Free Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir by William B. Davis Page B

chestnut called The Ghost Train . The play, for me, was an elaborate dance as I moved from sound cues to the lighting board and back again, often using knees and feet to operate the board while simultaneously releasing a record. The climax of the play on which everything depended was the arrival of the ghost train itself as it lurched by, an effect created by light and sound. Especially sound. On the first night, everything was going swimmingly, not a cue missed. As we came to the climax I set up the record of the train; at the precise moment when the cue was required I released the record, and: Nothing! Not a sound. I have seldom been more embarrassed for actors on a stage. What were they to do? Well, troupers that they were they pretended they had heard a train. I wanted to hide in the tiniest hole I could find but, no, I had to go on stage as I was also an actor in the piece who appeared after the train had gone through. I couldn’t look my colleagues in the face. I was mortified.
    The next day we fixed the amplifier and there were no further problems. But it was hard to hold my head up for quite a while.
    Arch McDonald, a successful radio actor, and his partner, Celia Sutton, a costume designer, ran a summer lodge for show business people just outside Port Carling. Among the regular clientele were the great Canadian dancers Lois Smith and David and Laurence Adams. It was quite a grand place, it seemed to me, and these successful artists would lounge in front of the fireplace every night listening to Frank Sinatra records. Boring. We only listened to classical music.
    Some of us from the Port Carling summer theatre company had room and board for the season at the Lodge, the men sharing small digs tucked under the verandah while the women shared real bedrooms inside the house. My roommate was the gay designer Wilf Pegg who always slept in the nude. Why was I not sharing with Cathy who was also in the company as an actor and ASM? Well, you might ask. Cathy had a room upstairs with one of the other actresses from the company. Unmarried men and women simply didn’t live together in those days nor share bedrooms, publicly at least.
    Still it was a great learning time for me and by the end of the summer, returning to university, I had no idea I would actually be running the company the next year.

New Frontiers
    1957. Spring. A young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of . . . London, England. And some love along the way.
    While New York was interesting, for a young Canadian theatre artist London, England, was Mecca in the late fifties. I was determined to go and in the spring of 1957 I somehow managed to arrange a two week trip. I have no idea how I found either the time or the money. I had all that studying to do for my summer theatre gig as a stage manager/electrician. Did I pay for the trip myself from my earnings as a child actor, which were quite modest by today’s standards — I was a radio actor, after all — or did my father foot the bill? However it was arranged, I was to fly there for two weeks and stay in a furnished flat in South Kensington, in the same building as Canadian actor Eric House, who was acting in The Balcony by Jean Genet.
    But first there was Sherry. Sherry Grauer, now an established painter and sculptor, was the daughter of Dal Grauer, the head of BC Hydro. She lived in Vancouver and was my mother’s goddaughter, if an atheist can have a goddaughter. She came to visit my mother in King in the spring of 1957. My goodness, she and I got on well. We talked and held hands and snuggled in the recreation room, nothing much more than that, but clearly we were both taken with each other. We figured out that if I travelled to London from Boston I could visit her on the way in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a student at Wellesley College, which was then, and still is, a college for women only.
    My visit to Cambridge was quite lovely, and quite chaste. While we did roll around on the grass as I