LOGGING IN, A DAY AT A TIME
Schnurmacher’s memoir
The Houdini of re-invention has done it again. His way, of course.
Over a 43-year period, Tommy Schnurmacher has been a film, TV and restaurant critic, a gossip columnist, a high-society reporter, a political pundit, a talk-radio host and even a psychic.
He is now writing a memoir on Facebook, pounding out at least 1,000 words a day and offering this output for free to readers.
When Schnurmacher retired from CJAD last December, he pledged he would finally get around to writing the memoir he had been talking about doing for years. Alas, he was beset by the age-old issue of procrastination, particularly when he didn’t have the sort of deadlines he had his entire professional life.
“I have more books on how to write a novel, how to promote it, how to get an agent than Barnes and Noble and Indigo combined,” Schnurmacher says while nursing a martini at the Ritz-Carlton bar.
“Even the algorithms at Amazon don’t know what to suggest to me anymore. But all of this was designed for one thing for me: to procrastinate. I would go to writers’ conferences and conventions. This was enabling me to do everything except depositing my tush in the seat and writing.”
Then he had an epiphany a month ago, while browsing at the Argo bookshop. He decided he would start writing at least two pages a day, every weekday, on Facebook, and post them by noon.
“This was a promise, but I needed people to hold me to it so I wouldn’t stop after a day. So having the pressure of having to have it done has made this possible. I still need deadlines.”
Schnurmacher has kept good on his promise over the last four weeks. And, thanks to positive feedback from binge-readers, the verbiage is flowing. He expects the memoir to be complete by year’s end.
The memoir is titled Makeup Tips from Auschwitz: How Vanity Saved My Mother’s Life. While the focus is on his still-going-strong mother, a Holocaust survivor, the opus covers all the germane territory in their family’s life, from the Second World War to the present.
“Many Holocaust survivors rarely talk about their experiences at the concentration camps, but my mother couldn’t stop talking about it. She would answer any questions I had about it.”
Schnurmacher reveals how he, five at the time, and his parents fled their native Hungary in the dark of night during that country’s 1956 revolution. After landing in Montreal, via Austria and Moncton, he recounts how he and his mother learned English by reading movie magazines.
He recalls crashing John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in 1969, and how he ended up with a photo of the couple while his fellow-crasher got the handwritten lyrics to Give Peace a Chance — which she later sold for 350,000 British pounds. But he wasn’t bitter.
“She did offer me a free coffee and piece of cake,” he cracks. “But I declined.”
Also inscribed in the memoir is the time Schnurmacher met Richard Dreyfuss while working on the set of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. It was mostly memorable because the only comment Dreyfuss made to Schnurmacher was to inform him he had cream cheese remnants on his mug.
The memoir, to date, is highly moving yet highly amusing, as well as being particularly revealing. No surprise that he has a cadre of hooked readers who hit their computers weekdays at noon for the latest instalment.
“To say I’m gratified with the reaction is an understatement. I am absolutely overwhelmed. It is super exciting. The book is growing organically, and where it will go, I don’t know.”
Schnurmacher has already received a call from a prominent Montreal theatre director who is thinking of turning it into a oneman play.
“Now I’m waiting for an offer from Netflix to turn it into a series. There’s enough material to write three or four books. I haven’t even scratched the surface in so many areas,” he says in reference to his career, from covering the taffeta-laden society set to discoursing on the merits of the Trudeaus, père et fils.
But Schnurmacher doesn’t miss his punditry days on the airwaves in the slightest.
“Unless it’s a major actor drowning a pit bull in a pothole, I’m not interested,” he quips. “I’ve covered road closures and potholes and projects coming in over budget thousands of times. I loved it. Like Edith Piaf, ‘Je ne regrette rien.’
“I’m not retired now. I’m simply re-wired.”
Tommy Schnurmacher’s memoir, Makeup Tips from Auschwitz: How Vanity Saved My Mother’s Life, can be read on Schnurmacher’s Facebook page or at talkradiotommy.com.
Many Holocaust survivors rarely talk about their experiences but my mother couldn’t stop talking about it.