I SAILED ACROSS ON THE SS France in a six-berth inside cabin! It was very rough and I was seasick for most of the trip. It was totally awful. But then we arrived in New York. Wow! I walked down Broadway looking for a lot of white buildings: that is what I thought the great White Way was! I had my first American milk shake; it was fantastic. Then I left for the airport. I caught the plane to St. Louis where Gerald was studying to become a psychiatrist.
We married a week later and had two guests at the wedding. The whole thing was simple but we wanted it that way. We drove up to Canada for our honeymoon, and saw Chris Plummer playing Hamlet at the Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario, a lovely old town, now really totally unrecognizable.
Back in St Louis, everything was so big! The cars, the houses, the meals. Eating out was cheap and we loved the bars and Dixieland bands that played across the Mississippi in East St. Louis. Little things were noticeable. How they had little bags of sugar on restaurant tables: no sugar bowls caked with wet sugar on spoons, as they did in London. Paper napkins in boxes, individual salt and pepper envelopes, rather than half empty pots on the table. I was very impressed with the cleanliness of everything.
One of the most enjoyable times was when we used to go to the Crystal Club where Mike Nichols and Elaine May were first starting with the Second City group, playing every night in a kind of black box theatre. It was the first improvisation I had seen, and they were brilliant. Later, of course, they took Broadway by storm and the rest is history. In desperation I joined the local Amateur theater Group acting in several of their productions, trying to master an American accent.
Gerald finished his training and qualified as a psychiatrist at the Malcolm Bliss Hospital, but he was not allowed to remain in the US so we had to choose where we wanted to go. One evening a former colleague phoned him from Canada and said there was a job they wanted him for in Toronto. So the die was cast.
When the time came we piled all our possessions in the car and drove up to Canada again. After lots of paperwork and immigration forms to fill in, we arrived in Toronto with great expectations.
Those first months were awful, especially arriving in winter. Nobody warned us! But at least they knew about central heating, thank goodness.
Spring arrived, then summer; I was pregnant so we were house hunting. After feeling very cramped in a sublet small one bedroom apartment, we saw an advertisement for a large country house for rent about 40 miles north of the city, for the same price. It had been totally renovated, with a new kitchen and was newly furnished. It sounded great! That Sunday, a lovely summer day, we went to look at it, fell in love with it, and rented it. Little did we know that it was right in the middle of what they called the snow belt in Ontario. What idiots!! Nobody told us.
A few months later the snow came. The house was a few miles in from the highway on a small side road, and after even a small snowfall, the road was blocked, and not cleared for perhaps 24 hours. Gerald couldn't get to work, and I couldn't have my regular checkups with the doctor. Even before the snow came, I found it very lonely living out there, with nobody to talk to. The nearest farm was a couple of miles away, so I often drove into town as well.
We were forced to move back to the city, and as the landlord would not let us out of the lease, we could only afford a room in a motel, close to the hospital where Gerald worked and where I would go when my time came. It was not good. The house stood empty, we lived beside a chain-smoking cigar lodger who lived in the room next door to ours. The stench was horrible. We had no fridge, so we would put milk and perishables on the window sill, even though it was usually frozen when we needed it.
I auditioned at the CBC for work. In those days they had a very active Drama Department that produced one-hour plays for television every week straight to tape. They were looking for professional theatre actors who were used to that technique, rather than film, where you stop the cameras.
After my son, Colman was born, we stayed in the motel because the snow was still falling in February. It was too icy to take a pram out or even walk because of the slippery pavements.
On weekends, if it was warmer, we would drive up to the house, but then spend most of the time there shoveling snow from the driveway and cleaning up the winter mess.
The CBC dropped their Drama Department, much to the dismay of hundreds of actors who immediately were out of work. Later on I worked for summer stock, and all the same actors were doing that too.
Barry Morse, Gordon Pinsent, who made that wonderful film with Julie Christie, Away from Her, Barry Baldaro, Joyce Gordon, Ted Fellows, whose daughter, Megan, became famous playing Anne of Green Gables. We toured every week between Port Carling, Huntsville, Lindsay, Peterborough and Coburg, which had a theatre in their old Court House building. Barry Morse went on to make films all over the world, and also was one of the founders of the now famous Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. He also initiated the first Retirement Home for Actors in Canada: PAL. The Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto.
Is was he who inspired me to write another play, The Private Life of George Bernard Shaw, because he was an authority on Shaw and had either played or produced every play Shaw had written. He presented the play at the Lodge using all the CBC actors, then later at the Theatre Museum in London at the age of 80, playing Shaw.
One day I persuaded a CBC radio producer to let me interview Canadian filmmakers who were in the south of France, for the Cannes Film Festival. I had read that Canada was well represented that year, but was amused to see subtitles on the films if the actors were speaking French Canadian French. Of course, I wanted to see the great stars as well. Dirk Bogarde was a favorite, and he lived close by Cannes. I had seen all the Doctor films including Doctor in the House, then when I met Gerald, who looked rather like him, I was smitten, especially as he was a doctor!
Cannes and its surrounding areas must be one of the most scenic, poetic, and inspirational places in the Mediterranean. But there are dozens of places! All with an atmosphere uniquely their own.
My novel On the Riviera tries to capture the feeling of the place, just as the street artists do on their colorful canvases on display along the Croisette.
I went there several times in the next few years, working on different projects. One job was representing Pan Am Airlines at a conference. I loved that airline. On another trip, I managed to find Dirk's house, after much searching, because it was so hidden! He wrote wonderful books, especially An Orderly Man. He bought an old olive farm and was blissfully happy there. He wasn't home when I found the place, but his longtime companion took the book I had brought for him to sign and a few days later I received the signed copy with a note from him.
In Toronto, our son was born nine months later but we were still busy trying to find a home. We hadn't enough money to buy a house, so after we gave up our house in Bradford, we rented for several years. I found that there was only one professional theatre in the city and of course, it was deluged by hundreds of out-of-work actors.
I auditioned for the Stratford Festival Company, only to be told that they only hired Canadian actors with Canadian experience. That wasn't true, but what could I do? I quickly became depressed and wondered what I could do; certainly not the theatre.
One day I found a tiny little shop, empty, in an old part of Toronto called Yorkville, where there were a lot of art galleries and very few other shops. I had found a dressmaker who was very talented, quick and cheap, so the idea of opening a little boutique with one-of-a-kind dresses suddenly came to me. I enquired about the rent and it was so reasonable and without a lease that I was very tempted.
Gerald and I were about to pay over a thousand dollars for a one-week trip to Paris to visit Art Galleries, and I thought that after that week, I would be back here, still with nothing to do, so why not put that thousand dollars towards some dress materials, patterns, and rent the place?
It was a good decision. My dressmaker had other dressmaker friends, and I quickly had enough colorful dresses to open a shop. I had a huge Union Jack painted on the front door, and printed carrier bags with the same design. In fact, if you look closely during the opening credits of the TV show A Time Goes By with John and Norma Major, you have a glimpse of a girl walking with one on Carnaby Street. It was the height of the mini skirt, Carnaby Street and Mary Quant!
After the shop began to make money I flew to London and bought trunkloads of Quant and other designers. Out came the electric dresses too, ones that shone in the dark. I hired a photographer and some models, and sent the photos to the fashion editors of the two main Toronto newspapers. It was terrific when I got a two-page spread in the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, and when my newly-hired accountant phoned to see how much it had cost, he was amazed to hear that there was no fee: the editor wanted to feature them. The owner of the only other shop that carried Mary Quant also phoned and accused me of hogging the market: she was furious.
Eventually I sold the shop and contents just as the craze for hot pants began---and hot pants for men!
During those years I flew to New York and bought crazy designs from Paraphernalia and Betsy Johnson who is still designing.
My restlessness was rearing its ugly head again. I enjoyed the challenge of starting the business, promoting it, even opening a second shop, but then came the sameness of each day, the long hours sitting in the shop waiting for customers, always a pain. But I did it for six years.
Gerald and I took a week's holiday in Paris. One night as we were sitting by the Seine at sunset, I had this enormous urge to live there, to actually live there as a Parisian! No matter how difficult it would be. Life suddenly seems very short and if you wait to do something, perhaps in in the future, it may never happen. Gerald was working hard in a good job, my son was a school, although not very happy, and I always wanted any child of mine to be fluent in French, because it was so difficult for me to learn the basics. I thought it has to be now!!.
We arrived back in Toronto to deep snow and freezing winter. Where to begin?