The singer Glenn Yarbrough died in August at the age of eighty-six after suffering from dementia for years. His voice and his songs were such a pivotal influence on my adolescence, I can’t imagine how I missed the news of…
Blog Archives
Baby, The Rain Must Fall: Remembering Glenn Yarbrough
Tagged with: Baby The Rain Must Fall, Everly Brothers, Glenn Yarbrough, Lee Remick, Ottawa Journal, Rod McKuen, Rose, Stanyan Street, Steve McQueen, The Limeliters, The Warm and Gentle Girls, Toronto Star
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Bumping Into O.J. Simpson
Arriving on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno—the downtown Bank of America building was standing in for the film’s fiery skyscraper—there was no one around. In the Bank of America lobby I found extras dressed to look like…
Back To School–Without My Turtleneck
I hated high school. All the more ironic, then, to find myself, nearly fifty years after I had successfully made my escape, back inside the Gulag of my youth. The Brockville Collegiate Institute (BCI, as we called it) celebrated its one hundred and twenty-fifth…
Tagged with: Brockville, Brockville Collegiate Institute, high school, Ogdensburg, President Kennedy, reunion, St. Lawrence River, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape
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Remembering Paul Newman
Paul Newman was handing out popcorn late one cold night on the San Francisco set of The Towering Inferno. The disaster film–the world’s tallest skyscraper is on fire–that was to become 1974’s biggest hit was in its final production stages,…
Tagged with: Absence of Malice, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, California Street, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway, Harper, Hombre, Hud, James Dean, Joanne Woodward, John Guillerman, Newman's Own, O.J. Simpson, Paul Newman, Sally Field, San Francisco, Sidney Lumet, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Steve McQueen, Sydney Pollack, The Bank of America building, The Cannes International Film Festival, The Glass Menagerie, The Hustler, The Long Hot Summer, The Sting, The Towering Inferno, The Verdict, William Holden
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Me and the Duke
In 1975, I went down to Newport Beach, California to interview John Wayne at the rambling seaside bungalow where he had lived for ten years. Wayne promptly pumped me full of tequila, a drink I had never had before, and…
Tagged with: Brannigan, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Newport Beach, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, The Searchers, The Shootist, The Toronto Sun
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Norman
My favorite Norman Jewison movie is Gaily, Gaily. I was only twenty and just starting out in the newspaper business when I saw it in 1969. I, of course, identified with the movie’s innocent reporter-protagonist, played by a very young…
Tagged with: Bell Lightbox, Doris Day, Hollywood, In The Heat of the Night, Moonstruck, Norman Jewison, Steve McQueen, The Cincinnati Kid, TIFF
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