Winging it with eclectic editor
Take a step behind the scenes as we highlight some memorable coverage from the Ottawa Citizen’s storied past. Today, former TV critic Tony Atherton recalls a sartorial run-in with one of the newspaper’s most colourful editors-in-chief.
I owe a large chunk of my career as a journalist — and my most embarrassing moment along that path — to Captain Canada.
Captain Canada is not a superhero, per se, though he has probably affected a cape from time to time. And he does have a kind of super-power. A comic-book writer would call it shape-shifting; the captain I refer to calls it “winging it.”
Captain Canada earned his title ( bestowed with only negligible amounts of irony) as chair of something called the Citizens’ Commission on the Future of Canada, which scrambled across the country in 1990 taking the temperature of Canadians following the failure of the Meech Lake accord. Its modest goal was to make recommendations to secure, well, the future of Canada.
Before then, CC was simply known as Keith Spicer. Well, not so simply. From early on, his name bristled with appendages: PhD (1962); professor of political science (1961-1969); inaugural Commissioner of Official Languages (1970-1977); chair of the CRTC (1989-1996); founding director of the UN’s Institute for Media, Peace and Security in Costa Rica (2000-2007); francophile, bon vivant and gadabout (from about 1954 on).
Keith was a syndicated columnist and a radio and TV broadcaster, from time to time, and an author, when inspiration struck. His book, Winging It, is about extemporaneous speech-making, but the title could also describe his career.
Case in point: Keith’s most substantial foray into journalism was as editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen from 1985-1989, a job for which he had few of the customary credentials. He was an academic and a public servant who liked to write. He had little experience, some opined, of any workplace tethered to humdrum reality.
That said, Keith turned out to be one of the Citizen’s most memorable editors, in part for his unpredictability. In 1989, at his insistence, the Citizen produced a 16-page supplement commemorating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Apparently no one had told him that supplements were produced to sell ads or, at the very least to attract readers, and never — never — to wax eloquent on subjects that newspaper readers should care about even if they didn’t know it.
Keith was also the architect of the Citizen’s erstwhile Sunday edition, whose defining spirit, as expressed by the editor-in-chief, was supposed to be a paper that could be devoured with croissants and espresso in a brass bed after a night of connubial (or non-connubial) bliss. He had even wanted to run a brass bed giveaway as part of the promotion for the new edition. Saner heads prevailed.
But as editor, Keith was a superb judge of journalistic horseflesh. I say this because in 1987 he plucked me from relative obscurity in the newsroom and made me the newspaper’s first TV critic in years.
Truth be told, it was Jay Stone, then entertainment editor, later one of Canada’s premier film critics, who suggested I apply for the job. But the position existed because Keith insisted upon it, noting that the paper had a serious music critic, a books editor and a film critic, but nobody writing daily on the most popular medium of the time.
When we met, I had told him I’d be happy to take the position if I could write about the medium from as wide a perspective as possible, commenting on TV and what it aired, as cultural, social and economic phenomena whose consequences went beyond mere distraction. Almost any other editor would have told me I was a pompous ass. Not Keith.
Keith and I didn’t talk again, beyond occasional pleasantries, until a few months later. He showed up at my cluttered desk in the entertainment department one morning to set in motion events that would lead to my abiding chagrin.
Robert MacNeil, half of the anchor team for PBS’s awardwinning news show, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, was in town to promote his book, The Story of English, and Keith was taking him out to dinner at his club, Le Cercle. Could I join them? “I’d really like you to be there,” Keith said, pointedly.
Journalists are not known as snappy dressers and columnists who spend most of their days in front of TV screens tend to make the least effort. As luck would have it, my cleanest apparel that morning had been a pair of nut-brown tweed pants, a deeper brown button-down shirt and a patterned sweater vest. I thought I looked damn spiffy (this was the 1980s, remember).
O, vanity.
I was looking forward to dinner. Robert MacNeil (Robin to his friends) is one of the giants of American television news. He ran up the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, as an NBC correspondent when Kennedy was shot, and won an Emmy for his coverage of the Watergate hearings for PBS in 1973. In 1975, he and Jim Lehrer created what was then called The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, notable for in-depth coverage.
Like another U.S. news anchor, ABC’s Peter Jennings, MacNeil had an Ottawa connection. Born in Montreal and raised in Halifax, MacNeil had graduated from Carleton University in 1955. The university gave him an honorary doctorate in 1985. So when I showed up at Le Cercle at the appointed hour, having just put the next day’s column to bed, I was anxious, but excited.
Le Cercle Universitaire d’Ottawa does not exist any more, its grand digs on Laurier Avenue having been taken over by Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in 2000. But for more than 40 years, it had been the dining and entertaining spot for the city’s francophone academics and mandarins. By 1987, it had settled into that kind of shabby elegance that marks a certain kind of club. As I entered the small foyer, I was met by a waiter who looked at me askance, even after I told him who I was meeting. He raised a finger, silently bidding me wait, and went to fetch the maître d’, a small man with an oily smile who looked me over and said, “But monsieur, you have no jacket, no tie!” He said it as if I might have unknowingly misplaced them on the way up the steps. “Um, no,” I mumbled. “Is that a problem?”
“No problem at all, monsieur,” he said, raising his hands in gracious conciliation. “We can make accommodations.” I thought he meant they could overlook my unfettered neck and casual sweater vest.
“We have some accoutrements to make you feel far more comfortable,” he said and I swear he winked at the waiter who abruptly ducked into a vestibule. He emerged with a hanger on which were draped a jacket and tie guaranteed to make no one in my vicinity comfortable.
The pair bustled around me, insisted the sweater vest must go, helped me knot the tie, and held the jacket for me to slip on. It almost fit, which is the nicest thing you could say about it.
Remember I was attired in brown: tweed pants, chocolatebrown shirt, tan brogues. To complement this ensemble I was now wearing a blazer in a shade of electric blue not seen in men’s haberdashery since the court of the Sun King. Or maybe the announcers’ booth on Monday Night Football.
Paired with this was the ensemble’s pièce de resistance, a tie the colour and insistence of a fire engine. I could see why they wanted me to abandon my sweater vest. It surely would have spoiled the effect of the gold Chinese dragon rampant on the tie’s front. The maître d’ raised his hands in triumph. “Voilà, monsieur, now you will fit right in.” Undoubtedly, I thought, if I was having dinner at clown school.
Right then, in walked Keith and Robert MacNeil, looking like a Harry Rosen ad. Though Keith sometimes displayed questionable taste in his newsroom apparel (his go-to was a safari suit), he knew how to dress for the occasion. And MacNeil looked like only an on-air host with a big clothing allowance can look.
I was too dumbfounded to speak, and they too polite to comment. But as we climbed the stairs to a private dining room, Keith leaned in close and spoke, sotto voce, words I’ll never forget.
“You look like a Panamanian pimp.”
The dinner was quite pleasant once my companions got used to the glare from my jacket. MacNeil was charming and gracious. Of all the wonderful raconteurs I had a chance to nosh with during my 17 years as the Citizen’s TV critic — Will Smith, Burt Reynolds, Jerry Seinfeld, and Patrick Watson, among them — only Peter Ustinov surpassed MacNeil in that happy combination of charm and erudition.
I got invited to Keith’s club a couple more times — along with other columnists — and was always, you can be sure, appropriately turned out. Keith and I, however, were never more than distant colleagues. Yet when he was named chair of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission in 1989, which put him directly in my line of inquiry as a TV columnist, he was happy to make himself available to me for long interviews at a time when cable channels and the internet were inciting a broadcasting revolution.
After his term at the CRTC, Keith moved to Paris, beloved since his days as a student at the Sorbonne. Frankly, I wasn’t paying much attention. But when, sometime early in the new century, I received a call out of the blue from an assistant to then-secretary general of the UN Kofi Annan, asking my fee to write a speech for Mr. Annan on the effect of the changing media environment on local television, I scratched my head — then thought of Keith. Sure enough, when I looked him up, I found he had recently been named director of a fledgling UN organization in Costa Rica called the Institute for Media, Peace and Security. I have never confirmed he was the link, but nothing else makes sense.
In 2007, as part of coverage commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, photographer Wayne Cuddington and I went to France in an ill-advised quest to follow a group of high school students on a pilgrimage to Vimy. It was like herding cats; little worked out the way it was planned. But Keith, having returned to Paris and somehow got word of our assignment, fired off an email insisting that Wayne and I join him for drinks at his Left Bank apartment. We hadn’t spoken in 10 years, but Keith, who had given my career a boost in 1987, seemed forever genuinely interested in his former Citizen colleagues.
So I forgive him for setting the stage for my grand mortification at Le Cercle in 1987, the night my face flushed as red as my borrowed tie. I suspect this must be what life is like for anybody in Keith’s orbit: awkward, grand and gracious by turns. In the end, we were all just winging it.
Tony Atherton, an Ottawa writer who served as the Citizen’s TV critic for 17 years, still occasionally watches television even though no one pays him to do it.