TV critic amassed vault of celebrity stories
Writer was passionate about vintage television and movie veterans
James Bawden cultivated a reputation as one of the most knowledgeable and plugged-in Toronto personalities on television and movie history.
Over a 40-year career as a TV columnist and critic with the Toronto Star, Globe And Mail, Hamilton Spectator and CBC, he accumulated a vault of celebrity stories, from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Robin Williams.
Although he retired from the Star in 2008, he remained active on his blog up to this month, offering television show and documentary reviews, sprinkling in funny anecdotes of stars he interviewed.
One could say, he did what he loved till the very end. Bawden died on Jan. 24. He was 75.
In a 2014 blog post, Bawden paid tribute to some of his famous friends and acquaintances who died that year. He recalled meeting Williams after the legendary comic landed his breakthrough role as Mork, the alien from the planet Ork.
“With Robin Williams, I’m totally surprised he lasted as long as he did,” Bawden wrote. “I met him first on the set of Happy Days … when he was as high as a kite.
“Later interviews would find him troubled and sad, never very funny, but increasingly preoccupied by life’s ironies.”
Bawden’s love for vintage television and movie veterans was echoed by almost everyone who knew him.
“He always gave them their due,” said his brother Harry Bawden. “If you had a question, he could answer it.”
Long-time Toronto Star television critic Rob Salem remembers Bawden as “The Phantom,” because of his pale features and perpetual after-dark presence in the office.
“Anytime I worked late, which was often, he was always around, anxious to share the latest newsroom or showbiz gossip, often exaggerated or outright false,” Salem said in an email. “He didn’t care. It was a good story.”
His favourite Bawden story, now an urban myth, was about Arnold the Pig on the CBS sitcom “Green Acres.” Bawden duly reported that star Eddie Albert said the cast ate their porcine co-star at the wrap party: an untrue but long-running joke that “became the stuff of legend.”
Toronto-based TV critic Bill Brioux reminisced on his blog over the times he’d worked with Bawden.
“His last entry was for a Nature of Things doc which aired on CBC in January about Cleopatra. I wrote about it, too, but only Jim could write that he once interviewed the star of the 1933 Cecil B. DeMille version of Cleopatra, Claudette Colbert — who told him she was afraid of snakes,” Brioux wrote.
Former Sun Media TV columnist Jim Slotek was on the critics circuit with Bawden and recalls their glory days.
Twice a year, in January and July, about 250 journalists would gather at a California hotel to review previews of new shows, attend conferences and interview TV personalities. The singular purpose was to keep audiences apprised of what would be coming up on TV. “We called ourselves ‘the mafia,’ ” Slotek laughed.
Other reporters were always amused by Bawden’s committed fascination for “the golden age of stars.”
Slotek described how Bawden used to regularly visit a lodge in California, a seniors residence for people in the arts, to listen to their stories.
“He always came back with the most interesting stories from someone from the ’40s.”
Peter Mansbridge, former CBC chief correspondent and anchor of “The National” for 30 years, knew Bawden to be “always fair and never mean.”
“Jim took his job very seriously and that meant at times the people he covered suffered at his keyboard. I was one of those,” he wrote in an email. “He will be missed and he will be remembered.”
Anne Moon, the former Star entertainment editor in the late 1970s who hired Bawden, described him as a deft interviewer, dedicated to “making us all discerning viewers.”
Bawden leaves his brother Harry, niece Jennifer, nephew Michael and great-nephew Jamie Davies.