I was so happy and privileged to work with Mr. Allan and his band of brothers. I had found a professional home there, far more exciting and comfortable than my own but, as luck would have it, it was all soon to be taken away. For that monster “Cyclops,” or the “Boob Tube,” or, as Don Harron more aptly christened it, “Summer Stock in an Iron Lung,” had begun to rear its ugly head! The fickle government, ignoring everything else, had decided to turn its attention to this newly adopted impertinent child, so all that was left of Andrew Allan and his golden gifts to a world whose imagination he had so eloquently enriched were a few faded worn-out cylindrical discs, some saved, many rusting with age, hidden away forever, in some remote forbidden archive.
THE OFF-MICROPHONE everyday life in stultifying “Muddy York” (Toronto’s original name) was considerably livened by the turbulent presence of one of the most unusual characters I have ever had the questionable fortune to encounter. His name was Kane. It could have been Charles Foster Kane (as Welles had played him)—his personal charisma was just as formidable—or the other Cain, for there was enough darkness in him to have done away with twenty Abels, but no, it was simply Kane. Unlike his biblical namesake, however, he was very much his brother’s keeper for the small band of devoted slaves he had gathered together to form his “cult;” he protected and cared for them as fiercely as he could make them jump. I am ashamed to say I was one of them—but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
He was in his late twenties, tall and handsome, had served in the war in the air force and at one glance he could have been taken for any successful young man on his way to a lucrative career. But his looks belied him, to put it mildly, for among his many personalities one could detect without much difficulty a Mesmer, a Pied Piper, an Aleister Crowley or a Groucho Marx. He would go to the very limits to use his demonic persuasive powers on the unsuspecting, which usually resulted in sidesplitting chaos! He was both frightening and shatteringly funny and had been blessed with enormous charm.
Professionally, Kane was a radio announcer-cum-narrator-commentator both in the United States and Canada, not particularly famous but certainly one of the best in the business. He regularly commuted between New York, Montreal, Toronto and Chicago—his polychrome voice floating over the airwaves, seductive and soothing. He made a very good salary indeed but never seemed to have any money, partly because of his enormous family of kids (some adopted), partly because he always gave it away to drunks, bums, nuns, cripples or simply burnt it whenever the mood of protest took hold.
He had left his hometown, Montreal, a bit of a war zone after his many pranks, fed up and seeking change. He had been demoted by an angry producer he thoroughly disliked who one day discovered a horse in the control booth just minutes before air time. Of course he knew at once who had done it. Kane had bribed the “boys” downstairs to put the beast on the freight elevator and take it all the way up to the third floor. As usual, he was fired on the spot. Chastised, Kane found himself dee-jaying a late-night “pop show.” After a raunchy old recording of a lady blues singer wailing away in a dirty, cracked whiskey-soaked voice he would announce, “And that was Eleanor Roosevelt with her version of ‘One for My Baby,’” or after some red-hot mama had belted out her mean jive or skat, “There goes Helen Keller doin’ her thing again.” He got his revenge but, further demoted, he was promptly sentenced to the lowest rung—the final insult—doing early-morning interviews out in the subzero wind and slush: “And how are you, sir, this fine morning? What do you do?” In those days the outdoor mikes were connected to power within the building by a cord fairly limited in length and Kane, in order to get out of the cold, would follow his interviewee onto a bus or streetcar, still talking. The door would close, the mike cable would snap and Kane, toasty warm at last, would not be seen for the rest of the day.
He never once ceased in his cause to fight for freedom of the spirit, his or anyone else’s, but his windmills had been invisible. Now in Muddy York, then the capital of conformity, he at last could see them as plain as pikestaffs and with renewed relish began his attack. He would prowl the streets (me tagging along as a fledgling Sancho Panza) and address the tight-lipped citizens, depression written all over their long, downcast faces. “This is National Smile Week in Toronto, folks—come on, you can do it! Give us a smile.” In supermarkets he would give away carton after carton of cereal or anything else to be found on the shelves, saying they were all gifts from the store “just for a smile.” They smiled all right, perhaps for the first time. Then we would quickly slither out a side door to the street and gleefully watch the crowds lumbered with hundreds of cartons trying to explain to the outraged manager and cashiers that it was “Smile Week” and they’d been told everything was free.
He loved public transport—any kind, because of course the audience was captive. Out of nowhere from the back of the bus Kane would scream at the top of his lungs, rush forward to the front crying out, “Rape!! That dreadful woman tried to rape me. Driver, stop the bus and let me off—I can’t stand it. Let me off now!” The driver happily complied and the bus moved on, everyone staring at a perfectly innocent-looking nun and wondering what hidden unleashed lust lay beneath her habit. One of his disciples, a pudgy, good-natured kid whose dark skin and thick hair could place him anywhere along the Gaza Strip, was called Irving Lerner. Far from stupid, Lerner could, however, make his rubberlike baby face assume the dumbest and most cretinous of expressions. Kane took instant advantage of this. He announced to an embarrassed and crowded bus that “Bongo” had just got off the boat, didn’t speak any language known to man, was extremely susceptible to appearances and could express himself only by laughing or crying; if he thought someone was ugly he would laugh—beautiful, he would cry. “Bongo! That woman sitting in the corner—what you think of her?” Bongo would fall about the bus laughing hysterically.
I once was on the same sardine-packed streetcar as Kane and Bongo. They were hanging on to their straps, looming over a sweet little old lady armed with parcels who had finally found a seat. Kane began regaling the old dame with an endlessly complicated but heartrending spur of the moment histoire of Bongo’s miserable and tragic life. When it was over the old lady was so overcome she got up and offered Bongo her seat. Kane took it instead, explaining that because of a rare jungle-related bone disorder caused by ill nourishment due to abject poverty, Bongo was more comfortable standing.
There was an orchestra conductor in the “light entertainment” section of the CBC not too many people warmed to—he was rather brash, loud, low on sensitivity and taste and exceedingly pleased with himself. Kane took matters into his own hands. He started spreading the totally false rumour that “higher echelons” were busy interviewing conductors from far and wide to possibly take the fellow’s place. As no one at the station recognized me, Kane decided I was to be the prime contender! I was to be the new boy wonder from Vienna, the next Mahler—the messiah the music world had been breathlessly awaiting. To make the stress even more emotionally charged, I was to be blind. (He even provided a white stick.) Every time we came upon the unfortunate conductor, on the street, in the studio corridors, anywhere, Kane would whisper in my ear the command “Blind,” and I would immediately go into my silent act, tapping my stick, as Kane slowly and gently led me by. This happened over and over again—in the most unlikely places. I was becoming exhausted. Once at a major hockey game we were venting our spleen at the opposing team when Kane (who had eyes in the back of his head) hissed, “Blind,” and I was forced to miss the rest of the match by having to become yet again that goddamn unseeing child-genius! It eventually drove the poor man (who was not overly endowed with grey matter) to utter distraction and I believe he sent in his resignation at a later date, possibly to save himself the embarrassment of dismissal.
Kane was brilliant on the telephone. He would pick a name at random from the directory, make the call and keep the unknown person on the line for as long as he wanted. If it was an odd name, a name that tickle
d his warped sense of the macabre—woe betide its owner. His improvisational powers were so extraordinary he could have, had he wished, started a war. He actually did once. He picked two names, both of them men, and phoned each one as the other. He continued this at intervals until he had managed to stir up such animosity between them that to settle the matter a meeting had to be arranged. Standing on the other side of the appointed street corner, Kane watched as the two perfectly innocent, complete strangers proceeded to beat each other to a pulp.
He had invented a smooth character for himself for these phone escapades whom he christened “Harrison Martins,” a cool cat who probably wore shiny suits and lifts in his shoes. Harrison and I would get on the blower, arrange assignations and work our way miraculously into the houses of people we had never set eyes on in our lives. We got to meet a lot of ladies that way. Even though these situations were fraught with danger, Harrison never did anything harmful; his only challenge was to see how far we could go. There was clearly not a lot to do in Toronto the Good in them there days—one had to search rather hard for diversions, but for a youngster like myself, trained to suppress emotions, being around this particular citizen Kane was certainly an early lesson in free expression, if nothing else.
One day Kane left Toronto—you could almost hear that old Mausoleum of Morality sigh with relief. It seemed, at the time, he had gone for good. His parting gesture was entirely in keeping. The producer and crew of his least favourite programme assignment reported for work early that morning to discover not a trace of Kane but in his place half a dozen sheep standing around the piano with a formal farewell note tied to one of them. I wondered where he’d got to and if he had taken his brood with him, that long-suffering family who adored him but who were forced to share him with his other much larger family—the lost and the downtrodden. In spite of his cruel streak, he had a huge and generous heart and would at a moment’s notice turn his home into a soup kitchen for the derelict and the homeless. In the shaky postwar days he proved, as the Brits would say, damn good value. He was not afraid to be free or to free others who were afraid.
The last I heard he was living with his family, his animals and God knows who else in an old abandoned railway coach on some deserted field outside Quebec City. I know it wasn’t because of hard times—that was far from the case—but because it appealed mightily to his strong sense of the bizarre, the eccentric. Before any self-righteous bigot could pronounce his doom, he had already sentenced himself to this cozy exile, locked away in his little fortress of protest, away from the world outside, which, freed from his tentacles for a while at least, could return uninterrupted to its former, more comfortable routine—dull and safe.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bonjour ma Belle Province
Vous m’avez sonné?
It was high time for me to leave as well. I made my way from that shadowy town which had yet to come out of the closet, back into the light—the light of my very own province where I could feel the pulse of the country; and my city, my welcoming city of sin, where it was always cocktail hour, where I could find at least some madness and laughter, the serum I craved. Like a man possessed, I went from dive to dive—every one of my favourite haunts—determined to make up for lost time. My frenzy continued far into the night and ended as it always ended in the first light of dawn way down in the bowels of the town, that final call to arms, that last little outpost of sound and fury—Rockhead’s Paradise! Even though it was falling to pieces, it hadn’t changed. It never changed. There he was, old Rockhead, waving you in and that sly Jamaican roué “Lord Caressor” still rhyming his raunchy calypso, along with Josh White, classic, dignified, tickling the ivories till dawn, the cabaret stars, their gigs over, would appear and start to improvise. Huddled in a corner, looking somewhat used and bleary-eyed, a little cluster of carriage trade in all their furs and finery, desperately drinking their way out of an era—the local vampires who came out only after dark.
I had met them on their decline. (My bad timing again!) It didn’t matter a damn, however; I was drawn to them as if by maggots—or magnets—I never know which. They were the outcast offspring of wealthy socialites (French and English, “Franglais” to be exact) who had gone astray. They’d never worked a day in their lives—you could call them failures, you could call them losers, but, at least, they were determined to “go out” in style. Their dialogue was a mixture of Coward, Rattigan, and Maugham, with distinct Rabelaisian overtones. Their biggest enemies, besides themselves, were the philistines of this world and they worshipped everything that was rebellious, left of centre or off the wall. Time magazine had called them “The Naughty 10.” Chic, theatrical prancing peacocks, they were early pre–jet-setters bent on terrorizing the globe, but now, no longer flush, their range was limited to café-society Montreal—the only stage left to them on which they could dance their somewhat depraved dance.
Two of the more formidable among them, the leaders of the posse, were women. One was a tall, fair, strikingly beautiful ex-debutante named LaFleur—with a shock of golden tresses and legs that went on forever. Somewhere within her, there lurked a jolly, fiendish dybbuk who gave her a maniacal wit and a danger that was as lethal as the sparks she ignited from a sinuous and quite stupendous body. When LaFleur was bored or had run out of invention, she and another ex-deb, a dark-haired beauty called Rita, would prop themselves up at the bar at Carol’s Samovar or any exclusive nitery, and pose as high-class hookers, just to see which of them could maka da mosta moolah in one night! They always managed to follow through and quickly became the favorites of the visiting business elite, much to the chagrin of the real prostitutes. I wager, in a dull month, had they wished, the two of them could have gone through a goodly portion of corporate Europe and America. If any lady at the bar became jealous and began asking for trouble, LaFleur would quietly and neatly place her unfinished martini into her bag—zip it up for safety’s sake—and engage her heckler in a boxing lesson she would never forget!
Ma grande amie, LaFleur, a mixture of glamour and fire
The other considerable force to contend with in the group was my favorite. Her name was Nanette. She was in her sixties. She was small, slim, soignée, dressed to perfection but with a face that not even a mother could love! It was the face of a comic and inspired nothing but laughter, so it was not surprising to discover that her beau ideal was none other than our own homegrown Beatrice Lillie. She had been married to a homosexual alcoholic called Stanley who played café-society piano. She had kept him for years. He had died writhing in agony from cirrhosis of the liver. Nanette was the biggest drunk I have ever known! By now she had squandered most of the fortune she inherited from the family steamship lines so the trust had cut her off with a mere piddling allowance and put it all aside for her two sons. “Not mirages dawling—they’re really mine. Poor Stanley—I had to prop it up with matchsticks but we managed!” When relatively sober her humour was gossamer, mercurial and excruciatingly funny. Her bon mots would be delivered in a voice that out-Talloo’d Tallulah. She made me laugh till I cried. But, one rye on the rocks, her eyes revolved back into her head, and she would slide, silently, on some invisible bobsled under every table or barstool across the city. Most bartenders in town could tell you she had no control whatsoever over her poor old pins, which she affectionately referred to as “Legs by Bechstein.” In this state, no piano legs they; they had to have belonged to some worn-out rag doll and were so wobbly it was impossible for one man to lift her (God knows, I tried!) so that several waiters had to be regularly commandeered. One could never say that Nanette was thrown out of a bar—for as she was gathered up, her exits had all the dignity and precision of a military funeral.
Part of the summer Nanette would disappear to the coast of Maine and sit on a beach with a picnic basket and a shaker by her side, sipping martinis all day long. She told me Stanley and she used to do this together every summer at this very same spot, but now she was doing it alone. I think she missed the old sot. “T
here was this rather dishevelled-looking seagull that kept hanging around me and my picnic basket all day long. Each time I’d appear on the beach, that same seagull would stride up and just stand there with its head on one side and stare at me. I threw everything I had at the stupid thing but it wasn’t interested in food—only the martini. It loved martinis! It became a ritual. I brought two chilled martini glasses to the plage, poured one for myself and one for the seagull. This went on for a whole week! One day the seagull didn’t turn up. I was relieved ’cause I’d have all my martinis for myself, yet a little hurt because it didn’t seem to care. At the end of the day I decided to fill one last shaker for the road and take a quick dip. Just as I was staggering back up the beach I saw the damn bird. He was on my rug, weaving about unsteadily, pissed out of its skull! It had lapped up the entire shaker of martinis! I always knew that Stanley would come back as a fucking seagull!”
I was crazy about her! She was kindness itself to me—we did all the nightspots together and she taught me how not to drink! Nanette was a total tonic to be with, for she saw the ridiculous in everything and everybody and most of all, which was as hilarious as it was redeeming, in herself!
SEAN O’CASEY might have been describing the Naughty 10 when he coined the phrase “wincing worms in a winecup,” but they were better than that. There was a reckless bravery about them—they had tremendous guts—you couldn’t take that away from them. The further they fell from grace, the more they stuck together; and when they replenished their coffers by selling their souls, they reformed ranks and like a pack of wild beasts, tore the city apart and once again left it ravaged! If they liked you, however, and you were in trouble, they would give you the shirt off their backs—a gesture which LaFleur by the way was only too happy to offer quite literally, at any given time and preferably in public. She owned a fabulous collection of furs from lynx to sable under which she very frequently wore nothing at all; so when the going got tough at the bar and the customers objected to her increasingly foul language, with an imperious gesture she would let the furs fall to the floor while she remained elegantly perched on the bar stool, magnificent in her alabaster nakedness—a veritable Godiva—gleaming in the soft, dim light. She had often thus reduced the room to a shocked and paralyzed silence and her musical laughter only made her more ravishing than ever, as she threw back her head in a taunting mockery of triumph.
In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Page 9
