The As It Happens Files Page 2

  “Oh yes, I got it back. It was 80 miles away when we found it.”

  “So you went out and you lost your anchor …”

  “Yes. I went fishing again a few days later, and a pin came out of the anchor and I lost it. It was a very expensive anchor, so I went back to where I’d lost it and I let the boat drift to where I thought it might be and I got out to look for it. My attention was on the ocean floor and the wind shifted, and while I was swimming one way, the boat started drifting in the opposite direction. But I got it this time. It was about four blocks away when I looked up.

  “You have more lives than a cat,” I told him.

  “More than 20,” he agreed. “I’ve been close to death probably more than 20 times. There was the time I was hanging from a building six floors up, in my underwear, trying to get into my apartment …”

  Here’s the story: Ignacio was living in a sixth-floor penthouse at the time. It was a hot summer day, and a couple of children came to the door to ask him if he could help them get their parakeet back; the bird had somehow got tangled up in the TV aerial on the roof. Ignacio wasn’t dressed, but he stepped just outside his door, to an exterior walkway, to see if he could spot the bird—and the wind blew the door shut behind him.

  When the kids saw what had happened, they ran away.

  “I was a young guy then,” Ignacio told me. “I thought, I won’t go in this fashion to the manager. Society was more prudish then. Today I wouldn’t mind going in my underwear anywhere.”

  Ignacio decided that if he went up onto the roof, he might be able to lower himself to his balcony and get back into his apartment from the other side, but he miscalculated. He let himself down partway, clinging to a piece of ironwork, but he couldn’t reach the balcony, and now it seemed he couldn’t get back up either. His hands were sweating in the heat, and he thought, This is it for me. Now I’m going to die.

  What was worse, he had an audience. The children had run to the vacant lot next door and, seeing his predicament, had begun to make a lot of noise, which had drawn a substantial crowd of interested onlookers.

  Somehow he scrambled back to the roof and lived to tell that tale, too. I forgot to ask about the parakeet. When I finish this book, I may move to Miami and write about the further adventures of Ignacio Siberio—but first, some more tales from Radioland.

  TWO

  The Princess of Love

  Radio fit for a king

  The day before I started hosting As It Happens, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in a Paris tunnel. I remember turning on the radio that Sunday morning to hear the news from Michael Enright:

  And now, just to recap: Diana, the Princess of Wales, is dead. She was killed early this morning, along with her friend, Dodi Fayed …

  My first reaction was shock, the way we are always shocked by sudden and untimely deaths. How could this be? She was so young, so beautiful, so … alive. And I felt sad. Sad for her, sad for her two young boys, sad even for Charles. I was sad on my own behalf, too. Diana seemed flaky at times, her marriage was a bust, and maybe she hadn’t been prepared for the unique demands that marriage to a royal heir would make on her, but she was beautiful—and glamorous, too. I know this may sound ridiculous, but I think for many girls and women, Diana the Princess Bride reminded us of a time when we were very small and could imagine ourselves in the role of fairy princess dreaming of knights on white chargers.

  Diana’s life, though, wasn’t a fairy tale, and it wasn’t to be lived happily ever after. After her marriage fell apart, she pulled herself up by her Valentino straps and went back to work. She campaigned for a ban on land mines, she visited hospitals, she reached out to children dying of AIDS. She doted on Harry and William, of course, and when she learned to laugh again, her smile lit up the world. She also gave television interviews in which she revealed far too much about her private life, but that seems to be the way of a modern celebrity, royal or not.

  But as we all know, bad news is good news for people who work in news—hence my second reaction, which was along the lines of “What a great story to kick off with!” As I continued hearing about Diana on that last day of August 1997, I was busy putting wine and beer on ice and setting out food for a little garden party I was throwing, a sort of getting-to-know-you affair for me and the As It Happens crew. Naturally, we had planned to talk about what might be put on the air the next day, which was Labour Day in Canada and the U.S. Holidays can be a problem when it comes to finding stories and people to talk about them, but there was no mystery about what the story would be this Labour Day; the only question was, who would we find to talk to?

  An event like Diana’s death—a Big Event—is both easier and harder than less earth-shaking stories to cover. It’s easier because it’s a story everyone’s interested in. Easier, too, because almost everyone you can think of to call will be happy to talk to you about it on the radio, provided they’re not fully booked doing other radio and television shows.

  It’s harder because, with all the media in the world focused on the same topic, it’s a challenge to find an angle that isn’t already being covered. We comforted ourselves with the thought that if people were listening to our programme, we could assume they weren’t taking in all the other shows as well. In any case we wanted to give them the best possible coverage. I don’t remember whether we had any eureka ideas that afternoon in my back garden, but early the next day, our chase producers hit the phones, and by air time we had a pretty good roster. Dame Barbara Cartland, Diana’s step-grandmother, was first up:

  ML: Dame Barbara, let me start by offering you, on behalf of myself and Canadians, our deepest sympathy for the loss of your granddaughter.

  BC: Well, it was a terrible shock and I loved her so much for so long and she’d always been very sweet, very helpful, and cared for other people. I called her “the princess of love.” She really loved people.

  ML: When was the last time you saw her?

  BC: I had lunch with her a fortnight ago. Also, I had a very sweet letter from her just before I left England to go up to Scotland.

  She gave people her love and then people loved her simply because they felt it pulling them. You see, it’s difficult to explain, but people have too little love now in this country; people feel sorry for people, they like them, but they don’t actually love them. What she gave people was real love.

  ML: Some people think that Princess Diana did not receive enough love in her life. What do you think?

  BC: Well, she went through a very difficult time, as you know. She did have a very, very sad time, and she was very lonely at times. She was very much alone.

  ML: What about the boys? You’ve talked about the close relationship they had. How do you think they’ll cope with this?

  BC: It’s awful for them, and I’m so worried about them—that they’ll have the right people to look after them. Of course, they go to school now, that’s something. But you see, the boys—she adored the boys. When my first son went out shooting one day with the eldest one and I wrote to her that he not only shot well, he was terribly nice to all the older men, she was so pleased, so thrilled, she was almost dancing with joy that her son was such a success.

  ML: She tried to protect them, I think, from some of the pressures of royalty. Who will be their guardian now?

  BC: Well, I don’t know. That’s what I’m worrying about. Who will look after them, who will be with them, who’ll understand them when they’re pretty miserable and unhappy?

  ML: Dame Barbara, Diana was, as I think you’ve pointed out before, a fairy-tale princess to millions.

  BC: Oh, I’ve known an awful lot of people in my life, but I’ve never known anyone quite so sweet as she was, who minded so much about other people. She wanted to make them better, and she did, you see! If there were people in hospital—The other night, she got up at 12 o’clock, late at night, took the car herself, drove to the hospital, cheered up a man who was dying … and then drove back alone. And I did say to her, “You mu
stn’t do that now in England, because things are very dangerous; they might have kidnapped you or they might have smashed you out of the car and taken the car away.” She wasn’t properly looked after. Of course, young girls are rather inclined to be brave about things; you and I would think twice about going out in the middle of the night alone … and of course, she ought to have had ladies-in-waiting with her or somebody to talk to, you see.

  ML: Will you have a favourite memory of her that you will keep in your mind? A picture?

  BC: I don’t know anybody who was as good as she was or so sweet to other people. She was the princess of love. She really gave out love, she felt love for people. We’d have to look very, very hard to find anybody whose heart is given to love the same way.

  After Dame Barbara came Lord William Deedes, former Member of Parliament and an editor with the Daily Telegraph, who recounted a recent trip he’d taken with Diana to Bosnia to campaign against land mines. She listened to the most gruesome stories without flinching, he said, and she never hurried people. When the day’s work was done and she could relax a little, she’d tease him by pretending to offer him a G-and-T and then flourish a bottle of Evian water in front of his nose.

  Diana’s brother Charles Spencer said later that the Press had blood on their hands in the matter of Diana’s death, but Lord Deedes said Diana had not been purely the victim of a pack of braying jackals; it was more complicated than that. She had friends among the paparazzi and the writers, and she knew how to use the media to further her own causes. A lot of people blamed the media for Diana’s death, Lord Deedes said, but it was the people themselves who made the market for pictures of Diana. Later in the show, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, echoed Lord Deedes’s observations.

  In that first programme, we also reviewed how the world Press were covering Diana’s death. We talked to two military men about the desirability and possibility of banning land mines, to an Egyptian writer about the potential fall-out from the Dodi Fayed connection and to Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell about Diana as a cultural icon. It felt like a good day’s work.

  Needless to say, the Diana story didn’t disappear overnight. Indeed, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Diana’s tragic end will probably live on forever in conspiracy chat rooms. It will also stay in the mind of Dodi’s father, Mohammed al-Fayed, who cannot seem to accept that an employee of his, the chauffeur who’d been drinking that night, may have been responsible for the deaths of the Princess of Wales and his own son.

  The weeks following Diana’s death were also the weeks when I was trying to shuck off the training wheels, so to speak. Getting used to the show, getting to know my co-host, Barbara Budd, and the rest. This wasn’t my first crack at hosting As It Happens. I’d filled in for my predecessor, Michael Enright, a few times and also for Barbara Frum in the 1970s. But in those days, I had just been dropping in for a brief spot of hosting; now I was in it for the long run—or so I hoped. How would I cope?

  Alex Frame, the radio Vice-President who’d appointed me, had a good deal of experience in programming. He was the producer who made Peter Gzowski a star on the radio show This Country in the Morning. He then accompanied Peter to the TV talk show Ninety Minutes Live, which didn’t fare so well. It was a mistake to take radio Peter—sweet, smart, witty, folksy, funny, rumpled Peter—and put him into a button-down collar, Armani suit and hair gel and force him to banter with late-night TV guests who were not, by and large, the types of people who had populated his radio show. People who loved Peter on the radio watched with dismay as the debacle unfolded. The highlight of the year was when the eminent Canadian author Pierre Berton shared an appearance with a food blender and nearly chopped off the end of his finger. And then there was the night the American writer Hunter S. Thompson, well soaked in scotch or rum and god-knows-what-other drugs, launched into a profane tirade about some corporate villain whose sins were about to be exposed on the CBC’s fifth estate.

  The question for me was, was I going to be one of Frame’s success stories?

  “Have fun,” he told me. “Make the show yours.”

  But what did that mean? And how was I to do that and still preserve the qualities that had attracted such a devoted following to the show over the years? Michael Enright has talked about how terrified he was the first time he was asked to fill in for Barbara Frum—and now I was set to follow Frum and Enright? What was I thinking?

  At the same time, I felt that As It Happens didn’t really belong to me or them or to any one host; it belonged to all of us and also to the army of loyal listeners whose radios came on every evening to the music of Moe Koffman’s “Curried Soul.” So, yes, I would try to make the show mine, but I would also try very hard not to break it. On odd days, that’s what I worried about. On even days, I worried that I’d be too exhausted to make it through the week. But I sensed right from the start that this was going to be the best job I’d ever had. Over the next few months, I talked to Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa about his Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to Max Sisulu, whose father had been in prison with Nelson Mandela, about Mandela’s retiring as Prime Minister. I spoke with American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and scientist Richard Leakey about politics in Kenya and with Colombian President Ernesto Samper about his country’s struggle with drug lords and terrorists. We talked about the plight of women in Afghanistan and about U.N. arms inspectors getting kicked out of Iraq. It’s interesting to recall that in 1997 Bill Clinton threatened to bomb Iraq if Saddam didn’t start to cooperate with the arms inspectors.

  This was also the time of ethnic killings in Kosovo and school killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and then—Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. When I’m feeling smug, I remind myself of the day in early 1998 that a producer first raised the subject of another possible Clinton sex scandal at the morning story meeting.

  “Just more unproven allegations,” I sniffed, or something of the like. “Not a story.”

  A few days later, Monica’s taped phone conversations became public. President Clinton looked into a TV lens and declared, “I have never had sexual relations with that woman,” and the impeachment train pulled out of the station. To this day, I wonder why he didn’t look into the lens and say, “This is none of your damn business.” Would the story have gone away?

  In the event, it didn’t go away, and we spent many hours over the next few years following the twists and turns of the “non-story” that made Bill Clinton the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. This is what we in the media were doing while the storm clouds of 9/11 were gathering; no wonder we didn’t see them coming.

  In Canada in early 1998, we were also preoccupied with the ice storm that had toppled power lines and left millions of people freezing in the dark; with the Krever Report on Canada’s tainted blood supply; with the Somalia Inquiry into the treatment of Somalis by Canadian soldiers; with Robert Latimer, imprisoned for euthanizing his severely disabled daughter; with teachers’ strikes, land mines and global warming. (Yes, we’d heard of it even before Al Gore made the movie.) At an APEC conference in Vancouver, the RCMP fended off protesters with pepper spray and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien made jokes about it.

  All this material was leavened with the usual assortment of strange animals, big vegetables, eccentrics and music. Producers George Jamieson, Bob Coates and Brooke Forbes, in particular, were always on the alert for an opportunity to play some jazz, blues or gospel music—often at the passing of some lesser-known guitarist or drummer or singer or arranger. Barbara Budd liked to add her own accompaniment, but she wouldn’t let me sing along, claiming—somewhat cruelly, I thought—that my singing voice was unlistenable and I couldn’t carry a tune. But after being instructed in the art of using exploding paper bags for cannon crashes, we did both play along with Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra one night as they performed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It wasn’t my fault that my bag didn’t go off at the right moment; it was a defective bag.
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  The only time I ever got to sing on As It Happens was one Hallowe’en night when Barbara was away and we decided to mark the occasion—Hallowe’en, not Barbara’s absence—by playing the 1962 hit “Monster Mash” and talking to the artist, Bobby “Boris” Pickett. When he agreed to perform live on the radio and invited me to join in … well, it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn’t it? Oddly enough, the world did not come to an end.

  Goldfish were very popular in my first season at As It Happens, especially the Old Goldfish, aged 42, and Sharky the Goldfish, the one who underwent an operation to have a brain tumour removed. Dr. Charles Coleman of Richmond, Washington, told us that when he first saw Sharky, the tumour had grown so big that the fish was swimming upside down. For the surgery he knocked him out by putting anaesthetic in the water and probing him and monitoring his breathing until he was sure the fish was unconscious. Then he cut out the tumour, cauterized the exposed tissue and—Bob’s your uncle—Sharky was saved. There wasn’t any postop infection either; maybe our people hospitals could take some pointers from the vet.

  The most amazing part of the story was that Dr. Coleman’s bill was only one hundred dollars. He was grateful to have had the experience, he said. But the PR didn’t hurt, I guess. When I talked to him again for this book, he told me that his practice was going great guns and he was in the midst of a major expansion, moving into new quarters in Richmond. He also said he was now heavily into holistic medicine for animals: acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, animal chiropractic. Changing his diet had saved his own life, he claimed, and he was very keen to promote good nutrition for animals.

  I asked Dr. Coleman if he’d done any more fish surgery. He said there’d been six more after Sharky, including an angel fish with a tumour.

  Sharky himself is no longer with us, alas. He developed another growth on his head about three months after his surgery and died not long after that of a necrotic liver. And if your fish needs an operation, you should know that the price has now gone up to between five and six hundred dollars.