Brian
Brennan has been featured on the South Branch Scribbler this past summer with
an excerpt from his book, "Brief Encounters: Conversations
with Celebrities, 1974-88” which talked about his meeting Victor Borge, the
renowned comedian. Brian is an award winning author and has agreed to answer 4
questions for today’s interview. His website is listed below.
4Q: We
recently had a taste from the above mentioned book, "Brief
Encounters: Conversations with Celebrities, 1974-88. At the
time of your sharing an excerpt with us, this was an in-progress book. I would
like to know how the idea for this book developed and is it completed.
BB: I
have since given the book a new title – And
Then I Asked: Brief Encounters with Writers, Comedians, Directors, Actors and
Musician – completed the manuscript, and submitted it to an agent for
consideration. The following Introduction provides the background:
This book had its
genesis in a conversation I had recently with a writer friend bemoaning the
fact that a Russian website was flogging pirated copies of our books online
without compensation to us. I mentioned in passing that Tennessee Williams once
told me he had been similarly victimized. The Russians ripped him off to the
tune of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties on plays they had translated
and staged without his permission.
“You talked to
Tennessee Williams?” said my friend, surprised.
Yes, I hadn’t thought
about it before, but indeed I got lucky. A week before I interviewed Williams,
for a story to run in the Southam (now, Postmedia) newspapers across Canada, he
had left another reporter in the lurch saying, “I haven’t been paid to pass the
time with people who insult me.” I don’t know what the other reporter said to
get Williams’s goat, but when I caught up with him in Vancouver – where he was
readying his new adaptation of a Chekhov play for its premiere production – the
playwright was in better humour and ready to answer any questions about his
life and work.
I did the Williams
interview in 1981 and, as I hunted through my archives to find that story, I
came across dozens of my other newspaper stories from the 1973-88 period that
collectively, I thought, would make for an interesting book if expanded and
updated. These were interviews I did with the likes of Kenny Rogers, Richard
Harris, Sophia Loren, Leon Uris, Bob Newhart, Cleo Laine and other artists who
had been sent on the road to promote new books, record albums, or upcoming
performances.
The interviews were
conducted during a time when artists relied to a great extent on the mainstream
media to get the word out about their current activities. Blogs and social
media had yet to be invented so the newspapers, radio and television stations
provided the only publicity outlets then available.
I was working as a
full-time general arts and entertainment writer based at the Calgary Herald,
and it was easy for me to establish a rapport with these visiting artists
because I had worked in the theatre as an actor and also had made my living as
a barroom piano player. Additionally, I had the advantage of being a writer for
a Canadian, as opposed to British or American, news organization. Artists who
had been victimized by tabloids digging up dirt on their sex lives and drug
habits seemed to feel on safer ground when talking to a Canadian reporter. They
didn’t think I was out to “get” them. In fact, to my surprise, they often
dropped their guard and revealed little-known facts about their lives and
careers when talking to me.
Crooner Al Martino, for
example, told me he became a social pariah in Hollywood when the producers of
the movie The Godfather signed him to play the troubled wedding singer
Johnny Fontane – a character loosely based on Frank Sinatra – because the
director, Francis Ford Coppola, wanted Sinatra protégé Vic Damone to get the
part. “Coppola didn’t think I was an actor,” said Martino. “He said I was just
a singer.”
Tammy Wynette was
similarly candid when she told me she was finding it difficult to reconcile
being a married mother of four with being constantly on the road. Recently
married for the fourth time, she admitted that the marriage was already on the
rocks. “It’s very hard to travel and live a normal life,” she said wistfully.
She divorced soon afterwards.
When I looked through those yellowed newspaper
clippings, I thought it might be fun for you, the reader, to revisit them with
me. I would give you some background, and perhaps tell you things that had to
be left out of the original newspaper stories for lack of space or other reasons.
For example, I can reveal here for the first time that when I talked to the
movie actor Glenn Ford, it was after I had watched him doing take after take
for a short one-minute scene in the first Superman movie. It took him
that long because he simply couldn’t remember the line.
Most of these stories
did not come from in-depth interviews. The sessions necessarily had to be
truncated because the press agents had other reporters besides me lined up to
ensure maximum media coverage. My interviews, therefore, never lasted for more
than 15 or 20 minutes. Yet even though they were short and generally
self-promotional in tone, they sometimes yielded nuggets. Richard Harris, for
example, was at first more interested in talking to me about how much he missed
boozing than how much he enjoyed starring as King Arthur in Camelot. And
Kenny Rogers gave me an impromptu a cappella preview of his soon-to-be hit
recording of “Lucille” when I asked him where he planned to go next with his
music after experimenting with rockabilly, jazz, folk, country and psychedelic
rock.
Occasionally,
interviews fell into my lap I when I least expected them. I never thought, for
example, I would ever get to do an interview with Chuck Berry because the
reclusive rock star was said to be miffed at all the bad press he had received
over his troubles with the law during the 1960s. Yet he agreed to talk to me
before going on stage for a nightclub performance in Calgary. Why? “Because now
I’m finally ready to talk,” he said, without elaboration. The legendary fan
dancer Sally Rand, was also reluctant to talk to reporters, especially those
who came with cameras and lights to film her show. But she happily chatted with
this reporter who came with just notebook and pen until I asked her why she was
still stripping at age 71. “What would I retire to?” she said dismissively.
Later events reminded
me of some of these long-ago interviews. When B.B. King played the blues for
President Obama at the White House in 2012, I recalled that he once told me he
thought the blues was dying. When Randy Bachman reinvented himself as a CBC
Radio host, I recalled asking him why he had seemingly committed artistic
suicide twice, first by walking away from the Guess Who and then by leaving
Bachman-Turner Overdrive. When Johnny Depp played Tonto in the 2013 big-screen
remake of The Lone Ranger (a flop, by all critical accounts), I recalled
that I had talked to the original Tonto, Jay Silverheels, about the racism he
encountered in Hollywood during the 1950s.
I did these interviews
long before celebrities connected directly with their fans via websites or
social media; when it was still possible for a lucky reporter to learn
something about an interviewee that hadn’t been in the news before. So in one
respect you might see this book as a nostalgic exercise in time-capsule
journalism, evoking a particular time and place before the era of Twitter and
Facebook. But I think it’s also important to tell you what happened to these
people after I talked to them. When I tell you, for example, about the problems
Mordecai Richler encountered when he first had his book The Apprenticeship
of Duddy Kravitz adapted as a stage musical, I think you might also be
interested in knowing the extraordinary lengths to which the producer went afterwards
in an attempt to take the show to Broadway.
Why does the song
“Amazing Grace” still occupy a very special place in the repertoire of singer
Judy Collins? Why did Robertson Davies abandon what appeared to be a successful
career as a playwright in Canada to start writing novels? Why did Sophia Loren
go back to Italy to serve a jail term for tax evasion? Why did Tom Lehrer
totally disappear from the scene after establishing himself as one of America’s
cleverest and wittiest satirical songwriters? Why did Michael Nesmith quit The
Monkees to start making music videos? Why did Shari Lewis start conducting
symphony orchestras after she had endeared herself to kids all over the world
with a comedy ventriloquism routine involving a cute sock puppet named Lamb
Chop? Why did Chubby Checker go through 20 pairs of platform boots a year to
keep his audiences twisting the night away? Those are some of the questions
I’ve tried to answer in this book while simultaneously looking backward and
forward.
I hope you’ll enjoy
taking this trip down memory lane with me. During a golden age for newspaper
journalism in Canada, I was one of the few full-time entertainment reporters
who wasn’t restricted to writing just about theatre people or television people
or music people. I got to talk to them all, and will be forever grateful to my
editors for giving me the opportunity to do so.
I am also grateful to
my editors for loosening the purse strings whenever I wanted to travel to New
York, London, Vancouver, Stratford or Edmonton to conduct interviews and write
stories. Many of the stories in this book happened only because the Calgary
Herald had plenty of money to spend on coverage that attracted big
readership in the first instance and big advertising revenue in the second.
Those generous travel budgets are now – sad to say – a thing of the past, not
least because of the precipitous decline in print advertising revenue following
the rise of the Internet in the 1990s.
A note about the
arrangement of the stories and choice of subjects: At first I thought I would
bundle the interviews, with writers in one section, actors in another,
musicians in another, and so on. But then I decided to simply present them
alphabetically by last name, primarily for the sake of variety and contrast. I
sifted through the interviews chronologically, picked out the ones I thought
would still be of interest today, only to discover to my shock, after I had
written practically half the book, that most of the subjects were male. Uh-oh.
That meant going back to the beginning and rebalancing the sex ratio. In the
process, I found myself highlighting the achievements of some fascinating and
talented if occasionally little-known women such as mystery writer Bunny
Wright, singer Colleen Peterson and actress Nicola Cavendish who might not
otherwise have made the cut.
I covered the Canadian
arts and entertainment beat for 15 years. The plus is that I got to meet a
great number of charming and gifted individuals. The minus is that I didn’t
have enough time to spend with most of them, so had to do many of these
interviews on the run. Thus the resulting stories are by no means definitive;
they are more snapshots than full-length portraits. But I hope you’ll take them
for what they are, as engaging and stimulating encounters with accomplished
individuals I once thought and still think are deserving of our attention.
4Q: I’m
particularly interested in your book Leaving
Dublin: Writing my way from Ireland to Canada. Please tell us more about
this book;
BB: This
is my autobiography, published by RMB – Rocky Mountain Books. Here's the
Introduction:
This is a book about a guy (me) who lived in Ireland
with his parents until he was 23, came to Canada for a bit of craic (the popular Irish word for fun),
tried his hand at different things (including playing piano in bars and reading
news on the radio), and eventually found his calling as a newspaper reporter,
as a chronicler of the passing parade.
Along the way, I met some very good people. I always
felt that if I ever wrote an autobiography, I would pay tribute to them. This
book is my attempt to do that. The subtext is a thank-you note to those who
gave me love, friendship, inspiration, amusement, encouragement or even a kick
in the pants whenever I needed it most.
I use the word “tribute” because, at this point in
my life, it has a special resonance for me. In 1992, as you will soon read, I
started writing an obituary column for the Calgary
Herald that quickly garnered more positive reader reaction than anything
else I had written during my previous 24 years as a journalist. It was called Tribute: People Who Made a Difference,
and, for the most part, it was about people whose names had never appeared in a
newspaper before.
Why did I write about unknowns? Because I thought
everyone had a story to tell and, if I discovered that story, I wanted to tell
it. While fondly remembered grandmothers, retired railway workers, nurses,
teachers and community volunteers might have seemed irrelevant to the
news-hardened editors who filled the front page with stories about the
shenanigans of politicians, crooks and millionaire athletes, there was nothing
irrelevant about them as far as their families and friends were concerned.
It turned out that it wasn’t just the families and
friends who enjoyed reading about the people I wrote about in the column. Everyone I met seemed to enjoy reading
about them. In essence, I was practicing community-weekly journalism in the
pages of a big-city daily, where by the conventional standards of newspapering,
my subjects had no right to be. Yet, during the seven years I wrote the column,
I felt I was producing something just as compelling as the stories about gang
shootings and NHL playoff games that appeared in the rest of the Herald.
I don’t claim any special credit for making Tribute as popular as it was. I was
merely the facilitator. The stories were already there; it was simply a matter
of gathering and telling them. I am grateful for the success of the column
because it paved the way for a series of books about individuals from Canada’s
past that I wrote after leaving the Herald. Tribute also provided me with the
impetus to write this book, to tell my own story in conjunction with the
stories of those who have made a difference in my life.
My stories begin in Dublin, where I had a childhood
that was mostly happy, peaceful and untroubled. It had none of the poverty,
misery, alcoholism or philandering that seem de rigueur for Irish memoirs nowadays. My youth was Angela’s Ashes without the rain; the
sunny side of the growing-up-in-Ireland experience.
That said, I cannot paint a picture of cloudless
nostalgia for you because mine was a childhood full of longing. Longing to have
a smaller nose, bigger muscles and the ability to be as good at hurling and
football as my more athletic classmates. Longing to feel appreciated by my
father. Eventually, longing to escape. Escape to what or to where? I hadn’t
figured that out yet, but as I got older I felt a growing need to find something better, someplace else.
In 1966 I took that big step into the unknown. At
age 23, I quit my job in the Irish civil service and headed for Canada. Was
this to be the something better, someplace else for me? Indeed it was.
Canada, I quickly discovered, truly was the fabled land of opportunity. There
were few barriers. Once the Canadian immigration authorities opened the doors,
I was home free.
In Canada, I was able to parlay my love of piano
playing into a steady gig as a professional musician. I was able to use my
Irish love of talking to inveigle my way into a job as a radio announcer. I was
able to use my love of writing and storytelling to find a job as a newspaper
reporter. In each of these instances all I had to do was knock on someone’s
door, ask for work and the job was mine.
In Ireland, things were different. There were fewer
opportunities and more red tape. If you wanted to work as a professional
musician, you had to join the musicians’ union and satisfy a union board of
examiners you could play any popular song on demand. If you wanted to work in
radio, you had to earn broadcasting school certification. If you wanted to work
as a print journalist, you had to prove you were proficient in shorthand and
typing, and be accepted into the National Union of Journalists.
Besides, Ireland was taking me in a different
direction. My destiny there was controlled by my parents, who wanted me to be a
civil servant: “The best job you’ll ever find in this country.” In Canada, I
was able to start over, to become the master of my own destiny. I came on a
mission of adventure, with hope in my heart and a safety net in my back pocket.
If my money ran out before I found work in Canada, I knew I still had the civil
service job awaiting me back home.
I never went back home, of course, except to visit.
My travels took me from Dublin to Cork, Vancouver, Toronto, Dawson City,
Smithers, Prince George and, finally, Calgary. Two keyboards have been my
constant travelling companions. On one I type, on the other I noodle. “Make the
words sing,” a Herald editor told me
once. “Make the music speak to me,” said my piano teacher in Dublin. Thus have
the strands of my life intertwined. Thus have the stories unfolded.
4Q: Is there
a childhood anecdote or fond memory you would like to tell us about?
BB: One
of my favourite childhood memories, recounted in the opening chapter of my
autobiography, Leaving Dublin: Writing My
Way from Ireland to Canada, has my father and mother arguing over whether
they should use the family savings to buy a car or a piano. My mother was
pregnant with her third child at the time. She and my father reached a
compromise: If the baby was a boy, they would spend the money on a car. If it
was a girl, they would buy a piano. My sister was born in August 1950 and my
father delivered on his promise. The new piano arrived a week later. All of the
children learned to play and I even managed to make my living for a while as a
barroom pianist.
4Q: What’s in
the future for Brian Brennan?
BB: My
non-fiction book of biographical sketches, Rogues
and Rebels: Unforgettable Characters from Canada's Storied Past, is
scheduled for publication by the University of Regina Press (trade division) in
the fall of 2015.
Thank you for being part of the South Branch Scribbler Brian. I’m
looking forward to reading more of your work. Brian’s website is www.brianbrennan.ca
Next week, join me here when Guest Author, Katrina Cope of Australia talks about her novels The Sanctum Series. The truth behind the deep and dark side.