Ron Base's Blog, page 6

HEAVENLY BODIES AND THE DANE: Remembering Actor Lawrence Dane

Larry Dane, or Lawrence of the Dane, as I dubbed him, was always a bit of a renegade in the Canadian film industry.

Over the years I knew him, I often thought Larry (actually, Lawrence Zahab) never got the credit he deserved for his contributions to the business.

Not only was he a fine, hard-working character actor who appeared in some of Canadian television’s earliest productions (RCMP, Wayne and Shuster’s comedy specials), kick-started John Candy’s film career (co-starring with him in the comedy, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time) and produced Gordon Pinsent’s groundbreaking and much loved, The Rowdyman.

Although I doubt he realized it at the time, and it’s largely forgotten now, Larry was also responsible for one of the country’s most improbable international movie successes, Heavenly Bodies. I played a small part in what became one of the most unusual stories in the history of Canadian film. Certainly it’s a story that has not been repeated.

I thought about Heavenly Bodies this week, in shock as I heard the news of Larry’s death from pancreatic cancer.

In those days, I was a freelance magazine writer yearning to write for the movies. My friend Larry Dane was an actor with aspirations to be – what else? – a director.

Over lunch we decided to collaborate on an idea Larry had about a ruthless paparazzi photographer who gets mixed up with celebrity and murder. To my surprise, we almost immediately optioned the resulting screenplay to a young producer named Robert Lantos, recently relocated from Montreal to Toronto.

We no sooner optioned that script, than Larry had another idea: a movie about three young women trying to start up their own workout club, and fighting the big corporate club down the street out to destroy them.

Flashdance, concerning a young woman determined to be a dancer, had become a huge box office hit that was originally written by another Toronto writer, Tom Hedley, a guy we both knew. I thought Larry was nuts– a Flashdance rip-off? Who in the world would be interested in that?

I should have known better.

Despite my best efforts to deter him, Larry pitched the idea to Robert Lantos. Since then, I have sat through countless meetings and lunches with many producers, but to this day I have never seen a producer react to a pitch the way Robert reacted to that one. It was the only time in my life I almost literally saw the light bulb go on over someone’s head.

Soon enough, Larry and I were writing his workout movie together. He had named it Heavenly Bodies, and, for better or worse, that title never changed. What’s more, he convinced Robert to allow him to direct. I could hardly believe what was happening. Every time I turned around, Robert seemed to bring in more co-producers. We met a German who demanded the young women in the film work out with hula hoops. We managed to avoid the hula hoops.

I’m not sure how I felt about any of this other than to feel like an outsider staring in wonder at these strange scenes unfolding before me, certain of one thing – this was never going to get made into a movie. Hula hoops or no hula hoops. We were, after all, a couple of guys who barely had been inside a workout club trying to make a movie about young women running a workout club.

I should have known better.

The next thing I knew, I was inside a converted warehouse full of Spandex-clad women in leg-warmers, Larry behind the camera yelling “Action!” Not only was Heavenly Bodies in production but the tiny TV movie soon began to take on big-budget trappings.

Playboy became involved, and then Hollywood über producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters. Giorgio Moroder, who had done the score for Flashdance, oversaw creation of the music. Fabled MGM, home to the likes of Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor, and Judy Garland, decided to release the picture at over one thousand movie theatres in North America.

Music scenes were reshot to provide more production value (Larry swore only one additional sequence was actually filmed). Robert spoke of Heavenly Bodies as a “Cinderella story.” There were predictions the movie would do twelve million dollars on its opening weekend–a huge figure at the time.

There was only one problem with all these high-powered producers and big studios and growing expectations–at the end of it all there was still only this minuscule TV movie shot on a shoestring budget (Robert said it was $900,000). All the talk in the world could not transform the sow’s ear into a silk purse.

That became evident when Heavenly Bodies, starring a then-unknown Cynthia Dale (the best thing about the movie, a star in the making who went on to much better things), opened in the midst of a howling blizzard in February, 1984.

And bombed.

Robert, who had so artfully created something out of not much of anything, and pushed the movie higher than anyone ever expected it could go, could not in the end convince an audience to see the movie in a theatre. But then a sort of minor miracle occurred. In the fledgling days of VHS video tapes, with everyone desperate for product, Heavenly Bodies became the hit movie at the Cannes Film Festival market. Vindication of sorts.

I’m not sure about Larry, but I’ve never been quite able to shake off Heavenly Bodies. It seems every time I try to escape it, someone somewhere is showing the darned thing. Larry probably deserved another shot at directing but he never got it. He continued life as a fine actor, married wonderful Laurel, and settled down in Niagara-on-the-Lake. This week, after a 17-month fight with cancer, decided enough was enough and slipped away.

We had a tempestuous relationship to say the least back in the day, but thankfully we ended up where we started—as friends. Thinking about Larry with great fondness, I can only imagine that wherever he is, not far away they’re showing Heavenly Bodies.

PETERTHE GREAT: REMEMBERING PETER GODDARD

Not only was Peter Goddard for many years Canada’s pre-eminent music critic, he was also a dear friend who I admired tremendously.

Peter had been fighting cancer for the past year or so. True to his contrary nature, he refused to go when he was supposed to. But last night he slipped quietly away in Toronto with his wife Carol Ann and his daughter, Kate, by his side.

I called him a couple of weeks before he died. We talked about books we were both writing, we talked about days long gone by working together at the Toronto Star, and we promised to keep in touch.

When I got a call from Carol Ann that the end was near, I recorded a letter to let him know how I felt about him. I’m not sure if he heard me or not, but here is what I had to say…

Peter, it’s me, your old desk-mate, that guy who sat across from you for the better part of a decade, the guy you traded so many mystified headshakes and eyerolls with, the guy you kept more or less sane. The guy who is writing you a love letter today. I know what you’re thinking: Base? A love letter? Good god. But, hey, that’s what this is, so settle in for some loving.

I’m down here in Florida at the moment, so so sad I can’t be there to visit, but full of fond memories of our friendship, and years together at the Star. I was never certain whether we were in the trenches or a couple of weary travelers who had stumbled into an insane asylum. Maybe a bit of both.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you were my sometimes frazzled but always good-natured rock back in those days. Although I never said anything, I had been a huge admirer of yours since I was in high school reading you in the Toronto Telegram, a newspaper I adored. Getting to know you, becoming friends with one of my journalism heroes, what a delight!

While I am quite sure the powers-that-be at the Star would gladly have sent the rest of us packing, I do believe they regarded you as the one jewel in an otherwise tarnished crown. They tended to regard entertainment as something to fill the spaces between the Famous Players movie ads, but you were their knowledgeable rock ‘n roll and pop music guru, the one guy whose work could keep them abreast of what was happening in a musical world they had at least a passing interest in.

You don’t know it, but you also had more than a little to do with setting me on a path to which I’ve managed to cling ever since. I have something like a career today in no small thanks to you.

So take care my wonderful friend as I remember us together in Paris, magical, doing those CBC radio pilots with mad Gina, and the sheer pleasure of looking across my desk most days and seeing you there, the two of us coming through the storm together.

I will be so pleased and honored to continue this love letter when the time comes. Carol Ann reminds me that years ago she was with you at the rather raucous celebration of our friend Paul King’s life.

She tells me that we will celebrate you in a quieter manner. I’m not quite sure if that was a warning or not. But I promise to behave when the time comes. Well, more or less behave… Lots of love, kid…lots and lots of love…

There will be a celebration of Peter’s long and productive life. An announcement will be made soon.

COMES THE BOOGEYMAN: Russia and a Lifetime of Nightmares

Berlin Wall today.

I’ve spent a lifetime worrying about Russia.

When I was a kid, it was Communism (out to take over the world!), Sputnik (they were in space first!), the constant threat of nuclear war (in case of nuclear attack huddle under your desk!), the Berlin Wall (Germany divided!), the Cuban Missile Crisis (Russian missiles 90 miles from Miami!), Nikita Khrushchev (remember him?) pounding his shoe on a desk at the United Nations, threatening to bury us.

The Russians were going to bury me in a small Ontario town, before I’d had a chance to see the world? No wonder I couldn’t sleep at night.

I pressured my parents into helping me stock canned goods in the basement. As close as I could get to a nuclear bomb shelter. At least I would be buried clutching a can of Spam.

Everywhere you looked at the time, Russia was giving the world problems. The popular literature of the day was consumed with Russian villains. James Bond took on the Russians (From Russia with Love), John le Carré’s Alec Leamas outwitted Russians (The Spy Who came in from the Cold—actually East Germans but it amounted to the same thing). When it came to necessary villains in books, movies and real life, the Russians were right up there with the Nazis.

I grew up scared of Russia.

Twice now, I have attempted to get to Russia to get some idea firsthand what all the fuss was about. The first time, in 1985, my father died and the trip was cancelled at the last minute; the second time, two years ago, Covid, thwarted a Russia trip. Never mind. Most of us have never been near the place. Yet it continues to haunt our lives.

There has always been a Russian boogeyman. This time he’s an autocrat named Vladimir Putin (Vlad the Impaler!) invading the Ukraine. Vlad fits his evil role perfectly. He’s camera-ready for the megalomaniac out to destroy the world in a Bond movie. Except what’s happening in Ukraine is no Bond movie.

Everyone is worried, frightened. It’s like the bad old days of the Cold War and my childhood all over again. Maybe worse because back then I felt like I was one of the few people my age who read the newspaper (the beloved Toronto Telegram) or watched television news (Walter Cronkite, the last word in authoritative reporting).

Nowadays, no one escapes the constant drumbeat of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Even if you wanted to, you can’t shut out the horror of what is happening in Ukraine. Everyone feels helpless in the face of this barrage, everyone wonders what is to be done—what they can do. What can anyone do? Huddling under a desk and hoarding cans of Spam no longer seem like options.

My friend Eric Hansen, an American author (aka Grumpy Old Writer), living and working in Berlin, has suggested that writers concerned about what Putin is doing to Ukraine should write about it. Darned good suggestion. He inspired me.

 I met Eric a few years ago when I finally visited Berlin, the epicenter of all my childhood fascinations and fears. By then, post Iraq, I may have thought that the Americans always seem to need an enemy to fight and for many years Russia was the convenient bad guy.

But you have only to experience the remnants of Berlin’s dark history, view the shards of the Berlin Wall that have been left standing or visit the Stalinist block that was headquarters for the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police, to bring home the reality of the terrible hardship and repression that the USSR visited upon the world.

Standing in the blandly utilitarian offices of the former head of the Stasi, I remember thinking, thank goodness those terrible days are over. Russia can no longer scare us. The boogeymen who shaped the fears that haunted my childhood, were long gone.

This past week, we have learned how wrong was that assumption. After all these years, the boogeyman rises again in the East.

But in my lifetime the boogeyman has always been there, unsettling and scary. He has come again and again under many different guises but however he comes, his name is always Russia.

Always bloody Russia.

The Ghostbuster: Ivan Reitman Remembered

When I first met Ivan Reitman, the most successful commercial filmmaker Canada ever produced who has died at the age of 75, it was back in the dark days when he was producing low-budget exploitation movies.

I have this memory of going up a narrow flight of stairs into a rabbit warren of rooms above a Yonge Street storefront where Ivan occupied an office.

He had produced David Cronenberg’s first movie, Shivers, which had infamously brought on the wrath of columnist Robert Fulford (“a disgrace to everyone involved with it!”) and howls of outrage in Canada’s parliament.

Perhaps because of all the criticism, he already seemed deeply suspicious of the press. That suspicion (distaste?) was always present whenever I encountered him over the years. Cool and remote, careful not to give too much away, it was hard to warm up to him. But then again you got the impression he couldn’t be bothered warming up. He could have cared less.

I was somewhat surprised when he directed a low-budget comedy called Meatballs which introduced the movie world to Bill Murray. The low budget didn’t surprise me. The fact that it was a comedy, did. Ivan never came across as a laugh-a-minute kind of guy. Just the opposite in fact.

But then the next film he produced, Animal House, built on Meatballs’ outrageousness and changed the course of movie comedy history, not to mention making a movie star out of John Belushi. Ivan had discovered that not only could you get away with raucous, below-the-belt, anything-goes youth comedy, but you could also make a fortune doing it.

But nothing Ivan ever did had quite the cultural impact or the box office success of Ghostbusters. Hardly a raucous teen comedy but when Ivan was finished with the rewrites of Dan Aykroyd’s original script, it became a very smart and funny piece of commercial filmmaking, the best thing he ever produced and directed.

Even before the movie was released, there was a sense that Ivan had a huge hit on his hands. At the end of the Ghostbusters New York press junket, I spotted him standing alone and walked over to shake his hand and tell him how much I enjoyed the movie.

As he had over the years of our encounters, he gave me that thousand-yard stare and offered a distracted thankyou. Cool and remote as always.

CALL ME MEAT

We were on our way to a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, having a bite to eat in a Hollywood diner before heading out.

“Now listen,” said Craig Modderno, a freelance journalist who, I had learned from sometimes head-shaking experience, could get me into the craziest situations at the most unexpected times. “We’ve got to wait a few more minutes.”

“Why?” I demanded, suspicious of what Modderno might be up to.

“We may have a guest coming to the game with us,” Modderno replied. “I don’t know if he’s gonna show up. But let’s wait a few more minutes and see.”

Greg Henry, the blond-haired, square-jawed actor who was a favorite of director Brian DePalma (Body Double, Scarface, Casualties of War) and I grumbled a bit but we agreed to wait.

A few minutes later in walked Modderno’s guest, Marvin Lee Aday, better known to the world and the fourteen million people who had bought his iconic Bat out of Hell album, as Meat Loaf.

Meat Loaf, in town for a movie, turned out to be a huge baseball fan. He couldn’t resist an evening at Dodger Stadium even if it was with three strangers. He sat down with us for a few minutes, very much at ease considering he had just met us (Modderno had interviewed him in the afternoon).

He wanted to take his car out to Elysium Fields in South Central Los Angeles. It was agreed that I would ride along with him. He was behind the wheel of a big rental sedan as we headed south, chatting away about some awful film experience he had recently endured while I’m thinking to myself, What do I call a guy named Meat Loaf? Meat? Loaf? So I asked him.

“Call me Meat,” he said with a grin.

And Meat it was, although I still fumbled self-consciously every time I said it.

Driving to the stadium, I prattled on about the irony of meeting him. I told him I’d just driven across the country from Toronto. On the way, I’d cranked up Bat Out of Hell, squinting hard, hoping to see paradise by the dashboard light, fighting off the demons I thought I’d left behind but soon realized had snuck into my Mustang and were travelling with me.

Bat Out of Hell, I told him, had helped keep them at bay.

To his credit, Meat took my babble in stride and did a great job pretending he hadn’t heard variations on this a few thousand times since the release of the album.

For a singer and actor often described as larger than life, Meat was surprisingly lowkey. He was big, no question, but certainly not overwhelming, and when we got to the stadium, he went largely unrecognized. Only the stadium manager, when Modderno introduced us, seemed to know who he was.

The four of us sat in the bleachers, doing what you do at a baseball game, drinking beer, eating hot dogs, shooting the breeze, and, oh yeah, occasionally watching the game. I don’t recall much of what we talked about, but hearing of Meat Loaf’s death at the far-too-young age of 74, I remembered the ease and the laughter, four guys together on a warm Los Angeles evening, enjoying the simple pleasure of each other’s company.

Three die-hard baseball fans and a Canadian, sitting beside the guy who had kept away the demons chasing him across the country, working to get his head around calling him Meat.

TO SIDNEY, WITH LOVE: REMEMBERING SIDNEY POITIER

My lasting memory of Sidney Poitier as the news came of his death t the age of 94, is of him making an entrance at a birthday party in Malibu for the producer Jerry Weintraub.

This was a party overflowing with famous people. Johnny Carson, Neil Diamond, Jacqueline Bissett, James Caan, the guest list went on and on. Never before had I rubbed shoulders in one place with so many Hollywood celebrities getting drunk.

Yet even in that glitzy crowd, Sidney Poitier stood out. Taller than just about anyone else present, powerfully handsome, movie star charisma on full display as he moved gracefully through the crowd with his wife, the actress Joanna Shimkus.

Years before, I had spent time with him and Harry Belafonte as they promoted Buck and the Preacher, a western they had done together. After the first director, Joseph Sergeant, was dispatched, Poitier had taken over to make his directing debut.

Poitier and Belafonte had known each other since they were young men together at New York’s American Negro Theater. In fact, Poitier’s first break as an actor came after Belafonte failed to show up for a rehearsal and Poitier replaced him. A producer happened to see the rehearsal and that led to Poitier’s Broadway debut and subsequent movie career.

Discussing their first film together, the two stars displayed an easy rapport, although Belafonte was the more loquacious, Poitier much more reticent and guarded. It was the heyday of the so-called blaxploitation films and he did not like any idea that Buck and the Preacher might be lumped into that category.

The movie didn’t do well with either audiences or critics, but it ushered in a series of curious directing assignments (a trio of Bill Cosby comedies) and starring roles in forgettable dramas (A Warm December, The Wilby Conspiracy).

When he attended that Jerry Weintraub birthday party, he had not been on the screen for over a decade. The trifecta of groundbreaking hits that made him Hollywood’s first black superstar—In the Heat of the Night; To Sir, with Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—were far behind him.

Yet it didn’t matter. That night in a sea of stars, Sidney Poitier shone.

WUNDERKIND MEETS LEGEND: REMEMBERING PETER BOGDANOVICH

Avidly listening to the legendary director Otto Preminger in his Detroit hotel suite in 1971 as he recounted acerbic tales of an old Hollywood slipping into the sunset from the man who had made such classics as Laura and Anatomy of a Murder, we were interrupted by a knock on the door.

A moment later, a somewhat unprepossessing young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses glided into the room. Peter Bogdanovich was anxious to meet one of his film heroes, and Preminger, beaming at the attention, was delighted to meet Bogdanovich. At that time, the 31-year-old former film critic, and Orson Welles pal, was Hollywood’s hottest and most adored young filmmaker thanks to the critical adulation showered upon his second feature, The Last Picture Show.

It was an amazing moment to witness, Old Hollywood coming face-to-face with the New Hollywood. I don’t recall much about their conversation, but I do believe the word masterpiece was tossed back and forth a time or two.

Standing together in that hotel suite, Preminger at the tail end of his long career, could shake hands with the future; Young Bogdanovich, at the beginning of his, had a closeup view of the movie past he at once revered and wanted desperately to replace. There is always the new gun in town. Back then Bogdanovich was the new gun, but as Preminger could have told him from personal experience, it wouldn’t last.

And it didn’t.

During the years I lived in Los Angeles, I would occasionally spot Bogdanovich browsing through the bookstore at the Beverly Center or poking around Book Soup, the iconic Sunset Boulevard book emporium. He was alone, way down on his luck at that point. If anyone other than me recognized him, they gave scant sign of it.

When the news came of his death at the age of 82, he was probably better remembered as the psychotherapist in The Sopranos than he was for The Last Picture Show or any of his other films.

But as I tend to do these days, I paused to remember another time sticking stubbornly to hazy memory: that morning in a Detroit hotel suite when the wunderkind met the legend.

WEST SIDE CRYBABY

Steven Spielberg’s beautifully reimagined West Side Story succeeds in doing what the musical has always done to me—turning me a sobbing emotional wreck.

Tears-streaming-down-my-face wrecked. For-god’s-sake-it’s-only-a-movie wrecked. Please-don’t-turn-the-house-lights-on-at-the-end wrecked.

Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant score has only to swell majestically as Tony meets Maria on that iconic fire escape and I’m in tears. I would like to think that this happens because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more sensitive and emotional. This blubbering in fact has been going on since 1961 when as a kid I first saw the movie version of the Broadway hit. It happened every time I played the motion picture soundtrack album. I’ve seen a stage production twice, losing it both times.

I remember discussing the emotional hold West Side Story had on me with Larry Kert who was the original Tony in the 1957 stage production. Kert laughed and said he felt much the same, despite the number of times he had played Tony. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for the musical, once described Kert as “laughing, bubbling, and deadly funny,” and that’s also my memory of him during an early dinner before he went off to Detroit’s Fisher Theatre where he was performing in the musical of Two Gentlemen of Verona. He was still slightly miffed that he had been passed over for the movie.

Years later, I talked to Robert Wise, the director of the movie (or rather co-director with Jerome Robbins) about what went into the casting. By that time, he said, Larry Kert, at the age of 30, was deemed too old to play the teenage Tony.

One afternoon, sitting around his Beverly Hills office, Wise, using notes he had taken at the time, talked about the jaw-dropping range of actresses and actors they had looked at searching for the right Tony and Maria. Ironically, given the power of the music, no one seemed concerned that almost none of the actors auditioned could sing (as it turned out, everyone was dubbed, anyway).

Jill St. John “is lovely,” Wise wrote in his notes, “but she doesn’t seem like Maria” (no kidding!). Jerome Robbins pushed for Carol Lawrence who had originated Maria on Broadway, but eventually it was decided that at the age of 25, she, like Larry Kert, was too old. Elizabeth Ashley was also in the running for a time.

Twenty-one-year-old Frankie Avalon was considered for Tony. Russ Tamblyn came close but didn’t get it (he ended up playing Riff, leader of the Jets). Tom Skerritt was thought to be too old. Richard Chamberlain gave a good reading “but looks and voice too mature,” thought Wise. George Hamilton, Burt Reynolds and George Segal were all auditioned, as was Robert Redford (they liked his reading) and, briefly, Jack Nicholson.

However, the actor Wise was most enthusiastic about for a time was a newcomer named Warren Beatty. Wise looked at Beatty in footage from Splendor in the Grass, the movie he was shooting at the time with his girlfriend, Natalie Wood. “And the minute she came on the screen,” Wise remembered, “we said, ‘Hey, that’s our Maria.’” Beatty was passed over in favor of another young newcomer, Richard Beymer who had appeared in The Diary of Anne Frank.

West Side Story on Broadway became a game-changing theatrical phenomenon. The movie is regarded as a classic that won ten Academy Awards. It was a huge hit in 1961. Everyone flocked to see it.

In 2021, sixty years after the release of the first film, sadly, no one is flocking to see Steven Spielberg’s recasting of West Side Story. I could be slightly prejudiced, but you will not see a more gorgeously mounted movie at the movies this year. Yet no one seems to care. The adults the studio was counting on to come to the film have not shown up, scared off, the thinking goes, by the continuing nervousness over the pandemic.

But there I was in a theatre on the opening weekend, swept away by that iconic music, those powerful performances, the transporting dance numbers, desperately holding everything in…

Until the fire escape.

Damn that fire escape! Damn that music! Damn Tony and Maria! Damn the silly, overwhelming romanticism I should have long ago ditched, but never could.

That was it. I lost it in the dark. Tears for a lifetime of memories, so moved, and yet embarrassed that at my age I am still crying at the movies.

Forever the West Side crybaby.

The Old Man and the Chair

It was falling apart, my chair. My forever office chair. The hours I have spent in that chair! I’ve written most of the Sanibel Sunset Detective novels sitting in that chair, written four Milton mysteries and two Priscilla Tempest mysteries (the first of which, Death at the Savoy, arrives in April).

The chair has been part of me for so many years, I hated to part with it. The chair and me were falling apart together. The decision was made to keep me (for the time being at least), but it was time for the chair to go.

For my birthday, my wife, Kathy, devilish romantic that she is, has bought me a new chair. So yesterday, I carried the old chair, the chair that has seen me through thousands of writing hours, I lugged it out to the curb.

Frankly, I didn’t think much more about it until later in the evening when I happened to glance out the window. There was my chair, my buddy for so many years, sitting forlornly in the rain. It looked absolutely lonely and miserable. As I peered out the window, intense feelings of nostalgia swept over me. What had I done to my chair? I felt terrible.

A couple of hours later, my neighbour, Kent Doney, emailed me. Kent and his father, Jack, are longtime faithful Sanibel Sunset Detective readers. He had been out walking his dogs when he spotted the chair drenched in rain.

He pointed out that Sotheby’s recently had auctioned for close to two million dollars, the chair Ernest Hemingway sat in writing The Old Man and the Sea. Never mind that Hemingway did most of his writing standing up and a search of the internet yielded no sign of any such sale, in my delirium I began to think that, potentially, I had thrown, thousands of dollars out to the curb.

When I informed Kathy of my concern, she gave me one of those looks that have become all too familiar: a combination of skepticism and headshaking disbelief. At times such as this, Kathy speaks to me very calmly and very slowly: “Ron…leave…the chair…where…it is…”

Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist going out in the rain one last time to say goodbye to my chair. “You’ve been a great chair,” I said to the chair.

This morning my chair was gone. Picked up during the night. Off to a new home, I hoped.

I wonder if the new owner will ever know that he is sitting on thousands of dollars.

Potentially…

WHAT ROSALIE LIKED, EVERYONE LIKED

When I phoned Rosalie Trombley, at the time one of the most powerful figures in the music business, I did not expect her to agree to talk to me.

Writing for the Windsor Star, I had been something of a thorn in the side of CKLW, the 50-thousand-watt Windsor AM radio station where she reigned as the widely admired—and feared– music director. Rosalie did not just play the hits on Detroit’s number one top 30 music station, she made the hits.

To my surprise, she agreed to talk for a profile I was doing on her for what was then Weekend Magazine. Although she was something of a legend within the music industry, she was not exactly a household word. Which was just the way she liked it.

In those days, the late Sixties, early 1970s, CKLW was in a unique position. An accident of geography gave what would otherwise have been a local radio station, entrée into the huge Detroit market and into the heart of the American Midwest If you listened to the Big 8, as the station called itself, you would never have known it originated in Canada. For its millions of listeners, CKLW was a hard-driving Detroit juggernaut.

This was the heyday of AM radio and the station had adopted the much more music format originated by a California disc jockey named Bill Drake. Drake rightly divined that young listeners wanted lots of music, not disc jockey banter. Rosalie had become one of the most fervent and successful disciples of that philosophy.

An attractive 33-year-old, her blond hair done in a bouffant, it was not hard to imagine Rosalie as a 1950s teenager from Leamington, Ontario, dancing to Frankie Lymon and Bo Diddley records on CKLW. She admitted that at the time she had little more than any normal kid’s interest in the hits of the day.

But after she arrived at the radio station as a parttime switchboard operator, she was moved to the music library. Soon the station manager asked her to “do the music.” The rest is radio broadcasting history. Some people have great natural singing voices. Rosalie had an intuitive knack for picking hit records.

Among her achievements at CKLW, she gets credit for exposing Bob Seger to a national audience, making Marvin Gaye’s groundbreaking “What’s Going On” a hit, and attracting national attention for Elton John when she added “Bennie and the Jets” to her playlist.

By the time I talked to her, however, CKLW and Rosalie were under the gun to play the 30 per cent Canadian content demanded by the fledging Canadian Radio-Television Commission. I wrote a great deal about the station’s determination to do everything it could to circumvent the new rulings. They even tried to preview short Canadian song clips on the popular AM station, then play the whole song on the lesser FM station and call it Canadian content.  

Writing about this sort of conniving did not make me popular at the station. I can’t imagine Rosalie thought a whole lot of me. Nonetheless, she went along with the interview. We talked in her cramped office. She was guarded at first but not unfriendly, and eventually quite candid about her job and her reputation for toughness. “The only thing I care about is my station,” she pronounced.

Despite CKLW’s disdain for the content regulations, it is generally accepted that Rosalie’s championing of Canadian performers such as Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, and the Guess Who helped to introduce them to American audiences. Because of her influence on Canadian music, the news of Rosalie’s death yesterday at the age of 82, brought more attention than she ever got during her most dominant years at CKLW.

And while Rosalie might not be all that happy to hear this, thanks to her, I got to write my first magazine piece. That opened the door to a career as a freelance magazine writer in Canada and the United States.

Rosalie helping yet another Canadian act.