Next Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY KINGPIN PRODUCTIONS INC.

  AND MALJO ENTERPRISES INC.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pinsent, Gordon, 1930-

  Next / Gordon Pinsent.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-7138-6

  1. Pinsent, Gordon, 1930-. 2. Actors – Canada – Biography.

  I. Title.

  PN2308.P49A3 2012 792.02′8092 C2012-900972-5

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Charm, this is for you,

  as is everything I do.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Born to Make Believe

  Lost in Celluloid

  Leaving Home

  Jump

  Shall We Dance?

  “Go Get Him, Ernie!”

  Let’s Kiss and Make Up

  Saying Yes

  Working Man

  Hooray for Hollywood

  Will Power

  Photo Insert

  Lovely, Tell Your Mother

  Home to the Hill

  Comeback

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

  All in the Family

  A Turn of the Century

  Away from Her

  Photo Insert

  Charm School

  Charmless

  Away with Words

  Making them Wait

  Chromosome 11

  Choose Me

  Working on the Dream

  Acknowledgements

  Photographic Credits

  foreword

  Who is Gordon Pinsent?

  He’s an actor, a movie star, a painter, a writer, a poet, a lyricist. And, first and foremost, an artist.

  We sit at the kitchen table in his downtown penthouse apartment, looking out at the west side of Toronto. My assignment, my task, is to elicit memories. we talk about the Winnipeg years, the Hollywood years, and his boyhood in Newfoundland, and suddenly he starts singing a verse of “Farewell, Amanda,” the Cole Porter song that David Wayne crooned to Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib.

  “Of all things to remember!” he says, chiding himself. Yes, of all things to remember – a song from an MGM movie that came out in 1949, more than six decades ago, when he was an admittedly callow youth of nineteen.

  Gordon the Actor has an actor’s memory. Gordon the Poet rhymes words I’ve never heard rhymed before and makes verbs out of nouns.

  Old ladies, plain old ladies,

  lackadaisin’ under a tree that’s shady …

  Gadflies and gals, Pepsodent pals in the sun

  wonderin’ how it will be when the war is won …

  Old gentry, hoi polloi gentry

  gentlemen distinctive and parliamentary …*

  Has anyone ever before or since made a rhyming lyric of “parliamentary”?

  No wonder we get along so well.

  In many ways we had grown up in show business together. In one earlier professional incarnation, I interviewed actors and movie stars for a living. And because I was raised in screening rooms and spent so much time in Hollywood, I knew almost all those films he saw as a child, who was in them, and why he was so taken by them. So it was, for me, pure pleasure to coax and cajole those stories from him, so he could revisit all those moments and share them with all of us in this autobiography.

  It was also fascinating, and more than a bit heartwarming, for me to hear him talk about his life with Charmion King. As you will learn, Gordon and Charmion met when she was starring on stage and he was cast as her love interest. (“And was apparently of some interest to her,” he notes, “on the luckiest day of my life.”)

  I was already familiar with Charmion King’s work on the big screen and the small screen; she made her moments count. I remembered her work with Don McKellar, playing the Meals on Wheels lady in his quirky television series Twitch City, and the cameo she did for him in the first feature film he directed, Last Night. But my memories of her work on stage are far more vivid. I’ll never forget her portrayal of Ethel Barrymore in Royal Family at the Shaw Festival, or the huge laughs she sparked when she rocked the house as Jessica in Jitters.

  I also have this fond, funny memory of going through U.S. customs with her one day at the Toronto airport. I was on my way to L.A. to interview some movie star, and Charm was on her way to Houston to do a play. She had bought a box of very good Cuban cigars as a gift for the director, a man whom she knew was exceedingly fond of cigars, at a time when you couldn’t get good Cubans in America. Much to her clearly apparent chagrin, two male U.S. customs officials refused to let her take the Cuban cigars to Texas. When she asked what the hell she was supposed to do with them, she was told to “just leave them with us.” At which point she smiled sweetly at the customs officer and replied, “No. No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.” She then opened the box of Cuban cigars, walked over to a large trash can and destroyed each cigar – breaking them one by one, rendering them unsalvageable – and dropped each one, now torn asunder, into the trash, while the U.S. customs officials watched in horror.

  Witnessing her performance that day was the highlight of my trip.

  I still regret that I never saw her that very last time, doing Our Town with Soulpepper in Toronto in 2006. It was such a big hit that they had already announced they were bringing it back again; I thought there was plenty of time. But, there wasn’t. My wife and I ended up, along with most of Canadian show business, at Albert Schultz’s memorial tribute to her, held at the Young Centre on the same stage she had shared with him in Our Town. Richard Ouzounian wrote in the Toronto Star, “She was the class act of Canadian show business.” Next is, in so many ways, a love letter to Charmion King.

  The author of the love letter remains open yet enigmatic, practical yet romantic. Gordon Pinsent’s lifelong friend Perry Rosemond sees him as a true Renaissance man: “He acts, he writes, he directs, he paints – he even builds furniture!”

  Another long-time friend, Larry Dane, sees Gordon as a man whose greatest work of art is himself – a man who knows his own brand.

  “Gordon has a reputation of being an actor,” he says, “of being someone who can really act. And yes, there are a lot of actors out there, but most of them are not considered that way. The way you are perceived will lay the groundwork for your entire career. And that perception has to come from you. You pass it on to your agents, and you pass it on to the world of show business. I will do this, but I will not do that. It’s up to you to set the tone.

  “From the very beginning, Gordon was considered and regarded as an Actor. He isn’t playing the same part in the same series for years and years, so audiences don’t get tired of him. And Gordon is happy when he’s working, as long as you treat him with respect. He does have a line that he will draw; there are certain things he w
ill not do. When he says ‘I won’t do this, and I won’t do that,’ producers may get pissed off for a few minutes, but ultimately they like it. Because they know where they stand with him, and they respect him for it. And that creates longevity.”

  And how. Pinsent has been onstage and onscreen for more than half a century. He is a member of a select group of actors – Christopher Plummer, William Shatner, and Donald Sutherland among them – who have never stopped working. Only HRM Queen Elizabeth II has held her job longer than they have – and she never had to audition. Paul Gross, a relatively new Old Friend in Pinsent chronology, has described him as “preternaturally young, bottomlessly creative; his contribution to our country is immeasurable and his passion for our country is inexhaustible.” And the fact that Pinsent decided to live and work in Canada was not lost on Gross, who, in his own words, did “a similar sort of thing.” He says, “I went down to L.A. and came back home to do Due South. And I thought, well, he’s done it. Maybe I don’t have to go back to L.A. Maybe I can do it here. And that’s an important legacy.”

  That Pinsent continues to win the affection, admiration, and respect of new generations may be in part a reflection of his own affection, admiration, and respect for his fans.

  “He hates it when I do this,” Larry Dane confides, “but there’s a quote about Steven Spielberg that I think also applies to Gordon: Much nicer than he has to be. And he is. He doesn’t want to let people down. If you go out for lunch or dinner with him, be prepared to wait an extra twenty or thirty minutes while you’re leaving the restaurant, because people will want to talk to him, and he will stop and talk to every single one. Sometimes I’ll just yell, ‘Okay, Gordon, talk to you tomorrow!’ and go home. But it’s still a quality of his that I very much admire.”

  Me too.

  Gordon, we’re all yours.

  George Anthony

  * From Sweet Orchids, by Gordon Pinsent.

  born to make believe

  I AM IN BED WITH JULIE CHRISTIE.

  Me, who used to practice kissing on trees.

  I’m in bed with Julie Christie.

  We lie naked under the blanket together.

  Well … half-naked.

  She strokes my arm lovingly. I look deep into her eyes and I see her past lives. The luminous Lara of Doctor Zhivago. The sexy seductress of Shampoo. The passionate wife who romanced tragedy in Don’t Look Now.

  A voice interrupts my reverie. “And … cut!”

  Julie Christie gives me a hug.

  “Well done, Gordon, well done!” she purrs, in her plummy English.

  That’s going in the resumé.

  I act. Always have.

  Sir Ralph Richardson said of us, “We are printers.” I suppose by that he meant that we copy life, and the living. We ride invisible horses, wear fall-away costumes, until they fall apart and we exchange them for others. One job does us for a while until that ends and we see or hear something else that takes us over.

  It took a while to figure out how to “hit notes” – to colour them properly, to play the right chords. And I guess I hit them pretty well. So now I know what to do with them. I can bring them down, down, down. And I can still be true to the rendition when I do it. All I need is the job.

  I see an excellent Glenn Gould documentary by filmmaker Peter Raymont and I get sucked into a silence where I am all alone, as Gould was at times, vulnerable, and wanting to be; where I would try to understand him, to the point that I, like Gould, would not enjoy a hearty hello or a meaningful handshake. I would dress in a scarf, and gloves, and cap, perhaps … No. Okay. Just the flaccid handshake would do to assume his sense of isolation and quietude, with just the tiniest bit of hope that someone had noticed how much more peculiar and enigmatic I was next to anyone else.

  Being someone that no one really knows … this is not pretense, entirely. It’s needed, but scary during weekends when the phones don’t ring, and all you have to do is to have enough breathing left to make it to Monday when you fire up your synapses again, quickly rattling in Italian, aloud, script-wise, while choosing bananas at the market next door, being not at all embarrassed by your own mumbling at the checkout counter. All this before that night’s performance, when you are able to remind the three-hundred-seat house that you are there for them, and haven’t actually starved yourself into complete and utter self-neglect.

  I once played to two old ladies and a pigeon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Porky Pinsent, at your beck and call.

  To be more formally precise: Gordon Edward Pinsent. Born July 12, 1930. Yes, 1930. No, that’s not a typographical error. But thanks just the same.

  Son of Stephen Arthur Pinsent and Flossie Cooper, of Grand Falls, Newfoundland. My father was a highly industrious fellow; when illness forced him to leave the paper mill, he taught himself to become an expert cobbler. My mother was a servant girl, born into a time when a woman got up in the morning and made breakfast for her children and made a place for her husband to come home to. My mother did all of that, and more.

  I was not an only child. Nita Hilda was the eldest, followed by Raymond and Morley, both of whom died in their infancy, followed by Hazel Winnifred, followed by Harry Thomas, then Lilith Leah, then Haig Alonzo, and then, finally, me. The runt of the litter.

  Before you picture me as a chubby baby who became a chubby little boy who eventually grew up and finally conquered his chubbiness, let me confess that hardly anyone, including me, remembers how or why I ended up with the nickname Porky. Early photos show me as an average kid with an average build and an average weight. But one short-pants summer I did go through a more robustly corpulent phase, thus winning me that nickname.

  Because I had rickets I didn’t walk until I was five. In our family pictures, I was always sitting, or sprawled out on the floor, or lying around in the grass. When my sisters thought it was time we had a picture of me upright, they hoisted me up against a tree in our backyard, then pulled me up to a standing position and stuck some of the lower tree branches under the back of my sweater, so that I appeared to be standing on my own. But of course it was a rather precarious position to be in, and I started to lean towards the camera, that little Brownie box camera we all had back then, and the only thing that was keeping me from falling forward were the tree branches that were slowly pulling away from my shirt. But my sisters got their picture. “Gord, stand up, for God’s sake!” And there I was, standing upright, proud as hell; it didn’t take much to make me happy. And then there I was, falling over, slowly, but still waving to someone who was passing by, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for Porky Pinsent to be standing.

  You’d think I’d remember the first time I stood up on my own, without the aid of my sisters or an innocent, unsuspecting tree. But I don’t. It just happened one day. I wasn’t waiting for it to happen. I couldn’t walk, but then I had never walked, so I just didn’t know any different.

  Because I had rickets I also started school a year after everybody else. Being a year late, I think I was probably playing catch-up, because everybody else had gone on without me, and I was left behind. That was the start of the anxiety and the insecurity that would plague me for the rest of my days. But I made sure at the same time to fake it, to act as though I had been there forever, just like in that photo; that I was an old hand at this. Didn’t know I was already acting. Just staying alive. Maybe I was old at heart, but I was able to fit in fairly well. Even though I could see around me others’ ideas of who I was, I could skirt around those and believe only in myself. I was born to make believe.

  I was not an over-privileged child – well, none of us were. Maybe Charles Dickens had Great Expectations, but ours were not so grand. Passed-down gifts were lost, then mysteriously resurfaced when there was little to give at some Christmas or other. My mother and father needn’t have tried so hard. I had never expected anything. Never the long face from me when there wasn’t enough under the tree. Even at my youngest, life just was. Whatever it
would bring, or not, would do. And because of this, things did stumble my way, as though they were in search of he who had not gone searching.

  My favourite hideaway was the small confines of the family woodshed. Here I would spend countless hours, on countless occasions. My father had transformed the woodshed into a cobbler’s den, where he would drive his fiddly tacks and slice his soles and heels. I was as happy crawling under it as playing inside it. And occasionally, when school or other compulsory distractions intervened, being the magnanimous kid I was, I’d let my dad have the whole shed to himself.

  My mother didn’t have an awful lot to say in our life, but there isn’t a hair on her head I can’t remember. Poor Mom. Mom would be ironing, and I’d say, “Well, Mom, I’m engaged.” I’d be ten, maybe twelve. And she would just keep ironing. And I’d say “Well, Mom, I just robbed a bank, I guess I’m in real trouble now.” Her expression would never change. She would just keep ironing.

  Legitimate. Wanted to think of myself as that. I knew I was in the most obvious way legitimate – Mom’s face, Pop’s chin. I made so much noise that I can hear it still. I needed proof of being counted. For something. It looked doubtful during those early years with the world rehearsing for the Second World War. No matter – the noise I made, the laughter alone, would help me be recognized surely. They’d hear me coming, a harbinger of mostly unwanted attention piping up for no reason except to be heard. John Philip Sousa could’ve used me. But it couldn’t be helped. I would dissuade timidity at the cost of childish arrogance.

  But why this great need to be legitimate? Where did that fear come from, that I was not? I would ponder this seemingly bottomless concept forever, if necessary; not being needed for anything special from breakfast to breakfast, porridge to porridge, of any given day awarded me as a boy.

  When the biggest book of all of this planet’s living, breathing human particles was written, would I, could I, be found among them, for the sake of the final census, shall we say? One would hope so.

  I didn’t know how I was being summed up – the ego and all – by others great and small around me. I was barely noticed, or so my ego told me.