Ron Base's Blog, page 4

I Am Swiftie!

If you haven’t heard, and if you are of a certain age, you probably haven’t, the summer’s most incredible phenomenon isn’t the Barbie movie, it is a real-life Barbie named Taylor Swift.

She fills huge stadiums with eighty thousand Swifties, as her fans are known. Currently she is playing Los Angeles. Her six shows are, of course, sold out in the SoFi Stadium, one of the largest indoor venues in the United States, accommodating an audience of up to one hundred thousand. One hundred thousand fans watching Taylor! Sold out for six nights! Los Angeles is going Taylor-crazy. But then every city where she performs goes nuts. In Seattle, thousands of Swifties who couldn’t get into the concert, nonetheless gathered outside the stadium to party.

Most of Taylor’s Swifties are young women and if the cell phone videos they post are any indication, they are having the time of their lives, dressed to the nines, joyously dancing and singing along as she performs. It’s an amazing sight to watch Taylor onstage surrounded by a sea of swaying, dancing fans singing at the tops of their lungs.

I’ve seen Elvis. I’ve seen Bruce. I’ve seen Sinatra. I’ve seen the Rolling Stones. But in all my life, I have never seen anything like this, and I doubt anyone else has either. Estimates are that once she has finished touring North America, Europe, and South America, Taylor’s shows will have netted over one billion dollars. Taylor will go home with in excess of a half a billion.

Watching her perform in a show that is an awesome light-and-sound spectacular, Barbie-perfect in a Versace body suit, wearing silver Christian Louboutin knee-high boots, tossing around perfectly coiffed blondish-brown hair, I get quite a kick out of her. She is a superb pop singer and performer who knows just how to make an audience of eighty thousand feel as though they’ve been invited over for an intimate evening at Taylor’s place.

I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I cannot get out of my mind, “You Belong With Me” (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts”), one of the anthem songs that drives her audiences particularly wild.

It has just been announced that after a lot of fretting she wouldn’t come to Canada, Taylor will appear in Toronto for six shows in November 2024. I am currently trying to put together the $7,000 I may need in order to secure a ticket. I am having some difficulty accomplishing this because my wife has locked me out of our bank accounts. She doesn’t seem to understand.

I am obsessed…

I am mesmerized…

I am Swiftie!

Tony Bennett’s Toupee

Hearing of Tony Bennett’s death at the age of 96, I immediately thought of the Great Toupee Scandal.

In the mid-1970s, I was dispatched by the Toronto Sun to write about Bennett, who was opening at the Royal York Hotel’s Imperial Room.

The Imperial Room, off the hotel lobby, was  one of the last of the old-fashioned night clubs. The publicist and, if memory serves, the room’s talent booker, was an eccentric Brillo pad-haired little fellow named Gino Empry. Gino was also Tony Bennett’s manager and thus Bennett was a regular visitor to the Imperial Room.

Back then, he was best known for his hit song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and as Frank Sinatra’s favorite singer.

The Imperial Room was packed for his performance. He bounced onstage, very much at home in the intimacy of the room. He sailed through the American song book standards for which he would be revered throughout his 70-year career, ending, of course, with “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The audience loved him, and I was certainly impressed.

Late that night I hammered out a rave review in which I said something to the effect that  when he arrived onstage, Bennett was outfitted in a tux that fit him almost as well as his hairpiece, although I think I called it a toupee.

The next day, when the review appeared, the poop hit the fan.

Gino Empry, enraged, was on the phone screaming at me: “How could you do this?”

“Do what?” I demanded in confusion. “What have I done?” This was not the first time I had battled with and had been yelled at by the mercurial Gino.

“You wrote about Tony’s…toupee!”

According to Gino, the Imperial Room was also upset, Tony’s people were upset, and, worst of all, Tony himself was upset.

Continuing to scream into the phone, Gino announced that he had intended to run my review as a full-page ad in Variety, the pre-eminent showbusiness publication. Now he couldn’t do that.

“Why not?” I asked meekly.

“Because you wrote about his…toupee!” Gino seethed.

The Sun’s publisher, Doug Creighton, happened to be lunching at the Imperial Room that day. Gino appeared at his table, still in high dudgeon, demanding that I be fired. Creighton, who knew nothing about the toupee furor, and was not at all pleased to be disturbed in the act of consuming his luncheon martini, demanded to know what Base had done now that would warrant his firing.

“He wrote about Tony’s…toupee!” cried Gino.

Creighton, thankfully, told Gino to get lost. He wasn’t firing anyone over a toupee.

Years later—by now it is the mid-1980s—I found myself in director Norman Jewison’s downtown Toronto office, having been invited by Norman to watch the Academy Awards telecast. The door opened and in popped Tony Bennett, outfitted in his trademark tux, fresh from a concert performance, accompanied by two beautiful young women. Norman introduced me. Bennett grinned amiably and we shook hands. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hairpiece.

It looked great.

FUNNY ABOUT MURDER: A Review of Scandal at the Savoy in BC Bookworld

Funny About Murder

BC author mines her time at iconic British hotel for murder mystery stories.

May 24th, 2023

by John Moore

For obvious reasons most murder mysteries are long on terror and short on humour other than the deadpan gallows variety exemplified by old Raymond Chandler novels. There have been novels, TV series and films featuring witty or comical detectives and even amusing killers (the film version of the board game Clue, Sleuth, American Psycho and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, etc.), but they tend to satirize familiar situations of the genre so broadly that they end up in Parody, (next door to Purgatory on Google Maps). It’s rare to find a novel like Scandal at the Savoy (D&M $19.95), co-authored by Prudence Emery and Ron Base, that can maintain suspense and genuine interest in the characters while delivering Laugh Out Loud moments every four or five pages.

Like the first novel in this series, Death at the Savoy (D&M, 2022), this too is set in the prestigious Savoy Hotel during the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and brilliantly evokes the period when A-list celebrities and international politicians, not just pop-stars, still needed the validation of being “seen” in London, not B-List burgs like New York or Los Angeles. Priscilla Tempest is a young Canadian woman in charge of public relations for the grande dame of London hostelries. Saddled with a moniker more appropriate to the heroine of a bodice-ripping novel set in a faux-historical England, (another bit of authorial tongue-in-cheek), Priscilla becomes a real damsel in distress when her already demanding job is complicated by the murder of a showgirl appearing in the Savoy’s cabaret headlined by aging British film siren, Diana Dors.

Younger readers may have to redline their search engines looking up all the Sixties stars who make cameo and walk-on appearances, but the history lesson will be rewarding. Those who remember the Sixties will cackle with satisfaction at the fictional resurrection of so many global celebrities whose careers proved it’s possible to be famous for more than fifteen minutes. Among them is Canada’s youthful bachelor Prime Minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, who sweeps Priscilla out of a star-studded Savoy cocktail reception and out of her Mary Quant mini-dress for a five-star one night stand.

For any Savoy employee, creeping out of a guest’s suite early in the morning is a career-ending move, but unemployment quickly becomes the least of her worries when the strangled corpse of showgirl Skye Kane is discovered in a dressing room at the hotel. Priscilla tells Scotland Yard detectives that during the party, in the Ladies room, she met Skye, who had been slapped and threatened with death by notoriously short-fused American theatrical producer, David Merrick.

Before he married, Prime Minister Trudeau was a noted lady’s man in the late 60s.

From that plot point, Scandal at the Savoy becomes a deliciously dark farce exposing the sleazy underside of the glamorous Carnaby Street-designed facade London showed to the world. It was a milieu in which celebrity gangsters like the notorious Kray Twins mingled with pop stars, famous actors, Members of Parliament and Commonwealth Prime Ministers with predictable results; blackmail, scandal and what Scotland Yard calls “suspicious deaths.”

As in the film True Romance, supporting actors steal this show. The trio of Savoy regulars, playwright Noel Coward and actors Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, resemble the three witches in MacBeth if their dialogue had been re-written by Oscar Wilde. At the initial cocktail party, one of them refers to the despised Merrick as ‘the Abominable Showman’ and the quips just keep on coming. Not content to play the role of Chorus in the play, they get stuck right in to aid their friend Priscilla, tailing gangsters through the means streets of London’s rough East End in Olivier’s Bentley and helping her rescue Diana Dors from the Kray twins. No more spoilers…you’ll have to read the book.

Nanaimo-born Prudence Emery worked for many years as the press and public relations officer for the Savoy Hotel. She’s now happily mining her memories of that career in collaboration with Ron Base, the Milton, Ontario. novelist who has authored his own series of Sanibel Sunset mystery novels, many set on the Florida islands of Sanibel and Captiva. One of the principal charms of the mystery genre is that murder provides authors and their fictional investigators with a moral pretext to expose the ‘best’ people on their worst behaviour. Prudence Emery and Ron Base have come up with a new twist on the old formula that’s five-star all the way to the last morsel.

Death at the Savoy and Scandal at the Savoy can be ordered online or from your favorite independent bookstore. They are also available as ebooks on Amazon and as audio books…

KEYS TO A KINGDOM: PRISCILLA IN FRANCE

In addition to point-of-sale displays, magazine ads, posters in train stations, Éditions de La Martinière, the French publisher of Bienvenue á L’Hôtel Savoy (Death at the Savoy), has now produced elegant key chains to help promote the book.

Co-author Prudence Emery and I are absolutely dazzled by what the French are doing. We shake our heads in amazement remembering that all this started with a phone call, two old (well, not that old) friends reconnecting, deciding one way to keep in touch might be to collaborate on a mystery novel…. who knew?

You can unlock the mysteries of the English language versions of both Death at the Savoy and its successor, Scandal at the Savoy, simply by clicking on the link below. Both books are also available in an audio format.

Appréciez!

Death at the Savoy and Scandal at the Savoy are available

HERE

Novel In Hand: The Sanibel Sunset Detective Goes to the Movies…

Finally received a print copy of The Sanibel Sunset Detective Goes to the Movies. As always, there is a moment of sheer, head-shaking amazement and delight when you hold a new novel in your hands for the first time.

I am grateful to everyone who worked so hard on the fourteenth Tree Callister adventure and made all the angst and uncertainty worth it: Jennifer Smith for the smashing cover, Ric Base for his elegant interior design and execution, and Bryan James Simpson who did such a great job editing the book.

Many thanks also to my wife, Kathy, for reading draft after draft and paid no attention to my loud announcements that I was never going to write another novel…

For Canadian readers, the most reliable way to order a print copy of the book is through Chapters-Indigo. They offer it at a reasonable price and deliver within the week. The link to the book at Chapters is HERE.

The ebook version of The Sanibel Sunset Detective Goes to the Movies is available HERE.

American readers can order their print copy HERE.

My Best Pal, Harry

I wasn’t sure what I would encounter as I drove down from Toronto to Hamilton to meet Harry Belafonte.

A bit surprised to learn that he was still even doing concerts, I thought of him more as the passionate civil rights activist, now, rather than as either a singer who had gained such immense fame in the mid-1950s, or as a movie star—he hadn’t made a movie in years.

Once before, in 1972,. I had met him when he and his friend Sidney Poitier were in Detroit promoting Buck and the Preacher, the western in which they had co-starred. Poitier had been the more reticent of the two. Belafonte was much more loquacious. It might have been the chaotic times back then, but both men were guarded, keeping their cool and their distance. I was anticipating much the same sort of experience meeting Belafonte a second time.

He was waiting for me in a reception room backstage at Hamilton Place Theatre where he would be performing that night. Tall and certainly imposing, he  wore a peaked cap and was dressed casually in a tan button-down sweater. Instead of the carefully reserved actor I had met years before, this Harry Belafonte on a Saturday afternoon was warm and chatty, not at all guarded, that husky baritone of his filling the room with bursts of laughter.

With Belafonte relaxing on a sofa, for the next three hours or so, without a publicist in sight, we talked about everything under the sun. The journalist Base demanded that I must not allow myself to be so completely charmed. The highly impressionable Base chatting away with his best pal in the world, for the afternoon, anyway, was totally charmed.

That night, Belafonte’s  easy charm was on full display for a sold-out crowd of over two thousand. The peaked cap was gone and so was the casual sweater, replaced by the form-fitting open-necked shirt and the hip-hugging slacks that made up the constant of his live performance costume.

Once again, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he have updated his original act, added a dose of the activism that had consumed much of his life? Nope, none of that. Perhaps because he was performing in Canada or maybe because it had never been part of his show in the first place, there was no hint of politics.

Instead, he gave the sort of traditional concert he probably had been doing since the 1950s, complete with calypso standards dating back to my childhood when the Belafonte at Carnegie Hall album got big play in our apartment: “Come Back Liza,” “Jamaica Farewell” and, of course, “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”

His audience was swept away by those songs, that baritone voice, and his magnetism—as was I.

Hearing of his death at the age of 96, I didn’t think so much about the legendary performer or the dedicated activist. I thought about Harry, for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, my best pal in the world.

Robert Blake With His Pants Down

Long before he was notoriously tried and acquitted of murdering his wife, when he was at the top of his career, the actor Robert Blake was waiting in his trailer when I got to the set of Second-Hand Hearts, the movie he was shooting just outside El Paso, Texas.

Blake had been an actor since he was five, one of the Our Gang kids (aka The Little Rascals), had appeared briefly as a Mexican boy selling Humphrey Bogart a lottery ticket in the opening scenes of John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. As an adult he had a breakthrough playing one of the killers in the film version of Truman Capote’s classic true crime book, In Cold Blood.

But real stardom had come on television portraying a tough-talking, unconventional cop named Baretta. The series, which featured a pet cockatoo named Fred, was a hit and had turned Blake’s life around.

He welcomed me in his small, cramped trailer, a gruff, fast-talking little guy, his gray-flecked black hair cropped short, surprised and delighted by his unexpected but hard-won stardom.

I don’t remember him ever being called to the set while I was there and so we talked through the night. Blake seemed edgy but open and vulnerable, talking about his fights to make Baretta better than it otherwise would have been, and his troubled, hard-scrabble childhood. You could not help but like him.

 We ended up discussing VCR players which were then becoming all the rage. He didn’t have one, and wondered about the expense. Then he shrugged. “What the hell,” he said with a crooked grin. “I’m rich. I’m gonna get me one.”

The door opened and in came an assistant armed with a syringe. “Time for my vitamin-B shot,” Blake announced. He stood up facing me and dropped his trousers and underpants. The assistant knelt behind him and plunged the syringe into his behind.

I sat there while Blake struggled back into his underpants. That night outside El Paso, he had let everything hang out, in ways I would never have expected.

Years later, in Los Angeles, accompanying veteran producer Shel Pinchuk, I arrived for a meeting at the green-glass fortress on Wilshire Boulevard that was ICM. At the time it was one of the biggest talent agencies in town.

The meeting ended early in the evening. Waiting for the elevator, who should come along but Robert Blake. By then his career was on the skids. He wasn’t doing much of anything. Second-Hand Hearts had been shot in 1979, plagued by problems, not because of Blake but due to the behavior of its director, Hal Ashby. Released briefly in 1981, the movie quickly disappeared.

Blake didn’t remember me, of course, but the three of us nodded hellos and then together stepped onto the elevator.

As the elevator slowly descended, the last rays of the dying sun seeped through the glass structure illuminating in shades of red and gold floor after silent floor of desks and shelves stuffed with scripts. I glanced at Blake. He was shaking his head.

“Jesus,” he said in disbelief. “Just think. This whole f**king place is full of agents.”

Shel and I both laughed as the elevator reached the ground floor. I watched Robert Blake, who has now died at the age of 89, disappear into the gloom along Wilshire Boulevard.

Robert Blake with Hal Ashby

A Star Is Recognized: Remembering Gordon Pinsent

Gordon Pinsent was making a movie called Klondike Fever in Barkerville, a snowbound middle-of-nowhere British Columbia town deep in the province’s mountainous interior.

He was co-starring with Rod Steiger and Angie Dickinson, iconic American stars who by then were somewhat past their prime.

I arrived in town to do a magazine piece on Gordon. As an actor, writer, raconteur, and hard-working jack of all artistic trades, I had known Gordon slightly, mostly through his good friend Larry Dane. I got to know him a whole lot better hanging around the set of Klondike Fever. As always, Gordon was welcoming and friendly, a delight to spend time with.

Stranded in Barkerville, he and Rod Steiger had become pals.

The Academy Award-winning star of On The Waterfront and In the Heat of the Night was a man who carried the weight of a complicated life on his shoulders, but he carried it with a certain merry glint in his eye.

The glint in Gordon’s eye was equally merry but with a bit of roguishness thrown in for good measure. He never seemed too weighted down by life. Nonetheless, he and Steiger saw themselves as kindred spirits, stranded in a British Columbia snowbank. They obviously got a big kick out of each other.

One day, when he finished filming, Gordon asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. Sure, I said. He then turned to Rod Steiger and asked him to join us. Steiger grimaced and said he didn’t want to go out. Every time he did, people bothered him. It was too much.

Gordon pushed and finally persuaded a very reluctant Steiger to join us. Arriving at a nearly deserted restaurant, a server hurried over to greet us. As she did, her eyes widened in recognition.

Steiger groaned and shook his head. “I knew it,” he said in despair. “I knew this was going to happen.”

The server drew closer and now she was smiling happily. “Gordon!” she exclaimed. “Gordon Pinsent!”

Gordon warmly shook her hand while Steiger’s face fell. The server, excited to have Gordon Pinsent in her establishment, led us to a table. By now aware of his deflated friend, Gordon tried to share the spotlight.

 “By the way,” he said to the server. “I’d like you to meet my good friend, Rod Steiger.”

The server beamed at him as she shook his hand. “Rob…” she said enthusiastically. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

Steiger looked more deflated than ever.

Klondike Fever never amounted to much, but I’ve dined out on that story for years.  I’ve taken great pleasure in reminding Gordon of it any time I ran into him. I do believe he took equal pleasure in hearing it. In fact, a version of the story appeared in Next, Gordon’s autobiography written with George Anthony.

I thought of it again this morning, hearing the sad news of Gordon’s death at the age of 92. As Rod Steiger learned that day at lunch in Barkerville, Gordon was something unusual in this country—a true Canadian star.

And something else too—a great guy.

SCANDAL AT THE SAVOY: The Rogues Gallery Of Characters

Scandal at the Savoy will be published March 25, 2023. You can order the second installment in the Priscilla Tempest Mysteries HERE

HERE

THE SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM

Back in the days when I was writing about television, if I needed some cogent, insightful conversation about the CBC or broadcasting in general, I would drop into Peter Herrndorf’s Toronto office at the corner of Bay and College streets.

At the time, if memory serves, Peter was the network’s vice-president of current affairs. He was tall, imposing, endlessly affable and welcoming. Like Sean Connery, Peter made baldness seem like a good idea. He was usually in shirtsleeves in an era when network executives made sure their suit jackets were buttoned when they met the press.

You didn’t have to spend much time with him before the realization struck that you were listening to the proverbial smartest guy in the room, one of the most intelligent, articulate people you were ever going to meet.

I used to think, When I grow up, I want to be Peter Herrndorf.

I was never going to measure up, of course, but that was okay because Peter dressed his innate intelligence with a warmth and charm that while you were with him, made you believe you were his best pal ever.

I never was his pal, but I was certainly a constant admirer. I was hardly alone, judging by the outpouring of praise accompanying the shock and grief following the news of his death at the age of 82.

He is survived by his wife, the remarkable Eva Czigler, who I knew at the CBC before I met Peter. If anyone could match his charm, it was Eva. They were an absolutely dazzling couple.

Peter occupied a dizzying series of arts and media chairs in the years following our Bay Street conversations, an influential mover and shaker whether he was at the CBC, publishing Toronto Life magazine, heading TVO or running the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Yet any time I ran into him—and by now he was the country’s bearded grey ‘godfather of Canadian arts,’ as the Globe and Mail called him—he was still…well, Peter, warm and welcoming, making you feel all over again like you were his best pal.

I hadn’t seen him for years when I encountered him in a downtown Toronto restaurant. He was with Claire Speed, my wife’s cousin, who had worked with him at the arts center in Ottawa. Ironically, she had just presented him with a copy of a novel I had written. When I came over, Peter beamed with pleasure, warmly shook my hand, and said he couldn’t wait to read the book.

It was the last time I ever saw him.

I thought about that moment with him when I heard the news of his death, hardly able to believe it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all these years later, nothing has changed.

I still want to be Peter Herrndorf when I grow up.