, his effervescent dance and business partner, who actually wrote the manuals given to me and every Arthur Murray dance instructor to study. Arthur Murray Dance Party was a runaway hit, reaching millions of potential customers every week. Including ours.
In retrospect I suppose the Fred Astaire and Arthur Murray dance studios were the lonelyhearts clubs of their era. Single women, unmarried or widowed, paid their instructor/escort to wheel them around a dance floor, bolstering their shaky confidence and low self-esteem. Suddenly they could take pride in their own achievement, and that exceptional sense of satisfaction, so rare in their everyday lives, might carry them all week – or at least until their next lesson. Every few weeks all of the instructors would gather in one room to watch a film of Arthur and Kathryn demonstrating a new dance step. And off we would go.
At times we also had to be fast on our feet off the dance floor. One of our clients, a wonderful woman, a widow, had lost her first dance instructor – apparently he had moved on to a real job – and I was informed that I was her new teacher. I was not a great dancer, but I had rhythm. And I had grown the appropriate moustache for my new role as an Arthur Murray designate. And she had already paid a lot of money, $10,000, I believe, and was registered in a lifetime course. So I took her out on the floor, and we did the foxtrot. (That one even Porky knew, from all those Knights of Columbus dances on Friday night in Grand Falls.)
She said, “I don’t want to do the foxtrot. I want to do the paso doble!”
“The paso doble!” I exclaimed. “Oh my dear, you need to do a little more work on your balance before we try the paso doble!”
I took her to a private room and gave her two exercises to do, to work on her balance. And then I excused myself for a moment, ran all the way back to the teachers’ green room and cried, “How the fuck do you do the paso doble?” I learned two quick steps and went back to the room where she was practicing her balance.
“Very good!” I said. “And now we will do the paso doble!”
And paso doble we did.
Dancing was easy. Marriage was hard. I had a head full of dreams, and the dreams just could not fit inside the marriage. I was not the man Irene needed me to be. What I was learning, sadly, was that I didn’t want to be that man. So it seemed like the only way to resolve it was to separate the two lifestyles, hers and mine. I had to choose between my family and my dream, in one of those awful moments when things aren’t what they should be and life isn’t on an even keel anymore. Suddenly you’re in a time of crisis and reaching that point where you realize it’s never going to be the same again.
Barry was five and Beverly was three. I remember leaning over their bunk bed to kiss them goodbye, and I remember wondering if I would ever see them again. I was in a terrible state at the time, and I remember feeling glad that they couldn’t tell how upset I was. I remember wondering if, when they grew up, they would ever understand what had happened, and why I had left. Finishing, kissing, not allowing myself t
o stop, boom boom boom and out the front door, standing alone on the street.
I remember feeling as if I had been given money to go to the store, and that I had lost it, or spent it on something else. I felt dreadful, and useless, concentrating on a life that might not pay me a living – certainly not enough to raise a family. And yet this hunger, this thing that I had not done before, would now force me to go out and see if it could happen.
Standing before a judge and agreeing not to see my children, so their mother could make a fresh start, was the lowest point of my immature young life. For the next two decades my children would see me only on television. Years later, thanks to their love and persistence, we would find each other again, and some thorny issues and unanswered questions would finally be resolved.
In an interview with Newfoundland filmmaker Barbara Doran my daughter Beverly described my departure from their daily lives with a perspective and a generosity I lacked at the time.
“My dad had to go,” she told her. “Issues in the marriage aside, the heart wants what the heart wants. You have to go. He couldn’t have been Gordon Pinsent without that. You can’t hold that kind of hunger down. It would be letting the hungry dogs out of the basement. When you do they would wreak havoc. So best let them out when they’re just a little bit hungry.”
“go get him, ernie!”
“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE,” QUOTH THE BARD, “AND all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”
Easy for you to say, Mr. Shakespeare. Especially in Winnipeg.
Here’s what I want to know: If all the world’s a stage, when do I go on?
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