Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
for the year, and Southam appeared before a parliamentary committee to say that the new National Arts Centre really needed a budget of $3 million a year. He would later comment ruefully that his pitch “had not been a strong enough smoke signal.”6
The board chairman, Lawrence Freiman, was deeply upset. He had promised Judy LaMarsh that the centre would live within the original $2.5 million budget, whereas Southam had blithely been pushing ahead. In several heated arguments with Freiman, he rationalized that public interest was much stronger than expected and, moreover, the basic costs had gone up. While the trustees urged senior staff to exercise better financial management, Southam argued in a memorandum to the May board meetings that they were dealing with artistic and theatrical temperaments—which functioned differently from those engaged in other activities. Freiman struggled hard to put better financial controls in place, even as he pushed to get the revenue-producing small shops along Elgin Street opened and the other commercial concessions paying some rent. The board floated yet another idea for fundraising in support of the NAC—a national lottery—but lotteries were still illegal in Canada and considered by many to be immoral. The plan was quickly rejected by the secretary of state’s officials and then by the deputy minister of the Treasury Board as “an ineffective way to raise money over an extended period.”7 The dispute over money between Southam and Freiman continued through many meetings, with Freiman so distressed at one point that he left the proceedings and turned them over to his deputy, Claude Robillard. The effort would affect Robillard’s already failing health, and, in October, he was forced to retire altogether from the board.
Jolliffe had worked hard to entice the Canadian and the international press to take an interest, and she introduced many of the leading journalists to Southam. He in turn beguiled them with lunches at the Rideau Club featuring the best food and wines, polished off with brandy and one of his Monte Cristo cigars. Whatever it took, the plan worked. Leading critics turned up to review the opening performances: Nathan Cohen, Canada’s outstanding theatre writer; Clive Barnes of the New York Times; Courtney Towers from Time magazine; and Hilary Brigstocke, Ottawa correspondent for the London Times, all gave them extensive coverage. Many of the more thoughtful articles looked well beyond the gilded two weeks of the opening festival to ponder what this new arts emporium would mean to the Canadian public.
While Jolliffe had pulled off an international public-relations coup and the name of the National Arts Centre had appeared around the world in the quality press, she now had little left in the kitty to promote the first regular seasons of orchestra, theatre, and other performances that would soon be starting on the NAC stages. Southam had not discouraged her efforts for the opening, and she had achieved what he wanted. But now the bills were coming due, and that spelt trouble.
The first public signs of the problem came in an article by John Drewery, the national CBC political correspondent. On June 13, as the thrill of the opening peaked, Drewery reported that the brand-new arts palace was already running out of money. What was worse, the source of the story turned out to be the sometimes-bibulous Mary Jolliffe herself. Jolliffe developed close relations with her press clients and had let her hair down with Drewery, giving him a glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes. Alarm bells rang furiously on Parliament Hill, and Southam raced to assist the deputy minister, Jules Léger, to fashion a statement for the new Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier to deliver in the House of Commons. Peppered by the Opposition, Pelletier spoke in the Commons on June 18, insisting that the real story was the “NAC’s immediate success from coast to coast and the aura it gave off of being a permanent Expo.” Léger kept the minister on message with a follow-up statement, that 65 percent attendance had been expected for the opening festival, but the event had gone way beyond that with an overall audience of 86.6 percent. This huge increase in unexpected visitors, the minister declared, had cost money.
Despite these public declarations intended to draw off the attackers, the board was facing a major crisis. The press leak had left the politically appointed trustees extremely nervous. At the July meetings, in the face of their chagrin, a sheepish Hamilton Southam delicately and dexterously brought about the disengagement of Mary Jolliffe. After the triumphant opening she had helped so much to engineer, she left with much praise and three months’ salary. Southam met personally with Pelletier, apologizing for the fuss and assuring him that the Arts Centre would henceforth respect its budgets.
The financial crisis that had been allowed briefly to surface was real. An extended struggle had been under way between Treasury Board officials and the NAC management throughout the opening celebrations. Southam had written earlier to ask LaMarsh to provide supplementary funds before her departure as the minister responsible. He had requested an additional $300,000 to $500,000 beyond the base $2.5 million budget that had been approved, but the Treasury Board was stubbornly holding the line. Southam argued tenaciously that a performing arts centre could not be treated like other government departments—that performance bookings often had to occur years in advance and that budgeting had to allow for this fact. It was a problem that would rage over the Arts Centre’s budget and dog its planning down through the years.
The trustees grappled with the problem and discussed how they should keep the government abreast of the gravity of the situation. Southam crafted yet another detailed memorandum for the minister to take to Cabinet, setting out reasons for the overruns that blamed everything from higher electricity costs than those projected by the Department of Public Works two years before to the expense of servicing the huge and unexpected increase in visitors. He also dropped a first hint that revenues for the proposed resident companies in the upcoming season might also be less than expected. The question of an audience for the real work to come had yet to be fully addressed.
As public tempests swirled around the fallout from the grand opening, inside the Arts Centre, intense efforts were under way for its real artistic beginnings. David Haber had carefully booked in a light season of summer fare for the tourists who poured through Ottawa in July and August. It included the Charlottetown Festival musicals Anne of Green Gables and Johnny Belinda as well as the Quebec folkloric dance troupe Les Feux Follets. One of the outstanding successes was a small in-house production, Love and Maple Syrup, an amusing cabaret show presented in the Studio which was so successful that it had an extended run on into September. A witty and ironic look at Canadian foibles, written by Louis Negin, it played on a few bilingual themes, including a spoof on a Quebecer ordering “un hamburger” with “tous les works” over the telephone. One of its stars was Jean Gascon’s brother, Gabriel Gascon, who had taken classical French theatre studies in Paris and then moved to London, where he trained and worked in English theatre with the famed director Michel St. Denis. The show proved so popular that it would come back again the following year.
While this first summer season kept the Arts Centre functioning as it prepared for the future, the trustees recognized that they had not yet devised a winning formula for the Summer Festival. It had been Part Two of the original approval for the NAC and was expected to attract and accommodate hundreds of thousands of tourists, both Canadian and American, to the capital each summer. By the end of the first year of operations, the tour guides had logged more than 117,000 visits to the Arts Centre. These encouraging numbers did not necessarily translate into audience members, but they did show a tremendous interest in the new facility.
The coming regular seasons in music and theatre were beginning to shape up. After lengthy negotiations, a final deal, although imperfect from the NAC’s point of view, had been struck with Stratford. The company would become a year-round operation, with a “substantial portion” of the six months away from its summer festival home spent in Ottawa. The company would also tour extensively around Canada and into the United States, but not under the NAC banner. Despite the newly acquired “National” in its name, Stratford would not become the English-language resident theatre company at the Arts Centre. Instead, it was contracted to present a limited number of plays there, and company members would do school programs and tours in the National Capital Region. The balance of the full theatre season would be filled out with other companies from across Canada booked into the centre by Haber. This was a bitter blow, especially to Lawrence Freiman, who had believed so strongly in his close ties with Stratford. The intense