3/695 WHERE THERE’S SMOKE . Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man A Memoir by WILLIAM B. DAVIS ECW Press Copyright © William B. Davis, 2011 Published by ECW Press 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2 416-694-3348 / [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmit- ted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribu- tion of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or en- courage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Davis, William B., 1938– Where there’s smoke : musings of a cigarette smoking man : a memoir / William B. Davis. ISBN 978-1-77041-052-7 Also issued as: 978-1-77090-047-9 (pdf); 978-1-77090-046-2 (epub) 1. Davis, William B., 1938-. 2. Actors—United States—Biography. 3. Actors—Canada—Biography. i. Title. PN2287.D323A3 2011 791.4302’8092 C2011-902825-5 Editor: Jennifer Hale 6/695 Cover, text design, and photo section: Tania Craan Cover photo: © Fox Broadcasting/Photofest Photo insert: page 6: photo by Kevin Clark; page 7 (bottom): © Fox Broadcasting/Photofest; page 8: © Fox Broadcasting (Photographer: Carin Baer)/Photofest. All other images courtesy William B. Davis Production and typesetting: Troy Cunningham The publication of Where There’s Smoke has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Govern- ment of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation. Preface I’m standing beside a filing cabinet. To my right is the actor Charles Cioffi, and to his right is Ken Camroux, the actor playing the Senior FBI Agent, the part I read for and didn’t get. I got this weird part with no lines. All I do is smoke. On the other side of the desk is a young unknown actress with red hair. We are doing a low budget pilot for an obscure science fiction show about alien ab- duction, if you can believe it. Well, a gig is a gig. I’m getting paid. Scale, I think. 8/695 I’m feeling pretty dumb, just standing there like a statue listening to the red-haired actress talk about someone called “Spooky Mulder.” I look at the cabinet beside me, the top just below my shoulder. I think, ‘If this were really me, would I stand here as if I were part of the scenery?’ which of course I was. ‘What’s to lose,’ I think. So I stretch my elbow across the top of the cabinet, cross my feet, and watch the action from this new pos- ition, a praying mantis with a cigarette. An icon was born. You can buy the trading card if you want. At that moment my career went up in smoke. Well, perhaps it had been smoulder- ing for some time. Once a boy wonder, I had failed in my major ambition. I was not the Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival at the age of twenty-nine, unlike my idol, Peter Hall, who headed the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK at that age. Still, always torn between directing and teaching, I was 9/695 getting along, making a good living, until that fateful day when everything changed. At the time, of course, I had no idea any- thing had changed. I had played a non- speaking role in a pilot for a television show whose chances of being picked up were about as good as the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series. It would be another year or two before the show and then this character became household names. At age fifty-three, I would become a full-time actor, a star even, dealing with fan mail to this day. One of my pet peeves are workshops con- ducted by successful people in the film busi- ness. Do what I did and you too can be a suc- cess. What did I do to become a successful actor and minor celebrity? I auditioned for a small role, didn’t get it, and got an even smaller one with no lines. If you do that, you too can become a television star. Life is ran- dom. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson became stars by chance. That is not to say 10/695 they weren’t and aren’t worthy. They are tal- ented actors and I wish them the best. But there are hundreds of other talented actors who were not so lucky. I’m waiting for the workshop where a lottery winner tells her story and inspires us to follow in her foot- steps. It’s all a question of where and when you buy the ticket, the 7-Eleven on Main Street on the second Monday of the month. It may be that life is really a series of ran- dom events. But being biologically human, I am going to make a story out of them. The story will be a lie, of course. But then so are the best stories. Richard III was actually a good king and Macbeth ruled for years. I don’t promise a story of Shakespearean scope, but hopefully it will be entertaining and occasionally enlightening. I may even open a window into my soul — well, not my soul actually, I don’t have one of those, but I will let you inside, as far as I dare. 11/695 Should the story be lineal? Should I start at the beginning and finally arrive at now? I am a product of the print generation and for us, according to Marshall McLuhan, lineality is natural. But many readers will be younger and will have grown up in the electronic age. When did you last see a movie where the story started at the beginning? In fact, when did you last see a movie where you could fol- low the story? Well, perhaps that’s another issue. Suspense in a movie used to be about how the movie was going to end. Now it seems to be about how the story is going to come together. I could weave a tapestry of events and you could be on the edge of your proverbial seat wondering how it will all come together. And then, the joke would be on you. It doesn’t come together. It may feel like one life, but is it really? They say that every seven years each cell in our body has changed. Am I the same person that I was seven years ago, or in my case, 12/695 seventy years ago? Bill Davis has had many lives, many loves. These stories may weave together into a coherent whole or they may not. There will be stories of life in wartime Ontario, of early Canadian theatre and radio, of university life in the late fifties, of Britain and British theatre in the sixties, of the Na- tional Theatre School of Canada and Festival Lennoxville, and finally, The X-Files. But is Bill Davis an actor, a teacher, a director, a skier, a water skier, a lover? Wasn’t he once a birdwatcher and a bridge player? Who is he, really? It’s all very well for Polonius to say, “To thine own self be true,” but who the hell is thine own self? I will leave it to you to decide about mean- ing; all I can tell you for certain is that it’s been quite a ride and it’s not done yet. Before I questioned whether to include a chapter in this memoir on ‘my early life.’ My younger years seem to have had little bearing on my future career and, after all, everything in my childhood seems to me so normal that I wondered why those years would interest anyone else. But then everyone’s childhood seems normal to the adult of that child. How things were when we are growing up is how they ought to be, now and forever. Southern Ontario in the forties is how life should be. It is an anomaly that the Muskoka 15/695 Lakes are now full of boats. What’s right is that there should be no more than five boats go by in a whole day, pleasure boats all being up on blocks as a result of rationing. Or that dogs should run loose in the neighbourhood. That milk and bread were delivered by horse. That horse manure on Eglinton Avenue was normal. That movies in the brand new Nor- town Theatre with pushback seats cost four- teen cents. That we listened to plays on the radio. That most middle-class families had household help. That there was no television, and certainly no computers, cell phones, in- ternet, terrorists, security. The big ski area in Ontario, now called Blue Mountain, then called Jozo’s, boasted nine rope tows. And the giant ski area in Quebec, Mont Tremb- lant, had two chairlifts, one of which was broken.