Working the Dead Beat (33 page)

Lindalee Tracey

Filmmaker and Writer

May 14, 1957 – October 19, 2006

T
HE CHILD OF
an alcoholic father and a chronically poor mother, Lindalee Tracey ran away from home as a young teenager, made a living as a stripper and an exotic dancer, and then forged an award-winning international career as a writer and filmmaker. Driven to make her mark, almost as though she had a presentiment that her time would be short, Tracey had an uncanny ability to document her own life in print and on film.

She could turn her gaze outwards as well as inwards, by connecting with her interview subjects on a visceral level in hardcore journalism that was as controversial as it was memorable. This approach — working at a story from the inside, from the perspective of a participant rather than the viewpoint of a detached, “objective” observer — is the signature of her work.

At first she was a willing contributor to the controversial film
Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography
, made in 1981 by Bonnie Sherr Klein and Dorothy Henault for Studio D, the women's unit of the National Film Board. When she saw the finished version, she felt betrayed and exploited.

“I'm reduced to porn queen, me, the softest thing in the film, the stripper who doesn't spread, immortalized as a cheap cliché and the ‘articulate' voice of all the live sex girls,” she wrote in her autobiography,
Growing Up Naked
. “Being moral, being decent, being honourable,” whether “you are in front or behind the camera,” were lessons, Tracey said, that she had derived from her experience with
Not a Love Story
.

Mischievous, determined, difficult, and passionate, Tracey was both theatrical — a trait she used to advantage as a burlesque dancer — and irrepressibly interested in other people, especially the poor and disadvantaged. Instead of averting her eyes or tossing a loonie into a plastic cup when she saw a panhandler, she would sit down on the curb and start a conversation that often ended in an invitation to a meal at the nearest eatery.

When her son, Liam, started asking questions about his dead grandfather, Tracey decided to make a documentary about the father who had abandoned her as a baby.
Abby, I Hardly Knew Ya
(1995) was a cinematic journey that took her through flophouses and long-term care facilities as she sought out her father's drinking buddies, and ended in the cemetery beside his grave. Although she had intended to mouth conventional bromides about absent fathers, she found invective pouring out of her mouth in torrents of rage as the cameras rolled. Another filmmaker would have yelled, “Cut!” and composed herself and started again. That might have been professional but it wouldn't have been authentic — and authentic was what Tracey was all about, as a filmmaker, a writer, and a person.

LINDALEE TRACEY WAS
born in Ottawa on May 14, 1957. Of Irish and Québécois ancestry, she was the elder child of Abby Tracey, a small-time criminal, and Yolande Tremblay, a government clerk. Her father took off when she was a few months old, reappeared briefly, and left again before her brother, Paul, was born a year later.

Home was an apartment above a diner in the west end of Ottawa. “There were no trees, no parks, just the incessant rattle and dark belching of warehouses, factories and rag plants,” she wrote in her first book,
On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada
(1993), “I remember a sweet unknowing before awareness and shame. The cheesy clumps of Kraft dinner and ketchup in the roof of my mouth. The gummy front-yard tar melting to my shoes in summer.” Her father was “a deadbeat, a man I didn't know,” while her mother “lived for years without her own room, without new clothes, with constant worry that lined her face early.”

Although proud of her mother's frugality and strength, Tracey was a rebellious teenager who ran away from home when she was fifteen. She rode the rails until she was picked up in Kamloops, British Columbia, and sent home. A year later she quit high school and moved to Montreal, where she began appearing in clubs as a stripper and an exotic dancer. She was sixteen.

“I just loved stripping; those were grown-up girls with real boobs, and I wanted to do that, too! It was the express lane into adulthood,” she explained to Marc Glassman in an interview in the fall 2006 issue of
pov
magazine. “We paraded our imperfections. We enjoyed them . . . The people who came to the clubs were often sorrowful folk; and we talked to them.”

She wrote a book,
Growing Up Naked: My Years in Bump and Grind
(1997), about her life as a peeler, working at a club called Eden under the stage name “Fonda Peters.” She was a runner-up in the Miss Nude Canada contest and was billed as “Canada's Top Young Show Exotic” on a tour of the United States before going back to Montreal in 1967 to work in an upscale club called SexOHrama. That's where, a few years later, she began organizing an annual striptease fundraiser for the Montreal Children's Hospital called “Tits for Tots.” “Certainly the mid-seventies was the last good time to be a stripper,” she wrote in
Growing Up Naked
, “before television swallowed our imagination, before the corporate agenda made us homogeneous and hard-core pornography spread its numbing venom.”

The publicity from
Not A Love Story
— the film was variously banned and lauded — helped her to find on-air work with a Montreal television show. “I wasn't supposed to do anything but wear tight clothes, but I brought on people like [abortionist Dr. Henry] Morgentaler,” she said in
pov
magazine. She began writing stories and columns for print, including articles about street people, notably a piece about homeless women — largely unexplored territory in the early 1980s — and worked in radio, hosting and co-producing
Montreal Tonight
on
CJAD
.

Tracey “went down the road” to Toronto to work for
CBC
's
As It Happens
and
Sunday Morning
in the mid-1980s. “She was very street wise, incredibly brash and an amazing thinker — very curious and very smart — and she could connect with almost anybody. I could send her into the most improbable places and she would find a way to get them to open up and bring back great tape,” according to Norm Bolen, then the executive producer of
Sunday Morning.
“She was a real word master,” said Bolen. At the same time, she had no deference for authority or experience, which could irritate her colleagues even as they were “dazzled” by her talent.

She met her husband, filmmaker Peter Raymont, in a documentary workshop at the old
CBC
Radio building on Jarvis Street in 1986. Like Tracey, he had been born in Ottawa, but on the right side of the tracks. His father, a colonel in the Canadian Army who had been awarded an
MBE
for his war service, was a senior staff officer and historian for the Department of National Defence.

Their similarities were bigger than their differences. They shared a deep commitment to social justice, human rights, and making the world a better place. When Raymont travelled to Nicaragua to make
The World Is Watching
in 1987, Tracey went with him. They were married in Ottawa in 1989 and their son, Liam Tracey-Raymont, was born the following year.

They conjoined their professional relationship as well when she became a partner in White Pine Pictures, his film, video, and television production company, in 1993. Its credits include
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
and
A Scattering of Seeds: The Creation of Canada,
for which Tracey also wrote the book.

An unregenerate multi-tasker, Tracey, who had been writing poetry since her days as a stripper in Montreal, was also producing magazine articles, mainly for
Toronto Life.
“The Uncounted Canadians” — about the thousands of illegal migrants who work in our fields and kitchens, hotels, and restaurants — won a National Magazine Award in 1991 and later became the spur for a 1997 documentary,
Invisible Nation
, about the underground illegal immigrant community in Toronto. In collaboration with Raymont, she produced the 2002 documentary
The Undefended Border,
which later became the backbone of a dramatic series,
The Border
, that ran on
CBC
TV for three seasons, beginning in January 2008.

Although Tracey was a very active partner in White Pine Pictures, she formed Magnolia Movies as a “boutique production company” in 2003. She did it partly because she wanted her own identity and partly because she wanted to make films that either didn't fit the profile of White Pine or came at similar subjects from a different slant.

Her first film for Magnolia was
An Anatomy of Burlesque
, tracing the bawdy business as far back as Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
and linking revolutionary fervour to naughty dancing. When it ran on the History Channel early in 2004, the
Globe
's television critic John Doyle deemed it “smart and entertaining” and a “cheerfully informative jaunt.”

Bhopal: The Search for Justice
— a scathing indictment of what happened after the massive chemical leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, on December 2, 1984 — aired on
CBC
's
The Nature of Things
in 2004 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. Initial reports said that three thousand people died, but later estimates put the number much higher, suggesting that at least fifteen thousand died and many thousands more suffered long-term effects. Bhopal is Tracey at her insistent, social democratic best.

In 2001 Tracey was diagnosed with
HER
2/neu-positive breast cancer, a very aggressive form of the disease. She was forty-four. After a mastectomy and chemotherapy, the disease went into remission for about two years. In fact it was only gearing up for another attack, on her bones, her lungs, and her liver.

She sought out an alternative cure in Tijuana, Mexico, in the late fall of 2004 and returned looking devastated. Desperately ill with metastatic cancer, she was eligible to receive Herceptin, which was then only available as a last-hope treatment. The drug gave her another year of life, in which she continued her frenetic work schedule and found time to help lobby the Ontario government in a campaign that eventually made Herceptin available to non-metastatic
HER
2 breast cancer patients.

By January 2006 the cancer had invaded her brain. Late that September, her family took her to the palliative care unit at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital, expecting that she would last two or three days. In the end she defied death for almost a month, as she had always confounded authority, even asking her loved ones to sing Gordon Lightfoot songs around her bed. She died on October 19, 2006, at age forty-nine. At her funeral, Raymont picked up his guitar and led the congregation in singing Ed McCurdy's “Last night I had the strangest dream . . . to put an end to war,” as he followed her coffin out of the church.

Private Lives, Public Impact

 

 

 

There Is No Such Thing as an Uninteresting Life

T
HERE'S AN OLD
adage that a lady's name should appear in the newspaper only three times in her life: to announce her birth, her marriage, and her demise. Death notices in newspapers and online obituary sites may seem archaic in an era when social media sites trumpet even the most insignificant personal details, but their discreet announcements can be rich repositories of information about fascinating lives that have been lived outside the glitter of celebrity. That's why I'm addicted to scouring family-placed notices about people whose passing will never make headlines or whose fame has diminished with the decades. Something about them awakens my curiosity about their lives and the times in which they lived.

For example, I learned about Kenneth Cambon in a newspaper death announcement. The notice was unusual in that it was witty and full of delicious biographical details that most people leave out because of the solemnity of the occasion. Here's the sentence that first caught my eye: “After graduating from Commissioner's High School in 1939, Ken joined the Royal Rifles of Canada, ostensibly to flee his job at a soda fountain where two broken coffee carafes were about to cost him a week's wages.”

I glanced back to his birthdate — July 29, 1923 — and realized that he had been only sixteen when he enlisted. He must have lied about his age, but what a price he paid for those broken coffee pots, I thought, as I read on: “Towards the end of 1941, having been initially trained to fight on the snowy slopes of Finland, the Royal Rifles were sent to semi-tropical Hong Kong to defend the then British colony.” Somehow he had survived the debacle of Hong Kong and four years as a prisoner of the Japanese and had trained as an ear, nose, and throat doctor after the war. What's more, in 1990 he had written a memoir,
Guest of Hirohito.

I was hooked. I got hold of the book, contacted the funeral parlour with a request to speak with the family, and began the reading, researching, and interviewing that uncovered a life of sacrifice and resilience that continues to haunt me. Fortunately for me, Cambon's widow, Eileen, and his younger brother, Austen, were sharp, articulate, and willing to talk frankly about Cambon's life and career.

He grew up in a distinguished military family in Quebec City. A lacklustre high school student, he found a job as a soda jerk after completing Grade 11, earning ten dollars a week plus the occasional tip. Miserable and frustrated by the coffee pot incident, he was trudging home when he passed a recruiting sign for the Royal Rifles of Canada. The advertised pay was $1.30 a day.

What did he know about risk, the watchword of the old and timid? He was after adventure and escape from a tedious job. He got more than he bargained for when the Royal Rifles were sent to Hong Kong in an ill-fated stand against swift and brutal military aggression by the Japanese. After the Canadian, British, and Hong Kong regiments surrendered on Christmas Day 1941, Cambon was taken prisoner by the Imperial Japanese Army. He spent the next forty-four months in execrable conditions in diabolical
POW
camps.

Japan finally surrendered in August 1945, after the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cambon's last forced act was to help dig a deep pit in front of the
POW
camp in Niigata, Japan. The prisoners were told they were preparing the foundations for an air-raid shelter, but in fact the hole was meant to be a mass grave for their executed remains if the Americans invaded.

After his release from Niigata, Cambon made the long journey home by ship and train, arriving in Quebec City more dead than alive. He weighed less than ninety pounds and was suffering from hideous gastrointestinal complaints and nightmares that plagued him for decades. That fall he enrolled at McGill University on a veteran's allowance. After excelling academically, he was eventually accepted into medical school. There he met another student, Eileen Sinclair Nason, from New Brunswick. She remembered that every time he took her out for dinner he would vomit outside the restaurant. His stomach still couldn't tolerate too much rich food at one sitting, coupled with his anxiety about being in university after such a long absence from studying. They were the first McGill medical students to marry — in 1949, at the end of their second year — and to graduate together, in 1951.

A man with an expansive personality who loved conversation, socializing, and playing tennis, Cambon was adamant about one thing: he wouldn't go back to Japan, not even to attend medical conferences. When one of his grown daughters visited Japan in the mid-1980s, she tried to find the
POW
camp where her father had been imprisoned and was told that it didn't exist. Outraged, Cambon fired off a letter to the mayor of Niigata, who wrote an apologetic reply along with a promise to search out the campsite if the former
POW
ever made a visit to Japan.

That invitation prompted Cambon to put aside forty years of hatred and fear and revisit the scenes of his capture and imprisonment. “The tears that had been held back so many years finally fell freely,” he wrote later in
Guest of Hirohito
. “I had come filled with doubts, fears, and prepared for catastrophe. I left with renewed hope and warmth, happy to have come back.”

In researching his life, which to me emphasized the human capacity for forgiveness, I came across a newspaper photograph that captured the scene at the train station in Quebec City after Cambon was finally reunited with his family. It showed a skeletal Cambon flanked by his parents — his mother holding on to his arm as if she were never going to let go — his two older sisters, both of them in uniform, and his kid brother, bounding in front like a rambunctious Labrador pup. What a sacrifice that showed: three young adult children in uniform, a commitment that was not unusual for a Canadian family during the Second World War.

So when I saw a second death notice headed “Cambon” a year later, I recognized the subject as Ken Cambon's older sister Margery Quail. After completing nurse's training at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec City in 1939, she enlisted in the nursing service of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and went overseas late in 1940, during the most treacherous days of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Along with head nurse Dorothy Macham (who was later awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal by King George VI), Margery Cambon worked in a pioneering plastic surgery unit, treating burn victims at a Canadian hospital in Basingstoke, southwest England. She survived the war, returned to Canada with her British husband, John Quail, and raised a family, only to succumb to the same illness that had claimed her brother — Alzheimer's disease — at age eighty-six in 2008. She spent her final days in a special hospital unit for veterans with dementia, named after her old mentor Dorothy Macham.

The Cambon siblings were ordinary Canadians who lived lives of sacrifice and duty without fanfare or glory, but that doesn't mean their lives aren't worth remembering or chronicling. Or that our lives aren't enriched by reading about them and their times.

I felt the same way when I learned that Betty Fox was dying. The mother of Canadian hero Terry Fox was certainly famous, even beyond our shores, but she was known mainly as a mother and not in her own right as a woman who had faced the unimaginable — the death of one of her children — and responded with extraordinary courage and endurance.

After a right-wing media outlet made headlines by declaring that she was dying of cancer in June 2011 — the same disease that had killed her twenty-two-year-old son in 1981 — her family posted a press release on the Terry Fox Foundation website. They denied that she had cancer, admitted that she was seriously ill, asked for privacy, and said they would make no further comment. Having faced Terry's death in the midst of television crews and media scrums, they wanted to share the last moments of Betty Fox's life as a family and to mourn away from the spotlight.

I appreciated that request and didn't try to contact the family, but I still wanted to know how a grieving mother had found the strength and the acumen to front the annual Terry Fox Run, protect her son's memory for thirty years, fight off the commercialization of his name, and raise more than $500 million for cancer research.

Born Betty Lou Wark in Boissevain, Manitoba, on November 15, 1937, she was a working mother living with her husband, Rolly Fox, and their four children when her second son, Terry, was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma. A keen athlete, he had his right leg amputated above the knee in March 1977.

After reading everything I could find in newspaper files, on the Internet, and in biographies of Terry Fox's short life, I wanted to talk with somebody who knew her. That led me to Isadore Sharp, the founder of the Four Seasons hotel chain. Sharp's own teenage son Chris had died of melanoma two years before Terry Fox began his run. That was an obvious connection, but what really intrigued Sharp was the “impossible” challenge that Terry Fox had set himself. He had befriended Terry in the early days of the run, before the public had become enamoured of the skinny kid in T-shirt and shorts awkwardly running with a hop-skip-hop on his prosthetic device.

The hardest lesson you have to learn as a journalist is to shut up and listen. Fortunately I had my wits about me when Sharp called me early one morning in response to my interview request. “You look at these people who set goals that are beyond our ability to imagine and it attracts you to them,” he said of the early days of the run, when motorists were laughing at Fox and he was drawing sneers instead of contributions. Sharp ran ads in newspapers and magazines saying that the Four Seasons would contribute two dollars a mile, amounting to $10,000 if Fox got as far as Vancouver. Then he invited 999 other companies to join him in order to make it a $10-million run and organized a huge reception for Fox when he reached Toronto.

“He took cancer out of the closet. He always presented himself with his leg exposed,” said Sharp. “It is never the outspoken, out-front, macho characters who become heroes; it is the kids in the crowd who live and die by their principles and become extraordinary in circumstances that call upon people to live by what they believe in. He was a remarkable man, wise beyond his years.” Before he died, Fox knew he had raised more than $24 million for cancer research, one dollar for every person living in Canada at the time.

After Fox had to stop running in Thunder Bay, slightly more than halfway through his run, Sharp contacted Betty Fox. He talked to her about holding an annual non-competitive fundraising run for cancer research in her son's name and persuaded her to be the public face of the event. “I told her if she wanted the run to really have meaning, and to have longevity, she would have to become the spokesperson, be out there, travel, and try to keep Terry's image alive, because people's memories are short.”

He knew he was demanding an enormous effort from her, but he also knew the run would give her a purpose. “The pain was always going to be there, but this was an opportunity that I sensed would be good for her for the rest of her life,” he said. Terry “gave her a cause that made her life better, having suffered that loss. You think you can't do something from the grave, but he did.”

Because of space and balance, I used almost nothing from that interview in the obituary I wrote about Betty Fox after she died of complications from diabetes and arthritis on June 17, 2011. I was trying to tell the story of her life, not her son's or the reason for Sharp's ongoing support and philanthropy. But it offered such a revealing and inspiring insight into the making of a hero and a legacy that we ran it as a separate story. That's one of the enduring private rewards of writing obituaries: the chance to learn what moves people and spurs them to make superhuman acts of generosity.

Some of the ten people I have written about in this chapter were famous, some were known only to friends, family, and colleagues, but all of them had an impact beyond the intriguing details of their private lives. Ralph Lung Kee Lee, for example, one of the oldest surviving head-tax payers, was long retired from his Chinese restaurant when he made a special trip to Ottawa in June 2006. He sat in the visitors' gallery of the House of Commons and listened to Prime Minister Steven Harper apologize for the racist policy that had separated families and caused such hardship for the Chinese who came here to work on the railroad and to help build this country.

Mabel Grosvenor, the last grandchild of Alexander Graham Bell, was one of the first women to graduate in medicine from Johns Hopkins University, but she was also a tiny witness to the first attempts at manned flight in this country, at her grandparents' estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 1907. Sculptor Dora de Pédery Hunt, who became the first Canadian to mould the likeness of the Queen on the coins that jangle in our pockets, came here as a penniless refugee from Hungary and championed the ancient art of medal-making.