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by Gordon Pinsent

  All heads turned. The entire convention, grabbing each other for support, drinking everyone else’s martini. My mind went immediately to Charm’s face back in Toronto, seeing cozy photos of me and Xaviera at a Halifax soiree.

  Not to worry. Within minutes Xaviera had grown young men on all parts of her, to prevent her from catching boredom.

  Next time she saw me, she didn’t know me.

  I pointed to her autograph on my shirt, and was rewarded with a flicker of recognition. Nevertheless, our hosts seated us at separate tables for dinner, so we could entertain two different groups, and we had just finished our entrees when I was advised by one of the publisher’s reps that they had bumped me up to First Class for my flight home. I was grateful, and frankly a bit relieved. Charm was coming to meet me at the airport, and Xaviera, who would be seated several rows behind, would be getting off the plane several minutes after the First Class passengers disembarked. It was all good.

  Xaviera, at the other table, was apparently blessed with stereophonic hearing. “If Gordon is going home First Class, I want to go First Class too!” she said, pouting. Next morning there we were, side by side in First Class on the Air Canada flight from Halifax to Toronto, while she engaged me with an endless tale from her early life, to do with a bathtub, a rubber duck, and a lot of Spaniards.

  I could be wrong about the duck.

  When we landed, the very first face I saw was Charm’s. Charm always insisted on being there the second I came home, warming my arrivals from anywhere. I sort of trusted my new Dutch friend to see the oncoming impasse, and to slide her arm out of mine. After all, anyone could tell that we, Xaviera and myself, had been no more than travelling companions … who looked as though they had swallowed Monaco!

  And then – about to reach Charm – I opened my mouth, to introduce the leopard-skirted woman who had apparently grown out of my hip, when suddenly Xaviera swung loose, veering off to parts unknown, leaving her farewell phrase to die on the wind – “Goodbye, Gordon! Keep in touch with the Dutch!” – in a voice that could have passed a Broadway audition.

  I couldn’t have thanked her enough.

  Playing one role consistently, as I had done in Quentin Durgens and A Gift to Last and even Babar, could be very satisfying, as long as you could keep discovering more and more about your character. Playing many different characters, in movies, TV movies, and TV series, was more challenging for me as an actor, and it was a challenge I relished. But as time went by, it also became more of a challenge to some viewers. One night, while whetting my whistle in a pub in St. John’s, a fellow imbiber approached me.

  “Gordon,” he said, “can you clear up something for me?”

  “Happy to help if I can,” I replied.

  “The thing is, the other night I was watching you and you were a lawyer. But I fell asleep, and when I woke up, you were a doctor!”

  I had to break the news to him that he had been watching two different series.

  all in the family

  IF YOU, YOUR WIFE, AND YOUR DAUGHTER ALL SPEND your days waiting for the phone to ring, you must be in show business.

  By the early nineties Leah had a few more TV movies behind her, including a bit in Glory Enough for All, a dramatized account of the Nobel Prize–winning discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, with R. H. Thomson as Banting and Robert Wisden as Best, and she was starting to get calls for both new and established series, including a stint with Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote. She had also met a talented actor from St. Louis, Michael Capellupo. A few years older than Leah, Michael was a charming fellow who was waiting for the phone to ring like the rest of us, and was now thinking he could cast himself in better roles by writing them himself. (Sound familiar?) Michael and Leah were married in 1991.

  Charm and Kate were finally working together again on stage, in a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace at their beloved Hart House Theatre. Not to be outdone, I had been persuaded, without too much arm twisting, to play Matthew to Barbara Ham’s brilliant Marilla in a revival of Anne of Green Gables at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Coming on stage every night, it was a delight to go home to Charm instead of an empty hotel room, and I savoured every moment of it. I had turned down the same role twelve months earlier, but now I felt ready to play Matthew, ready to do him justice, and strong enough to hold my own on stage with Barbara. The audience and the critics seemed to agree, and a few months later I would win my first and only Dora.* (So far.)

  While I was on stage at the Elgin, I was still looking for my next truly memorable role. Offstage I was having fun jumping from series to series, and promoting my first attempt at a memoir called By the Way. I had an onscreen reunion with Chris Plummer on Counterstrike, did a showy turn with Sara Botsford on E.N.G., and played a recurring role on Street Legal with Cynthia Dale, Eric Peterson, and newcomer Albert Schultz. I even had a reunion with The Missus, Jackie Burroughs, on Road to Avonlea, while Avonlea resident Barbara Ham kept us laughing between takes. I did an episode of The Hidden Room with Lara Flynn Boyle, and I did an episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues with David Carradine and Neve Campbell. Neve was very shy. I think it was probably one of her first acting roles, because she had started out as a dancer and was trying to make a new name for herself as an actor. She didn’t smile at all, which was fine. We were both struggling a little bit with our Australian accents – why we had Australian accents I can’t remember – but Carradine was going around asking, “How many bars are there in this area?” and I determined, once again, that if I wanted a great part, I would have to write it myself, because no one out there was going to hand it to me.

  Seldom if ever have I been so happy to be wrong.

  Steve Smith had already created Red Green as a character, and now he wanted his friends to play other characters on his new show. Steve had snagged my future son-in-law, Peter Keleghan, to play Ranger Gord, and seemed to know instinctively that trained actors who traditionally worked in drama could bring his quirky characters to life in a uniquely believable way. Hence he had cast, among others, Graham Greene as an explosives expert who was clearly unsuited to his vocation, Wayne Robson as a light-fingered ex-con still on parole, and me as Hap Shaughnessy, a guy who never met a story he couldn’t tell better with a few highly distinctive embellishments of his own. When I read the part for the first time, I was almost on the floor laughing, and Charm was too. “My God, this is funny!” she said. So I figured, if I can keep a straight face, I can get it done.

  Hap called himself a water taxi captain when in fact what he had was a raft. He would stop whatever he was doing to tell a really long story that would always bore the hell out of Red Green. And of course I grew to admire Hap; I thought he was terrific. With any luck he could tell you this tall story, and you might believe him. “Oh yes, yes, I was part of the Rolling Stones. You know, whenever Keith Richards had a little too much and couldn’t go on.” I just loved the guy. I remember sitting around the table at one read-through where Hap said he had worked as a foreman of a tiger rodeo – a tiger rodeo! – and I only got through three lines before I just burst out laughing. Hap claimed to have been an astronaut, too – “One small step for Neil Armstrong, a piece of cake for me.” We did one on ice fishing, too, with me and Steve in a boat, and I just couldn’t look at him, because I knew if we made eye contact I would never ever get through it. I think my very favourite was when Hap tells Red about his mother, who sold chips in Port Alberni but was really Anastasia, the daughter of Czar Nicholas – “Grandpa Nick” – who had smuggled her out of Russia in a giant Fabergé egg.

  “After she grew up,” Hap continues, “she married Ernest Hemingway.”

  “You’re not telling me that Ernest Hemingway was your father!” says Red incredulously.

  “Sure,” says Hap. “That’s why Margaux Hemingway and I couldn’t ever get married. Because our kids would be idiots!”

  Steve has a great talent for picking characters. Peter’s character
, Ranger Gord, who lives by himself in a tower in the woods and keeps insisting he isn’t lonely, is a classic as far as I’m concerned. Because it’s just so real.

  I was on the first season of Red Green, and most of the others, I think. I just loved it. What I didn’t love, soon after we started shooting, was learning that ACTRA had voted me the 1992 John Drainie Award for Overall Contribution to Broadcasting. John Drainie was an esteemed colleague, of course, so I was gratified to receive a prize bearing his name. But I didn’t like the sound of it. It had that “Lifetime Achievement” cachet and that peculiar perfume of early retirement. As far as I was concerned, I was just getting the hang of it. Bowing out was simply not an option.

  “They think I’m finished in the business!” I whined to Charm.

  “Oh Gordon, for heaven’s sake!” she sighed. “Get over yourself!”

  I did. And quickly, too, the moment we learned that Kate Reid had been diagnosed with brain cancer. She died in Stratford, near the Shakespearean theatre she loved, on March 27, 1993. She was only sixty-two.

  As always, it was a relief to go back to work. Charm did a bit in a Harlequin Romance movie, and I did my second Euro-pudding, a less-than-epic mini-series called Les amants de rivière rouge – Red River Love Stories, as it were. It was a western, with absolutely no relation to the classic western directed by Howard Hawks in 1948, and I can assure you that neither John Wayne nor Montgomery Clift was anywhere in sight. It wasn’t being made for consumption in America. It was being made for Europe. Which was a good thing, because it could very well have spelled the end of my career. I played the father of three girls out on the prairies. Unfortunately, my three girls couldn’t speak English. I spoke English to them; they delivered their lines in Italian. Nick Mancuso was also there for a while; he was a favourite of the director, Yves Boisset. I wasn’t, I guess, because Yves never said one word to me. He was one of those snooty guys who like to comment on other people’s films. “What a dreadful piece of work!” he would say, but then everything was dreadful as far as he was concerned, unless it was something he was working on. So there I was with my three daughters, and I said, “I’m sorry, we’re trying here, we really are.” But I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and they couldn’t understand what I was saying, because they hadn’t put any real system in place to make it work. And I had really been looking forward to it, because I thought it was going to be a real western. The only thing that made it bearable was the arrival of my daughter Beverly, who had wanted to visit me on a movie set. Bev is a horse person, so she had a great time, because of course there were plenty of horses in the production. So she had a better time than I did.

  I had to miss a few Red Green episodes because I was doing other things. Happily, some of the “other things” served to reassure me that despite my John Drainie Award I was not finished in the business. Best of the bunch for me was the pilot for a new TV series called Due South. Due South was a wonderfully fresh look at the core values of the RCMP, as personified by Benton Fraser, an officer whose RCMP father had been murdered on the job. Part of what made the series such a delight was Benton’s relationship with his dead father, whose ghost became a central character in the story. I knew Paul Gross first as an accomplished playwright, and then as an accomplished actor – I had even directed him in the eighties, in an episode of a Roberta Maxwell series called Air Waves with Tabby Johnson and Ingrid Veninger. Even then he was a man of ideas. He was already writing and producing. And I thought it was perfect casting, because he was spectacularly good as Benton.

  The series was created by Paul Haggis, who went on to win Oscars for writing Million Dollar Baby for Clint Eastwood and writing and producing Crash. Both Pauls were convinced that I was the guy to play Fraser Sr., and who was I to argue? It was supposed to be a one-shot deal, with Fraser Sr. getting killed at the top of the pilot and then appearing to Fraser Jr. as a wisdom-provoking ghost. The image that seemed to stick with people the most was of the two of us sitting across from each other, with Paul in his Mountie hat and me in my sawed-off Stetson. Before we shot that scene I had to wear it quite a few times before I could stop laughing. In the scene we’re sitting across from one another at a table, talking, and Paul asks me, “What’s wrong with your hat? … You only have half a hat.” And I say, “That’s how they buried me.” Or something like that. Because that’s how they were able to put Fraser Sr. in his coffin in full uniform, by sawing off the back of his hat.

  Another favourite scene was when Paul’s character is in a pool, getting physiotherapy. And I float by on my back, in full dress uniform, with the hat, too, of course. And when we were shooting I surprised them by breaking into the first verse of “Rose Marie.”

  Rose Marie I love you …

  I’m always thinking of you …*

  We shot my big death scene in Skagway. It was very snowy in Skagway, close to a whiteout, and there was some real concern that we might not be able to get the shot. But it cleared just enough, so we did. It was a great scene. I was standing at the edge of a cliff, and I turned to the camera – the camera representing an unknown assailant – and I said, “You’re going to shoot a Mountie? They’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth!” It was a great set-up for the series.

  Paul Gross remembers it slightly differently. He remembers a blinding snowstorm that persisted until I took my place on the edge of the cliff. “At that moment,” he told one Ottawa audience, “the snow stopped, the skies actually parted, radiant sun filled the landscape, bears crawled out of their dens, trees suddenly burst into full bloom, and I could swear I heard a choir singing.”

  That’s not quite the way I remember it, but I like his version better.

  While I was in Skagway I saw a statue of a woman that inspired me to sketch her. More of a monument than a statue, really, with a bust of a woman on top. The woman had apparently helped the miners and their families going to Skagway on their way to and from panning for gold, and she was really regarded as the Saint Anne or Saint Therese of the North. And if you walked around to the back of the statue you found another inscription by a man who was now the mayor of Seattle. Turns out that man had always been in love with her, and more than once had asked her to marry him. She was murdered, by a lover or someone who was jealous of her. But then there was no shortage of gold rush stories, as Pierre Berton so often reminded us.

  We finished shooting the pilot for Due South, and went for drinks at the end of the day. Paul Haggis was already saying, C’mon Gordon, of course you want to play this guy, we just have to bring him back. And I was happy as hell, because I’d wanted to do another series, especially one I could phone in! I liked Due South a whole lot. It was like walking into the centre of television at its best. It seemed so right, so real, so expertly done that you wondered where these people had come from.

  Paul Gross took me out to dinner to ask me to do the second season, and while we were talking I suggested that he consider using a clothes closet as a portal into the past – that when Benton Fraser opened the closet door he would see clothes on hangers, but if he pushed the clothes to one side he would see into his father’s old office, with his father still sitting behind his desk. He thought that was good, so we went with that. As it turned out my idea worked rather well, and Paul, very graciously, always gives me the credit for it.

  Paul is a worker, and boy, was he good! He did a lot of stuff on that show. And he always had his laptop handy. So he wrote, and checked, and added, and took away from the stuff that was already on the page and from new stuff he wrote himself, always to make it the very best it could be. And I took particular pleasure in amusing him.

  One day Paul walked into our house, saw me working on an oil painting, and looked at me wide-eyed.

  “That’s the way we do it in the Group of Six,” I told him.

  He blinked. “You mean Seven.”

  “No, no!” I said, vigorously shaking my head. “Not in our group!”

  Due South swept the next Gemini Awards, wit
h statuettes for Best Dramatic Series, Best Writing, Best Music, Best Sound – it was an RCMP love-in – and Paul and I both took home Geminis as well.

  I had another idea for the series, which I loved, but which we didn’t do, although I wish we had – that no matter what the season was, whenever I appeared I would always have to brush just a little bit of snow off my uniform. Because my character’s last moments on earth were spent in deep snow, getting shot down in Skagway.

  Still, at least I got to wear that sawed-off Mountie hat. Paul wrote a “hat trick” for Leslie Nielsen too, for his guest spots on the series. In the story the top of his hat got chopped off going through a tunnel, so his hair was standing straight up, sticking out of it. Leslie, whose father actually was an RCMP officer, played a character called Sergeant Buck Frobisher, and he and my Fraser Sr. got along very well, so a bit of humour came out of that, too. I enjoyed it, but I’m much better playing comedy now than I was then.

  I had a good time doing Due South. Although we didn’t have any scenes together, my son Barry Kennedy popped up in the series too, after the two Pauls hired him to play a character named Sergeant Eddie Polito in a two-episode story called “The Ladies Man.” There were also Due South conventions in Toronto every year, and we’d sit there answering the same old questions, but I was astounded at all the paraphernalia fans had from the series. It was very strange. We were asked to sign pictures of ourselves that we had never seen before. And people were coming away with little bits and pieces. One section of the convention was devoted to playing a game in which people stood up and shouted their favourite lines of dialogue. At one convention one person came up behind me and said, “Would you sign this for me please?” and handed me the Roots album I had recorded for Arc records thirty years earlier! Another time I received a package from Germany, saying Happy Birthday, Gordon, with a whole lot of verses, signed by one thousand Due South fans.