Up Till Now: The Autobiography

of the greatest seasons in Broadway history. Among the shows playing on Broadway in 1956 were My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella, Leonard Bernstein’s Candide , Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . Of all those shows, we were the only one that featured beautifully choreographed violent battles, murder, mayhem, and torture. So in retrospect, it was probably not the right play for the theater groups from Long Island. But it was great fun to do, a truly primal stage production. Obviously unlike anything else on Broadway that season. We received excellent reviews: according to Louis Kronenberger it was “an evening full of stunning theater, of slashing rhetoric, of glorious spectacle, with scene after scene suggesting a kind of richly lighted Delacroix canvas.”
    And even in a supporting role I attracted attention. For the first time agents began calling me. I’d heard about agents, I knew what they did, but I’d never had an agent of my own. Suddenly agents wanted to represent me! And I had offers from the great movie studios, asking me to sign long-term multi-movie contracts, telling me I could be a movie star. M-G-M offered me a five-year contract at exactly seven hundred dollars a week. Or maybe it was a seven-year contract at five hundred dollars a week. I was living rent check to rent check and they were offering tremendous security. It was every actor’s fantasy.
    The night before I was going to sign that contract I went to a New York party. An actor I didn’t know, and who I don’t believe I’ve ever seen again, advised me not to sign it. Somehow that made sense to me. The next morning I told the agent I had decided not to sign the contract. That was the moment I learned the definition of “apoplexy.” When the wind’s blowing right I think I can still hear him screaming. I really couldn’t explain to him why I’d changed my mind because I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t. Maybe I wasn’t the toast of Broadway, but I certainly was a shot glass of whisky of Broadway. An extraordinary world was opening up for me, I had made it to Broadway, the New York columnists were writing stories about me, agents were calling. I just didn’t want to give up control of my career even before it had really started. The mystical dreams ofthe actor had conquered the prosaic needs of the commerce student from McGill.
    Anything seemed possible. Although I do have to admit that anything probably didn’t include the fact that one day I would be starring on a television show making love to a blow-up doll and costumed as a pink flamingo.
    My ambition was to be a serious actor. I turned down all those offers and returned to Toronto with the Stratford Festival. In the winters of those years I was managing to eke out a living performing in radio dramas on the Canadian Broadcasting Company on Jarvis Street, getting occasional small parts on early Canadian television, even writing half-hour plays for the local TV stations. There were about thirty professional actors in all of Canada, meaning these were men and women who did nothing else to earn a living. I was one of perhaps twenty professional actors living in Toronto. We got up in the morning, searched for work, or were actually working that day.
    Each job lasted the length of the show and then we started all over again. I’d get a job Tuesday, work Wednesday, and begin looking for the next job Thursday. Then I’d have to wait two weeks for my thirty-five-dollar check. For the first time I lived every day with the feeling that this job might be the last job I’d ever get; that after this job my career might be over. Fortunately that feeling has lasted only sixty years.
    I lived in a tiny studio apartment on the top floor of a rooming house a few blocks away from the CBC. The bed actually had a rope mattress. For most of my first year in Toronto I was desperately homesick, it was only when I was working that I could forget how lonely I was. I was younger and less experienced than most of the people I was working with, so I wasn’t part of that group. I had some acquaintances but no real friends.
    I was living in a garret and I was starving. I was always cold, I was frightened of being alone in my room; afraid of the present, afraid of the future, afraid of being knifed in the back when I walked down the dark streets. I was living a fearful life. I told myself that this wasthe life of an artist. I didn’t