The wild bid, the fake and other art tales

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Coulson

The most difficult task a columnist can have is to write about a universally Good Thing. Santa Claus comes to mind. Well, no, it’s not Santa Claus I am about to discuss, topical though that would be in this December cheer, but rather Murray Frum.

Mr. Frum could be defined by many aspects of his life, unfortunately all of them very good. He was born poor, sleeping on the living-room sofa behind his father’s tiny grocery shop (good). He became a dentist, married a nice Jewish girl from Niagara Falls, Barbara Rosberg (triple good), and happily played Dennis Thatcher to super-broadcaster Barbara Frum while making lots of money in real estate and giving lots away. His gift for attracting the best women was confirmed when, after Barbara died, he married the enchanting, high-achieving business executive Nancy Lockhart. Now he has written a book about an aspect of himself (dodgy) but it is sadly not for sale, thus modest and good.

Published this month, the book is titled Collecting: A Work in Progress. Frum is a very important collector of African and Oceanic art as well as fine things in general. The Art Gallery of Ontario has the Frum gallery built with his own money and choice of architects. Frum sensed that superb as Frank Gehry’s new AGO addition would be, he was not the person to design the setting for Frum’s donation of African tribal art. This in itself is an excellent lesson: great name architects often build lousy museums. The best example is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, an evocative, even brilliant building but a disaster as far as creating display space and best viewed empty.

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This isn’t the way to protect our children

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

A virus hits American commanders-in-chief when on aircraft carriers. Think George W. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring we “have prevailed” in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. Or the sombre Richard Nixon doing a mini jig of excitement on board the Hornet at the Apollo 11 splashdown. Hard not to compare them unfavourably with Cher on the USS Missouri in thigh-high stockings and biker jacket, utter fabulosity, even though her lyrics, “If I could turn back time,” were nearly as banal as Dubya’s.

For new lows the ribbon goes to President Obama’s Veterans Day remarks on the USS Carl Vinson. The Penn State scandal, said the American President, should lead to “soul- searching” by Americans. “Our first priority,” he said, “is protecting our kids.” As opposed to what: protecting senior citizens, the economy or perhaps the endangered Kretschmarr cave mould beetle? A bit rich, anyway, in a country where over a million of its potential kids per year get deliberately aborted.

Briefly, in case you have been in a coma: legendary (junior grade) Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, 67 (there are many “legendary” figures in this story, but as I can’t tell legend from long snapper in American football, I can’t vouch for the designation), has been indicted on 40 charges, all relating to sexual assault on minors. The indictment came via a grand jury convened over years in the absence of the citizen under investigation or proper rules of evidence.

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Welcome to prison email, hot chick

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

FAME Pictures/KEYSTONE PRESS

The very moment Dr. Conrad Murray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson, an eager bailiff with an eye for camera angles and posterity handcuffed him while sitting down, in a move that required almost Busby Berkeley choreography to pull off gracefully. There was no reason to handcuff him, but this is a Barnum & Bailey world.

Dr. Murray has had some difficulty with child support payments, but this could be explained by the high cost of wives, seven children (I think) by six mums and the price of a defence team. Television shows him to be a handsome Afro-American man with sombre bearing. His new address will be a local jail and then probably a state prison, which is definitely not a happy address. State prisons are the stepchildren of the American carceral state and rarely have the benefit of extras such as email as in the federal correctional institutions.

Email allows inmates who have never written much more than a bad cheque or dodgy prescription to keep in touch with the outside world, thus maintaining the great tradition of prison belles lettres—and not so belle letters. The current system has dedicated email with no Web access or attachments and limited computer time. Lengthy communications are written on lined paper from the commissary and then typed in frantically. Pulling off The Gulag Archipelago would require a 20-years-to-life sentence.

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Rigoletto should have had a scooter

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Liam Casey/Toronto Star/GetStock

Heaven knows this column ought to be soaking wet in your hands. Between the severe drainage problems around our place, the endless rain and my guilt at leaving the dogs alone to go to the opera to watch Rigoletto humpback himself around the stage, I’ve been in bad weather purgatory. Hours on end spent standing in Wellington boots so the kuvaszok could splash around chasing skunks at two a.m. Then back to the computer, wet hair splashing all over it. I expect everyone in the land knew that while an iPhone can be dropped innumerable times, provided it’s in one of those lurid plastic see-through covers, one hit of rain and the whole bloody thing goes dead. Well I didn’t, and that happy bit of techno news was brightly conveyed to me by a child-assistant at an Apple store who performed an autopsy on my dead phone and showed me perfectly formed raindrops still inside.

My dogs can get anything out of me. Just that look when I come in the door from stealing an evening out, I feel like a heel. I can’t imagine the human being who actually stole a dog’s wheelchair off a Toronto porch a short while ago and left Roscoe, a five-year-old pug with paralyzed back legs, to drag himself around. That’s a contemporary version of stealing from the little match girl. Luckily for Roscoe a donated wheelchair had him back on the streets after two weeks, looking very jolly in the video clip.

Less jolly was my evening with the deformed Rigoletto dragging himself around on the stage sans wheelchair in the Canadian Opera Co. production I abandoned my dogs to see. Verdi’s opera plot revolves around the eponymous hunchback court jester Rigoletto, whose innocent daughter Gilda is seduced by the Lothario duke and then kidnapped by courtiers. When father sets out to get his vengeance, a plot twist has his daughter mistakenly murdered and delivered into his hands in a sack. Cheery stuff, though I must say, sans a few shortcomings, I loved the production and the soprano Ekaterina Sadovnikova was as close to a perfect Gilda as I’ve heard.

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The doctor who had time for people

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 19 Comments

Michael Stuparyk/Toronto Star

At university in the early sixties, films told who you were. There were guy films like The Guns of Navarone and high-class chick flicks starring Audrey Hepburn, doing Breakfast at Tiffany’s. On date nights I went to see Hollywood movies, on going-out-with-friends nights it was anything nouvelle vague and absolutely everything by Ingmar Bergman. His masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, gave me my notion of death.

Your age colours how you see death, and during university years it was black and white, melodramatic and terribly romantic. Death was La Dame aux Camélias, or Mimì coughing her lungs out in La Bohème. Death was heroic and sacrificial. We were Anna Kareninas dying over wrong choices and lost loves. Death was racing in fast cars like our pin-ups for fatal auto crashes—heartthrob James Dean or Nobel winner and French Resistance hero, author Albert Camus. Death was never chemotherapy and bedpans or a descent into senility. Death was a state to flirt with and reject, preferably in Givenchy like Audrey Hepburn. If death was to be drawn out it required intellectual style, like Max Von Sydow’s knight in Bergman’s film who plays a game of chess with death for 96 minutes. He loses, as we all must, and the film closes with a memorable scene in which fool and knight dance behind the Grim Reaper in a stark silhouette.

Death toyed with Steve Jobs and arrived last week, ending his life prematurely. Coincidentally, this past weekend death struck nearer to home when on Thanksgiving my cousin, Dr. Robert Buckman, died unexpectedly on the plane home after a trip to London. He died in his seat, fast asleep we hope. He was 63 years old.

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In my next life I’d like to talk like this

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 6 Comments

Sasha/Getty Images

As well as being an opera star, great writer and dressage champion—preferably all three at once—I have prayed that in my next life I will be able to carry on a conversation with Noël Coward and his friends. What a circle: snobby Bright Young Things from Oxbridge, campy men in espadrilles and pale linen trousers on the Riviera, the violently talented and viciously bitchy homosexuals he palled around with—Somerset Maugham, Beverley Nichols, Iris Tree, Tallulah Bankhead—all of this razor-tongued bisexual society of the 1920s and ’30s, madly experimenting with anything on offer. This was a pudding rich in Continentals, British aristocrats and intelligentsia including aesthetes and one-offs like Coward who had perfected the cut-glass accent and Savile Row suit necessary to transport himself from the ordinariness of south London to international society.

Going to see Coward’s 1930 play Private Lives at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto (now playing, and an absolutely fabulous production; never tell me Kim Cattrall is just a sex symbol. She is a superb actress and comedian) brought home to me once again how stuck in wet concrete my tongue is. When I say “carry on a conversation” with Coward, I mean to engage him by having at one’s tongue-tip le mot juste, just as his leading characters always do. I have never ever had a mot juste at the right moment in my life, and in my next I want to have paragraphs of them plus fabulous one-liners.

Imagine being at ease in a country-house party at Coward’s home Goldenhurst or at Edward Molyneux’s spread in Cap d’Ail, with Somerset Maugham’s wife, Syrie, spitting mad at her husband for his dalliance with Gerald Haxton, who tried to shock at dinner with a singular tale of seducing a 12-year-old girl in Siam for a tin of condensed milk. What a witches’ brew of hissing serpents and spewing talent. In these times, you mixed the trivial and decadent pursuits of the wealthy with genuine artists and artistic achievement—before war and tax policies broke the whole edifice down, exiling the wealthy to St. Barts and the artists back to their studios.

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Epiphany in Air Canada seat 23D

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

There’s a bit of a Mormon moment right now. Think me crazy, but I rather like the sound of a life in which men address each other as “elder” and the womenfolk call each other “sister”—or, when circumstances warrant, “sisterwives.” There’s a respect lost when complete strangers who obtain your credit card take to addressing you by your first name. When the HBO series Big Love brought Mormons into our living rooms, I also rather warmed to the idea of receiving testimony. Though Big Love never quite made the notion clear, I think receiving testimony is a moment when what you want to do gets heavenly sanction.

This line of thought accelerated last week on seeing The Book of Mormon, the most sought-after ticket on Broadway. The plot line is an account set to song and dance of some Mormon missionaries taking their message to Uganda. Doesn’t take a high IQ to predict whose side the writers (credits include the animated series South Park) and audience are on. Let’s just say it isn’t God’s. The play is a musical with superb performances, bad music and largely adolescent lyrics. It’s guiltily watchable, rather like the sloth of reading a bad book at the beach on a hot day. Given the sky-high prices of the tickets (don’t ask, but scalpers are getting nearly four-digit prices for back-of-theatre seats), you’d think the audience would be a tad more finicky over the song Hasa Diga Eebowai, loosely translated as “F–k you God,” rather than screaming with joy over the endless repetition of that banal scatology.

Making fun of Mormons is easy stuff. Mainstream Christians and Jews have the mists of time to cushion any inspection of their peculiar stories.We’ve got accustomed to the Red Sea parting, Lazarus rising. It was all so long ago. The patina of antiquity, backed up by great religious institutions reaching back a thousand years or more, bequeaths respectability. Christian congregations don’t sneer when their minister reads, “Behold there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.” That’s the Gospel according to Matthew. But when your prophet is not named Matthew but Joseph Smith and his revelation takes place in the upstate New York of 1823 during a visit from the angel Moroni, who tells him of religious writings buried on gold plates along with two stones called the Urim and the Thummim, the message sounds rather Lord of the Rings.

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Rupert Murdoch, tabloids, and me

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, July 22, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 12 Comments

Paul Hackett/Reuters

What’s your favourite tabloid headline? How about “Kill an Argie and win a mini Metro” at the time of the 1982 Falklands War? That was a spoof of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid Sun by Private Eye and can’t be outdone. But the Sun’s front-page “Bloody frogs scuttle our hols” at the time of a French workers’ ferry strike before the Chunnel train was built was legit. Horrid but brilliant.

I’ve been having a few tabloid moments, in the name of research of course. “Years of crash diets left me infertile, says reality TV star Chantelle Houghton,” photographed in this week’s Daily Mail. Name doesn’t ring bells? She’s 27. She drank up to eight 1.5-litre bottles of water a day to fill her stomach, and her periods once stopped for a year, in case you’re interested. At age 27 I never had more than one period a year and that didn’t interest even me, but then I wasn’t Channel 4’s first non-celebrity ex-reality-show star who was finding life after stardom “difficult.” Chantelle wants to help other women who may be drinking too much water, like gorgeous but aquaholic TV chef Nigella Lawson. See, you read that entire paragraph. It’s junk, but mesmerizing.

Since everyone is dissing tabloids in the wake of the great phone-hacking scandal, I might as well. After all, I have edited a tabloid (Toronto Sun), written for a tabloid (the National Enquirer), been the subject of tabloids ad nauseam, and worked for two of Mr. Murdoch’s London newspapers including the Sunday Times, now drawn into the scandal. This is more qualification than any hackette needs for an instant book.

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Why Kate might need to put on a few pounds

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 37 Comments

Arthur Edwards/Getty Images

Unlike some observers of the duke and duchess of Cambridge, I am not, to borrow the easy grammar of a Globe and Mail columnist, “conflicted” by royalty. I’m often ambivalent about eating another chocolate biscuit and I certainly have conflicting feelings about whether to get another dog since my husband has said one more and he’s building a house for people, but a constitutional monarchy isn’t something that bothers me. As an organizing principle of society compared to religion or tribal rule it looks harmless.

Royalty may irritate some female columnists given the infernally good-looking crop of princesses these days, all of them young, size four and about six feet tall. As if it were not enough to be sporting about the stunning former Miss Kate Middleton, now we have the wincingly gorgeous South African champion swimmer Charlene Wittstock beaming next to new husband Prince Albert II of Monaco. I saw their wedding announcement in last Sunday’s New York Times.

The Monaco royal marriage did not get the featured spot in the Times’ wedding section, which is called “Vows” and is ever a gold mine of joyous moments in courtship. This week’s “Vows” was given over to Laura Hwang, a classical viola player and former cashier at Blue Apron Foods in Brooklyn who married Steve Rosenbush, a business writer. Steve had to spend up to $100 a visit getting to know Laura because obviously it’s tricky to chat up a cashier with an impatient lineup behind you. They were married by a Universal Life minister, an unfamiliar denomination but apparently used by almost every American Jewish person who marries a non-Jewish person.

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As he lifted his leg, I watched, enviously

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

Kijiji Canada

Sniff, sniff, not a reference to me noisily crying, but the theme last Saturday at Toronto’s annual Woofstock gathering at St. Lawrence Market. Arpad and Maya were fairly indifferent about going but they climbed into the minivan with an air of cynical resignation, the specialty of Hungarians of any species. “It’s Woofstock’s ninth year,” I told them, “and there will be more dogs there than anywhere else in North America.” (I’m not certain that was true but the lady on the Weather Network had pronounced it with the same certainty she announced thunderstorms that afternoon, which fortunately was also wrong.) Actually, neither of my dogs is particularly interested in socializing with anyone but each other and me—a characteristic of kuvasz that makes even my intact male welcome at dog parks—but I wanted to go so they took me.

The atmosphere was a little cheesy, a bit like the Easter fun fair on Hampstead Heath, with lots of foul-smelling fast food. I dragged them into a Kijiji booth to be photographed for the Internet. “Would you fill out this release form?” the chirpy young lady asked, flourishing a clipboard. This immediately registered her as a non-dog person. I have two hands. One had Maya (42 kilos and underweight) and the other had Arpad (50 kilos and growing). If I could have put them in a handbag, which I was not carrying, her request would have made sense.

You can see how the ordinary becomes extraordinary through the eyes of a master filmmaker like Fellini or an artist like Brueghel. Lots of two-legged people of varying shapes and sizes gathered to talk while their four-legged companions made their own commentary. A tiny manicured toy poodle quietly lifted its leg and urinated on the hind leg—well, ankle, really—of a Great Dane as their owners chatted unaware. The harlequin Great Dane, being a gentle giant, simply looked around, sniffed and turned away. If only nations could react so wisely to such provocation, I thought. Well, no, I didn’t think that. I watched enviously and wished I had the bloody nerve to lift a leg and do the same thing on a long list of humans.

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It's true: 'what I want back is what I was'

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 4:20 PM - 1 Comment

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

There is nothing wrong with aging except what it does to you physically and mentally. The only solution, as far as I can tell, is alcohol, dope or oblivion. I usually put the issue out of mind until backed into a corner. Which happened last week when we had a helicopter overhead and an armada of police cars outside our house in Palm Beach.

The dogs were crazy with delight. Overhead searchlights are so much more fun than the usual bore of eating night beetles. The currents of the Atlantic merge together in a pattern that makes our location the Alexandrian lighthouse for travellers from Cuba and Haiti who come to America by less orthodox means than an Expedia.com ticket. Rather ironic, all these people aching to get into the United States and landing on our doorstep while my husband is aching to get out of this country and can’t.

I went inside and switched on Malt Shop Oldies to counteract the noise and my unhappiness at people risking their lives on makeshift boats only to be greeted by police dogs. The Malt Shop channel on satellite TV is my latest preoccupation, and it is using up a disastrous amount of time evoking bushels of nostalgia. It’s not just the Platters, though whenever they sing Twilight Time or Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I am plunged into the desperate despair that accompanied dancing with my first real love in Grade 12. The first cut is the deepest, but, at the time, I found it slightly morbid, some 43 years before HBO made it positively glamorous with Six Feet Under, that his father was the proprietor of the local funeral home.

I had a very early horror of growing old. Around 12 years of age, I began worrying about turning 16, which in my mind meant the dreaded 21 was not far off. Adulthood looked like a lot of weeping and worrying about bills. You can probably have a happy childhood or else be a bit ahead in discovering what most people do in retrospect, that getting old and then dying is definitely the wrong direction. But just in case you missed that point, the hills are alive with people reminding us of time’s gallop.

Few things infuriate more than the battalions of perky people discussing the “greying” of our population. They themselves aren’t a bit grey, in fact they tend to be blonds or healthy black males banging on about unfunded liabilities, leisure time and Pilates. (I exempt Canadian actor Donald Harron, who shilled marvellously on TV for funeral insurance when in his seventies.) Almost every week there is another article on Canada’s “demographic time bomb.” The only decent conclusion is that we elderly should all swallow hemlock for the sake of the generations behind us burdened with our care. In the absence of such altruism we must work till we drop while refraining from everything we like, especially gluttony. Apparently as we age we make less stomach acids, uptake less vitamin B, lose muscle mass (plus teeth), and go for raves of carbohydrates. Personally, I think one of the few pleasures of aging is that none of your dear ones are left to tell you no more macaroni and cheese.

The horrors of aging provide excellent material for writers and artists who thrive on lamentation; without it, at least half of mankind’s greatest literature and art would be gone. Fortunately there is also war, sickness and poverty. And let’s be candid, which means let me tell you why you fall short in every conceivable way, the whole aging thing is more difficult for intelligent people who tend to brood on existential questions. We may not be able to experience uninhibited joy but we can explore the wretchedness of the human condition with incredible zest.

The curse of aging, besides losing your looks and the ability to do up a back zipper, is nostalgia. Lots of people write about what nostalgia is, but as far as I can see, nostalgia is remembering something you like. I haven’t ever heard someone remark that they are nostalgic for the time they were hit by a bus. Nostalgia can be evoked by smell, as with Marcel Proust’s fresh baked madeleines (popularized when The Sopranos’ Dr. Melfi mentioned them to an uncomprehending Tony Soprano), or on a more banal level by the Platters.

Nostalgia focuses on youthful times when everything was possible. The imagination had no limits—a particularly joyous feeling for an artist. In later life, short-term memory fades first, leaving us plonked more and more in the past—bad news if English was not your native language. Robert Louis Stevenson is childhood schmaltz’s pin-up: in To Any Reader, which is the last poem in his mesmerizing A Child’s Garden of Verses, an adult sees himself through a window playing as a child:

“But do not think you can at all / By knocking on the window, call / that child to hear…he does not hear; he will not look…/ for, long ago, the truth to say / he has grown up and gone away / and it is but a child of air / that lingers in the garden there.” Proust took six volumes and 4,300 pages to come to the same conclusion in his back-breaking masterpiece In Search of Lost Time.

Premature death solves aging, as with JFK, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and lesser luminaries. Sylvia Plath said it all when she wrote “What I want back is what I was,” and put her head in a gas oven at age 30. This solution seems something of an overreaction. Though perhaps not. One wonders, on hearing yet one more doomsday scenario about the rising costs of health care and the difficult “choices” to be faced, if the greying society may yet be corrected by a kinder form of PlathCare: free hemlock on prescription, courtesy of the caring state.

'You can do it, pie' has been my call to arms

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, April 1, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 3 Comments

DPA/ZUMA/KEYSTONE PRESS

I have six lace-trimmed polyester slips because of Elizabeth Taylor after seeing her wearing them in Butterfield 8 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That look is now sold as outer party wear, but today’s Dolce & Gabbana leopard numbers don’t come close to Taylor’s 1960s creamy satin trimmed with cognac lace. A doctor in Toronto removed the raised black mole I had above my upper lip “just to be safe” when I was in my twenties, and I all but cried because even if it was not in quite the same place on my face as the one on Elizabeth Taylor, I felt it was a shared beauty mark.

Each challenge in my life, and there have been a few, Taylor’s “You can do it, Pie” in her 1944 film National Velvet has been my call to arms. If you haven’t watched 12-year old Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet Brown winning the Grand National on the Pie, the unwanted horse she won in a raffle, your parents have given you a stunted childhood and should be reported now, this very minute, to the nearest child protection agency. The film is compulsory viewing for all kids: showing the need of competition and the thrill of winning, as well as an Academy Award performance by Anne Revere (later blacklisted in the McCarthy era) as her mother who, unlike browbeaten Canadian parents of today brainwashed into the value of letting their offspring never lose or fail, believed in going for gold and having “a chance at a breathtaking piece of folly.”

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The woman who shoos off sacred cows

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 1 Comment

Every time a man tells me he doesn’t want to marry me after all I buy a horse. That’s not my thought, actually, because as diligent readers know, I am happily married. Anyway, buying horses while my husband is on bail, and all sorts of Nosy Parkers in Ontario have to be told about every little investment we make until his contretemps ends, puts a bit of a crimp on things. No, the sentence belongs to Melissa Kite, who used it once as the opening of her Real Life column in The Spectator, and I liked it so much I was determined to use it at the first opportunity. Canadian readers would be absolutely venomous if I wrote that I was purchasing a horse and would inform me that since most people couldn’t possibly afford such a purchase, mentioning it shows how callous and uncaring I am about real life in downtrodden Canada.

I was reading Melissa Kite because whenever I contemplate my underachievement, I read people I admire—Orwell, Camus, Melissa Kite, Dorothy Parker. And Fran Lebowitz—who is actually the point of this column and appears in a must-see HBO documentary called Public Speaking, available on DVD in May. Lebowitz is pea-green enviously literate and very funny. Even if she is not writing books anymore.

Meanwhile, absolutely everyone I know, except me and Lebowitz, whom I do not know, alas, is publishing a book even if sans words. Like Wagner’s Eternal Ring, published by Rizzoli, whose “author” told me all about it at the last dinner party I went to. The book arrived from her today and it is huge, 240 pages of photos each 34 cm x 22 cm. Even my sister co-authors books every new moon when not in the kitchen updating recipes in her husband’s The G.I. Diet books.

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Cringing, while waiting for my fantasy lover

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 12:44 PM - 6 Comments

Kevin Mazur/Wire Image/Getty Images

“And now an icon of our profession, the man who has been my idol… ” goes the sentence. Heart-stopping. You absolutely know what’s coming. A very, very old person is about to appear: there will be difficulty opening the Oscar envelope, hesitant speech will stop the teleprompter and we will all feel guiltily creepy about old age. Not to single out any of the  elderly Oscar participants from last weekend’s ceremony, but entre nous, do you think Kirk Douglas was actually alive? Embalmed? And before you accuse me of ageism for heaven’s sake, I’m old too, and those moments scared the merde out of me.

I would have turned the TV set off but like Vladimir and Estragon I was waiting for… Him. (Note the casual Samuel Beckett reference. The reason will be revealed later in this column.) Hands up girls, how many of you are in love with Colin Firth? Our numbers are legion, ever since he appeared, the perfect Regency dandy, at the Meryton Assembly dance in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice 16 years ago. Till then, my monthly reread of Jane Austen’s novel had Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy in my mind’s eye.

Was the waiting worth it? All through those  cringingly awful hours with Anne Hathaway doing her self-deprecating eye thing, opening them very wide, rolling them with a head tilt that was sort of cute in her first film The Princess Diaries 10 years ago but now comes over as self-confident narcissism, and co-host James Crisco, sorry Franco, smirking and loitering next to her, I waited. (Bitch-off, I just said to myself, you’d have hosted the Oscars with all the skill of a waxwork mummy.)

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Sorry to rain on everyone's parade, but . . .

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, February 21, 2011 at 10:38 AM - 14 Comments

Elliott D. Woods/Redux

Being a wet blanket is not my choice of roles. Sunny people are far more popular than Lucy van Pelt with a cloud over her head, but I just don’t get it. All this cheering and deskfuls of anchor persons beaming about people power in Egypt and congratulating one another on their good fortune and courage in being “there,” at this turning point in history. (And yes, I’m afraid this is the mandatory Egyptian column.)

I know it is a subject we must approach with tremendous respect, even though as far as I can see not much happened. The ailing 82-year-old president, Hosni Mubarak (alleged to be very ill), and backed by the Egyptian military, packed his suitcases and was replaced by exactly the same government backed by the same military. Nufi Mubarak, just like Sadat and Nasser before him, was a dictator with powers delegated to him by the military, except Mubarak wore civilian clothes—a civvy suit being more becoming for a modern dictator than the outfits of Greek colonels and Argentine juntas, decked out in opaque sunglasses and army uniforms.

The Egyptian military clearly wanted a putsch and riddance of the old man, and the people gave them—unwittingly, no doubt—the smokescreen of a popular uprising, which everyone, protesters included, seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker. Now we have Egypt with a suspended parliament, a continuation of the 30-year state of emergency, and lots of promises about reform that have been made routinely since 1952 when King Farouk abdicated, packed up his Ginori china, left his gold furniture and took his second wife to Monaco, much closer to the European shopping sprees he loved—the only compelling reason I should think to be a dictator.

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Too early for Jane Fonda, we had Jack

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 5 Comments

Bryce Duffy/Corbis Outline

On the way to this column, I got distracted by Jack LaLanne videos on YouTube. Shameful, I know, but I must have spent nearly two hours watching them. I had intended to put in a note referencing his death just last week at the age of 96 and thought that perhaps I could view a few old shows from the sixties when he had his morning half-hour TV exercise show and wax nostalgic. Turns out there are hundreds of LaLanne videos online, including a hypnotic interview with Groucho Marx.

Jack wore a jumpsuit before Donna Karan got us in them and, something I had never noticed before, he wore black ballet shoes with black socks for his TV workouts, probably because Air Nikes hadn’t reached conception. He opened his fitness gym in 1936 in Oakland, Calif. (California is the only cliché about Jack), and the obits named him father of the American fitness movement, which is a triumph for the short man who started out truly fat and poxy, unlike the faux acne complexions and cellulite thighs universally recalled by gorgeous movie stars. I defy anyone not to like Jack after watching him, or to resist—behind the privacy of their computer screens—sucking in their waists and resolving to exercise more and eat better.

Jack was something else: he came from the tradition of the muscleman of the 19th century, the stunt guy at circuses who could lift improbable weights. Jack’s stunts included celebrating the U.S. bicentennial by swimming one mile, shackled and handcuffed while towing 13 boats symbolizing the 13 colonies with 76 people on board—and he was 62 years of age. His enthusiasm was so contagious you’d almost think you should do it yourself, perhaps starting off with the trussed part in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

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My excuse was youth. What’s theirs?

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 23 Comments

Doral Chenoweth III/Columbus Dispatch/AP

Back in the 1960s I had “Charlie.” Charlie was a derelict living in Toronto flophouses. I was a CBC researcher living in a highrise studio apartment. My assignment was a documentary on skid row lives, and Charlie was one of the three winos I had selected. All of them had mental disorders of varying degrees. They heard voices or suffered from paranoia. The day before shooting, Charlie went AWOL, ending up in the drunk tank. I bailed him out on CBC expense money.

Charlie didn’t have a golden voice, but he heard lots of voices and had conversations with them all. He wanted a regular job, he told me. After filming, I bought him a clean T-shirt and took him to a centre hiring hourly labourers. When I came home, an inebriated Charlie was waiting. He preferred working on camera and thought that was his true calling. I took him into my apartment for coffee and a talking-to. Afterwards he left—taking some small sterling silver items of mine.

My excuse was plain stupidity and youth. I’m not sure what excuses the enthusiasts behind the golden-voiced, down-and-out Ted Williams who, in a predictable arc after discovery by a journalist, gained worldwide fame, was arrested for an altercation, took part in an intervention on television’s Dr. Phil show, and disappeared into rehab. His sob story was watched by millions, when they weren’t watching people with utterly no connection to victims of the Tucson killings (except nearby zip codes) sobbing their eyes out. Heaven knows, Americans can go on “healing” and “counselling” and “intervening” until every last person is in therapy. But the problem when a popular culture goes barking mad is that complicated problems get reduced to cartoons.

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Murder and sex, Canadian-style

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 7 Comments

Ajax, Ont., teacher Paul Martin leaves a courthouse in Jamaica | Jamaica Observer

The first murderer in my life was John George Haigh, also known as the acid bath murderer. While in prison for some lesser crime, he dreamed up the idea of dissolving bodies in sulphuric acid until they were sludge. Which he did during the late 1940s in Britain, pouring loads of it down manholes. His last victim was a 69-year-old widow living at a hotel in Kensington. Haigh liked the Persian lamb coat she wore and it was the cleaning ticket for it that helped track him down.

The British papers were rapturous about Haigh. There are no subjects that people read about more eagerly and deny reading about more readily than murder and sex—preferably in combination. When someone speaks of reading such a story, they proffer the waiting-room defence. Perhaps you are reading this very column while waiting for your dental checkup.

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A birthday with 3,233 dogs

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 19 Comments

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

One of the splendid aspects of proper dog shows is that almost all categories require the dogs to be “intact.” Which is to say, boys and girls must have all their bits and pieces. It’s very fashionable to support legislation for mandatory spaying and neutering (I personally think it preferable just to spay and neuter irresponsible or vicious owners and breeders) and in some cases it might be the best thing for your dog, although I can’t imagine why apart from health reasons. If you don’t want the seasonal inconvenience of a bitch in heat, buy a parakeet.

I’m not sure if dogs know when they are intact. It seems to me they walk more proudly, and certainly for the first couple of growth years having all their hormones allows proper development. The Brussels griffon that emerged recently from the elevator in the Hyatt Regency seemed to have a certain jauntiness sizing up a passing brace of female Salukis that his balls-off counterpart would not share. But who knows? The Brussels griffon with his beard and those wide black expressive eyes has always reminded me of a very randy professor I had at the University of Toronto, and that may cloud my judgment.

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Now I’ve got to worry about flies, too

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Shuji Kajiyama/AP

“I was an exile in Manhattan” has an improbable ring, rather like the fifties radio program I Was a Communist for the FBI. All the same, it wasn’t Duluth or Thunder Bay, but glorious, stenchingly hot Manhattan that became my exile during recent court proceedings. All I missed were my panting white dogs whom my husband had never seen, but who are now with us. There’s a bonding thing going on between little Arpad, 90 lb. at eight months, and my husband, undisclosed pounds at 792 months.

Conrad lectures him about the 10th century’s Prince Árpád, who led the Magyars over the Carpathian Mountains to establish Hungary, while Arpad wags his tail with joy and establishes himself on our bed.

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Thankfully summer will soon be done

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

DAVIDE MONTELEONE/CONTRASTO/REDUX

No matter how often I tell myself “everything dies,” which everything certainly does—hot water bottles, for example, and I have the scald burns to prove it, and my shoes definitely get to the cremation point—still, I can’t deal with anything dying that belongs to the zoological branch of biology except mosquitoes.

I bury ladybirds and feel perfectly Gestapo-ish if my rain boots squash the worms that come out in the wet. Nothing new about this: I’ve been an animal sentimentalist since I rescued the beetle swimming in my semolina pudding at school. This past week a dead chipmunk in a small copse in our garden destroyed the summer day.

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What on earth will my husband think?

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, July 23, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Steve Carrera/Reuters

Last week I stood chequebook in hand at an immense Toronto Toyota dealership, ready to buy the world’s most hideously expensive minivan, and you’d think I had a nasty social disease. I had an appointment to test-drive the box-on-wheels, made after endless email exchanges, but the car wasn’t there.

As for the smart-looking headphoned receptionists chatting to air (or the car lounge lizards hanging around them), I was Grandma Moses. A line of salespeople loitered to the left.

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In defence of (the possibly drunk) Fergie

By Barbara Amiel - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 4:02 PM - 14 Comments

Photo by Picture Perfect / Rex Features

I’d like to say a word in favour of poor old Fergie, by which I do mean the relatively poor and relatively old (50) Sarah, duchess of York. She just got caught  accepting money from a reporter in exchange for an intro to her ex-husband Prince Andrew, now the unpaid special ambassador for British trade and industry. In saying anything favourable, I can hear the (imaginary) voice of Nancy Grace: “Barbara, is anyone here thinking of those children?” And yes, having a mummy like Sarah can be embarrassing, and while princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are as devoted to their mother as she is to them, mummy filmed selling meetings with daddy must be unnerving.

Having now been seen on worldwide television scooping up an alleged $40,000, Sarah Ferguson is in muck. Mazher Mahmood, a specialist in entrapment journalism, whose earlier stings included Prince Andrew’s sister-in-law the countess of Wessex, passed himself off again as a wealthy businessman keen on making a royal connection. His down payment was on Sarah’s alleged asking price of $750,000. (Sorry about the repetition. We know it’s alleged and that the duchess has apologized for her alleged crime but allegedly it’s the rule around here to keep repeating it.)

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Stormy weather, scary birthday

By by Barbara Amiel - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

Bettmann / Corbis

I was thinking about Lena Horne at the time. “Stormy weather, since my man and I ain’t together,” which just about sums it up for me. She came to Toronto and sang that at the Prince George Hotel, which belonged to my first husband’s parents. That hotel was levelled to make way for the Toronto-Dominion towers so we could all spend lifetimes in a Hades of underground parking. Now Lena’s dead, I’m three marriages on, the sun never stops shining on my stormy weather in this subtropical state—but Lena did live till 92 and had a revival of sorts later in life.

The man on the gate phone who interrupted this train of thought said he was doing the census. I had no way of knowing who he was because the gate is miles away and it was dark out anyway. “I’m not a U.S. resident,” I replied (no point telling him the IRS says I am resident and so does the CRA—too much information), “I’m just visiting,” which I thought was polite when what I really meant was, stick it, I’m not going to fill out your damn form.

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