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by Gordon Pinsent

  Julie

  One week later the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television voters rewarded Away from Her with six Genie Awards, including Writing and Directing statuettes for Sarah, Best Supporting Actress for Kristen Thompson, Best Actress and Best Actor for Julie and me, respectively, and Best Picture of the Year. And we were all very happy when Sarah also picked up the special Claude Jutra Award for first-time feature film directors, because we knew she really deserved it. She is such a darling. And so smart. I don’t know if I could imagine her now not having the success she’s had. And she’s done it here. What a girl she is.

  I was surprised by the response to Away from Her. I was happy but surprised to see it received so well globally because the subject matter, up to now at least, has not been a household word, even though we’ve all been touched by it, one way or another. But it was also a great love story, so it was very gratifying to see it get such a great response wherever it played. As any actor will tell you, there is a lack of great material out there. But when you find a project like Away from Her, you just jump at the chance to do it.

  It was close to the end of the show when my friend and fellow ACTRA champion Wendy Crewson, looking every inch a star in her elegant crimson evening gown, presented me with the award for Best Actor. And when she did, all I could think of was how I got there, on that stage, because I had not made the journey alone.

  I looked out into the darkness. “Charm, this is for you,” I said, “as is everything I do and everything I ever will do.”

  She had sat by my side, as glamorous as always, at my seventy-fifth birthday celebration in Grand Falls. A year and a bit later she was at my side again, effortlessly glamorous again, at the September world premiere of Away from Her at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

  “Gordon,” she’d said, “your work in this film is exceptional. I’m so proud of you.”

  Four months later she was gone.

  The great Kate had died in March. Barbara Ham had passed in February. Winter deaths that left us chilled.

  Charmion King Pinsent left us on January 6, 2007, and we were never the same again.

  The Rowdyman. (photo credit 18.1)

  Leah, 5, taking me for a walk. (photo credit 18.2)

  Harry, Haig, me, Lil, Nita, Hazel.

  In Ottawa with Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. (This time I brought my own tie.) (photo credit 18.3)

  At Rideau Hall, receiving my upgrade to Companion of the Order of Canada from Governor General Roméo LeBlanc.

  (photo credit 18.4)

  When it comes to leading ladies, I’ve been lucky. Angie Dickinson in Klondike Fever; Jackie Burroughs in John and the Missus; Julie Christie in Away From Her; and, best of all, Miss Charmion King, who had the wisdom (and, even more remarkably, the patience!) to wait for me to grow up.

  (photo credit 18.5)

  Working with guest star Leslie Nielsen and Paul Gross on Due South. (photo credit 18.6)

  With Leah and Rick Mercer in Made in Canada. Fifteen minutes after this photo was taken I got to fire both of them.

  With Mark Polley, Sarah’s older brother, in A Gift to Last. We were a big hit at home, but in South Africa we were bigger than Dynasty! (photo credit 18.7)

  On screen in 1982 as Edwin Alonzo Boyd. Years later, Charm invited him to tea.

  On the set of A Case of Libel with my attorney Ed Asner.

  Going on record – in this case, a new words-and-music double CD – with Greg Keelor and Travis Good. (photo credit 18.8)

  Going viral on YouTube thanks to 22 Minutes and Justin Bieber.

  * Not the first time Charm’s name would be misspelled in the press. Not the last, either.

  * Daniel Day-Lewis won his Best Actor award (his second) for There Will Be Blood.

  charm school

  What do we do when the clock strikes two

  And we’ve dried up the bars and the wells?

  Where do the scribes go to imbibe

  when they’re drier than old cockleshells?

  Where do they go in the cold, cold snow

  when the heaven’s and hell’s bells knells?

  Well, the heart of my sweet Charmion

  is the place where Pinsent dwells!

  CHARMION KING PINSENT WAS A GREAT ACTRESS, A great mother, and a great wife. And she was more than that. She was my soulmate and my true partner, in everything I did.

  We were not perfect people. Brutally honest when she chose to be, Charm was not shy about acknowledging it. During an on-camera session for a Life & Times biography of me on CBC, she told her interviewer that we’d had three breakups in one five-year period alone.

  “I’ll tell you frankly,” she added, “a lot of it was my own fault. I was drinking at the time. So I think, you know, that was hard to take.”

  She didn’t say, And Gordon has a well-known weakness for flirtations. But she could have. I know my extramarital diversions were hard to take. That period in my life was very hurtful to Charm, and I will always regret it. It certainly put a strain on my relationship with Leah, who to this day remains my toughest, most honest, and most loving critic. Like her mother, Leah is not shy about expressing her true feelings. And, like her mother, she is still the first to come to my defence. In an on-camera interview with filmmaker Barbara Doran for her 2011 documentary, Gordon Pinsent: Still Rowdy After All These Years, Leah partly attributed our breakups to my “rowdiness,” adding that show business could be hard on marriages, “because if you’re a relatively attractive man, or sexy, as some people seem to think, a lot of women don’t stop to think, ‘Oh, you’re married.’ They just don’t care. They just love the attention on them, or vice versa. And that’s very flattering.”

  Yes, Charm and I had some ups and downs, but the ups were so many, and so high, that the downs become more distant in memory every year. I knew when I first saw her that friends of hers would be very lucky people. And I wondered how I would ever get to be a “keeper” too. Maybe she would include me at the trailing end of a smile to others, but anything more than that would not be necessarily needed. She might well show me something about myself that would drop me from contention. Oh God, I hoped not. After we met at the Crest, me the supporting player to her star turn, there were a couple of awkward months of theatre openings and dinners, during which times I didn’t know what pose to assume, so I remained mostly patiently un-decorative, until it was time to leave. The fact that her old friends might not have approved of her new choice mattered not, as she was already through her “eeny-meeny-minies” and I was her “mo.” Lucky, lucky mo.

  We didn’t like being apart. Sometimes it was unavoidable. The jobs were sometimes at opposite ends of the country. There would be the inevitable nightly calls, then opening night wires. We used to send each other telegrams. Telegraph operators were forbidden by law to transmit messages of, shall we say, an overly amorous nature, but nonetheless I’d get away with a tricky one at times: “I’d much rather be at your opening than mine,” one said, and somehow slipped by the regulations.

  Larry Dane used to tease Charm that she was living in a ménage à trois – Charm, Gordon, and Gordon’s Career. It was funny because it was true. When she was on Broadway in Love and Libel, she turned down a Hollywood contract to come back to Canada. She wanted to help build Canadian theatre and Canadian theatre audiences. She did twenty-one productions at the Crest, for about $100 a show. “Labour of love,” she would explain with a shrug. She would have been both amused and pleased, I think, to read obituaries that referred to her as “the Grand Dame of Canadian theatre.”

  Her passion for theatre inevitably reduced her opportunities to shine on big and small screens. And she wasn’t as lucky as I was. When we moved back from L.A. she was very hurt because she didn’t get a part she wanted on King of Kensington. “I couldn’t even get that,” she said. I could hear the deep disappointment in her voice, but she never ever mentioned it again. She was all for wining, but not for whinin
g. So she just became more Charm, more of who she was. Who she was was a wonderful teacher. She considered acting akin to university: “It opens your mind, your soul, and makes you tap into yourself.” She used to say, “We need to tell kids that if your first experience as an actor is working with awful people in a situation that has a rushed and treacherous feel to it all, don’t think for a second that that’s the way the business is. Because there will come a time, maybe even your next time, that will have a standard that you can really look to. You don’t have to look to the standard of the bad experience with the director or whomever. Because the better standard is waiting for you, and when you come across it, you’ll fit like a glove, and this business will become the love of your life.”

  This business was never the love of my life. Charm was. She completed me – in so many ways. Sometimes I would sit in bed like a whimpering child, complaining about the business, and she would remind me about how much I had already accomplished, how much I already had on my resumé that so many others didn’t, and she’d bring me right back again. Because we had history together. I can still remember the two of us standing in the kitchen of our apartment, our arms around each other, watching the tower on top of the old CBC building on Jarvis Street come down. And then we could see the shell, and it seemed as if we knew someone who had worked in every one of those rooms.

  Charm had made sense of this business for everyone she touched. She was a remarkably generous actor. I would overhear her talking on the phone with a producer or director who wanted her for a part she didn’t want to play “No, honestly, it’s just not right for me,” she would be saying, very consolingly. “But you know who you should call?” And then she would give them the name of another actress – a supposed rival, if you will – and then tell them how to reach her. “Because the role is perfect for her, and she’ll do you proud.”

  She could have written the book on being professional in our industry. And she never went off track once. She was just a tremendous guide and friend and partner. She was also one of life’s great naturals when it came to beauty that lasts. She had never flaunted her superb gift of rejuvenation, but it had never failed her ’til closer to the end. She never stopped smoking, but after a while, when it was just too difficult for her to catch her breath, I would take her in to the hospital, at about the same time for about five years in a row, and after her usual, three-day stay, she would not be seen in public or anywhere but her inner mirror, until the sign was there showing her she was back again. I’d never seen anything like it. Leah and I knew that she would have hated to return home only to spend her days with the oxygen attachment. That wasn’t Charm. Not in the slightest. She had believed so very much in the creative spirit, and had succeeded, so expertly, in her comebacks, until it was no longer possible.

  In the early years of our marriage I had a lot of living to do. And a lot of growing up to do. And Charm waited till I got there. She waited for me to grow up, through all those years, all that staggering around, trying to call myself an actor, trying to call myself an artist, waiting for that special door to open. We need margins in life, guidelines, and my life had no margins. Charm was my margins.

  After Charm passed I fell into a most natural state of, well, what’s left? I didn’t want to do anything. And for a while, I didn’t. The world was not the same without her in it. I had spent all these years showing off to Charm. She treated me as a brand-new person every day. Because we were in the business of ideas.

  I kept to myself after she passed. I had said just about everything I had to say to her out loud, so many times, that I guess the time had come to share it with the computer. So, along came The Sculptor, a word-painting of my state of mind. It was about me; about Charm; about us.

  Someone once asked Charm the secret to a good marriage. Charm said, “Laughter, darling. Laughter.” We had kept each other laughing for more than forty years. We always had time for it. It was like a terminal to us. Circled it on many an occasion; got shot at and shot down by things – mostly pertaining to the sea-changing of the business – but we’d get back home and you’d never guess, we were the same people. I’ll take a shot at an example, here.

  We were expecting company. Both sitting in the living room. I was still in my shorts, planning to dive into my slacks just before our guests arrived. We heard a noise outside our front door. “If that’s our company,” said Charm, with her flawless deadpan delivery, “I would tuck that back inside.” Sorry. True.

  I had whistled for her every night when we were doing Madwoman of Chaillot at the Crest. We would continue to whistle for each other for the next four decades.

  I still keep whistling. And I know she still hears me.

  It’s not the same.

  THE SCULPTOR

  He had sculpted her face. She’d liked it.

  Especially the right half.

  “What’s wrong with the left?” he’d asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s more like my cousin’s. You remember her.”

  “I disagree,” he said.

  And though he did, he would kiss the right profile, never the left, whenever passing.

  The closer he burrowed his face into the sculptured face, the truer in nature the more real her clay features became. Not really, of course, because it was less than perfection in reality. But now he was able to think he was breathing with her, and could talk to her as he had always done – close – endearing himself to her and leaving the world behind.

  He would do this easily, and her smile would seem to know what he needed and she of him. And it was a pleasure.

  And with her gone, he’d have words with this image. Especially after a Scotch at cocktail time.

  She must truly be gone, because with the coolness of their place, she would have warmed it by now.

  Each day, he found himself caring less, needing less, moving less, almost breathing less, and missing her more and more. After all, what had he been? Who the hell was he without her? Not enough of himself left to matter anymore. Melting now. No interest in what the calendars were saying, triggering the arrivals of one season after another.

  He’d become careless, his immunity so overdrawn, that anything could invade him, bend him, in ways it would never have been possible. Yet, he didn’t care. Strength wasn’t necessary anymore. What would he use it for? And giving himself over to the weakness in this way was not a frightening thing to him.

  Job offers had vanished from his mind, and everyone with it. Truth is, he didn’t care if he got the job or not. Since losing her, he truly didn’t place importance on anything; and this from a man who had laughed at himself and his foibles louder than anyone. The hiccup in which he had lived was over two-thirds done anyway. How lame was it now, in its humorous staging, after he’d been broadsided with mortality.

  Without her, ordinary pain would be nothing to bear. It would be fun to wish for a wicked toothache, a crashing migraine, a stinging slap in the face, a pinch, a whack from a door, or a newly acquired broken limb, all former enjoyable things as well: the tang of salsa, smell of wet spruce, pine and fir. All jokes now, worthy of applause to God. All replaced now, with the stupidity of conversation with a boring person quiet enough to block out the noise of the world, a scar left over, so quickly forgotten after the welcome, momentary intensity of the initial pain? Promised sensations paid off in fleabites, as if they’d never happened. Gone the way of all things. Strongly tasted, and gone.

  Most of all, he hated to think less of himself than she did. And didn’t go out a lot. Friends had seen them together; envied the match, saw the great thing they had; why would they want to see one without the other?

  Her greatness, her beauty, her mind, the world of love in her eyes for him, a daily thing, was not to be worn out by side-long glances of sympathy or cheap curiosity in a theatre lobby. What he had, was his; and he still knew he could reach out and touch her at any time – privately or publicly – when his heart needed warming off hers. But he didn’t owe any of them anyth
ing right now. He owed her. Even now; because he always thought that everything belonged to everyone – anyone – but himself. The things surrounding him at all times in his early life or mid-to-late life – especially her – were always far beyond what he might expect to be his.

  That night – turning in at an hour that would have been unheard of for him in his life – he thought he’d read, before falling off. The following night, he did so again. The eyes had always been good, had never needed help. But now a squinting had taken place, and this found him looking for – and miraculously finding – a pair of old spectacles. He knew right where he’d find them – in the cedar closet – and went straight for them, as if they were his own, and he’d merely misplaced them. He put them on, and wore them as if they were ordered for him. Just right for the small print of the bedside bible.

  Other than the eyes, everything about him seemed stronger. He saw nothing wrong with talking to himself.

  At the very moment that she died, he was robbed of his proper mind. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time for fear of wanting to never wake again, which would be fine with him, but hateful to her in her thinking.

  He had remained in their place afterwards, as he wanted to, and he was sure that she was still with him, as her scent had remained, at any time of day or night. Her voice had clung as well, and told him there was no great difference in her going, to prod him that he should keep on. They hadn’t spoken of this. He was far more the child when dealing with this sort of thing, but it was different with her. “It’s okay, get over yourself!” she’d say. The understanding of death was deeper and more naturally in her bones than in his. He was not ready. Not nearly ready for shit like dying. Would never be. Oh hell no. That’s what doors were for, to keep things out, like death. That’s what songs were for as well; about lasting love. EVER lasting love. Yes, there were deaths of friends, and their funerals, and they would attend, but he had perfected a practice not to take them in completely. He’d always look for scraps of amusement about them. These moments were not always available of course. On one occasion, they had left a funeral with another grieving friend, whose idea of dying equalled the perfection of the best movie he’d ever seen.