Thirteen

“Why Do You Need Royalties?”

In the late 1970s, I was becoming more and more frustrated by the comings and goings at Haber Artists, where a continuous stream of fresh-faced young assistants had to be trained from scratch. Eventually, Sandy Castonguay and Costa Pilavachi, who possessed a refreshing degree of business acumen, came on board, taking over negotiations on my behalf. Sandy, like several future agents and managers, suggested that signing autographs after concerts no longer befitted my ever-increasing stature as an international artist. “By allowing yourself to be accessible to the public, you destroy the mystique that classical artists should preserve,” he insisted. I had always been willing to meet members of my audience face to face, especially young guitar enthusiasts to whom it meant so much. What a thrill it had been during my student days to acquire Julian Bream’s and Segovia’s autographs backstage; what a treasured moment when Narciso Yepes had allowed me a close-up view of his nails. Resisting my agent’s counsel, I made a point of continuing to meet individuals from those seas of shadowy faces in darkened theatres. I remember the shy smiles of a little girl in a wheelchair who offered me a crayoned portrait, and the nervous eyes of pimply-faced teenagers presenting, like sacred offerings, pieces they had composed for me. I have signed everything from guitar straps, T-shirts, plaster casts, and the undersides of stage chairs, to thousands of programs, record covers, and music books. It is thanks to all those enthusiastic fans that my guitar career exists, and I will never take them for granted.

One thing that disconcerts me is to be rushed before a concert. I make every possible attempt to reach the venue at least three hours before a performance to adjust speakers, microphones, stage curtains, and lights. However, due to delayed flights, flat tires, traffic jams, or nonchalant promoters, pre-concert panic is sometimes unavoidable.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, my plane touched down on the icy landing strip at 8:20 p.m. for a 9:00 p.m. performance. Trying to iron my concert gown on the backstage floor while tuning uncooperative strings was not the best introduction to a new country. People expect me to glide off a plane right onto the stage, unaware that guitar strings and their players need time to adjust and acclimatize. Latin American concerts are notorious for their late starts, but there the unperturbed audiences expect recitals to begin at least half an hour later than advertised, so nobody voices concern.

Every performing guitarist can relate to a recurring nightmare I have. In my version of this dreadful dream, I am frantically preparing to set off for a concert, having forgotten to practise and feeling totally unprepared. Usually, I am dashing around a hotel room, slapping makeup on my face, and sprinkling talcum powder into my unwashed hair in a vain attempt to resuscitate it. All the gowns I pull out of the closet are either torn or dirty, and nothing seems to match. One of my guitar strings has snapped and I cannot locate a replacement set anywhere. (In other versions of the dream, my precious guitar has developed a nasty crack or my trusty footstool is broken.) To add to my frenzy, I am desperately late! Eventually, I reach the concert hall, where colleagues and critics are anxiously awaiting my arrival, and realize to my horror that this is an important international guitar festival. While trying to tune up, I notice that I have neglected to file my nails. One is about to split, so with trembling fingers, I struggle to repair it with Krazy Glue, praying it will hold together. Finally, after a long introduction and thunderous applause, I am propelled onstage, with thumping heart, dry throat, and clammy hands. I cannot remember the chords to the first piece, so I quickly jump into the next, but when that also draws a blank, I start to improvise, inventing entire contemporary-sounding sections to the compositions. Nobody in the audience breathes. Mental blocks sabotage each of the pieces, which dissolve into weird improvisations with special effects — even vocals! Some in the audience are already walking out. Mercifully, at this point, I wake up — the nightmare is too unbearable! Believe it or not, most of these individual situations have actually happened to me, but never could so many things go wrong at once. We guitarists all have disaster anecdotes that we love to recount when we get together. How could anyone who is not a player empathize with the anxiety caused by out-of-tune or fraying strings, the pain of cracked callouses, or the anguish we suffer on realizing we have filed our nails too short before a concert? Such agonies can be appreciated only by fellow string-pluckers.

The Kolmar-Luth agency in New York agreed to take over my U.S. bookings, arranging an engagement at Town Hall, my second successful concert in Manhattan. In addition to Kolmar’s dates, which were scattered around the continent, I teamed up with Chet Atkins for an outdoor gig in Chautauqua, New York; accepted the Vanier Award; was named Artist of the Year and Honorary Mayor of San Antonio, Texas; performed in the Bermuda Music Festival; shared the billing on an Alberta TV special with an upstart comedian named Jim Carrey; and gave a joint concert with Anne Murray in Wilmington, Delaware. Stickers from Phoenix, San Diego, Kansas City, and New Orleans vied for space on my well-worn guitar cases. Hiring my own Learjet was the only way to deliver two performances scheduled too closely together. Through hundreds of zigzagging bookings, I soon became intimately familiar with the walkways, lounges, and ladies’ rooms of airports from Pittsburgh to Dallas. I knew which empty nurseries could provide a retreat for an hour’s private practice and which coffee shops served the best muffins or were the least smoky. Days in the air had become my way of life.

In first-class lounges or on board planes, I was frequently approached by prominent businessmen, who slipped me their cards along with invitations to dinner. Most were politely declined, but some provided interesting diversions from concert halls and recording studios. Toronto entrepreneur Ben Webster trailed my tour of western Canada, and Frank Stronach, the charismatic founder of Magna International, gave me glimpses into his world of international business deals, racehorses, and antiques. I found it exciting to be in the company of successful and attentive men, knowing full well that I was merely a pretty ornament to adorn their sizeable egos.

A concert in Copenhagen was arranged, where I was warmly received by the Danish public and hailed by the press as “the new Segovia”! A few days later, to my immense satisfaction, the Liège Guitar Festival gave me equal billing to my teacher, with whom I fondly reminisced about our escapades in Paris and Nice. Alexandre Lagoya had acquired a new batch of adoring female students, and took wicked pleasure in recounting the details of his recent conquests. My dear maestro seemed to possess such an insatiable appetite for young women that I wondered how he ever found time for the guitar!

After participating in another music festival in Paris in June 1981, at which I performed Castérède’s “Homage to Pink Floyd,” I set up meetings with certain CBS record executives, hoping to encourage them to release my albums in France. For some reason I was not seeing French sales on my royalty statements as I was for most other foreign countries. “Mademoiselle, we are proud to have Lagoya on our label, but we’re not interested in a girl from Canada,” they told me, shrugging their shoulders over a plate of crudités during lunch. How different from our humble Canadian approach, where we are receptive to European talent, often believing it superior to our own. The rejection was disappointing, as the French love classical guitar and had always appreciated my performances.

The head of marketing cast scornful glances at my album covers. “You think a pretty picture will sell these records?” he scoffed. “In France, we specialize in serious artists.” Were my “Zambra Granadina” and Cimarosa Concerto any less serious than Lagoya’s “Carnival of Venice”? Music should stand on its own merits, regardless of the appearance of the artist. I deplored the attitude that equated serious music with stiff traditional images, and resented their chauvinistic response to a feminine image. All my covers were simple portraits; this was still some time before I posed on a white horse for the Best of Liona Boyd album. Since when had they criticized Yepes’s bald head or Parkening’s turtleneck sweaters? Trying to convince them that I had an interesting and unique repertoire was as impossible as explaining an American recipe to a French chef. I gave up.

Greece was another country where, other than a few imports, my albums were not distributed. The chauvinism that was rampant throughout the music business reared its head again in Athens, where I took a lengthy taxi ride to visit a recording company executive. He effusively predicted how saleable my records would be in his country. “Why don’t you join me for dinner so we can discuss their release?” he suggested. I was delighted that my initiative to show up at his office was going to generate positive results. “Perhaps you’d like to call by my house to see the litter of puppies our dog has just produced,” he added. “By the way, my wife is away today,” he continued, lowering his voice and adopting that unmistakable look I had seen often enough before. “No, if you don’t mind, I’m a little tired and would prefer to meet at the restaurant,” I replied, wondering if accepting dinner was a mistake. “Fine, sweetheart,” he agreed. “I’ll be at your hotel at seven forty-five.” I cringed a little at his familiarity.

After taxiing in rush-hour traffic for over an hour, I made it back to my downtown hotel, where I steamed out a dress to make myself presentable. At eight o’clock, a call came through: “Sorry, sweetie. I fell asleep and don’t feel like going out to dinner now — perhaps next time you come to Greece.” I was starving, and furious at his weak excuse. I hoped the man’s puppies would give him some good bites on my behalf. This was no way to treat one of CBS’s bestselling classical artists. Wolfing down a packet of cookies for dinner (I had spent my last remaining drachmas), I felt furious at all the sleazy executives who related to me only as a single woman, and then remembered a New York lawyer taunting, “Why do you need royalties? You’re a woman!” Once again, a man in the music industry was trying to take advantage of his position of power. There had been too many times when business managers, agents, and promoters dangled career offers before me while making suggestive overtures. Already I had forfeited television opportunities and concert bookings by withholding sexual favours. I had no doubt that had I stroked his puppies, or whatever else he had in mind, the executive would have assured my record distribution in Greece, but I was becoming tired of the games men play and their attempts at exploitation.

Although hardly a militant feminist, I support the feminist movement’s fight for equality. Because of their stand on issues such as equal pay and the right to control our own reproductive systems, laws and attitudes have gradually improved. But it seems we still have far to go in the music business. My modest contribution to women’s liberation was to have succeeded in the male-dominated world of guitarists. It was satisfying to know that, by forging an independent creative career, I was serving as a role model for young women pursuing similar goals.

In 1982, the Shakespearean actor Nicholas Pennell and I staged The Rose and the Fire, combining poems by Federico García Lorca with the music of Manuel de Falla, Granados, Albéniz, Torroba, and Rodrigo. The evocative music, theatrical lighting, and dramatic readings provoked rave reviews in Stratford and Chicago. I composed and recorded the musical soundtrack to a short film of The Olden Days Coat by Margaret Laurence, then jetted to Monaco for The Monte Carlo Show, which beamed my playing to five continents. Television proved an easy way to reach new audiences, so I appeared without hesitation on shows hosted by René Simard, Alan Thicke, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, John Davidson, Toni Tennille, and Paul Anka, as well as Entertainment Tonight, often staying in the guest house of my friends Gloria Loring and Alan Thicke. How mind-boggling it was to know that millions of people around the world were watching my fingers on their TV screens.

In the studio green rooms, I enjoyed encounters with such fellow guests as Sir Edmund Hillary, Loretta Lynn, Neville Marriner, Helen Reddy, and Pia Zadora. Alvin Karpis, once the FBI’s public enemy number one and the last surviving member of the Barker-Karpis gang, told me, as we shared an Alan Hamel Show limousine, how he had taught Charles Manson to play guitar while living in San Francisco “in a place with a great view of the bay” — Alcatraz! The notorious bank robber, now seemingly an affable elderly man, sent me frequent letters from his home in Alicante. Brooke Shields and I chatted on a flight to New York, and Toller Cranston skated around me and my guitar with flamboyant choreography during Stars on Ice. The consummate actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov shared two concerts with me after we had been awarded Doctor of Laws degrees from the University of Lethbridge in 1981, and to my amusement, Nancy White added a new character to her satirical skits: Fiona Freud, Second Lady of the Guitar. How curious that my own appellation, once private, had become communal property. Taking a holiday alone at Club Med in Guadeloupe, I began to realize that the privacy I had taken for granted all my life was no longer possible: fans announced their presence with starstruck gazes, cameras, and requests for autographs. It was gratifying to be so appreciated, but I made a mental note to avoid the nude beach!

Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI), one of the most powerful New York agencies, decided to represent me in the U.S., so it was a cordial farewell to Kolmar-Luth. When CBS Masterworks suggested I record an album of baroque repertoire with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis, I locked myself away for two weeks, industriously transcribing Cimarosa, Marcello, Albinoni, and Bach. In the summer of ’79 I recorded them at CBS’s London studios in England, despite my 102-degree fever, which caused the cancellation of one of the three sessions. When I listen to that album, I am amazed by how well I played under such time and health pressures. Perhaps the constant doses of penicillin and cough syrup helped to relax me during this milestone recording of my career.

That same year, encouraged by the writer Shel Silverstein, Chet Atkins and I recorded The First Nashville Guitar Quartet, combining our talents with two studio guitarists, John Knowles and John Pell, whose steel and acoustic guitars enhanced our melodic lines. What a ball to be laying down tracks with three of Nashville’s finest “pickers”! Arrangements of “The Washington Post” march and movements from the Aranjuez and Brandenburg concertos had a distinctly country flavour. Chet was as meticulous as any classical producer I have known; I marvelled at his performance and engineering skills. A year later, he offered to edit Spanish Fantasy, my new CBS solo album, which contained “Gran Jota de Concierto,” “Guajira,” and Sor’s “Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart.”

In 1981 Eric Robertson produced the next international release, A Guitar for Christmas, a reference to the gift I received as a teenager. The addition of harp, strings, oboes, and drums expanded my solo guitar tracks. As a challenge, I played “What Child Is This?” on the instrument of my childhood, the treble recorder. “Silent Night,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” adapted perfectly to the guitar, yet CBS Masterworks was sceptical that a classical guitar Christmas album would sell. However, after becoming the first classical recording to reach platinum status in Canada, it racked up impressive sales around the world. For the cover shot, I was flown to New York to have my image captured by the renowned photographer Deborah Turbeville. The gold lamé pantsuit and silver fox coat her stylist picked out for me struck me as more appropriate for Diana Ross. A diaphanous white curtain with frosty patterns that I unhooked from the studio windows saved the day. Draped and pinned, it made a perfect outfit — if Scarlett O’Hara could, why not I?

In contrast to the high sales of A Guitar for Christmas, my first digital recording, Virtuoso, recorded in 1983 and containing more substantial selections — works by Berkeley, Torroba, and Villa-Lobos — had the weakest sales of all and was far outstripped by The Best of Liona Boyd, a 1982 release that fast achieved gold record status. It was obvious, and not surprising, that most people preferred accessible melodic pieces to more complex contemporary works, but despite Virtuoso’s meagre sales, I was happy to have recorded the more demanding repertoire. As expected, the classical reviewers embraced Virtuoso. In my career, rave reviews have always occurred in inverse proportion to the number of records sold. I can please either the public or the critics, but seldom both. I have always believed, however, that the most important thing for an artist is to please oneself.

Although I do play music of many contemporary classical composers, my audiences will attest to the fact that my tendency is toward repertoire of an emotional nature. If a piece is merely a technical or intellectual exercise, it usually gathers dust on my shelves. I was amused to read a comment by Jascha Heifetz, one of the great violin virtuosi of all time, who wrote, “I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons: First to discourage the composer from writing any more, and second to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.” I like to think my listeners leave the concert hall uplifted, having touched some of the purity and ephemeral beauty conveyed by the guitar notes as they resonate in tune with their inner spirits. Whether music speaks of despair, loneliness, anger, and frustration, or of happiness and love, it is the language that is most able to probe our very souls — be it through a Beethoven symphony or a simple Carcassi étude. Like all forms of art, the effects of music are universal, without boundaries, timeless, and almost impossible to define.

When David Haber retired, Uriel Luft took over his company, hoping to make it stronger internationally. I met up with the elusive Quebecker in Brussels during the final concert of a solo tour I was playing around Western Europe. For a while, I harboured high hopes for a turnaround at Haber Artists, but a few months later Uriel abruptly abandoned the agency, his wife, and their children for an “alternate lifestyle” in Marrakesh. Such is the unpredictable music business!

At this point, my former agent, Ed Oscapella, resurfaced, hoping he and Sandy Castonguay could keep Haber Artists afloat, but this proved unsuccessful. When Ed offered to be my personal manager again, it felt like a step backwards. Fate was good to me at this moment of uncertainty. Bernie Fiedler, who had co-managed the careers of Dan Hill, Murray McLauchlan, and Bruce Cockburn, had just split up with his partner, Bernie Finkelstein. Through his long-time friendship with Gordon Lightfoot, he had become intrigued with my career. At first, I was apprehensive about entrusting a manager from the pop world with my classical business, even though he had once been a boy soprano with the Cathedral of Berlin boys’ choir. Would Bernie know how to deal with symphony directors and the characters who inhabited the rarefied air at CBS Masterworks? We had several meetings, during which he impressed me with his wide-reaching understanding of the music business. Finally, here was someone who possessed the chutzpah and savvy I had been looking for. He would make a great manager.

Bernie’s bright, good-natured personality and charm made him an excellent concert negotiator who represented my career in a more professional manner. I became very fond of him, tolerating his idiosyncrasies as he did mine. He met with CBS staff, who were reluctant at first to use the whimsical photo Robert Vavra had taken of me on a white horse in Sevilla, Spain, for the cover of my Best of Liona Boyd album. “Horses are sexual animals. You should have worn riding habit and not bared your leg,” they objected. Even Bernie could not persuade CBS England, whose prudish attitude prevented its release, but back home the album went platinum. My manager accompanied me to Japan for ten concerts at the Honda Theater in 1984, three of which Sony recorded for a Live in Tokyo album, released that year. We used the second concert with a few inserts taken from the first and third if a buzz or a really bad squeak intruded. The minimal editing, done at night after I left the theatre, made it the simplest record I ever made. Recording “live to tape” had been nerve-racking enough, but tensions were compounded when a strong earthquake sent me scurrying down thirty flights of fire escape.

Bernie’s other artist, the singer-songwriter Dan Hill, who wrote the international hit “Sometimes When We Touch,” came backstage after one of my concerts in New Orleans. We decided to take a walk as the southern night was invitingly balmy. As we returned to the hotel to drop off my guitar case, he asked, “Do you mind if I leave some money in your room? I’ll pick it up later.” My eyes bulged as he nonchalantly pulled thousands of dollars from his back pocket and stashed it under my pillow. “They’re always loading me down with cash instead of cheques,” he mumbled. Apparently in the pop music world there were certain promoters whose cheques evaporated with the morning sun — another lesson to be absorbed.

By the early eighties, my name was becoming well known all over North America. Requests for concerts and television shows flowed into Bernie’s office. His expertise was propelling my career to new heights, and CAMI kept me zigzagging across the continent in their Community Concerts series. In those days of non-stop travel, I rarely had more than four hours sleep each night. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed me as “the guitar world’s new superstar,” the Denver Post wrote, “… nothing short of fantastic…. Liona takes one’s breath away,” and the Ottawa Journal said, “some of the finest classical guitar playing anywhere, and likely the best in North America.” Toronto music critic Wilder Penfield III wrote that I might be “the messiah to bring classical music to the masses!” Chatelaine magazine put me on their cover, and three times Johnny Carson bantered with me on The Tonight Show. My playing was featured by Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show and my performance with the Boston Pops Orchestra, under the baton of John Williams, was broadcast by PBS. I did my best to personally answer the piles of fan mail that arrived, frantically writing in airports and on planes. How gratifying it felt to read that, for so many, my playing had introduced them not only to classical guitar, but also to classical music in general. I read how couples had used my recordings during their weddings and honeymoons, doctors had delivered babies to my guitar, and proud parents had named their daughters after me. People occasionally ask me why all this recognition did not “go to my head” as I suppose it does with some performers, but I could not imagine a change in my basic personality.

This lifestyle left no room for any close girlfriend, so for years my mother filled this role. She helped by coordinating the endless petty details that accompany a touring career, acting as liaison with travel agents, record companies, performing rights societies, and publishers. In addition, she tackled my concert gowns, whose special features could not be found in the stores: no buttons to clang or rhinestones to scrape; no tight sleeves to bind, or bulky ones to deaden the strings. With only her imagination to guide her, she cut pieces of panne velvet, silk, or brocade, then painstakingly draped and pinned them onto my body. The gowns were created to withstand the abuses of travel and designed to catch the stage lights, falling to the floor in folds of light and shadow as in a Gainsborough painting. The lessons learned from the pink taffeta dress she had improvised for me when I was a five-year-old “lady-in-waiting” in a school play had returned to haunt her.

My record sales, outstanding for a classical musician, garnered four Juno Awards from 1979 to 1988, and attracted the attention of Silver Eagle Records, a TV marketing company based in California, who entered into a joint venture with CBS for The Romantic Guitar of Liona Boyd. Besides standards such as “Tara’s Theme” and “Maria Elena,” I added my own “Shadows of the Wind,” dedicated to the memory of the jazz guitarist Lenny Breau, whom I had met with Chet Atkins, and “If Only Love,” which was chosen to be the single and video. Several months later, on Billboard magazine’s chart, “If Only Love” placed number three, while Julio Iglesias’s new single had to settle for number four! How fleeting are these positions of fame and fortune; in a few weeks, both of our songs vanished from the charts.

A few years earlier, in 1978, Jury Krytiuk of Boot Records, believing that my career could benefit from stronger connections in the U.S., had invited me to meet Seymour Heller, the personal manager of superstar entertainer Liberace. Seymour struck me as the stereotypical Hollywood manager — extroverted, gravel-voiced, toupéed, with a flair for risqué jokes and music-industry anecdotes. “Listen, honey, I can help you get ahead in the entertainment world, but ya just gotta move to L.A. I’ll introduce you to all the guys in the business. Whaddya doin’ livin’ up here in Tranta, Canada?”

I agreed to consider his offer, but a week later, believing I was not ready to exchange the familiarity of Toronto for “the big time,” I wrote explaining that I would keep in touch about my career. Over the years, Seymour jokingly referred to himself as my “manager without portfolio.” In retrospect, I probably should have jumped at the opportunity to have his representation early on in my career, but I did not believe that my path was showbiz, and I decided to pursue the more challenging, yet ultimately more satisfying, route of the classical artist. Seymour, however, was responsible for my appearances on twenty television shows and a gala evening where I shared the stage with Bob Hope, Henny Youngman, and Milton Berle. Seymour and his vivacious wife, Billie, became good friends of mine, inviting me to Liberace’s glitzy shows, where “Mr. Showmanship” always arranged for a spotlight so I could be introduced to his audience. In January 1980, Liberace launched a classical series at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and opened with my recital. He gave me a flowery introduction from the stage and clapped heartily after each piece, then drove me around town in one of his Model-T Fords and invited me for drinks in his rococo house, which was furnished with gilded antiques gleaned from French châteaux and English castles. Liberace had created a fantasy world in which eight little white dogs scampered around a piano-shaped pool and leaped on ermine bedspreads.

I became privy to Liberace’s backstage routine: two warm tea bags placed on the eyes to reduce puffiness. I felt the weight of his rhinestone-studded costumes; witnessed his high-energy entrances from the wings; met the various boyfriends, protégés, and legions of adoring fans; felt the spray from his the Dancing Waters fountains; and saw how graciously he treated his staff. Although Liberace was more showman than great concert pianist, he introduced thousands of people around the world to light classical music, from Chopin and Liszt to Cole Porter and Gershwin. This phenomenal entertainer certainly deserved his superstar status.

Although I had decided to remain based in Toronto, spending January in the Beverly Hills Hotel to test the waters seemed like a good idea. Laurindo Almeida, the famous Brazilian jazz and bossa nova guitarist, and his wife, Didi, befriended me. After we exchanged musical and technical tips, he remarked, “Liona, you have such a natural feeling for Latin music, and the best tremolo in the business.” Coming from someone with six hundred film-score credits and strings of records, this was indeed a compliment. Seymour Heller and his assistant, Bette Rosenthal, took me around to entertainment events, flew me to Las Vegas for television shows, and introduced me at Hollywood parties. In between these showbiz activities and practising new repertoire, I kept an eye open for any interesting characters in the hotel, determined to make new contacts.

A silver-haired French film director struck up a conversation in the hotel lobby and claimed to know Alexandre Lagoya. “Would you join me for breakfast tomorrow, so we can discuss using your music for one of my films?” he inquired. Always enjoying the chance to speak French, and ever hopeful for this type of opportunity, I agreed to meet him in the coffee shop. The next morning, he phoned to ask if I would come over to his hotel bungalow instead. “I have already ordered breakfast from room service,” he insisted. As soon as I entered I realized I had made a mistake. A heavily perfumed monsieur, making what he had calculated to be a dramatic and irresistible impression in a black silk robe, lunged toward me in greeting while his lecherous hands slid below my waist. Angrily extricating myself, I told him I was expecting a business meeting; he laughed sardonically. “Chérie, you look so sexy when you are angry. Come and let me tame you, my gorgeous lioness.” After a few barbed exchanges, I stormed out, leaving the bewildered Frenchman to his double order of café au lait and chocolate croissants. Brewing a pot of tea in the privacy of my small room, I reprimanded myself for being so naive in regard to men.

Bette introduced me to a friend of hers in the entertainment business, hoping that he might help me with television contacts. “He has a bad reputation as a womanizer, but he’s a dear man and I’ve told him not to try anything, so you needn’t worry. He’s invited you over to his house at four o’clock.” Wearing a pantsuit to convey a businesslike manner, I purposefully made several references to his friendship with Bette. After an hour of exchanges about music and the media, he walked me over to his bookcase and proceeded to pull out prints of Japanese erotic art — an obvious ploy to gauge my reaction. “Here we go again!” I thought, glancing offhandedly at the gigantic samurai penises and spread-eagled geishas. “I’ve just been given some rather unusual films you might like to view with me later on,” he persisted. I could guess full well the nature of his movies, and made excuses to leave before we had a confrontation.

Dismayed, Bette suggested another friend, the legendary manager of Merv Griffin and Jackie Gleason, George “Bullets” Durgom, who might be able to help me. Offers of a musical cameo on Love Boat and a guest spot with Frank Sinatra at the White House were dangled provocatively before me, but once again the price became too apparent. No way was I going to oblige this opportunist, whose bald head came up to my shoulders. Couldn’t these men find enough willing action in the starlet-packed studios they frequented?

A few days later, a well-known screenwriter approached me in the hotel corridor with a line all too familiar to aspiring actresses. I had the perfect face for a character in his new film. Would I like to come to his suite to audition and perhaps land a role starring opposite Nastassja Kinski? Slightly flattered, but definitely on my guard, I turned down his offer when it became obvious from his innuendos and body language that he had more on his mind than casting. My acting potential, which had such a rocky start with The Mish-Mosh Bird in grade eight, was again aborted before takeoff. Years later, running into him in Hollywood, I suggested he might score my guitar music for one of his films. “In order to use your playing, I have to have sex with you. It is nothing personal — just the way I always work with women,” he stated. This man and I apparently had vastly different concepts of “scoring”! This, however, seemed to be what was expected of women by the men I encountered in the Golden State that spring. Los Angeles, with all its seductive sunshine, violet jacaranda trees, and swaying palms, seemed to attract a disproportionate number of raptors. I wished I could act tougher, like some of the American women I chanced to meet, but it was not in my nature. After a series of unsatisfying encounters, I left the Polo Lounge, the pool, and the red carpet of the Beverly Hills Hotel and headed home to the comfort of Toronto.