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by Gordon Pinsent

  Years later I was in Victoria, staying at the Empress with Charm and Leah, when the concierge called up to say that a man was waiting for me in the lobby. I explained that I was not expecting anyone, and asked if the man had identified himself.

  “Yes,” said the concierge, “he says his name is Edwin Alonzo Boyd.”

  I could see a glint of mischief in Charm’s eyes. “Bring him up for tea,” she suggested.

  I went down to the lobby and greeted him with outstretched arms. “Eddie!” I cried. He hesitated, but only briefly, before shyly returning my embrace.

  We had tea with Edwin Alonzo Boyd.

  “I’ve got four copies of that film!” he confided, munching on a cookie. “Y’know, all that criminal stuff aside, I see it as my biography.”

  No kidding.

  More than twenty-five years later Scott Speedman played him in Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and was chosen as one of the Ten Best Canadian Films of the Year. Boyd didn’t get to see that one. He died in 2002, half a century after his headline-making second escape from the Don Jail.

  After playing Boyd I played another real-life character – prolific journalist and war correspondent Quentin Reynolds – for director Eric Till in a TV movie version of Louis Nizer’s A Case of Libel, his personal account of Reynolds’s celebrated lawsuit against newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler. The names were changed, not only to protect the guilty but also to protect Nizer, who had won the case for Reynolds, from more lawsuits. A Case of Libel had started as a book, then became a play, and then became a movie, twice. Our TV movie remake pitted Mary Tyler Moore Show alumnus Ed Asner, as Nizer, against fellow Canadian thespian and Klondike Fever alumnus Robin Gammell, while I played the Quentin Reynolds role and Daniel J. Travanti of Hill Street Blues played the Westbrook Pegler role. Larry was in it too, so it was not a dull shoot.

  Back on the boards, I was at the Vancouver Playhouse, playing Prospero in The Tempest. I was in my dressing room between a Saturday matinee and evening performance when I heard a slightly tentative knock on my door. When I opened it, the young man looking back at me from the hall was, well, me. It was like looking at an old eight-by-ten of myself. It was ghostlike. Amazing.

  “I’m your son,” he said.

  No kidding.

  “Your son Barry,” he added a bit shyly, perhaps concerned that I might confuse him with my imaginary sons Larry, Moe, and Curly.

  Despite his sister’s Beverly’s assurances that I did not in fact have two heads, he had waited another eight years to contact me, he would later explain, “just in case you turned out to be an asshole.” He was a jet pilot and a soon-to-be published novelist and would eventually enjoy new success as an actor (hello!) and, toughest of all, as a stand-up comedian.

  It was a wonderful first visit. There would be many more ahead. More new beginnings. More new chances to take a crack at finishing unfinished business. My own loose ends were slowly disappearing in the mist. Charm thought I looked more relaxed when I came back from Vancouver, and she attributed it to Barry’s visit. “Because now you have children you love who love you, so you don’t have to pretend that none of that ever happened.”

  I was growing up.

  Back to work, and another real-life character, for Sam Hughes’ War and CBC. Sir Sam Hughes was Canada’s maverick Minister of Militia and Defence from October 1911 to November 1916, and the driving force behind Canada’s early war effort. Controversial and incorrigibly irreverent, he was as pugnacious as a pitbull, constantly scrapping with his superiors, whom he clearly did not respect as such. By now a thorn in the government’s side, Hughes was finally dumped by Prime Minister Robert Borden, but he is still regarded today as the single most important figure in organizing the first Canadian war effort. And I got to play him flanked by a top-drawer company including Douglas Campbell, Richard Donat, David Fox, Christopher Newton, Douglas Rain, and Tony van Bridge.

  In Hollywood, award-winning Canadian director Daniel Petrie had become famous as an actors’ director. On television he had guided Sally Field to greatness in Sybil and Jane Fonda to new heights in The Dollmaker. He was also the man behind Paul Newman’s startling performance in Fort Apache, The Bronx, and Sir Laurence Olivier’s terrific star turn in Harold Robbins’ The Betsy. Born in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Dan wanted to come home to make a Canadian film. He’d already written the screenplay, and the film he wanted to make, The Bay Boy, would provide two second-generation film talents with memorable screen debuts: Kiefer Sutherland, son of Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, in the title role, and Leah Pinsent, the teenaged daughter of Charmion King and Gordon Pinsent, as his love interest. Kiefer was wonderfully appealing onscreen, and so was Leah, and I don’t think either set of parents could have been much prouder. When the Genie Award sweepstakes were announced, The Bay Boy had racked up eleven nominations, winning Best Picture and best screenplay for Dan. Five cast members – Kiefer, Leah, Peter Donat, Jane McKinnon, and Alan Scarfe – were also nominated, but only Scarfe took home a golden statuette. Kiefer lost to Gabriel Arcand in Le crime d’Ovide Plouffe, and Leah was trumped by Linda Sorensen in Draw! Nonetheless, both Kiefer and Leah had made auspicious screen debuts that would serve them well in the future.

  Meanwhile, the 1985 ACTRA Award recipients were announced, and I was asked to present the very first Jane Mallett Award for Best Radio Actress to the enduring Canadian show business survivor Charmion King.

  “Quelle surprise!” said Charm as she accepted the award. “I have waited all my life for this kind of recognition for my work. I really appreciate this. It’s an honour to be the first recipient of the Jane Mallett Award. Jane has been a role model for all of us. She had the spirit that we all need and I loved her very much.” She held up her cherubic Nellie for all to see. “And of course it’s a great pleasure to receive this from someone who will be as happy as I am that at last I got one of these fat little darlings of my own!”

  I renewed my efforts to make John and the Missus sing as a screenplay, interrupting the process just long enough to do guest shots on Louis Del Grande’s hit comedy mystery series Seeing Things on CBC and Nicholas Campbell’s engaging detective series Diamonds on Global.

  I received a call from Michael Levine, the country’s top entertainment attorney, the man who represented such renowned authors as Mordecai Richler and Peter C. Newman and such renowned broadcasters as Brian Linehan, Patrick Watson, and future Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. Would I like to do a talking book?

  I said Yes.

  I’d never done an audio book before, but sitting in front of the microphone for a few hours, reading someone else’s prose, didn’t sound particularly arduous. Unless, of course, the book you were hired to read was Peter C. Newman’s A History of the Hudson Bay Company: Volume One: Company of Adventurers. All 650 pages of it. A perfect tape for your car, for a long, long, long, long drive. Or perhaps for the half-frozen passengers of a downed northern bushplane out of Nunavut. Never mind – a gig is a gig. I spent something like sixty hours in a sound booth. Went mad for a period of time, but the director, who’d flown over from the U.K. to supervise the taping, waited patiently for me to get back my bearings, which I did, and he was soon able to fly home again, head still held high, with all eight audio cassettes.

  Charm’s old friend, Arthur Miller favourite Kate Reid, was back on Broadway, co-starring with Dustin Hoffman in an acclaimed revival of Death of a Salesman. “When I get back to Toronto,” she told Charm, “you and I have got to do a play together!” Meanwhile, Charm had been conscripted to appear in the new screen version of Anne of Green Gables with Dawn Greenhalgh and Ted Follows’ daughter Megan. When Charm finished filming her scenes she returned to the stage in an audience-pleasing revival of her David French play Jitters at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. As it happened, Anne of Green Gables was a huge hit, and Charm happily returned to the soundstage to shoot a sequel.

  I was on a soundstage t
oo, doing my first and only CBC music special. It was originally planned as a concert of Irving Berlin songs, but as I recall, the executors of Berlin’s estate were not as thrilled with the idea as we were. So the thrust of the show was switched to Hollywood songs – “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Tea for Two,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” and a pleasing collection of more golden oldies from the silver screen. My producer, Lorraine Thompson, had wisely surrounded me with a trio of musical crowd-pleasers – Kerrie Keane, Jeff Hyslop, and Peter Appleyard. Unfortunately, I was suffering, and I do mean suffering, from a pinched nerve in my groin, which made most dance steps excruciatingly painful. Did I say dance? I could hardly stand. I asked Lorraine to delay production. Which she did, but not long enough for me. I had originally wanted Lorraine and Alex Barris, the writer on the special, to let me slide in and out of the show in a guest spot. (Imagine, an actor asking for less attention!) I did not want it to appear that we thought I was the best all-round vocal purveyor of Astaire songs; for one thing, Tony Bennett was still working. But, producers don’t always listen to the on-camera talent. And Lorraine and Alex had other ideas.

  “I can write the review for you right now,” I warned them. “Gordon Pinsent hosted his own special last night. He also sings a little.”

  Most of the reviewers were kinder than I was. Suffice it to say that Fred Astaire had nothing to worry about. Granted, I might have had a step or two more in me, if I had been able to walk. Turns out I had to sing all those songs instead. So I just sat there in front of the curtain and surprised everyone by staying on key. But no one, including and especially me, suggested we should do this again sometime. Ever.

  Bringing John and the Missus to the screen – finally! – presented its own special set of challenges. It was an important story, to me and to many Newfoundlanders who had faced the same reality. My character, John Munn, refuses the paltry amount of settlement money offered by the government when the copper mine – his town’s only source of income – is closed, because he doesn’t want to leave the land of his ancestors. In truth, things pretty much go downhill from there; when the town turns against him, he literally uproots his house and sails away. But the story is filled with heart and pain and some very “big” moments that need to be played very small, so I was especially happy to be directing it myself. My producers, Peter O’Brian and John Hunter, were the current young lions of the Canadian film industry. They had recently won Genie Awards (for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, respectively) for The Grey Fox. Blessed with thirteen nominations, they had gone home with seven statuettes. Composer Michael Conway Baker had won a Genie for his stirring score, and Jackie Burroughs had picked up the Best Supporting Actress award.

  I had first met Jackie in my salad days with the Straw Hat Players, a Muskoka summer theatre company created and sparked by the same group of Hart House alumni who had founded the Crest – Donald and Murray Davis, their sister Barbara Chilcott, and of course Charmion and Kate Reid. I was doing something called Wedding Breakfast, a three-act comedy set in New York in the fifties, and Jackie was doing all sorts of things. There was no real work for her there, so she was painting scenery, sweeping the stage, doing whatever needed doing, because she wanted to be part of it. Later our paths crossed many times. We had shared the stage at Stratford in Trumpets and Drums, and at any number of events over the years – by now she had dozens of television and film credits, in which she successfully portrayed independent women from twenty-six to eighty-six – but I had never thought of her as someone who could play the Missus to my John. However, my producers were so keen on her, based on their Grey Fox experience, that we offered her the part, and she accepted. And once she decided she was doing it, that’s all there was to that. Her understanding of it, her homework, was incredible. She did incredible homework. And for a mainlander she displayed an uncannily deep understanding of the situation. “It’s a pretty simple story,” she told one reporter. “Plain folk. Small town. But what’s underneath is that all their lives are at stake. Not just their possessions, but their pride, and their dignity, and don’t you damn dare play with that! And to me,” she added, “that’s like Gordon.”

  I was impressed, and so were the members of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, who nominated her for Best Actress of the Year. All in all we picked up six Genie nominations, but at the end of the day we were gently trounced by Denys Arcand’s Decline of the American Empire. Our only two wins were for Michael Conway Baker, who composed another Genie-winning score for us, and for myself, for Best Actor. Backstage I held up the award proudly. After all its incarnations, after all those investments of time and money and talent, John and the Missus was finally paying dividends.

  “What do you think, Charm?” I asked her, grinning like a schoolboy.

  She rolled her eyes in mock disdain, then laughed and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I think,” she said, “you should build a bigger mantel.”

  Unfortunately, there were no glittering red carpet premieres when it opened stateside, which film critic Janet Maslin was quick to point out in the New York Times. “Despite its terrible title and the complete lack of fanfare with which it arrived at the Quad Cinema yesterday,” she wrote, “the Canadian film John and the Missus is a fine little sleeper.” It’s still a gorgeous-looking film, just a knockout visually, and I always thought Frank Tidy should have won the Genie Award for Best Cinematography – but he wasn’t even nominated.

  I know, I know, it isn’t personal. But some days you don’t win.

  Charm was busy again, doing a guest shot on Twilight Zone, playing a recurring character on a series about a canine crime-fighter called Katts and Dog, and starting a new TV movie with Chris Plummer, Shirley Douglas, and Brent Carver called Shadow Dancing. I was back behind the camera again, this time directing John Vernon and Jan Rubes in Two Men, Anna Sandor’s touching screenplay about the waking-nightmare existence of concentration camp victims. John and Jan played the survivor and the war criminal, respectively, and I also got a chance to direct Lila Kedrova, who had recently emigrated to Canada. The irrepressible Kedrova had won an Oscar for playing Madame Hortense in Zorba the Greek in 1964, and twenty years later won a Tony Award for playing the same role in the Broadway musical version, Zorba.

  We’d graduated from ACTRA Awards to Geminis and I’d been nominated for a guest shot on one of the most popular dramas on television, Street Legal. The actual nomination sounded much more important: Best Guest Performance in a Series by an Actor or an Actress. The award itself was very attractive, and I decided there and then that I wouldn’t mind owning one. But I was sad to see Nellie relegated to the wings, and expressed my feelings in a cover story of our union magazine. Nellie, I wrote,

  You graced our gatherings, enlivened our lives, and brought us closer together than we’d ever been. Even if there are many impressions of you, you still have a way of telling each of us with your beamish saucy smile that you are truly an original. Your steadying belief that you could easily get off the ground told us we could do the same. It was as if you were giving a bit of ourselves back to us.

  You can have your Junos, your you knows, your Genies, your weenies, your Oscars and things. There is nothing that fills the hand and delights the eye as does yourself when the light is right.

  You couldn’t have been more real to us or had more spirit, more charm or pure beauty if you’d walked and danced among us. Even as you were, you could have been Prime Mistress of Canada. And we are going to miss you, Nellie. You were on a pedestal for good reason. And now, on your much deserved sabbatical, be assured you will not get dusty on my mantel nor tarnish in my heart.

  Meanwhile, three bright, young, talented entrepreneurs had started a successful Canadian animation house called Nelvana and scored a huge hit with their Care Bears movies and TV shows. The trio – Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert, and Clive Smith – had made an animated movie about one of childhood’s most endearing heroes, Babar the elephant, and asked me if I would like to voice the role of
King Babar himself. I thought it was a charming idea, and the fastest way to make money short of inheriting it. So I said Yes, voiced the role of the King, and thought no more about it. But the movie was such a hit that Nelvana asked me to voice sixty-five new episodes for television. I loved doing it, because I’d grown very attached to Babar and my role as the royal father elephant. I loved the cheques, too.

  Another awards show, another black-tie evening. “And the Gemini goes to … Gordon Pinsent for Street Legal!”

  My first Gemini. I promised myself it would not be my last.

  Before the end of the decade I got word that the New American Library would be “paperbacking” the two earlier books: The Rowdyman and John and the Missus. Would I come to a book fair in Halifax to promote them? Yes. But when I arrived at the bookseller’s booth I was advised that I was one of two authors they would be featuring over the two-day period. The other author would be arriving momentarily.

  Curious, I skimmed to the bottom of the press release, and there found the identity of my “companion” with whom I’d be doing the necessary press, radio, and TV interviews. And just as I came to her name, I felt what I imagined was a minor seismic shock overtake us all. This was answered by the entrance of my publishing handler’s second author, and my “date” for the next forty-eight hours, the inescapable Xaviera Hollander, a Dutch treat if ever there was one. For those too young to have shared the planet with the lady at the time, she was a marvel at being larger than life in all ways, may I say. She had written an international bestseller about her life. It was called The Happy Hooker, and Xaviera was enjoying every minute of her notoriety, making splashy entrances for press photographers everywhere.

  Coming face to face with me, and having spent the last few minutes waiting for her trailing tiger-tail, she smiled and blinked her mighty lashes, daring me to keep my balance. We could have re-read both our books in the time it took for her to fold her lips around “ ’Hello!,” causing my usually lyrical lower baritone to sound like Doris Day, for all the world. Xaviera was about to autograph my forehead when she was informed that I was her date for the event, which would start with an introductory cocktail party. At the appointed time I picked her up at her room, and we swished down the corridor, the two of us, and made our entrance; she and her “Eunuch.” I might as well have been holding her two pet cheetahs on leashes, I was that useful.