"I am Canada. I'm a lover of life. I'm a dreamer of dreams. And I believe it's time I said, 'I Love You,' But I got to hear you say you love me too."
-- Lyrics from the 1978 disco song Gotta Hear You Say It Too, written by Al Waxman
Yes, Al Waxman wrote a disco song, with music by Skip Prokop of Lighthouse.
"The King" also acted in, wrote, directed and produced movies (with pot-smoking, the F-word and even the "Happy Hooker"). He studied under Lee Strasberg, bossed around Cagney And Lacey, and inspired a dance among the Queen St. crowd called The Waxman Wiggle.
And, yes, Waxman, who died yesterday after heart surgery, was Canada.
In retrospect, Waxman could have devoted his entire life to simply being the King Of Kensington. The '70s CBC sitcom was that good, and the political commentary came so acerbically and effortlessly out of the mouth of Waxman's character, Larry King, that it presaged the rants of Rick Mercer on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
"Y'know why meat is so expensive?" Larry said. "Because the feed they give the cattle is so expensive, that's why. They should feed the cattle something worthless." -- "Like what?" -- "Like Canadian dollars!"
Or when apprised that John Turner had resigned from Trudeau's cabinet over interest rates, he said, "Yeah, his interest in being finance minister went down, and his interest in being prime minister went up."
And this was a show they sold to the States.
But Waxman's appetite for life and career was too great to tie him down to one persona, or one clothing size.
He also wasn't comfortable being inextricably tied to comedy, since he was always expected to be funny and, in desperation, hired joke writers for public appearances. In real life, even his much-loved wife, Sun columnist Sara Waxman, has admitted he was "not as foolish and not as sweet" as his TV character.
Sweet to Sara
He was, however, sweet to her. On their first date, during a cold Toronto winter, he warmed her hands upon meeting her. In his earliest location filmwork, he had built into his contract a daily long-distance phone call to Sara and once-a-week delivery of a dozen roses.
And though he could be gruff and demanding, he could alternatively be generous with praise and with his time. He and Sara aided an array of causes, including Big Brothers, the Variety Clubs, the United Appeal and the Canadian Cancer Society. The Sara and Al Waxman Centre for Maternal and Fetal Medicine is his legacy at Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Hospital.
Waxman came by the role of Larry King honestly, growing up in Kensington Market near the corner of Spadina and Nassau, above a tobacconist shop and a poultry store. His Polish immigrant father, a furrier and investor, died of a heart attack when Al was only nine. Al enrolled in drama school at 14, and for obvious reasons he kept secret his first job -- a role in the CBC radio series Doorway To Fairyland -- for fear of reprisals from the toughs he hung around with.
A far tougher critic of his career was his mother, Tobie, who went ballistic when her son quit law school at the University of Western Ontario to move to New York for acting classes.
There wasn't much to show for his subsequent adventures -- a handful of CBC TV drama roles and a stay in England at the Wimbledon Repertory -- to convince her that he'd done the right thing. She died in 1964, leaving him wrestling with his doubts and fear of failure.
After another stab at success in the U.S., with only a role in an episode of Ben Casey to show for it, Waxman decided he might be better off in the role of auteur in the then almost non-existent Canadian film scene.
Film created buzz
What he called "my calling card" was a short film called Tviggy, about a plain Jewish girl who becomes a model, emboldened by the success of the unconventional British model Twiggy. This being an era when movies had actual short films as openers instead of commercials, it ran with the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and created a buzz around the thirtysomething filmmaker.
Then came a spectacular failure -- the feature The Crowd Within, about four hippie-era young people sharing a flat in Toronto, which Waxman wrote, directed and produced. The film got plenty of publicity (in one report, Waxman was excoriating one of the actors over the right way to smoke marijuana), but fell victim to terrible reviews and non-existent box office.
The setback was profound, Waxman now being out of work and responsible for a young family. But he plugged on, directing an acclaimed CBC movie about neo-Nazis called Black Phoenix and, in a career-making move, shepherding the movie debut of Xaviera Hollander, a.k.a. The Happy Hooker.
Waxman always winced when I brought up My Pleasure Is My Business. I'll admit that I snuck in to see this R-rated film at age 16. All I remember about it was that, naked, Ms. Hollander didn't hold a candle to the Playboy models we were used to, and the movie's big chase scene was on mopeds.
More importantly, it cost $350,000 to make and grossed more than $10 million. Movie math dictated that Al Waxman was now "somebody."
Crowned King
Shortly thereafter, Waxman was crowned King Of Kensington by producer Perry Rosemond -- who nonetheless made him lose 40 pounds to play the role of a slightly-overweight Kensington storekeeper. It was Waxman reinventing himself yet again, from the Falstaffian figure in Hawaiian shirts he cut as a filmmaker to the burly Kensington mensch.
Weight would always play a big part in Waxman's life. He would lose it for charity. He would gain it back. In the last few years of his life -- before his theatrical tour de force as Willy Loman in the Stratford Festival production of Death Of A Salesman -- he seemed to lose an entire person, and looked healthier for it.
The King Of Kensington lasted five years before Waxman walked away without regrets. And, sure, F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. But, of course, Al Waxman was consummately Canadian.
He followed up King Of Kensington by winning a best actor ACTRA (the precursor to the Geminis) for The Winnings Of Frankie Walls, a CBC movie about a laid-off blue-collar worker.
And then came Cagney And Lacey. Both Waxman and longtime friend Harvey Atkin found themselves cast in the series pilot, shot in Toronto with Tyne Daly and Loretta Swit. Sharon Gless later took over Swit's role in the series.
"Al was auditioning for the role (of Lieut. Samuels)," Cagney And Lacey creator Barney Rosenzweig said yesterday, "and I met him and screened a show he'd done up there where he played the character of Louis B. Mayer (CITY-TV's Titans).
"And I'd met Louis B. Mayer. I'd worked at MGM in my youth and it impressed me incredibly -- as did everything Al did."
Where King Of Kensington could reportedly be a fractious set, Cagney And Lacey seems to have agreed with Waxman in every way.
"The fact is, I'd never worked with people who were that close -- not even on King Of Kensington," said Waxman, who remained best of friends with Gless, her husband Rosenzweig and Tyne Daly.
Directed episodes
Waxman found his legs directing episodes of the series, and he went on to direct episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, My Secret Identity, Hard Time On Planet Earth, and the TV movies White Light and The Diamond Fleece.
Hey, it wasn't experimental cinema, but it paved the way for a triumphant debut last year as a Stratford director with his production of The Diary Of Anne Frank.
Nor was the end of Cagney And Lacey in 1988 anything close to a setback for Waxman's career. In the ensuing years, he made no fewer than 36 movie and TV appearances. My personal favourite: His malevolent portrayal of Jack Adams in Net Worth, about the first NHL players union. During the last five years, he also made his mark on the strange frontier of the stage.
The latter included Neil Simon's Proposals at the Royal Alex, and Salesman.
This summer, he was to have played Shylock in Stratford's The Merchant Of Venice.
"I am Willy Loman," he told Sun theatre critic John Coulbourn of his Salesman performance. "With one important distinction: I am a winner."
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