Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  That same year he launched an autobiographical musical, Dream a Little Dream: The Nearly True Story of the Mamas and the Papas, which opened in Halifax and went on to Toronto and then Santa Barbara, California. He opened the show by saying: “My name is Dennis Gerrard Stephen Doherty . . . In the sixties, I was in a group called the Mamas and the Papas, and this, among other things, is the story of that group and those times. But, as Grace Slick said, ‘If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.’”

  Doherty was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996 and nominated for a Gemini for best performance in a children’s or youth program or series for Theodore Tugboat in 1997.

  Just before Christmas 2006, Doherty had surgery for an abdominal aneurysm. He subsequently suffered kidney problems and was put on dialysis, but his earlier life had caught up with him. He collapsed at home in Mississauga, Ontario, and died before he could receive medical attention.

  Robert Burns

  Graphic Designer

  April 16, 1942 – May 14, 2005

  ROBERT BURNS WAS many things: a graphic artist, a creative thinker, a brander — he and partner Heather Cooper created the beaver logo for Roots — but most of all he was a drug addict. That fact obscured his talents and darkened his life, from the collapse of the high-flying design firm Burns Cooper Hynes in the early eighties to the ruin of personal relationships and his own early death in 2005. He had been abusing drugs for nearly half his life.

  “Addiction isn’t a flaw. It’s a disease,” communications consultant Bob Ramsay said in a eulogy at Burns’s funeral, lamenting the waste of such brilliance. Himself a recovered cocaine addict and winner of a Courage to Come Back Award from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Foundation, Ramsay had intervened several times to get Burns into treatment, but the addiction’s hold was too tenacious.

  As a designer, Burns was the equivalent of a bandleader, said his former partner, copywriter Jim Hynes. “He was like Glenn Miller. He knew the sound he wanted to create and he was a genius at putting together the right ingredients to get that result.” Other people did most of the work, of course. “He used to call me the donkey,” said Hynes, “because I did a little work every day, keeping the cart moving at all times while he would run, run, run and then crash because he would be running at a pace that nobody could sustain.”

  At his best, Burns was a virtuoso of the big idea — the central phrase or image that you could build a product or an advertising campaign around. “He had heart, wit and intelligence,” said Eric (Ric) Young, a social and environmental communications consultant. “That is a rare combination and it was invested in all of his work, which was strategic and conceptual. He had real passion and ambition and he brought fantastic energy and an aspiration for greatness to every project.”

  Like Svengali, he “could plug into another person and tune himself onto that wavelength so perfectly that it was mesmerizing,” said Hynes. “That was his greatest talent when he was building a very successful organization, but it was also the talent that enabled him to survive on the street and carry on with a lifestyle that most people can only manage for a few years before they end up in the graveyard.”

  ROBERT BURNS WAS born on April 16, 1942, in London, England, less than a year after the Blitz ended. His early childhood was spent in a war-racked working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of London.

  He was hard to handle as a teenager and once made headlines in a local newspaper after he and a couple of friends were arrested for urinating on somebody’s front lawn. His parents, fearing he was headed for trouble, made him enlist in the Royal Air Force after he left school at sixteen. The RAF tried to train him as an armaments technician working on nuclear weapons, but he couldn’t tolerate the routines and regulations. The quintessential free spirit, he frequently butted heads with his superiors, although he did find success as a bugler and a fencer. Finally, having joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he persuaded the RAF that he was a conscientious objector and won a discharge.

  He put together a portfolio and won a grant to go to art school to study painting and sculpture. Later he confessed that he had spent his grant money on Savile Row suits and handmade shoes to “make up for lost time” before dropping out. Like so many creative types in the early 1960s, he fancied himself a folksinger. As well as strumming a guitar, he ran an artists’ booking agency called Folksounds in Lewisham.

  He met Canadian Ellen Anderson (later an artist and social activist) in 1965 as she “stepped off the plane” from Toronto. One of her high school friends, who was working at Folksounds, had asked Burns for a ride to the airport. They were together from that moment, according to Anderson. They married and made plans to move to Canada because she thought they would both have a greater chance of making a living in the arts in Toronto.

  Burns, then twenty-two, needed a passport. At the registry office he made a casual joke about his parentage and then learned that he’d been adopted as a baby. He felt betrayed, according to Anderson, who believes that confronting the truth about his birth was one of the demons that Burns wrestled with for the rest of his life.

  In Toronto, Burns and Anderson shared a house with a number of artists, including the photographer Bert Bell. Burns found work as a graphic artist for CFTO, the Toronto flagship station of the CTV television network, and then formed his own company, Robert Burns Designs. The Canadian market was too small for him to specialize in, say, exhibit design or annual reports, so he had to learn to be a generalist, which became an advantage because he could “cross-pollinate” ideas from one aspect of the business to another and combine images, type, and metaphors in fresh ways that caught the attention of some big American clients.

  Burns, who had grown up with rationing and deprivation, was so bewitched by the wealth of North America that he wrote a letter to a friend back in England saying, “The streets are filled with cars as big as houses.” Soft drugs and easy money were big parts of the advertising world in the late 1960s, and few were more attracted to both than Burns.

  He left Anderson in 1969, when she was pregnant with their son, Gabe. The breakup was cruel and acrimonious. By then he was working on a freelance basis with Heather Cooper, an illustrator and graphic designer whom he’d met through photographer Bert Bell. They began a professional and personal relationship that lasted eleven years, a creative partnership that brought them a stellar list of clients, a lavish lifestyle, and a daughter, Sarah.

  Either separately or together, as the graphic design firm Burns Cooper, the duo seemed to be involved in everything that was hip and innovative, from David Crombie’s mayoralty campaign in Toronto to the Canadian Brass, Roots, and Citytv. “Being intensely creative was what we were about,” said Cooper in an interview after Burns died. “Work was our passion and probably the original reason for us being together.”

  Jim Hynes arrived in Toronto from Montreal in 1972 to work as corporate communications chief for the Industrial Acceptance Corporation, which was about to become the Continental Bank of Canada. He hired Burns Cooper to develop a new graphic identity and design an annual report for the transformed company. Over the next three years the two men became such close friends and colleagues that Burns persuaded Hynes to quit his job in 1975 and join him and Cooper in a partnership that became Burns Cooper Hynes.

  Within five years they became one of the biggest, best known, and most prestigious graphic design companies in the country. They produced corporate identities, annual reports, and sales materials for clients such as Northern Telecom, Alcan, Imperial Oil, Cadillac Fairview, and Canadian Pacific Air Lines.

  “He loved luxury. When he had money, it vanished instantly on the most expensive things he could find,” said Hynes. In those days it was not uncommon to end a meeting with an advertising agency by doing a “mile-long line” of cocaine on the boardroom table. “Everybody snorted coke,” said Hynes. “It was considered completely harmless fun.”
But Burns, who had become a serious addict by the end of the decade, moved on to injecting, quickly draining the company to feed his rapacious habit.

  “He changed our lives in a big way, first for the better and then for the worse,” said Hynes. “I needed to get out of the corporate world and I still remember that decade as the happiest of my working life. Heather is a very reclusive person and for her to sell herself as an illustrator was very difficult, but Robert made her into a superstar. The first requirement of one of Robert’s big ideas was a great big poster by Heather Cooper. He created an unending market for her work that she could never have created for herself.”

  After the collapse of Burns Cooper Hynes in the early 1980s — Cooper said it took her years to wind up dealings with creditors and contractors — Burns started a couple of other design firms and collaborative ventures, but he never really recovered his momentum or his sobriety. By the mid-1990s he was calling himself a communications designer and a “cartographer of new realities” and had a business card advertising his services as “Making Values Visible.” He declared: “Design is at least as important, maybe more important than art in contemporary society,” in an April 1993 talk sponsored by the Advertising and Design Club of Canada.

  That was probably the highlight of his post–Burns Cooper Hynes career. He couldn’t control his addictions and ended up on the streets for close to a decade. In 2004 he learned that he had at least two types of hepatitis and terminal liver damage. The following year he moved into a group home run by the Homes First Society and connected with outreach and religious workers at St. James Cathedral in Toronto and a neighbourhood centre called 6 St. Joseph Street. There is a photograph of him looking happy and peaceful standing with the rest of the crew on a break from a renovation project. Not long after that picture was snapped, he collapsed at his group home. He was taken to hospital, where he died of complications of hepatitis on May 14, 2005. He had turned sixty-three the month before.

  Paddy Mitchell

  Bank Robber

  June 26, 1942 – January 14, 2007

  AS A CROOK, Paddy Mitchell was charming, manipulative, and flamboyant. One of Canada’s most successful armed bank robbers, he was a master of disguise and a diabolically clever escape artist. He considered himself a gentleman thief and took pride in never harming anyone — at least physically. In that nicety, he was the consummate Canadian. His signature was a ticking stopwatch dangling from a chain around his neck, a graphic reminder to keep moving in order to get in and out of a bank in ninety seconds.

  During an eleven-year crime spree, his Stopwatch Gang, which included Lionel “The Ghost” Wright and Stephen Reid, stole $15 million from banks across North America. The only casualty was Reid, who once shot himself in the foot during a holdup.

  Mitchell was the mastermind. Impossible to imagine what he might have become if he’d parlayed his wits and his chutzpah in a more conventional career. Instead, the kid who grew up poor and rough in a working-class district of Ottawa graduated from pinching money from his mother’s purse to planning bank heists to underwrite his lavish drug-and-booze-soaked lifestyle.

  He once boasted that there wasn’t a bank in the world that couldn’t be robbed. “No matter how careful they are, they always seem to miss at least one little chink in their security. And that was where I came in,” he wrote in a letter to a journalist friend in 2000 from his final home, an American prison. “I could always find that little chink.”

  A strategic and tactical whiz, he’d often plan diversions such as calling in a bomb threat at one end of town to preoccupy the police while his Stopwatch Gang was pulling a bank heist in another. Even when apprehended, he could slip through prison walls. He faked a heart attack to break out of the Joyceville prison, east of Kingston, and later strolled out of a maximum-security institution in Arizona after crawling through an air-conditioning duct located in the ceiling of the warden’s office. Mitchell was also a master of disguise who dyed his hair, wore wigs, and even submitted to plastic surgery when his face, plastered on wanted posters throughout the U.S., became dangerously familiar to law enforcement officials.

  He estimated that he had taken part in more than a hundred robberies in his three-decade-long career as a bank robber. At the peak of his notoriety he was at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. His gang’s exploits were the subject of a film, television documentaries, and a 1992 book, The Stopwatch Gang, by Greg Weston.

  “Stealing was not something any of us wanted to make a career of,” Mitchell confided from his final prison cell. What he couldn’t resist, though, and what he described as “the greatest thrill in the world,” was being “back in the apartment after a successful job, counting the money.” That’s why he and the rest of the gang kept going back to the till, hoping to make “that one big score so we could all retire and never have to rob or steal again.”

  Instead he died alone, more than two thousand kilometres from his family, of metastasized lung cancer in a prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina, on January 14, 2007. He was sixty-four.

  PATRICK MICHAEL (PADDY) Mitchell was born on Preston Street in Ottawa on June 26, 1942, in the middle of the Second World War. He grew up in what was then a scrappy neighbourhood with his two older brothers: boxer Fred, known as “Pinky,” and Bobby, also a thief, who died of cancer in 2002.

  He was only twelve and in Grade 6 in Our Lady of Perpetual Help School when he pulled his first scam. The nuns had organized a campaign to send food to the starving children in China. It was the aftermath of the Mao Zedong–led revolution, and the nuns promised that every ten-cent donation would help move a soul out of purgatory and to the first rung of the ladder towards heaven. By his own admission, Mitchell embarked on a two-month crime wave, pilfering money from purses, helping himself to loose change in his older brothers’ pockets, and grabbing money from the cash drawers in local shops. “I was the biggest donor in the school,” he later bragged.

  Nobody caught him that time, but as a teenager he was frequently in trouble with the local police for fighting, drinking under age, loitering, or petty vandalism. His high school years were spent behind bars, learning a life of crime rather than the usual academic skills. When he was fourteen, he got into a brawl with another boy. During the fight, the other kid hit his head on a cement sidewalk and died. Mitchell was convicted of manslaughter and sent to a reformatory in Guelph for two years. Only two months after his release, he got into trouble again and was sent back to Guelph, where he was detained until his eighteenth birthday.

  While he was honing his larcenous craft throughout the 1960s, he married, had a son, and held a number of low-level jobs. But parenting and punching a clock didn’t have the lure of carousing and thievery. He had hooked up with Lionel Wright, the night clerk for a large trucking company that had a warehouse the size of a football field crammed with property belonging to customers. The two thieves systematically removed the goods and sold them on the black market.

  By 1973 Mitchell was a thirty-one-year-old aluminum-siding salesman by day and the after-hours boss of a burgeoning criminal empire that he operated mostly from a table in the tavern of Ottawa’s Belle Claire Hotel. That’s when he met convicted bank robber Stephen Reid, “just turned three times seven” and holed up in a basement suite in Ottawa, “fresh off a prison break,” as Reid recounted in “The Art of Dying in Prison,” an essay in The Heart Does Break, a collection edited by George Bowering and Jean Baird. The two meshed. “Pat’s strong suit was charm and he carried it off with the smile of a little boy and the manicured look of a Las Vegas pit boss.”

  Initially Mitchell planned the robberies and Reid carried them out in what he later described as a relationship like that of Jack Sprat and his wife: “We licked a lot of platters clean.” With Mitchell’s felonious sidekick Lionel Wright, they formed what came to be called the Stopwatch Gang. They pulled their first big job — the “Great Gold Heist,” a robbery at Uplands Airp
ort in Ottawa — in April 1974. Mitchell, the mastermind, and his cohorts, Reid and Wright, stole seven gold bars destined for the Canadian mint that were worth more than $750,000.

  He got away with that one, but he was charged, tried, and convicted for another crime, although he always claimed he was innocent. The Ottawa Police and the RCMP connected him to a suitcase filled with cocaine at the same airport. Mitchell said he abided by the criminal’s honour code of not snitching on a fellow thief, but police linked the suitcase to Christopher John Clarkson, a nephew of Stephen Clarkson, a University of Toronto professor. (Clarkson jumped bail in 1976, while awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to import cocaine from Curaçao. He was extradited back to Canada in late December 2006 to begin the twenty-year prison sentence he had been given in absentia thirty years earlier.)

  Meanwhile, Mitchell had been given a seventeen-year prison sentence on the cocaine charges, to be served at a Kingston-area penitentiary. The prison walls couldn’t contain him, though, because he was prepared to risk his life for freedom. In November 1979 he soaked a pack of cigarettes in a cup of water, filtered the resulting mixture, and then swallowed the massive dose of nicotine. It simulated the symptoms of a heart attack. Prison guards rushed him by ambulance to a Kingston hospital, where Stopwatch Gang members Wright and Reid were waiting with Mitchell’s brother Bobby, all of them garbed as paramedics.

  They wheeled him inside the hospital on a gurney and then came back outside a short time later, claiming the prisoner had fled. When the guards rushed inside to track down Mitchell, the fake paramedics wheeled the gurney to a parked ambulance and spirited the crook away to freedom. Later Mitchell reported that his heart was beating double-time for days, but whether that was solely the result of the nicotine rush was never clear.

  After his heart calmed down, the trio took a train across the border into the United States, where they kept right on thieving for nearly five years, including holding up two armoured cars that were delivering US$283,000 to a San Diego bank. He was finally arrested in the Phoenix, Arizona, area for another robbery in December 1981, but he walked away after giving the police a false name.