Dining out on celebrity tidbits
It was not what you would call a pleasant conversation. In my second week of journalism classes at Carleton University, my professor assigned me to cover a town council meeting in the Glebe, an Ottawa neighbourhood.
“No council meeting for me, sir. I don’t want to ever cover any council meeting and I don’t like the word Glebe. Since I am only interested in entertainment, I want to write a review of The Exorcist.”
“I am not asking you what you want to do. I am telling you what you have to do. This assignment represents 15 per cent of your final mark.”
“In that case, put me down for a zero.”
“Schnurmacher, you better start looking for apartments in very small towns because you are never going to work for a major metropolitan daily.”
Ignoring his prediction, I wrote a few freelance pieces for the Montreal Star and fortunately, just before it went on strike, I was lured away by the Montreal Gazette, then celebrating its 200th anniversary.
I remember being amazed to learn that it was Benjamin Franklin who had encouraged Gazette founder Fleury Mesplet to persuade the locals to join the American Revolution. And now, this august institution was hiring me to be its TV and radio critic.
Since gossip was my forté I asked the editor-in-chief, Mark Harrison, if it would be okay to throw in a few tidbits of gossip at the bottom of the column. He made the mistake of saying yes and before long, there were days on end with no TV reviews but lots of gossip, both local and international. Harrison hired Mike Boone as full-time TV critic and I ended up writing a gossip column five days a week.
During those heady days, the Gazette actually had money to spend. One day, I went to Gazette management to say that CJAD radio was going to fly me to Hollywood to cover the Oscars. Would the Gazette be willing to pay for my hotel stay? Not wishing to miss out on such exclusive coverage – no other Montreal reporter was going – they said yes. As soon as they did, I hightailed it over to CJAD and said the Gazette was paying for my hotel stay. Would CJAD at least pick up the airfare? They agreed.
The following year I did not ask either one. I just booked the plane and hotel and handed in the receipts. When asked if the trip had been approved, I said, “We do it this every year. It’s a tradition.” The tradition lasted 13 years.
Relations between the Gazette and CJAD were not always so cordial. One year, Queen Elizabeth came to Ottawa to hand out some science awards. At the reception that followed, she was doing her walkabout and, all of a sudden, there she was – right in front of me.
She asked me, “And what do you do?”
“I write about many of the people in this room.”
“Oh, you must be seeing them under a different light.”
“Yes. Four hundred watts.”
Her majesty laughed out loud and I was thrilled. I had just made the queen laugh. I was like a court jester and could not wait to share the story on air with CJAD morning man George Balcan. I also wrote up the story for the Gazette, but it never saw the light of day.
“Sorry,” Harrison said. “If I already heard it on CJAD, I don’t need to see it the Gazette.”
Harrison, whose real name was Yitzhoc Goldstein, knew his stuff and once gave me an excellent piece of advice about a letter of complaint. I had just been named society editor, replacing the woman who had made the mistake of informing one gala organizer that she did not want to be seated with Jews.
Soon after I started covering the social scene, a Mrs. Smith complained that I had neglected to mention that it was a hospital auxiliary that had organized a gala to raise money to buy a special piece of medical equipment.
It took Mrs. Smith, president of said auxiliary, eight typed pages to point this out along with sundry errors of omission. It took me eight pages to respond, informing her I had no journalistic obligation to mention all of her friends and that this was not a whodunit. I pointed out that she had never made any mention of any auxiliary nor had she breathed a word about any medical equipment.
I asked Harrison to read my response and if it would be okay to send it.
“You can if you like,” he said. “Totally up to you. But I have found it might prove more effective to reply with something like this: “Dear Mrs. Smith, thank you for your letter of April 17th. Sincerely yours …” I tore up the eight pages and took his advice.
During the days of the rivalry between the Star and the Gazette, the former had lots of cash and the latter did not. Case in point: French actress Catherine Deneuve was in Quebec City shooting a film on a cold February weekend. Both the Star gossip columnist and I had been granted interviews.
The Star columnist was flown in. I had to hitch a ride with film director Lois Siegel whose car heater had given up the ghost. Since the temperature was minus 30, we had to stop every 15 minutes at a coffee shop or farmhouse to warm up.
By the time we arrived in Quebec City, there were 10 minutes left for interviews and I was told I would be allowed to ask Miss Deneuve only one question.
Okay then.
“Miss Deneuve, will you marry me?”
She burst out laughing and said that she would think about it. I guess she still is.
The Gazette had very strict rules about money and journalistic ethics. When a dozen beautiful red roses arrived for one of the columnists, they were in the process of being returned when the columnist in question intervened to explain that the roses were no bribe. They were a birthday present – from her husband.
The basic rule was you could only accept something if it was edible and/or worth less than $20. The House of Dior had sent me a bottle of cologne in a beautiful box that I was in the process of opening when the editor walked by my desk. I lifted the bottle to my lips and said, “I’m drinking as fast as I can.”
The code of ethics was supposed to apply to everyone, but it affected primarily the proletariat. A senior manager would pop by my desk and mention that his wife was putting on some very worthy charitable event. I was under no obligation, of course, to mention it, but just in case I did, here was the press release.
No obligation. Yeah, right.
I had a daily deadline of 5 p.m. but on Thursdays I would hand in both the Friday and Saturday columns. One week, my Saturday lead was a story about Margaret Trudeau possibly coming to Montreal to read from her new book at Cavendish Mall, a suburban shopping centre. This was an amazing scoop considering that at the time Margaret was the number one international celebrity. She was the only wife of a world leader to have cavorted with the Rolling Stones.
The entertainment editor read it and told me it was not a good enough lead because said editor didn’t really like shopping at Cavendish Mall and besides, it was far from certain that Margaret would be coming.
Those were the 1970s. We were still typing on IBM Selectric typewriters and handing in paper copy. I saw my editor take my Saturday column in hand, crumple it up and throw it on the floor. I was told I had to come up with a new lead.
“I do not have to do anything of the kind,” I said. “I have already written a great lead. You, on the other hand, will have to reach down, pick up my column off the floor and smooth it out. Otherwise, you will have go to the big boss to tell him the reason why there is no Saturday showbiz column is because you don’t like to shop at Cavendish Mall.
“On the way to see him, you might want to stop by the sports department. Tell them to stop writing that the Habs might win the Stanley Cup since that it is far from certain that they will do any such thing.”
Copy editors were there to keep mistakes to a minimum. I recall having written about a gala event attended by the first vice-president of the Bank of Montreal. The copy editor called me at home to tell me that could not possibly be right since the Bank of Montreal began conducting business in 1817.
I told the copy editor that I was not referring to the first ever vice-president. I was writing about the current first vice-president as opposed to the current second vice-president.
Writing a gossip column provided me with unparalleled access to celebrities. You name them, I met them – and I followed them.
After Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau quit politics, he moved to Montreal and lived on Pine Avenue in the beautiful Cormier House, a stunning art deco residence in the heart of the Golden Square Mile. Marika Coulourides, a Greek community activist and part-time antique dealer, lived a few doors away.
One day, she walked over to Trudeau’s place, left an art deco chair on his doorstep as a gift along with a dinner invitation. Tight with his cash and never one to miss a free meal, Trudeau accepted. As soon as he did, Marika invited me to attend a hastily arranged dinner party for 12.
Towards the end of the meal, Marika’s sister Mireille inquired if we would like to have some pineapple for dessert.
“No, Mireille, no pineapple,” Marika said. “We don’t want to be picking toothpicks out of our ass all night.”
This was a very serious dinner party and everyone pretended not to have heard. I was not about to let the moment go.
“What was that, Marika? What did you say?”
When she repeated her observation, the guests could stand it no longer and burst out laughing with Trudeau roaring the loudest.
As I churned out five columns a week of celebrity tidbits, there was a lot less laughter from Mila Mulroney. She was not at all amused when I detailed her lavish spending sprees at the posh Holt Renfrew department store. I lived at the Chateau apartments across the street and would often spot her limo parked outside while she shopped.
Mila was even less amused when she was caught trying to stiff taxpayers into buying her used furniture. I knew that she had bought an antique mirror from Marika for $300 and was amazed that she had tried to pawn it off on the unsuspecting people of Canada for about $5,000.
Fortunately, the sale never went through but much of what I wrote about Mila’s shopping prowess did make it into the Stevie Cameron book, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years.
Mila was convinced that I had paid people to spy on her. I had to do nothing of the kind. Some of her relatives and friends would call me, regularly filling me in on everything from a list of gifts she received for her birthday to the guest list at her brother’s wedding.
I loved writing about celebs. At the first Montreal World Film Festival, I got to rub shoulders with film legends like Ingrid Bergman, Gloria Swanson, Fay Wray and film critic John Simon whom I took all over town in search of his latest book of film reviews.
This plum job gave me the chance to take my mother to the Academy Awards the year of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Understandably, security was tight outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the Oscars were held.
Since I had only one press badge, we kept passing it back and forth surreptitiously until a 6-foot-5 Los Angeles cop noticed. He came over to ask which one of us was Tommy Schnurmacher.
I saw my life flash before me. Mom was undeterred. In a strong Hungarian accent, she said, “You are so charmink, officer, and you are ebsolutely right. I vill leave immediately and try to find my vay back to da hotel even doe I vill be all alone.”
Five minutes later, mom was telling the cop all about how she had escaped from Hungary during the 1956 revolution as he escorted her to a great spot where she would have an unobstructed view of the arriving celebrities.
After churning out a showbiz column five days a week, I enthusiastically dived into the world of black ties and taffeta as the Montreal social scene and charity galas became my beat for eight years.
Just about the time I was finding it difficult to write something new and different about how to handle the haggis at the annual Saint Andrew’s Ball, I was asked to pen a weekly op-ed column on the subject of my choice. This new gig dovetailed very well with my daily talk show at CJAD.
I wrote that op-ed column for several years until former football player Larry Smith was brought in as publisher of the Gazette. He hoped to attract more francophone readers and was reticent to keep me on. After all, my friend and French talk show host Gilles Proulx, with whom I had co-hosted a historic bilingual broadcast from Magnan’s Tavern, had referred to me as “le chef général” of the “anglo army.”
Smith had one of his underlings call me to suggest that the paper could no longer afford a weekly column, but I would be welcome to submit an occasional one. I told them they would be welcome to hire someone they could afford.
Smith went on to accept a Senate position using his Gazette profile to run for Parliament.
He pointed out that with a salary of just $132,000, he was taking “a dramatic, catastrophic pay cut.” Smith lost a winnable riding by a country mile and hightailed it back to his Senate seat.
I have to say I was glad I was no longer at the Gazette the day this man had walked around the newsroom to meet the employees and told them he did not have time to read the paper.
Publishers, entertainment editors and copy editors notwithstanding, I’m glad that I managed to spend 25 years working for a major metropolitan daily even though I never covered that meeting in the Glebe.
TOMMY SCHNURMACHER’s latest book is a memoir entitled Mom’s Makeup Tips From Auschwitz: How Vanity Saved My Mother’s Life. Still a terrific dancer, Tommy is thrilled that he has been asked to run the Montreal Poetry Brothel and act as its official emcee.