Working the Dead Beat (30 page)

In 2000 he returned permanently to Toronto. Taylor had died three years earlier and his final bequest had long since been spent; Symons was on his uppers and “a postscript to his own life,” according to one friend. He spent his last years at Leisure World, where a few of the faithful continued to stop by to take him out for a meal or celebrate his birthday. He often got into rows with other residents, accusing one of sexual harassment after the man objected to the cavalier way that Symons appropriated his newspaper every day.

Although Symons had long since divorced himself from his family, his youngest brother, Bart, attempted a reconciliation in the summer of 2008. “Almost in fear” of a confrontation, he made the train trip from his home in Stratford to visit his older brother, who was in St. Michael's Hospital suffering from respiratory problems. “He was an absolute sweetie,” Bart Symons said later about a five-minute duty call that turned into a lengthy and emotional visit several months before his brother died. “It was an incredible event and he was so glad I had come and in hindsight so am I.”

In the end, blood and family proved stronger than kicking against the pricks.

 

Paul Brodie

Saxophonist

April 10, 1934 – November 19, 2007

O
N AN ORDINARY
day in 1978, musician Paul Brodie was playing the saxophone in his Toronto studio when the phone rang. Warren Beatty, the actor, was on the other end of the line. A fan of Brodie's musicianship, Beatty wanted permission to use a recording of Brodie playing the fourth movement of Handel's Sonata no. 3 in Beatty's new movie,
Heaven Can Wait
. In the film, Beatty was cast as a wealthy football hero who played the soprano saxophone as a hobby; he wanted to use Brodie's solo as background music for the scene in which Beatty's character and his servants, all dressed in tuxedos, toss around a football in the garden of his mansion.

Brodie quickly agreed to terms with Beatty, put down the phone, and set to work parlaying a less-than-three-minute part in composer Dave Grusin's film score into something akin to a Command Performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England. Before long “the Canadian media somehow got the idea that a Canadian saxophonist was being featured throughout the film,” Brodie wrote disingenuously in
Ambassador of the Saxophone,
his self-published
autobiography.

When
Heaven Can Wait
was nominated for several Academy Awards, Brodie, whose chutzpah was surpassed only by his musicianship, flew to Los Angeles. He wangled tickets to the awards, sent 250 postcards to Canadian media pumping his connection with the film, and arranged to do a live telephone interview with
CBC
Television the day after the ceremonies.

Brash, dynamic, and entrepreneurial, Brodie had precisely the right combination of talent and salesmanship to promote himself and his instrument at home and abroad. The saxophone is a relative newcomer as a musical instrument, so it did not have a role in traditional orchestras or in the music of the great classical composers. Invented by Belgian Adolphe Sax in Paris in the 1840s, the saxophone is a hybrid that combines the volume and carrying power of brass with the intricate key work and technical finesse of woodwinds. Although some modern classical composers have written for the saxophone, it is still mainly played in military and blues bands and jazz combos. Brodie tried to change that.

He was the first person to teach saxophone at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Although not himself a composer, he persuaded composers such as Srul Irving Glick, John Weinzweig, Bruce Mather, and Violet Archer to write music for his instrument. In his quest to promote the saxophone he co-founded the World Saxophone Congress with Eugene Rousseau in Chicago in 1969. The organization brings players, critics, composers, and audiences together in a different city every three years.

Early on, as a struggling performer and teacher, he invented a fictitious character, Ronald Joy, to be his front man for booking and promoting concerts to impresarios throughout North America. When potential sponsors responded to Brodie's mass mailings by telephoning and asking to speak to Joy, Brodie would lower his voice by a couple of octaves and start bargaining performance fees, hotel rates, and dates. The fake manager arranged nearly eight hundred concerts for his “client” in the 1960s and '70s.

During his fifty-year career as a professional musician, Brodie, the self-styled “ambassador of the saxophone,” probably played more concerts, recorded more albums, toured more countries, and taught more private students than any classical saxophonist of his or any other day. He was a champion not only of his own virtuosity as a player but of the saxophone as a musical instrument.

PAUL ZION BRODIE
was born in Montreal on April 10, 1934, the younger son of Sam and Florence (née Schiller) Brodie. When Paul was ten months old, his father, who ran a dry goods store, shifted his family to the north end of Winnipeg, where he found work selling radios in an appliance store. The family moved again when Paul was eleven, to Regina, in neighbouring Saskatchewan.

He went to Strathcona School and sang in the junior choir at his synagogue. His father gave him a clarinet for his bar mitzvah and taught him to play “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” In high school, the only subject that interested him was music. Sick in bed with a cold one day, Brodie was listening to the radio and heard Freddy Gardner play
“I'm in the Mood for Love” on the saxophone. He was besotted with the sound and immediately decided to switch instruments. Goodbye, clarinet. Hello, saxophone.

He earned money to buy a saxophone by working at a local deli, but he couldn't find a teacher and so transferred what he knew about playing the clarinet to the saxophone. After graduating from high school in 1952, he packed his sax and his clarinet and headed to Winnipeg. He enrolled in a pre-law program at United College (now the University of Winnipeg) but failed so miserably he switched programs and schools, ending up at the University of Michigan, where Larry Teal taught the saxophone. Unable even to play scales, he was stunned by the virtuosity of the other applicants. When the university accepted him on probation for six months, he “practiced like a nut, ten hours a day,” and still barely passed the audition. But he'd learned discipline and how to set a goal.

In one of his first classes in the history of music he heard a recording of French classical saxophone virtuoso Marcel Mule playing the alto sax. His ambitions changed: whereas he had once hoped to be good enough to play in a band led by a musician of the calibre of Tommy Dorsey or Les Brown, he now considered the possibilities of becoming a classical saxophonist.

He joined the university band under conductor William Revelli and played the bass saxophone when they performed at Carnegie Hall in April 1954. He also formed a dance combo called the Stardusters, which helped earn tuition money and taught him a great deal about the business of promoting and organizing a group.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's degree in performance in December 1957, he went to Paris to study with Maestro Mule. Back in Canada, he moved to Toronto and looked for a job teaching saxophone.

“The Royal Conservatory of Music is now in its seventy-second year and we have never allowed a saxophone in the building,” protested Ettore Mazzoleni, director of the
RCM
, but the ever-persuasive and persistent Brodie succeeded in getting an audition. He played so well he broke the embargo and was hired as a woodwind instructor. Soon he was also playing on an occasional basis for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and doing regional tours with Jeunesses Musicales, first with pianist George Brough and then with Colombe Pelletier as his accompanist.

He made his debut as a soloist with the
TSO
at a Sunday afternoon concert on December 27, 1959, with Walter Susskind conducting, and his New York debut at the Town Hall on November 18, 1960, with George Brough accompanying him on the piano and Rima Goodman, a modern dancer from Toronto whom he'd married eight months earlier, turning the pages. There were only about forty-five people in the audience, but one of them was Raymond Erickson, the music critic for the
New York Times
. “Mr. Brodie's skill made everything he played sound fluent and easy although the music was studded with technical difficulties . . . producing a lovely soft tone when he wanted to . . . in his splendidly vital performance,” he wrote. A jubilant Brodie phoned the Canadian Wire Service and begged them to pick up Erickson's review, which they obligingly did, flashing the news about the Canadian native's success in the Big Apple. Brodie carried that tattered clipping in his wallet for the rest of his life.

Two performance careers in one family meant too much travelling for a couple who wanted to stay married, so the following year, the Brodies settled in Toronto, added teaching to their repertoires, and established the Brodie School of Music and Modern Dance in a former furniture store. The dance studio was on the ground floor, six music studios were in the basement, and the second floor had two apartments. They lived in one and turned the other into an additional five music studios.

The Brodies ran their school for nearly twenty years, employing about twenty music and dance teachers and training about 650 students a season, among them Willem Moolenbeek, Lawrence Sereda, Robert Pusching, John Price, Robert Bauer, and Jean-Guy Brault, who went on to a long and successful career as a flautist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Brodie also taught woodwinds at the University of Toronto from 1968 to 1973; he formed a quartet in 1972 to showcase his own playing and the work of a revolving group of three students. The Paul Brodie Saxophone Quartet played at the World Saxophone Congress in London in 1976 and in the 1981 film
Circle of Two
.

After his “international” success with the film
Heaven Can Wait
, Brodie shuttered the school and wound up the quartet. The lease was up, he was in “phone ringing off the hook” demand, and she was “wildly busy” with commissions for her work as a fibre artist. He never stopped teaching, however, either privately in a smaller studio or at York University, where he taught from 1982 until the late 1990s.

Concert saxophonist and composer Daniel Rubinoff was one of his last students. “I needed a mentor and I found one,” he said about his relationship with Brodie. After studying in Europe, Rubinoff worked with Brodie for eighteen months beginning in 1995 and won the gold medal for the 1997
ARCT
(Associate of the Royal Conservatory) exams.

“One of the things about Paul's legacy is that he realized that you had to practise the saxophone to become as good a performer as you could possibly be, but you also had to be a tireless promoter,” Rubinoff said. “He was a wonderful businessperson and he passed that on.” How to have a career as a concert saxophonist, how to talk to an audience, how to be tough about criticism, how to cold-call a concert promoter, and how to set up a teaching studio were among Brodie's synergistic “life lessons.”

In his mid-sixties Brodie, who had high blood pressure and diabetes, almost died from an aortic dissection — a tear in the wall of the aorta. Even that nearly fatal condition didn't persuade him to pack away his saxophone. When an
MRI
revealed an enormous aneurysm in his aorta in 2007, he insisted on postponing surgery until after he had finished recording a CD of his favourite pieces with harpist Erica Goodman. Once again the man and his instrument prevailed, but at a perilous cost. Near the end of the long operation, his heart finally gave out. He died, aged seventy-three, on November 19, 2007.

 

Jackie Burroughs

Actor

February 2, 1939 – September 22, 2010

A
S SKINNY AS
a praying mantis, tottering on platform shoes, sucking on a cigarette, her hair a cumulus of auburn curls, Jackie Burroughs — all of five feet, three inches — showed up for an audition at the Stratford Festival in 1975, clutching a handmade male doll so large it threatened to topple her.

“If you don't mind, I thought we would do it together. It's so boring doing it by yourself,” she explained to artistic director Robin Phillips in the first of a litany of deadpan comments larded with double entendres. “She was absolutely hysterical,” he remembered thirty-five years later. “Everything she said was so provocative that it was almost impossible not to give him [the doll] a contract too, because she was able to make him look so good. That is one of the most extraordinary things about her: she has always made the rest of us look better than we are.”

Burroughs, a classically trained dancer, had a body that she could twist like a corkscrew and a quicksilver imagination that could morph from sexy to farcical to tragic. Along with the great actor William Hutt, she shared an ability to find humour in the tragic roles and tragedy in the humorous ones, according to Phillips, who directed them both.

Best known for her triple-Gemini-winning role as the twitchy and eccentric schoolteacher Hetty King in the long-running television series
Road to Avonlea
, Burroughs appeared in more than seventy-five films, often in a cameo that stole the viewer's heart, beginning with a role as a factory worker in Don Owen's 1966 National Film Board classic
Notes for a Film about Donna & Gail
. She luminously played Kate Flynn, with her toothy, sensual smile, opposite Richard Farnsworth in
The Grey Fox
, the Missus with Gordon Pinsent in
John and the Missus
, and the narcissistic and obsessive Maryse Holder in
A Winter Tan
, a film she also co-wrote and co-directed.

Beginning as a stage actress at Hart House at the University of Toronto, she played contemporary and classical roles in Canada and abroad, including Portia opposite Hume Cronyn's Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
at Stratford. She appeared with Peter O'Toole in
Uncle Vanya
at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and as part of the original cast of
Ten Lost Years
at Toronto Workshop Productions.

A bohemian by inclination, Burroughs, who died at age seventy-one of gastric cancer at home in Toronto on September 22, 2010, was an unconventional celebrity in the tiny world of Canadian entertainment. Despite her many Genie and Gemini Awards, including an Earl Grey Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (2001) and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement in 2005, she rarely, if ever, displayed the hauteur of a “
grande actrice
” deigning to grace a stage or set.

Instead she had intense friendships with men and especially young women, including actress and director Sarah Polley. She took an eager but not avid interest in their careers and their creative lives. She was “an artist in the most true, pure, brutal sense of the word,” said Polley, who first met Burroughs as an eleven-year-old on the set of
Road to Avonlea
. She was “passionate, fierce, uncompromising, honest.”

JACQUELINE WEST BURROUGHS
was born in Southport, Lancashire, England, on February 2, 1939, during the treacherous diplomatic preamble to the Second World War. Her mother, Edna Berry, had been a silent screen actress before marrying salesman Harry Burroughs, who worked for the company that made True Temper golf-club shafts. He spent the war flying missions as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. After suffering through the bombs and the casualty lists with a small child, the Burroughses waited for the advent of peace to have a second one. Their son, Gary, was a “peace baby,” born in December 1945.

When Burroughs was twelve, her father moved the family to Toronto because he had business opportunities there: importing True Temper golf shafts into Canada and running a tool-manufacturing company called Brades Nash Tyzack Ltd. The family settled on Chestnut Park Road in Rosedale after a romantic spell on Centre Island, a ferry ride across the Toronto harbour. A decade later, the effervescent Edna Burroughs persuaded her husband to buy the historic Oban Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a hostelry that was later owned and operated by their son.

At home, Burroughs was a rebel, often clashing with her mother at the dinner table; but at school she was a conformist. Head girl in her final year at Branksome Hall, a tony private girls' school, she carried a hefty 165 pounds and strutted around in her uniform of knee socks and a kilt, eager to please the headmistress. “I was a horrible suck,” she confessed later.

After Branksome she went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto (1958–61), where she shed her extra schoolgirl weight, “discovered literature and was full of angst about Virginia Woolf,” and began acting at Hart House and in summer stock theatre in the Muskoka region.

About this time she opened a front-loading dryer at her local laundromat and out tumbled a “seventeen-year-old Jewish boy with green teeth and acne,” according to a
Toronto Life
profile by journalist Martin Knelman. That's how she met Zal Yanovsky. Five years her junior and a self-taught musician, Yanovsky was playing guitar in coffee houses; later he teamed up with Denny Doherty in the Halifax Three and still later joined Cass Elliot to form the Mugwumps in Greenwich Village. (For more about Denny Doherty, please see page 242.)

Doherty and Elliot went on to form the Mamas and the Papas and Yanovsky collaborated with John Sebastian in the short-lived but hugely influential pop-rock group the Lovin' Spoonful. One friend described Yanovsky in those days as “the guy . . . in the striped shirt with the sheepdog bangs and a world-eating grin” who played the “classy, joyful, percolating guitar solo in ‘Do You Believe in Magic.'”

While Yanovsky was playing in coffee houses, Burroughs, who had spent years in ballet classes, went to England to study drama, mime, and interpretive dance and ended up joining the Chesterfield Civic Theatre in Derbyshire. “It was a bleak little northern town, but the people there came to our plays just the way they'd go bowling or play bingo on other nights,” she recounted years later. “It was terrific experience — you'd play a lead one week, an extra the next and a character part after that.”

That's what Burroughs loved: the process of creating character, using every gram of her being — intellectual, emotional, and physical — to react to the script, her fellow actors, and the audience. After returning to Canada in 1963, she acted in theatre companies in Toronto and Winnipeg and in a couple of small parts at the Stratford Festival before moving to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she resumed her tempestuous relationship with Yanovsky.

While he was busy becoming rich and famous as a rock star, travelling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, she lived mostly in Greenwich Village with her pet iguanas and frogs and studied theatre with Uta Hagen and dance with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. Pressured by her parents, she and Yanovsky married in 1967, shortly before their daughter, Zoe, was born on October 17, 1967.

The following summer, after a drug bust that had turned acidic, Yanovsky quit the Lovin' Spoonful and turned his back on the music business. He and Burroughs moved back to Toronto with their daughter. Within a couple of years they had split; in the early 1970s he moved with Zoe to a farm outside Kingston to live with restaurateur Rose Richardson. Together they created the landmark Kingston eateries Chez Piggy and Pan Chancho Bakery. “My mother was an actress and my father a musician, and I was carted around to all sorts of adult situations,” Zoe Yanofsky said in an interview after her mother died. They “were fiercely in love with each other” and had an “intense” although atypical mother-daughter relationship, including hanging around backstage while Burroughs was acting at the Stratford Festival.

As artistic director, Phillips had lured Burroughs away from contemporary theatre in Toronto and back to Stratford in the mid-1970s. “A lot of people spend a lot of time acting for the audience,” he said. “Jackie is so compelling and so bizarre and so penetrating that she demands your full attention. And God help you if you don't pay attention to her [on stage as an actor] because you will find yourself walking straight through a laugh where you least expect it . . . [or in rehearsal as a director] because she will go from the text to asking you a question and unless you are very alert, you will never know the difference.”

Incessantly in search of the fresh and the immediate, Burroughs was passionate about getting it right rather than delivering what a director demanded, a perfectionism that often led to tears and arguments in rehearsal halls, at television studios, and on film sets. Polley remembers Burroughs “constantly sticking up for the crew” and “confronting” the production bosses on the set of
Road to Avonlea.
“She put herself on the line constantly for other people, for their rights as workers on a set.”

Performing a defined role in a continuing series —
Avonlea
ran for six seasons, from 1990 to 1996, on
CBC
and the Disney Channel in the U.S. — was artistically wearing, but the show gave Burroughs a comfortable financial cushion and made it possible for her to create a winter respite and an artistic oasis in Mexico.

She “loved the people, the language and the culture” of Mexico, said Yanovsky, who can remember her mother drawing pictures of her dream house after acquiring a piece of land in a tiny village in Oaxaca. Eventually, with help from locals, she built an adobe house opening onto a courtyard, in keeping with the landscape. And then she added a twist: painting it a bubblegum-pink colour. With another local friend, a gardener named Julio, she dug a multi-level series of gardens connected with intricate walkways and planted masses of flowers and blossoming shrubs.

Her love of Mexico melded with another creative project, her obsession with the life and letters of Maryse Holder, a feminist author and sexual hedonist who had published the book
Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder's Letters from Mexico
in 1979. It is hard to understand Burroughs's fascination with Holder, but it is certainly true that she delivered a virtuoso (and Genie Award–winning) performance as the self-destructive and doomed drug- and sex-addicted tourist in the 1987 film
A Winter Tan
. “It would never have been a film without her,” Yanovsky said of the project, which began as a monologue written by Burroughs.

A vigorous smoker and reformed drinker who loved partying, dancing, and talking late into the night, Burroughs was diagnosed with gastric cancer in 2009. As the disease rampaged, she made a final visit to her beloved home in Mexico. Then, sustained by family and dear friends, she began the serious business of dying, holding court in her Yorkville apartment in Toronto, making her own funeral arrangements, and sharing final thoughts and wishes with friends and family.

She approached death with the same intensity, honesty, and creative impulse that she had done everything else in her life. “I never knew it was possible to die so eloquently,” said Polley. “She's redefining what it means . . . breaking down boundaries and rules and storming the gates of experience, refusing ever to deny what is real and honest in her work and her life. It's kind of amazing to see her do that to the end.”

But it wasn't the end. Burroughs had planned a curtain call. Mourners sitting in the pews at St. James Cathedral in Toronto, a week after her death, knew from the order of service that there was going to be a reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm. What they didn't expect was to hear that husky, alluring voice intoning “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want . . .” from across the ultimate threshold, in a performance that was simultaneously haunting and comforting. Burroughs was gone but the voice lived on, in the silence of the cathedral and the memories of the bereaved.