Oliver's Twist (9 page)

Perversely, in this environment the inner eight-year-old thrived. He was perfectly at home with the idea that life was a
battle, that it took all our strength and wiles to prevail against our enemies, that there was no room for charity or compromise or unguarded vigilance. His delight in our circumstances told me something.

Whatever her frailties, I always respected my mother's instincts. Her judgments could be swift, yet almost without exception they proved correct, so I didn't hesitate to seek her counsel on career decisions. Mom had listened for years to my complaints about the CBC's vast bureaucracy, its management incompetence, and, more recently, its truculent staff. As usual, her advice was blunt and clear: “Get out of that place,” she told me. “They're all jerks.”

The career-saving rescue she recommended that I accept came at the hands of Don Cameron, a renowned and much-admired news producer, with an assist from Pierre Juneau, then chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the regulatory body of Canadian broadcasting.

Juneau had turned his eye on the nation's private broadcasters and in particular CTV, the commercial television network that was at its most profitable in the sixties and seventies. Although CTV called itself a network, it was in reality a disparate collection of independently owned local television stations that came together to buy American sitcoms and dramas en bloc. These shows were purchased cheaply, and then peddled to Canadian sponsors at exorbitant prices. Since most Canadian viewers had a choice of only two or three stations in those days, CTV's market share was impressive and its annual profits typically in the 25 percent range.

The paltry amount spent on Canadian programming at CTV was a fig leaf to keep the regulators at bay: The network did not even have a national newscast worthy of the name. Most news broadcasting and what passed for public affairs was done by the local stations. The network's idea of national news programming was to fly local film footage to a central studio, first in Ottawa, later at CFTO in Toronto, and hire an anchor to front it on air. There were few national correspondents even in Ottawa. A
Globe and Mail
columnist of the time branded the private owners as “pirates and buccaneers” for their plunder of the airwaves.

Then in 1970, Juneau announced stringent Canadian content regulations for private broadcasters and attached tight deadlines for implementation. With their federal broadcast licences on the line, the board members at CTV moved quickly to assemble a serious national and international news service. The only place to find people with the necessary expertise was the CBC, and CTV promptly sent out its raiding party. Their first steal was one of the corporation's outstanding correspondents, Tom Gould, who then brought aboard Don Cameron, my boss at CBC News and a man known in the Corp's corridors as “Craze” Cameron.

Flamboyant, self-indulgent, and the architect of countless madcap and risky adventures, Cameron was one of the last of the swashbuckling, hard-drinking, womanizing newsmen, a club that included his friends Norman DePoe and Peter Reilly. Shooting wars were his great passion, and he had made his reputation for bravery, if not foolhardiness, in his coverage of the Vietnam War for the CBC. Once in the producer's chair, he couldn't resist following his correspondents into the field, just to
check on how things were going. He would insist on dragging everyone as close to the action as the local military would allow, then insist equally on their accompanying him on drinking binges at the local bars and whorehouses.

In 1983, one of Cameron's CTV reporters, Clark Todd, was killed in the civil war in Lebanon. Todd's crew were forced to flee without him to save their own lives. Don and a colleague left the executive offices in Toronto, flew to Lebanon, and risked their skins going into the war zone to find Todd's remains. They drove up into the Chouf Mountains in the midst of an artillery barrage of the kind that had killed Todd, found his putrefying body, and brought it home.

My first meeting with Don Cameron—or rather the first time I shook his hand—was a classic “Craze” story. In 1962 a crew from his groundbreaking CBC program
Newsmagazine
was in Regina covering the medicare fight. They invited me to join them for a drink. While we chatted, the conversation kept being interrupted by remarks that seemed to come from under the large table where we sat. A disembodied voice insisted that we tell him the name of the most beautiful woman we had ever seen him with. Finally, one of the group explained that the voice belonged to their boss, Don Cameron, and he introduced me by name. A hand emerged from beneath the table in a friendly greeting. I clasped it, uttering the usual pleasantries, but I never did see the man's face.

On my first day at the Corp's Jarvis Street premises, I had hoped to find Cameron in his office where I would impress him with my readiness for action. His door was closed tight and when I knocked there was no answer, though I could hear murmured exclamations from inside. I banged on the door more insistently
and, after a moment, Cameron and his secretary emerged, rearranging their clothing. He gave no sign of discomfort, but welcomed me with a compliment on my “edgy” reporting style and reassurances that we would get along just fine; after all, his son and I shared the same name.

Cameron was a completely undisciplined and self-interested human being. Though he possessed a fierce intelligence, he was ruled by instinct and whim. Yet he had two saving graces: He was capable of enormous and sudden kindness and sensitivity, and he possessed the ability to recognize talent in others, gifts they were often unaware of themselves. Of course he exploited that talent for his own purposes, but in the process he crafted careers for two generations of broadcasting luminaries at CBC and CTV, among them Knowlton Nash, Pamela Wallin, Sandie Rinaldo, Michael Maclear, Bill Cunningham, and Lloyd Robertson.

Once at CTV, Cameron had the answer to its problem of how to meet the CRTC's content rules without undermining the lucrative evening schedule. He would create the country's first early morning news and current affairs show, aiming to repatriate the substantial Canadian audience for the American
Today
show on NBC. Armed with CTV's fat wallet, he hired many of his former CBC co-workers as cameramen, film editors, and reporters. He offered me the job of producer. Since I was already producing a news-hour program at the CBC—also a Cameron creation—the position seemed ideal.

The alter ego had no trouble with the idea of fleeing the Corp.
Keep moving,
was his mantra,
stay ahead of enemies and critics.
And Mom had caught my mood at that moment: While there were many individuals I appreciated and admired as professionals at the CBC, there were others I could not abide. It
was time to take my leave. It helped too that Cameron was one of Mom's favourites, a man she recognized on first meeting as a boozer and manic-depressive like herself.

Before giving formal notice, I went to see my immediate boss, Knowlton Nash. It took me two days to get an appointment, and when we met, he was pleasant but rather indifferent. His parting words were that CTV's commitment to a breakfast talk show would not last more than six months and that I would soon be back, looking for work. I submitted my resignation without regret.

Cameron assembled a small team of seven or eight for the new morning show. We occupied three dingy offices in the windowless basement of CFTO, the network's flagship station in the suburb of Agincourt, well north of downtown Toronto. The lack of daylight and circulating air soon produced sallow complexions and constant colds, but we were eager. Early on we brainstormed possible names:
Canada in the Morning
was too long;
AM
Canada
might be confusing;
Canada
AM
put the country first and felt just right.

My editorial staff of four chase producers pulled together seven and a half hours of interviews a week. The working day started at four in the morning, and the show went on air at seven. In the first year, it was a ninety-minute production, ending at eight-thirty; in the second, it went to two full hours. Since we could not start lining up the next day's guests at such early hours, it was a long shift for everyone on the editorial side. Not everyone had the constitution to endure such a schedule, and staff turnover was brutal. One producer was so miserable and cranky at the prospect of arriving in what seemed the middle of the night that Cameron banished him to days. The subterranean
quarters did not help, but comfortable in management's carpet city a few floors above, Executive Producer Cameron was oblivious.

We needed stars to attract an audience, and Cameron hired two high-profile co-hosts. Popular weatherman Percy Saltzman was lured away from CBC Toronto, and Carole Taylor, a local personality and show host, was called up from CFTO. Both were expected to draw viewers in the critical Toronto market.

To the public, Percy was an easygoing yet polished performer in front of a chalkboard weather map, beloved for his signature toss of the chalk at the end of every meteorological report. But Percy was far more than that. He was a serious man, an intellectual in the European Jewish tradition, and as with many of his generation, the injustices of the Depression and the horrors of the Holocaust had deeply affected his outlook. He possessed a deep ethical sensibility combined, at that stage in his life, with a lot of anger. The world was a tussle between good and evil for Percy, and he believed that television could be an instrument for overdue change. At our story meetings he was full of ideas, most of them heavy with social relevance.

Carole, on the other hand, had an engaging interviewing style that was perfectly matched to the largely female audiences for morning television in those days. Though her entree into television had been the crown in a Miss Toronto beauty pageant, she was nobody's fool. In her early twenties, she had a sharp, incisive mind, as well as high standards and unvarnished honesty. She also had a perfect understanding of where she wanted to go and what she needed to learn to get there, an attitude that would eventually take her to a highly successful career in British Columbia politics.

The show was launched on September 11, 1972, and in the early weeks our strategy was to position the much-older Percy as the lead personality and father figure, with Carole acting as his attractive assistant. That script did not last long. The story editors who produced and researched the segments wanted Carole to interview their guests. When these guests began to include political figures and other prominent individuals, Percy rebelled. We had a heated exchange in which I had to remind him that our show was primarily an entertainment vehicle with hard news on the side. He was not anchoring a documentary unit intent on exposing the corruption of government or the crimes of industry, even if that would have suited him better. I tried to persuade him to relax and enjoy himself.

But to Percy, lightening up meant selling out. One morning he interviewed actor Michael Caine about his role in a justreleased war movie. Percy accused Caine of being a fake: What did a fancy-pants British actor know about war? In fact, Caine had fought in Korea as an infantryman in a London regiment, once engaging in hand-to-hand combat against Chinese mass attacks. He told viewers of being in the skirmish line the day the armistice was signed in Panmunjeom, afraid he might be the last man to die. It was riveting television but showed the risks of Percy's style.

During a week the crew spent in Ottawa, Percy also came off second-best in an interview with Pierre Trudeau. He told the prime minister that he was sick of Ottawa politicians fighting like children in a sandbox and suggested they should simply get together and agree to solve the problems of the country. Trudeau countered that, unfortunately, democracy was messy. If Percy could arrange for all those irritating and argumentative people
to join one big political party in which everyone agreed on all policies, Trudeau said he would be happy to lead it.

It became apparent that viewers were tuning in because of Percy but staying because of Carole. The tension between the two grew so great that we had to hold separate story meetings every morning. Decisions over who would handle which guests became a negotiation to test the wisdom of a Solomon. Percy's irritability was compounded by the fact that he was not an early morning person; as the weeks passed, he arrived at the studio at 4 a.m. looking increasingly haggard and worn. Plus he was carrying a heavy workload, more than a dozen interviews every week. Don Cameron had made the mistake of telling him that he was to make guests earn their airtime—a hard news concept not appropriate for what was essentially a talk show. But Percy took it seriously. He researched every interview meticulously, and then felt deeply frustrated when the time given to his segments was, in his view, too short to develop his subject.

His wife monitored the show at home with a stopwatch. Every “intro” and “extro,” and every segment, whether Carole's or Percy's, was timed to the second. At the end of the show, Percy received a full report and then confronted me. If Carole had been given even a minute or two more camera time, then I was failing to provide them equal exposure. He accused story editors of showing favouritism, steering their interview subjects away from him.