Ron Base's Blog

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.

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…