We shot the movie up in Revelstoke, and whenever we got to a new location Rod Steiger would tell the producer that he and I needed a two-hour lunch, so he could try out the local restaurants. We went to this one place, still in costume, and he was standing in front, to negotiate the best table, and I was standing behind him, in my Swiftwater Bill wardrobe.
“Hello, my dear!” Ron said to the young lady who greeted us. “We’re here for lunch.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t serve lunch!” she said with a sad little smile. And then she happened to see Swiftwater Bill standing behind him.
“Ooooh!” she cried, “Gordon Pinsent! What are you doing in town?”
Steiger didn’t move a muscle.
“Ooooh!” she cried again. “Oh I think we can serve you lunch!”
And then she took us in and sat us down, and Steiger kept staring at me with those eyes of his. Years before he had been introduced to me by Norman Jewison, but he didn’t really know me, except as this guy who was working on this movie with him. At which point another woman from the kitchen came out and said, “Oh my God, it is you!”
I looked at Rod’s face, which was about to ignite.
“Yes, and Rod. Steiger. is here too!” I said.
“Oh!” She smiled politely. “Hello, Ron!”
“Pinsent,” said Steiger, “this is the last fucking time I’m buying you lunch. The next one is on you. And I want two bottles of Pommard to go!”
We were all housed in the same motel, and Rod couldn’t resist sharing his impression of Lorne Greene with us, usually whenever Lorne was within earshot. Trouble was, Rod did him rather well. “Here. Comes. Mister. Bonanza!” he would proclaim, prompting gales of laughter. Lorne did not appear to be as amused as the rest of us.
I loved working with Angie Dickinson on Klondike Fever, and I suspected the feeling was mutual. But I knew it was when she told me about her next project, a TV movie about a woman whose husband, a college professor, kills himself, leaving her with guilt, shame, and an angry teenaged son.
“Gordon,” she added pointedly, “you’ve got to do this film with me.”
I said Yes, of course!
Back in Toronto, while waiting for Angie’s film to happen, I jumped at a chance to direct Charm in Once, a TV drama about an older woman who has an affair with a younger man. I needed to find some subtle way to let the audience know that when they made love the young man was giving her a level of sexual pleasure she had never before experienced. Happily, I found it. In the bedroom scenes I worked with the lighting director to bring the lights up and down, with increasing rhythm, to convey moment-to-moment orgasm. It worked, thanks to CBC technical expertise and Charm. Making Once work inspired me to take on another directing assignment, this time for the prestigious CBC series For the Record, guiding Richard Monette and Mary Ann McDonald through a ninety-minute drama called A Far Cry from Home with Louis Del Grande and Gerry Salsberg. Monette played a middle-class businessman who was battering his wife, a gym teacher who couldn’t seem to see herself as anything but a victim, played by McDonald. It was a taboo topic at the time, not one that was widely discussed, but the show was a big hit when it aired, drawing 1.5 million viewers and an 81 percent EI (Enjoyment Index). So we must have done something right.
It was time for me to go back to being on camera. The day I showed up for work on Angie Dickinson’s movie I sent word to her that I had arrived, and when she heard I was on set she flung open her trailer dressing room door, opened her arms in a big embrace, and purred, “Swifty!” – which delighted me and probably mystified everyone else. And although we shot it after we wrapped the Jack London movie, The Suicide’s Wife aired before Klondike Fever opened, creating a kind of reverse reunion for us onscreen.
In 1980 the forty-year-old Canadian Film Awards were remounted as the Genie Awards, and Klondike Fever went on to earn nine nominations, including nods for Best Picture and Best Director. So Peter Carter had certainly earned his stripes on that one. (As it turned out, the Best Picture award went to The Changeling, and Best Director went to Bob Clark for Murder by Decree. The only prize given to Klondike Fever was the Genie for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and I was pleased and happy to accept it.)
Playing a Canadian ambassador wasn’t a very exciting prospect – unless the ambassador was Ken Taylor. Previously faceless to the public, Ambassador Taylor became a national hero after he and his crack Canadian Embassy staff in Teheran hid half a dozen American embassy staffers during the Iranian hostage crisis. Risking his life, he cleverly smuggled the same Americans out of Iran safely, in full view of the internal Iranian security forces. Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper had a stellar supporting cast, including Bob Joy, Jimmy Douglas, Julie Khaner, Carl Marotte, and R.H. Thomson, and Ambassador Taylor seemed to get a kick out of seeing a pivotal moment in his life on the screen. He told me that one time in Ottawa a woman in an elevator told him, “You look just like that actor!” And whenever we would bump into each other after that he would always make some reference to it. “Gordon, are you still getting my calls?” he would tease. “Because I’m still getting yours!”
Back on Air Canada, back to L.A., this time to take a meeting with Shirley MacLaine. We met for dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s newest Hollywood oasis, Spago, just off Sunset Boulevard. An outspoken and independent woman herself, Shirley was fascinated by the story of another female maverick, Betsy Bigley, a notorious turn-of-the-century Canadian con woman who had relieved a string of amorous millionaires of their fortunes. Shirley’s mother hailed from Nova Scotia, and Shirley liked to say that she and her brother Warren Beatty were half Canadian. “In Warren’s case, it must be the top half,” she would add, eyes twinkling. In any case she thought Betsy’s story had the makings of a wildly entertaining feature film, one which could be shot in Canada, and she wanted to meet me to discuss my possible participation as one of Betsy’s husbands. It was a tasty meeting – Puck’s nouvelle cuisine Italian innovations were delicious – but nothing ever came of it – at least, not for me and Shirley. A few years later Jennifer Dale would make a splash playing Betsy Bigley in a TV movie version called Love & Larceny, directed by Rob Iscove, which proved so successful that a few years after that she starred in a sequel, Grand Larceny, directed by Stephen Surjik. So clearly the enterprising Ms. MacLaine had been on the right track.
That first winter of the new decade I made another movie for my Who Has Seen the Wind director Allan King. Ellen Burstyn had held the option on The Silence of the North for six years and came to Canada to get it made, with producers she didn’t really know, and a group of actors she didn’t know, except for maybe Tom Skerritt. She didn’t know Allan either, and quite understandably she was very protective of the project. It was based on the true story of Olive Frederickson, a woman who braved the northern wilds during the early part of the twentieth century, and I got to play another real-life character, her husband John Frederickson. The producers had hoped to sell it as an exciting adventure set in the beautiful Canadian wilderness, but moviegoers stayed away in droves. All four of us, Burstyn, Skerritt, Allan King, and I, were later nominated for Genie Awards, which also eluded all four of us. We heard that one studio exec at Universal referred to the film as Silence at the Box Office, but years later it became a cult favourite, and I’m told Ellen Burstyn still gets asked about it today.
Meanwhile, back in semi-civilized southern Ontario, there was everything but silence at the King-Pinsent household. Leah announced that she had decided to follow in our footsteps and become an actor. I was appalled at the very idea. My sweet little girl, barely a teenager, so bright in so many other ways, wanted to go into show business? Not on my watch.
“Say something!” I barked at Charm, looking for support.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Gordon, get over yourself!” Charm barked back.
Did I mention before – I believe I did – that this was the Era of Hard Liquor? Oh sure, it’s all white wine spritzers and SATC Cosmos now, but back in th
e eighties the only time we drank wine was at weddings. I had grown extremely fond of Scotch whiskey, and Scotch had grown extremely fond of me. And Charm, Kate, and Barbara Ham, in their time, were justifiably proud of the fact that they could drink any man under the table and, given the somewhat more relaxed traffic regulations of the era, drive him home when he was too inebriated to find his own car.
At sundown Charm and I would indulge in a cocktail or three before dinner, followed by a couple more with our meal, which always prompted what I still prefer to remember as lively debates and spirited exchanges of ideas. We both had big voices, we both had a flare for the melodramatic, and neither one of us was ever accused of being even remotely reticent, let alone shy. Leah remembers our debates somewhat differently. She reminds me, gently but succinctly, that one of our friends who was a frequent witness to our verbal battles at the dinner table used to call us George and Martha, an homage of sorts to the married protagonists in Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. When she was a teenager, Leah would often leave our nightly dinners in tears, which is something I still regret. Charm kept telling me I was being too overprotective, and I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but yes, of course I was. I’ve met a lot of fathers over the years, and it’s a common trait in all of us. Rodgers & Hammerstein got it absolutely right in Carousel; you can have fun with a son, but you’ve got to be a father to a girl. Which necessarily calls up your personal definition of fatherhood. And this was the little girl I taught to foxtrot to Sinatra records. This was the little girl who would sing with me when I played the guitar. This was the little girl who would help me learn lyrics when I was doing musicals like Guys and Dolls. Of course, this was also the little girl who had grown up at Fenton’s and the Celebrity Club with Anna Cameron and Kate and Barbara Ham. I didn’t want my little girl setting herself up for a vocation of rejection and disappointment, but there was more to it than that. I was still carrying a lot of the guilt I felt for not being there for Beverly and Barry when they were growing up. With Leah another thing took hold. I came on strong. I wanted her to come to my senses, but of course I couldn’t see it at the time. I didn’t see myself in that role until after the fact. And then I kept asking myself, Why was I being so rigid? Why did I keep trying to direct her, to steer her path?
Happily, Leah didn’t listen to me, and followed her dream. Apparently Father doesn’t always know best.
—–
By now, of course, audiences had seen my daring heroics as ambassador Ken Taylor. I’m pretty sure my role as a Canadian who rescued Americans in peril didn’t hurt my reputation in Ottawa or Washington, because when Pierre Elliott Trudeau decided to stage a glamorous gala to welcome visiting U.S. fireman Ronald Reagan, he asked me to host it.
I said Yes, of course; I was honoured by his invitation. And when I walked out on the Opera House stage at the National Arts Centre on that night in March, I thought that since this was their first visit to Ottawa, it might be appropriate to give the Reagans a geography lesson.
“Here in North America,” I began, “it might be said that we all live in one big house. Welcome to the attic.”
It was a great night, with the Irish Rovers and the Shumka Dancers, Anne Murray and Ginette Reno, Rich Little (who of course did spot-on impressions of both Ronnie and Pierre) and many others, and I quite enjoyed the splendour of it all. My only disappointment was that, due to a previous commitment, Charm was unable to be there with me.
The next morning I got a call from the Prime Minister’s Office asking if I would like to sit in the Speakers’ Gallery to hear Reagan’s speech to the Senate. Sure! What a splendid way to finish up the trip!
Except for one little detail.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’m afraid I didn’t bring a tie with me, only the black tie for last night’s gala. And I know you need to wear a tie to get into the Speakers’ Gallery.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
All right, then!
I showed up outside the Speakers’ Gallery as requested, and Trudeau’s sons were there, and his sister, and Robert Charlebois, and quite a few security people. And of course I still didn’t have a tie. There was someone else there, too, a lovely young woman with an impressive connection to the arts. And why not? This was the post-Margaret era, and Pierre Trudeau was known all over the world as an extremely eligible bachelor leader.
A woman came out to tell me that the Prime Minister would like to see me in his office and escorted me in.
Trudeau looked up from the papers on his desk. “How are you, Gordon!”
“Fine,” I said, “but I don’t have a tie.”
Trudeau turned to the woman who had brought me into his office. “Give Gordon my Emergency tie.”
Off she went, returning no more than a minute later with this green job, with a big Windsor knot, bigger than I’ve ever seen him wear, with a few coffee spots on it.
“You don’t really wear this, do you?” I said.
He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
And then, as we were leaving his office: “And you’ll join us for lunch?”
“With pleasure!” I said. And I thought, What fun! I’m so sorry Charm is missing out on all of this.
So we listen to Reagan’s address to the Senate, and after his speech the limos are waiting, and off we go to Sussex Drive to have lunch. As it turns out I’m seated next to the aforementioned lovely young woman, who is absolutely charming, and everyone at the table is speaking English and French, and Trudeau, who is a wonderfully gracious host, is repeating everything to me in English, because he knows I’m not fluent in French. And after lunch he says, “Gordon, I have to get back to the House, but I can drop you at your hotel on the way.”
Now the three of us are in the car, Trudeau and me and the lovely young woman. And I hear him say to her, as I pretend to be looking out the window in the opposite direction: “Well, you don’t have to go home this evening, do you?” And realize why I’m along for the ride. I have been cast by Pierre Elliott Trudeau as the beard.
(No, not the Bard – the Beard.)
The limo took us to our hotel, where there was champagne waiting for us, just another layer of icing on the cake. So we had a little champagne, and I don’t know if the lovely young woman ever got on her plane, but I got on mine. And two weeks later Charm and I saw the Prime Minister at the Genie Awards in Toronto. As he walked in he was immediately surrounded by fans and admirers, but at one point he looked up and saw me.
“Where’s my tie?!?” he inquired playfully, cocking his head to one side.
“You’ll get it,” I assured him. “You’ll get it.”
As it turned out, I spent a fair amount of time in Ottawa that year. The National Arts Centre’s own theatre company staged a revised version of John and the Missus for Ottawa audiences, with a wonderful cast including Edward Atienza, Wayne Best, Neil Munro, Gerry Parkes, and Florence Patterson as my Missus. Because I was working with actors of that calibre, I couldn’t wait to go on stage every night. John Wood, the director, was able to bring some new ideas to this production that he’d been unable to achieve when we’d premiered the play in Halifax five years ago.
“Well?” said Charm. “What do you think of it now?”
“I think it’s a film,” I said. Which of course I had wanted it to be all along.
The following year, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau brought our Constitution back to Canada from Britain, I sent his Emergency tie back to him in an envelope with a personal hand-written note:
Please, don’t thank me.
It’s the least I can do.
Back in 1952, the big news was the escape of the Boyd Gang from the Don Jail in Toronto. It was the second time they’d escaped.
I remembered reading about them when I was in the army. Their leader, Edwin Alonzo Boyd, had been jailed for robbing banks in 1950 and met two of his future gang members, Willie Jackson and Lennie Jackson (who were not related)
while doing time in the Don. The three of them broke out of jail with a hacksaw concealed in Lenny’s artificial leg. After adding an ex-musician, Steve Suchan, as their fourth member, the “gang” went on a bank-robbing spree that ended tragically when Suchan shot and killed a policeman. All four were arrested and, by some twist of fate, all four were locked up together in an empty death-row cellblock at the Don Jail. On September 7, 1952, they managed to escape for a second time with the help of another saw blade smuggled in by a lawyer. The following night, the CBC’s first television newscast, anchored by Lorne Greene and produced by Harry Rasky, detailed the escape, and it was pretty riveting stuff.
Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan were found guilty of murder and were executed in a double hanging at the Don Jail that December. Willie Jackson was sentenced to thirty-one years. Boyd himself was sentenced to eight life terms plus twenty-seven years concurrent in Kingston Penitentiary, but was paroled ten years later. After serving another four years for parole violations, he moved to the West Coast, changed his name, and started a new life.
The Life and Times of Edwin Alonzo Boyd was an ambitious, stylish project – a faux documentary narrated by me as Boyd, whom I also played onscreen. The stellar supporting cast, especially Jean-Marc Amyot, Domenic Tudino, and Jack Langhorn as the other three gang members, were not overly familiar faces, which gave the story that much more credibility. After I wrapped my part in the Boyd Gang saga, I teamed up with director Allan King again to shoot Ready for Slaughter, a fifty-five-minute drama for For the Record. We must have been doing something right again, because Ready for Slaughter took the highly coveted Best TV Drama prize at the Banff Television Festival, and I myself was nominated for two ACTRA Awards that year, one for Boyd and one for Slaughter.
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