Next

by Gordon Pinsent

  I had sent my novel to McGraw-Hill in Toronto, who agreed to publish it. Two years earlier, when I had needed to generate work for myself, I’d sat down and wrote The Rowdyman. Now I needed to get moving again. Now I needed to start writing again. And finally it came down to where I wanted to work – and Hollywood wasn’t it.

  My novel was published. It was called John and the Missus, and after it came out, I read it again and shook my head.

  “What’s wrong now?” asked Charm, with the patience of a saint.

  “I think I was mistaken. I think it will work better as a play,” I replied somewhat tentatively.

  “Then write it as a play,” she said with a shrug.

  We sold the house in the Hollywood Hills to Perry, who inherited what absolutely everyone, including Marlon Brando, said was the best view of the San Fernando Valley they’d ever seen. Perry was happy, and so were we.

  We had been there almost six years.

  We packed our bags and headed home.

  * George Peppard died of lung cancer in May 1994.

  * Buzz Kulik had just come off a monster TV movie hit, Brian’s Song with James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, and would soon direct Susan Clark in Babe: The Babe Didrikson Zaharias Story.

  comeback

  RETURNING TO TORONTO I COULDN’T WAIT TO TELL every producer, director, and casting agent I knew (or had even heard of) that I was back in town and raring to go.

  One of the first jobs I landed was hosting a weekly drama series, The Play’s the Thing, on CBC Television. Next came a National Film Board movie shoot in Montreal. In The Heatwave Lasted Four Days, I played a TV news cameraman who accidentally photographs an escaped convict, played by Larry. It was fun to do – imagine, having fun making a movie. I’d almost forgotten it was possible – and Alexandra Stewart and Domini Blythe played the brainy female eye candy, and gorgeous eye candy they were. Much to Larry’s chagrin, Alexandra Stewart was preoccupied, and Domini Blythe was seriously involved with another actor, the charismatic Richard Monette. “Two beautiful girls, and neither one of them on the market,” Larry sighed. “What a bummer!”

  In Hollywood George Peppard was about to shoot Newman’s Law, a movie about a cop who uncovers an international drug ring involving some high-ranking police officers. My phone rang again, and I added one more Hollywood film credit to my bio. And best of all, when I was wrapped I got to come home to Toronto and work on a musical version of The Rowdyman for the Charlottetown Festival, which was hoping to come up with another monster hit besides Anne of Green Gables. Could a musical Rowdyman be the answer? We’d soon see.

  Herb Roland was producing a weekly soap opera for CBC called House of Pride and asked Charm to play Mary Kirby, one of the key recurring characters. Bud Knapp and Cec Linder were already cast as Pride family scions, and now that Leah was safely enrolled in the Bishop Strachan School, a fairly rigorous private school for girls in Toronto – the same one her mother had attended – Charm felt free to do it.

  “I wonder if Cec will wear his suit,” Charm mused. Cec Linder had been given the stylish suit he’d worn in Goldfinger and had cleverly recycled it, donning it for at least a dozen onscreen performances since then. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I won’t be wearing mine!”

  I was about to play my first priest, in a TV movie called Only God Knows. Paul Hecht was the rabbi, and John Beck was the minister, and we were stealing from the Mafia to keep a young people’s home going. Mia Farrow’s sister Tisa was in it too. And Larry, who also produced it. At the time it seemed like a natural for a TV series spin off, but it didn’t happen. Still, it gave me a taste for playing a man of the cloth, one that I would tuck away and use thirty years later as Father Fitzpatrick in Saint Ralph.

  After Only God Knows I was offered a great part, playing Phillip Stockton in Horse Latitudes. Of course I said Yes. Stockton was an egocentric yachtsman determined to sail in a non-stop race around the world who realized he couldn’t win and decided to fake the race. But between his own feelings of guilt and his fear of getting caught, he ended up hallucinating himself into his own private hell. So it was a great part, but Horse Latitudes was hard to make, because I had also taken over from Brian Bedford at Stratford in a show called Trumpets and Drums. So I was doing that at night and shooting Horse Latitudes on Lake Ontario in the morning, which was very tricky in a trimaran. A trimaran is easier to work on if the water is rough, because it can be quite unstable in smooth water. But we got it done, and it was a fascinating study of a man so desperate to be noticed that he eventually sailed himself into madness and suicide. At one point, when I saw the quality of work that the young director Peter Rowe was getting, I asked him to consider shooting an additional fifteen or twenty minutes so it could qualify as a feature film. But it never happened.

  The musical version of The Rowdyman opened at Charlottetown. I had written the book and the lyrics; musical wunderkind Cliff Jones had taken over composing chores from Charlottetown contributor David Warrack. It was all very pleasant but decidedly lightweight, and I realized quite quickly that I should have devoted far more time to it than I did. I had worked diligently on it, but at a time when I clearly had too much on my plate, none of which I was prepared to give up. The end result was a lacklustre event for both the Charlottetown Festival and me. Another lesson learned the hard way. Maybe one day I would be able to learn things the easy way, whatever that was. But that day was probably still a long way off.

  Donnelly Rhodes, one of our original Winnipeg gang at the MTC, was doing a weekly series with Jonathan Welsh called Sidestreet, so I was happy to do a guest shot. Donnelly and I also ended up in the same movie, a thing called Drága kisfiam. In English it was called His Mother, and it was based on a New Yorker short story by Mavis Gallant, and it was my first “Euro-pudding.” That’s what they called them, back in the day – co-productions with international co-producers who could access tax benefits and local production funds. Drága kisfiam was a Canadian-Hungarian co-production, a movie for television with most of the funds coming out of Hungary. Donnelly shot all his scenes in Canada; I shot all my scenes in Budapest. I played a Hungarian, and Iréna Mayeska played my Canadian wife. Hungary was still state-run, and we were paid in their currency, forints, of which there seemed to be an endless supply. Only catch was, they had to be spent before leaving the country. Which was a pretty big catch. Oh well. Another day, another forint.

  I loved acting, and it was still my first priority, but by now writing was a passion for me, superseding sketching and painting and almost any other creative endeavour. I decided to write a Christmas special, set at the turn of the nineteenth century, called A Gift to Last. The story was told by Clement Sturgess, an elderly man who looked back on his childhood Christmases with especially fond memories of the family hero, his uncle, the colourful and irresponsible Sergeant Edgar Sturgess of the Royal Canadian Regiment. CBC liked it and liked the idea of me playing Edgar. I had actually fashioned it for Douglas Campbell, but Herb Roland, our producer, insisted.

  Before we started shooting A Gift to Last I decided to give my novel one more shot, this time as a two-act stage play. John and the Missus had its world premiere at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax and was warmly (read, kindly) received. I’d written great parts for all the actors, of course, including and especially me. For me that’s what it was all about. But it was clear to me that as a play John and the Missus still needed work.

  Back in Toronto I proposed a bit of offbeat casting for A Gift to Last. I liked the idea of enlisting Melvyn Douglas, whom I’d worked with when I first came to Toronto, to play the family patriarch Clement Sturgess. My old ally, producer Herb Roland, helped make it happen, and Douglas showed up for work like a pro. Like the rest of us, he was now ten years older, but still a wonderful actor, and I loved working with him again. But the unsung heroes of the show were the people behind the scenes, literally. I loved the crews, the craftsmen of the CBC – they were proud of their work, and they should have been. They did won
derful work. They were remarkable. And they were so attuned to the material, which made them even more terrific.

  When December rolled around, A Gift to Last stood out from all the other Christmas specials. It was a big hit – so big that CBC asked me to spin it off into a weekly dramatic series.

  I said Yes.

  I started working on the scripts with Peter Wildeblood, who had come over from Upstairs, Downstairs as head editor and ended up writing a couple of episodes. Peter was a man whose colourful past made him an astute observer of human behaviour,* and in the next twenty-one episodes we would trace the family’s history (and in doing so, our own) in small-town southern Ontario from 1899 to 1905.

  Meanwhile, it soon became apparent that some viewers saw Edgar, the character I played, as the father figure they’d always longed for. One of them, watching from the other side of the country, was my daughter Beverly. Beverly was particularly smitten with my handlebar moustache. My first wife, Irene, had remarried, and Beverly and my son, Barry, were living in Vancouver with their mother and their stepfather. But I didn’t know that then.

  I was writing too, but between drafts of episodes I managed to sneak in a few guest spots on Bruno Gerussi’s popular series The Beachcombers and even did a turn in Allan King’s screen version of W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind. It was Allan’s first feature film, and Charm did a bit in it too. I played Gerald O’Connal, Charm played Mrs. Abercrombie, and we were part of a strong ensemble cast, including Patricia Hamilton, Chapelle Jaffe, Helen Shaver, Cedric Smith, Gerard Parkes, and José Ferrer.

  Mitchell was a wildly eccentric guy. When he came to dinner he brought his own spittoon. He was always chewing and spitting and chewing and spitting. He was, without a doubt, memorable. I was hosting the ACTRA Awards when the picture was nominated, and Bill Mitchell was in the audience, of course, and I said, “Let’s go out behind the shed and play W. O. Mitchell.” I wish I could tell you that he had roared with laughter, but he was not amused.

  Who Has Seen the Wind was a seminal book and in some ways a seminal film, but that title was too much fun to resist. Because Mitchell’s work was still such a part of our zeitgeist, Second City got a lot of attention ten years later when they called one of their shows Bob Has Seen the Wind.

  The Christmas special A Gift to Last had inspired viewers to write letters, and a lot of fan mail was coming in. CBC would send the letters to us, so Charm and I could go through them. One said something like, My mother said I could look you up one day. I passed it over to Charm. I didn’t think anything of it.

  Charm was far more astute. “Guess what?” she said, handing back the letter I’d already read. “That’s your daughter.”

  My mother said that when I was old enough I could write to you and perhaps meet you. I am twenty-seven now. I have thought of you so often and can’t wait for the opportunity for us to get together. If this is impossible, please tell me, and I won’t pursue it further. If nothing happens, I will at least be satisfied I have been in touch and opened the door a little at least in our getting to know each other again.

  I answered the letter, and a few months later Beverly knocked on my door – I was staying in a hotel in Vancouver – and there was this girl with this terrific face, this sweetness, whom I hadn’t seen in eighteen years. A new beginning. A second chance. A silent vow to do better by her this time.

  Much as you’d expect, Charm and I were concerned about Leah’s reaction to finding out she had a sister. We needn’t have worried. When she was little Leah used to call herself “a lonely child,” and Charm would gently correct her.

  “No, Leah,” she would tell her, “you’re an only child.”

  “No, Mom, I’m a lonely child,” Leah would insist, because she had always wanted brothers and sisters. And suddenly, at long last, she had one.

  The first season of A Gift to Last was warmly received by viewers even when we killed off Harrison Sturgess, played by Alan Scarfe, in the first episode. His survivors included his wife Clara, played by Janet Amos, their children Clement and Jane, played by Mark Polley and Kate Parr, his mother Lizzy, portrayed by Ruth Springford, and his brothers, the meek and conservative James, played by Gerard Parkes, and the rowdy, high-spirited Edgar, played with unabashed enthusiasm, relish, and delight by yours truly. The central episode of the series, which won an ACTRA award as Best Television Program of the year, was the one in which Edgar finally married Sheila, the Sturgesses’ maid, who was wonderfully well played by Dixie Seatle.

  By the final season, the now-married Edgar was serving in the militia, and Clara, suffering ill health, succumbed to consumption. Why did poor Clara have to die of consumption? So Janet Amos could be written out of the script for eight episodes while she toured the U.K. with Theatre Passe Muraille. We were, all of us, first and foremost creatures of the theatre. While I was toiling on set on A Gift to Last, Charm was originating the role of the indomitable actress Jessica Logan in David French’s madcap comedy Jitters, first onstage in Toronto at the Tarragon Theatre, and then in New Haven at the Long Wharf. She was spectacularly good in it, and she knew it. And I was itching to get back on stage again.

  On hiatus from shooting A Gift to Last, I slipped back into cleric’s garb again, doing a bit in a CBC Newfoundland project called Up at Ours. I call it a Newfoundland project because that’s what it was – a project designed to stimulate and showcase some of the considerable talents on the Rock. A twelve-episode dramedy series about the disparate residents of a Newfoundland boarding house, it was produced in St. John’s and directed by Newfoundlanders, with scripts from such noted Atlantic writers as Walter Learning, Michael Cook, Alden Nowlan, and me. Mary Walsh played the owner of the boarding house, Ray Guy played her long-standing lodger, Janis Spence played the lady who lived next door, and Kevin Noble played a myopic taxi driver. In my episode I played a parish priest who found his faith tested, then reconfirmed, by his encounter with two young women.

  The second and final season of A Gift to Last was a bit of a stumbling block for everyone but me. In addition to its high ratings at home, the series had been sold by the CBC to television stations in the States and to networks in Belgium, Australia, Ireland, and South Africa. In South Africa we were more popular than Dynasty.

  (Sorry, I had to say that!)

  (Sorry for saying sorry.)

  Little did I know that the pilot Christmas episode of the series would soon be adapted for the stage by Walter Learning and Alden Nowlan. As it turned out, A Gift to Last: The Musical was destined to become a perennial Canadian Christmas favourite in regional theatres across the country, including the Gryphon Theatre in Barrie, the Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon, the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Thirty years later the show would still be playing to Christmas audiences – but all that was yet to happen. In my present-tense meanwhile, it had taken two seasons to tell the story I wanted to tell, and to get the series established. And then the story was told, and as far as I was concerned, it was time to end it.

  I may have been quite popular with the viewers, but I wasn’t very popular with some actors, especially when they realized I had pulled the plug on the series. I remember going to a party at Herb Roland’s house and Dawn Greenhalgh was there, and she said, almost spitting out the words, “Gordon! What have you done?” And she wasn’t even in the series. But people like Ruth Springford, and a lot of the actors I had cast, were very unhappy about the decision to end the series, and Peter Wildeblood was just as shocked as the others.

  “Gordon, it’s a hit show!” he protested. “We must continue! That’s what you do with a hit show!” But I had so many other things I wanted to explore and needed to try. Our final episode of A Gift to Last was telecast on a Sunday night in December 1979, and a few days later I looked up from my typewriter at the calendar and the seventies were over.

  Did I mind? Not one little bit.

  Looking back now, I think I was just getting warmed up.

  * Peter W
ildeblood was a British-Canadian journalist, novelist, playwright, and gay rights activist before that term was coined. He was one of the first men in the U.K. to publicly declare his homosexuality and was imprisoned for it. In 1955 he published Against the Law, a significant account that detailed his experiences, brought to light the appalling conditions in British prisons, and campaigned for prison reform and acceptance of homosexuals in society.

  let us now praise famous men

  WHEN YOU KICK-START YOUR SCREEN CAREER BY playing fictionalized versions of Canadian MPs and American presidents, or characters who at first only exist in the minds of novelists and screenwriters, playing real-life, flawed, flesh-and-blood civilians like bogus sailor Phillip Stockton is an irresistible challenge to an actor. Over the years, between guest appearances on almost every dramatic series shooting on a sound stage or location near you, I was lucky enough to play a lot of them. First up? Bill Gates.

  No, not that one.

  Rowdyman director Peter Carter was whipping a mélange of Jack London stories into a feature film called Klondike Fever, with young Jeff East playing Jack London. Surrounding the innocent lad onscreen were all the characters London had described so vividly – Rod Steiger as legendary scoundrel Soapy Smith, Angie Dickinson as saloon siren Belinda McNair, Lorne Greene as Sam Steele of the Northwest Mounted Police, Lisa Langlois as Diamond Tooth Gertie, Barry Morse as outdoorsman John Thornton, and yours truly as Swiftwater Bill Gates, known simply as Swiftwater Bill. Given his personal background and his penchant for research, Canada’s most entertaining historian Pierre Berton knew a lot more about Swiftwater Bill than I did and documented some of his antics in his book Klondike. Suffice it to say that Bill was a rogue, albeit a lovable one, and we had a good time making the picture. Ron Steiger’s character, Soapy Smith, was an American gangster, an ex-priest who was perhaps the most famous confidence man of his times. He was credited with organizing organized crime in Colorado and Alaska. Rod was having a lot of fun playing him. Not that he was even the slightest bit like him, of course!