Ron Base's Blog

Dolly Parton’s legendary cleavage loomed below me as I bent over her, fumbling to attach a clip-on microphone. Seated on a love seat in her suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1984, Dolly was highly amused by my efforts.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes twinkling mischievously, “you can stick your hand down there, go ahead.”

All these years later, I am able to report that I did not stick my hand down Dolly Parton’s cleavage. But I did have a lot of fun interviewing her. She was a combination of flirtatious Barbie Doll sex symbol and serious businesswoman, gimlet-eyed about Hollywood and determined not to as she said, “put up with bullshit from anyone.”

The night before we talked,, she had attended the  world premiere of Rhinestone, the first movie she had done in two years. She posed for photographs with Joan Collins (who was not in the movie) signing autographs and asking everyone she met, “How’d y’all like the picture?” The critics present, who’d had to sit through the excruciating comedy that co-starred Sylvester Stallone, ran for the Hollywood Hills when that question came up.

At the time, curiously enough, Dolly saw Rhinestone as redemptive after the unhappiness she experienced making The Best Little Whore House in Texas with Burt Reynolds. After that, she doubted she would make more movies but she came back to make Rhinestone because she thought it a good project, and, she added with her usual honesty, “I needed the money.”

She never had any doubts that she would become a movie star. “No, I expected it,” she said forthrightly. “But it pleases me. I always had such big high hopes. I had been offered lots of movies before, but I didn’t want ’em. And then when 9 to 5  came, I thought, This feels right, this is the smart thing to do because if it’s a great success, I can take a lot of credit for it. If it’s a big failure I can blame it all on Jane Fonda.” Her giggle was delightful as she added, “She’s a big star.”

“But I like being a movie star,” she continued. “I like the end product, the doors that it can open, and the money that one can make. But it’s slow and a little bit boring waitin’ around and waitin’ around.”

She was well aware of the downside of stardom. “You gotta be on guard all the time because they will cut your throat if you let ‘em. But they ain’t gettin’ that close to me.”

I couldn’t help thinking at the time that, unlike so many others, I had gotten pretty darned close to Dolly Parton. Hearing of her death at the age of eighty, I thought fondly of that afternoon with her on a love seat at the Beverly Wilshire.

And that moment when…well, never mind.

The young guy I spoke to while pumping gas wanted to know what I was up to for the weekend. “I’m on my way to Niagara Falls to see Jerry Seinfeld,” I said.

“You mean the artist?” replied the young guy.

“No, he’s a comedian,” I answered.

The Uber driver taking us to Fallsview Casino thought Jerry was a singer doing a concert.

“No, he’s a comedian,” I informed him.

The five thousand people in the vast OLG Theatre at the Fallsview Casino Friday night certainly know him. Seinfeld, the situation comedy that Jerry co-created (with Larry David) and starred in for nine seasons, became a television phenomenon that turned Jerry into a TV superstar and remains hugely popular in reruns to this day.

As soon as Jerry, nattily attired in a dark suit and tie, bounced on stage, his audience started laughing.  Jerry kept everyone in that helpless state for the next hour.

You would not necessarily describe Jerry as angry at the world, although it occasionally seemed that way. More accurate to report that he was in fine  grumpy form about the minor inconveniences of life in general. He would prefer to be left alone and not have to talk to anyone. Talking to people is boring, he explained, yet he feels compelled to act as though he is interested when he is not.

When a woman cried out that she loved Jerry, he looked pleased. “I love you too,” he called back. “This is the perfect relationship. I love you. You love me. And we will never meet.”

Jerry does not like cellphones. He does not like streaming television. He mindlessly watches streaming shows although, like the rest of us, he never can remember what they are about—one more episode to go, one person left to kill. Then something else starts the process all over again.

He does not dislike AI. It sort of pleases him. For centuries all dumb people had to worry about was I. Now A has been invented for to do the thinking for dumb people.

He has been married for twenty-six years. His wife is the shark always moving forward. He is the dolphin leaping mindlessly out of the water. From the moment Jerry married, he learned to never under any circumstances ask  a question. When he sees something new in the house, he does not ask where it came from. It’s there now. That’s all he needs to know. When something disappears, he does not ask where it went. What’s the use? It’s gone.

He does not like to go anywhere. But when his wife tells him where to go, he goes. Even though he doesn’t like being there.

Cities grow and expand. Towering buildings are constructed filled with people and more people. Yet despite all these people, nobody ever builds a new cemetery. Where do they put all those people once they are no longer here?

Coffee saves Jerry from a miserably mundane life. He wakes up each morning dreading the day. With a cup of coffee, he is able to endure whatever is thrown at him. He hates tea, warm water with honey added, he snarls. All those names for various flavors of tea? They sound like the names of hookers in a bayou brothel.

At the end of the hour Jerry said he had to leave. The  audience strenuously objected. He said he had to go to the bathroom. That led to a rant about bathroom stalls. Why are they stalls? Why are their walls not built to the floor?

Good question to send us all home with.

On the way back to our hotel, the Uber driver asked if we’d had a good evening. I said my wife, Kathy, and I had just seen Jerry Seinfeld. We had never laughed so hard.

The Uber driver wanted to know who Jerry Seinfeld was.

Not to drop names (heh-heh) but many years ago I met the American playwright Arthur Miller whose seminal work, Death of a Salesman has been revived this summer at the Stratford Festival.

I also wrote and co-produced a thriller titled First Degree where I got to know Tom McCamus, who plays Willy Loman in the Stratford production, and who co-starred in the film with Rob Lowe.

When Arthur Miller walked into the room, you knew immediately why Marilyn Monroe would fall in love and marry him. He was tall and slim and quietly charismatic. The photos of him with Marilyn did him no justice at all.

When Tom McCamus walked into the room to audition for First Degree, you knew immediately there was something very special about him as an actor. Rob Lowe may have been the film’s star, but the best performance, by far, was given by Tom. He even got away with delivering the most cringe-worthy line in the movie. I didn’t write it, the director added it. In a scene where Tom and Rob are conducting an investigation, Tom was called upon to turn to Rob and say: “I’m reading your mail.” I still think about that line and groan every time.

All these years and hundreds of days and nights in a theatre, not to mention spending time with Arthur Miller, I had never seen Death of a Salesman. Finally, Kathy and I attended a sold-out Sunday matinee at the Avon theatre. What a revelation!

Not only is it a fine production, but Tom as the aging, failing Brooklyn salesman riding on a smile and a shoeshine, delivers one of the most powerful performances I have ever seen on a stage. This is Tom’s nineteenth season at Stratford. I have seen him in different plays at Stratford and at the Shaw Festival, always excellent, but never have I seen him inhabit a role the way he inhabits Willy.

It is staggering to watch him slowly disintegrating before our eyes. Attention must be paid: This is a great Canadian actor working at the very top of his game. If Tom were anywhere else in the world, he would be a celebrated international star. Instead, he toils magnificently and mostly anonymously in Stratford. On that stage that afternoon, he was a star of the brightest magnitude— unforgettable.

I stumbled out of the Avon and did what you do in the 21st century to honour a splendid actor in a play first produced in 1949—I bought the Death of a Salesman T-shirt. Arthur Miller is probably rolling in his grave, but I am proudly wearing Tom McCamus on my chest.

Attention, after all, must be paid.

Inside the ancient confines of Victoria University on the University of Toronto campus this past weekend, over fifty authors gathered at MOTIVE, Crime and Mystery Festival, to investigate the mystery of writing mysteries.

I was invited to attend. My author-daughter Erin Ruddy came along to hold my hand and to let readers know about her latest thriller, Pitch Dark Night, to be published next year.

Bright and early Sunday morning, I was onstage with acclaimed author Sujata Massey whose novels are set in 1920s India. She was in town with her fifth book in her Perveen Mistry series, The Star from Calcutta.

My job was to sound very interesting talking about the fifth book in my Priscilla Tempest series, Midnight at the Savoy, set at the iconic London hotel in the late 1960s. We were overseen by our delightful inquisitor, Wendy O’Brien.

To my surprise, the Alumni Hall was packed. Sujata was articulate and insightful; I babbled away as best I could. Wendy ably kept us both on track and the hour flew by.

Afterwards, we managed to convince a few readers to buy our books. I kept looking at Sujata out of the corner of my eye. I can’t say for sure, but I think she sold more books than I did.

I must say it was somewhat daunting to be in a confined space with so many who really do care who murdered Roger Ackroyd. Everyone I encountered and listened to over the two days I attended, struck an optimistic note about what they do.

Everyone on the various panels was celebrated—no bad mystery writers at MOTIVE! The producers, Zain Ahmed and Hani Yakan, were everywhere making sure we all felt very important and well cared for. They succeeded admirably. My wife, Kathy, had to take me aside and tell me to settle down. I was important she said, but not that important.

The shortcomings of publishers, meagre book sales, the impossibility of earning a living at what we all love to do, were not subjects for discussion, at least not as far as I could see.

The AI controversy currently roiling publishing circles was not talked about at all during the sessions I attended. When I briefly brought AI up Sunday morning, there was suddenly a noticeable tension in the hall.

What did I take away from a weekend of mystery writers talking? The sort of hard-boiled mystery I grew up with, the pulp fiction tough-guy private detectives created by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Mickey Spillane have disappeared down the mean streets they once dominated.

The protagonists who inhabit today’s mystery novels are female, including Priscilla Tempest, the plucky heroine of my Savoy series. This is hardly surprising since most of the mystery readers—and this is true of fiction in general—are women. I know there were men present at the festival, I was one of them, after all, but, again not surprising, women dominated.

I was happy to slip briefly among them. Wondering who murdered Roger Ackroyd.

Sort of.

In Saint-Tropez one evening recently a large crowd gathered in the square next to the Gendarmerie Nationale, a former Gendarme headquarters now a museum devoted to French cinema, to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of And God Created Woman.

If you are not familiar with it, this is the 1956 film that not only put on the international map Saint- Tropez, until then a Mediterranean fishing village, but it also created the international phenomenon that is Brigitte Bardot.

Seventy years later, Bardot is everywhere in Saint-Tropez. She lived here until her death in December 2025 at the age of ninety-one. The elderly Bardot, the hard-right conservative, anti-Muslim animal activist, is not mentioned. Instead, BB, the youthful symbol of the sexual revolution is celebrated everywhere—in shop windows, on magazine covers, posters, photos, fashionable T-shirts and handbags.

She is a Venus in gold curled on a half-shall in front of the Gendarmerie, created by the Italian comic book artist Milo Manara with a nod to Botticelli. A new exhibition devoted to her and And God Created Woman, recounts how the young screenwriter Roger Vadim came to direct his first film with his twenty-two-year-old wife as its star.

Vadim based his screenplay on a news item about a woman who was the mistress of three different brothers and ended up killing one of them. The woman became the seductive Juliette, a free-spirited girl in Saint-Tropez who lives and loves and plays with the affections of three brothers and a suave older millionaire played by the German-Austrian actor, Curd Jergens.

Movie-making life imitated art when Bardot fell in love with one of the brothers, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Their affair effectively ended her marriage to Vadim. The film, shot in widescreen and color, unusual for a French film of the time, became a worldwide success and overnight turned Bardot into the symbol of freedom and sexuality she never escaped.

The exhibit argues that And God Created Woman was the precursor to what became in the 1960s the French Nouvelle Vague or New Wave of cinema. It opened the way for such auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. None of Vadim’s other films had the same impact as his first. Seen today it is embarrassingly amateurish. For those reasons it is difficult to regard Vadim as one of the fathers of modern French cinema. One cannot simply say he is all but forgotten—he is plain forgotten.

Bardot never left France and had no interest in Hollywood. An enduring icon known around the world, the eternal BB, yet ironically most people have never seen any of the forty-seven movies she made before retiring in 1973.

She is buried with her parents and grandparents at Cimetière Marin de Saint Tropez, bordering the Mediterranean. Her grave is not hard to find. It overflows with flowers and photographs as well as stuffed toy seals in memory of her campaign to end the slaughter of seal pups in Northern Newfoundland. She receives a constant flow of visitors.

Not far away is the man who made her famous. Roger Vadim died in 2000 at the age of seventy-two. All five of his wives, including Bardot and Jane Fonda, attended his funeral.

You eventually find him by accident after a long search. A few stones adorn the top of his burial vault. A single word is etched in gold lettering: Vadim.

There are no visitors.

On his long and difficult mystery train ride to Hollywood, Ray Bennett stopped off in Windsor, Ontario so we could become friends for a lifetime.

His epic journey from his working-class English roots to encounters with some of the world’s most famous stars is recounted in his just published memoir, Mystery Train to Hollywood: A Memoir of Life Among the Stars. It is a remarkable tale of a remarkable life.

 Ray drops famous names in much the same way a monsoonal storm dispenses raindrops. I show up in the deluge every so often as he passes on his way to have lunch with someone famous, possibly a lovely actress bestowing a thankful kiss.

From the moment I met him in the Windsor Star’s newsroom where we were both reporters and he came over to introduce himself, what struck me about Ray was his confidence. Back then he would arrive at a party, decide he didn’t like the music and change it to something he did. You talk about hutzpah.

If anyone was born to be a critic, it was Ray. To this day, he is absolutely sure of his opinion and everyone else, well, what do they know? This indestructible belief in one’s self is an indispensable necessity when one is either a critic or an editor and Ray, throughout his professional life, was very good at being both.

Growing up in Ashford Kent, the son of a railway man, he was obsessed with movies and yearned to go to Hollywood to meet Roy Rogers. What helped to cement our friendship, I think, was that we shared both those ambitions, although I do have to say I met Roy first.

Even though we grew up in distant small towns far removed from each other, we were joined together by our shared love for TV’s The Cisco Kid and his companion, Pancho.  Ray was Cisco, I was Pancho. Or was it the other way around? Thus our nicknames: Raymondo and Ronaldo. Out to conquer the world. Or at least get as far as Hollywood. Why Raymondo and Ronaldo didn’t just take the damn train to Hollywood and be done with it is the ongoing much-discussed mystery of our lives.

Ray’s journey to achieve his boyhood dreams took him through newspapers in England, work at a weekly entertainment magazine in London, and then Canada, mostly at the Windsor Star, before landing in Toronto to become managing editor of the Canadian edition of TV Guide. The magazine enabled him to finally reach Los Angeles—the Hollywood of his boyhood dreams.

Much of that dream Hollywood didn’t disappoint—lots of interviews with delightfully famous people—but as anyone who lives in Los Angeles quickly learns,  the dreams soon get ambushed by reality. You go up to the mountaintop to chat with the rich and famous, and they are invariably charming and welcoming. But then you go back down the mountain to the flatlands where real life lurks.

Ray writes more-or-less candidly about his sometimes messy personal life in those years, his troubled, ultimately tragic, marriage to country singer Charlie Rich’s daughter, Renée; his money problems;  the jobs that kept slipping away; the restless nomadic life he ended up leading; and finally, the ongoing miracle of survival that has been his long fight with prostate cancer.

When the gods wish to destroy you, they first make you go to Hollywood.

Except the gods could not destroy Ray. That confidence I saw early in our friendship, his inextinguishable optimism, his ability to keep whistling past the graveyard no matter what, have always seen him through.

Ironically, he found his greatest success not in Hollywood but in London. As the Hollywood Reporter’s European Arts Editor, he had what I used to tell him was the best job in the world, at least for Ray. He was charged with doing reviews of all the West End theatre shows, the new movies, supplemented, of course, with lots of famous shoulders to rub. While attending the major film and music festivals in Europe, he stayed in the best hotels, dined in the finest restaurants, and drank scotch with Sean Connery.

He even found his way for years to Toronto for its film festival which allowed him to visit his two children and keep in touch with me so I could make my annual attempt to correct his views on life and films—with no success whatsoever.

 Currently, Ray is lodged comfortably in the Hampshire countryside of southwest Britain, the last place I ever expected to find him, unabashed city boy that he is. A bearded octogenarian, quite elegant in the white Borsalino hat he sometimes favors,  Ray is a bit more cantankerous, still ferociously convinced of his own opinion, still a resolute whistler past the graveyard, and after nearly sixty years still my dear friend—now and forever Raymondo and Ronaldo!

(Mystery Train to Hollywood, with a revised and improved cover, is once again available worldwide on Amazon platforms.)

The first hardcover book I ever bought was Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton. It had a cover wrapped in reflective silver foil that made it stand out dramatically, highly unusual for a novel published in 1966—created by the noted British designer Raymond Hawkey, a friend of Deighton’s.

By then, Len Deighton was a New York Times bestseller. His first spy novel, The Ipcress File, featuring a nameless, wonderfully anti-establishment anti-hero, was already one of my favorites, and I loved the movie version that helped make Michael Caine a movie star. Harry Palmer, the name bestowed for the film, fit Caine like a glove.

I bought Billion Dollar Brain at the little bookstore on King Street in Brockville, directly across from where I lived in an apartment above the Bank of Commerce branch my father managed. In barely legible pencil the bookstore staff had written the book’s list price: $4.65.

I still have my copy of Billion Dollar Brain. I’m told that the foil-wrapped first edition sells on the rare-book market for as much as three hundred and fifty dollars. It’s not for sale.

 I brought it out when I heard the other day that Deighton had died at the age of ninety-seven. The novel’s opening line is vintage Deighton: “It was the morning of my hundredth birthday.”

In his early works—I still have the original Penguin paperback of his second novel, Horse Under Water—Deighton borrowed the intoxicatingly cynical humor and descriptive cleverness of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and added it to the spy thriller—better than Chandler, I would argue.

Here is how Deighton described his hero’s hotel room in Marrakech: “The rooms were finished in brown and cream paint and the wall decorations were notices telling me not to do certain things in French. From the next room came the sound of water dripping into the stained bath tub and the call of an indefatigable cricket…”

For a teenager struggling with dreams of someday becoming a novelist, Len Deighton was an immense influence. Like other early influences, it came with the hopeless sadness of understanding that, try as I might, I was never going to be as good as him.

But, oh, I could keep trying…and trying…

What was perhaps more surprising about Deighton—and somehow reassuring—is that unlike John Le Carré and Ian Fleming, the most notable practitioners of the spy thriller in the 1960s, in real life he had nothing to do with espionage.

He had been many interesting things, including a very good chef (he wrote several books about cookery), a commercial artist,  and an advertising executive but had never written anything before he sat down on vacation in France and knocked out a draft of The Ipcress File.

Le Carré once said that writers are frauds who make it up as they go along, the most under-valued part of novel writing. Deighton was the evidence of that: “The information room at Scotland Yard came through in seconds,” he wrote in The Ipcress File. “Shoreditch Police Station. I want to speak with an officer of 3H Security Clearnce or above; my authority is WOO(CP).”

This from a guy on vacation writing—for fun, he said—his first novel.

After the publication of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy in 1975, Deighton stayed away from the genre that made him rich and famous until  1983 when he published the first of nine Bernard Samson books. These are a bit more melancholic, Samson working for “London Central” aka MI6,  middle-aged and married. But Samson, thankfully, is no less cynical than the protagonist in the earlier books.

Although I read them all, I was never as enamored with the Samson novels. The mischievous energy that made the early books such great fun seemed to have slipped away. I didn’t have much interest in his non-espionage work (Bomber, Close-up, City of Gold) except for SS-GB, a thoroughly inventive reimaging of who won World War II (it wasn’t the Allies).

He gave up publishing books in 1996, deciding, despite all his success,  that it was “a mug’s game,” he did not have to participate in any longer. Le Carré, thankfully, never lost his appetite for the next novel, but sadly for us readers, Deighton did. Apparently, he continued to write, but not for publication. Now that he’s gone, perhaps we will get to see some of his unpublished work.

Nothing, however, can match the brilliance of his prose in those early novels that to this day I reread and cherish: “It was all very well telling oneself that Humprey Bogart had that sort of face,” he writes in Billion Dollar Brain. “But he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year, and a stand-in for the rough bits.”

I’m soon to go on vacation. In the South of France. I’ll be finishing a novel there.

I keep trying…

During his action-star heyday in the 1980s, I encountered Chuck Norris a couple of times.

Reading of Chuck’s  death at the age of eighty-six, brought back memories of a guy I thoroughly enjoyed.

He remembered my name when most stars didn’t remember you, let alone your name. He was welcoming and affable even though he knew I didn’t particularly like his movies. He would grin as he said, “You know Ron, I saw your review of Invasion, U.S.A. I didn’t agree with it…”

Even in impressively expensive cowboy boots, he was short, under six feet tall. If you hadn’t seen him on the big screen, you would not immediately think of him as either a tough guy or a former undefeated karate champion (he trained with his friend Bruce Lee and gave lessons to Steve McQueen, who urged him to get into movies).

He didn’t like me referring to him as the bargain-basement action star of the era, but that’s what he was, in company with Charles Bronson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Segal. His movies lacked the multi-million-dollar budgets enjoyed by the A-list action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and, of course, Clint Eastwood, the original modern-day action star whose squint was imitated by all pretenders to his throne, including Chuck Norris.

I talked to him again a couple of years later when he had signed a deal with the Cannon Group, the kings of independent lower-budget filmmaking in the 1980s. He was to receive twenty-five million dollars, the same amount as Sylvester Stallone got to make one movie. Chuck had to make fourteen of them over seven years. That is not to say he didn’t entertain thoughts of superstardom, although he did it with a certain amount of shyness, noting that Eastwood was in his fifties and co-starring with orangutans (in Every Which Way but Loose). “I’m only in my forties,” he reasoned. “There is a gap where the strong, heroic type is concerned. Clint, Burt (Reynolds), all of them are getting out of it. They’re tired. I’m not.” He was smiling when he added, “Besides, I haven’t reached their level of success.”

He never did, although Missing In Action, perhaps his biggest hit, did reach number one at the box office. “I love the action,” he said. “I like it, and I train extremely hard for it—three hours a day. I dread the day I wouldn’t be able to do all the action stuff.”

 The day came in the 1990s when the steam—and the surefire box office—oozed out of the action genre.   Chuck switched effortlessly to television for nine seasons of Walker, Texas Ranger without changing much of anything.  He remained as he said, “the strong, heroic type” who gave his audience confidence that as soon as he appeared on the screen everything would turn out okay.

Curiously enough, that’s kind of how I felt after talking to him. A nice guy, a pleasure to spend a little time with—and, hey, he always called me Ron.

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.