Ron Base's Blog

The first of the three times I saw Elvis Presley in concert it was Friday, September 1l, 1970. He played to a crowd of seventeen thousand at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. I know this thanks to my very old and dear pal Ray Bennett, who was with me that night and who carefully records and remembers such things. The memory of that concert forms part of Ray’s soon-to-be published memoir, Mystery Train to Hollywood. In the book, he writes that we paid the princely sum of ten dollars each for our tickets.

Detroit was one of the stops on Elvis’s  first concert tour since 1958 when the draft stopped dead the phenomenon he had created overnight. Until then, the only way most of us fans could see him was on a movie screen in blazing Technicolor in those mostly excruciating movies he made in Hollywood. Seeing him in person was a spellbinding experience. For forty-five minutes he put on an electrifying show, complete with relentlessly screaming fans—Ray and I restrained ourselves when it came to screaming. Fifty-six years later, we are still friends and we still talk about the night we first saw Elvis.

A mere seven years after that concert, we both also vividly remember where we were when we heard the news of Elvis’s death at the age of forty-two. Ray happened to be staying with me in Toronto on Sept. 11, 1977. Sadly, it was also the day Ray learned that his mother had died.

These memories and more came pouring back over the weekend after seeing Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s EPIC: Elvis Presley In Concert. The documentary—Luhrmann calls it the ultimate Elvis concert movie—puts the lie to the criticism back then that performing in Las Vegas diminished the king. Using lots of previously unseen and meticulously restored footage, Luhrmann presents the case for an even better Elvis in Vegas and on tour, even more magnetic and powerful than he had been in the 1950s. And that underrated baritone voice with its extraordinary range, never sounded better.

I saw Elvis for the last time in Buffalo a few years before his death. Amid reports about lackadaisical performances, forgetting lyrics, rambling on, I wondered what we were in for. He turned out to be great that afternoon, maybe a little slower and heavier, but still Elvis, very much attuned to his audience, even stopping to make sure an overexuberant fan was okay.

When he died at the age of forty-two, it was a shock of disbelief heard around the world. I found myself in tears. I actually thought of trying to somehow get to Memphis for his funeral. I pulled myself together and never went. I ran into my friend Earl McRae, a terrific journalist, gone now, and a fellow dedicated Elvis fan. I told him about how ridiculous I felt even fleetingly considering going to Memphis. “Don’t feel bad,” Earl said. “I went out to the airport and tried to get on a plane.”

In 1994, my soon-to-be wife, Kathy, and I were driving from Los Angeles to Toronto where we would start a new life together. In those days, you navigated across America with a map. Kathy had three of them open on her lap. We were driving through Tennessee when she looked up from her maps and  said, “We’re  passing Memphis. Let’s stop at Graceland.”

And we did. You could love a woman like that for a lifetime. And I have.

This past weekend we were with Elvis once again. I left the theatre a little sad, filled with bittersweet memories, buoyed by Luhrmann’s lovingly reimagined portrait. “Elvis ate America before America ate him,” U2’s Bono says in his ode to Elvis at the end of the movie. There was never anyone like him before, and there hasn’t been anyone like him since.

For Baz Luhrmann—and me—Elvis never left the building.

Freelancing for the now defunct Ottawa Journal in the late Sixties I heard that pop singer Neil Sedaka was performing in the area. Neil Sedaka’s early hits were unshakable earworms (“If I should smile in sweet surprise, it’s just that you’ve grown up before my very eyes…”). You couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing one of his songs: Calendar Girl , Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Happy Birtday Sweet Sixteen, on and on.

At the time I convinced my editor at the Journal to do a piece on him, Sedaka had dropped out of view, pushed aside almost overnight by the so-called British invasion, led by the Beatles. I hurried across the Ottawa River to the Gatineau Club where he was playing, staying at a rather rundown motel that was part of the club.

Sedaka met me in his room, a chubby, moon-faced, balding man, twenty-eight-years-old—I was so young and naïve at the time, I thought twenty-eight was old. He was not exactly the personification of a pop singer, but he was cheerful and welcoming. If he was feeling down on his luck playing this, to say the least, minor venue he gave no sign of it. Instead, he professed to be optimistic about his future.

“I’m starting a new career,” he said enthusiastically, “almost like a second time around.”

 Sitting with him on an unmade bed,  we spoke for the better part of an hour. Sedaka stopped going on about his future from time to time to regale me with great stories about the kid from Brooklyn who hung out with Carol King in high school was supposed to pursue a career as a classical pianist until he began writing the hit songs that made him a teen idol at the age of nineteen. In a much different era, he was a pioneer.

“You could count them (teen idols) on the fingers of one hand,” he remembered. “There were less than ten of us. They spent a hundred thousand dollars on me alone. The only other rock ’n’ roll singer they had then was Elvis Presley.”

We were talking away when the door opened and in came a young woman in a diaphanous blouse, wearing shorts. “Neil, honey…” she began and then stopped when she saw me. “Oh, she said, “sorry, didn’t know you had company.”

And away she went.

Sedaka had gone white. “Don’t get the wrong idea, that was nothing,” he announced in a panicked voice, jumping to his feet and pacing back and forth. “I’m a happily married man. I’ve got two kids.” This was one of his backup singers, nothing more to it than that.

I did my best to reassure him that I wasn’t going to write about what had happened, and I didn’t. But he was clearly rattled.  I wondered back then, of course, and all these years later, hearing of his death at the age of eighty-six, I still wonder.

Later that evening Sedaka sat at the piano and smoothly performed his hits. As I recall, there was a good crowd but the Gatineau Club wasn’t full. It didn’t seem to matter. Sedaka gave it his all.

None of the record deals or albums he talked about happened. But six years after I spoke with him he met Elton John at a party. A huge admirer, John signed him to his record label and helped to resurrect his career.

Sitting on that unmade bed, reflecting on his teen idol years, Sedaka said that for the rock singers like him who fell so suddenly from grace, “There were lots of tragedies.”

Neil Sedaka, thankfully, wasn’t one of them.

Until I looked up one of the pieces I did on Robert Duvall back in the 1980s, I had forgotten about his supporting role in the Canadian production of The Terry Fox Story. Duvall had not even heard of Fox, and when we spoke on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic at the Cannes Film Festival, he admitted the reason he accepted the part: “I needed the work. That’s basically what it was. I mean it was a nice project, a very lovely project, but I hadn’t done a feature in a year and a half…I had to work.”

At the time, it seemed hard to imagine that Duvall, who had become regarded as one of the finest and most respected American actors, could be out of work. But it was a reminder that more than anything else, Robert Duvall throughout his career, despite all the accolades, was always a working actor. He was never the romantic lead, he almost never got the girl, but he always managed to stand out memorably no matter how short a time he was onscreen.

 He only appeared for a couple of minutes as the reclusive Boo Radley at the end of To Kill A Mockingbird, his first film in 1962, but all these years later his performance remains the onethat is most remembered. In True Grit playing the outlaw Ned Pepper he was probably one of the only actors capable of projecting enough convincing menace to go up against John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn. The movie also opened the way for him, particularly as he got older, to become one of the screen’s most convincing cowboy actors.

Part of a now legendary acting ensemble in two Godfather movies (he didn’t do the third because—you guessed it—the wouldn’t pay him enough), Duvall’s quiet authority dominated every scene he was in as Tom Hagan, the soft spoken consigliore to Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone.

Does anyone remember any other sequence in Apocalypse Now other than the one in which Duvall appeared as Colonel Kilgore, uttering one of the most memorable and endlessly repeated lines in movies: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.”

The Robert Duvall I met on a lovely sundrenched morning in Cannes, was handsomer than expected, a bit shy and nervous about doing interviews, sitting close to his wife Gail Youngs, whom he had married the year before and would divorce a couple of years later. He explained that his father, a rear admiral in the U.S Navy, wanted Bobby, as everyone called him, to follow in his footsteps. His father, he went on, was unhappy to hear that his son had decided upon a much different career path. “I just wanted to be an actor,” he told me.

Even then, money drove him. He loved the New York stage, but “I would be in an off-Broadway play, you’d get thirty-seven bucks a week. For television, you’d get like one thousand, two thousand dollars a week. So eventually you see that you’d rather not do TV, you’d rather do features because there’s a better quality. Oh, yeah, to make a living, travel, meet people.”

At the end of our conversation I jokingly asked him if he’d like to play something romantic where Robert Duvall gets the girl. The question produced an unexpected glint in stony eyes that looked at you with disconcerting directness. “Yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “I used to do Naked City episodes on TV, and I was always the guy who walked away at the end with nobody.”

The working actor, who died Monday at the age of 95, had to settle for greatness.

No author likes to admit this, but I have to say that the unique covers designed by the noted Paris designer Maëlys Chay have a lot to do with the success of the Priscilla Tempest Mysteries.

Her lively, beautifully rendered designs capture the essence of the Savoy novels—elegance leavened with humour and mystery. That is certainly true of her cover for the fifth novel, Midnight at the Savoy.

In the top centre window, Priscilla, our endlessly plucky heroine, dressed for the evening, discovers that once again she is up to her neck in trouble. Next to her, the legendary actress Marlene Dietrich—and what’s she up to?— arrives at the Savoy in a haze of cigarette smoke.

In the lower left, meet Raymond, the Savoy doorman who has a pivotal role in the opening chapters. Because it is midnight at the Savoy, and danger lurks, the two lovers in the lower right window should pay more attention to that gun.

Next door, Agatha Christie, the world’s bestselling mystery writer, has momentarily left her typewriter. Mrs. Christie generously comes to Priscilla’s aid. If you look closely, you may be able to see the title of one of her novels—an important clue, perhaps?

Midnight at the Savoy is to be published in April 2026. Meantime, the anxious author keeps his fingers crossed that thanks to the creative genius of Maëlys Chay, readers will judge the book by its cover.

The Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, the thought of whose beauty kept me awake many nights in small town Ontario, came to Canada nine years ago.

At the height of her stardom in the 1960s, she was breathlessly described as an Italian icon, “something between reality and unreality.” She inspired such legendary filmmakers as Werner Herzog, Fellini, Visconti and Leone. The unreality of her on a movie screen certainly inspired me.

The icon had moved closer to the reality of a charming 78-year-old when she appeared at what was briefly called the Niagara Integrated Film Festival, founded by Bill Marshall and his wife, Sari Ruda.

My wife Kathy and I were among the attendees celebrating Cardinale’s career at Trius Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, outdoors under a full moon. At that point she had made an astonishing 164 films and was still working. During the after-dinner interview, Miss Cardinale was a delight in her implacable insistence that she had never worked with a director or leading man she didn’t love.

Everything in her life had been, well… best to hear it from her…

What about Burt Lancaster with whom she made two movies, The Leopard and The Professionals. “Burt, ah, Burt was fantastic!”

Lee Marvin was also in The Professionals. “Lee was fantastic!”

How about John Wayne with whom she co-starred in Circus World? “John, he was fantastic!”

And Sean Connery, who appeared with her in The Red Tent? “Sean was so fantastic!”

Jason Robards who joined her in Once Upon a Time in the West. “Jason, ah yes, Jason. I had to talk him down out of a tree.”

The memory of Peter Sellers, her co-star in The Pink Panther, produced a pleased laugh. “Peter? Peter was crazy!”

And how was Henry Fonda her co-star in Once Upon a Time in the West? The question produced a rare frown. “When we were doing a love scene together, his wife was there. She gave me dirty looks.”

And what of Fellini who cast her in 8 1/2 as his ideal woman opposite Marcello Mastroianni (also fantastic!)? “He kept asking me if I was in love.”

The news of her death Wednesday at the age of eighty-seven, not so fantastic. The memory of that perfect night under a full moon with Claudia Cardinale—fantastic!

First thing in the morning at the old Gulf and Western building in midtown Manhattan, I was in the midst of a crowd of office workers waiting for the elevator. The doors opened and all but lost among those exiting was Robert Redford. No entourage, no bodyguards, just…Robert Redford. He smiled slightly, taking in the quietly stunned reactions of onlookers. Then he moved on. “Well,” someone said as we all crowded onto the elevator, “that was an interesting way to start the day.”

I thought about that encounter hearing of Redford’s death at the age of eighty-nine. As it was with Redford’s friend, Paul Newman, it was hard to imagine a movie world with these two icons of another, much more interesting, era of movie stardom.

Redford was at the height of his fame when he ducked out of that Gulf and Western elevator. Cinema’s last romantic hero as it turned out. He always denied it, and said he felt constricted by it, but Redford carefully nurtured that romantic image and went to great lengths to maintain it, most comfortably in a shimmering past, whether it was starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Way We Were, The Natural, The Great Gatsby or Out of Africa.

Margot Kidder played his girlfriend in The Great Waldo Pepper, another big budget epic also cast in the nostalgia of a bygone era, but less successfully at the box office. She told me that she saw firsthand how Redford protected his image. “I thought he wore too much makeup,” she remembered.

He did slip away from the past from time to time, most notably and successfully in Three Days of the Condor and All The President’s Men. But I got an earful from veteran producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown when they told me about the lengths to which Redford would go in order to protect his image in a contemporary film.

I knew Zanuck and Brown a bit over the years, and knew them to be extremely careful about what they said. When it came to their experience with Redford, however, they could not contain their anger.

The two producers had acquired the rights to a courtroom novel by a Boston lawyer named Barry Reed titled The Verdict. They quickly discovered that just about every actor in Hollywood wanted to play the part of the novel’s alcoholic hero, Frank Galvin. Frank Sinatra called about it, and even Cary Grant got in touch, seemingly willing to come out of retirement for the role. “Never before in our careers have we had a property that attracted that kind of attention,” Richard Zanuck told me.

While they were running 20th Century Fox, Zanuck and Brown had fought hard to keep Redford out of co-starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (they preferred Steve McQueen). Now they badly wanted his box office potency for The Verdict.

At first Redford seemed anxious to play Galvin. But then trouble started. Redford disliked David Mamet’s script. Other writers came and went. Redford still wasn’t happy. It eventually became apparent to Zanuck and Brown that their star did not want to tarnish his carefully honed movie star image. Specifically he did not want to play a drunk. “When he realized he’d have to let the warts show, let it all hang out, then he backed off,” Zanuck said. “Every time a scene was written in which he looked boozy and ill-kempt, unshaven, he resisted. He wanted to be a family man…a kind of boy scout version of the character. That was not what we conceived at all.”

Eventually, Zanuck and Brown were forced to do what almost never happens to a movie star of Redford’s magnitude: They fired him. “We were sick of it, quite frankly,” recalled Zanuck. Ironically, the producers then turned to Redford’s good friend Paul Newman. The Verdict won him an Academy Award nomination.

Maybe Redford was right after all. Audiences didn’t want to see him drunk. They flocked to the two sweeping romantic dramas he made after The Verdict, The Natural and Out of Africa. Redford clean shaven and blond, cast in a golden light, the last romantic movie star doing what he did best.

Many years after that brief New York encounter, I was present in Toronto when Robert Redford showed up late (notoriously, he always on what was known as Redford Time) to receive a donation for his Sundance Institute. He entered the room, a scarf was draped around his neck, his blondish hair was properly tousled, there was no security, no entourage just, briefly…Robert Redford.

If on the rare occasion anyone cares enough to ask, of all the novels I have written, I always answer that Magic Man is my favorite, the love of my ill-starred literary life.

As soon as I say this I am usually rewarded with a blank stare and a nervous half-smile. Magic Man?

The fight to get Magic Man published is a saga of hope and heartbreak. The hope is you have written a great novel, an international bestseller that will place you firmly on the literary map. The heartbreak is the realization you haven’t.

 Here is the story: A mysterious young man named Brae Orrack arrives in Venice, California, in 1928. He claims to be a magic man who can turn stones into bees and is under a curse: he will die unless he finds true love. Brae, in need of money, becomes the chauffeur and bodyguard for a young actor named Gary Cooper. He enters the glamorous and chaotic world of early Hollywood, where he encounters real-life figures like Clara Bow and George Raft, and gets involved with gangsters and bootleggers.

An adventure novel, a fantasy, and a love story that I began writing while living in Los Angeles. Over the four years I worked on the book, it underwent many incarnations and a lot of frustration. What kept me going was the joy not only of taking the story to places I never would have imagined but also in doing the period research at the Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and in the archives of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.

I finally finished a version of the book after my wife Kathy and I moved to Montreal. Trepidatiously,  I turned it over to my longtime agents, Francis Hanna and her husband Bill. They moved heaven and earth attempting to sell it in Canada and the U.S. To their everlasting credit, they never gave up. Bill pulled off some real life magic when he finally sold Magic Man to St. Martin’s Press in New York. A moment of euphoria was followed by the usual intrusion of stomach-churning reality.

The advance St. Martin’s Press offered was a pittance and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, signalled then and there they weren’t going to put much effort into marketing the book. The editor, Pete Wolverton—I was one of two hundred and fifty books Pitbull Pete, as one author nicknamed him, would be handling that year—liked the book but hated the ending. Months of rewrites ensued. The ending changed. The book only got better. Pitbull Pete was eventually, well, at least satisfied. Then silence to the point where I was certain they weren’t going to publish the book. Pitbull Pete was reassuring—it would be published.

Three years after the manuscript landed on Pete Wolverton’s desk, and seven years after I started to write it, Magic Man was finally a reality. Very  quietly. I was told a publicist would get in touch. No publicist ever did.

 The day of its publication, I happened to be in Chicago. I dropped into a big downtown bookstore. They were sure they had a copy in stock. A…copy? They tried their best, they searched high and low over the immense store, but they couldn’t find the book. They were sure they had it. Somewhere. Many apologies. A year or so later, I finally came across a single copy in Toronto’s The World’s Biggest Bookstore. It was the only time I ever saw the book in an actual bookstore. Every time I think about this, I still scratch my head. Why did St. Martin’s Press even bother?

The reviews were mixed. The book trade bible, Kirkus Reviews, gave it a starred review: “Beautiful women and gangsters, movie stars and dictators all rub shoulders in this delicious tongue-in-cheek debut set in 1920s Hollywood…. Base works his own magic as he crisply choreographs the entrances and exits of his large cast. There will be thrills aplenty before we are done, and disillusionment, but never defeat for the resilient Brae. A page-turner, spiffy and irresistible.”

In Canada, the Edmonton Journal liked it: “It takes off with relentless speed, refusing to permit us to catch our breath. Never boring, Magic Man makes for an entertaining and engrossing tale…”

But other reviews were less enthusiastic. The Globe and Mail thought the period detail was okay but otherwise… Entertainment Weekly, which could have made a difference with booksellers, gave it a no-sale B minus. In my dreams that B minus still comes back to haunt me.

Not that any of it made much difference when all was said and quickly done. No matter what happened to it—and nothing much did—I loved Magic Man then and I love it still. For me it said all the things I had always wanted to say about love and movies, the two things I could never have gotten this far in life without.

On Sunday I will be at the Eden Mills Writers Festival in the Ontario town of Eden Mills, courtesy of my good friend Stephen Froom. I will have copies of Magic Man with me. Like Brae Orrack, the hero of the book, I refuse to give up. Hope and heartbreak—the essence of life and book publishing.

If you are in Eden Mills this weekend, please drop by. I’m the guy with the big smile, holding a book, hoping…

The Toronto International Film Festival as it is now known, celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. From someone who, to paraphrase Nora Ephron, was a mere wallflower at the orgy—er—festival during those early years, a few memories…

The Corner Table: Bill Marshall pretty much owned the corner table at Club Twenty-Two (nick-named the two-two) Toronto’s most fashionable and celebrity friendly watering hole located inside the Windsor Arms Hotel. Watching from afar before I knew him, I was somewhat in awe. Bill spoke in a low, gruff growl so that you had to pay attention and he did not suffer fools gladly—as I found out on occasion. Meeting him, it wasn’t hard to believe he was the smartest guy in the room. He held court at the 2-2 most nights, often joined by his partner in crime, Henk Van der Kolk, a cowboy hat-wearing lawyer named Dusty Cohl, and the writer Tom Hedley who would go on to originate the screenplay for the hit Flashdance. Bill and Henk were movie producers at a time when Hollywood North was flourishing. They would have their biggest success with Outrageous in 1977. What you could not have imagined was anyone at that corner table coming up with the notion for a movie festival. What the hell was that all about? I wondered when I first heard the idea being floated.

From the (Carlton) Terrace: Back in the days when I was kicking around the Cannes Film Festival, everyone came to the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, and at one point or another, everyone seemed to find their way to Dusty Cohl’s table. Surrounded by an everchanging cast of characters, wearing his trademark black cowboy hat,  he was hard to miss. It helped that Dusty was buying the drinks and remained something of a mystery in a place where everyone else was only too eager to let you know who they were. Invariably, as soon as Dusty got up to leave, someone would lean over and whisper to me: Exactly who is Dusty? I always replied, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Affectionately, Henky-Panky: Henk Van der Kolk, christened “Henky-Panky” one evening at the Twenty-Two, avuncular and courtly, the gentlest and least flamboyant of the three founders. That constant twinkle in his eye was a reminder he wouldn’t be taking festivals or life too seriously. My first wife, Lynda, and I became good friends with Henk and his wife, Yanka, a popular Toronto model and one of the city’s great beauties. They were among the guests at our wedding. Yanka dazzled as always. If you saw the wedding photos you would have thought Yanka married Lynda.

The Miracle Workers: Bill, Dusty, and Henk may have founded the festival, but it was the combination of Wayne Clarkson and Helga Stephenson who provided the organizational gravitas and created the required daily miracles. Watching them in action was an object lesson in retaining one’s cool while overcoming the challenges and near catastrophes that always seemed to be flaring up. Everyone almost immediately fell in love with Helga. Two minutes after you met Wayne, he made you believe you were his best friend in the world. I could never resist either of them.

The Secret Weapon: The Paris-based American critic (and occasional actor), David Overbey, was, I would argue, as responsible as anyone for the early success of the festival. David introduced Asian cinema to North America, the films of the German director Reiner Werner Fassbinder as well as the Hong Kong action director John Woo. He was invaluable in helping to establish Toronto at the Cannes Film Festival. An extraordinary character, David was a combination of acerbic wit, sharp intelligence, and unflappable arrogance. Early one morning in Cannes, Steven Spielberg screened for the press his latest film. No one knew a thing about it except the title, E.T.  When it ended, there was a moment of complete silence in the theatre as everyone took in the magic of what they had just experienced. Everyone except David. As the lights went up, he sprang to his feet and announced: “Well! What a piece of shit that was!” Pure David.

The (Sort Of) Big Festival Story Everyone Missed: As Helga Stephenson and I were leaving the Park Plaza Hotel with Lee Majors one year, we encountered Ryan O’Neal of Love Story fame. Lee was the star of the hit TV series Six Million Dollar Man and the husband of actress Farrah Fawcett-Majors, at the time, thanks to her bestselling poster, America’s pinup icon. Lee and Ryan exchanged greetings. Ryan mentioned that he was leaving Toronto the next day. Lee said he was staying on to shoot a movie. We all got on the elevator together. As it started down, Lee turned to Ryan. “Listen,” he said, “when you get back to L.A. will you do me a favor and stop in and see Farrah, make sure she’s all right?” Ryan quickly agreed. In fact, Ryan did as he promised. The rest was a whole lot of tabloid history.

The Magnificent Six: Bill and Dusty and David are gone now but Henk, Wayne and Helga carry on. Fifty years later it is impossible to imagine a film festival in Toronto without those six. They were the perfect combination of the talent, hutzpah and audacity needed back then. In different ways I adored them all. This week I’ll be lifting a kir royale in celebration of what they achieved.

A kir royale? It’s all right. They will know what I mean.

The news of the death of former Lieutenant Governor and philanthropist Hilary Weston sent my mind spinning back to the night Hilary and her husband Galen Weston dined with me and my wife, Kathy. The night the four of us became best friends forever.

By happenstance, I found myself seated next to Galen Weston at what turned out to be the last lunch hosted by the Hollywood columnist George Christy as part of the Toronto Film Festival.

The two of us were seated with Lynne St. David, an old friend of mine and the wife of the great filmmaker Norman Jewison.

At the time, Galen maintained a controlling interest in Loblaws Companies and was the second (or third?) richest man in Canada.

When I mentioned to him that my wife was a vice-president at Loblaws, he immediately perked up. For the next three hours as the luncheon droned on, Lynne and Galen and I ignored everyone else, laughing and chatting away, having a whale of a time. Galen turned out to be a delightfully genial luncheon companion.

When lunch was over, Galen took me aside and said, This has been so much fun. Why don’t you and your wife have dinner with Hilary and me?

When I told Kathy I had lunched with Galen Weston and he wanted to get together for dinner, she didn’t quite turn white, but it was close. She looked at me in disbelief and said, “What?”

We both consoled ourselves that, yes, lunch was a lot of fun, but there was no way we would be getting together any time soon with the Westons.

Two weeks later, the phone rang. It was Galen Weston. Let’s figure out a date for when we can get together for that dinner we talked about, he said.

When Kathy arrived home that evening, I told her about the phone call. We were having dinner with the Westons. She said, “What?”

As the date approached, I was sure Galen would cancel. He didn’t. Instead, he called Kathy at Loblaws’ Mississauga, Ontario headquarters and invited her to his office.

They chatted for a time and then Galen announced he wanted to see where Kathy worked. Together, they went down to her desk. Everyone she worked with was agog—the owner of the company hanging around with Kathy.

On a stormy, blustery November night, we met the Westons at what they said was their favorite downtown Toronto restaurant. They were already seated when we arrived, both sipping on cosmopolitan cocktails. They greeted us like long lost friends. Whatever else they were good at, they were superb at putting their guests at ease.

In the subdued warmth of the restaurant, while a storm howled outside, there was endless conversation punctuated with lots of laughter. An onlooker might well have mistaken us for four friends who had known each other forever.

Eventually, Galen took control of Kathy for a tête à tête about her views on Loblaws. I was seconded to Hilary. Now I have to say that my memory of her is of a slightly batty but charming conversationalist.

While Kathy and Galen talked serious supermarket business, Hilary and I furiously dropped names. For example, when I let it out that I had recently worked on a script in Rome with director John Boorman, she countered excitedly that the Boormans were neighbors and close friends in Ireland!

As the evening drew to a close, Galen was inviting us to Windsor. Dummy that I was, I initially thought he was talking about Windsor, Ontario. On the verge of announcing that I had once worked in Windsor, in the nick of time it became apparent they were referring to the very high-end village they had created north of Palm Beach, named, not after the Ontario City, but their place in Windsor Great Park outside London.

By the time we hugged and said our goodbyes, Hilary and Galen were our new best friends forever. Why, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they arranged to have us move in with them.

Still laughing away and promising to keep in touch, they disappeared through the snow and into their chauffeured limo waiting outside the restaurant.

We never heard from them again.

But for a few hours on that snowy night, they were our very best friends in the whole world.

I

It is not easy to get into the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Tickets are limited. A new batch becomes available every few weeks at 10 a.m., Amsterdam time. We got up at six a.m. to secure ours. They were gone in two hours.

 The musings and recollections of a teenaged girl about life in the place where she and her parents hid from the Nazis during the worst days of the Holocaust, has continued to attract and fascinate the world for more than eighty years. The Diary of a Young Girl has been published in seventy-five languages and sold over thirty million copies since its publication in 1949.

The space that Anne referred to as the secret annex, was located in the back of a storage warehouse operated by Otto Frank, Anne’s German-born Jewish father. It has been transformed into a museum built around the original two floors where eight people were crammed together: Otto and his wife, Anne and her older sister, Margot. They were joined by the van Pels and their son, Peter. The eighth occupant was a dentist named Fritz Pfeffer, a curious addition since the others hardly knew him.

With help from friends and Otto’s employees, the group hid together for two years from 1942, when the Nazis started rounding up Jews, to 1944 when the family was discovered and sent off to Auschwitz.

During that time, Anne, who had a burning desire to become a writer, kept herself sane filling pages with her tiny handwriting, often critically detailing the daily frustrations, irritations, and arguments of eight people surviving together in constant fear.

Today, the visitor squeezes through the entranceway that was hidden from view by a specially built bookshelf and crawls up the steep, narrow staircase into the living quarters (the photo below shows the common room where the group gathered).

There is an eerie sensation as you pause in the hiding place where Anne wrote the diary that has resulted in millions of book sales, plays, and at least thirty film and television productions, including a major Hollywood movie directed by George Stevens in 1959.

These tiny rooms, lit dimly, preserved much as they were in 1944, are real enough. At the same time you have difficulty shaking off the surreal reality of a modern tourist attraction where you are pushed and pummeled by visitors all anxious to have the same experience.

The modern glass structure encased around the original building does not help the atmosphere, nor does the comfortable open-air cafeteria, and the nicely appointed Anne Frank gift shop. Here you can purchase, among other items, copies in many languages of her diary, pictures of Anne on postcards, a cardboard model of the secret annex, an Anne Frank jigsaw puzzle, and, wouldn’t you know it, an Anne Frank tote bag.

What Otto Frank would have thought of all this is anyone’s guess. He was the only member of the group who survived the death camps. Only after he was back in Amsterdam did he learn that everyone else had perished. Anne died of spotted typhus at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. She was fifteen.

A friend who had found Anne’s diary in the annex after the arrests held on to it until Otto returned. When he finally brought himself to read it, he couldn’t quite believe this was his daughter. He decided to try and get it published. After a number of false starts and rejections, Diary of a Young Girl was eventually published in 1949. International acclaim soon followed.

Otto, who died in 1980 at the age of 91, did a great deal of editing and trimming to amalgamate the two versions Anne created into a single publishable book. That has fuelled accusations that he wrote the diaries himself. It got to the point where handwriting experts were brought in to verify their authenticity. The original notebooks are on display at the museum.

Curiously, the subject of how Anne and the others were discovered by Dutch police on August 4, 1944, is not addressed in the museum (more information is available on its website). They were all arrested and sent to Auschwitz on what, ironically, was the last train carrying Jews out of Amsterdam. Viewing the artfully constructed bookcase, it is hard to imagine how Anne and her family could have been found—unless they were betrayed. Certainly, that is what Otto Frank believed.

But then who would have betrayed them? All sorts of theories and suspects have been suggested over the years, usually involving an informant calling the police, but nothing has been clearly proven.

A recent investigation by the Anne Frank House suggested an alternative: Police looking for ration-book fraud at the warehouse complex might have stumbled upon the hidden annex in the course of their investigation. Except when you look at that bookshelf, it seems unlikely the hiding place would have been discovered by accident.

Visitors in the summer of 2025 are probably unaware of the mysteries that still swirl around Anne Frank’s life and death. The more than one million people who annually visit the museum are simply drawn to the place where a young girl hid and wrote the diary that created the story that places the Holocaust into intimate tragic focus and continues to inspire generation after generation.

Hard to get into the Anne Frank House; impossible to  leave, unmoved.