Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 9
Armed with the usual militant instructions from Garth and his commandant Lynda Friendly on what I could and could not say, my cinematographer John Holosko and I went to visit Minnelli in the presidential suite at The King Edward Hotel. What happened next was disconcerting. I knocked on her door and a woman answered. She was wearing a colourful caftan, a matching turban and not a stitch of makeup. I told her that we were there to meet Ms. Minnelli. She told us to have a seat in the living room, and that Ms. Minnelli would be with us shortly. I assumed this rather eccentric woman was Liza’s assistant or maid.
The living room was old-school massive with a baby grand piano and a half-dozen glasses filled with cigarettes. After about 45 minutes, Minnelli made her entrance looking radiant and quite glamorous. I then realized that the woman who answered the door was actually Liza. It was odd, but somewhat charming in a faded Mae West kind of a way. We had a very technical conversation on process and camera angles. She was impressively knowledgeable about filmmaking.
Charles Aznavour, Garth Drabinsky and Barry Avrich at the Kiss of the Spiderwoman soundtrack recording
© Michael Cooper
The shoot the next day was at a recording studio in Toronto and you could feel the excitement in the air. We set up our camera equipment among the dozens of musicians. Garth had assembled the orchestra, choir and sound engineers and it was thrilling to be in the middle of it. The door to the mixing booth swung open and Charles Aznavour walked in as if he was a natural thing to be in a recording studio in Toronto. He and Minnelli were touring together and appearing at the O’Keefe Centre and he wanted to watch her record the song.
Watching Liza was like watching an architect design a house. After each take, she would rush into the booth and suggest changes to the instrumentation and her own interpretation of a lyric. She would then watch the playback with me and suggest camera angles by holding up a compact mirror to check lighting. She was a one-woman tour de force.
At the end of a long day, Michael Cooper, a photographer we hired to document the session climbed up on the roof to take a photograph of the giant cast that had taken part in what felt like a historic day.
GOING PUBLIC
My most unexpected Echo client was the Toronto Stock Exchange. The opportunity came about in 2001 through a friend, Robert Pattillo, a corporate communications guru who had previously worked at Alliance, CBC and Scotiabank.
On the recommendation of my Alliance mentor, Mary Pat Gleeson, Pattillo called me into a meeting to discuss a couple of Alliance TV series that weren’t doing well: Once a Thief and Bordertown. People had warned me, “Be careful. This guy has a horrible temper. He loves his dogs more than he loves people.”
Robert was tough. He was cold and direct. He was acerbic. Right away, we loved each other. Lucky are the people who have angels in their lives, and Robert was one of mine. We worked together on ad campaigns for the two struggling television series and managed to push them through several more seasons. Our relationship outlasted our collaboration. To this day, we love finishing off a couple of bottles of expensive French wine at a single sitting.
After Robert left Alliance for Sun Life Financial Canada, he had called me to work on another ad campaign. When he moved to the Toronto Stock Exchange, he called me again. “The TSE is about to celebrate its one hundredth anniversary. We’re looking for an agency of record, but we have to do a search. What do you know about us?”
Not much. I had done some work on Dynamic Mutual Funds, but financial services had never been my core interest. I did know that Barbara Stymiest was the first woman in North America to chair a stock exchange. I also remembered an effective ad campaign Scotiabank had run when Robert was there. It featured Mary the Bank Teller, whose job was to put a human face on the institution. I felt the TSE also needed to personalize its operation. Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, the TSE had no trading floor of the kind that is so often featured in movies, with people shouting and waving their hands and papers fluttering to the floor. Everything in Toronto was automated. Our audience was not the one Mary’s was aimed at. Unlike her, we weren’t trying to attract customers to use our services to pay bills or take out a mortgage. We were trying to encourage corporate executives and entrepreneurs to see the TSE as the place where they could build their companies then take them public.
I called the public relations department of the New York Stock Exchange and asked for a tour. This was just after 9/11: they didn’t do tours anymore. I called back. This time I told them I was thinking of listing my company on the NYSE and that I wanted to meet some of the people with whom I would be dealing. Different story. A meeting was arranged.
The security was insane. Barricades blocked off the building so no one could pull up in a vehicle in order to bomb it. For clearance, I needed my passport and a NYSE sticker, which I still have. But after putting me through all that, they gave me a royal tour, which included the private dining room where NYSE customers have permanent seats. They gave me a NYSE forest-green, linen bound book as a souvenir, along with some videos—in short, all the tools I needed to create my own vision of the Toronto Stock Exchange as a place of flesh and blood, rather than as a place where rows of machines hummed at one another.
My Echo account director, Tori Laurence, and I pitched our ideas, and we won the contract, no doubt sending shockwaves through the advertising community. Suddenly, our entertainment-based agency would be cutting multimillion-dollar corporate TV and cinema commercials. As so often with my ad career, there was never a dull moment and I loved every minute of it. If someone could have predicted that a math idiot like myself would one day be working on a stock exchange account, I would have bought land in Kabul.
Chapter Nine
FAMILY, MENTORS AND OTHER INVALUABLES
IF YOU LOVED DUSTY, YOU FLOATED
A year after my dad, Irving, died in 1992, I found a second father.
I was working in the Echo office when a tall guy with a white beard strode in. He was wearing a black cowboy hat and a Rolling Stones jacket, and carrying a bag labeled Outrageous, from the film starring female impersonator Craig Russell.
I asked Len Gill, “Who’s that?”
“It’s Dusty Cohl—Michael Cohl’s cousin. He was one of the founders of the Toronto International Film Festival. Stay away from him. He’ll ask you to do jobs for him, then suck you into his life.”
Len was right on both counts. No sooner had I introduced myself to Dusty than he said, “I need a poster for the Floating Film Festival. Can you get that done?”
“Sure.” And so I made the poster. And in 1996 I attended my first Floating Film Festival. Dusty founded the festival in 1992 when he got bored of wintering in Florida and decided to invite two hundred of his closest friends to cruise for ten days in the Caribbean, watching movies. If you were Dusty’s friend, you floated. Attorney Eddie Greenspan used to complain for the entire ten days, “The festival is a wonderful thing, if you like the extreme heat of the Caribbean, and I don’t. The festival is a wonderful thing, if you like the ocean moving under you making you feel seasick twenty-four hours a day, and I don’t.” Nevertheless, Eddie attended every year to smoke cigars and laugh with Dusty, surrounded by friends and film lovers.
In 2002 Dusty persuaded me to take over the festival for him. I agreed as long as I could do it my way. That meant booking a better cruise line and honouring celebrities. I also ended the custom of inviting critics, who chose obscure films that no one liked and declined to socialize with our guests. I brought in more accessible films instead.
Through the years, the festival provided me with some wonderful theatrical moments. When l visited Gena Rowlands in her Beverly Hills home along with friend and long-time festival programmer George Anthony to discuss her participation, I felt like I was meeting Norma Desmond on the set of Sunset Boulevard. All around me were the faded film posters, the Golden Globes, the Oscars from Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980), all starring Gena and directed by her husband, John Cassavetes. On the bar were cigarette burns from those bygone days when the Cassavetes entertained the greats of Hollywood: Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Judy Garland, Robert Taylor, Burt Lancaster.
Gena is still an elegant woman and a fabulous actress, as she proved in 2004 in The Notebook, directed by her son Nick Cassavetes. At the Floating Film Festival, she told wonderful stories, as long as she didn’t find the bar before we needed her to perform.
In 2015, we honoured Dick Cavett—the cerebral version of Johnny Carson. Cavett had interviewed giants on his show: Katharine Hepburn, Salvador Dalí, Marlon Brando, Alec Guinness, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, Muhammad Ali, Orson Welles, Bette Davis, Fred Astaire, Frank Capra, and then, of course, Richard Nixon.
Dick was a machine. You’d press a button with a celebrity’s name, and he’d produce a story or some pithy commentary. On Groucho Marx: “We were sneaking out of a snobby Beverly Hills party when the hostess stopped us. ‘Why are you leaving?’ she asked. Groucho replied, ‘I’ve had a wonderful evening. This wasn’t it.’” On Richard Nixon: “He was a foul-mouthed son of a bitch. His obsession with his manhood was material for a psychiatrist.” After Cavett’s Watergate interview, another journalist asked Cavett, “Does any part of you feel sorry for Nixon?” Cavett replied, “After examining all my parts, I’d say, Yes. That poor man died without knowing the answer to his question, ‘Is Cavett a Jew?’”
Through the years, Dusty became a close and much-loved mentor to me. His office above Echo reeked of smoke, just as my father’s office had done. We gravitated toward each other as if drawn by some cosmic force. He introduced me to everyone in Toronto show business. If a photographer came to take his picture, Dusty would call to me, “Hey, kid. Come over here.” He’d introduce me, “This is Barry, watch this one.” Then he’d pull me into the photograph.
It was because of Dusty that I became involved in the Toronto International Film Festival, which he cofounded with Bill Marshall in 1976 as the Festival of Festivals. As that story goes, Dusty and his wife, Joan, found a parking spot in front of the famed Carlton Hotel during the Cannes Film Festival. He loved it. From that time forward, year after year, he returned to network, schmooze, hold court and buttonhole every Canadian there about the need to kickstart the Canadian film industry with a festival of our own in Toronto.
Dusty’s father, a house painter, was a self-declared Communist; his mother was a salesperson for Eaton’s. Dusty trained as a lawyer. He married his high-school sweetheart, Joan Carin, with whom he had three children. He was rumoured to have made a lot of money in real estate, but apparently retired to work full-time building friendships and instigating bold projects, for which he preferred the title “accomplice.”
Dusty was more than a role model to me—though he was that too. He involved me in many of his projects, including Canada’s Walk of Fame, which he also cofounded. He brought me onto the board. And on and on. Much later, when Dusty began to slow down, and the pendulum began to swing the other way, I pulled Dusty in by taking him to Los Angeles to introduce him to younger celebrities. I also nominated him for the Order of Canada that he received in 2003.
THE WEDDING PLANNER(S)
Most of my friends and relatives thought I would never marry. I was too independent, too hedonistic, too footloose, too driven. I was a perennial dater.
In 1996, when I was thirty-three, I met the woman who walked into my life and would change it forever. Her name was Melissa Manly and she was a knockout.
It was a blind date, sort of. Rey Tabarrok, who worked for me, said, “I’d like to set you up with a good friend who’s just moved back from France.”
I protested, “But I’m dating someone else.”
“I know. You always are, but it’s always the same kind of girl.”
That came as a surprise. I had no answer.
Rey continued, “What I told my friend was, ‘Barry knows everyone. He’ll help find you a job.’”
I protested again. “If this is a date, then I’m not going.”
“Relax. Melissa has a boyfriend in Provence. You’re not in his league.”
I remember the exact date of our first meeting: November 8, 1996.
Melissa Manly, Nantucket, 2009
from the personal collection
We hooked up at a jazz club called the Black and Blue above the Prego restaurant in Yorkville. Melissa walked in wearing a camel coat with a pair of zebra gloves. My heart stopped. I told myself, Okay. Don’t mess this up.
It went well: Melissa laughed at my jokes. When I lit a cigar—you could do that in restaurants in those days—Melissa shared it with me. We talked till three in the morning.
Next day, I called Rey. “Have you spoken to Melissa?”
“Yes.”
Don’t make me beg. “What did she say?”
“She said she had a good time, and that she was looking for some furniture.”
I suggested a place where Melissa could find cool furniture, then phoned her to invite her to dinner that night. Over drinks, she said, “We both know there’s chemistry here, but my guy’s coming in from France, so nothing can happen between us.”
I told her, “I’m going to Hawaii with a friend, but until then, I’d like to get together with you for dinner as often as you want.”
We had dinner every night till December 22. I called Melissa when I was still in Hawaii. “How’s it going?”
“I can’t stand the guy. How’s it going with you?”
“Hawaii’s pretty good.”
By the time I returned to Toronto, Melissa had broken up with her French boyfriend, who had returned to France. That’s when we began dating with intent. Though everything felt great, I was nervous because I knew Melissa was The One, but I was afraid to commit.
We had one issue—in my mind, anyway. When I pressed her about rebooting her career, Melissa stormed out of my house. “I can’t do this any longer.”
That winter, while I was visiting Dusty in Florida, he asked me, “How’s it going with you and Melissa?”
“I’m concerned we aren’t a match,” I replied dolefully. “I’m an entrepreneur, and I don’t understand why she isn’t looking for some kind of career.”
“Are you crazy?” snapped Dusty. “Do you want to be married to yourself?”
The horror of that struck home. The fog cleared from my head.
Melissa and I were married on May 16, 1999.
We had two wedding planners at the start. In this corner, Melissa’s mother, Doreen; in the other, Barry the producer. The referee: Melissa, the bride, practising the diplomatic skills she’d learned as the youngest child.
I didn’t want to be married in a synagogue, because that was too much of a cliché, and they lacked great spaces. I wanted the Four Seasons Hotel ballroom, where I’d been booking gala events. Doreen—a force of nature, tough and opinionated—had different ideas. She was marrying off her only daughter about whom she cared deeply. I love Doreen and also Melissa’s father, Sheldon. I would have been afraid to marry Melissa if I hadn’t, because I’ve witnessed too much fallout among friends with bad in-law relationships.
Probably Melissa would have enjoyed being more involved in wedding details, but we’d been together long enough for her to trust my taste. More to the point, Melissa, like her father, was wise enough to know some battles aren’t worth fighting.
Doreen and I sat down in the Manly kitchen to divide up the territory. I told her, “You can have catering and floral, but I want venue and entertainment.”
Though Doreen agreed, she would continue to manoeuvre around me. One day she announced, “The food tasting for the catering will be on Thursday.”
“Okay.”
“You have to come.”
“Why? That’s your domain. Who eats at a wedding anyway? Certainly not the groom.”
Doreen was insistent and I went to the synagogue basement where the caterer had set up his food, which was kosher, out of respect for both sets of religiously observant parents. Everything I was given to taste, I said, “That’s fantastic.”
Doreen said, “You have to make a choice.”
“I love it all.”
“You just want to get out of here, don’t you?”
I said my first, “I do.”
Unexpectedly, Doreen announced that she wanted a wedding planner.
What, with two Type A’s already in the ring?
I said, “I don’t need some yenta to tell me how to walk down the aisle or how the tables should be set up.”
When I sensed I was losing this battle, I went for compromise. “Okay, if you want the peace of mind of having some ‘expert’ make recommendations, to which I won’t listen, then fine, but I don’t ever want to see her.”
Doreen said, “I’d like the whole wedding filmed.”
“I don’t want a camera and a microphone in front of people’s faces, including mine. I live and breathe that stuff daily.”
Doreen was heartbroken. She wanted her memento.
“Okay, here’s the compromise. I’ll bring my own film crew. They’re not going to go around the tables interviewing people. They’re going to shoot it and I’ll edit it.”
We ended up with about three hundred guests. Doreen wanted the tables mixed so the two sides of the family could get to know each other, whereas I insisted on keeping them separate. Who wants to make chit-chat with someone you’ll never see again? I also didn’t want a head table. Instead, Melissa and I would sit together at a table for two.
