William B. Davis - Where Theres Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir

WHERE THERES 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 / info@ecwpress.com

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Davis, William B., 1938

Where theres 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. ActorsUnited StatesBiography.

3. ActorsCanadaBiography. i. Title.

PN2287.D323A3 2011 791.43028092 C2011-902825-5

Editor: Jennifer Hale

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 Theres 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 Government 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

Im 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 didnt 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 abduction, if you can believe it. Well, a gig is a gig. Im getting paid. Scale, I think.

Im 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. Whats 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 position, 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 smouldering 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 getting along, making a good living, until that fateful day when everything changed.

At the time, of course, I had no idea anything 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 conducted by successful people in the film business. Do what I did and you too can be a success. What did I do to become a successful actor and minor celebrity? I auditioned for a small role, didnt get it, and got an even smaller one with no lines. If you do that, you too can become a television star. Life is random. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson became stars by chance. That is not to say they werent and arent worthy. They are talented actors and I wish them the best. But there are hundreds of other talented actors who were not so lucky. Im waiting for the workshop where a lottery winner tells her story and inspires us to follow in her footsteps. Its 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 random 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 dont 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 dont have one of those, but I will let you inside, as far as I dare.

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 follow the story? Well, perhaps thats 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 doesnt 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, 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 National 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? Wasnt he once a birdwatcher and a bridge player? Who is he, really? Its 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 meaning; all I can tell you for certain is that its been quite a ride and its 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 everyones childhood seems normal to the adult of that child.