Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  After flying to Montreal on a Canadair North Star — the pride of Trans-Canada Air Lines — she told immigration officials that she was a sculptor. “How do you spell that?” was the response from the immigration clerk dealing with “displaced persons.” He wasn’t impressed when she explained that she carved small animals in wood, but when she allowed that she could also carve lamps, he brightened, stood up, shook her hand, and welcomed her to Canada.

  The Chutters’ son Donald, who was waiting in the airport, took her home to Ottawa with him and introduced her to Harry Orr McCurry, the director of the National Gallery. After looking approvingly at photographs of de Pédery’s work, McCurry suggested she contact his friends “the Girls” in Toronto — the sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.

  First, though, she had to meet her sponsoring employers and get to work as their housekeeper. The Olsons turned out to be warm and hospitable, opening their home to her parents and her “fiancé” when the trio arrived (with her prized bronze elephant) several months later. Shortly thereafter de Pédery (re)married her husband and added his last name to hers. Then she and her reconstituted family — two parents, two sisters, and their children — moved into a small apartment above a store. Her siblings quickly moved on, but she remained the financial mainstay for four adults.

  In addition to her housekeeping duties, she started a small business making Christmas cards, tree ornaments, and centrepieces for tables and combined it with a variety of other modestly paying endeavours: art classes, making decorative cushions and window treatments for restaurants, painting lampshades, repairing and restoring an antique metal rooster, and creating murals for schools. Life was hard but satisfying, except for her depressive husband, who never adjusted to the loss of his former journalistic career.

  “My husband was impossible,” she told Elspeth Cameron, author of And Beauty Answers: The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, complaining that he refused to take on the menial painting jobs that she accepted with relish. By 1958 her parents had immigrated to Argentina to join one of her two sisters, and de Pédery-Hunt and her husband had separated, although they didn’t divorce until the early 1960s.

  Finally on her own, and aided by the stalwart and influential support of Wyle and Loring, she was able to concentrate on her abiding passion — art. “The Girls” fed her Sunday dinners at their studio in a former church in the Moore Park area of Toronto, encouraged her artistic aspirations, and arranged for her to take over A. Y. Jackson’s room in the Studio Building (an artist’s facility in the Rosedale Valley, designed by Eden Smith and financed by Lawren Harris) while he was away on a sketching trip.

  “The Girls” also helped her get a job teaching sculpture beginning in 1950, supported her for election to the Sculpture Society of Canada in 1953, and introduced her to critics and curators. “We like her very much — and think she will be a great acquisition to Canada,” Loring had written to McCurry at the National Gallery in August 1948. They also encouraged their friend Alan Jarvis, who became the third director of the National Gallery in 1955, to support her work.

  Jarvis saw de Pédery-Hunt’s bust of Loring at an exhibition in Toronto in 1957. Because she couldn’t afford to have it cast in bronze, she had concocted a mixture of plaster, sawdust, and white glue that hardened to the point where she had to carve rather than model it like clay. Intrigued, Jarvis asked to meet the artist, who wasn’t there because she was teaching. He persisted and not only met de Pédery-Hunt but bought the carved bust of Loring and its maquette for the National Gallery. He also recommended her for a $700 travelling grant to visit European museums and galleries and meet sculptors — including Henry Moore in England.

  While in Europe, she found her vocation as a medallic artist. She didn’t go to Soviet-controlled Hungary, where revolution had been brutally suppressed two years earlier, but she did go to Belgium, which was hosting Expo 58 in Brussels. Nostalgia (and hunger) drew her to the Hungarian pavilion to sample goose-liver sandwiches, but what captured her imagination was a display of exquisitely crafted art medals. From that moment she knew that she wanted to make medals, and she wanted to do it in Canada. “I studied medal-­designing for some years in my art school,” she said in a speech at her ninetieth birthday party in 2003. “This art-form was unknown in Canada. So I will introduce it! This might become my contribution to my country.”

  And so it did. While she was in Europe she used her travels as a primer: every country she visited, including Italy, France, and England, had a strong medal-making tradition. Back in Canada she spoke with her friend Alan Jarvis about medal-making; he proposed that the fledgling Canada Council should commission a medal from her. It did, and she made the design in plaster, but there was no bronze foundry for artistic work in Canada at the time. Sending the medal abroad to be cast would be prohibitively expensive, so she searched around for an alternative and found a small commercial firm operated by Eric Knoespel that used similar methods for machine parts. Enterprising and innovative, Knoespel took on de Pédery-Hunt and her project and eventually created a company, Artcast Foundry, that still works with artists.

  Besides being an artist, de Pédery-Hunt was a passionate advocate for her art form. In this role she described the “magic” of owning a medal. “Clasp it in your fist, let your warmth enter the cold metal and then take it to the window. Watch it: The light hits some edges, hidden crevices appear, there are some mounds you had not even seen before. Feel the tension of the surface. There is life underneath. It is not a cold piece of metal any more: Trees grow here, bodies leap high, faces emerge. All of this is brought about by you, and only you can arrest this magic moment or change it at any time with a light flick of your fingers.”

  After an extremely long and celebrated life, de Pédery-Hunt died of colorectal cancer in the palliative care unit of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto on September 29, 2008. She was ninety-four. A few days later her family lovingly placed the ashes of the “shoebox baby” in another cardboard box — this one brandishing the name of the designer Ferragamo — and buried her in her adopted city of Toronto.

  Ed Mirvish

  Entrepreneur and Impresario

  July 24, 1914 – July 11, 2007

  LONG BEFORE BIG-BOX stores existed, with their sky-high warehouse shelves crammed with outsize containers of everything from soup to nuts, “Honest Ed” Mirvish invented the discount store in Canada. His bargain emporium at Bloor and Bathurst Streets in midtown Toronto was a model of entrepreneurial chutzpah.

  Mirvish developed his marketing philosophy early and he never changed it: fulfill a need; go against the trend; keep it simple. That’s why he opened Honest Ed’s in the downtown core instead of a suburban shopping mall, and he never developed a branch-store system. What he lost in savings on bulk purchases he gained in having only one store to stock, staff, and oversee.

  Among the marketing tips Mirvish lived by were “bright lights lure customers like moths” and “the bigger the display of merchandise, the more people buy.” To show he meant business, he illuminated the store’s exterior with a mammoth sign implanted with 23,000 light bulbs and plastered the walls with luridly painted signs such as HONEST ED’S A FAT SLOB, BUT HIS PRICES KEEP A SLIM FIGURE and DON’T JUST STAND THERE, BUY SOMETHING.

  As a young man he joked that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes sealed in a large hourglass prominently mounted in the store. That way, somebody could turn the hourglass upside down every hour so that his employees and his customers could say “There’s good old Ed . . . still running.”

  Despite his brash approach to business, Mirvish was soft-spoken, with a courtly manner. A dapper dresser, even down to patent-leather black shoes, he loved to go ballroom dancing with his wife, the artist Anne Mirvish.

  He opened the doors of Honest Ed’s in 1948, financed by the proceeds from cashing in his wife’s insurance policy. Five years later he was pulling in an annual gross of
some $2 million. His privately held, strictly cash business took him from poverty to wealth, especially as the city expanded in the postwar boom and turned his rock-bottom property acquisitions into prime real estate. His empire included a city block running south from Honest Ed’s, a residential street of brightly painted Victorian houses that he rented to artisans and book dealers and dubbed Mirvish Village.

  Mirvish’s entrepreneurship was revered, but it was his zany antics, generosity to immigrants, and open-armed embrace of the arts that earned him an affectionate place far beyond the commercial reach of his store. He revitalized King Street West by opening restaurants, buying and building theatres, and importing blockbuster theatrical productions to Toronto such as The Lion King, Mamma Mia, and Miss Saigon. He rescued the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto and the Old Vic in London and built (with his son, David) the lavish Princess of Wales Theatre, projects that enabled him to rub shoulders with both royalty and theatrical stars, including the Queen Mother, Peter O’Toole, and Sir John Gielgud.

  He never had a secretary, never accepted government subsidies for his theatrical productions, never took his operations public, and never — well, hardly ever — went into hock.

  YEHUDA EDWIN MIRVISH was born on July 24, 1914, in Colonial Beach, Virginia. He was the eldest of three children of David and Anna (née Kornhauser) Mirvish. By the early 1920s the Mirvishes, who had both immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers fleeing pogroms, had moved north to Toronto with their three children. They lived above the small grocery store they operated in the west end.

  His father “loved to sit in the store and read up to six newspapers a day,” Mirvish told Jack Batten in Honest Ed’s Story: The Crazy Rags to Riches Story of Ed Mirvish. “He also gave credit to customers who couldn’t pay. Which is why the store was always insolvent — and why, after school, I worked.”

  After his father died in 1930, Mirvish quit school to become “the proprietor of a completely bankrupt store.” He was fifteen. “Somehow, I ran it for the next nine years. Or it ran me,” he told Batten. His day began at four a.m., when he climbed on his bicycle and rode to the local markets to buy fruit and vegetables, racing back to open the store at seven a.m. His mother clerked while he stocked the shelves and set the prices. His brother, Robert, quit school at thirteen to help out.

  The family kept the business open during the long years of the Depression before calling it quits in 1938. Mirvish went to work for Leon Weinstein, a local kid who had started a chain called Power Supermarkets. By then he had met Anne Macklin, a painter and singer from Hamilton. They married in 1941 and lived in the family duplex while she worked a variety of jobs, including the Sports Bar, a clothing store they opened with money they received as wedding gifts and a loan from the bank.

  Unlike his father’s store, the Sports Bar began making money because of Anne’s winning way with customers, Ed’s canny deal-making with suppliers in the rag trade on Spadina Avenue, and the spending power of style-­conscious young women working in wartime munitions factories. Their real break came at the end of the war, however, when Mirvish struck a deal with the University of Toronto to buy a property the institution had been bequeathed but didn’t want: the stretch of small shops on Bloor Street running west from Bathurst to Markham Street. He paid $5,000 down and carried a $20,000 mortgage for what turned out to be a prime real estate asset.

  By now the Mirvishes were parents. Their only child, David, was born on August 29, 1945. With Anne Mirvish at home taking care of the baby, Mirvish gave up the dress business and went back into dry goods. In the spring of 1948 he bought up the entire stock of a burned-out Woolworth’s store in Hamilton, evicted the shopkeepers on his strip of Bloor Street, and piled up his merchandise on orange crates on the sidewalk. Over the entrance he hung a sign: NAME YOUR OWN PRICE! NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED! The store, which at first was open only on Saturdays, was mobbed. “Finally, I’d found my true forte,” he said later. The name Honest Ed’s was a spoof on what he hated about hypocritical advertising. As the persona of Honest Ed, he enlisted Dick MacDougal, a local drunk, who slept in the store’s basement and shovelled the sidewalks when he could stand upright. Known as Dirty Dick, MacDougal was “skinny, totally toothless, perpetually filthy, with stubbled chin, cauliflower ears, and a corkscrew nose,” according to Mirvish. For years most people believed that the photograph of Dirty Dick hanging under the sign reading HONEST ED WELCOMES YOU was a likeness of the proprietor.

  Even though consumer credit ballooned with postwar optimism and prosperity, Mirvish, having learned a painful credit lesson from his father, stuck to his cash-only policy. He also introduced daily door-crashers, taking a loss by selling spectacles or bloomers for nine cents a pair but more than recouping his investment by selling additional merchandise to the customers he had lured into the store.

  Mirvish’s penchant for buying low and selling cheap got him into trouble with brand-name manufacturers, who tried but failed to organize a boycott of his store in the 1950s. His location proved a boon when the east–west Bloor-Danforth line of the subway opened in 1966; the stop at Bloor and Bathurst was only steps away from his emporium.

  By the late 1950s, Mirvish felt secure enough to buy his family a home in affluent Forest Hill and to snap up the Victorian-era houses on the street behind his store. Although he had to fight city hall because the street was zoned residential, he finally won the day.

  Accompanied by clowns and brass bands, he opened his expanded four-storey, 6,000-square-metre store on October 23, 1958. Four months later, Nathan Phillips, then mayor of Toronto, pushed the button to illuminate the “World’s Largest Readograph,” a six-by-forty-one-metre sign containing 1,500 metres of neon tubing and 1,500 copy panels. The energy surge caused local blackouts. Today Honest Ed’s still has one of the biggest electric signs in the world.

  Of all his crazy promotion stunts, including Noah’s Ark and Pink Elephant sales, the Marathon Sale and Dance in February of 1958 was the wackiest. A “wilderness girl” named Janet Benson made the 1,500-kilometre trek from a village west of Fort William (Thunder Bay) to Toronto on a dogsled to publicize spot sales in the store, including a washing machine for $1.89 and a mink stole for $1.98.

  The big draw was the dance, in which couples shuffled around trying to last seventy-two hours and win the thousand-dollar first prize. Some eighty thousand customers crowded into the store during the three days and nights of the marathon, spending $75,000 — six times more than Mirvish had ever made in a single week in February, the slowest sales month on the calendar.

  Because the event ran continuously for three days, Mirvish violated a local bylaw that said retail establishments had to close by seven p.m. Sixteen Toronto police officers were sent in the middle of the night to check out his dance marathon, and they laid four charges. Mirvish paid the fine without arguing, calculating that it was small potatoes compared to his gross from the marathon. But by flouting the embargo against staying open late, he’d drawn press and public attention to the silly bylaw, and before long it was changed.

  He had a much more serious contretemps with the legal system in 1959, after he rented space to pharmacist Norman Englander to set up a discount drugstore. The Ontario College of Pharmacists refused to register Englander and the wholesale drug companies refused to deal with him, on the spurious grounds that selling bargain-priced drugs didn’t serve the common good.

  Riled, Mirvish went to the press, a favourite tactic that invariably resulted in megawatt headlines. “Abject persecution,” one columnist complained. The case ended up in the Supreme Court of Ontario, which ruled that the college had no right to refuse to register a qualified pharmacist. Englander was back in business, filling 6,500 prescriptions in his first year at Honest Ed’s.

  By the early 1960s, with the success of Honest Ed’s assured, Mirvish began looking for new ventures. He bought up the rest of the late-Victorian-era houses on the west side of Markham Street below Bloor, i
ntending to knock them down to create a parking lot. The residents protested and the city refused the application.

  Instead of fighting city hall, he surprisingly acquiesced, for reasons that were personal rather than commercial. His wife, Anne, was restless. Stories circulated that she was thinking of leaving Toronto to study art in New York City. She changed her mind after her husband bought up the houses on the other side of Markham Street, painted them pastel colours (following her suggestion), and leased the premises on both sides of the street to art dealers, artisans, and restaurateurs. Their own son operated an art gallery and bookstore on the street for several years. Eventually Toronto renamed the street Mirvish Village and designated it and Honest Ed’s store as tourist sites.

  Mirvish also toyed with the idea of buying the Victory Burlesque Theatre, a vaudeville house on Spadina Avenue that had been turned into a striptease venue, and transforming it into a legitimate theatre. Experts advised him that the Royal Alexandra, on nearby King Street, would be a much better investment. The theatre, which was architecturally and historically significant, had been built by Cawthra Mulock in 1907. Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, the Marx Brothers, Jessica Tandy, Raymond Massey, and Mary Pickford were among the greats who had appeared on its stage.

  Time had not served the grand old theatre well, and it came up for sale at a bargain-basement price in 1962. Egged on by his wife and his son, Mirvish acquired the Royal Alex for $200,000 cash and a promise that he would run it as a legitimate theatre for the next five years; after that, he could convert the building and property to another use if the theatre couldn’t sustain itself.

  He spent twice the purchase price on renovating the theatre, replacing the original tearoom with a bar, furnishing the lobby with his own Louis XV–style furniture, hanging framed photographs of famous performers in the lobbies, and mounting a marquee sign outside with 1,362 flashing light bulbs. Audiences and critics raved about the reopening on September 9, 1963, even though they panned the production of Never Too Late, starring William Bendix.