Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 14
Anne: “So long, asshole!”
Jackie: “Goodbye and fuck you!”
And he mutters under his breath, “Irish drunk” and we exit. I said to Jackie, “You’ve been holding a grudge for over forty years?” He responded, “Why not? It’s fun.”
My crew shot the show, and every month I’d fly to the Masons’ apartment to show them some of our editing. They loved the film, and The Ultimate Jew played in festivals all over the world. That was in 2008. So far so good.
The next chapter in our relationship was more chaotic. Jackie had cowritten a screenplay called One Angry Man. It was a parody of Twelve Angry Men, which was an intense, inside look at the jury of a homicide trial. Jackie and Raoul Felder, the well-known divorce lawyer, were to be on the jury of One Angry Man. It would debate the guilt or innocence of an Arab accused of murder, with Jackie as the only one who believed in his innocence. Jackie wanted me to direct the film, to which I agreed, until I read the script. Then it was a flat no as I felt the script was not reflective of Jackie’s wonderful comedic talent. I also turned down the role of producer, but finally agreed to be executive producer. For the director, they hired Steve Moskovic, who owned a film equipment company and had filmed a few documentaries, but this was his first feature. He has never forgiven me. Fights erupted constantly over the script. Jackie improvised all the time, confusing the other actors. It was chaotic.
When it came time to shoot a big scene in the Newark courthouse, Jyll asked me to fly in to watch it. A cab picked me up from the Premier Hotel in Times Square. As I climbed in, I asked the driver, “Do you know where the Martin Luther King Court House is in Newark?”
“Yes, of course.”
After a while, I could see we were lost, but the cab driver denied it. Finally, I exploded, “Do me a favour and take me to Newark airport.”
He refused. “You won’t pay me the fee.”
“I will pay you the fee. I need to get out of this cab.”
The driver was from the Middle East and this was just post–9/11. I was uncharacteristically nervous for no good reason. While he was driving me all over the map, he was also on the phone using his headset, listening to music and talking in a language I didn’t understand. Whenever I complained, he told me not to worry because his brother had a GPS system.
“Your brother’s not in this fucking taxi. I need to get out.”
By now I was panicking. l called the taxi commission, which is the 311 number posted in the cab, but they shrugged me off. “We can’t help you.”
Finally, I told the driver, “Unless you take me to Newark airport, I’m calling 911.”
When Melissa phoned, I told her, “I can’t talk to you now. I’ve been kidnapped in a taxi cab.” Then I hung up, leaving her in a panic.
I called 911.
The responder asked, “Where are you now?”
“I see a sign that says Hoboken.” I told them everything else I could read.
“We’ll be there in one minute.”
One minute later, the police cars showed up. They circled the taxi, they rescued me then drove me to the courthouse.
When I told Jackie and Raoul the story, Raoul said, “Let’s sue.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
I watched the filming of the courthouse scene in One Angry Man as requested. Jackie had cast a Sopranos actor, an anchorwoman and a character actor, whose names I won’t reveal to protect the innocent. I did a poster for them for free and I arranged a sale in Canada.
Ever the comedian in search of a hit, Jackie worked a joke about my cab experience into his routine, which is too racist to repeat. This, of course, was rather ironic, given that Jackie was supposed to be the One Angry Man on the jury who wanted to acquit the Arab of murder.
One Angry Man was released in 2009, and, in my opinion, my taxi ride was a metaphor for the whole experience.
Aside from working on a few films with Jackie Mason, I would occasionally book him for personal appearances and charity fundraisers. Jackie is always entertaining and his observations on life are hysterical. But not always. Ned Goodman, a Toronto-based mogul was chairing a gala for Maccabi, a national, non-profit, athletic organization and asked me to book Jackie to headline. Goodman loved him and thought he would be a great draw.
I booked Jackie and briefed him on the demographics of the older and very liberal crowd. In recent years, Jackie had become very right-wing and political in terms of his material. He hated that Barack Obama had recently been elected as president and his material was very hardline and negative towards Obama. I told him that would not play well in Canada and that he should stay away from politics and focus on his own greatest hits. He nodded and ignored me.
What followed was a caustic set that was so mean-spirited and anti-Obama that he failed to capture the crowd. He did have a few good lines on Obama: “We elected a President who has absolutely zero experience in running a country. If American Airlines called you and said we are looking to hire a few pilots who have never flown a plane before, would you fly that airline?”
The crowd sat on their hands and hated his material. As people started to leave prematurely, I knew I had to get him off. I signaled him with a flashing light to wind up and get off. He ignored me as he was looking for a big laugh to end on. No luck. He finally wrapped up by saying, “What a crowd! May the people at your work tomorrow do to you what you did to me tonight!”
In his dressing room, Jackie was apoplectic. “What a fucking crowd! Who are these people?” At a private meet and greet after the show, Ned Goodman humorously suggested to Jackie that he refund his fee. Jackie was not laughing. Years later, backstage at his show in Miami, Jackie admitted to me that he made a mistake and used the wrong material. He wasn’t offering a refund, but there was some mea culpa.
ONE THING THAT WILL CURE SHYNESS
In 1997, Anita Gaffney, then head of marketing for the Stratford Festival, rejected me as a candidate to be their advertising agency. My friend, Jonas Prince, a festival board member, later told me, “Anita concluded from your interview that you didn’t understand entertainment marketing.”
What? I’d worked for the Mirvishes, I’d worked for Drabinsky, how could I not understand the business?
After interviewing other agencies, Gaffney came back to me. “Okay, I’ve made a mistake. How would you like to have the festival’s ad account?”
I also served on the board for six glorious years before joining the Stratford Festival Senate (retired board members).
I still love working for Stratford because it’s where my parents took me to see my very first plays, but the festival is a demanding client. It’s driven by passion, drama and a particular point of view when it comes to marketing.
Richard Monette, the festival’s artistic director from 1994 to 2007, encouraged my agency team to be unorthodox and bold. During our first season, Stratford staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream, West Side Story and Dracula. I suggested the headline, “Fairies, Gang Members and Blood Suckers. What the hell is going on at Stratford?”
Though Richard loved it, he cautioned me, “Barry, you’ll have to sell it to the board.”
The meeting in Toronto was chaired by Jonas Prince, head of the festival’s marketing committee. After a few moments of silence, Joan Chalmers, the great art philanthropist, pronounced, “If we don’t run that ad campaign, I’m quitting.”
In 2003, I made a TV documentary for Bravo about Richard Monette called The Madness of King Richard.
Born in 1944 in Montreal to working-class French-Italian parents, Richard never dreamed his imagination would fuel his destiny. Both parents were alcoholics who paid little attention to him or his younger brother, Mark. “We weren’t beaten or molested, but it was dramatic because we were always ducking the crockery and there were a number of horrible incidents.”
Richard’s father, Maurice, made one bold move that set the course for Richard’s life. “He felt his sons would have a better future if we were educated in an English school. When I was rejected because our family was French, he wrote the cardinal to say, “If I can’t send my son to Loyola College, then I’m taking my wife and sixteen children out of the church.”
That threatened soul drain had its impact. Richard was welcomed into Loyola.
Richard first visited Stratford in 1959 when he was fifteen. William Hutt and Irene Worth were playing in As You Like It. “I don’t know what came over me, but when the usher took me to my seat, I spontaneously genuflected. I was embarrassed by my behaviour, but at the end of the performance, I knew I wanted to be an actor, to do Shakespeare and to work on the Stratford stage. This was my church.”
Richard began his professional acting career while still in college. When his acting coach asked him what he wanted out of life, he replied, “I would like to be as great an actor as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.”
“Mr. Monette, we have a great deal of work to do.”
At nineteen, Richard became history’s youngest Hamlet in a production staged by Toronto’s Crest Theatre. Though Richard Burton was playing the same role down the street at the O’Keefe Centre, actor William Hutt was more impressed by Monette’s interpretation. “It was extraordinary for a man so young.”
In 1967, at age twenty-nine, Richard appeared at Stratford in Antony and Cleopatra. He was Eros, the slave to Antony, who was played by Christopher Plummer. As Plummer later recalled, “I always liked to keep Richard in mind as my slave, no matter how successful he became. The last thing I expected was that he would turn from Eros into Stratford’s Caesar, and run the damn place.”
“I had a lot of scenes with Plummer, including dying in his arms, and he was terrifying,” said Monette. “He became nice later in life, but wow! What a lot of temperament.”
In 1970, Monette appeared in the original London production of Oh! Calcutta!, an avant-garde British revue in which the actors played in the nude. “I was too shy to expose myself on the inside,” said Monette, “but if there’s one thing that will cure shyness, it’s doing a nude revue.”
Monette added to his professional notoriety when he played a drag queen in Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, which travelled to Broadway in 1974.
“Richard’s Hosanna was the first star-making performance I had seen on the stage in this country,” said William Hutt. “He was shockingly good.”
It was after Hosanna that Monette permanently established himself at Stratford. “I thought this should be Richard’s home, from what I had seen of the young man,” said Hutt. “While he was rehearsing, I walked across the stage to him and said, ‘Welcome home, Richard.’”
“I was learning from the best, like a blotter sucking it all up,” said Monette. “I found later that I could remember the gestures and bits of business that those who did them on stage had forgotten.”
Monette eventually chose to direct rather than act. “I always found it hard to think of real-life incidents on stage that would make me laugh,” he said, “but thanks to my family, I had much unhappiness to draw upon.” In 1988, when he directed Stratford’s The Taming of the Shrew, he told his actors, “When you throw the crockery, make it funny because it was never funny for me.”
His style as a director was sometimes fierce, but spiced with humour. As actor Dan Chameroy recalled, “He liked us to discover our characters on our own, but when he wanted your attention, he would shout loud enough for anyone in the theatre to hear, ‘You look like a fool walking on the stage that way. Do you want to look like a fool?’ You didn’t do that a second time.”
Cynthia Dale remembers a gentler Monette. “Richard taught me how to work the Stratford stage. He showed me its magic and its sweet spot.”
When Monette became artistic director in 1994, no one seemed more surprised than he was. “The board president knocked on my door Saturday morning to say, ‘What would you think if I told you that you would be Stratford’s next artistic director?’ I said, ‘What would you think if you opened your mail Monday morning and received the notice I sent to you on Friday telling you that I’ve withdrawn my name?’”
Despite that momentary failure of nerve, Monette became the Stratford Festival’s first Canadian artistic director, a job he held till 2007. “You never dream as a kid that you want to be an artistic director. Maybe a firemen, yes, and there’s no school to teach you how to be an artistic director.”
In Monette’s first year, he turned the festival’s accumulated deficit into a surplus of $800,000, an instance of financial alchemy that he continued for thirteen years as he built a broader audience, established an endowment, created an acting conservatory and introduced new Canadian plays.
He also made musicals a regular festival feature, an innovation for which he was often severely criticized as a populist in the tradition of P.T. Barnum. Though Plummer played in the deep end of the festival pool, he defended Monette’s vision. “The job of Stratford’s artistic director is only second in its demands to being prime minister. You take all the blame and you’re the butt of all the jealous intrigues. When Richard went home each night, he didn’t know whether he was loved or hated. It’s a job for a masochist. Richard is actually a loveable guy. I admire him immensely.”
Monette’s talent for business came as a surprise even to himself. As for the negative reviews, “I stopped reading the tabloid terrorists. Bad reviews stick like burrs inside of you. I remember one that began, ‘If you happen to be Richard Monette stop reading this dot dot dot.’ No one else remembers that review, but it remained a billboard in my mind.”
Monette found it lonely at the top, without family or a partner. “There would be a full house, and I’d go home alone without even a cat to kick. I’d like to be remembered as a man of the theatre who loved the Stratford Festival more than myself. It’s a public service. It’s very hard but not many people have this chance.”
Richard Monette died not long after he retired in 2008, at age sixty-four. Making the film about Monette was a personal pleasure for me. He was so exciting and loyal to me that I wanted to honour him. He was also a nervous and insecure individual: when I showed him the film privately in his home, he cried and thanked me. Although he died from cancer, I always felt he died of loneliness and the loss of his leading role in running the theatre he saved and so loved.
Des McAnuff, director of such Broadway musicals as The Who’s Tommy and Jersey Boys, became Stratford’s next artistic director in a power-sharing arrangement with Don Shipley and Marti Maraden. There could only be one star on the door and Des soon took over from the other two, who left.
I always felt that Antoni Cimolino, Monette’s protege, should have been his heir. Though Des was sometimes theatrically daring and thrilling, my loyalty was with Antoni. I was thrilled when Antoni finally became artistic director in 2013. Though I was no longer on the board, I coached him when he asked and I lobbied for him, and I was delighted when the boy who would be king actually became king. Antoni is extraordinary, with a good understanding of the festival’s business side as well as its artistic side. Since Anita Gaffney had by then been promoted to executive director, I have now been working with her and the festival for eighteen years.
“I AM NOT A JUKEBOX”
I filmed nine Stratford stage productions including King Lear, Hamlet, King John, Antony and Cleopatra, Caesar and Cleopatra and The Tempest. Those last two productions starred Christopher Plummer.
I had met Plummer—in the sense of being in the same room—when I moved to Toronto in 1982. Over time, I gravitated to Alexandra’s, a piano bar at what was then the Sutton Place Hotel. Plummer was often there. After a while, I’d say hello, and he’d nod, though he had no interest in me, or anything else beyond his drink, and perhaps the music.
In 1996, Plummer portrayed the silent star John Barrymore during his slide into alcoholism. Barrymore, a two-actor play, premiered at Stratford, then went to Broadway the following year. I was hired to direct Plummer in commercials for the production, which, as it turned out, metaphorically cast me in the role of the slave Eros. As Richard Monette had exclaimed when similarly cast, “Wow! What a lot of temperament.”
Plummer kicked the shit out of me. He roared at me, “I’m not just a jukebox that spits out lines when you stick in coins. If you want another take, tell me exactly what you want.”
In 2009, I again worked with Plummer, when I produced Caesar and Cleopatra from stage to screen, and then the following year, when I filmed Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Though Plummer was skeptical at first about this transformation, he warmed up to the idea. For The Tempest, we had ten cameras on dollies and cranes to make it a real cinematic production. Plummer looked at rough cuts and gave us notes. He was a fantastic resource, and often pushed to give his cast members more screen time.
As Richard Monette had also observed, Plummer did mellow with age. Even in his milder incarnation, however, he would often tease or torment me as if I were still the invisible kid who used to hang out at Alexandra’s bar. Years earlier, before we shot the films, when I attended Garth Drabinsky’s second wedding, Plummer called out to me as I was passing his table, “Hey, boy, will you see if they can lower the music?” He didn’t recognize me. It didn’t bother me.
In 2011, I attended a sold-out screening of The Tempest in New York, then served as moderator for the post-screening discussion. It was only after I had appeared on stage in front of nine hundred people that I came to exist in the eyes of Christopher Plummer and we developed a warm relationship. He is the last of the great actors. I was thrilled when he finally won an Oscar in 2012—it was long overdue.
Chapter Thirteen
ALL ABOARD THE TITANIC
I met my future business partner through the Young Presidents Organization, an exclusive group with chapters around the world. Since YPO membership is restricted to individuals under fifty who are president of qualifying companies, it would seem to be the best—or most deceptive—place to meet someone with whom to build a career. All the faces around you reflect your collective success. What could possibly go wrong?
