Cool, sweet taste of printer’s ink
I was extraordinarily lucky to work at the Montreal Gazette in the 1960s and ’70s. It was a great time for newspapers; they were confident and profitable. And it was a great time for me. I was young and out in the world and I had a job where I went to shows and movies and met no end of interesting people.
I worked in the entertainments department. And if some artist or actor did something interesting, or if somebody interesting passed through town, I interviewed them. Actors, directors, singers, knife-throwers, I met them all, and I wrote about them. I was possessed of that journalist’s joyous burden: to find things out and tell everybody.
It was 1967, and it was old times at the Gazette. The paper was family-owned, sedate, conservative (and Conservative), a hundred years older than its rival Montreal Star but second fiddle in circulation and prestige. One problem might have been a reluctance to spend money. I don’t want to say they’re tight, went a line at the time, but when a reporter is sent out to cover a fire, they give him two bus tickets.
The editorial department was a sea of desks, each with a telephone and an ashtray. There were windows that opened, a side room full of teletype machines (very noisy), and a pneumatic tube that conveyed copy from editorial to the composing room in back with its perennially irate (and slightly scary) foremen.
The composing room itself was strictly 19th century, all hot lead, ranks of Mergenthaler Linotype (line of type) machines, a cluster of Ludlows (for headlines), ranks of steel benches where the pages were composed, and in the middle, the hell-pot, the cauldron of molten lead that fed the whole system.
We weren’t allowed to touch the type, we from editorial. It was a union rule. There were lights over the steel benches, and if someone non-union did touch type, a composing room guy could pull a string that turned out the lights and everybody stopped working. I never saw it happen, I’m happy to say, but if nothing else, it set a boundary that worked for both sides.
Just a few years later, everything went electronic. There were job losses in the composing room, and later a lockout of 11 employees that the Gazette, to its shame, let fester for nine years. As for those Linotype machines, some of them went straight from the Gazette to the Museum of Science and Tech in Ottawa.
I caught the end of Al Palmer; he was still writing a Page 3 column in the late 1960s. He’d been a police and nightclub reporter through the wide-open era, and he wrote a couple of hardboiled books, the novel Sugar Puss on Dorchester Street (1949) and a nightlife guide called Montreal Confidential. He had a weary look and a grey complexion and an ever-present cigarette. When he died in 1971, he was 58. I would have thought him much older.
The police reporters in my time (memorably) were Albert Noel and Eddie Collister. They monitored police radio at their desks by the front window and periodically dashed out the door.
Edgar Andrew Collard was editor emeritus but still writing his Saturday history column, a gentle, knowledgeable man. Leon Levinson was court reporter into his 70s, patrician and courtly, the dean of Canadian court reporters, I read later.
Tim Burke was a perceptive and informative sports writer, but best of all I loved his rants about the “big-money boys” who control and corrupt society.
Brodie Snyder was the quintessential desk editor, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up, barking orders, taming reams of raw copy with a thick black pencil.
Things got goosed up considerably around 1970 when Southam bought the Gazette. There was more money, more pictures in the paper, an interesting new editor in Denis Harvey and a slew of J-school graduates. I’m not sure there were any college degrees among the reporters before that; it wasn’t that kind of job. Coming on as a copy boy and moving up was a more usual route.
I got a taste of printer’s ink at the Daily, in an otherwise fruitless year at McGill University. And in 1966, I went to an anti-Vietnam War march in Montreal and ran into Carla Marcus, who was marching, as it turned out, with Nick Auf der Maur, later a celeb journo, politician and boulevardier; then just starting out. We marched down Sherbrooke St. and afterwards went to Carla’s father’s apartment where the name of some recently-deceased person came up and Nick said, “oh yeah, I wrote his obituary.”
How cool is that? I thought.
I wrote four letters – to the Gazette, the Star, the CBC and the National Film Board. And I don’t claim that this is for any reason other than times were different then, but they all wrote back. The Gazette answered first, so I went to work there. I had no experience, I was 21, but I knew how to write, sort of, because I had always written, diaries and journals, and especially when my brother Peter was studying architecture in Scotland, long letters about movies and music and the developing 1960s.
The Gazette’s new university grads were good, Linda Diebel, Brian D. Johnson, Andrew Phillips, Nigel Gibson, Luana Parker, many others. The Gazette was hopping by the early 1970s, more than a match for the Star, with lots of busy reporters and lots of good news stories, profiles and investigative pieces. I was interested in urban preservation – Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau, had made the city a free zone for developers – and a story I broke, about the threat to the Van Horne mansion on Sherbrooke St, became a cause célèbre.
At the same time, French became a whole lot more important. Unilingual Bob Hayes, who had covered suburban politics for years (and who ran the Gazette’s charity Christmas Fund), was shown the door.
It used to be fun to scoop other news outlets, publish some piece of information before anyone else. I don’t think you can do it anymore on account of the interweb; now everybody knows everything right away.
Once I heard from a phone friend at an L.A. PR firm of an upcoming Rolling Stones tour, before the official announcement, and I put it in the paper. Next morning inquiries were made. There was a conference call with the Rolling Stones’ offices in London and New York, promoter Donald K Donald in Montreal and the only person in the Gazette’s entertainment office that morning, the classical music critic Jacob Siskind. He listened to their plaints. So he scooped you, Siskind asked. Yes, they said. Good for him, Siskind said, and hung up.
I was proud to work for the Gazette and proud to play hockey for it, too. We played a handful of games in the 1970s against the Star, Sunday mornings at the Forum, and we beat ’em every time. We had some good players: Dave Bist, who was on the desk at the Gazette, and Dave Carter from the sports department and Ted Blackman, a Page 3 columnist, among other occupations, who could write a column that was funny, perceptive and relevant in 20 minutes. He brought his Export As to the bench at the Forum and smoked between shifts.
Ted died in 2002 at 60 years of age. Nick auf der Maur died in 1998 at 55. A generation earlier, Al Palmer had succumbed at 58. These people were masters of their craft. They informed us and they delighted us. They were engaged in the community and important figures in it. They gave a great deal. But they paid a steep price.
Group Captain Peter Townsend was a hero of the Battle of Britain, a Hurricane pilot, a standout even among those daring twenty-somethings who saved Britain in the early 1940s. He was also famous for a thwarted romance with Princess Margaret.
He came to Montreal in 1969 for the movie Battle of Britain on which he’d been an advisor. He was well-spoken and wore a tweed jacket. He talked about the movie and of the real-life Battle of Britain. He said that under some circumstances ice formed on an aircraft’s windscreen and the only way to remove it, even in the middle of a dogfight, was to open the cockpit window and scrape it off with your fingernails.
I met the other Peter Townshend, too, sort of, he of the Who. They were touring Tommy in 1969, but not to Montreal, so we went to see them in Ottawa, and it was a good show. Afterwards, we stopped for smoked meat at Nate’s, the Ben’s of Ottawa, and who should be in there ordering at the counter but the Who. So there were lots of “great shows” and “thanks very muches” until we sat down and they took their takeout to the motel across the street.
Vincent Price came from well-to-do circumstances. His father was president of the National Candy Company and the Price children grew up with all the advantages. Vincent liked acting and art collecting from early on, while the greatest joy for his sister, he said, was to sit down and play all the Mozart sonatas.
Price made a couple of movies with Michael Curtiz, the prolific and much-admired director of Casablanca and dozens of other pictures. But he said that it was not Curtiz but his wife, actress and screenwriter Bess Meredyth, who blocked the shots for him and otherwise instructed him in directing. When Meredyth left Curtiz, Price said, his career faltered.
In 1975, the author Ken Kesey was at odds with the movie studio that made the screen version of his wonderful novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I tracked Kesey down to his home in Pleasant Valley, Oregon. (It wasn’t that hard: Information had a K. Kesey.) And very pleasant Kesey was, and friendly, and chatty. He talked about his farm (“It’s getting nice and fuzzy”) and his literary magazine of the time, Spit in the Ocean, and about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
He was annoyed at Michael Douglas and whatever movie studio it was, because in 1962, when the book came out, Michael’s father Kirk had bought the movie rights for a few thousand bucks, and now in 1975, the movie was raking in millions. Kesey suggested a fairer split. The movie company disagreed.
“They hit me hard,” Kesey said. “They put their top lawyers on me. For a while, I was getting a lawyer’s letter a day.”
He hadn’t seen the movie version. “It’s pretty good,” I said.
“Well,” Kesey replied, “I always thought it was a pretty good book.”
He said he always saw it as the Chief’s story, as played in the movie by Will Sampson, whereas the movie, he knew, had made McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, the main guy.
Memorable Forum shows. Sha Na Na on New Year’s Eve around 1971, bringing back the joyfulness of At the Hop and Get a Job. Johnny Cash with June Carter and Carl Perkins and the Statler Brothers all singing their hearts out. David Bowie’s dazzlingly stylish black and white show in 1976.
Stevie Wonder, between hits, at a club in the east end. Also Tiny Tim, whose circus persona hid an encyclopaedic knowledge of earlier-era pop music. The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, whose on-stage bickering obscured their elegant harmonies and booming guitars. They’d been singing together since they were tots and turning out hits since their teens. They’d seen a lot of each other and it was starting to wear. In later years, separate tour buses kept them out of each other’s hair and lengthened their career.
Rockabilly hero Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, singer, raconteur, colourful character, started out in Arkansas but moved to Ontario around 1960. He brought Levon Helm with him and added four local boys to form the Hawks that became The Band that backed Bob Dylan for a time.
In the early 1970s, he put out a new record and the record company threw him a party at the Edgewater Hotel. It was fine, but we slipped out and sat in the car, Rompin’ Ronnie and me in front, my sweetheart Anna McGarrigle and my excellent Gazette friend Herb Aronoff in back. We smoked dope and Rompin’ Ronnie spun his wonderful tales, including, unforgettably, that he played in bars so tough “you had to puke twice and show your knife before they’d let you in.”
The Esquire Show-Bar, on Stanley Street, the House of Good Music, was maybe the greatest venue in Montreal musical history. There was a new show every week for 30 years. Ellington, Coltrane, Hendrix and Charlebois played there. So did Ray Charles and James Brown. And Aretha and Tina, and Otis, Etta, B.B. and Fats. It was star-studded and loud and bright and fun.
That put it in stark contrast with the Vaisseau d’Or, a stupid fancy restaurant opened in the 1970s by Mayor Drapeau (while he was mayor!) just half a block away. It had a resident orchestra and you weren’t allowed to talk while the orchestra played. People would leave the Vaisseau d’Or (escape would be a better word) and see the Esquire jumpin’ and thumpin’ just half a block away. The mayor, of course, would have noticed it, too.
No surprise, Drapeau’s asinine eatery went belly-up in short order. And no surprise either, the next year, the Esquire’s liquor license was not renewed. It lingered a while on soft drinks and great bands and then the House of Good Music died.
One night we went to L’Association espagnole on Sherbrooke near Durocher to see Philippe Gagnon and Dominique Tremblay, violinists who played traditional fiddle tunes on stainless steel violins. Robert Charlebois, who was always interesting, engaged them as sidemen, including in 1970 on the Festival Express, the cross-Canada-train-trip- with-concerts that featured Janis Joplin, The Band, Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Brothers and (truly) many others. (The film of the tour came out in 2003.)
Mayor Drapeau cancelled the concert in Montreal (need I say?), but the show went on in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary. And Gagnon and Tremblay forever cherished the memory of accompanying Janis Joplin in the endless jam session as the train rumbled west.
Dave Billington came to the Gazette after the Toronto Telegram shut down in 1971. He was a loud, large character with a powerful writing style and a huge capacity to complicate his life (relationships, drinking, the usual things). For some time he entirely abandoned coming into the office, just sent in his column by taxi, where I added capital letters, punctuation, verbs, things often absent from his stream of consciousness. But I take nothing away from Billington. He could muster up feelings. And it’s no surprise that a couple of those columns won National Newspaper Awards.
He had a party one summer’s day for Margaret Laurence, who was passing through Montreal. She lived for a decade in Buckinghamshire, where she’d been mother hen to a handful of Canadian would-be writers, Billington among them. We sat outside and chatted all afternoon, five or six of us, and Margaret Laurence, who was sweet and modest and friendly. Margaret Laurence, for heaven’s sakes, who wrote The Stone Angel and The Diviners.
Once Billington wrote a column about Marlene Dietrich. She was in her seventies in the 1970s, still touring her one-woman cabaret show. Billington went to see her at Place-des-Arts, wrote a very favourable review and got a handwritten note from La Dietrich herself. Hemingway has written about me, she wrote, and Fitzgerald, but never has anyone … Billington was over the moon. Dietrich’s next show was in Toronto, so he hopped on a plane, went to the show, went backstage afterwards and knocked on Dietrich’s dressing room door. A maid answered. Billington said I’m the writer who wrote the column in Montreal, you know, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and … The maid went away, came back and said Miss Dietrich is not available.
“But –”
“I’m sorry.”
Marlene Dietrich kept herself in the public eye for 65 years, not least by being friendly towards the press. I think the lesson is, accept a compliment. Don’t push it.
For what it’s worth, I think I broke the profanity bar at the Gazette, specifically the word “fuck.” It was the mid-1970s and David Fennario’s play On the Job was a major hit at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. It was an entirely home grown success, local play, local theatre company, local cast and crew. Its narrative of a group of angry factory workers on Christmas Eve shift reflected Fennario’s growing-up in working-class Point St. Charles. And the language was authentically gritty.
The production was so successful that CBC-TV in Toronto took notice and announced plans to put the play on television – not with the Montreal cast and crew but with all new people from Toronto. That pissed off a lot of people in the Montreal theatre community, and after the story came out, a lot of Montrealers generally.
I had asked Fennario if CBC wanted him to change anything in the play, and he said: “Not really, I just had to go through it and take all out the fucks.”
Well, I wasn’t going to fuck with a quote like that, so I wrote it as he said it and it ran in the paper the next morning. I expected some heat, but here’s what happened: nothing. No one ever said anything, at the Gazette or anywhere else.
Maybe they were liberal times. Or maybe Montrealers preferred to direct their indignation, not towards a word in a newspaper, but at CBC-Toronto’s dumb-ass misbehaviour.
Montreal lost so many treasures in the 1970s, the Van Horne mansion, Prince of Wales Terrace, the Capitol Theatre, all those lovely downtown blocks of Victorian row houses. But eventually, preservation caught on. And then a generation later, when the city announced plans for a quartier-des-spectacles on Sainte-Catherine Street, the first thing they did was tear down the Alouette Theatre (built 1952, latterly the Spectrum, the top pop music hall in town) and another venue at the corner of Bleury that had hosted spectacles for a hundred years. This is why old people feel tired.
That and Paul Godfrey. He’s president of Postmedia which owns the Gazette and a slew of other papers, and he has simultaneously slashed jobs, closed papers, put the company in hawk to U.S. vulture capitalists, and paid himself a $900,000 bonus.
The truly lovely Diana Rigg dropped into Montreal in 1969. She had already starred with the Royal Shakespeare Company and played Emma Peel in The Avengers and here she was promoting her new movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, opposite George Lazenby as James Bond. She’d been on the road for a while and was a little weary of answering questions from, as she put it, a “succession of earnest gentlemen.” But interview her I did, and she was patient and kind.
Wait a minute.
This luminously gorgeous woman suggested she was perhaps up for something other than an interview, and I said no, no, we’ll do the interview. Was I that stupid? Or is it just that I was, as she said, an earnest gentleman?
Of course, in my dreams ever since, I toss aside my reporter’s notebook and Diana and I head down to the hotel bar, where we get along amazingly well, and we giggle and flirt, and, well, you know the rest.
There used to be a Sportsmen’s Show at the Show-Mart, which was on Berri where the Bibliothèque Nationale is now, and one year there was a knife-throwing act. A man threw knives and then axes at a young woman who stood against planks of wood that the knives and axes stuck in. The blades barely missed the woman, her body, her limbs, her face. There was no trick; the man just didn’t miss. They did eight shows a day.
The man usually threw knives and axes at his wife, but she was taking a break, and it was his 16-year-old niece who was filling in. I talked to them. He was businesslike, she was quiet and polite. She read books between shows. They seemed like perfectly normal people except for their odd occupation. Fifty years later, I marvel still at their skill and sang-froid.
DANE LANKEN, born Montreal 1945, worked for years as a writer and editor. He and his wife Anna McGarrigle live near Alexandria, in rural Far Eastern Ontario.