Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir (23 page)

The next afternoon I was killing time outside and put my hand in the pocket of my jacket that lived at the cabin. Inside was half a pack of cigarettes. I could have surrendered right then. But no, it’s only three days, remember, and one is nearly over. Later that day, I went shopping for a woodstove, but I was so spaced out I couldn’t concentrate. I could barely drive back to the cabin.

I returned home Sunday night. Two days gone. Only one to go. Somehow I got through the third day at work waiting for the magic moment when the addiction would lift and I would be a nonsmoker. Needless to say, the magic moment never came. There would be six months more of struggle and torture that only gradually lessened. But I wouldn’t and didn’t go back.

I didn’t touch another cigarette for seventeen years when I would become famous for what I had worked so hard to stop. But I was never a smoker again. And in the meantime my older brother, Ashe, died of lung cancer.

Now if someone had told me that quitting would take six months . . .

And so now I was a nonsmoker who would become famous for smoking. Of course, I didn’t know that then — I would have laughed out loud if someone had foretold such a future for me. I was a director out of a job. Not that I considered it, but my tenured position at Bishop’s had long since been filled. Freelance directing gigs were not immediately presenting themselves. My teaching résumé was pretty good, maybe that was the way to go — for now at any rate. As I had been away from teaching for a few years, I applied to the Canada Council for a small grant to give me the time and means to look at the work of other acting teachers, both in Toronto and New York. I sat in on classes given by a variety of teachers, the most interesting being Carol Rosenfeld, Rosemary Dunsmore, and Kurt Reis — yes, that Kurt Reis. A small decision though had a big impact on my future career. I thought it might be a good idea to actually take some of these classes, not merely audit them, to experience the teaching methods as a working actor in the class. It was almost twenty years since I had spoken a line of dialogue in a scene. Had I learned anything for myself after twenty years of telling other people what to do?

Yes, it seemed that I had. A buzz started going around that Davis was a pretty good actor — for a director/teacher at any rate. Gradually an economic life was piecing itself together. In addition to having a number of part-time teaching assignments, I thought, what the heck, let’s see if an agent would take me on for acting. Two things I’ve always hated about acting: makeup and curtain calls. I hate having junk on my face though I mind it less if someone else puts it there, and I find taking a bow in front of an audience duty-bound to applaud quite embarrassing. Who else expects to be applauded for their work? Certainly not the clever person who fixes my car, not even the clever doctor who fixed my cataracts. My first job on returning to acting was some kind of promotional film where I didn’t need makeup and of course there would be no curtain call. Not so bad, this acting, after all. No one warned me that years later I would be in the makeup chair for several hours so that the Cigarette Smoking Man could not only be old and ill, but could smoke through a hole in his throat. Or that eventually I would return to the stage and have to endure those excruciating curtain calls. For now I was putting together enough acting and teaching to keep the family afloat. And soon that became easier when Humber College offered me a full-time teaching position.

Once again I was in a position where I might have stayed for the rest of my working life. But Humber did not have the appeal of the university community or the charm of a small Quebec village. Humber was a dull concrete building northwest of Toronto in a what, subdivision, no, a mall, no — really it was nowhere at all. But I stayed there for three years until an acting opportunity conflicted, and Humber and I began the slow process of separating ourselves from each other, after which I once again needed a job.

Next stop: Vancouver.

I had been to British Columbia on Canada’s West Coast a few times, directing at the Vancouver Playhouse twice, several trips on the National Theatre School audition tour, and more recently as part of my duties for CBC Radio Drama. With the ocean on the doorstep flowing inland through deep fjords, a ski hill larger than Osler Bluff right in the city, and Whistler, one of the great ski mountains of North America, a mere two hours away, Vancouver had seemed a spiritual home, the place where I ought to live. Imagine a snow ski season that begins in November and goes until June and a water ski season that begins in March and goes to November. Apart from the challenge of what to do when, what skier could ask for more? So when the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School advertised for a director, I threw my hat in the ring.

I did, after all, need a job. At least I thought I did. In truth, I was putting some food on the table with freelance teaching and acting gigs in Toronto. My first feature film role was as the Ambulance Driver in David Cronenberg’s
The Dead Zone
. Shot on the shores of Lake Ontario in temperatures hovering around thirty below zero Fahrenheit, I figured I had the best job on the set as I could retreat into my heated ambulance after every take. Having almost no idea what was going on on a film set, I said my one line with enthusiasm whenever I heard my cue. I was a touch surprised when the lead actor, Tom Skerritt, I think, replied, “Fuck off.” I guess he was off camera at the time. I still get fan mail from time to time praising a number of my film roles including
The Dead Zone
. Well, if they could find me in the film they have better eyes than I; as far as I could tell my role ended on the cutting room floor. But if I wasn’t setting the film world on fire I was at least making a name as an acting teacher and doing a few stage roles in summer stock and small theatre in Toronto.

In 1975 the Playhouse Theatre Company in Vancouver created an acting school, a two-year program where students would have the opportunity to work in a professional theatre company while participating in an intensive training program of their own. The company would benefit from being able to present larger cast plays by using students in smaller roles, while the students would benefit from serving an apprenticeship on the mainstage. It seemed like a win-win situation, but turned out to be an idea better in principle than practice. The aforementioned Powys Thomas — “think of the Welsh fire” — was the original Artistic Director of the School, giving way in a short time to David Latham, later director of theatre training for the Stratford Festival. Latham was leaving to take an appointment, in Australia I believe, and the position was coming open.

At the time the Playhouse School was thought to be, or had ambitions to be, one of the two leading acting schools in Canada, rivalling the National Theatre School on the other side of the continent. While the job did not pay well, it seemed it might be a boost to my flagging résumé to be, or to have been, the Artistic Director of both of Canada’s leading schools. With my father’s recent death, a small portion of the Davis leather fortune had flowed to me, allowing me some independent means to supplement the meagre offering from the Playhouse. After some considerable discussion with Francine on the feasibility of moving our now family of four to Vancouver, we decided to accept the offer when it came. And so, in the fall of 1985, we hitched our secondhand boat to our secondhand car and drove across the country.

Unfortunately, Latham had decided to leave his position after he had auditioned the next class. As a result I inherited a class of twelve students chosen for someone else’s vision, and they were saddled with me for two years. Of course, it was all expected to get on track in two years time when I would audition the next class. But of course it did not get on track. Why not? Well, the person who hired me, Walter Learning, the Artistic Director of the company, decided to leave. Are you getting bored with this movie? I am. When the top person leaves, everything is in flux, and particularly so with the Playhouse School. For months the very future of the school was in question. Finally, at the eleventh hour, under new Artistic Director Guy Sprung, they decided to continue the school — but not with me.

It was never clear to me why Guy made that decision; we had seemed to have good professional relations for some time before he arrived in Vancouver. It may be that he was influenced by my reputation as an experimental teacher in the sixties with my emphasis at that time on creative development, for when we finally discussed his decision he referred to the students “rolfing” prior to a presentation. Good gracious. Rolfing was a psychotherapeutic technique in the sixties involving deep muscular massage with the intention of releasing repressed emotions. Even I never dreamed of using that technique with acting students. Even in the sixties. One of the teachers in the program, movement or voice, I’m not sure which, had encouraged patting each other’s backs as a warm-up. Likely this was the worrying exercise that Guy had observed. At any rate, he made his decision; perhaps two alphas were one too many for him.

As it turns out his stay at the Playhouse was even briefer than mine. Following a tradition of doing things in ‘the provinces’ that you wouldn’t do in Toronto, Guy’s opening production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
required Titania and Oberon to sing their roles. Guy is reported to have had a heated discussion with the theatre publicist. Finally he burst out with, “That is the worst fucking press release I have ever read!” To which the apt reply was, “That was the worst fucking production I have ever seen.”

Me bitter? Never.

By some irony, serendipitous no doubt, Scott Swan, under whose leadership Festival Lennoxville died, took over the school and within two years it too had passed into the annals of history.

What to do? As it happens my second, and last, year at the Playhouse School, included quite a rush of film work, as well as directing a production on the theatre’s mainstage. The children were in school; we had a nice house; inertia dictated remaining in Vancouver. Once again I was back to freelance teaching and acting, hoping to keep the bills paid, the children in classes, and me on the ski slopes and lakes. And so I embarked on a challenging path that would lead not to
The X-Files
but to
Xena: Warrior Princess
.

The William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study is now a fixture in the city of Vancouver, but in 1989 it was not even a gleam in my eye. In the bitter divorce from Francine she implied that I had sacrificed income for the family to pursue my personal dream of founding an acting school. I wonder what she thought my options were at age fifty-one with a degree in philosophy. Certainly it would have been easier to be a movie star or a professor of philosophy, but those jobs were not on offer. Nor indeed was the artistic directorship of the Stratford Festival or even the Manitoba Theatre Centre. No, if I wanted to make a living, to support a family, I had to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.

Out of work actors do this all the time, hang out a shingle, call themselves an acting teacher and supplement their erratic actor earnings by teaching classes. Unlike the competition I did have real credentials as an acting teacher, both in training and experience, perhaps in talent and skill as well, but I will leave that to others to say. Like the famous British director Peter Hall, I often used to wonder if I would be found out. I think I was almost seventy when I finally said to myself, ‘Dammit, I really am good at this.’

In the beginning I had no intention of starting a school; I just needed a few classes to supplement my income. And so, for one night a week, I rented studio space from a local theatre company and advertised for students. Meeting with some success I began to rent some other spaces and expand the offerings. It is remarkable that it was not so long ago that to teach a class in film acting one had to lug a large camera, a tripod, and a full-sized television set to each class. Where was the digital revolution when I needed it? Undaunted by such challenges and rewarded with some success I began saying mostly in jest and often to the rolling eyes of the students, “When I get my own space . . .”

Of course getting one’s own space really means starting one’s own business. It’s one thing to run a few classes in rented premises, but with one’s own space one has overheads and all the other obligations of a real business. What did I know about that? Not much but I was to learn quickly. I had help. Local architect John Keith-King, husband of Sherry Grauer — yes, that Sherry Grauer — helped me locate the first space, three rooms over a picture framing business. In order to meet all the overheads we would need to rent the space sometimes to other performing arts groups. What should we call it? I wanted it to be a centre, a place where artists could convene and work and develop. Garry Davey, a graduate of the Playhouse School during my tenure and now an associate teacher with me suggested, “The William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study.” To be honest, I was never sure about attaching my name to the enterprise. In retrospect the decision worked out rather well.

And so in 1989 we officially opened the doors. Soon we had a small full-time program in addition to our part-time classes. Early graduates included successful actors, and acting teachers as it happens, William MacDonald, Nancy Sivak, and Sarah-Jane Redmond. But soon I was saying, still more or less in jest and still to the rolling eyes of the students, “When I get a larger space . . .” But I was not going to be given the opportunity to prevaricate; my hand was forced. The lovely picture framing business underneath us moved out and was replaced by an auto body paint shop. We had to get out of there quickly before the paint fumes suffocated us or lawsuits closed us.

In truth we were quite innocent when we acquired the first space. I think we called ourselves a studio rather than a school to avoid stringent zoning regulations. The requirements for a school include all sorts of unlikely things such as handicap access, fire regulations, and parking spaces, eliminating ninety-five percent of otherwise suitable buildings. What were we to do?

I don’t remember now how we found it, but at the corner of Hornby and Helmcken in downtown Vancouver was a modelling school that had been there since 1945. And it was closing down. If the premises continued to be used as a school it did not have to meet the current standards. At the time the area was a bit down-market, but it was a great deal better than some of our competitors in the Downtown Eastside. And as an added bonus it had a neon sign overlooking the street corner. Neon signs had long ago been banned in Vancouver, but existing ones were grandfathered. So I bought the air rights from the previous owner — well, actually she kept them and I paid her; if there had been an actual transfer the sign would have been prohibited. And so finally, I had my name in lights. If no one else would do it, I would do it myself. In 1992, after extensive renovations and a course in accounting for the owner — me — we opened our new school and remained there for the next fifteen years.

We were hardly settled into the new space when the Davis refrain began again. “When we expand our space . . .” and the students rolled their eyes yet again. But indeed we did add another studio so that in our prime we had four active studios before the business began to contract for whatever reasons.

Being on a street corner was a help. The school became a hub, for actors, students, teachers, and occasionally the homeless who might spend the night on our doorstep. And after
The X-Files
became a hit, we were a focus for fan tourism as well. Always messy it seemed, under the egalitarian leadership of longtime administrator and my great good friend Sharolyn Lee who used students as “gumbies” to do the grunt work in exchange for classes, the centre had a palpable energy and friendliness.

Organizationally the school evolved from a studio for part-time classes for working actors and beginners to a mix of a one year full-time program and part-time students, some of whom would share some of the full-time classes under a program we called IPOs (Independent Program of Study). Now, long after I sold it, it has become almost exclusively a one year full-time program and is part of a larger school in the city, VanArts. Still under the name William Davis Centre — though now a division of VanArts — the program is run by the dynamic and excellent acting teacher Chilton Crane.

I am often asked, what method did I teach? The only answer I could ever provide? My method. Yes, but what is that? Well, come to some of my classes, act in a play I direct, watch me when I act in one. I know, that’s no answer and I have often said I will write a book on acting and perhaps I will one day. But as far back as my time in Dundee I have had a vision of what acting should be. The vision has modified and clarified over the years circumscribed perhaps by awareness of the context within which actors normally work. After all, how fresh and spontaneous and immersed in the character can you be when you are instructed to hold your cigarette two millimetres from your left nostril to maximize the lighting effect? Still, the goal for me always involves a reality, a truth, a spontaneity, an interaction between the actors. One sees so often a lovely performance that would change not one iota if a bomb went off on the other side of the stage. Or where an actor says her lines because she remembers them, not because she has to say them at that moment because of what has gone on before, who she is, and what she wants. I often used to say the life of a scene exists in the space between the actors not in the actors themselves.

All very well — who can disagree — but how do you accomplish these laudable goals? My own approach evolved from the multitude of teachers, directors, actors, and schools I had been exposed to. But LAMDA on the one hand and American traditions on the other have somehow fused into a central philosophy. But if there is one question an actor should ask when he starts work it would be this: why do I say what I say or do what I do? At this moment. Not two lines earlier or later but right now. This question will lead one to everything from the social history of the play, the physicality of the character, the precise meaning of the line, the background and thoughts of the character before entering the scene, to the relationships with the other characters, etc.

And if there is one word of advice I could give to an actor it is this:
Don’t learn your lines!
No, I am not saying you should work like Marlon Brando in later years and have crib notes of your lines all over the set. Of course, you must
know
your lines. But if instead of memorizing them you constantly ask yourself, why do I say this, exactly this, at this precise moment, not only will you know your lines you will know many other things about the character and the scene. And when you struggle in rehearsal to remember a line you will remember it by thinking more closely about the scene and what is said to you. I remember an old-time film teacher saying to me he didn’t like stage actors because they have “dead eyes.” He was thinking, I imagine, of actors who try to remember their memorized lines by looking in their own head and not at the other actor. Not only is memorizing lines really boring, it deprives the actor of the clarity of the question: why.

But who, besides me, could I get to teach both what I wanted and the way I wanted it taught? Garry Davey had been my student at the Playhouse — coincidentally the only student that I actually auditioned myself for that program. It was clear when he was a student that he had both a good eye and an ability to communicate. He became first my assistant, then my associate, and finally, me. When the demands of my acting career overwhelmed me, Garry became the Artistic Director of the School with Sharolyn Lee as the General Manager.

Of course, not all our choices for instructors worked out well. We hired a local teacher who operated her own studio and taught the Meisner technique. I have always been suspicious of techniques named after an individual, but I audited one of her classes — for which she was forty minutes late — liked what I saw, and asked her to teach for us. I have already confessed to making poor choices in the past — add this to the list. For one thing it turned out that being forty minutes late was the rule not the exception — often far later than that for the start of a class. The Meisner technique itself, based as it is on projecting one’s personal emotions into the imagined scene, is prone to self-indulgence, and our new teacher was a master at encouraging her students to express their personal pain even to the point of punching a hole in the wall of a classroom. Yet these classes were highly popular and good for our bottom line. Did the technique help the students act better in actual scenes? I remain to be convinced. But when we discovered that she was poaching our students for her own studio I pressed the delete button.

While there was never money to be made it seemed — there was no profit stream; I made a living by teaching a lot of classes — fame was just around the corner. It began with a curious correspondence with a young woman in New Zealand. She wanted to come to our school. I mean, why not? Was she any good? Why our school? I’m not sure I ever did find out how Lucy Lawless heard of us and decided she wanted to study with us. At any rate we took a chance on this unknown person and accepted her into our full-time program. Well, guess what? She was terrific and has gone on to fame and fortune most notably as Xena, the Warrior Princess.

And meantime, I auditioned for a small role in a pilot for a television show about alien abductions.