MANAGING EDITOR WAS only the first of my five or so titular promotions. I was executive editor for a few months, then editorial director, then editor-in-chief, with vice president added for extra spice. Each time, I think Jack figured a new title meant he didn’t have to give me a raise. He was right. Those days at M&S were so jam-packed with new faces and manuscripts that I barely had time to think about money. Jack, on the other hand, thought about it most of the time. The firm was running out of cash, he said, and what was left wouldn’t be wasted on staff stipends. If anyone felt it was not enough, he or she could leave. He considered it a privilege to be at M&S with the country’s best authors. And it was, indeed, a privilege.
With two notable exceptions, Jack was unable to fire anyone. The closest he came was clipping printed advertisements for suitable jobs and placing them on the desks of those he wanted to be rid of. One notable exception involved one of our many vice presidents, who told Jack he had to make a choice between himself and me. I stayed. The second firing would rock the entire company, but more about that later.
Periodically Jack would complain about the general incompetence of people who worked for him, as when he announced to a roomful of booksellers at the company’s annual big fall list launch party at the Royal York Hotel that he was, sadly, “surrounded by idiots.” We, his senior staff, dutifully arrayed behind him on stage, took it reasonably well, though someone had to restrain Peter Taylor, our director of marketing, from grabbing the mic and making a few observations of his own.
Peter was irrepressibly witty, always full of ideas for how to sell books, never lost for words, friendly to newcomers like me. He was thin, wiry, and almost completely bald. His novel Watcha Gonna Do Boy . . . Watcha Gonna Be? was published by M&S before he came on board. We became friends as soon as we met.I
The building itself, at 25 Hollinger Road, was cruel and unusual punishment for even the most dedicated employees. Brick with a tin roof, it was perishingly cold in the winter and nightmarishly hot in the summer. Some days in mid-winter the snow-removal crews would leave out most of East York or decide not to de-ice the roads off Eglinton Avenue, east of the Don Valley Parkway, so that even showing up for work was an act of courage in face of civic indifference. Midsummer, the place turned into a sauna. Jack would sometimes be shirtless, as would a few male staff; the women wore as little as possible and hovered over fans. The floors were covered in linoleum that sweated as we did.
* * *
IN THE EARLY summer of 1969, in preparation for the publication of Harold Town’s Drawings, after an excruciatingly sweaty debate in the boardroom, I laid out the sticky, curling, damp photostats of Harold’s drawings along the continuous corridor. The line started before reception, went past Jack’s office, turned the corner, carried on past Sam Totten’s office and the editorial bunker, all the way to the door of the art department. Since I spent most of the day on my knees, arranging drawings, I was glad that I had given up my London miniskirt and worn long cotton pants—rather than my new quite fashionable, beige imitation-leather pants—that didn’t ride down when I was bent over.
Frank Newfeld had already planned the design of the book; Robert Fulford, art critic and columnist for the Toronto Star and recently appointed editor of Saturday Night magazine, was writing the text.
It’s hard to overstate Harold Town’s fame at the end of the 1960s. In 1968 alone he had had eight one-man shows and been part of many others featuring the work of his generation’s best-known artists, Painters Eleven. He had represented Canada at the Venice Biennale; he was profiled everywhere, revered, collected, and discussed; he won international awards; he reviewed other people’s work, appeared on talk shows, debated, fought, argued, and lambasted those who dared to criticize or contradict him.
He was not only one of the country’s most celebrated artists but also a man given to great flights of belligerent verbal abuse with a full lexicon of sexual and scatological references, including some I had not heard even in the company of American servicemen stationed in the United Kingdom. My London boyfriend had been a captain in the US Air Force, a veterinarian in civil life, and delightful company. Some of his less gentle-hearted friends, however, did manage streams of interesting invective.
Harold’s drawings were even more eclectic than his language. He had experimented with a variety of styles and media: heavy blacks, light pencil sketches, pastels, gouache, charcoal, brush, ink, in a wide range of colours and surfaces. He did soft portraits, such as one of Allen Ginsberg, figures in motion, dancers, and the surreal Enigmas—grotesque figures with temples for heads and objects sticking out of their asses—Picasso-style nudes, horses, ancient warriors, queens, and some pure whimsy, such as “Michelangelo Composing a Sonnet by Candlelight.”
He was a lanky, broad-shouldered man, pale, with soft mousy-brown hair and grey sideburns that ran down the sides of his face all the way to his chin. He had an intense, fixed look with a pair of long lines between his eyebrows that made him seem angry even when he was not. That day, he wore white pants and some sort of pleated twill jacket in defiance of the heat.
Jack had warned me about Harold’s insatiable ego, his inability to compromise, and the likelihood that we would be sorting through pictures for the rest of the day, the night, and maybe the week. Harold considered each drawing to be of such superior quality that leaving out even one was an insult to his genius.
While Bob Fulford admired Town’s prodigious talent, he did not think that everything he had ever produced was a work of unparalleled brilliance. One of his ways of dealing with Harold’s flights of verbal fancy was to listen, chew on his pipe, nod sagely, and postpone the decision until it had become obvious, even to Harold, that the book could not accommodate all his drawings.
Bob’s experience as editor of the venerable magazine Saturday Night must have taught him a great deal of patience. The eighty-two-year-old magazine was an institution but, according to Jack, in a very precarious financial state. One wrong move and this could be its last year. In a strange way, Jack both delighted in and sympathized with Saturday Night’s plight, as M&S was in a similarly precarious situation.
Balding, with black-framed glasses that had a habit of slipping down his nose while he was in contemplation, Bob also had a smiling, thoughtful, and cheerful attitude to the whole improbable day. Frank had, surprisingly, held his temper in check for the better part of an hour, then left. Harold and Bob appeared not to notice the heat or the dampness. Each was determined to wrestle the other into submission—Harold to include more than the designated number of works, Bob to urge discernment.
My job was to get down on the floor and move the sheets of sticky paper in and out of order, or just onto a pile of what Harold bitterly called “rejects.”
Harold didn’t directly address me while I was squatting or kneeling, but he did have a few choice words he urged me to pass on to my boss when the “son of a bitch” dared show his face again. Jack had mentioned that he loved Harold but did not much like him. He was tired of the tirades and of picking up the tab every time they went out for drinks. He thought Harold was depressingly cheap when it came to paying his own way.
Jack was also critical both of the fact that Harold had a “lady” in addition to his wife and annoyed that Harold often reneged on paying her for her research work. I met Iris Nowell, Harold’s lady, one evening when the four of us had dinner in a restaurant on King Street. Harold harangued Jack for his lack of attention to the quality of paper in Drawings and the amount of promotion he felt entitled to and didn’t get. For some mysterious reason, then, Harold sang “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie,” with its anti-Vietnam overtones and unforgettable image of “the day the music died.”
Iris was blond, with soft grey eyes, quiet, smart, and very attentive to Harold. When she expressed an opinion about something, he berated her:II I think the subject was dogs or cats. Harold hated all pets but especially dogs and cats. He wanted Iris to write a book about the dangers they posed to humans. He talked about movies he hated, about Toronto landmarks slated for destruction by bureaucrats who knew the value of nothing, about critics—particularly art critic Clement Greenberg, who had promoted the work of Jack Bush, a Canadian artist whom Harold despised—and about a proposed book on his own famous Christmas trees. They were miracles of lights and construction displaying hundreds of fabulous old things he had collected over the years. Even after a tree toppled under the weight of its decorations, the surviving objects remained treasures in Harold’s studio.
But back to the linoleum floor. Bob Fulford, who must have appreciated my efficiency in placing damp paper in straight lines and my dumbfounded diplomacy about the final choices in Drawings, invited me to lunch a few weeks later. He was then, and is now, the most interesting and erudite conversationalist, one of the most quoted people in the country. He discussed art, museums, Jane Jacobs’s ideas for cities, Expo 67 and why it was such an important event, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and what it should be broadcasting, movies, and filmmakers. Unlike some of the writers I met later in Toronto, Bob was an anti-Communist, and we found we shared a suspicion of the Soviet Union verging, at least on my part, on vehement dislike.
To my great relief, we did not talk about Harold’s drawings.
Bob had been writing a movie column for some years as Marshall Delaney. I tried to persuade him to write a book about films and filmmakers for M&S. Though I failed to convince him, eventually he did publish his Marshall Delaney at the Movies, but not with us.
* * *
DRAWINGS WAS PUBLISHED in time for Christmas, 1969. It was a handsome book but suffered a little from “show-through”: some of the strong blacks were showing through the paper under the finer drawings on the reverse side of the page. Harold was, predictably, unhappy. Jack, in a mischievous moment, assured him that the choice of paper would have been a part of my job. Harold raged and shouted and refused to speak to me for a while. Perhaps because of my childhood, I am not comfortable around violence, whether physical or verbal, and Harold, as I said, was very good at invective.
I knew I had been forgiven when he set me up for a date with his close friend Sig Vaile. Siggy was quiet, restrained, and charming. He told lovely stories about his growing up in Ontario along with a few amusing Harold tales, but we were, clearly, not destined for each other. We belonged to different worlds, though we managed to have a couple of very pleasant dinners at rather swish restaurants. At the time, I was still somewhat involved with a young Jewish lawyer named Harvey, whose parents actively disliked gentiles, particularly Hungarians.
Harold was disappointed but not discouraged. He assumed that my relationships were of a temporary nature and that eventually I’d be looking for someone he would find acceptable.
I. Years later, Key Porter published his still very funny Bald Is Beautiful. (With so many balding boomers, surely it’s time for a new edition.)
II. Iris Nowell has written several books, including Hot Breakfast for Sparrows: My Life with Harold Town and Harold Town.