As the story goes, her big boss Jack Warner took one look at her and almost had a heart attack.
“My God, Bette, what happened?” he cried.
“I’ve been in a terrible car crash, Jack,” said Bette – “and this is what it looks like.”
Fortunately I was by now an old hand at applying makeup, so I decided to enhance the CBC work with some special touches of my own. Soon I had deeper “bruises” and fresher “cuts,” and in another innovative stroke I jammed a mile or so of bloodied gauze inside my mouth on one side, to create the effect the script required, i.e., to look swollen and beaten as if my face had been “smashed with a rifle butt.”
Lights. Camera. Action.
The two guards who have just beaten me – two actor friends of mine – have barely dumped me in the cell when I hear the soft voice of the female prisoner in the next cell. Slowly I drag myself to the bars between our cells, one of which is a microphone disguised as a prison bar. Having made enough mic noise to rival a thunderstorm, I’m now in a very tight close-up with my beautiful leading lady, Louise Walters, and begin to deliver a full page of dialogue. Which I suddenly go up on.
Dry up completely.
Totally blank.
My beautiful leading lady’s expression moves from astonishment to fear to abject terror. The silence is deafening. As the seconds tick by I come up with a solution. I reach through the bars, grab her by the back of her head, and kiss her, sure that my lines will come back to me.
Which they do.
Until I see that the CBC paint on the fake prison bars is not quite dry, and that two distinct bar impressions now decorate the margins of her gorgeous face. Along with a few smudges of my bloody makeup.
Which causes me to forget my lines. Again.
So I reach through the bars, again, and pull her face to mine, again, and kiss her, again, this time even more longingly. And all my words come back to me like a song, and as I release her, to begin my dialogue, we both become aware that the tail end of the mile of bloody gauze stowed inside my mouth is now attached to her mouth, a thin ridge of gauze hanging from her lips, swinging like a tiny rope bridge, beautifully lit by the CBC.
Bette Davis notwithstanding, maybe there was more to learn about this “live” television thing than I’d thought. And suddenly my urge to get to New York wasn’t nearly as strong. I would try to tame this TV animal first, and I would do it in the jungle where it lived and flourished: Toronto.
I was in Winnipeg when I saw my first live black-and-white television show from Toronto. Toronto was where most of Canadian television was happening, the electronic nut to crack if you wanted to work as an actor. MGM’s tagline was “More stars than there are in heaven.” Well, CBC had the people. CBC had the performers. CBC had performers of every stripe and colour, and some of the top singers, too. I was living in Manitoba but I knew every face on CBC. Because they were our stars at that time.
Perry Rosemond got to Toronto first, about six months ahead of me. He had originally planned to stay at his old University of Toronto frat house, but changed his plan as soon as he saw it. “What a dump!” he reported gloomily. At that time he had a couple of friends who were studying to be dentists, and they suggested that he move in with them. So he coughed up the enormous fee of $52 a month – for room and board – and stayed at the School of Dentistry frat house at 42 Bedford Road in Toronto’s downtown Annex neighbourhood. He shared a room with Allan Blye, a singer who would later become a very successful Hollywood producer, and a guy from Australia named Jimmy Hannan, who was also a singer. I was still in Winnipeg, staying with Perry’s parents. At that point, as testament to my great good luck, one Jimmy Hannan moved out of the frat house and one Gordon Pinsent moved in to take his place. Allan was the only one working – he was doing one of Billy O’Connor’s music shows – and Perry still suspects that Allan declared both me and Perry as dependents on his 1959 tax return.
Perry had already ingratiated himself with the casting office at CBC Television, and he had been cast in “The Death Around Us,” an episode of a weekly dramatic series sponsored by General Motors. Artistically speaking it was not the most challenging role; he was supposed to play a dead body on a hospital gurney.
When I walked into 42 Bedford for the first time, having just arrived back in Toronto, Perry was on the pay phone in the lobby, talking to Liz Butterfield, who was responsible for casting GM Presents. He was pretty excited, too, because he had just received word that he had been upgraded to a two-line bit. Alfie Scopp, the actor who had originally owned the two-line bit, had apparently moved on to bigger and better things. So Perry now had every actor’s dream – a speaking part.
I walked in while he was still on the phone, and after gratefully accepting his new speaking part, Perry said, “Have you re-cast the dead body yet?”
Liz said no, they hadn’t.
“Well, in that case,” said Perry, “have I got a corpse for you!”
So I got Perry’s part. With no lines to learn.
At the read-through the casting director said he needed someone to be seen sweeping the floors of the hospital hallway when the principal actors walked by. “I can do that!” I said. And I got it. At rehearsal they decided they needed an extra to play a young intern walking down the hall. “I can do that!” I said. And I got that one too.
At the end of the day I made more money than Perry did, because I racked up three roles. Every time they turned on the camera, there I was. And Perry told that story to everyone.
When we weren’t waiting for the phone to ring (and when weren’t we?) we came up with temp jobs to pay the rent. I was a painter, so I painted graduate students, oil portraits for their family, that sort of thing, for $30 a head. I had it worked out that if I got one small one-line speaking part on television and one small non-speaking part on television, I could get through the month. I would do six grad students at a time, line them up in six chairs, while Perry would provide a running commentary: “He’s just finishing the chin on number four, no, wait, he’s moving to the nose on number two, okay, okay, he’s fixing the eye line on number six …” And when he wasn’t giving the play-by-play on my artistic endeavours, Perry kept himself reasonably solvent by selling shoes downtown at the Betty Jane Shoe Store.
The benefits of staying in the Jewish dental fraternity were not insignificant. Because we were in residence at the Alpha Omega frat, we also got free dental work at the dental college: 100 chairs, no waiting. After my bottle-cap-biting days, I was an ideal candidate. Oh sure, open a bottle cap with bravado, then cry like a baby at a root canal!
There was only one television set, in the basement. The frat housekeeper and the handyman were a married couple, Burt and Lisa Bergman. English was their second language, and Burt and Lisa could understand only one show, The Red Skelton Show, because Skelton did a lot of mime when he performed. So they loved to sit down Sunday night at eight o’clock and watch Red Skelton. Perry and I, of course, wanted to watch GM Presents on Sunday night at eight o’clock, to see, in Perry’s words, who would be playing the roles that we were born to play. But we always had to acquiesce to Burt and Lisa. In the months to come we had a whole coterie of people – Al Waxman and Martin Lavut and Larry Zolf and that whole Yorkville gang – who would gather in the basement of the dental fraternity to watch black-and-white TV dramas on CBC.
I remember playing an extra in “Dr. Ocularis” with Douglas Rain and Lois Nettleton. Dougie and Lois had lines, of course, but I had the best coat. Humphrey Bogart, right out of Casablanca. I walked out on the deck of the ship, paused for a moment with the sound of the sea behind me, and then walked out of frame again.
Perry, of course, couldn’t resist such a tantalizing cue. “For a moment there,” he said, eyes twinkling, “I thought you were going to speak!”
Another time we were watching The Grapes of Wrath with Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell and I saw a familiar shadow on the wall. “Here comes O. Z. Whitehead,” I said. Sure enough, Whitehead, a
supporting actor who received seventh-place billing in the movie, suddenly sauntered onscreen.
“How do you do that!” Perry cried, as if I had just done my best party trick ever. “What’s your secret?”
“Growing up in Grand Falls,” I said.
One night it was a television production of Death of a Salesman, and Perry had auditioned for the part of Bernard, the part that he had played in Winnipeg for John Hirsch. He thought getting it would be a cinch, too, since he had just come off a magnificent stage engagement of the very same play. But the part went to Sean Sullivan instead, so we were desperate to see the show. Perry and I decided that we would have to get Burt and Lisa to abstain from watching Red Skelton, if only on this one occasion. I went downstairs, and I pretended that I had a cousin in the production, and Burt and Lisa were quite intrigued, and stayed to watch it with us.
To this day Perry still claims that it was me who got him out of acting. As we watched Salesman Sean Sullivan came on, in the part Perry insisted he was born to play, and Perry evaluated his performance. And after the telecast he turned to me and said, “You know, Gordon, he’s better than I would have been.”
I nodded in agreement. “Perry,” I said, “get out of the business now!”
At least, that’s what I said according to Perry. If I’d known how successful he would become as a producer and director, not to mention his phenomenal success in bringing Air Farce, Canada’s most beloved comedy troupe, to television, I would have told him sooner. For even then he was enchanted with the whole behind-the-scenes thing, hanging out in control rooms and taking television courses at Ryerson, a technological institute that would decades later become Ryerson University.
Besides, he didn’t have the ego to be an actor. Perry would come home from an audition, or even just from wandering the halls of the CBC, and he would take all his clothes off and go to bed. It didn’t matter what time of day it was. As far as he was concerned, his day’s work was done.
More to the point, Perry had read a book on producing and thought he should explore his options backstage rather than in front of the camera. “I only get cast as Jews or Indians,” he noted wryly, “and I don’t see a big future in that.”
saying yes
MY VERY FIRST TV ROLE IN TORONTO, AND HERE I AM, lying on the ground under a tarp, desperately hoping no one will discover me. Which feels extremely counterproductive, considering I came back to Toronto with the sole purpose of being discovered. But since I’m playing a stowaway on a ship, discretion is not only called for, it is demanded.
“Do the stars have to sit on me?” I whine to the first assistant director.
“The stars aren’t supposed to know you’re there,” the A.D. replies. “That’s the whole point. We don’t want them to know you’re there, not until the end of the show. So please stop wiggling under the tarp!”
Afterwards I rush home to the frat house, where Perry and the others have just watched the live telecast in the freezing basement.
“How was I?” I ask.
“Really good!” says Perry, without a moment’s hesitation.
“I was only on for a second.”
“I know,” he says. “But that second was like a minute. You were that convincing.”
“I shoulda had the lead,” I sigh.
Oh well.
I was playing many small TV parts – and yes, there are small parts, Virginia, not just small actors – and getting to do more radio, sometimes for the legendary Andrew Allen. Andrew always referred to his actors as Mister and Miss, something that added a special note of dignity to your craft. The minute you stepped inside Studio G at the CBC building on Jarvis Street to make your contribution to the revered medium of radio drama, you felt you had somehow reached a special level in your normally unstable status as a performing artist.
Lots of TV series were shooting in town. John Hart was the star of Last of the Mohicans. Lon Chaney Jr. played Chingachcook and he got through it with the worst wig you ever saw in your life, with braids on it that had things crawling in ’em, and a bottle of Black Velvet a day. But I was still awestruck, because his was one of the names I had learned in my boyhood, when I was always the last one to leave the matinee. Barry Nelson was doing a series called Hudson’s Bay. Perry acted in one episode and still has a snapshot of himself with Barry. That’s what we wanted in those days – photographs! Photos to show that we were part of their story, and they were part of ours. And then there was Tugboat Annie, and Cannonball, and you were watching the medium grow up around you, taking baby steps.
I was still saying Yes to everything. Can you ride a horse?” “Yes!” “Can you drive a car?” “Yes!”
In 1960 I got back in uniform again to play one of the grunts in a CBC war drama called Rehearsal for Invasion. Director Ron Weyman had cast an Ottawa actor named Lawrence Z. Dane in the lead, and we were all suitably impressed. No less a celestial personage than Paul Almond himself had brought Dane in from Ottawa to do his TV drama Shadow of a Pale Horse. In one scene in our TV drama Larry had to use a rope to scale a wall. So they threw a rope over the wall and he started to climb – and then the magic of television took over. Ron Weyman cut to the top of the wall, at which point they put up a ladder which you couldn’t see on camera, and Larry promptly scrambled up the ladder to go over the top of the wall. For some reason I found this hysterically funny, and for some reason Lawrence Z. Dane was amused by my inappropriate and unprofessional reaction, and a great friendship was born.
Although we weren’t aware of it at the time, Larry and I had a lot in common. We had different yet similar upbringings. He was one of six children in a Lebanese family up in Ottawa, always conscious of perception, always concerned about what other people might think. We could both remember getting kicked under the table when someone offered us a second piece of pie, in case we’d forgotten that we were supposed to say No Thank You. Growing up in close-knit communities, both of us were always conscious of perception. What else was there?
Larry had caught the showbiz bug even earlier than I had. He was on stage when he was just a kid, competing in a variety show at the Elmdale Theatre in Ottawa, doing his stellar impression of Al Jolson. (He lost to a French-Canadian kid who did his stellar impression of Al Jolson with a French accent. Go figure.)
Before we met, Larry had worked on the R.C.M.P. series shooting in Ottawa. The three leads were Gilles Pelletier, Don Francks, and an American actor named John Perkins. Larry was hired to be John Perkins’ stand-in double and consequently got to spend a lot of time on set, with all sorts of guest stars like Jack Creley, John Drainie, Frances Hyland, and Toby Robins, and got to work with Paul Almond, who was hired by the producer, Budge Crawley, to direct some of the thirty-nine episodes. And it was Paul Almond, of course, who had brought Larry to Toronto, so he could roam the halls of CBC like the rest of us, trolling for the next job.
I was dating a bit and flirting a lot. So was the Very Tall, Dark, and Ruggedly Handsome Lawrence Z. Dane. Larry and I both liked women, but Larry liked beauty. He was immediately drawn to the most beautiful girl in the room. And it didn’t matter if she didn’t have very much to say. He wasn’t in it for the conversation.
I decided to go the other route. I was sure no one was going to see me as a matinee idol, so I would pick out the lonely girls and talk to them. Chatting with lovely ladies of all kinds was wonderful, and exciting, and at times romantic. And crucial to my growing up. In those days people were not as open to friendships between men and women, but friendship was very important to me. And I was as good at chatting as I was at catting.
Meanwhile, I was working not only on sound stages but on real stages, too, at the New Play Society, shepherded by Dora Mavor Moore. The first Canadian actor to perform at the Old Vic in London, the indomitable Dora had launched her ambitious theatre troupe right after the war, in 1946. Dora’s modest but boldly creative company would end up supplying more than half the onstage talent when her friend Tyrone Guthrie helped Tom Patterson fo
und the Stratford Festival in 1953. I loved working with her, and her company of players.
On one occasion the esteemed Globe and Mail theatre critic Herbert Whittaker, a stage veteran himself, was directing a new production of André Obrey’s Noah, inspired by a great British production he’d seen in his youth, with John Gielgud playing Noah and Alec Guinness playing the Wolf. In our production Hugh Webster was playing Noah, and as you can imagine a lot of the actors in the production were wearing animal costumes. At one rehearsal Hugh suggested that he should make his entrance holding the hand of one of the monkeys.
“No, Hugh, you won’t be doing that,” said Herbie.
“But Herbie,” Hugh began, “I think it would be charming –”
“This is Noah, Hugh,” said Herbie flatly. “This is not a Tarzan movie!”
As any Bible student worth his salt can tell you, Noah had three sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth. I was cast as the middle son, but the part was not nearly flamboyant enough for my taste.
“When I make my entrance,” I proposed, “how about I come out and take my shirt off?”
“No, Gordon,” said Herbie.
Consequently I had to come up with other ways to detour the spotlight from my stage brothers Shem and Japheth onto me, and I did manage to upstage them both on more than one occasion.
My dedication to scene-stealing was not lost on Herbie. “Gordon,” he said, “your performance continues to prove to me that I was right to give you the part of Ham.”
Okay, maybe I overdid it a little. But it must have worked, because soon Dora Mavor Moore herself tapped me to play Orpheus in her remount of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Especially after Dora took me aside and whispered, “Gordon, please don’t tell anyone, but I’m giving you a dollar more than anyone else.” Heady days indeed.
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