Again he seemed to have found his métier. Within three years he had been appointed curator and assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Toronto and granted a sabbatical, which he spent as a visiting curator at several august institutions in the United States. He gave a memorable public lecture, complete with slides, at the Smithsonian Institution, in which he compared the “full-bodied and orotund” Quebec weathervane roosters with the flat and one-dimensional American “cocks” as his stunned audience slowly grasped that they were on the losing side in a discussion of comparative cultural eroticism.
Symons was intent on kicking against the pricks, a defiance that he tried once too often with his superior at the ROM, who fired him for insubordination. Unable to quit the field of battle, he turned down the offer of a permanent job at the Smithsonian so that he could pursue his self-styled vocation as “a kind of priest of the chapel of Canadiana.” Living on a fifty-acre farm east of Toronto that his wife had bought from her husband’s family, he began and abandoned a book on Canadian history, wrote a play in which a symbolically unfulfilled English Canadian achieved a beatific state when sodomized by a French-Canadian chair, and, perhaps deliberately, messed up an audition for This Hour Has Seven Days, a provocative television show that seemed suited to his talents and tastes. The Symons universe was unravelling.
He fled the farm and holed up in a small hotel in Montreal. In an obsessive twenty-one-day outpouring, he produced his first novel, Place d’Armes, an autobiographical torrent about Hugh Anderson, an English Canadian, who wants nothing more than “the right to love my country, my wife, my people, my world,” a goal that he can achieve only by reclaiming his emasculated soul through sexual intercourse with male Québécois prostitutes in the square adjoining the Église de Notre-Dame. Anderson celebrates his deliverance by taking Holy Communion in the church, eating the Host in the Place d’Armes, and embracing bemused passersby.
Critical reaction was not mixed when Place d’Armes — Symons’s centennial project — was published in 1967. Writing in the Toronto Star under the headline “A Monster from Toronto,” cultural critic Robert Fulford castigated Symons’s gauzily veiled protagonist as “the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing” and criticized the author for being incapable of writing with or about love. A savaged Symons licked his wounds in Yorkville, which was enjoying its sexually liberated heyday, by cavorting with all manner of libertines, including two statuesque and begowned black transvestites whom he invited to a family party hosted by his in-laws.
He was also creating his second novel, Civic Square, an even more unwieldy manuscript that was the English-Canadian counterpart to Place d’Armes. A massive collection of polemical letters addressed “Dear Reader,” it was printed as a nearly 900-page unbound manuscript and packaged in a blue box, symbolic reminder of a gift package from Birks, the tony establishment jeweller. As a final flourish, Symons drew birds, flowers, and a red phallus on each page as it came off the Gestetner machine. He then delivered a copy to St. James Cathedral, his family’s church, depositing the nearly four-kilogram offering on the collection plate after Communion.
By now Symons had more serious preoccupations than rampaging book critics. The year before, at thirty-four, he had run off with John McConnell, the underage son of a prominent Canadian family. The lovers fled to Mexico with the police in hot and fruitless pursuit and then lived for a time in lumber camps in northern British Columbia. Coincidentally, Symons received a minor literary prize — the Beta Sigma Phi Best First Canadian Novel Award — while he was on the lam. He returned to Toronto to pick up his laurels and his thousand-dollar cheque and to have a formal meeting with his disaffected wife, who, not surprisingly, had begun divorce proceedings.
And so Symons began the long nomadic phase of his life. He lived variously in Trout River, a west-coast Newfoundland village, where he wrote much of the text for Heritage, his furniture book (which would eventually be published by M&S in 1971); in the Mexican expatriate artists’ colony San Miguel de Allende, where he began writing Helmet of Flesh; and mainly in Morocco, where he lived and loved and wrote for more than two decades in Essaouira, a walled medieval town. That’s where he seemed most in harmony with himself, his new lover, Aaron Klokeid, and his cultural and physical environment.
Periodically he returned to Canada: in 1970 on “a personal odyssey into the heart of early Canadian belief” as he researched his furniture book; in 1986 for the launch of Helmet of Flesh at a lavish party hosted by Charles Taylor at Windfields, his family estate (now the home of the Canadian Film Centre); and in 1998 to attend the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, where Nik Sheehan’s documentary film about him, God’s Fool, was being screened and Christopher Elson’s anthology Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons was being launched by Gutter Press.
Symons always claimed that he was homosexual, not gay, by which he probably meant that he didn’t embrace the gay liberation movement as a defining political and social cause. He wasn’t seeking equality, he was railing against the real foe: the Blandmen — the establishment types who he felt had betrayed Canada’s British and French heritage. Frequently lonely and depressed, often suicidal, perpetually broke, he was dependent on the indulgence of friends as his job prospects dwindled and his health deteriorated. He smoked, drank, and ate prodigiously at their expense and suffered over the years from diabetes and kidney problems.
In 2000 he returned permanently to Toronto. Taylor had died three years earlier and his final bequest had long since been spent; Symons was on his uppers and “a postscript to his own life,” according to one friend. He spent his last years at Leisure World, where a few of the faithful continued to stop by to take him out for a meal or celebrate his birthday. He often got into rows with other residents, accusing one of sexual harassment after the man objected to the cavalier way that Symons appropriated his newspaper every day.
Although Symons had long since divorced himself from his family, his youngest brother, Bart, attempted a reconciliation in the summer of 2008. “Almost in fear” of a confrontation, he made the train trip from his home in Stratford to visit his older brother, who was in St. Michael’s Hospital suffering from respiratory problems. “He was an absolute sweetie,” Bart Symons said later about a five-minute duty call that turned into a lengthy and emotional visit several months before his brother died. “It was an incredible event and he was so glad I had come and in hindsight so am I.”
In the end, blood and family proved stronger than kicking against the pricks.
Paul Brodie
Saxophonist
April 10, 1934 – November 19, 2007
ON AN ORDINARY day in 1978, musician Paul Brodie was playing the saxophone in his Toronto studio when the phone rang. Warren Beatty, the actor, was on the other end of the line. A fan of Brodie’s musicianship, Beatty wanted permission to use a recording of Brodie playing the fourth movement of Handel’s Sonata no. 3 in Beatty’s new movie, Heaven Can Wait. In the film, Beatty was cast as a wealthy football hero who played the soprano saxophone as a hobby; he wanted to use Brodie’s solo as background music for the scene in which Beatty’s character and his servants, all dressed in tuxedos, toss around a football in the garden of his mansion.
Brodie quickly agreed to terms with Beatty, put down the phone, and set to work parlaying a less-than-three-minute part in composer Dave Grusin’s film score into something akin to a Command Performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England. Before long “the Canadian media somehow got the idea that a Canadian saxophonist was being featured throughout the film,” Brodie wrote disingenuously in Ambassador of the Saxophone, his self-published autobiography.
When Heaven Can Wait was nominated for several Academy Awards, Brodie, whose chutzpah was surpassed only by his musicianship, flew to Los Angeles. He wangled tickets to the awards, sent 250 postcards to Canadian media pumping his connection with the film, and arranged to do a
live telephone interview with CBC Television the day after the ceremonies.
Brash, dynamic, and entrepreneurial, Brodie had precisely the right combination of talent and salesmanship to promote himself and his instrument at home and abroad. The saxophone is a relative newcomer as a musical instrument, so it did not have a role in traditional orchestras or in the music of the great classical composers. Invented by Belgian Adolphe Sax in Paris in the 1840s, the saxophone is a hybrid that combines the volume and carrying power of brass with the intricate key work and technical finesse of woodwinds. Although some modern classical composers have written for the saxophone, it is still mainly played in military and blues bands and jazz combos. Brodie tried to change that.
He was the first person to teach saxophone at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Although not himself a composer, he persuaded composers such as Srul Irving Glick, John Weinzweig, Bruce Mather, and Violet Archer to write music for his instrument. In his quest to promote the saxophone he co-founded the World Saxophone Congress with Eugene Rousseau in Chicago in 1969. The organization brings players, critics, composers, and audiences together in a different city every three years.
Early on, as a struggling performer and teacher, he invented a fictitious character, Ronald Joy, to be his front man for booking and promoting concerts to impresarios throughout North America. When potential sponsors responded to Brodie’s mass mailings by telephoning and asking to speak to Joy, Brodie would lower his voice by a couple of octaves and start bargaining performance fees, hotel rates, and dates. The fake manager arranged nearly eight hundred concerts for his “client” in the 1960s and ’70s.
During his fifty-year career as a professional musician, Brodie, the self-styled “ambassador of the saxophone,” probably played more concerts, recorded more albums, toured more countries, and taught more private students than any classical saxophonist of his or any other day. He was a champion not only of his own virtuosity as a player but of the saxophone as a musical instrument.
PAUL ZION BRODIE was born in Montreal on April 10, 1934, the younger son of Sam and Florence (née Schiller) Brodie. When Paul was ten months old, his father, who ran a dry goods store, shifted his family to the north end of Winnipeg, where he found work selling radios in an appliance store. The family moved again when Paul was eleven, to Regina, in neighbouring Saskatchewan.
He went to Strathcona School and sang in the junior choir at his synagogue. His father gave him a clarinet for his bar mitzvah and taught him to play “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” In high school, the only subject that interested him was music. Sick in bed with a cold one day, Brodie was listening to the radio and heard Freddy Gardner play “I’m in the Mood for Love” on the saxophone. He was besotted with the sound and immediately decided to switch instruments. Goodbye, clarinet. Hello, saxophone.
He earned money to buy a saxophone by working at a local deli, but he couldn’t find a teacher and so transferred what he knew about playing the clarinet to the saxophone. After graduating from high school in 1952, he packed his sax and his clarinet and headed to Winnipeg. He enrolled in a pre-law program at United College (now the University of Winnipeg) but failed so miserably he switched programs and schools, ending up at the University of Michigan, where Larry Teal taught the saxophone. Unable even to play scales, he was stunned by the virtuosity of the other applicants. When the university accepted him on probation for six months, he “practiced like a nut, ten hours a day,” and still barely passed the audition. But he’d learned discipline and how to set a goal.
In one of his first classes in the history of music he heard a recording of French classical saxophone virtuoso Marcel Mule playing the alto sax. His ambitions changed: whereas he had once hoped to be good enough to play in a band led by a musician of the calibre of Tommy Dorsey or Les Brown, he now considered the possibilities of becoming a classical saxophonist.
He joined the university band under conductor William Revelli and played the bass saxophone when they performed at Carnegie Hall in April 1954. He also formed a dance combo called the Stardusters, which helped earn tuition money and taught him a great deal about the business of promoting and organizing a group.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music education and a master’s degree in performance in December 1957, he went to Paris to study with Maestro Mule. Back in Canada, he moved to Toronto and looked for a job teaching saxophone.
“The Royal Conservatory of Music is now in its seventy-second year and we have never allowed a saxophone in the building,” protested Ettore Mazzoleni, director of the RCM, but the ever-persuasive and persistent Brodie succeeded in getting an audition. He played so well he broke the embargo and was hired as a woodwind instructor. Soon he was also playing on an occasional basis for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and doing regional tours with Jeunesses Musicales, first with pianist George Brough and then with Colombe Pelletier as his accompanist.
He made his debut as a soloist with the TSO at a Sunday afternoon concert on December 27, 1959, with Walter Susskind conducting, and his New York debut at the Town Hall on November 18, 1960, with George Brough accompanying him on the piano and Rima Goodman, a modern dancer from Toronto whom he’d married eight months earlier, turning the pages. There were only about forty-five people in the audience, but one of them was Raymond Erickson, the music critic for the New York Times. “Mr. Brodie’s skill made everything he played sound fluent and easy although the music was studded with technical difficulties . . . producing a lovely soft tone when he wanted to . . . in his splendidly vital performance,” he wrote. A jubilant Brodie phoned the Canadian Wire Service and begged them to pick up Erickson’s review, which they obligingly did, flashing the news about the Canadian native’s success in the Big Apple. Brodie carried that tattered clipping in his wallet for the rest of his life.
Two performance careers in one family meant too much travelling for a couple who wanted to stay married, so the following year, the Brodies settled in Toronto, added teaching to their repertoires, and established the Brodie School of Music and Modern Dance in a former furniture store. The dance studio was on the ground floor, six music studios were in the basement, and the second floor had two apartments. They lived in one and turned the other into an additional five music studios.
The Brodies ran their school for nearly twenty years, employing about twenty music and dance teachers and training about 650 students a season, among them Willem Moolenbeek, Lawrence Sereda, Robert Pusching, John Price, Robert Bauer, and Jean-Guy Brault, who went on to a long and successful career as a flautist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Brodie also taught woodwinds at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 1973; he formed a quartet in 1972 to showcase his own playing and the work of a revolving group of three students. The Paul Brodie Saxophone Quartet played at the World Saxophone Congress in London in 1976 and in the 1981 film Circle of Two.
After his “international” success with the film Heaven Can Wait, Brodie shuttered the school and wound up the quartet. The lease was up, he was in “phone ringing off the hook” demand, and she was “wildly busy” with commissions for her work as a fibre artist. He never stopped teaching, however, either privately in a smaller studio or at York University, where he taught from 1982 until the late 1990s.
Concert saxophonist and composer Daniel Rubinoff was one of his last students. “I needed a mentor and I found one,” he said about his relationship with Brodie. After studying in Europe, Rubinoff worked with Brodie for eighteen months beginning in 1995 and won the gold medal for the 1997 ARCT (Associate of the Royal Conservatory) exams.
“One of the things about Paul’s legacy is that he realized that you had to practise the saxophone to become as good a performer as you could possibly be, but you also had to be a tireless promoter,” Rubinoff said. “He was a wonderful businessperson and he passed that on.” How to have a career as a concert saxophonist, how to talk to an audience, how to be tough about criticism,
how to cold-call a concert promoter, and how to set up a teaching studio were among Brodie’s synergistic “life lessons.”
In his mid-sixties Brodie, who had high blood pressure and diabetes, almost died from an aortic dissection — a tear in the wall of the aorta. Even that nearly fatal condition didn’t persuade him to pack away his saxophone. When an MRI revealed an enormous aneurysm in his aorta in 2007, he insisted on postponing surgery until after he had finished recording a CD of his favourite pieces with harpist Erica Goodman. Once again the man and his instrument prevailed, but at a perilous cost. Near the end of the long operation, his heart finally gave out. He died, aged seventy-three, on November 19, 2007.
Jackie Burroughs
Actor
February 2, 1939 – September 22, 2010
AS SKINNY AS a praying mantis, tottering on platform shoes, sucking on a cigarette, her hair a cumulus of auburn curls, Jackie Burroughs — all of five feet, three inches — showed up for an audition at the Stratford Festival in 1975, clutching a handmade male doll so large it threatened to topple her.
“If you don’t mind, I thought we would do it together. It’s so boring doing it by yourself,” she explained to artistic director Robin Phillips in the first of a litany of deadpan comments larded with double entendres. “She was absolutely hysterical,” he remembered thirty-five years later. “Everything she said was so provocative that it was almost impossible not to give him [the doll] a contract too, because she was able to make him look so good. That is one of the most extraordinary things about her: she has always made the rest of us look better than we are.”
Burroughs, a classically trained dancer, had a body that she could twist like a corkscrew and a quicksilver imagination that could morph from sexy to farcical to tragic. Along with the great actor William Hutt, she shared an ability to find humour in the tragic roles and tragedy in the humorous ones, according to Phillips, who directed them both.
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