11

Close-Up

A single tear, quickly wiped away, ended the most important show on Canadian television in the 1960s. A fourteen-year-old boy, Stephen Truscott, had been found guilty of murdering a classmate and sentenced to death, the youngest ever person to receive that judicial fate in Canada. The TV program This Hour Has Seven Days sent a reporter to interview Truscott’s mother. The interview showed why so many Canadians found This Hour to be compelling and controversial television. The camera stays on Doris Truscott as she is asked about visiting her young son in prison. An off-camera voice asks softly if she is ever alone with him, if she embraces him, if she tells him that she loves him. Doris Truscott is quiet and composed. She taps her hands in an odd way and the camera zooms in on the physical tic – as if to signal that this is a hint of all the emotion she is keeping in check. “Do you tell him you love him?” the interviewer asks. The camera zooms upward to the mother’s face. It fills the entire screen. Nothing can escape the camera at this vantage. “Is it hard not to cry when you visit him?” There is a silence, a pause as the interviewer waits to see if she will cry.1

The show returns to its host, Laurier Lapierre. He is clearly affected. He explains that Truscott’s sentence has been commuted. A tear forms under one eye and he quickly wipes it away. It was very little, but it was enough to infuriate the CBC executives. Within a matter of weeks, they cancelled the show.

Of course, it was never just this single tear. From the beginning, there had been a continual battle between the show’s creators and executives at the CBC.² The executives would issue directives, calling for more objectivity, less controversy. Then the journalists and producers at This Hour would invariably ignore the instructions. The final tear symbolized a kind of journalism that the show had practised since its first episode – and, in fact, the kind of journalism that the producers had promised when they pitched the show to those in charge at the CBC. In their proposal for This Hour, they argued for a program that would “draw attention to public wrongs and encourage remedial action.”3 It wouldn’t simply be neutral, pretending that objectivity consisted of always withholding opinions. Two years into the show, the CBC executives had seen enough. Despite a large public campaign of protest, the show remained cancelled and its employees went on to other programs and other parts of their careers. Yet, for those in charge at the CBC, it was a hollow victory. The show had ended but the idea of television it embodied had won and would go on to inform other programs, changing the public landscape of television.

Although the story of Canadian television often highlights the cancellation of This Hour as a pivotal moment, in truth, the kinds of changes that the show represented had been slowly changing television even at the end of the 1950s. The show was created by two men, Patrick Watson and Douglas Leiterman, who had, since the mid-1950s, been discussing ways to create meaningful public-affairs television in Canada. Reality was inherently interesting – even more interesting, they thought, than the kind of fairy-tale shows like Bonanza that the public liked so much on television. The trick was to figure out ways of telling real stories that were just as compelling.

Several years before working on This Hour, the two men had collaborated on the documentary series Close-Up. It was there that Leiterman turned his attention to Mackenzie King. The medium of television through which Canadians were coming to see their political leaders was changing priorities, shifting the ground under public figures, reorienting priorities and obliging politicians to interact differently with the public. Television seemed to demand an authenticity and an emotional connection even when so much of what was presented could be staged and inauthentic. Mackenzie King would find out that this applied to dead politicians too.

In 1957 Patrick Watson went to work in the public-affairs division of CBC, his first project being the new program Close-Up. Television was still a novel and strange technology. Watson had planned to do a PhD and had only by chance been convinced to change plans and join the national broadcaster. He simply did not know, nor did many people, what television could do. It didn’t take long before Watson was converted to its possibilities.

Close-Up’s creators tried to get the established and dignified Blair Fraser of Maclean’s to work on the show. When he declined, they turned to a young reporter in the parliamentary press gallery named Douglas Leiterman. He stood out among the Ottawa reporters in the mid-1950s. At this time, the parliamentary press gallery, consisting of only two or three dozen reporters from newspapers across the country, denied access to radio or television journalists, who were seen as a threat. As the journalist Peter Dempson recalled, the press gallery on the third floor of the Centre Block was a dingy, brightly lit room, littered with beer bottles and half-empty whisky glasses. Everyone knew everyone else, including all of the politicians and the top bureaucrats. The partisan nature of the press lingered in connections between journalists and the political parties with which they were identified. The Toronto Star was Liberal and the Ottawa Journal was Tory. But this group of journalists, including Fraser, wanted to present themselves as professionals and different from their partisan predecessors in a different age of journalism. Their professionalism, though, also meant that they treated politicians with deference.4

Bruce Hutchison recalled being called up short in an interview by Louis St Laurent. Hutchison asked the prime minister about his time as minister of justice in King’s government and about the controversial decision to arrest and detain the suspects in the Gouzenko spy scandal. The detention abrogated the ancient rights of habeus corpus and Hutchison wanted to know what St Laurent, who had been minister of justice at the time, now had to say about it. St Laurent was known to have a temper, though journalists did not report on this. Hutchison later described how St Laurent’s “smiling face hardened in a scowl. The kindly eyes seemed to congeal in black opacity.” St Laurent simply said, “I don’t care to answer that question.” It was enough. Hutchison thought he had nearly been “decapitated.” He had learned his lesson.⁵

11.1 Douglas Leiterman

Douglas Leiterman was different. His friend Patrick Watson later recalled how, “in his quietly persistent way, [Leiterman] would seize on obfuscation or dishonesty like a ferret. ‘But Minister,’ he would say, ‘last week you said the exact opposite; here’s the quote. How do you account for the contradiction?’ He was courteous but relentless.”6 This is the breed of journalist that Watson wanted to have working with him on Close-Up. He was just the kind of probing, demanding reporter who would rise to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Although we often associate the rise of that more critical journalism with those later years, especially in the response to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, in fact journalists like Leiterman were already at work in the 1950s, and they were developing those more probing techniques even then.7

The Close-Up team took on any number of issues that in previous decades might have been considered taboo. They sent a camera crew to Sweden to do a show on what were the allegedly more open and liberal sexual practices in that country. In another episode, they profiled a Toronto woman, whose name was not revealed, who advertised her services as a “professional divorce correspondent.” At a time when divorce law in Canada restricted marriage break-up to only a few very narrow conditions, one way out of wedlock was a finding of adultery. The woman featured in the Close-Up episode would, for a fee, arrange to be “discovered” in a hotel room in the initial stages of an affair, and allow photographs to be taken. The show exposed the way the actual behaviour of many Canadians did not live up to the moral code that was still enshrined in the law.⁸

This particular episode upset the top brass at the Toronto Telegraph, who later sought out and found the “divorce correspondent” and wrote a story about the so-called Shady Lady in which she said that she did not offer these services. Patrick Watson claimed that they later discovered that the Telegraph had paid the Shady Lady $ 2,000 to change her story.⁹ Such were the costs of maintaining the illusion of a society of marital harmony in the late 1950s.

In 1958, with news of the upcoming release of MacGregor Dawson’s first volume of the official King biography, Leiterman had written to the literary executors asking if they would cooperate in producing a television documentary that could coincide with the book’s release. Fred McGregor thought it would be an excellent idea, though his views about what the show would look like probably differed from Leiterman’s. He thought that the crew could film at Laurier House and Kingsmere and suggested a list of King’s friends and colleagues who could speak on camera. The list included only Liberals, all of whom would likely give a rather friendly interpretation of the old chief.¹⁰

Leiterman was delayed in putting together the show but he finally began interviewing subjects in the late summer and spring of 1959. The two-part Close-Up special on Mackenzie King aired on 10 and 17 March 1960. It was a perfect example of the way the show was an in-between experiment between the neutral and deferential television of the 1950s and the irreverent and pointed television that would eventually emerge with This Hour in the mid-1960s.11

The program begins in an expected fashion. The camera pans over King’s fake ruins at Kingsmere before the host, Frank Willis, comes on screen to speak of how we could say of King, as Voltaire said of God, that “if he had not existed, we would have had to invent him.” Willis gave the two common views of King, how he had been prime minister “for twenty-one of the most crucial years of our history” and how he “must someday rank among the world’s great nation-builders.” Yet, even so, “he was not loved. Indeed, few leaders have been so enthusiastically disliked by so many of the people who showered them with votes.” This was the standard way to speak of King – his success and importance alongside his lack of personal appeal. It was Hutchison redux.

But then Close-Up took its cameras to the streets of Ottawa, and the statesman came off his pedestal in an entirely new fashion. “Who was Mackenzie King?” the reporter asks a young woman walking down the street. She pauses before saying she thinks he was an explorer. “We talked about him in social studies,” she says. This less than a decade after King’s death, and not twelve years since his retirement. The journalist goes to several more young women and an older woman. None have any idea who Mackenzie King was.

Eventually Close-Up finds many people who remember King and their opinions vary from the man who thinks he was “an outstanding statesman” to a woman who simply says, “Don’t ask me, I’m a Conservative.” An old man complains that King wanted “conscription without conscription,” that he was afraid of Quebec. “A Frenchman should fight for his country just like any Canadian,” he says. A taxi driver says he liked King and voted for him, though he couldn’t recall anything that King had done for the country. Someone else says that at least King was “better than Diefenbaker,” while a group of young kids eager to be on camera ask if King was someone from TV.

This took King entirely out of the realm of pro- and con- debate and plunked him into the democratic levelling of street opinion where the question wasn’t about whether you agreed or disagreed with King’s politics; rather, it was about whether he mattered at all. Leiterman later defended the decision to begin this way. He wrote that he had descended on a busy street corner in Ottawa to get the average Canadian’s opinion. Leiterman “noticed some puzzled expressions as I mentioned Mackenzie King but the truth didn’t dawn on me until [the cameraman] dropped his earphones and exclaimed, ‘You know, I think half of these people don’t know who King was!’”12

Close-Up offered viewers a “personal portrait” of King. This choice shaped the show in particular ways. The producers told of King’s earlier years in a conventional enough fashion, though with an emphasis on King’s personality, on him as a private man, much as the journalists focused on this new information in Dawson’s biography. They paid particular attention to his failed romance with Mathilde Grossert. They also interviewed Princess Cantacuzene, a lady who had known King during his time at Harvard and after. She was the granddaughter of Civil War general and American president Ulysses S. Grant. She speaks on camera of King as a “gay” young man, though one who was, in the super-wealthy social circles he frequented at Harvard, considered from a “poor” background. She was amazed that he had not tasted champagne until his arrival at Harvard. When the journalist asks her if King had any love interest, she coyly answers that he had loved someone once, and again later in life. That’s all she says. It’s unclear if the journalists know that she is probably referring to her own short romantic dalliance with King and how it resumed in subsequent years, though again only briefly and not completely.

The camera moves on and we are faced again and again with prominent Canadian politicians and journalists who knew King and now reflected on what kind of man he had been. The personalities don’t just include those the literary executors would have asked. Certainly, we get Bruce Hutchison and King’s cabinet colleague C.D. Howe as well as Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker. But we also get Eugene Forsey and the journalist John Stevenson, who disliked King intensely and speaks here about King as someone you couldn’t take to the club with other men, someone who was better with women. The show gives the Liberal view of King as nation builder, but the emphasis on the private King serves mostly to bring King down. As the Liberal Bruce Hutchison had been obliged to admit earlier, King the man was an unimpressive and often an unpleasant figure.

The second episode created the most controversy because it was there that Close-Up played the reels of its visits to two of King’s spiritualist mediums in Britain. We meet on camera both Geraldine Cummins and the Scottish medium Helen Hughes. Even though Close-Up gives voice to King’s friends who claim that his interest in spiritualism was just a hobby, like Franklin Roosevelt’s stamp collecting, viewers meet the spiritualists face-to-face and can judge for themselves how serious or ludicrous were the practices King participated in.

As much as the conservative, deferential culture of 1950s Canada was showing signs of fracture by the end of the decade, there were still many who found a show like Close-Up’s feature on King to be an abomination. One could expect certain Liberals to be upset and they were. Brooke Claxton, who had been too ill to be interviewed for the program, wrote to C.D. Howe of how he thought Howe’s performance as well as those of Bruce Hutchison, former Liberal minister Jimmie Sinclair, and Jack Pickersgill had been the documentary’s “saving grace.” Otherwise, he considered it an exercise in “character assassination.” Howe agreed, writing how he felt it was “a great pity that sensible people will allow comparatively minor episodes, with which they do not agree, to divert their mind from the great qualities of Mackenzie King.” Chubby Power reverted to what had been the reliable logic of “no one could fool the people for so long.” When the political scientist Paul Fox had told him that the program was “badly out of balance, [with] too much on his spiritualism and almost nothing on his policies, aims, accomplishments, and failures in the political realm at large,” Power agreed. He reported that all of those he talked to had said the same thing. “Mr. King was Prime Minister of this country for over twenty-one years,” Power wrote, “and he must have to his credit certain accomplishments, both in policy and administration, and to stress, as was done in these broadcasts, the private eccentricities of the man, was not fair either to Mr. King or to the television audience.”13

The establishment magazine Saturday Night felt aggrieved enough by Close-Up’s portrayal of Mackenzie King to publish an article by Edwin Copps entitled “A Distorted Image of Mackenzie King” in its next issue. Copps reported that even Conservatives had been upset by the program. “Being politicians and aspiring statesmen,” Copps wrote, “they were shocked that an erstwhile colleague, a man who accomplished more in our public life than most of them can ever hope to achieve, should be posthumously ridiculed by an agency of the Canadian Government for no other purpose than to provide suitably light entertainment.” Close-Up had attacked one of the fraternity. It just wasn’t done.14

There was a real sense in Copps’s article that those who didn’t truly understand the respectable world of politics were pushing in where they didn’t belong. Politics wasn’t about entertainment, it was about statesmanship. The idea of a program on King was a good one, he thought. At least it was better than the way the CBC’s money was usually “wasted on stuff that promotes only national moronism: canned U.S. cowboy shows, ‘celebrity’ parlor games, and outdated Victorian dramas staged for no other apparent reason than to provide employment for immigrant British actors.” Copps simply couldn’t give credence to what he saw as the show’s depiction of King as a “crackpot [and] an evil genius who somehow managed to trick the Canadian voters into installing him in the country’s highest elective office for nearly a quarter of a century.”¹⁵

Saturday Night gave Leiterman space to defend himself and the program. He claimed that the documentary had been balanced and that, if its emphasis on King’s spiritualism had been out of proportion, this was merely because no one had yet interviewed Cummins and Hughes. As a “personal portrait” the show was bound to pay less attention to King’s statesmanship, and given that King’s successes had come in his public life and his personal life had been less than impressive, he inevitably would not come across as well as some might hope.¹⁶

Letters to the magazine rebutted past Leiterman’s defence. One man, a rear-admiral in the US Navy, thought the program had been the “nadir of bad taste” and that it would have been “better left undone and … soon forgotten.” Another man, from London, England, defended King, saying that anyone “who could be the leader of any national party for a lifetime, Prime Minister for most of it, and Prime Minister moreover, during Canada’s greatest and proudest years, is entitled to respect.” A reader in Vancouver claimed to “have never known of such an attack on a national leader.” He suspected that the initiative might have come from within the Diefenbaker government but felt “it will not help those in power at Ottawa. It was too small stuff.” 17

Similarly, a writer in the Canadian Annual Review thought that Close-Up was an important show which, unfortunately, was “alternatively brilliantly triumphant and sadly disappointing.” Its biography of Mackenzie King was “probably the biggest disappointment of the year.” The problem was that the show failed “almost entirely to come to grips, or even attempt to come to grips, with the strong core of an obviously quite extraordinary man who had been prime minister for 21 years,” concentrating instead “on the more bizarre elements of his personal idiosyncracies.” ¹⁸

Clearly, there were still those who subscribed to the view that a prime minister deserved respect and a certain amount of deference simply by virtue of his position: Close-Up had hit a nerve. Yet, over the course of the 1960s, the defenders of the status quo found themselves under siege. When Patrick Watson and Douglas Leiterman went from Close-Up to the controversial show This Hour Has Seven Days, they created a special place in which to put prominent figures who appeared on the show. They called it the “hot seat.” An uncomfortable chair in the middle of the room, without the protection of armrests, bright under the glare of the lights and in full view of several cameras that could zoom in to catch the slightest twitch of discomfort, the “hot seat” was a metaphor for the changed attitude toward authority in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the way Canadians talked about politics had become radically less deferential and more irreverent. There were quite a few people under close-up scrutiny in the hot seat.