Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Best known for her triple-Gemini-winning role as the twitchy and eccentric schoolteacher Hetty King in the long-running television series Road to Avonlea, Burroughs appeared in more than seventy-five films, often in a cameo that stole the viewer’s heart, beginning with a role as a factory worker in Don Owen’s 1966 National Film Board classic Notes for a Film about Donna & Gail. She luminously played Kate Flynn, with her toothy, sensual smile, opposite Richard Farnsworth in The Grey Fox, the Missus with Gordon Pinsent in John and the Missus, and the narcissistic and obsessive Maryse Holder in A Winter Tan, a film she also co-wrote and co-directed.

  Beginning as a stage actress at Hart House at the University of Toronto, she played contemporary and classical roles in Canada and abroad, including Portia opposite Hume Cronyn’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at Stratford. She appeared with Peter O’Toole in Uncle Vanya at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and as part of the original cast of Ten Lost Years at Toronto Workshop Productions.

  A bohemian by inclination, Burroughs, who died at age seventy-one of gastric cancer at home in Toronto on September 22, 2010, was an unconventional celebrity in the tiny world of Canadian entertainment. Despite her many Genie and Gemini Awards, including an Earl Grey Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (2001) and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement in 2005, she rarely, if ever, displayed the hauteur of a “grande actrice” deigning to grace a stage or set.

  Instead she had intense friendships with men and especially young women, including actress and director Sarah Polley. She took an eager but not avid interest in their careers and their creative lives. She was “an artist in the most true, pure, brutal sense of the word,” said Polley, who first met Burroughs as an eleven-year-old on the set of Road to Avonlea. She was “passionate, fierce, uncompromising, honest.”

  JACQUELINE WEST BURROUGHS was born in Southport, Lancashire, England, on February 2, 1939, during the treacherous diplomatic preamble to the Second World War. Her mother, Edna Berry, had been a silent screen actress before marrying salesman Harry Burroughs, who worked for the company that made True Temper golf-club shafts. He spent the war flying missions as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. After suffering through the bombs and the casualty lists with a small child, the Burroughses waited for the advent of peace to have a second one. Their son, Gary, was a “peace baby,” born in December 1945.

  When Burroughs was twelve, her father moved the family to Toronto because he had business opportunities there: importing True Temper golf shafts into Canada and running a tool-manufacturing company called Brades Nash Tyzack Ltd. The family settled on Chestnut Park Road in Rosedale after a romantic spell on Centre Island, a ferry ride across the Toronto harbour. A decade later, the effervescent Edna Burroughs persuaded her husband to buy the historic Oban Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a hostelry that was later owned and operated by their son.

  At home, Burroughs was a rebel, often clashing with her mother at the dinner table; but at school she was a conformist. Head girl in her final year at Branksome Hall, a tony private girls’ school, she carried a hefty 165 pounds and strutted around in her uniform of knee socks and a kilt, eager to please the headmistress. “I was a horrible suck,” she confessed later.

  After Branksome she went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto (1958–61), where she shed her extra schoolgirl weight, “discovered literature and was full of angst about Virginia Woolf,” and began acting at Hart House and in summer stock theatre in the Muskoka region.

  About this time she opened a front-loading dryer at her local laundromat and out tumbled a “seventeen-year-old Jewish boy with green teeth and acne,” according to a Toronto Life profile by journalist Martin Knelman. That’s how she met Zal Yanovsky. Five years her junior and a self-taught musician, Yanovsky was playing guitar in coffee houses; later he teamed up with Denny Doherty in the Halifax Three and still later joined Cass Elliot to form the Mugwumps in Greenwich Village. (For more about Denny Doherty, please see page 242.)

  Doherty and Elliot went on to form the Mamas and the Papas and Yanovsky collaborated with John Sebastian in the short-lived but hugely influential pop-rock group the Lovin’ Spoonful. One friend described Yanovsky in those days as “the guy . . . in the striped shirt with the sheepdog bangs and a world-eating grin” who played the “classy, joyful, percolating guitar solo in ‘Do You Believe in Magic.’”

  While Yanovsky was playing in coffee houses, Burroughs, who had spent years in ballet classes, went to England to study drama, mime, and interpretive dance and ended up joining the Chesterfield Civic Theatre in Derbyshire. “It was a bleak little northern town, but the people there came to our plays just the way they’d go bowling or play bingo on other nights,” she recounted years later. “It was terrific experience — you’d play a lead one week, an extra the next and a character part after that.”

  That’s what Burroughs loved: the process of creating character, using every gram of her being — intellectual, emotional, and physical — to react to the script, her fellow actors, and the audience. After returning to Canada in 1963, she acted in theatre companies in Toronto and Winnipeg and in a couple of small parts at the Stratford Festival before moving to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she resumed her tempestuous relationship with Yanovsky.

  While he was busy becoming rich and famous as a rock star, travelling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, she lived mostly in Greenwich Village with her pet iguanas and frogs and studied theatre with Uta Hagen and dance with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. Pressured by her parents, she and Yanovsky married in 1967, shortly before their daughter, Zoe, was born on October 17, 1967.

  The following summer, after a drug bust that had turned acidic, Yanovsky quit the Lovin’ Spoonful and turned his back on the music business. He and Burroughs moved back to Toronto with their daughter. Within a couple of years they had split; in the early 1970s he moved with Zoe to a farm outside Kingston to live with restaurateur Rose Richardson. Together they created the landmark Kingston eateries Chez Piggy and Pan Chancho Bakery. “My mother was an actress and my father a musician, and I was carted around to all sorts of adult situations,” Zoe Yanofsky said in an interview after her mother died. They “were fiercely in love with each other” and had an “intense” although atypical mother-daughter relationship, including hanging around backstage while Burroughs was acting at the Stratford Festival.

  As artistic director, Phillips had lured Burroughs away from contemporary theatre in Toronto and back to Stratford in the mid-1970s. “A lot of people spend a lot of time acting for the audience,” he said. “Jackie is so compelling and so bizarre and so penetrating that she demands your full attention. And God help you if you don’t pay attention to her [on stage as an actor] because you will find yourself walking straight through a laugh where you least expect it . . . [or in rehearsal as a director] because she will go from the text to asking you a question and unless you are very alert, you will never know the difference.”

  Incessantly in search of the fresh and the immediate, Burroughs was passionate about getting it right rather than delivering what a director demanded, a perfectionism that often led to tears and arguments in rehearsal halls, at television studios, and on film sets. Polley remembers Burroughs “constantly sticking up for the crew” and “confronting” the production bosses on the set of Road to Avonlea. “She put herself on the line constantly for other people, for their rights as workers on a set.”

  Performing a defined role in a continuing series — Avonlea ran for six seasons, from 1990 to 1996, on CBC and the Disney Channel in the U.S. — was artistically wearing, but the show gave Burroughs a comfortable financial cushion and made it possible for her to create a winter respite and an artistic oasis in Mexico.

  She “loved the people, the language and the culture” of Mexico, said Yanovsky, who can remember her mother drawing pictures of her dream house
after acquiring a piece of land in a tiny village in Oaxaca. Eventually, with help from locals, she built an adobe house opening onto a courtyard, in keeping with the landscape. And then she added a twist: painting it a bubblegum-pink colour. With another local friend, a gardener named Julio, she dug a multi-level series of gardens connected with intricate walkways and planted masses of flowers and blossoming shrubs.

  Her love of Mexico melded with another creative project, her obsession with the life and letters of Maryse Holder, a feminist author and sexual hedonist who had published the book Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder’s Letters from Mexico in 1979. It is hard to understand Burroughs’s fascination with Holder, but it is certainly true that she delivered a virtuoso (and Genie Award–winning) performance as the self-destructive and doomed drug- and sex-addicted tourist in the 1987 film A Winter Tan. “It would never have been a film without her,” Yanovsky said of the project, which began as a monologue written by Burroughs.

  A vigorous smoker and reformed drinker who loved partying, dancing, and talking late into the night, Burroughs was diagnosed with gastric cancer in 2009. As the disease rampaged, she made a final visit to her beloved home in Mexico. Then, sustained by family and dear friends, she began the serious business of dying, holding court in her Yorkville apartment in Toronto, making her own funeral arrangements, and sharing final thoughts and wishes with friends and family.

  She approached death with the same intensity, honesty, and creative impulse that she had done everything else in her life. “I never knew it was possible to die so eloquently,” said Polley. “She’s redefining what it means . . . breaking down boundaries and rules and storming the gates of experience, refusing ever to deny what is real and honest in her work and her life. It’s kind of amazing to see her do that to the end.”

  But it wasn’t the end. Burroughs had planned a curtain call. Mourners sitting in the pews at St. James Cathedral in Toronto, a week after her death, knew from the order of service that there was going to be a reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm. What they didn’t expect was to hear that husky, alluring voice intoning “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want . . .” from across the ultimate threshold, in a performance that was simultaneously haunting and comforting. Burroughs was gone but the voice lived on, in the silence of the cathedral and the memories of the bereaved.

  Denny Doherty

  Musician and Actor

  November 29, 1940 – January 19, 2007

  FOR A SHINING moment in the mid-1960s, the Mamas and the Papas were an American counterpoint to the Beatles. In three short years — 1965 through 1968 — they produced five albums and sold an estimated twenty million records. Their ten hits included “California Dreamin’”, “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and “Monday, Monday.”

  Unlike the well-tailored mop-tops, this hippie group had as many women as men — and a Canadian. Michelle Phillips was blonde and beautiful and could carry a tune; Cass Elliot garbed her obesity in caftans but she had a magnetic charisma and a haunting alto voice. The leader and Michelle’s husband was John Phillips, a lanky songwriting guru who sported a funny chinchilla hat. Haligonian Denny Doherty was the fourth. A cherubic, sweet-voiced tenor, he co-wrote the hits “I Saw Her Again Last Night” and “Got a Feelin’.”

  Behind the scenes the group was wasting its talent and energy because they were all in thrall to sex, drugs, and alcohol in those sexually liberated and naive post-Pill, pre-AIDS times. Cass Elliot (whose real name was Ellen Naomi Cohen) was in love with Doherty; he was besotted with Michelle Phillips; and John Phillips, not surprisingly, was jealous, especially since the threesome all lived in the same house.

  “He came downstairs and caught us . . . flagrante delicto,” according to Doherty in Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas & the Papas, by Matthew Greenwald. Michelle and John attempted a reconciliation so the band could keep on playing, but the following year, in June of 1966, the band signed a statement, with the backing of their record label, that temporarily kicked Michelle, the most beautiful but least talented member, out of the group.

  “I’ll bury you all,” she screamed at them in a rage. And she did. Mama Cass died of a heart attack in 1974, when she was only thirty-two, and John Phillips succumbed to heart disease after decades of drug and alcohol abuse, in March 2001, at sixty-five. Doherty turned his life around with the help of his wife, Jeannette, but even he didn’t reach his three score years and ten. Doherty died of complications following abdominal surgery on January 19, 2007. He was sixty-six.

  BORN IN HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, on November 29, 1940, Dennis Gerrard Stephen Doherty was one of five children of a hard-drinking Halifax pipe­fitter. He began singing publicly on a dare, performing “Love Letters in the Sand” in a skating-rink-turned-dancehall with Peter Power’s dance band. He was fifteen. After high school he began working in a pawn shop and singing after hours with a local rock band, the Hepsters.

  He formed his first folk trio, the Colonials, in 1959. The group changed its name to the Halifax Three and signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York. They had a minor hit, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sing Along with Mitch”; released an album, San Francisco Bay Blues, in 1963 on the Epic label; and performed in eastern Canada and in the United States.

  Separately he also became friends with Cass Elliot, a singer with a band called the Big Three that also featured Tim Rose. A few months later Doherty’s band broke up, ironically in a hotel called the Colonial, the original name of his ill-fated group. He and his accompanist, Toronto musician Zal Yanovsky, were destitute in New York City.

  After hearing about their troubles, Cass Elliot convinced her manager to hire them. So Doherty and Yanovsky joined the Big Three and enjoyed some success in Greenwich Village. More players were added and the group changed its name to the Mugwumps. They also broke up, as so many groups did in those fluid times, and for the usual reasons: insolvency and bickering.

  About this time, John Phillips’s band the New Journeymen needed a replacement for tenor Marshall Brickman, who had left, after an affair with Michelle, to pursue a career as a television and screenwriter. That band also broke up — those were tempestuous times. Two powerful new groups emerged from the wreckage: Sebastian and Yanofsky formed The Lovin’ Spoonful and Elliot and Doherty joined voices with the Phillipses in 1965.

  Finding a name was more difficult than forming the group. John Phillips fancied The Magic Cyrcle, which was too arcane for the rest of them. Then, “lying around vegging out watching TV” and doing the usual — drinking — the foursome saw a Hells Angels member on a talk show refer to his girlfriend as a “mama.” Elliot decided that’s what she wanted to be, and Michelle agreed. “We’re the Mamas,” she declared, which left the men little choice but to become the Papas.

  Six months later, in September of 1965, the group signed a recording contract with ABC/Dunhill Records and began to record their debut album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. That’s when Doherty and Michelle Phillips began their tumultuous affair. After the band stripped Michelle of her Mama status the following year, she was quickly replaced by Jill Gibson, girlfriend of the band’s producer, Lou Adler. Her tenure as a Mama lasted ten weeks, a period during which Doherty drank heavily to console himself over the loss of the beautiful Michelle. In an effort to put things back together, Michelle was allowed to rejoin the Mamas and the Papas, but things were no longer copacetic.

  “The first thing I did in the morning, and the last thing I did at night, was have a blast of rum,” Doherty, by then a recovering alcoholic, told a reporter for the New York Times in January 2000. The band seemed to have lost its focus. In the middle of making another album, Elliot left to go out on her own. With the loss of her outsize presence and distinctive singing voice, the group fell apart in the summer of 1968, although it did re-form briefly in 1971.

  Elliot, who had embarked on a successful solo career, remaine
d friends with Doherty, even though he continued to drown his romantic sorrows about Phillips. Later he admitted he had ignored a marriage proposal from Elliot because he’d been too stoned at the time to respond. Like most of the pop music world, he was devastated when she suffered a fatal heart attack in July 1974, after two sold-out performances at the Palladium in London, England.

  On his own, Doherty released Whatcha Gonna Do in 1972 with ABC/Dunhill. He acted on Broadway in Andy Warhol’s 1974 production of Man on the Moon, with a script written by John Phillips. It closed after five performances. Three years later he headed back home to Halifax. He performed at the Atlantic Folk Festival for the next two summers, was host of the regional CBC TV program Denny’s Sho’ in 1978, and took on several acting roles at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax under artistic director John Neville. Among other plays, he appeared in The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, and Cabaret.

  Unwilling to bury his halcyon memories of pop success, he re-formed the Mamas and the Papas in 1980, with John Phillips and his daughter Mackenzie and Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane. They toured internationally until 1986, when Doherty moved to Toronto.

  In the late 1980s Doherty appeared in Fire, a gospel-rock musical written by Paul Ledoux and David Young. In his most enduring role as an actor, in 1993 he began playing the Harbour Master in Theodore Tugboat, a children’s television show chronicling the “lives” of vessels in a busy port loosely based on Halifax Harbour. By then he was married to Jeannette, and was the father of three children. Often credited with saving Doherty’s life, Jeannette was the one who insisted he had to leave Hollywood in the 1970s and make Halifax and then Toronto home base. She died of ovarian cancer in 1998.