Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (2 page)

For reasons Ashe and I understood at the time but now I can’t fathom, Ashe and I felt we had to keep the Timothy Game secret. Perhaps we felt young boys should be doing more masculine things: playing ball or hunting squirrels. For several summers when my mother would ask what we had been doing we would find some way to avoid a direct answer until finally we could equivocate no longer. We told her the story of the game. I don’t know what we expected. To be laughed at or mocked in some way for not being ‘real’ boys? Anyway she responded as if what we had been doing all these years was perfectly normal. What a relief.

The pattern of the days changed somewhat when Rolph and Tim, known in the household as “the babies,” stopped being babies and began to join in. The games became less imaginative, but more sophisticated. We played car racing and horse racing by flicking the toys with our fingers up and down the long hall. I know this doesn’t sound very sophisticated, but each of us had a stable and kept detailed records. Every race was a claiming, or an allowance, or a stakes race, and we kept track of earnings. We bought, sold, and claimed horses. To the bemusement of my mother, when I returned from Britain in 1965 at the age of twenty-seven, the first thing Rolph and Tim and I did was get out our old horses, get down on our knees, and restart the races.

We had different games in the city. Besides playing baseball in the backyard and destroying the flower beds or bombing Germans from our upper bunk, we invented a game we often thought later we could have marketed and made our fortunes called Flick Hockey. We found a way to emulate a real hockey game using pictures and cards of hockey players, a marble, and goals made of blocks. Of course there was no way to keep this game secret from our parents — it could be pretty noisy — but we never shared it with anyone outside the immediate family. As “the babies” got older they joined in, but I don’t think we ever told anyone at school about it much less encouraged them to play. We had friends we would play traditional games with, chess or baseball, but flick hockey and horse racing were private.

My life changed dramatically in 1952 when we moved from the city to the country, a twenty-seven-acre estate named Memory Acres that my father inherited from his father. A mile and a quarter west of King City and a half-mile east of the new highway just completed, now known as the 400 but then as the Barrie Highway, Memory Acres was the site of the original Davis leather tannery before it moved to Newmarket in the early 1900s. Not that I had a lot of friends in Toronto, but I had even fewer in this farming community. Oddly enough one of the few I did have, Rod Woolham, was the son of the manager of the Davis leather tannery now losing money outside the family.

Country life had its compensations. I was able to buy two horses from my earnings as a radio actor and I cut some of the narrowest ski trails in the world through the wooded hill on the west side of the property, so narrow that I broke my leg on one of them one year. But mostly I waited to be sixteen.

Lots of boys, and girls too I suppose, want to be sixteen. There could many reasons for this: to be more grown up, to smoke in the house, to have sex. But I wanted to be sixteen so that I could go to the Track. In 1954 children were not allowed at a horse racing track even in the company of an adult. By age fifteen, partly I suppose as a result of having horses of my own, I had a passion for horse racing. I studied form charts and made imaginary bets. I would sit in school with a racing form under my exercise book pining for the day I could actually go to the Track. Strangely, the minimum bet in 1954 was the same as it is now, two dollars; who knows what that bet would be worth in today’s dollars. The day I could go finally came. Rod and I took a bus to Toronto and a streetcar to the old half-mile Dufferin Park Track at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin, and my days as a punter began. Some of my happiest days in the next few years were sitting in the open upper deck of the old Woodbine Racetrack on Queen Street.

The babies, no longer babies, followed in my tracks, as it were. While Ashe never took to horse racing, Rolph and Tim both did. After the new Woodbine track opened outside the city, I would take Tim to the track. Since he was only eleven or twelve at the time and forbidden entry, I would park him outside an entrance gate where he could see the races. Between races I would go down to where he was and he would pass his bet through the gate to me and I would place it for him. Occasionally we would get strange looks from the guards, but what could they do?

Over the years my interest in horse racing has waned and it pretty much vanished when I went to Britain in 1961. Not so for my brothers Rolph and Tim. The two of them get together every year wherever they happen to be to watch the Breeders’ Cup. And Rolph is now an owner himself with a stable of real horses at Woodbine.

So how did I become an actor?

or A History of Canadian Theatre, Part One

I don’t know what was in your basement, but in mine, when I was ten, was a summer theatre company, one of the few professional theatre companies in Canada at the time. They didn’t perform in the basement, but they rehearsed in our house in Toronto for several weeks before heading to cottage country to perform for cottagers and tourists.

My cousins, Murray and Donald Davis, a half generation older than I, formed a summer stock company, The Straw Hat Players, in 1948. Composed largely of university students and directed, more or less, by the University of Toronto’s professional director, Robert Gill, the company played in Gravenhurst and Port Carling, resort towns that bookend Lake Muskoka a hundred miles or so north of Toronto. Limited by contractual agreements with a theatre in Woodstock and with U of T, Gill was not able to be the official director or to travel to Muskoka with the company. Nonetheless, he conducted the majority of the rehearsals in the basement of our Toronto home. It took some time for the neighbours to understand the shouting and screaming coming from our house did not indicate a dysfunctional family or necessitate calls to the police. In the 1940s actors acted full out all the time. The concept of starting slowly and allowing one’s characterization to grow was still in the future.

A word needs to be said about theatre in Toronto in the early post-war years. With Toronto now boasting a number of thriving theatres, contemporary readers may be surprised, astonished, to know that there was almost no professional theatre in the city. The stock companies of the twenties had succumbed to the joint pressures of the Great Depression and Hollywood. In the late forties the Royal Alexandra Theatre served as a prestigious roadhouse for touring productions, but only occasionally were professional productions mounted in Toronto. One of the centrepieces for theatre in the city was the four play season, directed by Robert Gill, at Hart House Theatre in the University of Toronto. The actors were all university students — not even drama students as there was no drama department at the university — who were studying other subjects and doing theatre on an extracurricular basis. And yet theatregoers in the city at that time subscribed to the season and discussed the plays as if they were attending the latest offering from a major theatre company. Mind you, these were no ordinary university students. Many were returning veterans from World War II, often on special post-war programs and more mature than your average student. Because of this influx the student body was a double or triple cohort as we would now say; or in sport terms, it was a very deep draft. Also, the extracurricular program run by the very professional and talented Robert Gill was not only effective in itself, but its existence attracted talented actors to the university. Some of those actors included Charmion King, Donald and Murray Davis, Eric House, Ted Follows, Araby Lockhart, Lloyd Bochner, Kate Reid, Don Harron, and William Hutt.

Of course at age ten I had no idea that the birth of Canadian theatre as we now know it was happening in the very basement of our house. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. The actors in our basement, and in our living room, and on our phone, included many who would go on to forge substantial careers.

The first Straw Hat season, 1948, went by in a blur as Ashe and I were sent off to summer camp and learned of it only through letters from my mother saying things like,
The Drunkard
was sold out, whatever that meant. But the next year my cousins asked my mother who asked me if I would like to act in one of their plays. If it meant I didn’t have to go back to summer camp, why not?

The play in question was a thriller called
Portrait in Black
. As I recall, my mother in the play, Charmion King, was in some kind of triangle with two men, played by my cousins, Donald and Murray. Murray’s character tried to kill Donald’s when he was driving, but missed because Donald’s character reached for the emergency brake. Doesn’t that date the play? A gun went off sometime during the play and so scared my youngest brother, Tim, whom my mother had brought to see me act, that she had to spend the rest of the evening in the parking lot calming him down while he kept insisting that he was “never going to
Portrait in Black
again!” He would have been five at the time. I’m not sure if he has been to the theatre since. Certainly, he was never tempted to follow in my footsteps.

Why did they cast me in this play? They needed a young boy, but why me? It’s a funny thing, but in all the years that followed I never thought to ask. I was handy. After all, I only had to go downstairs to get to rehearsal and I had excellent marks in school for oral reading, a subject I am sure no longer exists. But I don’t know if they knew that. A mystery, but one that changed my life.

I don’t recall being nervous about any of this. I think I was too young to appreciate that I could embarrass myself in front of an audience or die in a car crash on the treacherous road to Port Carling driven at competitive speeds by the young actors in the company. I was much more comfortable acting in a play for the first time than trying to figure out how to hoist a sail at camp. I did get nervous once. I was sitting backstage waiting for my first entrance when a member of the company came by and asked if I was nervous. I was probably reading a comic or something. Assuring her that, no, I wasn’t nervous at all, she proceeded to explain that nervousness was a good thing, that an actor
should
be nervous. By the time I went on stage I was in a near panic because I wasn’t nervous.

I must have acquitted myself satisfactorily in
Portrait in Black
as I was asked to appear in one play a season for the next several years. The next year I had a small role in
Goodbye Again,
but the year after I played the large role of Ronnie Winslow in Terence Rattigan’s
The Winslow Boy
, and the year after, Taplow in Rattigan’s
The Browning Version
.

Of course, like all Canadian boys of a certain age, I still really wanted to be a professional hockey player. But if that wasn’t going to work out maybe I could be an actor. What to do? Perhaps I should take acting classes. So, back in Toronto, I signed on to take classes from Josephine Barrington, who had taught my cousins. She herself was a graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and performed in community theatre as well as some of the rare professional productions in the city. She had a studio in her home a few miles from our house in north Toronto.

My mother drove me there for my first class. It never occurred to her or to me that she should ever drive me there again. Nor did she ever drive me to school. Nor to the CBC when I started working there a year or two later. What’s with the present generation? They don’t know how to take a bus? Or ride a bike? It was quite a trek to Josephine’s studio, either two buses or a half-hour bike ride, but after that first class I happily went on my own. I think I remember more about the bike trips than I do about the classes.

I remember little of what Josephine taught. Some of the classes were private and some were with one or two others. I remember quite a bit of talk about the diaphragm, which I also remember having to unlearn when I studied with Iris Warren years later. But as well as her classes, Josephine presented plays every Christmas at Hart House Theatre: Josephine Barrington’s Juveniles. I played the lead in
Aladdin
one year and the lead in
The Snow Queen
the next. My ‘costar’ in
The Snow Queen
was Michele Landsberg, later to become a noted journalist, Officer of the Order of Canada, and wife of Stephen Lewis who will appear later in this story.

It was Josephine who suggested that I try my hand at auditioning for CBC Radio.

or Canadian Radio Drama, 1949–1952

In 1950 CBC Radio was the centre of the universe, or so it seemed at the time. Housed in a four-storey walkup on Jarvis Street in Toronto, a building formerly owned by Havergal School for Girls, radio drama was the sine qua non for a professional actor in Toronto. And there was a ton of it. There were two major anthology dramas each week:
Ford Theatre
on Friday nights and
CBC Stage
on Sunday nights. There were regular series, school broadcasts, and children’s programs. And there was the pièce de résistance,
CBC Wednesday Night
, which produced drama as well as music. As a boy I remember listening to the full Shakespeare history cycle on
CBC Wednesday Night
.

Just up the street from the CBC Radio building was the Celebrity Club, Toronto’s answer to Sardi’s; across the road was Lorne Greene’s acting school (yes, that Lorne Greene) and the offices of ACRA. Perhaps you have heard of ACTRA, the Alliance of Canadian Television and Radio actors? In 1950 it was simply ACRA, the Association of Canadian Radio Actors. Down the street from the radio building was the hooker capital of the city. Was it Shaw who once said the only difference between an actor and a prostitute was the price?

The building itself was at once welcoming and intimidating. Anyone used to entering a modern CBC building would be astonished to realize that in 1950 one could simply walk into the building through any door, wave at the receptionist if so inclined, and go wherever one liked. Security? What’s that? There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, of men entering the building in broad daylight and walking out with a grand piano. Getting into the building was one thing, but seeing a producer quite another. The producers, who might now be known as directors, all had offices flanking a wall on an upper floor of the building. In front of each office was the desk of the production assistant, the keeper of the gate. The PAs protected their producers with their lives. No wonder the actors would prowl the halls hoping for a chance meeting, “Anything for me this week?”

It was tough for newcomers, but for regulars life was simpler. Casting was often done like this. I’m walking down the hall when producer Norman Bowman sees me and calls out, “OK for Sunday, Bill?” Without pausing, I call back to confirm. Casting complete. No audition. No call to the agent. No agent. Of course, this practice encouraged a good deal of loitering. Actor Murray Westgate, who would rise to fame later as the Esso Man on
Hockey Night in Canada
on television, ate all three meals in the cafeteria. Lots of casting opportunities that way.

There were two worlds of actors in Toronto at this time: the Hart House Theatre world and the CBC Radio world that included John Drainie, Bud Knapp, Tommy Tweed, Lorne Greene, John Bethune, Aileen Seaton, Jack Mather, Murray Westgate, Ruth Springford, Maxine Miller, and Lister Sinclair, among others. These worlds overlapped only rarely, when a Hart House actor would get a gig on CBC or a radio actor would do a stage play. Of course many of the Hart House actors were still students who did summer stock. The central core of radio actors, small though the core was, actually made a good living as actors. They lived middle-class lives, had houses and families, and in some ways were more secure than most actors in Canada since. Only if they drifted out on to the fire escape at the back of the building would they sense a looming danger. A large, ugly, yellow building was slowly rising out of the parking lot. CBC Television.

Some of the radio actors went on to successful careers on television and stage. Stage became an opportunity with the opening of the Crest Theatre and the Stratford Festival, both in the early fifties. But some radio actors were less fortunate. Radio was their medium and as the medium declined so did their careers. King of radio drama was John Drainie. If Andrew Allan was the producer god, Drainie was the actor god. Blessed with a marvellous voice and limited by a physical handicap, radio was his forte although in later years he gave rare but exceptional stage performances, notably in
Inherit the Wind
at the Crest. But his radio work was dominating and enthralling. For all that he brought great truth to his roles, modern actors would find his work method remarkably technical. His scripts were covered with hieroglyphics — meaningful only to him — that guided his vocal inflection through his performance. Spontaneity was not a key ingredient of radio drama in that period. Television was not kind to John Drainie; his career declined and he died at the young age of fifty. Others also saw their careers abate, for instance, Ruth Springford, John Bethune, and the king of accents, Jack Mather.

For others, dare I say it, television was a bonanza. Many years later when working in Scotland, I was invited to dinner at my girlfriend’s house and we were to watch this wonderful new television show. When that urban sophisticate, that voice of the news that got us through the war, rode up on a horse, I just about fell out of my chair. Lorne Greene as Ben Cartwright was a sight to behold.

As a child actor with big ears and little understanding, I would overhear conversations about the coming of television. I don’t recall a single actor saying, ‘I can’t wait, it will be wonderful.’ The tone was always anxiety, or at best cautious apprehension. As for this particular actor, it would be more than fifteen years before I made my first appearance on television.

I’m not sure how it came about, but in 1950 I found myself, aged twelve, at my first audition, a reading in the office of one of the leading radio drama producers of the time, Esse Ljungh, an intimidating Scandinavian, who was now supervising producer of drama for the CBC in Toronto. He was casting a mental health drama called
Life with the Robinsons
. What is a mental health drama, you ask. The Robinsons were a fairly typical Canadian family with two children. Each week in this half hour commercial-free program some family problem would be dramatised. At the conclusion of the program, a noted psychologist would analyze the issues and suggest approaches the family could take to the problem. The shows were written and narrated by playwright and screenwriter Ted Allan, who would work with me many years later at Festival Lennoxville.

At this audition I was asked to read from a script I had not seen, a normal practice for auditions at this time. Mr. Ljungh told me the other young boy role in the series was going to be played by Warren Wilson, now well known for his contributions to the music department at the CBC, but then a young actor who was, Esse proudly announced, a member of the union. I did not let on I had no idea what union he was speaking of. However, he asked me to read and since I read rather well he was somewhat pleased. I suspect in those days I also read as though I were reading and not as though I were speaking. His instruction to me was to put the script down and simply say the lines without looking at the text. After I did that he seemed satisfied and I got the role.

The role in question was Mickey Robinson, the older of the Robinson’s two children. My younger sister on the show was played by the older Maxine Miller who worked with me many years later when we were both playing septuagenarians on a television series called
Robson Arms
. We had a big argument at the time as she insisted that she had played the older sibling in the radio play. What can I say? She was wrong. I do remember though that she and the other adult members of the cast were very helpful to me, showing me around, helping me with annotating my script, and, most important to a young boy, showing me where the cafeteria was.

It’s important to understand that all radio drama at the time was live. As I recall, the cast would meet the producer in the studio at 2:30 in the afternoon and we would go live to air at 8 the same evening. The first order of business would be a reading of the script, to get a feel for the piece and so the script assistant could get a timing, time being a critical factor when broadcasting live. Although to me, it seemed the purpose of the first read was for the actors to make as many jokes as they could. After the read and some cuts and work at the table, we would rehearse ‘on mike.’ The producer (director) would retreat to the control booth overlooking the studio and give his instructions over a PA system while we worked out our positions at the microphones and rehearsed the scenes, practising turning our pages soundlessly, an important skill for actors of the time. The sound effects person would create live sound effects, another challenging skill that time has rendered redundant. Once all the pieces had been worked on we would break for dinner. Following the dinner break, there would be a dress/technical rehearsal in which the live music would be incorporated, in the case of
Life with the Robinsons
performed on an electric organ, followed by adjustments to the timing, and then the live performance itself.

Once again it didn’t occur to me, aged twelve, to be nervous. My main concern on the first day was finding the cafeteria and ordering all the food that I really liked, free of any parental advice. Nowadays, it seems that child actors always have a parent tagging along. Not only was it inappropriate for my mother to be there, I never saw any parents other than Roger Newman’s mother — more on that later. I had a large helping of pancakes and a chocolate milkshake. When I returned to the studio after the meal, the reality of the task ahead finally struck home and the butterflies in my stomach churned the pancakes and milkshake unmercifully for the next two hours. Fortunately, I had a strong stomach and the performance went ahead without a hitch. Thereafter, I took more care in my choice of diet before a performance.

Had my mother known of my dietary excess her anxiety during the first broadcast would have been even greater than it was. It was bad enough that she had to listen to the first live broadcast of her young son, but the first appearance of her son on the show was heart-stopping. In the story a line was delivered to young Mickey and he did not reply until asked again. In that moment of Mickey’s silence my mother was sure that I must be on the floor trying to gather my fallen script or recover from some similar catastrophe. Her breathing returned when Mickey started speaking.

It was ironic that my first radio work was a mental health series since my mother was a child psychologist. I assume the connection was purely serendipitous. She was never a stage mother. She never pushed my career nor discouraged it. She allowed my life to happen and I am forever grateful for that.

Not like Roger Newman’s mother. Roger Newman was the leading child actor on CBC at the time and played some truly major roles on some of the major dramas. And to my twelve-year-old judgement at the time, he was very good. One day we were doing a
CBC Stage
drama. These were hour-long plays rehearsed over two days, starting on Saturday and performing Sunday evening. Roger and I were playing small roles, unusual for him, not for me, and the lead role was being played by another child actor. These shows were not done in the CBC building but in a local theatre, though there was no live audience. As we started to break for lunch on Saturday there was a huge commotion in the foyer. Moments later someone grabbed me and pushed me protectively into a small room. Roger’s mother was on a tirade. And she was dangerous. Why was her son not playing the lead? She charged up and down the theatre as people rushed to protect the young actor she might have killed had she got to him. Shut up in my hideaway I’m not sure how it resolved, but eventually she was taken away and Roger’s role was recast.

As far as I know, Roger never worked for the CBC again.

For two or three years I was quite busy doing roles mostly on secondary dramas and school broadcasts. Oh yes, school broadcasts. Every Wednesday morning there would be a fifteen-minute drama tailored to a school audience even though it was broadcast on the full network. Quaint though it seems now, in those days the CBC was thought of as a public service. Once my performance in a school broadcast conflicted with an exam I was to take in high school. I was in Grade 10 at the time. The principal kindly arranged for me to take the exam in his office after the broadcast provided I took a taxi directly from the studio to school and entered the school through the front door, an entrance normally reserved for grown-ups.

Cuckoo Clock House
, a Sunday afternoon show for children, was my bread-and-butter gig if such could be said for a twelve-year-old actor. As I have described, the producer, Norman Bowman, frequently did his casting by a call down the hall. A lifelong conflict began one fateful day. I was walking through the front lounge of the radio building on a Wednesday, likely doing a school broadcast, when Norman spotted me and called out as usual, “OK for Sunday, Bill?” Instead of responding with my usual cheerful affirmation I did the unforgivable. I hesitated. A friend of the family had invited me to ski with him in Collingwood on Sunday, a rare opportunity and one I had been looking forward to. “I’ll have to check and get back to you,” I replied. In the end I cancelled the skiing and did the broadcast but, whether as a consequence of my hesitation or pure coincidence, it would be one of my last performances on
Cuckoo Clock House
.

Only once did I do one of the major radio dramas, which required two studios, one for the actors and sound effects, and another, separated by a glass wall from the first, for the full orchestra. The producer, in his raised control booth, visible to both studios, directed the production like a conductor, cueing the orchestra, the actors, the sound technicians, as well as the board operator who was in the control room with him, ensuring that the hour finished exactly on time, to the second. It is small wonder that producers were thought of as demigods.

I returned to CBC Radio many years later, in 1977, as a producer of radio drama. What a change was there. Of course, radio drama had lost its preeminent position both as an entertainment and as a source of employment for actors. To say it was a shadow of its old self might be an exaggeration. But the main difference was the manner of production. Radio drama was no longer live. It was recorded in pieces and edited together like a film. Sound effects were usually recorded rather than manmade and the final work would be mixed together on various tracks in a post-production process not even imagined in 1950.