Bev and I chose to spend the greater part of 1984 in L.A. The previous year had been a year of mixed blessings. It had started with a thud, thanks to the twin failures of a poorly selling album (despite massive radio airplay and surprisingly good reviews) and my poorly received novel Comeback, released by Bantam/Seal books in Canada. But 1983 had ended positively, with a recent co-write of mine (“One Giant Step”) being covered by the platinum-selling Spanish singing star Camilo Sesto. As well, “In Your Eyes” kept landing on more and more best-selling records: a couple of George Benson greatest hits packages and enough soft rock and R&B compilations to fund my ongoing legal battle with the IRS.
“How do two songs I write in a total of thirty minutes rake in a ton more royalties than a novel I slaved over for a year?” I asked Bev, who’d been calmly flicking a cockroach out of her tea, courtesy of L.A.’s hot climate and crappy hospitality apartments.
“Did those two songs really take you thirty minutes, or fifteen years of writing several hundred songs to set you up for those fifteen minutes?”
“So I have to write fiction for fifteen years before it can stand up to my songwriting?”
“How old’s Larry?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“How long has he been writing fiction?”
“About as long as I’ve been writing songs.” “Res ipsa loquitur.”
“I hate it when you pull that legal Latin stuff on me. Okay, you win. I’m sticking to songwriting. It pays better and it’s more fun.”
It sure hadn’t been fun having my book castigated by the Toronto papers. And it was pretty embarrassing when Maclean’s magazine warned readers that my novel resembled soft-core porn.
“Soft-core porn? How dare Maclean’s write that about my firstborn son!” Dad had fumed, after he’d updated me on my latest media spanking. “You ought to sue for slander. That book wasn’t the slightest bit soft-core—it was hard-core all the way.”
I was still smiling at how Dad had sucked me in for the nth time when the answering machine clicked on: “Son, it’s your pappy checking up on you. Still don’t understand why you two are risking your lives in earthquake country. And where’s that letter you promised to write your mother and me?”
“Get to the point, Dan!” Mom squawked.
“Shhh, woman, get a hold of yourself!”
I could picture the two of them, Mom giving Dad that exasperated scowl, Dad acting as though he had no idea what she was going on about.
“Anyway, Danny, I’m calling to tell you that I’ve been selected as Ontario’s new ombudsman. I expect you and Bev to be here for the official swearing-in session next week.”
I listened to the crisp sound of the answering-machine tape rewinding and thought of that old Mission Impossible scene, where the message self-destructs after one play.
“That’s so exciting!” Bev said, having overheard the message.
“Can’t you hear how thrilled he is? Be happy for him.”
Ahhh, if life could only be so simple.
When Bev and I flew into Toronto for Dad’s swearing-in ceremony, it felt like we’d arrived to pay homage to a rock star. Weird enough that I’d landed in a time warp, but the eras kept moving around. Was I revisiting the late seventies, when I played the big pooh-bah, or the sixties, when I’d watched people swarm Dad after one of his enthralling speeches on human rights? Let go of the knee-jerk father-son comparisons, I repeated, silently, to myself. Stop analyzing everything and just enjoy watching Dad shine.
Without question, this new job represented Dad’s crowning achievement. The media was abuzz with praise over Dad’s ombudsman appointment and, in a rare display of solidarity, all of the provincial party leaders enthusiastically supported Dad’s posting.
There was, however, more to my uneasiness than the feeling of déjà vu. At sixty, Dad’s undimmed charisma fooled people into believing he was robust and healthy. But the combination of decades of diabetes, no exercise, poor diet and low-level dysthymia meant that his body was on the verge of giving out. A five-year posting as ombudsman would add one more ingredient to Dad’s growing health problems: stress. And while too much stress is toxic for everyone, regardless of age, it is exponentially worse if you’re older and diabetic.
Bev and I took a cab straight from the airport to my parents’ home. I could hear Dad’s footsteps before we’d made it through the front door. Clomp, clomp, clomp—”Donna!”—clomp, clomp, clomp—”Donna!” For a big man he moved disconcertingly fast, pacing in ungainly circles in the kitchen. Any nagging rivalry I may have felt evaporated the moment I saw his face.
“Son! You got here just in time. This is—”
Larry and I jumped in: “Family history in the making!”
“Donna! Daggum, I can’t find my gold cufflinks. You must have moved them.”
“Dan, Jesus Christ. I’m coming with your blasted cufflinks. You handed them to me five minutes ago.”
“What about my acceptance speech? Did you take that too? Come on, woman, hurry! Danny, get over here and help me with my tie.”
“I can’t help you with anything if you don’t stop with the pacing.”
Gone were my worries about how Dad’s health would hold up over five years; he looked like he might spontaneously combust within the next five minutes. Meanwhile, Mom’s constant refrain, Dan, calm down, clanged like an alarm clock that couldn’t be turned off. It took all four of us—Larry, Bev, Mom and me—to escort him to the car.
“If this is another Hill succumbing to mania, I swear I’m gonna fly straight back to L.A. and assume a new identity,” I whispered to Bev, as she, Larry and I wedged into the back seat.
“It’s just all the excitement, mixed up with his diabetes,” Bev diagnosed, adding, “Has anyone checked his meds today?”
“Why is Dad driving?” Larry asked.
“How about because we’re a family bent on mass suicide by car wreck,” I said.
“Shut up, you two,” ordered Mom. “You know how driving always settles your father down.”
Actually, I’d never known that. As we wound down the Don Valley Parkway, en route to Queen’s Park, the group of us settled into a stolid silence. The grimace on Larry’s face led me to believe he and I were thinking the same thing: that Dad should turn the goddamned car around, floor it until we were out of Ontario and act as though this whole ombudsman appointment had never happened.
By the time we’d driven up to the front steps of the legislature, Dad’s behaviour had gone from agitated to erratic. None of us knew until later that Dad had snuck one of Mom’s Valiums. Mistaking his slurred speech for a dangerous blood sugar crash (insulin injections can sometimes cause a diabetic’s blood sugar to plunge to the point where they lapse into a coma), I urged, “Take some deep breaths, Dad,” quickly reached over Mom in the front seat, popped open the glove compartment, grabbed one of his dextrose tablets and pressed it into his mouth. The car sat idling.
“Dad, listen to me, try to relax for a minute before everyone starts swarming.”
Uh oh. Dad had that same glassy-eyed glaze as Cassius Clay during his first, 1964 pre-fight weigh-in with Sonny Liston. As Mom was getting out of the car (presumably to run interference for Dad, who was already late), Dad confused the brake with the accelerator, leaving her to flail about on the legislature’s front steps like a child tripping over her feet. Perhaps it was Mom cussing Dad out in language not exactly suited to the occasion that snapped him out of his fugue. He somehow pulled himself together and within an hour was delivering his acceptance speech in his typically congenial and homespun style. He spent the rest of the afternoon soaking up the attention and congratulations as if he’d been born in the spotlight.
Dad’s fluctuation between breakdown and celebration was a telltale glimpse of how he would live his next five years. That final half-decade of his working life more or less destroyed what remained of his health. For Dad, wired to believe that success was everything, sacrificing an extra ten or twenty possible years of retirement in exchange for five tempestuous years as Ontario’s ombudsman seemed a bargain.
“To me, an ombudsman’s office is the incarnation of human rights,” Dad explained during his swearing-in speech. “I really believe this is a human rights agency.” Speeches such as these, steeped in easy-to-grasp comparisons, are usually written to inspire rather than be taken literally. It says something about Dad’s naïveté and his passion that he honestly believed that he could pattern the provincial Ombudsman’s Office (OO) after the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC). Regrettably, he would discover that these two organizations could not have functioned more differently.
The purpose of the OO is to investigate claims of wrongdoing within the government or government-run services and agencies. If, for example, inmates at the Don Jail were complaining about the poor quality of their food and an investigation by the ombudsman uncovered a systemic problem in food preparation and services, then the OO would recommend that the Ministry of Corrections implement an improved food policy.
Unfortunately, the visionary thinking that had served Dad so well at the OHRC was not so easily applied at the OO. For one thing, prosecuting a racist restaurant owner was far more straightforward than taking a branch of the government to task for an alleged act of malfeasance. The never-ending political layers of bureaucracy, the chummy protectiveness of certain high-up government officials and the multiple connections between civil servants left the OO frequently hoop-jumping, often with no resulting basket.
Once the ombudsman is able to spot and confirm a problem in government services then the real challenge begins: the branch of government in question must be persuaded to own up to its problem. Only then can changes be made through direct policy recommendations or, failing that, through strenuous debate and voting in a parliamentary hearing.
This new world, which seemed to foster obfuscation at senior levels, was not ideally tailored to my father’s brand of one-on-one, friendly-but-fierce confrontation. Increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the OO’s reach, Dad argued passionately that his office needed more power and authority to properly investigate and advocate on behalf of Ontarians wronged by their government. To his credit, Dad’s strenuous lobbying managed to eventually equip the OO with more power, but that extra muscle came only after his term was over. Alas, among my father’s many strengths, patience was not high on the list.
Early in his term, Dad discovered that the inner workings of the organization were a mess; the staff often seemed too caught up in their own office rivalries to have any energy left over for their work. Dad wanted no part of the internecine squabbling.
“I want to do things, I don’t want to worry about staff,” Dad told Eleanor Meslin, a long-time friend whom he’d hired to be his executive assistant. Dad’s natural delegating skills translated into Ms. Meslin handling the interpersonal issues, administration and finance, leaving Dad to concentrate on what he’d always excelled at: innovative ideas, combined with broad-stroke, spare-me-the-details thinking.
“He had a temper,” Eleanor Meslin told me, her voice dropping to a whisper as though she were revealing some long-held secret. “Every so often with a couple of the senior people, he’d discover they’d done something wrong and he would blow, like, fast.” Ms. Meslin quickly went on to qualify, “And then it would be over. He had a fantastic oratory ability. Such wonderful language. And of course, that amazing charisma. So that when he got angry, it was devastating.”
The despotic figure that Ms. Meslin described was perfectly in line with the dad I grew up with, so the inconsistency of Dad’s aloof persona in the office with his populist image outside the office came as no surprise for me. But twenty years later, Ms. Meslin still appeared flummoxed by Dad’s “contradictory” behaviour.
A master of the symbolic gesture, Dad, upon taking the reins at the OO, made a big to-do of ridding the executive dining room of all the garish displays of elitism held over from the previous administration. There was no refuting Dad’s point that this gaudy show of luxury (fine linen, elegant cutlery and china, and an endless supply of expensive liquor, which Dad referred to as befitting a “princely kingdom”) was hardly appropriate for a branch of the government created to serve the public. But Dad’s first in-house mandate—that his office would be permanently off limits to everyone other than Ms. Meslin without prior appointment—didn’t do much to bolster his image as the ever-approachable people’s champion.
Interestingly, during his travels throughout Ontario, Dad’s ability to connect with anyone and everyone returned. Dad was the first Ontario ombudsman to set up field offices so that the OO’s services could be more accessible, forming new networks of human rights allies everywhere he went. North Bay, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Owen Sound, Timmins—the more remote the Ontario towns, the more Dad delighted in the people he came into contact with.
The legacy of Dad’s work as “travelling ombudsman” in small-town Ontario came to my attention in the late nineties, when I was performing in these same small towns. Every town brought me in touch with someone who had worked with Dad at the OO. Almost everyone had the same thing to say: “Your father was the most amazing man I’ve ever met. He inspired me to make things better for everyone in this community. Everybody loved him here.” No matter how many times I heard this, I could never think of what to say in response.
“I can’t believe it Danny, you look just like him.” I would find myself on the receiving end of an intense stare, as though Dad’s former employee were looking into the face of a ghost. Dad’s ghost.
“Well, I’m not as good-looking as my dad,” came my formulaic reply, while signing an autograph.
The reserved, well-dressed adult, usually twenty years my senior, would often start to cry, embracing me in a hug that gave me chills, as though I could feel the very soul of my dad pouring out of the stranger’s arms and finding its way deep beneath my skin.
All his travelling, however, tore Dad apart physically. He finally admitted to Eleanor Meslin, two years into his term, that he’d “recently been diagnosed with diabetes”—and only because Eleanor had grown increasingly suspicious and Dad had wearied of her questions. After extracting a vow of silence, he went on to claim that it was just a minor health issue that he had under control.
The more Dad denied his illness at work, the more anguished he appeared about it at home. “The travelling is hell,” he told me, after returning from yet another long trip. “This hotel in Ottawa had a fabulous after-hours buffet in one of their hospitality suites and I wandered all night through the hallways, trying to remember where it was. I finally asked a hotel clerk. He explained they had no such suite. Then I realized I wasn’t in Ottawa anymore. I was so exhausted, I’d forgotten which city I was in.”
“When are you going to quit that job?” his family doctor would ask, reacting in alarm to Dad’s ever-escalating blood sugar readings and weight gain. I also suggested that he consider stepping down, citing health reasons. But that was as likely as me setting aside my guitar.
While Mom and we three kids were counting down the days to Dad’s retirement, Ms. Meslin and many of Dad’s closest friends, convinced that he was retiring too soon, urged him to carry on. That if he wanted, he could conceivably extend his ombudsman’s term beyond the usual five years. True to form, Dad had managed to project an air of invincibility to everyone in the workplace.
It’s easy to imagine Dad caught in the middle of these two opposing forces, his friends and work associates telling him he had a moral imperative to keep working—”The mandatory retirement age of sixty-five was a travesty for your dad,” was the statement most often bandied about by my father’s friends—while his family demanded that he retire before he was carried off in a coffin.
“Thank God for those five years as ombudsman,” Dad would always say when he’d finally retired. “That big, fat salary and pension is paying for all my extra medical bills.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him what he already knew, that all his costly health problems—enlarged prostate, collapsing bone structure in his feet due to badly compromised circulation, glaucoma, macular degeneration—came as a direct result of those same five years as ombudsman.
To this day, Eleanor Meslin insists that Dad’s diabetes didn’t affect his ability to work, and that it was really Dad’s retirement, more than anything, that damaged his health. She told me that once Dad had retired, “The community wanted to do tremendous things in his honour. Give him awards and dinners. To fete him. He wouldn’t have any part of it.” Ms. Meslin had loved Dad too much to openly criticize him. And it was this very affection that left her so disappointed when he appeared to withdraw from public life. Refusing to sit on committees or be part of arbitrations was one thing. But Dad appeared to take pleasure in turning down the lifetime contribution awards that “hounded” him after retirement, viewing them as little more than political grandstanding.
“Son,” he’d snort, “the only reason that mean s.o.b. Harris [Ontario’s ultra-reactionary premier at the time] wants to give me some bogus human rights award is because he thinks it will reflect well on him. That the public will be fooled into thinking he’s a champion of people’s rights.”
What Dad left unsaid was that he believed any kind of lifetime recognition ceremony suggested his best work was behind him—something he couldn’t bear to consider.
“I’ll be taking your mother on lots of vacations now,” Dad would tell me in his increasingly gravelly voice. “My pappy always promised my mom he’d take her to Europe after he retired but he never did. He was too weak by then. I promised your mother I wouldn’t make the same mistake with her.”
And they did go on vacations. Alaskan cruises. Month-long stays at quaint little Portuguese inns. Villas in Spain. But Dad far preferred the idea of a European vacation to the event itself. He’d hole up in his little room, rarely venturing outside. In fairness, Dad’s foot was far more irreparably damaged than either he or Mom understood at the time. Not only was walking excruciatingly painful, it exacerbated his injury.
Work addicts do not make good retirees. I’ve known lots of successful performers whose wives begged them to go back on the road when the sight of them muddling about in a cloud of inactivity, or slowly dying in front of the TV, proved far worse than the loneliness of being separated from them.
A therapist once told me, “People like you all end up the same, super-achieving your way into that final heart attack.”
But what’s the alternative? Is playing bingo and being coddled through a senior’s art or stretching class really preferable to falling dead onstage at Carnegie Hall?
This put me in the unusual position of understanding, perhaps more easily than most sons, what Dad was dealing with now that he’d retired. Once you’re out of the public eye, regardless of the profession that catapulted you there in the first place, you’re no longer viewed as special. At least when I crashed out of my brief superstar orbit I was in my twenties; there were countless creative stones still left for me to turn. Dad was sixty-six when he officially retired. He knew his physical health couldn’t stand up to the stress of any more work, just as he tacitly understood that his mental health would suffer if he stopped working.
Dad slipped in and out of various stages of melancholia for the last thirteen years of his life. His father had also drifted in and out of his own deep blue moods once he’d retired, a paralyzing sadness that followed him to his grave. It’s fine when you’re king of your imagined domain, but sooner or later you have to step down. And once you do, the black dog is always there, patiently waiting.
I knew, all too well, the deep, seemingly irrational sadness so often connected with diabetes, the sum total of which felt more dark and overwhelming than its individual parts. I could spot the slightest flicker of depression in a stranger a football field away. And so, if I quickly developed a knack for distracting Dad from his moodiness, it was born out of pure selfishness. I couldn’t bear to feel the sadness spilling out of his soul and leaking into mine.