Canadians are Thicke as thieves

After my interview with Robin Thicke, it seemed obvious to me that his dad, the late “Growing Pains” actor, Alan Thicke, a native of Ontario, must have been running a boarding house for Canadian superstars. Exhibit A: Wayne Gretzky. In 1988, when he was traded to the LA Kings, he was staying at the Thicke residence and was essentially baby-sitting Robin. Imagine the Great One pouring you a bowl of Lucky Charms in the morning and reminding you to brush your teeth?

But Robin was also an inadvertent player in the story of Gretzky’s blockbuster trade from the Edmonton Oilers. Alan had taken Robin’s older brother to Russia for 10 days, and Gretzky and his soon-to-be wife, Janet Jones, were staying at chez Thicke for the summer. Robin was attending Joe Torre’s baseball camp, and he was about to leave the house, when the phone rang. It was former LA Kings owner Bruce McNall, who was also a friend of Alan’s.

“He wants me to wake up Wayne,” Robin told me. “I’m like OK, so I’m knocking on the door, ‘Wayne, Wayne’. I’m like 10 [or 11]. And so Wayne gets the phone, I got to camp. I come back from camp, and Wayne is in Edmonton on a podium, saying that he has been traded and he’s crying. And I’m like, ‘Holy what!’ That was the 7 a.m. phone call from McNall.” Then when I asked him about Canadian artists Céline Dion and Shania Twain (inset), he said his father was close with producer David Foster, so he got to be around Dion in the early days. But Twain stayed at their guest house for two weeks when she first came to Los Angeles to score a record deal. “She stayed at the house. She’s part of our part of our Canadian brethren,” said Robin. I have a feeling that house had more celebrity Canadian DNA than Canada’s Walk of Fame.