Only one, a smartly turned-out sexpot, had it right. She’d cut her session with the producers short, making it easy for everyone, with this character-revealing intro: “I play whores!” she said. No one worked more, apparently. Sixteen hours a day. Two hours in front of the camera, and fourteen in the backs of limos.
The others entered one at a time; in and out, living up to their milk-faced appearance and body language, and leaving me bullet-eyed and experience-laden by God. As they came out of the office one by one, I wanted to thank them for failing, but it might have them heading for open window exits.
My turn. Entering – thinking much taller than I actually was, and dipping my head to avoid the door size – I made the most of each step from door to desk, imagining my shoes were size elevens and planting them in front of the producer types. I had planned to laser my eyes along them – American Producer, Co-producer, Director, an especially pretty lady Writer, and Casting couple – with the hope of mesmerizing them long enough to have them cast me in their partially interesting film. Instead, I was quickly asked how I was.
“Good.” I said. (Recalling not to overdo my replies, having made that mistake on too many other occasions.)
“Did you have a chance to read the script?” said the Director.
“Read it? I ate it,” I answered, quite sure that my classically trained projection would cause the lady Writer to caress herself.
“I’m sorry,” said she. “Didn’t quite hear.”
(What? This to Caesar, for Christ’s sake! This to a voice that I would usually have to pull back in a three-thousand-seat theatre, stuffy little shit, with – on second thought – thick legs?)
“Oh, yes!” I said. “Loved it! Exciting! Fell right into it! Amazing material! Totally unusual! Never read anything like it.” (Couldn’t stop by now.) “You wait a long time for this kind of thing! Felt we were all on a great journey together. By the time I finished, I was them and they were me. Knew them and could play them. Any one of them. All of them! Loved them! Backwards.”
(Too much. Said too much. Too loud as well. They had to hold down their fluttering sheets. But so what? I needed that much to make it sound truthful.)
The male Co-Producer spoke next. He was short. All of them were. Short. Good. Kept thinking that as I continued to overpower. Now, I was even taller. Really, really tall. What if I fell over from this height?
“How tall are you?” said a Bela Lugosi.
Couldn’t believe my ears.
“How tall d’ya want me to be? I can be any height. An actor can do that.”
“Yeah,” said a cigar, “But the camera can only do so much!’ ”
“No,” I offered. “It’s called IMAGINATION.”
Whoa, Nellie. Producer-types must not be made to seem asshole-ish on such short notice.
What look will I give them now? A stare, a double stare. A take, a double take, a freeze take and a fade-away squint. Oh God, I love this business. Look at what you can do with a fade-away squint: It can say “Come on” or “I’ll be in the bar at five.” Thick Legs should be so lucky.
Not important now. Focus now.
Pushing my fingers through my thick mane, I rolled it back, sort of, taking myself to the fifties or sixties when the story was set.
“Do you have a rug?” asked the little shit next to him.
“A RUG? I can ACT hair!”
Too loud? Who cares? I didn’t take this trip across town after a terrible night’s sleep and a go at self-hypnosis to be treated like fucking Oliver Twist.
After a series of mumbled goodbyes and one thank-you, I stayed just long enough to ask them where the can was, and got out of there, capping the meeting with a fart. Not silent and odourless, but memorable, colourful, warlike in its audacity. And Canadian, buddy! One that, when closing the door behind me, would cause them to head for the plane.
All in a day’s work.
* “Putting It Together,” music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, from the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984).
working on the dream
WHEN YOU GET OLDER YOU CAN’T ALWAYS SEE AS WELL, especially the distances. But you get to see deeper.
Now I realize what a good family I was born into. None of us, neither my brothers nor my sisters nor I, were ever really great family people, even though we had a terrific family, as it turns out. Our lives didn’t allow for a love of playtime. And certainly we were not demonstrative. We certainly didn’t stop to say, Don’t we have a great family. And now I’m truly able to look back on those days, and those times, and think those things.
My three sisters were wonderful. Hearing them laugh when they got together, when they were all in the same room, was sheer delight. And as they grew up and started to make lives for themselves, they had a chance to laugh more, and enjoy life more. I remember one time standing in our kitchen in the house we grew up in, when my oldest sister, Nita, was visiting my younger sister Lilith – Lilith Leah – and they were all crowded into the living room, with Lilith’s children, watching an old movie with Shirley Temple, on this little black-and-white television. They were transfixed by it, and Nita looked over at me, as I was standing in the kitchen watching them, and mouthed the words, Shirley. Temple! Isn’t. That. Wonderful? Because Shirley Temple was in our living room in Grand Falls.
I have fond memories of my brother Harry from those bygone days. Harry’s wife was a divorcee with three children – a wonderful girl, Dot, just the best – and after they married she got pregnant with twins, and so within one year he gained five children! And this for a man who never wanted to get married. “Harry,” I told him, “you’re never going to be able to close your eyes again!” Little did I know they would have nine more children. But Harry has developed a fascinating relationship with all fourteen of them. One of his grown children will come in and say, “Dad, the fence in the back is practically falling down. You really should do something about that.” And Harry will say, “No, no, there’s nothing wrong with that fence, it’s just fine the way it is, and I don’t want to hear any more about it.” And the next thing you know it’s fixed.
He tells me he has four computers now. Four. How did he acquire four computers? Simple. He kept telling his kids, “No, no, I don’t want to get into all that Internet stuff.” How ingenious is that!
One day a parade was passing by his house, and there he was, out on the sidewalk, nodding his head ever so slightly in time with the marching bands. I think the neighbours were surprised to see him, because Harry is not a flag-waving, parade-viewing kind of guy. What they failed to notice at first was that Harry was standing there with a shovel behind his back, and when the last cluster of horses finally paraded past him, Harry got to work with his shovel and added a few wagonloads of fresh, still-warm horse manure to his garden mulch.
Harry has an exceptionally dry sense of humour. He’s very much a man’s man – pulls a moose out of the woods every year, that sort of thing. Says to Dot one day, after he’s been tramping through the woods, “I really need to soak my feet.” So she gets him a big pan of boiling water, and he soaks his feet ’til they’re ready to come out, and she goes to hand him the towel, and he says, “Dot, Mom always wiped my feet on her hair.” Of course, she caught on to him over the years, the longer they were together. But you really had to watch yourself around him. Because he could say the most outrageous things and make them sound absolutely normal.
“Do you know Raymond Burr?” he asked me one day.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Oh, too bad,” he said. “Dot’s watching reruns of Perry Mason and she just loves the guy. If I could get a picture of Raymond Burr signed to Dot …”
“Well, let me make a few calls,” I said. I called a friend in L.A. and asked him to go to Raymond Burr’s office on the Universal lot and see if he could make it happen. And he did. And he sent it to me. And I put it in another envelope and passed it on to Harry.
“Gordon, thank you so much for that pic
ture of Raymond Burr!” said Dot. “You must’ve gone to a lot of trouble!”
I was about to say “no trouble at all,” but then of course I remembered she lived with Harry.
“Well, the Raymond was easy,” I said, “but the Burr was a bit difficult.” And Dot slapped me and said, “You bugger! You two buggers!” And I thought Harry was going to fall off his chair laughing.
By the time I left home Harry had already taken over the family reins, and my sisters were already married. All three had gotten married in the last two years of the war. And Haig was, well, Haig. He was just two years older than me, and he worked in the paper mill until he was old enough to leave. I left just after Haig left. He got married, started a family, then joined the Air Force, then came back home. One day he said to me: “You think you’re the dreamer! I’ve always been a dreamer.” I regret not having tried harder to create and spend a closer time together; and perhaps shifted life around a bit more to make that happen. I miss him greatly now in later years, and have, as it turns out, not enough memories to make the rounds with.
In his day Haig was a clever boy, and a clever man. Perry Rosemond described my brothers and sisters as “equalizers” who kept my feet on the ground. Haig embraced the assignment of keeping me humble with unabashed gusto, and over time it became something of a hobby for him. When CBC did that Life & Times profile on me a dozen years or so ago, Haig was more than happy to lay it on the line. “We’ve always said, you never really know yourself ’til you come home,” he told the CBC interviewer. “We would never let him get above himself. We’d cut him off and say Who the hell who d’ya think you are! … this type of thing. So when he came home, he knew it. He got put in his place.”
I had left the Rock because I was looking to live a thousand different lives. When I look back now I can’t help but wonder – did my brothers and sisters ever have time to consider other lives as an option for themselves? I don’t know if the older members of my family ever had a chance to stop and look around and think about it. Somehow, I doubt it. And yet, somehow, all three of my children carved out successful careers in the arts, no special thanks to me. I can’t begin to describe the emotional wellspring I experienced on my seventy-fifth birthday, sharing a head table in Grand Falls with Charm, Leah, Beverly, and Barry. What a remarkable family. So much greater than I ever could have hoped for. So much greater than I ever deserved.
Barry and Beverly’s mother, Irene Reid, left us in 2010. I look back at our courtship and our wedding and our marriage, and wonder, What were we thinking? But then I remember how young we were, and how we weren’t thinking of anything much at the beginning, besides being in love. It was such a different time.
The hospice is one of life’s great gifts to us, and the caregivers who work there are just as sweet and kind as we need them to be. Irene was in a hospice at the end. She had been ill for a year and a half, and I called her to say goodbye. I knew she would never call me. She was the last of her family – she was one of nine children – just as Harry and I are the last of ours. And after she passed I was able to talk to Beverly, and bring her some comfort, I hope, giving her my best advice about how to deal with your feelings after you lose someone you love. Before I spoke to Beverly that day I had often wished that I didn’t know quite as much about that subject as I do. But suddenly none of that seemed to matter, and we consoled each other and had a good talk.
Like her sister and brother, Leah continues to grow intellectually and spiritually. Leah has everything her mother had, and more. I cannot tell you the degree to which she improved our lives simply by being part of them. She’s a strong, independent woman with a mind of her own. When I was directing her for a movie we were doing, I said, “How about saying the line this way?” To which she replied, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” But Ken Finkleman and Rick Mercer and some of this country’s top directors seem to like what she gives them. Which is probably why, for her television work alone, she’s already earned six nominations and three Geminis.
As an actor herself she fully understands the vanity that necessarily comes with the job, and how easily that vanity can spiral out of control. She is also blessed with her mother’s wicked, take-no-prisoners sense of humour, which I’m reminded of at least once a week. She started one recent phone conversation by saying, “Hello, Daddy, this call is not about you.” To which I responded, in the most hurt, wounded, and disappointed voice I could muster: “It’s got to be!”
Very early on I advised Leah not to bring her work home with her, so she could maintain a real life as well as the make-believe ones. “Perspective, Leah, perspective,” I would tell her. That, she tells me, has become an invaluable mantra for her. She also tells me that keeping perspective is one of the things I have had the most trouble achieving (or even remembering) in my own life. And I think that’s probably true too. Do what I say, not what I do.
On the other hand, despite seeing Leah shine in dozens of films and television and stage stints, I’m still overprotective. I’m not nearly as obsessed with her safety as I once was, because now she has Peter – her husband, Peter Keleghan – who says all the things I used to say, much to her chagrin. If we’re together and she has to go to a meeting, she may casually mention that she plans to get to her meeting by taxi.
“I’ll call one for you,” I will say.
“No, I’ll go out on the street, I’ll get one for you,” Peter will say.
And she will just look at the two of us and groan. “Please! … I can hail a cab all by myself!”
Peter and I are tied for Gemini wins at the moment. Not that I’d ever dream of competing with a son-in-law. As you can imagine, that’s just not me. No, not at all. Just thought I’d mention it in passing.
In any case, there are three of us again, waiting for the phone to ring. Not just waiting, however. All three of us understand the need to keep things in order, before your life looks like a loose clothesline. Some twenty years ago, in an autobiography called By the Way, I wrote: “Watching your child take some of those same roads and turns as you did years before, and possibly gathering identical scars to yours, can make you hold your breath in a business where less than 2% make a living wage. But even that’s not important these days. Until we square the economy again, we won’t know where anyone stands.”
Pardon my French, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
At the same time, I believe that you can change some things, in an instant. You can say, I’m in charge of me, and I can do this. Lynn Redgrave was diagnosed with cancer, went through the treatment, and had supposedly beaten it. When she found out she had a second cancer, she was in the midst of doing a play on Broadway, and she said something then that has stuck with me to this day. She said, “Why should I stand in my own way? Other people are going to be standing in my way. Why should I?” And that made sense to me. Why should I, of all people, keep standing in my own way? I’ve done it too. We all do it.
A few months ago I woke up in the middle of the night laughing to myself about the absurdity of the Gordon Pinsent Award of Excellence. Now don’t get me wrong – I was genuinely touched when Allan Hawco and Philip Riccio first proposed it. And at time of writing I’ve personally presented it twice now, to two richly deserving honourees, Eric Peterson and Jayne Eastwood, and I look forward to presenting it again. But honours don’t rest easy on Pinsent shoulders. I was raised with values that have stayed with me like a parade. The possibility of being honoured for what you chose to do was simply not on the table. That’s probably why I resisted Lifetime Achievement awards for so long. Lucky for me that no one ever pays any attention to my feeble protests.
Over the years I have collected a lot of trophies and statuettes. And yes, I’ve had more years to collect them than most working actors. But in hindsight, where 20/20 vision is more often than not the norm, there are two or three special moments that still stand out for me above the rest. Why? Because they meant the most to Charm. And they weren’t show business awards. Th
e first moment was when I received my Order of Canada in 1980 from Governor General Edward Schreyer; the second was when I was upgraded to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1998 by Governor General Roméo LeBlanc; and the third came when a group of ACTRA members, including Charm and myself, made our annual trek to Ottawa to lobby our elected masters to increase arts funding. While we were there, some of us paused to watch the proceedings in the House of Commons. When we got up to leave, the Speaker of the House interrupted the proceedings and said, “I want to acknowledge Gordon Pinsent,” and the members stood up spontaneously to cheer. I was stunned, but mostly I was thrilled, because Charm was by my side, shining in the moment. Charm had given so much to me in so many ways during our “actors’ marriage.” She had, with hardly any notice, curtailed her own career, for mine. Yes, to become a mother, but afterwards as well, giving so much encouragement – and, when needed, silence – throughout our lives together, while riding this sometimes terrible and unforgiving horse called “Acting.” She gave me time to climb over and through my own anxieties regarding winning or losing, in this divisive, difficult, hysterical, soul-satisfying, lovely busyness of mad activity, or in a field of dead silence. At the time, I certainly would have hated to face being the one to make that sort of decision; yet there she was, extracting time from her own work, to allow me that same time to spend on mine, without complaint. And she was there with me in the gallery in Ottawa, with a look on her face of utter pride and happiness; yes, for me, but also for the validation of an actor’s acclaim, given in such a bold and satisfyingly public way – and the actor now happily, completely, unmistakably Legitimate.
Awards are funny things. I love them, but I am totally aware of the fact that they cannot love me back. I think that’s why some people find them confusing. So often they seem to say more about the people who give them than about the people who get them.
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