Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Franca had barely unpacked before beginning an arduous regimen of recruiting and training dancers, staging promotional promenade concerts, organizing a summer school, and setting off on a national audition tour. All that activity was essential if she was going to whip her uneven but enthusiastic new company into shape for its opening a scant nine months later, on November 12, 1951, at Toronto’s Eaton Auditorium.

  Word of Franca and the fledgling ballet company spread quickly; there were news reports of four Yugoslavian dancers who had defected with their ballet shoes from behind the recently hung Iron Curtain and stories of British ballerinas who had come here as war brides, wanting to audition for Franca. Her principal male dancer was David Adams, a Canadian whose work she knew from London. He insisted that his wife, Lois Smith, be part of the package. Together Adams and Smith became the stars of the new company — until his roving feet and wandering eye broke up the marriage and he left the company to dance again in England.

  The company’s debut program at the Eaton Auditorium featured an abundance of Franca, as dancer, choreographer, and artistic director. Writing in the Globe and Mail, an ecstatic Herbert Whittaker concluded: “A rousing stamping performance of Kokine’s Prince Igor brought to a conclusion the first full-fledged Canadian National Ballet and one left Eaton’s auditorium with a happy feeling that Celia Franca had got her dancers off to a strong start.” He went on to extol the “quality of the music” that she “had managed to instill in the young dancers from Winnipeg, Edmonton, London, Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere west and east. This is a national ballet in those points of origin, and it behaved itself like one last night.”

  CELIA FRANKS WAS born on June 25, 1921, in the East End of London, England, the second child and only daughter of two Jewish Polish immigrants, Solomon Frankelstein and his wife, Gertrude (née Morris). Her father, who anglicized his name to Franks, made his living as a shoe salesman and then a tailor. His daughter also changed her name — to the more Italian-sounding Franca — shortly after Germany and Britain went to war in 1939.

  Even as a small child, Celia wanted to dance, gripping her mother’s hand at the cinema when she was “just a tiny tot” and pleading to go on the stage. At a reception for her aunt’s wedding, four-year-old Celia made such a nuisance of herself dancing around the tables that the bandleader told her mother to organize ballet lessons — the first time, Franca said later, she had heard the word that would encompass her life’s work.

  Her mother followed the bandleader’s advice and took Celia to the Guildhall School of Music in London’s East End, where she was admitted to study music, dance, theatre, and elocution. As well she absorbed heavy doses of self-discipline and a respect for excellence. She won a scholarship in dancing at six and another in piano when she was eleven, the same year she was awarded a fellowship at the Royal Academy of Dance.

  Her father despaired that she would never be able to support herself through dancing, a skepticism that brought out the Franca steel — the same determination she would call upon so many times during her tenure with the National Ballet of Canada. Having heard about Spread It Abroad, a musical starring Dorothy Dickson, Hermione Gingold, and Michael Wilding, she showed up at the auditions for chorus girls. She scarcely looked the part, with her straight, dark hair cut in a bob with bangs across her forehead, dressed in her school uniform, her ballet bag slung over her shoulder.

  The directors were looking for tap dancers, a skill she had never been taught. Undaunted, she told the pianist to play the same music that the previous applicant had requested — Jerome Kern’s “I Won’t Dance,” from the 1933 musical Roberta — and “I just improvised.” She got the job, mainly because the choreographer, bored by all the dyed blondes he’d auditioned, looked at her feet instead of her face.

  Spread It Abroad, which marked her first appearance at the Saville Theatre, also let her hone her teaching skills by coaching one of the principal actors, who’d been given a little dance number to execute. Her doubting father changed his tune when he learned that his dancing daughter was adding three pounds a week to the family coffers.

  She joined the corps de ballet of Ballet Rambert (now the Rambert Dance Company) in early 1937. Founded in 1926, it is the oldest dance company in Britain. She was a soloist and the company’s leading dramatic dancer when she joined the Three Arts Ballet in 1939, although she continued to dance for Rambert in their lunchtime ballets during the Blitz. When German planes were spotted over London, the management would hold air-raid warning signs above the orchestra pit. “It was always so satisfying to find that nobody in that audience ever got up to go to the shelter,” she said in a CBC interview in 1974. “I can remember saying at that time that I am so glad to have chosen this profession because all you can do is give pleasure to people. You can’t kill anybody by dancing on the stage.”

  In 1941 she became a member of Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet), where she excelled as a dramatic ballerina in roles such as the Queen in Hamlet, the prostitute in Miracle in the Gorbals, the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle, the spider in The Spider’s Banquet, and the Prelude in Les Sylphides.

  After the war she joined Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet as a choreographer and achieved acclaim by creating the ballet Khadra, with an Oriental setting to music by Jean Sibelius. The next year she presented Bailemos, with a Spanish motif, and joined Ballets Jooss for its last tour of the European continent, teaching ballet in exchange for training in modern dance. Then she joined the short-lived Metropolitan Ballet Company as a soloist and ballet mistress. It was there that she began choreographing for television, creating the first two ballets — Eve of St. Agnes and Dance of Salomé — that were ever commissioned by the BBC.

  Chance intervened in 1950 when a trio of Canadian balletomanes — Eileen Woods, Sydney Mulqueen, and Pearl Whitehead — sent an envoy to England to ask de Valois’s advice on starting a Canadian classical company. She urged them to speak with Franca, describing her as “probably the finest dramatic dancer the ‘Wells’ ever had.” Although some have suggested that de Valois was hoping to rid herself of a potential rival, Franca snapped up the all-expenses-paid invitation to attend the Third Annual Canadian Ballet Festival in November 1950. Three months later she was back in Canada, having left behind a career, a former husband — the dancer and choreographer Leo Kersley — and a devastated postwar Britain. In a leap worthy of a prima ballerina’s jeté she embraced the unknown and the chance to create something new in a barren cultural landscape.

  Franca got a job as a file clerk at Eaton’s to support herself and briefly married Bert Anderson, a keyboard musician and manager of the box office at the Eaton Auditorium. She also forged an alliance with Betty Oliphant, a British war bride, who was the proprietor of a small dance school and a founding member of the Canadian Dance Teachers’ Association.

  In the company’s second season, Franca hired Oliphant as ballet mistress, the beginning of a long and often fractious association. Franca trained her dancers by her own example and in annual summer-school sessions, but she longed for a more intensive training program and argued for the creation of a permanent ballet school at the 1958 annual general meeting. She was supported by the late Eddie Goodman, who had been dragooned onto the board and had chaired the management committee (which usually meant staving off creditors and hitting up his friends for financial contributions) since the ballet’s founding. “Without Eddie Goodman, there would be no National Ballet [Company],” Franca said in a 2005 interview.

  Even before the school opened its doors in 1959 in a former Quaker meeting house, Goodman recognized that the school and the company should be separate entities, although they were linked through the working relationship between Oliphant, the school’s principal, and Franca as the founding director of the school and founder of the company. Today there are still debates about which was the more significant achievement, the school that trained the likes of Karen Kain and
Veronica Tennant or the company that cultivated and showcased their talent across the country and in international venues. “Celia Franca had a dream, but I made it a reality,” Oliphant sniffed in an interview in 1984, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school’s founding.

  During her twenty-three-year tenure as artistic director, Franca danced leading roles herself and brought in guest artists including Lynn Seymour, Erik Bruhn, and Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev’s lavish $400,000 The Sleeping Beauty in 1972 threatened to bankrupt the company, but it attracted international attention, made a star of Karen Kain, the young dancer Nureyev picked to be one of his Auroras, and eventually put the company in the black.

  Franca relied on the classics she had learned during her dance career in England, and called up on the choreographic talents of her English friends, such as John Cranko and Antony Tudor. She presented his Offenbach in the Underworld, calculating that the racy cancan dance would draw in men who wouldn’t normally attend the ballet. She even created ballets herself (Cinderella and The Nutcracker). In 1973, she and Bruhn collaborated on the National Ballet’s classic production of Les Sylphides.

  The National Ballet nabbed international headlines in the news rather than the arts pages in June 1974, when Mikhail Baryshnikov, the star of the Kirov Ballet, defected in Toronto while on a North American tour. After receiving political asylum, he came out of seclusion to dance La Sylphide with Veronica Tenant for the National Ballet. He then moved to the United States, where he joined the American Ballet Theatre.

  By then Franca was worrying about defections of a different sort. She had leapt from one financial crisis to another and admitted that she could be a “tyrant.” But throughout her time as artistic director, she stressed the importance of developing Canadian choreography, taking more than thirty Canadian ballets into the repertoire and starting the National Ballet’s choreographic workshops. She served on the jury of the Fifth International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1970 and in the same capacity at the Second International Ballet Competition in Moscow three years later.

  Franca also took the company across Canada and the United States and to Mexico, Japan, and Europe, simultaneously creating a strong international reputation and seeing that the company remained worthy of its fame. Performing in the 1970s in London, her old jeté ground, was the highlight of her travels with the company, because it meant that “we have been accepted as an established ballet company and we don’t have to run around proving it.”

  While she had built a company of stellar dancers, she had not created a choreographer of equal merit — a point U.S. critic Clive Barnes made pointedly in 1971 when he opined that the company lacked a “genuine creative spark” and needed “a choreographer as badly as the Sahara needs rain.” In retrospect it was obvious that the spark was there in James Kudelka, who arrived at the ballet school as an eleven-year-old boy, danced as a member of the company, left to expand his choreographic opportunities, and then returned as artistic director from 1996 to 2005 — a tenure that saw him mount several of his own ballets, including The Contract, An Italian Straw Hat, The Actress, and The Firebird, as well as new interpretations of Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Cinderella.

  After more than twenty years at the helm, Franca decided to share the artistic directorship with arts administrator David Haber for the 1973–74 season and then to step down, although she insisted later that she had merely wanted a sabbatical. With Franca gone, Oliphant quarrelled with Haber and resigned her position as associate director, which led the board to fire Haber after only a year as artistic director. Franca stepped back into the breach temporarily as artistic director and then stayed on as a teacher and coach until Alexander Grant was appointed to the position in 1976.

  By then Franca had moved to Ottawa with her third husband, James Morton, a clarinettist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and announced plans to write her memoirs. She returned to the NBC to dance Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet with Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn, a gala performance of John Cranko’s version set to music by Sergei Prokofiev. In 1978 the People’s Republic of China invited her to teach and give lectures in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, in a tour so successful she was asked back again two years later. Although she continued to live in Ottawa, where she was in demand as a coach and teacher and as co–artistic director of the School of Dance, she returned to the National Ballet to produce a thirty-fifth anniversary gala performance at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre in 1986, and to stage Judgment of Paris in 2002.

  The “Haber business,” as Franca called it, and public bickering over dancer Kimberley Glasco’s forced retirement during James Kudelka’s era as artistic director caused a major rift between the two prima donnas of Canadian ballet. Oliphant and Franca ceased speaking and publicly traded insults until Franca was able to enjoy the ultimate revenge: outliving Oliphant, who died in July 2004. “Betty became jealous of my position,” she said in a 2006 documentary. “She wanted to be the big queen bee and I had made her as big a queen bee as I possibly could. I made her director of the National Ballet School and that was as much as I was prepared to do for Betty.”

  Her many honours included the Molson Prize and being made a Companion of the Order of Canada. The National Arts Centre organized a gala performance for her eightieth birthday in Ottawa in 2001. The National Ballet School named part of its new facility the Celia Franca Ballet Centre in 2004. Karen Kain, who had succeeded Kudelka as artistic director of the NBC, dedicated the 2005–06 season — the company’s first as a principal tenant of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts — to her mentor.

  In August 2006 Franca made an elegant final appearance in Toronto for a screening of Celia Franca: Tour de Force, a documentary made by her former dancer Veronica Tennant. Already bedridden after a series of falls and in chronic pain, she arrived — elegant as ever, sitting in a wheelchair as though it were merely a stage prop — at the Carlu, the contemporary update of the Eaton Auditorium, where she had staged the National Ballet’s first performance half a century earlier. That was the swan song of the woman who had trained and exhorted generations of young dancers and created an internationally renowned ballet company out of hope, tenacity, and ambition. Back home in Ottawa, her dancer’s body was painfully wearing out. Finally she was admitted to hospital, where, after visits with some of her favourite dancers, she quietly died on February 19, 2007. She was eighty-five.

  Ken Thomson

  Business Magnate and Art Collector

  September 1, 1923 – June 12, 2006

  A MAN OF small economies and grand generosities, media magnate and art collector Kenneth Thomson was Canada’s richest man and ninth-wealthiest in the world. When he inherited the Thomson media empire in 1976, many thought that he was merely a pallid version of his father, Roy Thomson, first Lord Thomson of Fleet. In fact, the two men were very different, a fact that the senior Thomson acknowledged to colleagues when he said about his son, “He is so full of goodness he will be successful” in managing the company and looking after the family.

  Roy Thomson was a gambler and an opportunist who loved making deals, an extrovert with an ego to match. A barber’s son, he started out poor and was in his forties before he achieved financial success. He was almost eighty when he joined the North Sea oil and gas consortium that made him fabulously wealthy in the 1970s.

  By contrast, his son was shy, private, extremely modest, and much more focused. Although he was keenly interested in business, Ken Thomson’s job, as he saw it, was to serve as steward of the empire on behalf of his family and the shareholders of the Thomson Corporation. “Roy was more the entrepreneur, the tycoon, the guy who saw opportunities and propelled the business beyond anything else. Ken truly was a builder,” according to Geoff Beattie, deputy chairman of Thomson and president of the Woodbridge Company Ltd., the Thomson family’s private holding company. “In business, people are either traders or builders. Traders are looking for things and tryin
g to move from opportunity to opportunity, whereas Ken was someone who saw opportunities, but more in the context of wanting to stay the course. He was not an impatient guy, because he had tremendous confidence that if you keep doing good things, more good things will happen.”

  What father and son shared, according to the late John Tory, the lawyer who worked for them both for half a century, was shrewdness and an ability to distinguish between owning a company and running one. Neither Thomson was a micro-manager; both encouraged consensus and risk-taking and were loyal and committed to the professional managers in their employ. “They both realized that you couldn’t do everything yourself, so you had to have good people and to provide them with really strong support and to trust them.”

  After his father’s death from a stroke in London in August 1976, Thomson inherited vast holdings and a hereditary title — Baron Thomson of Fleet, of Northbridge in the City of Edinburgh — for which his father had happily renounced his Canadian citizenship a dozen years earlier. Typically, the younger Thomson found a way to remain himself and to accede to his father’s wishes. “In London, I’m Lord Thomson. In Toronto, I’m Ken,” he told writer David Macfarlane in a profile in Saturday Night magazine in 1980. Although Thomson never sat in the House of Lords, he did allow to having two sets of Christmas cards and two sets of stationery, one for each country. Bizarrely, considering Thomson’s significance in Canadian life, he was never inducted into the Order of Canada or the Business Hall of Fame.