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by Gordon Pinsent

  Barbara Ham was enjoying a nostalgic return to the Royal Alex in Toronto. She had made her auspicious debut there in 1943 in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace, which, she loved to point out, was a brand-new show when she did it. “The original production was still playing on Broadway when we did it at the Alex!” she would remind us. Now she was back on the same stage, lovingly and lavishly refurbished by “Honest Ed” Mirvish, doing eight shows a week of a “new” George and Ira Gershwin musical called Crazy for You, and loving every minute of it. By the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the cancer had already spread throughout her body. It seemed like only yesterday that we had worked together, clowning around on the set of Road to Avonlea, playing to each other’s strengths onstage in Anne of Green Gables and Brass Rubbings. Suddenly she was in a hospice, in palliative care, preparing for her final journey. We took turns visiting her. At the end we all held hands and she passed. Like Kate, she died in the winter, in February, three years after Kate. She was sixty-nine.

  A staunch supporter of all my Creative endeavours, Barbara always professed to like my paintings and years earlier had asked me to do a painting, just for her, of clowns.

  “Are you sure you’re not mixing me up with Red Skelton?” I teased her. Skelton was celebrated for both playing and painting portraits of clowns.

  “When I want a painting by Red Skelton,” she snorted, “I’ll ask him!”

  A few weeks later I presented the indomitable Barbara Ham with a small watercolour of more than a dozen clown faces. She loved it on sight, and deliberated where she should hang it. “Y’know,” she said, furrowing her brow, “there’s something so familiar about these clowns –”

  She stopped mid-sentence. “Oh my God!” she gasped. “They’re all YOU!”

  True. I had posed for myself, and all the clowns were me, in different clown makeup. She thought it was hilarious, displayed it prominently in her living room, and couldn’t wait to show it off when friends came to call.

  Hollywood was born for stories like Barbara’s. Barbara was successfully courted by Wayne Lonergan, who had been convicted of murdering his wife and was released from prison after twenty-two years. “You kill me, Wayne!” Barbara would say. She’d introduce him to total strangers at the drop of a hat. “Have you met my new boyfriend? He’s a real lady killer!” Oh she had a million of ’em! And Wayne would just sit back and grin.

  I have his hat, his summer straw fedora. Barbara gave it to me after he died. I still wear it, every summer.

  After Barbara left us, all three Pinsents were mercifully distracted by employment. Charm took on Mary Pickford’s persona, as well as her Hollywood history, on an outstanding episode of Patrick Watson’s Witness to Yesterday, and then joined an impressive ensemble cast (including Sandra Oh, Geneviève Bujold and Due South alumnus Callum Keith Rennie) in Don McKellar’s debut as a feature film director, Last Night. Leah landed a great role, playing a Diane Sawyer wannabe in Ken Finkleman’s stunning media-mashing mini-series More Tears, and then landed an even better role as the brainy corporate executive in Rick Mercer’s sly send-up of Canuck show business, Made in Canada – her first significant series and one which would keep her in front of the cameras for the next five years. I myself was juggling two weekly series, Wind at My Back and Power Play, while trying to figure out what else I could fit in. What I had to fit in was another Wave Goodbye Gordon trophy – the Earle Grey Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Canadian Academy of Film & Television, presented at the 1997 Gemini Awards. Barbara Ham had won one a few years earlier. So had Ernie Coombs, TV’s legendary Mr. Dressup, who was no longer dressing up every morning for his audience of preschoolers. So had The Kids in the Hall. And Bruno Gerussi, just the year before, except his had been presented posthumously.

  I checked my pulse.

  As usual, I wanted more. I was writing again, a new idea for a movie about a man who returns home to his family after being on the run for twenty years for a murder he didn’t commit.

  Also, Global Television was doing a series of one-man shows, based on notable short stories, called Spoken Art. The idea was that you would memorize the whole short story and then deliver it to camera. You had two monitors, so you could turn your head a little. My story was called The Clumsy One, written by Ernest Buckler from Nova Scotia, and Charm thought it was the best thing I ever did. It was certainly her favourite. I fell for it because it reminded me of my brother and my family in Grand Falls. But what an interesting piece of work! It’s about a brother who returns home after some time away – he’s now a doctor or a teacher or something like that – and he tells a story about his older brother. The background is that when the time had come to decide who was going to go out in the world, only one of them could go; the other had to stay, to keep the farm going. So the older man has been in the fields, and the younger brother has come back. The whole thing is about the man’s memory of how he had made his brother feel cheap, feel low, feel uneducated, feel ignorant – somehow inferior, somehow unworthy – because on a past visit he had brought two friends home from school with him, and he took part in making fun of the honest labour that his older brother did. And how he has had to live with this all these years, about how badly he made his brother feel.

  I loved doing it. It was such a haunting piece. And I was touched when my peers seemed to share my enthusiasm for it, because they nominated me for two Gemini Awards that year, one for Due South and one for The Clumsy One. Meanwhile, I was still writing, and still juggling key recurring roles in two series. Wind at My Back was one of those splendid period pieces that producers Kevin Sullivan and Trudy Grant did so well. They had made a name for themselves with the Anne of Green Gables franchise and subsequently produced Road to Avonlea, which was a great success both in Canada and the United States Wind at My Back was set in the Depression with a stellar cast headed by Shirley Douglas and Kathryn Greenwood. What was not so stellar, in my opinion, were the scripts, which proved to be just a bit too windy for me. I played Leo McGinty, the owner of the town pawnshop, a former suitor of May Bailey (Shirley) and her late husband John’s prospecting partner. Which all in all sounded very promising. But I couldn’t find the same promise in the scripts.

  “They’re better if you read them all the way through,” said series’ creator Kevin Sullivan, who was writing most of them.

  Really? Was reading them all the way through going to make my part any better? Or even any bigger? It never had in the past. Just reading my part was a habit I’d gotten into, and I was quite comfortable with it, thank you very much. Until one episode we were shooting called for a group of miners to sit down at a table with Shirley Douglas, to talk about saving the mine. The director was blocking out the scene for camera moves as we rehearsed, and suggested I join Shirley and the miners at the table.

  “No, that doesn’t feel right,” I said. “I’m a shopkeeper, not a miner. I think I should just stand back here, behind them, leaning against this wall. That way I can convey my concern for them without imposing on them – you know, invading their space.”

  The director nodded sagely. “All right,” he said, “but what are you going to do with the blind man?”

  I blinked.

  I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

  “No problem,” I said with a shrug. “He can lean too.”

  “All right then,” he agreed. At which point one of our best and tallest actors, Richard Donat, joined us on set sporting opaque black glasses and a standard-issue white cane.

  The blind man cometh.

  “You have to take my hand, Gordon,” Richard whispered. “I’m blind.”

  I took his hand, guided him gently to our starting position, and managed to keep a straight face for the entire scene.

  Later, of course, I couldn’t resist sharing the incident with Charm and Leah. Charm found the whole thing hysterically funny. Leah, not so much.

  “Daddy,” she said sternly, “you’ve got to start reading the whole script
!”

  After a few more episodes I finally asked Kevin Sullivan to put me out of my misery. Charm was in the series too, playing a schoolteacher. She called from the set to tell me that they had killed me off.

  “You’re dead,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Traffic accident.”

  A few months later I was amused when the Academy nominated me for a Gemini for my work on the show. I’m sure Kevin and Trudy were amused too.

  I was especially pleased when I got to do a guest shot in my daughter’s television series. I played the alcoholic star of the series being produced by the film company run by Leah and Peter Keleghan. Playing a drunk can be funny at a certain age, when you know you can get away with it. I knew Peter, of course, from our Red Green days; I didn’t know that he and Leah were destined to be together, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t know that either. Not then. When the series ended they asked me to come back again, to play the phoney-folksy conglomerate shopper who buys the company and fires them all – Rick, Leah, Peter – in the last episode.

  Made in Canada was another series, like Due South, where everything was in place, everybody was totally committed to what they were doing. You felt that you could go and do your thing, because you knew that you were in good hands, and you didn’t have to worry or try to compensate for anybody else, because they were just as ready as you were, except maybe even more so. Rick Mercer and his partner Gerald Lunz epitomize that high calibre of professionalism. It’s always great to be invited to be part of a project of that nature, and again, to work with people you know and admire and trust. Because it’s not often that way. It’s mostly not that way.

  In Power Play I played an over-the-hill NHL hockey coach, and I actually got to work with Don Cherry. We had one scene together. I walked towards him and he walked towards me, and I immediately started to speak, and he immediately answered, and we finished the scene.

  I said, “That was great, Don.”

  He said, “WHAAAAT?? … WAS THAT IT??”

  I said, “Yes, Don – YES, DON, THAT WAS IT.”

  “OH,” he said, “THAT WAS LIKE REAL!”

  Michael Riley played the lead, a burned-out sports agent. I had never worked with him before but I was very impressed with him and the way he committed the scripts to memory. At the first read-through he would always arrive with copious notes, on different coloured pages; he would save all the different colours, all the different versions of each script as it evolved. Not a lot of people knew how much he was putting into it, how he kept trying to make it better and better. But I knew, and a few others knew. Between the role he had to play and his desire to make the most of every moment, his workload was enormous. So he was the first guy I called when CBC gave me the green light for Win, Again.

  Win, Again was a true labour of love. It was the story of Win Morrisey, a man who has been on the run for twenty years for a murder he didn’t commit. New evidence has proven him innocent, and Win is anxious to return home, but not many in town, including his wife and son, are as anxious to see him. I took on the lead role – I had created it for myself – and brought in Eric Till to direct. But I purposely made it easy on myself by casting three terrific actors – Gabrielle Rose as my wife, Leah as my daughter (not too much of a stretch), and Michael – and the end result was, if I do say so myself, funny, touching, entertaining, and uplifting. Cheered by the response of both the audience and the Nielsen ratings, CBC drama executives seemed to agree with my contention that Win, Again had all the right stuff for a weekly series. What none of us knew at the time was that most of those same executives would be swept out the door in a major management shuffle. New regime, new broom, new faces, new ideas, and not much regard for the recommendations of the previous brooms.

  Hello, new world. Goodbye, Win, Again. And yes, Irving Berlin – I agree. It’s like no other business I know.

  I decided I would write something completely new and fresh and unexpected. And I did. And for the first time ever, the computer ate my homework. The script was almost finished when it crashed, and when that happened, I crashed too. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore, jump into that particular fray again. Certain things were not as ready-made for me as they once had been. The phone wasn’t ringing the way it once did. I wasn’t ready to go out there like a bag lady. Please read my wares! Please watch my work! Please accept me again! I felt extremely vulnerable. It wasn’t something I could easily explain, even to my family. I certainly couldn’t explain it to other actors, most of whom had never had the kind of luck I’ve had. So I felt very much alone. I took it all so seriously at that time.

  And then they announced the nominees for the 1999 Gemini Awards, and I thought, Okay, maybe I can hang in a little longer.*

  Meanwhile, something exciting was happening on stage at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. The premiere of Janet Munsil’s Emphysema (A Love Story) opened September 29, 1998, after six preview performances. Directed by Diana Leblanc, the play was based on an actual meeting between fifty-three-year-old British writer Kenneth Tynan and the seventy-one-year-old screen actress Louise Brooks, best known for playing Lulu in the film classic Pandora’s Box. Playing Louise Brooks was a challenge Charm found irresistible – especially since the producers wanted Leah to play the young Louise Brooks in onstage flashbacks. Leah had just won rave reviews playing the news anchor in the CBC mini-series More Tears, and Frank Moore, a stage veteran with a voice as powerful as Charm’s, was set to co-star as Kenneth Tynan.

  It was an extraordinary opportunity for Charm, to be working with her daughter onstage, coming and going to the theatre with her every night, not to mention being able to watch her daughter from the wings, even if they couldn’t have any scenes together.

  A lot of that sexy, smoky voice of Charm’s was the result of years of whiskey and cigarettes. She was seriously addicted to nicotine. She knew it, of course, and had finally had to quit. And from that point on, even when she hit rough spots in her life, personally or professionally, she was still able to resist reaching for a smoke.

  What she couldn’t resist was a great part in a good play.

  Louise Brooks had smoked like a chimney – the way Charmion King had once smoked – and no one involved with the production had any concerns about being politically correct. So Charm, as Louise, would be smoking onstage.

  When rehearsals began Charm and Frank Moore started out with herbal cigarettes, but the playwright was unhappy, and so was the director. They wanted the audience to smell the real thing.

  Charm hadn’t had a cigarette for fifteen years. But it was a great part. So she thought about it, and thought about it, and finally said, “It’s okay, it’s all right, I can do this.” But she couldn’t, of course. She had convinced herself that she could stop again after the play was over, but she couldn’t, and by the time the curtain came down on that last performance she was smoking as much as she ever had. Maybe more.

  I’ve tried very hard to forgive them for pushing her into it. I haven’t quite managed it yet. Because in the end, that’s what did her in: Emphysema. The disease and the play.

  * The Dora Mavor Moore Awards, named for the beloved theatre pioneer, are presented annually in Toronto and are the Canadian equivalent of Broadway’s Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards.

  * From “Rose Marie,” music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, from the operetta Rose Marie (1924).

  * Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series: Gordon Pinsent for Win, Again. Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series: Gordon Pinsent for Win, Again. Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Supporting Role in a Dramatic Series: Gordon Pinsent for Power Play.

  a turn of the century

  SOMEHOW THE YEAR 2000 MANAGED TO SNEAK UP ON me. Not that we were completely oblivious to all that manufactured Y2K panic. But we were, you know, working. So when July rolled around, and I hit seventy, I was rather shocked by the whole th
ing.

  “I wasn’t expecting to make it to seventy,” I told Charm.

  She shrugged. “It happens.”

  She herself was only a week away from her seventy-fifth birthday, but she was also starring in a new play by Claudia Dey at the Factory Theatre, doing a guest stint on Don McKellar’s quirky CBC series Twitch City, and getting ready to play Rose Kennedy to Jill Hennessy’s Jackie in a TV movie called Jackie, Ethel, Joan: The Women of Camelot. Leah was still shooting Made in Canada with Rick Mercer and Peter Keleghan, and she and Peter were waiting for Ken Finkleman to finish the script for a Newsroom movie spin-off.

  Charm and I saw the end of Leah’s eleven-year marriage to Michael Capellupo, a talented actor and writer, but before they broke up Michael had written a short film called A Promise, a father-and-daughter drama for Leah and me, with a cameo by Charm. One of Leah’s pals from The Bay Boy, actor Peter Spence, wanted to produce it and persuaded a few others, including rising feature film entrepreneur Daniel Iron, to produce it with him. Once they put it together, we shot the whole thing in a couple of days, and it turned out to be the one and only time all three of us – Charm, Leah, and me – would be in the same movie together.

  I had two shiny new Geminis, one for performing in Power Play, one for writing Win, Again. I hit the road once more, flying into Newfoundland to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of The Rowdyman in Corner Brook. Was it possible? Had it really been three decades? Larry and I were still working actors. So was Linda Goranson, who was now doing more theatre than film. But Will Geer was long gone. So was Ben McPeek, who had composed the score for the film. And so was Peter Carter, who directed it. So there were lots of toasts to absent friends. Around the same time, my union, ACTRA, celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, and I hitched a ride on Air Canada to join festivities in Calgary. My fellow ACTRA members in Alberta gave me a lovely gift just for showing up, a beautiful ceramic bowl. When I got home Charm took one look at it and placed it in the centre of our kitchen table, so we could be sure to see it every day.