In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  I once got a tremendous thrill when our great World War I flying ace Billy Bishop, then over seventy, sashayed into Martin’s replete with boutonniere, homburg angled over one eye and two delectable blondes angled over each arm. At the bar, huddled together in intrigue, two young avocats, Canada’s future political icon, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and his mortal opposition, René Lévesque, probably carving up the country between them.

  It was Mark Twain who said that you can’t throw a brick anywhere in Montreal without breaking a church window. That also could have been said of its nightspots. There was an old saying around town that you could enjoy a different nightclub for every day of the year. That wasn’t far wrong, for our unique metropolis with a lascivious wink could smugly boast that it never closed, that it had more clubs, casinos and whorehouses than you could shake a stick at, where jaded New Yorkers—especially during Prohibition—who had run out of trouble could be easily replenished by simply staggering across the border.

  In an abortive attempt to clean things up, Quebec’s ruthless and humourless premier Maurice Duplessis passed an edict which became known as the Padlock Law. He ordered the police to close down every house of ill repute in the city. It was such a profitable business, however, attracting so many important customers, including one or two Supreme Court justices, that the police, principal profiteers themselves, had to come up with something. They did. They locked up the front doors of the whorehouses but left the back doors open.

  Entertainment was at a premium, and with all those languages floating around, we got the best and the tackiest imports and I was determined to take ’em all in with a vengeance. My mother worked late every day at the Handicrafts Guild and would come home and cook us dinner, but the minute dinner was over, I was out of there—no thought in my head that she might be hurt or concerned. I was on the move; there was too much temptation in that town. I had fallen in love with the night.

  Down the street from Mum’s flat was the exclusive privately owned Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Charles Hosmer, with the support of Sir Herbert Holt, Sir Montagu Allan and other wealthy Golden Milers, pigeonholed the famous Cézar Ritz of Paris to give the proposed building his blessing and his name. He did so and on its completion in 1912, it became the second-oldest Ritz on the continent after Boston’s. At fifteen years old, I used to monopolize its Maritime Bar, guzzling freshly opened Malpeque oysters by the baker’s dozen, washed down with Molson’s or Dawes Black Horse Ale as I ogled local society scampering past. Conveniently across the hall from my perch was the elegant Ritz Café. There the accent was on sophistication so we got Lucienne Boyer, Mabel Mercer, Jean Sablon, Charles Trenet, Jacqueline François and Carl Brisson; then the pianists, Shearing, Fats Waller, Errol Garner, Art Tatum and, of course, Oscar, who by now had securely planted his star in the firmament. I sat marvelling at George Shearing, whom I later befriended. I was astounded that someone so totally without sight could play with such dexterity and so beautifully. He made blindness seem an asset and, being a true musician, his imaginative arrangements of “Tenderly,” “Roses of Picardy,” “Lullaby of Birdland”—anything he chose to give us—had a musical style quite its own. Classically sound, he would occasionally color his tunes with the harmonies of Debussy, Ravel or Satie in a most witty fashion. He also interspersed his sessions with some very clever repartee and with that exquisite touch of his he could silence a room at once. When, very rarely, people at the back tables continued talking during a number, George would stop dead, stare them down (he could always tell where they were) and remark with acid politeness—“Oh, do go on, please. I was only playing softly so I could hear what you were saying.”

  All season long, our own Johnny Gallant presided at the Ritz piano, smoothly accompanying regulars Suzi Solidor, Hildegarde, Celeste Holm, a sleek Anne Francine and a beauty with ebony tresses and a sultry voice named Monica Boyar. There was also on view the striking, very cool blues singer Josephine Premise. I had such a crush on this beautiful black lady, you wouldn’t believe, so I turned myself into a sort of groupie—her veritable man Friday. She let me sit and watch her act every night as her guest and then she would join me at the table. I thought my golden moment had come, but all she wanted to discuss was how crazy she was over Frank Sinatra, with whom she had shared a tryst. She transformed me into some sort of personal telephone operator whose sole mission was to reach Ol’ Blue Eyes at all costs from her hotel room nightly. Tough assignment, considering he was in Africa madly chasing Ava Gardner.

  Along with my school chum young Lynch-Staunton, who always had an “in,” I would crash as many parties as I could around town where I might rub shoulders with the local legends. Montreal’s leading impresario, Jean Lallemand, a strutting peacock of a man who dressed his chauffeurs in the same matching colours as his two-tone Rolls-Royces, threw fabulous after-concert suppers. He had great flair and they were very grand indeed. I was present one night when Leonard Bernstein, then in his twenties, a guest piano soloist with Les Concerts Symphoniques, was feeling particularly boisterous. He promptly sat down at Lallemand’s precious grand, took off his socks and proceeded to pick out with miraculous dexterity some intricate tune with his bare feet. Monsieur Lallemand, not amused, muttered to anyone in earshot, “He ith rooinin’ my betht peeano!” Leonard, ignoring him, explained to the room that it was being treated to Bernstein’s Concerto for Right Foot.

  Next, I’m nursing a beer at the Chez Paree, gaping openmouthed at the young Billy Daniels, Sinatra (back in town at the request of mobster and owner Harry Shipp), Tony Martin, even Judy Garland. Sinatra, if not in the right mood, would sometimes “throw the show.” He would publicly humiliate the band and merely phone the whole thing in. On one such night, some of “the Boys” were out front. Afterwards, so the story goes, they went backstage and offered to take him for a “ride” if he didn’t shape up. For the remainder of the gig, Frank sang like an angel.

  Then I would sneak into the El Morocco to watch Milton Berle or Sophie Tucker; Dede Pastor and Charles Aznavour were visible in les boîtes on Rue St.-Laurent. Edith Piaf sang at the Sans Souci—tiny Edith, a pathetic birdlike figure in a simple black frock, her pale white face and matted hair illuminated by cruel lighting, let loose her songs of the streets and sent shivers down your spine. There was a bitterness, a bravery and a poignancy about them; that such an outpouring of sound and passion could come from such a minute frame boggled the mind. I would haunt Edith, wherever she sang, for the rest of her life.

  How lucky I was at my age to have seen Louis Armstrong, the great Ella, Lady Patachou and the fabulous Kay Thompson. And over at Carol’s Samovar, although I never saw her, a young chanteuse regularly appeared named Angela Lansbury. Then at Chez Maurice, all the big bands—Basie, Miller, Dorsey, Kenton, Cab Calloway—and the jazz, the jazz! I was swept away by a tornado of talent, all of which had an immense impact on my life. If they could hold a rowdy crowd filled with drink spellbound—the hypnotic powers necessary to our profession were worth investigating. After every such nocturnal adventure, I would walk home acting out everything I’d seen, singing at the top of my lungs all the material I’d memorized, shouting it out to the tall cathedral spires along Sherbrooke Street—my only audience.

  The real downtown (Vieux-Montréal itself) was where the future was on the boil in tiny clubs and holes-in-the-wall—the French Canucks emptying their hearts, folk singers, revolutionaries, the political satirists—the true rebels stirring up a new anger, the poets of the night. And in the wee hours down at the old Martinique among a crowd of beer-swilling toughs the great Mistinguette at age eighty was still giving us her apache dance and showing her “million-dollar legs”!

  We all sat there waiting for la Grande Dame to make her entrance. What a surly lot! Every drunken, brawling backwoodsman was there that night. The noise was earsplitting—it wasn’t possible that this rabble could ever be silenced. All of a sudden, there was a skirmish directly behind us at the entrance doors to the club and a lot of screaming. The bounce
rs were trying in vain to evict an old bag lady who was yelling a lot of French cusswords the likes of which I’d never heard before in my life! “Sortez, Madame! Sortez!” they shouted, and she would scream back in a guttural, whiskey voice—“Bien non! Non! Je veux chanter! Je veux chanter!” They tried to explain to her that only Mistinguette was allowed to sing here, but it was too late. The old bag jostled and fought her way past them and was now staggering between the tables on her way to the stage. She was a ghastly sight to behold, decked out as she was in all her filthy rags. Suddenly a blue spotlight hit the old crone full in the face. She stopped dead in her tracks at the center of that motley multitude and began to sing “Mon Homme,” the song that had been written for her so long ago. The silence was deafening—in one second she had us all in the palm of her hand—there was not a dry eye in the house.

  That was what it was about! That was a star! It was Mistinguette herself all right! And moments after, she had quick-changed out of her rags and was being hurled about in the apache dance wearing a skintight leotard that showed off her hourglass figure and those incredible legs. Not bad for eighty! Sometimes the lowliest of dives can give birth to the loftiest of memories—for that entrance of hers and what followed was certainly one of the most astonishing coups de théâtre I have ever witnessed!

  A COUP DE THéâTRE of another kind was about to make itself known—for one day, Miss Diana Barrymore came to town. She was doing a nightclub stint at the old Mount Royal Hotel. A friend introduced me and I was knocked out of my socks to meet the great John’s daughter! I didn’t realize she was on the skids and doing this hard-sell tour to pay her drinking debts. She was truly a victim, was Diana. Most of her act was pretty awful—some not-too-terrific imitations of famous personalities (including her dad) and some exceedingly off-colour jokes and jargon. People came to see her because of the legendary Barrymore signature, but Diana was generally pretty inebriated and would stop in the middle of her act to reprimand the waiters in her father’s stentorian tones if they so much as rattled a single dish. Because of her eminent family the promoters had insisted on modestly billing her as “The Crown Princess of the Theatre.” She was only in her late twenties and although neither of us had the faintest clue then, time for her was swiftly running out.

  Diana with her father, the great John Barrymore

  J’ai ta main

  dans ma main. Je joue avec tes doigts.

  She had a dark animal look about her, not beautiful, but sensual, arresting, and she sang songs in French—vraiment comme un ange! I am positive that had she known what discipline meant, she could have been a really wonderful actress, for she was riddled with hidden talent. By now I was a grown-up sixteen and sorely stuck on her! The rebel in her appealed to me divinely—she was “real wicked bad”! I never paid for anything, meals or drinks—she was one of the kindest women I’ve known. I guess underneath the bravado she was a lonely soul and liked the attention a worshipping idiot swain like myself lavished on her, so I was allowed to hang about. When I was fourteen, I had just about memorized cover to cover Gene Fowler’s Good Night, Sweet Prince about John Barrymore’s dynamic career and outrageous high jinks. It was the book that decided me on my future.

  One of Barrymore’s many wives was a stunningly striking and eccentric lady of means called Blanche Oelrichs who preferred to be known as Michael Strange. Diana was their offspring. I shamelessly showed off my knowledge of the Barrymores to her and in return she would regale me with a delicious lot of family dirt, especially concerning her father. She seemed quite obsessed by him. We would drink, smoke and talk for hours in her hotel room, she, sultry and brooding, a Madame de Montespan, draped seductively over her bed, naked as the day she was born and I, in a chair opposite her, bolt upright, fully clothed, ridiculously formal, pretending I hadn’t noticed.

  One night she was asked for after-dinner drinks by some very posh people in town who had known the Oelrichs side of the Barrymore clan. She instructed me, in no uncertain terms, to come along as her escort. Diana had already primed herself for the evening and was well on her way. So indeed was I. When we arrived, I realized that my hostess was a friend of Mother’s. My God! What was I to do?! Although very polite, they were an awfully stuffy lot and they looked at the two of us as if we were from outer space. In order not to panic and to somehow justify my presence, I boldly sat down at the piano, hoping to accompany Diana in a French song or two. She hadn’t known I could play—was very surprised and mightily relieved. She winked at me and took up the cue. As was her custom, she had decked herself out in a daringly revealing low-cut dress. In the middle of a song in order to emphasize a phrase, she made a sweeping theatrical gesture, miles over the top, when suddenly, not just one but two glorious breasts popped out in full view and stayed out for the rest of the number. Even after it was over, they were still out—I suppose Diana was too far gone to notice. Gauche was my middle name as I tried to revive the old gag about the waiter with a warm spoon, etc., etc.—there was nothing but deadly silence! They finally found their manners again, that poor shocked little gathering, and were nice enough to give us some mild applause as we bundled ourselves together and made a hasty retreat into the snow and to the nearest pub where we could drown our questionable triumph in a gallon of stingers.

  DUE TO MY appalling sense of timing and the fact that I was somewhat underage—I just happened to miss the Second World War (a rather embarrassingly large chunk of history to let slip by, you might say)!—I felt a little left out, for at the time my cousins and older friends were “over there” getting decorated on a regular basis for acts of bravery and derring-do whilst I had to be content with sitting at home for the entire duration—listening to the whole damn thing on the radio!

  We lived by the “wireless” then. I had barely stopped teething before I’d heard George V’s garbled Christmas messages crackling over the airwaves, Edward VIII’s rather weak but terribly human abdication speech, Roosevelt being very impressive, our own dry little prime minister Mackenzie King doing his pedantic best—then George V’s amazingly sombre and grandiose funeral service echoing through the Abbey; and following hot on its heels, the halting, stuttering, gentle George VI trying valiantly to assume control of his speech and his nation.

  We heard the slimy voice of “Lord Ha-Ha,” Hitler and his bad German, the piercing oratory of Herr Goebbels and, of course, Churchill—Churchill and then Churchill—Pickwick as the God of War or a militant Falstaff, cheering us on with his great command of the language and its wit. We sat, tensely listening for the daily “missing” lists—the horrors of Dunkirk, the disgrace at Dieppe. Then Big Ben, sonorous but comforting; L for Lanky, the serial made in Canada about life aboard a Lancaster bomber; the utterly unruffled-by-war programme The Archers, produced by the BBC, a comforting and affectionate part of one’s daily life.

  Then on the home-front stations, we could hear our own mayor, Monsieur Houde, urging everyone in Quebec not to join up—“It isn’t our war”—a bit late as everybody had been embroiled in it from day one! Camillien Houde was fat, ugly, bombastic, full of oozing charm and a two-faced bully. He was also notorious for continuously making insufferable faux pas. At a banquet at Montreal’s Windsor Hotel in honour of Their Majesties George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Houde, according to my mother, who was present, concluded his welcoming salutation by saying in broken English, “Your majesties, I wan’ to tank you from de bottom of my heart—and Madame Houde—she tanks you from her bottom too!”

  Mayor Houde with their Majesties—good luck!

  When conscription was in full flower in Quebec, everyone got religion. The priesthood was suddenly bombarded with applications from young men running away from the draft. There were more priests than ever—thousands—beneath every cassock, a draft dodger. You could see them in winter joining their brethren on their skis, clogging up the hills—there was hardly room for anyone else. If you stood at the bottom, there they came, barrelling down upon you, so close together they looked like
a Breughel painting in an earthquake. Then Mayor Houde tried to stop conscription altogether (“Why should we fight d’ere warr—it’s none of our business?”) but nobody listened anymore and in a matter of days he was safely in Sing Sing. The irony was that Les Fusiliers de Montréal and the famed Régiment Vingt Deux, two of our crack French Canadian battalions, had already proved themselves some of the toughest and bravest fighters on the European and African front. Well, that was my war and I’d missed it, just as I’d missed my baptism, my catechism, probably my circumcision—and God knows what! It couldn’t help cross my mind—was I to miss college as well?

  I blindly recall my entrance examination to McGill! There was that moment of ghastly tension and unbearable suspense as the questionnaire was being passed around—the same tension I was to feel in later life in those few moments before watching my first “corrida.” No difference really—in both cases, I was about to witness death! The questions blurred and ran into each other as I stared vacantly down at them; I felt a mounting nausea, so I averted my eyes and looked out the window. One of those perfect spring days was in progress—with the tiny crocuses and trilliums peeping so optimistically through the rapidly melting snow.

  It was all too inviting. I exchanged glances with my Ol’ pal Lynch-Staunton, a few “pews” away. He had just recently appeared with me in an amateur production of As You Like It, in which he contributed hugely. Though he had no lines to speak whatever, he came on wearing several dead branches as a headdress by which he represented the entire Forest of Arden. I liked him for the simple reason that he was out for a good time. Over the shaky scholastic years we had shared many similar tests of terror at cram schools such as “Jenning’s Hoscatorial” or “Barney’s Barn for Backward Bastards.” So, “Who the Christ needs this?!” was obviously the question on both our minds. After all, with his mum’s money he could probably buy McGill, and with my talent and genius it was all redundant anyway! We both grabbed our pens simultaneously, scribbled across the answer foolscap in huge scrawl, “I HAVEN’T THE FAINTEST FUCKING IDEA!”—and ran from the room out into the warm and, in our case, exceedingly brave new world. I think we both turned out okay in the end, in spite of it; I was to enjoy some success on the stage in the Theatre of Starvation, and he, out of the woods of Arden at last, on the Senate, in the Theatre of the Absurd.