“Standards are my great love,” I lied. “But since we’re going to have the Junior Forest Ranger kids in the car from time to time, better make it an automatic. Safety first,” I added thoughtfully. “Safety first.”
The second assistant director took the car down to a dip in the road, not visible to the fort, where I would start my run. The third A.D. stood by, out of camera range, ready to give me my cue. The director himself, the ever-prescient George McCowan, instructed his first A.D., Peter Carter, to move the rest of the crew inside the fort.
“Yes,” said George, nodding sagely. “I think we should go inside now.” Because he had asked me if I could drive a car, and of course I had said Yes. And George could tell when an actor, whether he was on stage or off, wasn’t telling the truth.
I got my cue, put ’er in Drive, hit the gas pedal, and proceeded to careen through the dust storm I was creating, coming to a smart halt only inches away from the fort.
“Cut!” yelled George. “And print!”
I slid effortlessly out of the driver’s seat, strolled over to my trailer, and threw up behind it, causing the youngest member of the Forest Rangers to announce, “Sergeant Scott just puked!”
All in a day’s play.
When I wasn’t on set I devoted a fair amount of time to stalking one of the country’s hottest directors. During Paul Almond’s directorial reign on the Canadian film scene, it would always be a badge of special merit for an actor to have worked in an Almond production. When one was first appearing on the scene, and haunting the director-producer floors of the CBC, one soon discovered some offices stood out as most impenetrable – Paul’s being one of them.
The first trick was to catch Paul en route from elevator to office door. Birdlike, he was. Definitely in flight. This is not to say I was dismissed by him or by his angel girl Friday who, if I’m not mistaken, bore the name Olwyn Millington, but rather that he was, for one thing, taller and loftier than I, and clearly on his way to or from something far more elevated than the points on the landscape I frequented, I, fresh off the Rock, unable to tell the difference between an iambic pentameter and a fish cake, and now one of the Toronto acting rabble, clattering up his pathway, always close enough to smell the warm odour of a script fresh off the mimeograph machine.
I was about to say I had never had the pleasure of being under his august guidance in one of his productions, but that would not be entirely true. He and I shared wasp bites on an episode of The Forest Rangers – he as director, and me as the questionable Mountie, Sergeant Scott.
When I wasn’t on one set or another, I was working on stage. The prolific playwright Bernard Slade, a personal friend, was constantly honing his craft, and constantly coming up with wonderfully original ideas. By the end of the decade his resumé would be awash in hit TV series – The Flying Nun, Bridget Loves Bernie, The Partridge Family – and by the end of the seventies he would be a bona fide Broadway baby, breaking box office records with Same Time Next Year, Tribute, and Romantic Comedy. But Bernie was brilliant even back then, so it didn’t take much persuading to get me back on stage in Winnipeg to do his new play, A Very Close Family, with Bud Knapp and John Vernon for the MTC’s 1962–1963 season. I played the family’s youngest son, who happened to be gay. And even though the play was still a bit rough around the edges, CBC bought the rights to it and televised it the following season in the network’s most prestigious series, Festival. It proved to be a career highlight for me, because Charm was in it too – one of the few times we would work together onscreen. The cast included Tom Bosley, who would one day become famous as Howard Cunningham, Ron Howard’s father on Happy Days, and Jill Foster, a natural comedic talent who never seemed to be “acting” and who by now had become Mrs. Bernard Slade. An unexpected bonus, particularly thrilling to me, was the casting of Melvyn Douglas as my father. Granted, he was considerably smaller than when I had last seen him, looming large up on the screen at the Nickel in Grand Falls. But for me this was a close encounter of the best kind. I was sharing the screen with the man who had made Garbo laugh. Even Flossie Cooper Pinsent knew who Melvyn Douglas was, and when the neighbours asked her which role I was playing, my mother replied, “The son who doesn’t like girls.”
I was doing The Forest Rangers when I was asked to meet with a couple of gentlemen at a favourite CBC watering hole, the Four Seasons Motel on Jarvis Street. One was Julius Rascheff, a cinematographer, who was also the producer and one of the writers for a movie they wanted to make in Greece. The other was the director, a man named Cedric d’Ailly. This was all very new to me, meeting people who made independent films. They wanted me for the lead, and I thought, Oh, so this is how it works. They see you on TV, and they like you for something they are planning, and you get to try something new.
At the time it seemed to be too good a thing to turn down. And Charm felt the same way about it, even though it meant we’d have to be away from each other for a while. Rascheff and d’Ailly allowed that it was an independent film, not a big studio movie, and they didn’t have much money. They offered me the princely fee of one thousand dollars. And the trip, of course. And they said it would be fun, because they had a lot of connections over there.
I said Yes.
So I flew to Greece, and we were housed in a private home in Athens, down the road from the summer palace of the young prince Constantine, who would ascend to the throne the following year. It was a very nice spot, but it was nothing grand. A meagre breakfast, a meagre lunch. They provided the meals, but they weren’t great, and it wasn’t like I was getting paid all this money so I could go out and buy better meals. I never even made it up the hill to the Hilton. We filmed first in Athens, then shot more stuff in Piraeus with all the boats. We filmed mostly in Hydra. The whole shoot was a horrible experience, mainly because there were just not enough funds. A few years earlier Melina Mercouri had made Never on Sunday, and that tune was still playing everywhere we went. And the place was alight with Greek character and fury and dancing and singing, and because it got so hot so early in the day we had to get up at 4 a.m. to start shooting. Then we’d have to come back and try to sleep in the afternoon.
Trouble was, I couldn’t. I simply could not fall asleep. I was so sleep deprived that I actually thought, I’m not going to make it through this. I could have had a better time over there if I’d just been a young bachelor, but I wasn’t, and my thoughts were with Charm, who was in Toronto. I wasn’t a kid actor. I wanted to make sure that I did the job that I had set out to do; I wasn’t there to party. And the partying went on and on and on, and I didn’t want to become part of that. But it was wicked. I had at least five nights in a row with no sleep. And I hated cats at that time, and Greece was full of them, clawing at your ankles to get food while you were sitting at an outdoor café, trying to have dinner, or even just trying to relax. Charm had a cat she loved, named Clea, after one of the novels in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Clea was not my greatest fan, nor I hers, and here I was, sleepless in the Hellenic Republic, surrounded by mewling cats. I had never taken a sleeping pill, but I was ready to. But the production doctor hadn’t arrived yet.
By the end of the shoot, I hated everything about Greece. One night I was sitting in a taverna with a group of Americans, including a leathery old lady who was wearing a lot of diamonds, a lot of bling. She was from New York, and apparently wintered every year in Greece. And for some reason the main topic at the table was astrological signs.
“What sign are you?” she asked me.
I answered her with a stoney stare.
“What day were you born?” she persisted.
“July 12,” I said, hoping that would satisfy her curiosity.
“Oh, Cancer,” she said. “My husband and all my boyfriends were Cancers.”
“I can’t help that,” I said wearily, and I stood up and left the taverna. I think that if I had been older, or disappointed in life, I would have considered committing suicide, because it was that bad. I had lost the
language of sleep. I just couldn’t do it. It was totally impossible for me to nod off.
I heard footsteps behind me. The woman from New York had followed me. She said she had something at home that would help me sleep. She rented an apartment close to the place where Leonard Cohen used to stay every year. And when we got there she poured me a glass of local Greek wine that made retsina taste like Pouilly-Fuissé.
She also had three cats. One of them had only three legs. Another had only one eye, which was constantly draining.
“I really have to go,” I announced. “I’ve really got to try to get some sleep.” And after I was out the door I took my boots off, because it was late and I didn’t want to disturb anybody, and walked through all the donkey shit back down to the port where I was staying. I’m sure I was really something to see. And when I got home there was a whole mess of cats in my bed, and I had to heave them all out onto the roof.
The next morning, when I was having coffee down at the port, the woman from New York came by again, and after she left I asked someone who she was.
“That lady,” they said, “is the woman who wrote ‘Que Sera, Sera,’ and she’s been living on royalties ever since.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I was pretty sure Jay Livingston and Ray Evans had written “Que Sera, Sera.” But after five nights without sleep, what did I know?
Not sleeping is not good. It was hideous. And I’m sure they thought I was just a giant pain in the ass. They couldn’t understand why the Canadian guy kept complaining about Greece. But it wasn’t Greece that I was complaining about. Years later I went to a psychologist who hypnotized me. And he said, “Don’t think of that place as being awful. Think of it as being a treatment room.”
The movie was called Lydia. I was playing an American who was dying of a fatal disease, and most of the time I felt like I was. I was also advised that the leading lady was a personal friend of the producers, but they couldn’t have been all that friendly, because we weren’t even halfway through the film when they tried to replace her. When they couldn’t do that, they decided to hire another actress to re-voice her part. So after we finished in Greece we had to go to Rome, to Cinecitta, to do that. It was just fucking endless. And all I wanted to do, of course, was go home. And go to sleep. Mostly in that order.
On the plane back to Toronto, as I dozed on and off, I thought of some of the jobs, both real and imagined, I had turned down so I could be in a movie, just like all my black-and-white heroes who sparkled on the big silver screen at the Nickel. Thanks to my sleepless nights in the Aegean, the glamorous world of film-making had never seemed less appealing, and I fell into bed the moment I got home.
“You’ve had a terrible time,” Charm agreed. “Just awful. But the next time will be better. And the time after that will be better still. You’ll see.”
And then her cat jumped up on the bed.
As it turned out I went right into what turned into another movie.
George McCowan cast me as a pre-Columbo, raincoat-clad detective named Grainger, five years ahead of Peter Falk, in a two-part episode of Maxine Samuels’ weekly dramatic series Seaway. Stephen Young and Austin Willis were the leads, and the cast for this special two-parter included, among others, Ivor Barry, Sean Sullivan, Murray Westgate, visiting U.S. glamour girl Lynda Day George, and Ms. Charmion King as Anna Amorest.
It was all a bit incestuous, because Maxine Samuels’ partner and co-producer was Michael Sadlier, Kate Reid’s first husband. So he had lots in common with Seaway star Austin Willis, who was also an ex-husband of Kate’s and the father of her two children. Ironically, the only one who wasn’t on the set glaring at someone was Kate; I think she was in Hollywood with Natalie Wood, Charles Bronson, and Robert Redford, shooting the screen version of Tennessee Williams’ This Property Is Condemned, after her new fan “Tom” (a.k.a. playwright Williams) had recommended her to sophomore director Sydney Pollack.
In any case, the episode was called “Don’t Forget to Wipe the Blood Off,” and the two parts were later edited together and released, not once, but twice, as a ninety-minute theatrical film, first as Affair With a Killer, then as Don’t Forget to Wipe the Blood Off.
(I can’t honestly remember if we even knew that we were going to be seen on the big screen too. I doubt it. I’m sure we would have asked for more money!)
It was good to be back home again, especially when the phone rang. Producers were pitching projects to be part of a CBC Television summer series called The Serial, which was designed to showcase new dramas. Would I like to play a rookie MP in one of them?
I said Yes. And my life ever so quietly shifted on its axis.
The show – actually a series of six half-hour shows – was called Mr. Member of Parliament, and I played a naive young MP who arrives in Ottawa and quickly learns that he is a very small fish in a very big pond. One great thing about the character, whose name was Quentin Durgens, was that although he was full of piss and vinegar, he wasn’t full of himself. So as he learned, we learned. Which we all thought was a pretty good premise.
What we didn’t realize right away was how many Canadians would be interested in sharing that learning experience with him. Happily for me, the executives at CBC quickly saw the show’s potential – their vision no doubt assisted by dynamic Mr. MP producer-director David Gardner – and ordered a winter series to complement their first hour-long drama, Wojeck, which featured John Vernon as a crusading crime-fighting coroner who bore more than a passing resemblance to a real-life headline-maker, Toronto coroner Morton Shulman. Network brass ordered only eight episodes of our new series, but we would become CBC’s second hour-long drama, and we would also return with a new name: Quentin Durgens, MP.
Because the priority mandate of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was to bring Canadian stories to Canadians “from coast to coast to coast,” most TV directors and writers had cut their teeth on news reporting and documentaries. These talents were fully exploited in our story lines, which more closely resembled reality than fiction. Freshman MP Durgens waded recklessly into such thorny Page One issues as pornography, violence in minor-league hockey, gender discrimination, and religious tolerance, all within the context of his struggling to learn the inner workings of power and how the backroom deals were made. It was a groundbreaking show, and we knew it. It was the first time anyone in Canada had seen their own government portrayed on a weekly drama series. The series was giving Canadian viewers an inside look at their own politicians, and even though the politicians were fictional, it was very important storytelling, and most of the time we had the freedom to do it the way we wanted to. Writing from the Parliamentary press gallery, Peter C. Newman noted that on Tuesday night CBC telecast new episodes of Quentin Durgens, “and on Wednesday morning Ottawa MPs go to work with an extra spring in their step.”
Quentin Durgens was also giving me the kind of public profile that I had secretly dreamed of. My pal Perry Rosemond had already directed profiles of Oscar Peterson, Arthur Hailey, and Donald Sutherland for CBC’s popular Telescope series, and persuaded series creator Fletcher Markle that he should do one on me. So off we went to Newfoundland, to shoot in Grand Falls. We had a lot of fun doing it, even though the weather was, as usual, predictably unpredictable. We took Perry to meet all the relatives, and to all our favourite haunts, and he somehow learned to keep screech down. At one point the whole family came over to my brother Harry’s place, and I chided Perry because he couldn’t remember whom he met minutes after he met them.
“There’s a good reason for that,” he assured me. “When your family gets together, we are talking about a crowd which is roughly the size of the population of New Hampshire.”
We were shooting a sequence on the cliffs behind our house when it started to rain. Perry and the film crew loved it, because in daylight rain diffuses the light and looks great on camera. Meanwhile, I was getting wet. “Here,” Perry said, and against his better judgment handed me his good suede jacket to wear. Clearly, he
really wanted that shot.
My brother Harry watched the whole scene – take one, take two, take three, and me standing in the rain, in a good suede jacket – and just shook his head.
“So, Harry,” said Perry, “what will Grand Falls think of your kid brother now?”
“Well,” said Harry, “they won’t think he’s learned much on the mainland, coming out on a day like this!”
I spent three years in Parliament as Quentin Durgens, MP. It was the kind of role, and the kind of reaction, that made me think I might have a future in this business after all. We didn’t get huge numbers, but the show became very well known very quickly. I went on the road to promote the second season. Alberta was going through a dry wheat problem at the time, and one day when I was signing autographs in Calgary, an old farmer came up to me and asked if I could help him.
“Because I saw what you did for the Indians last week,” he said, “and the teachers the week before. I was hoping you might be able to do something for us.”
He thought I was a real MP.
“Could you come out and look at it for me?” he asked. And I had to say, “No, I’m afraid I can’t.” But it broke my heart to say so.
Another lesson in the power of television.
Quentin Durgens, MP ran only three seasons, but its impact was undeniable. One night Perry threw a going-away party for himself, because he was leaving to try his luck in L.A., and I guess the theme was White, because I remember I was all decked out in white – white sweater, white pants, white shoes – I was even driving a white car! I also remember overindulging in a number of white bourbons. I left the party early – well, early in the morning – and was on my way home when I was pulled over by the police. Minutes later, there I was, an inebriated vision in white, quite unsuccessfully attempting to walk a straight line.
A senior officer sidled up to me, clearly disgusted.
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