Working the Dead Beat (31 page)

Denny Doherty

Musician and Actor

November 29, 1940 – January 19, 2007

F
OR A SHINING
moment in the mid-1960s, the Mamas and the Papas were an American counterpoint to the Beatles. In three short years — 1965 through 1968 — they produced five albums and sold an estimated twenty million records. Their ten hits included “California Dreamin'”, “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and “Monday, Monday.”

Unlike the well-tailored mop-tops, this hippie group had as many women as men — and a Canadian. Michelle Phillips was blonde and beautiful and could carry a tune; Cass Elliot garbed her obesity in caftans but she had a magnetic charisma and a haunting alto voice. The leader and Michelle's husband was John Phillips, a lanky songwriting guru who sported a funny chinchilla hat. Haligonian
Denny Doherty was the fourth. A cherubic, sweet-voiced tenor, he co-wrote the hits “I Saw Her Again Last Night” and “Got a Feelin'.”

Behind the scenes the group was wasting its talent and energy because they were all in thrall to sex, drugs, and alcohol in those sexually liberated and naive post-Pill, pre-
AIDS
times. Cass Elliot (whose real name was Ellen Naomi Cohen) was in love with Doherty; he was besotted with Michelle Phillips; and John Phillips, not surprisingly, was jealous, especially since the threesome all lived in the same house.

“He came downstairs and caught us . . . flagrante delicto,” according to Doherty in
Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas & the Papas
, by Matthew Greenwald. Michelle and John attempted a reconciliation so the band could keep on playing, but the following year, in June of 1966, the band signed a statement, with the backing of their record label, that temporarily kicked Michelle, the most beautiful but least talented member, out of the group.

“I'll bury you all,” she screamed at them in a rage. And she did. Mama Cass died of a heart attack in 1974, when she was only thirty-two, and John Phillips succumbed to heart disease after decades of drug and alcohol abuse, in March 2001, at sixty-five. Doherty turned his life around with the help of his wife, Jeannette, but even he didn't reach his three score years and ten. Doherty died of complications following abdominal surgery on January 19, 2007. He was sixty-six.

BORN IN HALIFAX,
Nova Scotia, on November 29, 1940, Dennis Gerrard Stephen Doherty was one of five children of a hard-drinking Halifax pipe­fitter. He began singing publicly on a dare, performing “Love Letters in the Sand”
in a skating-rink-turned-dancehall with Peter Power's dance band. He was fifteen. After high school he began working in a pawn shop and singing after hours with a local rock band, the Hepsters.

He formed his first folk trio, the Colonials, in 1959. The group changed its name to the Halifax Three and signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York. They had a minor hit, “The Man Who Wouldn't Sing Along with Mitch”; released an album,
San Francisco Bay Blues
, in 1963 on the Epic label; and performed in eastern Canada and in the United States.

Separately he also became friends with Cass Elliot, a singer with a band called the Big Three that also featured Tim Rose. A few months later Doherty's band broke up, ironically in a hotel called the Colonial, the original name of his ill-fated group. He and his accompanist, Toronto musician Zal Yanovsky, were destitute in New York City.

After hearing about their troubles, Cass Elliot convinced her manager to hire them. So Doherty and Yanovsky joined the Big Three and enjoyed some success in Greenwich Village. More players were added and the group changed its name to the Mugwumps. They also broke up, as so many groups did in those fluid times, and for the usual reasons: insolvency and bickering.

About this time, John Phillips's band the New Journeymen needed a replacement for tenor Marshall Brickman, who had left, after an affair with Michelle, to pursue a career as a television and screenwriter. That band also broke up — those were tempestuous times. Two powerful new groups emerged from the wreckage: Sebastian and Yanofsky formed The Lovin' Spoonful and Elliot and Doherty joined voices with the Phillipses in 1965.

Finding a name was more difficult than forming the group. John Phillips fancied The Magic Cyrcle, which was too arcane for the rest of them. Then, “lying around vegging out watching TV” and doing the usual — drinking — the foursome saw a Hells Angels member on a talk show refer to his girlfriend as a “mama.” Elliot decided that's what she wanted to be, and Michelle agreed. “We're the Mamas,” she declared, which left the men little choice but to become the Papas.

Six months later, in September of 1965, the group signed a recording contract with
ABC
/Dunhill Records and began to record their debut album,
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears.
That's when Doherty and Michelle Phillips began their tumultuous affair. After the band stripped Michelle of her Mama status the following year, she was quickly replaced by Jill Gibson, girlfriend of the band's producer, Lou Adler. Her tenure as a Mama lasted ten weeks, a period during which Doherty drank heavily to console himself over the loss of the beautiful Michelle. In an effort to put things back together, Michelle was allowed to rejoin the Mamas and the Papas, but things were no longer copacetic.

“The first thing I did in the morning, and the last thing I did at night, was have a blast of rum,” Doherty, by then a recovering alcoholic, told a reporter for the
New York Times
in January 2000. The band seemed to have lost its focus. In the middle of making another album, Elliot left to go out on her own. With the loss of her outsize presence and distinctive singing voice, the group fell apart in the summer of 1968, although it did re-form briefly in 1971.

Elliot, who had embarked on a successful solo career, remained friends with Doherty, even though he continued to drown his romantic sorrows about Phillips. Later he admitted he had ignored a marriage proposal from Elliot because he'd been too stoned at the time to respond. Like most of the pop music world, he was devastated when she suffered a fatal heart attack in July 1974, after two sold-out performances at the Palladium in London, England.

On his own, Doherty released
Whatcha Gonna Do
in 1972 with
ABC
/Dunhill. He acted on Broadway in Andy Warhol's 1974 production of
Man on the Moon
, with a script written by John Phillips. It closed after five performances. Three years later he headed back home to Halifax. He performed at the Atlantic Folk Festival for the next two summers, was host of the regional
CBC
TV program
Denny's Sho'
in 1978, and took on several acting roles at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax under artistic director John Neville. Among other plays, he appeared in
The Taming of the Shrew
,
Much Ado about Nothing
, and
Cabaret
.

Unwilling to bury his halcyon memories of pop success, he re-formed the Mamas and the Papas in 1980, with John Phillips and his daughter Mackenzie and Elaine “Spanky” McFarlane. They toured internationally until 1986, when Doherty moved to Toronto.

In the late 1980s Doherty appeared in
Fire
, a gospel-rock musical written by Paul Ledoux and David Young. In his most enduring role as an actor, in 1993 he began playing the Harbour Master in
Theodore Tugboat
, a children's television show chronicling the “lives” of vessels in a busy port loosely based on Halifax Harbour. By then he was married to Jeannette, and was the father of three children. Often credited with saving Doherty's life, Jeannette was the one who insisted he had to leave Hollywood in the 1970s and make Halifax and then Toronto home base. She died of ovarian cancer in 1998.

That same year he launched an autobiographical musical,
Dream a Little Dream: The Nearly True Story of the Mamas and the Papas
, which opened in Halifax and went on to Toronto and then Santa Barbara, California. He opened the show by saying: “My name is Dennis Gerrard Stephen Doherty . . . In the sixties, I was in a group called the Mamas and the Papas, and this, among other things, is the story of that group and those times. But, as Grace Slick said, ‘If you remember the Sixties, you weren't there.'”

Doherty was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996 and nominated for a Gemini for best performance in a children's or youth program or series for
Theodore Tugboat
in 1997.

Just before Christmas 2006, Doherty had surgery for an abdominal aneurysm. He subsequently suffered kidney problems and was put on dialysis, but his earlier life had caught up with him. He collapsed at home in Mississauga, Ontario, and died before he could receive medical attention.

 

Robert Burns

Graphic Designer

April 16, 1942 – May 14, 2005

R
OBERT BURNS WAS
many things: a graphic artist, a creative thinker, a brander — he and partner Heather Cooper created the beaver logo for Roots — but most of all he was a drug addict. That fact obscured his talents and darkened his life, from the collapse of the high-flying design firm Burns Cooper Hynes in the early eighties to the ruin of personal relationships and his own early death in 2005. He had been abusing drugs for nearly half his life.

“Addiction isn't a flaw. It's a disease,” communications consultant Bob Ramsay said in a eulogy at Burns's funeral, lamenting the waste of such brilliance. Himself a recovered cocaine addict and winner of a Courage to Come Back Award from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Foundation, Ramsay had intervened several times to get Burns into treatment, but the addiction's hold was too tenacious.

As a designer, Burns was the equivalent of a bandleader, said his former partner, copywriter Jim Hynes. “He was like Glenn Miller. He knew the sound he wanted to create and he was a genius at putting together the right ingredients to get that result.” Other people did most of the work, of course. “He used to call me the donkey,” said Hynes, “because I did a little work every day, keeping the cart moving at all times while he would run, run, run and then crash because he would be running at a pace that nobody could sustain.”

At his best, Burns was a virtuoso of the big idea — the central phrase or image that you could build a product or an advertising campaign around. “He had heart, wit and intelligence,” said Eric (Ric) Young, a social and environmental communications consultant. “That is a rare combination and it was invested in all of his work, which was strategic and conceptual. He had real passion and ambition and he brought fantastic energy and an aspiration for greatness to every project.”

Like Svengali, he “could plug into another person and tune himself onto that wavelength so perfectly that it was mesmerizing,” said Hynes. “That was his greatest talent when he was building a very successful organization, but it was also the talent that enabled him to survive on the street and carry on with a lifestyle that most people can only manage for a few years before they end up in the graveyard.”

ROBERT BURNS WAS
born on April 16, 1942, in London, England, less than a year after the Blitz ended. His early childhood was spent in a war-racked working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of London.

He was hard to handle as a teenager and once made headlines in a local newspaper after he and a couple of friends were arrested for urinating on somebody's front lawn. His parents, fearing he was headed for trouble, made him enlist in the Royal Air Force after he left school at sixteen. The
RAF
tried to train him as an armaments technician working on nuclear weapons, but he couldn't tolerate the routines and regulations. The quintessential free spirit, he frequently butted heads with his superiors, although he did find success as a bugler and a fencer. Finally, having joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he persuaded the
RAF
that he was a conscientious objector and won a discharge.

He put together a portfolio and won a grant to go to art school to study painting and sculpture. Later he confessed that he had spent his grant money on Savile Row suits and handmade shoes to “make up for lost time” before dropping out. Like so many creative types in the early 1960s, he fancied himself a folksinger. As well as strumming a guitar, he ran an artists' booking agency called Folksounds in Lewisham.

He met Canadian Ellen Anderson (later an artist and social activist) in 1965 as she “stepped off the plane” from Toronto. One of her high school friends, who was working at Folksounds, had asked Burns for a ride to the airport. They were together from that moment, according to Anderson. They married and made plans to move to Canada because she thought they would both have a greater chance of making a living in the arts in Toronto.

Burns, then twenty-two, needed a passport. At the registry office he made a casual joke about his parentage and then learned that he'd been adopted as a baby. He felt betrayed, according to Anderson, who believes that confronting the truth about his birth was one of the demons that Burns wrestled with for the rest of his life.

In Toronto, Burns and Anderson shared a house with a number of artists, including the photographer Bert Bell. Burns found work as a graphic artist for
CFTO
, the Toronto flagship station of the
CTV
television network, and then formed his own company, Robert Burns Designs. The Canadian market was too small for him to specialize in, say, exhibit design or annual reports, so he had to learn to be a generalist, which became an advantage because he could “cross-pollinate” ideas from one aspect of the business to another and combine images, type, and metaphors in fresh ways that caught the attention of some big American clients.

Burns, who had grown up with rationing and deprivation, was so bewitched by the wealth of North America that he wrote a letter to a friend back in England saying, “The streets are filled with cars as big as houses.” Soft drugs and easy money were big parts of the advertising world in the late 1960s, and few were more attracted to both than Burns.

He left Anderson in 1969, when she was pregnant with their son, Gabe. The breakup was cruel and acrimonious. By then he was working on a freelance basis with Heather Cooper, an illustrator and graphic designer whom he'd met through photographer Bert Bell. They began a professional and personal relationship that lasted eleven years, a creative partnership that brought them a stellar list of clients, a lavish lifestyle, and a daughter, Sarah.

Either separately or together, as the graphic design firm Burns Cooper, the duo seemed to be involved in everything that was hip and innovative, from David Crombie's mayoralty campaign in Toronto to the Canadian Brass, Roots, and Citytv. “Being intensely creative was what we were about,” said Cooper in an interview after Burns died. “Work was our passion and probably the original reason for us being together.”

Jim Hynes arrived in Toronto from Montreal in 1972 to work as corporate communications chief for the Industrial Acceptance Corporation, which was about to become the Continental Bank of Canada. He hired Burns Cooper to develop a new graphic identity and design an annual report for the transformed company. Over the next three years the two men became such close friends and colleagues that Burns persuaded Hynes to quit his job in 1975 and join him and Cooper in a partnership that became Burns Cooper Hynes.

Within five years they became one of the biggest, best known, and most prestigious graphic design companies in the country. They produced corporate identities, annual reports, and sales materials for clients such as Northern Telecom, Alcan, Imperial Oil, Cadillac Fairview, and Canadian Pacific Air Lines.

“He loved luxury. When he had money, it vanished instantly on the most expensive things he could find,” said Hynes. In those days it was not uncommon to end a meeting with an advertising agency by doing a “mile-long line” of cocaine on the boardroom table. “Everybody snorted coke,” said Hynes. “It was considered completely harmless fun.” But Burns, who had become a serious addict by the end of the decade, moved on to injecting, quickly draining the company to feed his rapacious habit.

“He changed our lives in a big way, first for the better and then for the worse,” said Hynes. “I needed to get out of the corporate world and I still remember that decade as the happiest of my working life. Heather is a very reclusive person and for her to sell herself as an illustrator was very difficult, but Robert made her into a superstar. The first requirement of one of Robert's big ideas was a great big poster by Heather Cooper. He created an unending market for her work that she could never have created for herself.”

After the collapse of Burns Cooper Hynes in the early 1980s — Cooper said it took her years to wind up dealings with creditors and contractors — Burns started a couple of other design firms and collaborative ventures, but he never really recovered his momentum or his sobriety. By the mid-1990s he was calling himself a communications designer and a “cartographer of new realities” and had a business card advertising his services as “Making Values Visible.” He declared: “Design is at least as important, maybe more important than art in contemporary society,” in an April 1993 talk sponsored by the Advertising and Design Club of Canada.

That was probably the highlight of his post–Burns Cooper Hynes career. He couldn't control his addictions and ended up on the streets for close to a decade. In 2004 he learned that he had at least two types of hepatitis and terminal liver damage. The following year he moved into a group home run by the Homes First Society and connected with outreach and religious workers at St. James Cathedral in Toronto and a neighbourhood centre called 6 St. Joseph Street. There is a photograph of him looking happy and peaceful standing with the rest of the crew on a break from a renovation project. Not long after that picture was snapped, he collapsed at his group home. He was taken to hospital, where he died of complications of hepatitis on May 14, 2005. He had turned sixty-three the month before.