In the summer of 1993 Ted was in relationship with Bee, a young lady in her late thirties. Bee was a friend of mine; and Bee was "psychic"(1). One of the readings she gave me impressed Ted. "I would like to meet your psychic," he said. Which brings us to the subject of Ted and the "paranormal".
     Ted had developed a moderate interest in alternative healing and psychic phenomena in London in the late sixties. Then, later, after his heart attack he had seen a New Age dietitian, Eileen Poole, who dowsed with "muscle testing" what foods agreed and disagreed. It was Eileen who put Ted on Beiler's soup… Monty Landis, an actor and a friend from London, and then in LA, had psychic abilities and impressed Ted greatly. And others, and others. Ted became quite a believer, though certainly not in a credulous way. Now, Bee, my psychic, was a new and small time film maker. She was though, in several ways, quite a powerful lady, and attractive. She and Ted hit it off. A lot of their interaction seems to have been around working on stories and scripts. Here they are writing a play about themselves.
     This was at a time when Ted, at his nephew Paul's suggestion, was recording thought and sundry on tape for posterity. In the following transcript Ted's words are in Times font. We take up the story in mid-flight. Bee is saying how: "... he's constantly hacking, which, which she tries very hard to get used to and ignore."
     "He's clearing his throat all the time," Ted explains.
     Bee continues, "There's constant innovations on new health themes. She comes home excited with.. totally excited over the new Tibetan pulsing, Tibetan pulsation technique, or Network Chiropracty (sic), and he's constantly worried about whether he took his fucking vitamins or not."
     They laugh and Ted takes up the story. "Also, she makes him promise he'll go see this guy and that guy. "Promise me. Say it." "I promise to go." He's got a son whose a chiropractor. She's sending him to a million other chiropractors."
     After a pause in the taping Bee continues with suppressed laughter: "He's so desperate to stay young. When they have dinner, she has a plate, a normal looking plate of food. He had a plate of vitamin pills. This is the honest to God truth, a plate full of vitamin pills."

There is now a jump in the tape. A new "ambient" noise. "Sunday. Going back to Toronto on the Train." (Ted is coming back from Montreal where he was, among other things, working with Merrily Weisbord on the biographical film she was making on Ted - the film unfortunately has become snagged - Ted hated the first draft - and this lead to intrigue by Merrily: intrigue and deceit.) "I think I should tell Merrily about my feeling about the Bible, that if I learned the vocabulary of the Bible I wouldn't have to learn any other words, and so I tried to master the vocabulary, and I thought that if the Bible, the vocabulary of the Bible could have had the effect that it's had on so many millions of people... then those were enough words for me to learn. I sometimes thought that I could have been a better writer if I had a larger vocabulary. I envy Shakespeare's vocabulary, and I envy Nabokov's vocabulary."
     Following this statement there was a long long silence on the tape during which my mind jumped to another version, in Ted's papers, of this Bible/vocabulary issue. Ted wrote in notes titled "Confessions":- "I realized that I had during my long life unconsciously and unknowingly been writing for only one person, my mother, who was semiliterate and wouldn't have understood any words not used in the Bible…"
     Back to the tape. After ten minutes of ambient noise (the train has a rushing sound rather than the traditional "clatter clatter"), after ten minutes the conductor makes an announcement in English and French over the intercom. Then Ted says, "Obviously this isn't working. I'm trying to remember, to describe my mother's black, black eyes. Black hair. Her wonderful smile. How I adored her." His voice swells. "Her wonderful smell. She always smelled of lemon cookies."
     "Paragraph," he says. "I'm just remembering my mother in the kitchen, me taking her by surprise, being hugged by the milkman. And that was probably how we got our milk when my father was in hospital. Wow!"
     There is a short gap. Then, "Thinking of my father, the things he did teach me, and his total obsession with himself and the man's illness." And Ted continues, his a voice full of lyricism and emotion, "How I loved him when I was little, and how sad that he was… that he was crazy, and frightening."

On the same tape there is recorded a conversation between Ted and Lise Abastado. Lise worked in the movie business in Montreal. She had worked in some capacity on "Lies My Father Told Me" back in the seventies. In the nineties, for a brief while, she was hoping to produce "Secret of the World". The following is a discussion of a speech of Miriam's and other "Secret" stuff. Lise speaks with a Quebec accent.
     Ted starts. "This is ah, Saturday March the 6th, talking with Lise about Sam's belief, and the belief of someone today, that what I believe is the only truth, and there is no other truth. That what I believe explains everything and.."
     Lise whispers, "Explains every action."
     "Sorry?"
     "Explains every action."
     "... explains every action. It explains every action of every human being, and of every government, of every person. It explains everything that goes on."
     "Permit. Permits every action," Lise suggests.
     "And it permits every action in the name of this truth. To fulfill this truth, to spread this truth, I am allowed to do anything, and anyone who doesn't agree with me is an enemy of truth, is a danger, is evil. To be... he has to be..."
     "Eliminated..."
     "Eliminated, defeated, eliminated at whatever risk, and there is no question, while this is a cliché, the means justifies the… the ends always justify the means, always, for our end is good, therefore whatever we do is good. This has been going on since the dawn of time."
     "What the play is saying, then," Ted continues, "but is it saying it clearly enough? That if... if this man was a Moslem fundamentalist and believed in his Sheikh.. This guy is living in Brooklyn, or where ever he's living, the Ayatollah, or whoever he is.. If I were writing about an Islamic fundamentalist who is saying, "my, Sheikh, my Ayatollah, what I believe is..." and he discovers that this Ayatollah is a vicious, murdering liar..." (break)
     "The point is, those who believe in one truth usually, usually believe in one leader. It is true - just a point - that the elite (unintelligible), Picasso, the great minds, the great artists, the great writers, sculptors, composers, the intelligentsia of the worlds believed, Drisser (sic), Hemmingway, believed in Communism as the answer to everything, it is true."
     Lise starts to speak, but Ted continues… "Wait, wait.. Just one point. What does Marion (the wife) learn, what does Susan (the daughter) learn? I'm not sure about Joe (the son). And the Old Man knows this. They learn this: that a cause may be great, good and noble, but that it does not follow that the leaders of this cause are great, good and noble. So that's one thing you learn."
     "What is the difference between the conclusion I reach in Madrid, in my movie on Spain, where the last two words before we see this man at the grave of the woman he loves, where the last two lines in the treatment, whether it's going to be in the movie or not is beside the point, one man says, "Come, we still have a war to fight," and the other one says, "Yeah. The war to defeat fascism in ourselves." What's the difference between the message there, the theme there, and the theme here? There is a difference, but what is it? There it's so clear."
     Lise speaks of how we exteriorise evil and ignore our faults. "The guilty one is the one in front of you..."
     "Never yourself."
     Lise continues to elaborate on this projection, exteriorisation.
     "It's the same theme," says Ted.
     "Yeah. It's the same theme."
     "It's exactly the same theme."
     "Maybe life is all about..." Lise begins.
     "Ah," says Ted. "Even in Bethune, that's the theme. "We will never defeat fascism," says Bethune - I have him say - "until we defeat the fascist in ourself." Everything I've writing for the last twenty years has this same theme, and that is the theme of our lives. We will never ever make it a better world until we defeat the bully, the fascist, the evil in ourself. And I, I'm not the first man to say this..."
     Lise says, "Until we accept this part of our self, and that's why I say until we're able to integrate the bad and the good and accept it so, to see it, we cannot defeat anything we don't see. The only place we try to defeat it, where we see it, and we see it in the other one. It's the other one that is bad."
     Ted speaks overlapping the last, "And that's good. That's good, but you see, we have something here that I didn't, I didn't consciously, intelligently try to do, and maybe I'm writing too many prayers for Marion, but Marion had to believe in someone, so she believed in Sam, and in God, and she didn't believe in God all that much cause she thought God was a bit of a fool, but she had to believe, and she continues to believe in God, and in the end she stops believing in God because she said, "Let somebody else take over," says Marion."
     "Because she doesn't believe in Sam anymore," says Lise.
     "Because she doesn't believe in Sam anymore," Ted repeats.
     "She doesn't believe in God because she doesn't believe in Sam anymore," says Lise.
     "Oh, but that's what this play is saying, because she says to God, "Make him believe in himself. Make me believe in him again. Then she says, "If I can't believe in You," God, "whom is there to believe in." And in the end she says, "You can't... You've been a flop. You can't hurt me anymore. What more can You do to me! Achh!" Defies God, and in that defying she liberates herself, because she has to stop believing in something outside herself, and that's when she does. Whether that's clear or not, I don't know..."

I've been reading one of the of New Age spiritual self-help bibles, and I came across the line "Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal to… dot dot dot."(2) It set something echoing. "Right. Ted said that. Where?" It's in Lies My Father Told Me, right at the front of the book as a poem, and in the film it is recited under the credits. Grandpa's song."

My grandfather stood over six feet high
As big as a mountain that fills the sky

And he sang me a song as grandfathers do
A song I feel I must sing to you

Only love is the truth and the truth is love:
Everything else is a lie

So "love" is Ted's theme. Love of life, love of truth. Love of women.
What more is there to tell?

Ted in 1994 in LA He was 78, grown frail. He ailed. He had just finished another rewrite of "Secret…" and this draft, of course, was it; was definitive.
     On several occasions in his latter years Ted had attacks of tachycardia and went into ventricular fibrillation. A life threatening crisis. Now in LA, again Ted fibrillated and fainted. Said Julie, "He was ashen, like a corpse." She was sure he was dead this time. The paramedics arrived, and meanwhile Ted opened his eyes. He saw Julie. In a faint and quavering voice he said… "Kinko's!" (3)

In the 1980s Ted started spending more and more time in Canada, in Toronto. Sometimes he would stay at his friend, Sylvia Schwarts, sometimes he would summer with us. He slept in the "children's bedroom" above us. The cat, Grey, could not decide whose room to sleep in, and slept on the stairs between.
     With the sale of some project (Love Streams?) Ted bought a house in Stratford Ontario, that little haven of Theatre. Ted was delighted with this move. (Ted was easily delighted.) But Stratford presented strategic problems through its distance from Toronto. When we, Teresa and I, had to make a sudden move, Ted found a wonderfully cheap and pleasant apartment for us. It was a room too small (we had the more than occasional child), but it was such a bargain that Ted took it for himself. Close by the Broadview park and ravine that overlook downtown Toronto, the apartment itself lacked that broad prospect. The living room looked out on a street shaded with trees. The kitchen and the study looked on a brick wall. The bedroom, at the rear of the flat, looked down over a hodgepodge of gardens onto a back alley. Of the flat itself I've spoken of the long corridor. There was a tightness to the rooms, but they didn't feel squashed, except the kitchen. It was a pleasant flat. I recall my admiration of Ted's approach to furnishing the apartment. His LA furniture was in Stratford, but he looked forward with relish to the task of furnishing his new domain. After surviving Spain, as he had said, all challenges were a game.
     For a long time, several years, Ted maintained a summer home in T.O. and a winter residence in LA He sold the house in Stratford. He lived off that. He sold the home in LA and wintered at Julie's.
     Here is a tape from LA

"January twenty fourth"
     Bronwen, his granddaughter, interjects, "The day before your birthday."
     "The day before my birthday, a week or so after the earthquake. I'm still effected by it. I'm walking with…"
     Under this Bronwen speaks and Ted repeats her statement, "There isn't one person that isn't. You want to repeat that?"
     "There isn't one person who isn't."
     "I'm walking with my darling Bronwen and we're headed for Roxberry park. I don't know what I'm in the mood to recall."
     "Why don't we talk about me," Bronwen jokes and Ted laughs. Then Bron must have inquired, 'cause Ted goes on to answer… "How did I meet Kate?" Ted tells the story in great detail. The story rambles through Spain (John Lenthier and Spain being the connection to Kate) and while the conversation does embrace Ted's meeting with Kate, it meanders. It wanders through Ted's return from Spain.
     "To go back a bit: Bill Kashton, a bureaucratic arsehole if there ever was one, had come to Madrid because of my reports to the Party to come and get Bethune back because of his heavy drinking, 'cause he kept accusing two of the doctors of being Fascist spies…" There is a short interruption on the tape, which begins again with Ted explaining how he only found out "last year" that these doctors indeed been Franco's agents. "So they sent Bill Kashton to bring him (Bethune) home and tell the Brigade that they wanted me to go back into the trenches. So I was under the eh, I forget the word. I can't think of words at the moment. Luegi Longo, whose name at that time was Gallo, was the chief Political Commissar of the International Brigade. I used to report to him every couple of weeks. We became very friendly. Everything that I did was as a member of the International Brigade."
     Bronwen asks, "Do you want to walk or do you want to sit?"
     "I'd like to walk a little more. So Bill Kashton said to me, "The Party wants you, thinks that you acted in an irresponsible manner and wants you to return to the trenches." So I looked at him and I said, "Well, I am under the discipline of the International Brigade and my immediate superior is Gallo. So if that's what the Party wants, fine, but I think you'd better check with Gallo and see if he okays it, and I'll go back." I think I said, "I don't know what you guys are…"
     The first side of this tape finishes. The second side begins, "I introduced…"
Bronwen asks, "Is it on?"
     "Yeah. I introduced Gallo to Bill. Gallo spoke English. "Yes?" "Well, I've come because the Bethune…" He says, "Yes, yes, I know all about it. Comrade Ted has been keeping me informed." "
     " "Well, the Canadian Party has decided…" "
     "So Gallo looked at him and said, "The Canadian Party has decide what?" He said, "Why don't you go into the trenches." "
     "Kashton said, "What?" "
     "Gallo said, "Why aren't you in the trenches? Why are you sending him into the trenches?" He said, "He is doing what we have asked him to do. Is the Canadian Party running the war here now?" "
     "Bill Kashton said, "Oh, are you satisfied him?"
     "It's none of your business whether we are or not. He is under our jurisdiction and discipline and how dare.. You go back and say to that Canadian Party of yours, how dare they sit there in the safety of their countries and are ordering people to the trenches or not to the
trenches." "
     "Later, just a few years ago, the son of a bitch accused me of lying when I claimed that I was the Political Commissar of the Blood Transfusion Unit. He said, "He was not, and I brought him home." He didn't. He brought Bethune home, but his mind was addled.
     "These asides are ridiculous because I don't know how anybody is going to follow them, including me. This is me telling you how I met Kate. It's like a comedy routine…"
     Ted finishes the story of his meeting with Kate. It rambles through Mexico, his love with Aza, the dancer, Her husband, Frank, was a puppeteer. At some point the tape goes on to other subjects, to conversations with other people.
     Ted tells the story of "it", his hesitation, the little jumps, gaps in consciousness, and then seeing letters, words, in his vision, but not being able to read them until in Spain, holding the corpse of a child, he could see them… he could read them. "Something happened to me once and I wonder what it is." Then a few years later Ted looked up from his typewriter and saw his father, a vision of his father trying to step out of the window.
     "Suddenly I remembered my two cousins trying to pull him back, and me, I must have been about nineteen months old, certainly before I was two years old, 'cause Sadie had just come from the hospital, born, and she was a year and a half younger than me. I remember putting my thumb in my mouth, lying down, pulling the blanket over me and thinking, "He doesn't love us any more. He wants to leave us." And I fell asleep. That was what I blocked out, that memory of my father. … That memory was blocked for nineteen years, almost twenty years."
     "The other memory that was blocked for twenty years was my relationship with Gerda. Her death wasn't blocked. I remembered the whole day. I wrote about it. But our emotional involvement and how she wanted me to make love to her and my being afraid of Capa and Hemmingway, and I wasn't all that clear. I had blocked that out for twenty years, so that the "Something happened to me once and I wonder what it is", the amnesia with Gerda, the relationship with Lucille, the marriage to Kate during the amnesia, are all part of the structure of my autobiography, for I have finally found a thread. What is curious is that as a result of Susan' O'Grady's death, the last two months with Susan, I was able to love someone, outside of my children and my grandchildren, in a way I'd never loved anyone before. I've been in love, madly, crazily, ecstatically with Lucille, in particular, because that was a reliving of the love affair I didn't have with Gerda … I also have insight now into why I hate making comments. I would rather report what happened, and give you the dialogue, and not try to tell you what I think, because I'm never sure. One of the reasons that I'm never sure is the sense I have that I'm living a sort of a world of amnesia. That is another reason that when I'm not writing I trust myself to wait until it happens. The only difference is this time I'm not writing because I'm physically disabled. The aftershocks of the earthquake are taking their toll, 'cause every time my bloody heart leaps I get ill for a little while."

Susan O'Grady was different from the other women in Ted's life. Most of the women he was involved with were in the arts or were intellectuals. Young Joan D. - who lived down the hall from Ted in the Tennis Crescent Mansion apartment in Toronto - Joan whom he loved, with whom he was involved for years, was not in the arts, but there was an air of bohemia about her. Susan, however, came out of the bourgeoisie. I should say didn't come out, didn't transcend her bourgeois up bringing.
     But Susan had red hair, and she reminded me of Lucille.
Susan O'Grady and Ted's relationship was difficult. "She's so hostile, so unpleasant when she's drunk," said Ted. But he hung in and he worked at the relationship, and I could see something change in him as a result of that effort. He became a larger man. After two years, though, the relationship ended. Susan O'Grady was the only woman Ted lived with after Genevieve, after Martie, after Lucille, after Kate, after Mama. (Of course there were so many, so many loves before and after Susan.) Later, Susan was suddenly very ill and dying of cancer. Ted devoted himself to her in those last months.

                                                                * * *

Aunt Nina just phoned to say she has a box of Ted's papers he had left in her basement in the '50s. Old papers. I work my way through one more box of Ted's affairs. There is an intimate (though not apparently romantic) correspondence with a lady "J". And a lengthy correspondence with Sam Wanamaker. Wanamaker wrote,

"11th August, 1952,

Dear Ted,
     I received your outline of the play you "are writing for me". It sounds very funny indeed and I shall be most delighted to read it.
     "As for "The Money Makers" I am anxiously awaiting the revisions on the script and perhaps there is a possibility of talking Charlotte into letting me consider at least the possibility of doing it!
     "Delighted to hear that you will get a production at the Jupiter Theatre and that the C.B.C. is going to do it on television…"

Here, from several letters later in the correspondence, is one of Ted's replies…

"Sunday, Nov. 16, 1952.

Dear Sam:
     The play opened Friday night with actors not knowing their lines and I was driven out of my mind. However the first night audience screamed stamped, applauded, shouted for eighteen curtain calls, and kept screaming "Author" for ten minutes. I refused to appear. I was furious at the breakdown of the third act when the actors repeated themselves several times. Also, I didn't hear the clamour. I was outside at that moment smoking!
     Anyway we've got a smash on our hands here. The reviews were excellent … I'm very excited. The audiences have been eating it up.
     I feel this at the moment that I've overwritten. The first act can be cut. The second act plays beautifully, beautifully. The third act needs more lines for Michael to make his transformation more believable. It's alright for a Canadian audience which wants to believe, but I wouldn't be so sure about an English audience…
     A word on Lorne Greene who plays Finch. He isn't just good or wonderful. He's a tremendously talented find. He is one of the greatest actors I have ever seen anywhere and I've seen my share. He would turn London on its ear with his performance. …
     The fact that the Canadian government radio can put on this play should effectively answer any of Charlotte's arguments re your connection with it. The CBC radio and the CBC television are BOTH putting on The Money Makers. The reactionary Telegram (as bad as Hearst in its politics) said of the play "Jupiter Theatre has produced a Canadian winner. Last night … the first performance was given of the Money Makers, a pungent, or more accurately, bitter piece of theatre-writing by Ted Allan, who by the way modestly declined to respond to repeated calls of 'author' at the end."
     I again strongly recommend that you fly here and see the thing as it appears now…

                                                            * * *

Ted so much wanted to be recognised. If not Shakespeare, if not Chekov, well, he'd taken the measure of Tennessee Williams and his peers. And he was confident his work and worth would be discovered. He was proud of the body of his work. There were eleven major plays and they ranged from good to wonderful. And they would be discovered. They will be discovered.
     Ted's last decade is typical of his life in that there were numerous triumphs but only a modicum of "success". In 1986 he won the Stephan Leacock award for his humorous novel, "Love is a Long Shot". In Toronto in 1987 "Willie the Squowse" was performed as a delightful musical at the Young People's Theatre. In 1993 Ted gave a one man show at the St. Lawrence Centre to raise funds for the Jewish Library. There was a "Gemini" award for "life times achievement". And then there was Merrily's documentary, though that got bogged down and then mired in intrigue Finally released posthumously, it is controversial in the family. It's okay, but...
     In 1988, in New York, Chu Chem was finally produced and received rave reviews. It had run for more than half a year, and might have run forever in the "intimate" Jewish Repertory Theatre off off-Broadway, but the producers decided to transfer to Broadway, to the Ritz where the play's intimacy drowned in the enormity of the theatre.
     On the international scene, in 1985 Cassavettes' "Love Streams" which won the palm in Berlin. It was Love Streams as much as anything that brought Ted to Leonard Cohen's attention. Cohen was among the coterie of cognisanti who felt "Love Streams" was one of the century's great movies. For half a year in the late eighties Ted and Leonard hung out together. Ted was tickled that Cohen offered his music for Ted to use in his plays. (At that time Ted was working on a rewrite of his sister's, Sadie's, story which was then re-titled, variously, "My Sister's Keeper" or "Helen's Song". )

My own "Ted and Leonard" story isn't really a California story. It's a Ted/Leonard/Lea and me story… I was courting beautiful, delicate, Lea while my second marriage was dissolving. Lea showed me her poetry. It was stunning. I took her round to Ted's to make copies for her. Ted had a big photocopier. I introduced her as "a potential daughter-in-law". Ted was mesmerised by the depth of this lady.
     Now Lea had a twin sister, Lynn. Lynn was much more feminine. She too was beautiful. They sang together, the twins. (Lea's lyrics.)
     Ted started dating Lynn. Meanwhile Lea and I approached the threshold of "relationship"… and Lea backed away. And with this Ted started courting Lea.
     It was very upsetting.
     Julie said it was like leaving an alcoholic in a room with a bottle of vodka. You might tell him quite clearly, "That's my bottle of vodka," but he couldn't help himself.
     Confronted, hurt and "misunderstood" Ted complained, "But you made a pass at Genevieve."
     Ah, but the Cohen story is this. Ted sent Lea's poetry, and a photo of her, a "head shot", off to Leonard. And then, Ted thought about me… and he asked me to give him copies of my poetry. And he read it again for the first time in many years, decades. "It's great,": he said. "You're good. You're very good," he quoted. And he sent my poetry off to Leonard Cohen too. And Leonard said… well he said that my poetry didn't transcend bourgeois background (4), but he pointed out that Ted hadn't sent my picture.
     And Lea and Ted? The relationship survived Ted's attempts to sexualise it. Lea established the relationship as non-sexual. They became close friends. Lea found in Ted the redeemed father. She worked, for a long time, part-time, as Ted's secretary. She was the ideal secretary. She cleaned the house when needed, and cooked, and typed, and edited with intelligence, and massaged Ted. Ted, on tape, speaks with amazement, "Her breast just brushed my body, and it didn't excite or disturb me!"

52 micro-tapes. A while ago I listened to 45. Then I'd left a long gap. Now, as I work on the last chapters, I've listened to the 7 remaining tapes. Three were rich, but the last four were empty, or nearly empty, and I felt a loss as though I'd lost my father again. The last tape that I'm transcribing is probably the last he dictated not long at all before he died. It's dated April (and May) 1995. In part it is notes to me about this book.

"I have given people the impression that I fought in the trenches and then was called out of the trenches. That's not true. I was transferred to Madrid before I went into the trenches. The boys I came with went into the trenches. I stayed on in Albacete to write articles. I was in the trenches later out of a sense of guilt, 'cause I would go, particularly at Brunette, and stay in the trenches over night - two, three, four nights - out of guilt, but knowing that I could leave and that I wasn't tied down the way they were made it possible for me to tolerate, I forget how long - I think I once spent a week. Steve Nelson, the commissar at the Abraham Lincoln battalion, and I became, I don't know "close friends", but friends … "
     Ted goes on to talk about the events around his Spanish short story "A Gun is Watered". "The only trouble with this story is that it isn't true. It didn't happen to me. It happened to two other people. What is true is my story of Bethune in Madrid. The whole story of Gerda is true. All the other stories in Spain are absolutely true. I still tend to want to make up stories of my bravery and heroism. I've got to, I've got to deal with that in the autobiography. The need to do that despite the fact that, as I look back, I think, "Christ, I went to the front more often then any other reporter in Madrid. And that includes Mr. Hemmingway. I went because I felt so guilty that they were there, so I used to go to show them I could spend the time. The attack, the machine gun and shells, to be bombed just as they were, and fuck it, I was. And I remember one particular afternoon in Brunette before that terrible, that terrible day of retreat, we were sitting around and some fucking Nazi, I forget what they called those fighter planes, began to drop bombs and machine gun us, and Pete Welch and I jumped under a truck and the fucking bombs dropped very very near. I can remember that I wasn't all that scared that time as I had been when I had been bombed in Albacete. I was pissed with fright at Brunette with Gerda when they machine gunned us, but I've already written about that."
     Ted drifts into sexual memories. He sighs. "Ah, Christ! Most of my life has been spent in half fantasy. I have been half here and half somebody else."
     "Paragraph. I'm listening to Gabrielle roaring with laughter, speaking to her friend in New York, Kim. She's had, she says, one glass of wine. She's tipsy. I said, "Good God, what would happen if you had two?" " For two years, Ted's last, his granddaughter, Gabrielle, and later also Bronwen, lived with him.
     "Uhm. I love her laugh. Reminds me of my Mum. Well, actually Julie laughs the same way. They both have this wild, wonderful, free laugh. They're entire body is shaking with laughter. Julie has it. Gab has it. Actually not too many other people I know have it. I do. Auntie Katie had it, as well as my mother. My Grandfather's wit was drier. He smiled more often, and hardly laughed. He was more of an observer than a participant, I think."
     Ted goes on without even a pause, "I feel so much less stress since I know that Norman will attempt to do this…" to help him with the autobiography. He goes on to discuss how we will share the royalties. "If we get the next ten thousand dollars, I think he should have it all, 'cause he's doing most of the work now, or hopefully he will." (Unfortunately "the next ten thousand" never came.) Ted spoke of the politics of the publishing deal that was then in the offing, and on to other matters. …
     "Paragraph. I have to write about Johnny. I mean John Cassavettes. How we met." Ted laughs. "How we met in Bray, outside of Dublin. That whole story, that he hadn't read the script, and he was describing what he thought should be done, et cetera. I had never, well I knew him only as an actor. He was in some T.V. series. He needed twenty five thousand dollars, that they were offering him to play in this movie, and he accepted it without reading the script because he needed it, I think to finish "Faces" or "Shadows".. I guess it was "Faces", which was his second movie. Gena doesn't think I should write this story. She thinks it shows him in a bad light. I don't agree. In any event I promised I'd let her look at it before I published it. But it was then that he and I became close friends. And it was the first time he read anything of mine, besides that script, which I wasn't too proud of, called "In the Middle of Nowhere". But he read the film-script of "Lies My Father Told Me", and was very excited about it."
     "Paragraph. I've never been able to understand the excitement of people over work of mine, like "Willie…", and it's taken all these years of people who keep telling me how wonderful "Lies My Father Told Me" is, and "Willie the Squowse", that I sort of.. "Okay, Yeah. Jesus, they're wonderful." Because the play I always thought was wonderful was "Secret of the World"… Ted goes on to tell how he feels his current projects are wonderful, and how difficult it is to judge his own work. "I really don't know. I know when I'm reading other people's work, like Lea's or Norman's, or anyone. I know it's good, or not so good, but I never know about my own work."
     "Paragraph. I should also outline what I wanted to be, and my disappointment…" and with this side "A" ends abruptly.
     Side "B" (which was in fact the first side, so for a moment the tape seemed to loop on forever like "the riverrun" in Finegan's Wake. But no. It ends with "… my disappointment…") on side "B" Ted talks of current politics, of the nuclear families, of love affairs. "My affair…" He stops. "Who cares? Was wild and wonderful. I have to be careful of going back through all the affairs. Who cares?"
     There follows some instructions, suggestions to me about how to handle aspects of the biography. He says, for instance, I might read Joyce's Ulysses for inspiration. "…The first time I've begun to relax about the autobiography now that I feel that Norman will take over. I don't anticipate the problem with Norman, his saying I hope his name will come first. ("Good God, Ted: a joke!") My name will come first! And we have to decide whether it's "as told to Norman Allan…"." Ted goes on to discuss further details surrounding the publishing deal. "That's about it."
     "It's interesting to me that as I was dictating this I didn't have any difficulty breathing. The angina seems less, also my left arm and my.. When I'm not doing this, and I'm trying to sleep, I.." Ted gasps to illustrate, "I catch my breath, or I wake up where I have, you know, I'm choking, not choking but like I need to.. I haven't breathed, or something. Why is that?" This is followed by a long wavering sigh, "Ohhh!"
     "You might, this is to Norman, you might, when you have time in a year or so, look up the play I've written called "All Saints", and it could be very good there." Then Ted speaks of "A Legend of Paradiso", and "Willie…" and then talks about casting the movie of "Secret", Gena Rowlands and who? "I should tell my stories of Sutherland and Borsos, and Joan Littlewood and, my meeting with T.S. Elliot. Nasty little snob. What a creep!…" He tells the story of his introduction to the Savage Club and asking for ketchup and horseradish, and the tells us that, "I think I've mined all the Mama stories. There's nothing more to tell."
     "I haven't written about Susan. That's really been painful. It's a terrible story because, I really loved her. God! It was so sick. She was so, she was a Jeckel and Hyde. When she got drunk she was really ugly, but when she was sober she was so witty. She was a joy in every way. Ohhh."
     Ted speaks of Spain, of Stalin, of the Second World War, of Vietnam, the "hypocrisy of the Americans talking about democratic values when they have trained and supported every right wing gangster in every part of the world they have any interest in, and they're interested in every part of the world. They trained the death squads… There isn't all that much to choose from, is there, between the mad Russians and the Americans… Ravishing, what they did with the native peoples. They killed more than ninety percent. Man has been the most voracious, the most monstrous animal ever created, as well as, as Shakespeare says, "What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason…"." Ted quotes at length from Hamlet.

"Monday morning, May the 1st.(5) May Day. Ha! God. Does that bring back memories. Mayday! But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about me coming for a visit.. I don't know why, to work? something, from London feeling like a very important man. Lawrence Olivier had.. Olivier and Vivien Leigh had produced "Double Image", starring Richard Attenborough, the play that Roger MacDougal and I wrote. It ran for over a year (over half a year). "Gog et Magog", which was a translation of that play, was, I think, then in its third year in Paris. Joan Littlewood had directed "Legend of Papito". The BBC had done six or seven of my original stage drama's and comedies. ITV had done a couple. The "Scalpel the Sword" was selling everywhere. I felt very important, and I had sent to my mother the newspaper photographs of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon with me when they came to see "Secret of the World", and she (Margaret) considered it a great play. I had also sent her only the best reviews: Bernard Levin. Oh dear, I've forgotten the names. Clancy Segal. The various daily critics as well as Harold Hobson. The only one who didn't like it was Ken Tynan, who comment was that "everything happens to Sam", and when, you know, I knew him and I said, "Well, doesn't everything happen to Hamlet? Doesn't everything happen to Lear?" And I said, "Don't you think.. you're a social democrat." "I'm not a social democrat," he said. Anyway, when I got home and I showed her the.. either I'd already sent it.. (Ted became a little confused here. He swallows a "but anyway" or a "when") I showed her the picture of Princess Margaret, she asked, "Have you…" She wasn't impressed. "Have you met the Queen?" I said, "No. I haven't met the Queen." And suddenly she said, "You know, darling, if you'd have stayed in Montreal, you would have had your own hardware store."
     "Ah, space, space, space…" Ted tells Lea Harper how he'd like her to edit my novelisation of "Lies…" to include in "volume one" of his autobiography. He wanted to change from the present tense to the past so that it fits more neatly, and change the names: for example, David would become "I".
     "Paragraph, or space. I want to go to New York. I want to see all those plays. I miss those plays! … I'm also wondering how Julie's going to react to the "Nine Stories of Annie". I'm in a strange mood, and I can't quite figure it out. I'm on the verge of writing something new."
     Ted talks at length about turning his seductive thoughts about his lovely massage therapist into a one act play, and then… "I'm going to have, if I just calm down and work with Norman and Lea, I will put things into place, and the various things which I have not written, just written notes about, I'll either make notes to indicate the sequences that have not been written, or I'll have Norman write the, for instance, "Brecht was My Babysitter", ah, what the hell you call it, "Excremental Therapy", where this guy in Tel Aviv asked me to bring my own shit (sheet), "Farting On Stalin", my interchange with Francois Perrier when after "Gog et Magog" ran five years and I said to him, "I don't think this is one of my better plays. How do you explain such a hit?" And he said, (Ted speaks with a French accent) "I can only explain flops." Little lines, as well as, certainly a chapter on my involvement, my deep involvement in being a young communist and writing for the newspaper. It was my ambition to write for a newspaper, and particularly this one, and when I saw my name in the by line printed the first time, I was so excited that I had to go into another room and be by myself…"
     Ted talks about how he changed his name to spy on Arcane's fascists. He speaks of his relationship with Houde, the mayor of Montreal. Then…
     "… Paragraph, or new page. I've been having trouble sleeping and its been really knocking me out. I fall asleep like six, seven o'clock in the morning. I have been meditating, however, so its not as devastating. … What I find interesting is that at night I have trouble breathing. I sort of lose a breath, and I have to breath deeply, and I have problems breathing, but I don't when I'm sleeping in the day. So I don't get it. (And then he yawns and repeats..) I don't get it!"
     "Paragraph. I love Genevieve. I have such a sweet, warm, delicious, loving feeling for her. And she's so funny, and it is such a joy to talk to her. It's a joy to talk to Julie and Gab, and Genevieve, because they're all so witty and we do so much laughing. Which reminds me, I've got to call that daughter of mine again."
     Ted spoke to Julie, at some length, every day. They were extremely close. I hope at some point Julie will find the time to write her reflections and recollection.

I listen to Ted's voice and wonder, "Is he with me now?" I was so used to him, always there in the foreground, in the background. My best friend.
     On one or two of the tapes Ted spoke of his fear of dying. Private ruminations. Never to me nor, I imagine, to Julie. With us he'd tell us he wanted us to know that his life had been full and he had enjoyed it. He recalled, though, from his heart attack, when he was passing out in the hospital, dying, his last thought was, "Oh shit!" He hoped his last thought would be more edifying next time round.
     We all said, after the heart attack, that Ted would live as long as he wished - that his will was indomitable. But in the last few years, past his mid-seventies, he ceased to be a powerful magnet to young women (sexually, at least), and he found it harder to sustain focused work at the typewriter, and with this his tenacity weakened.
     To what degree of minutia should we travel here?
     In the spring of '95 Ted's lungs began to fail him. He coughed sputum streaked with red, and found himself increasingly short of breath. In early June he went back into hospital. The family drama was intense. Though the outside world did not tremble, our world was shaking. They moved Ted into intensive care. They intubated him. With face and hands he gestured, joked, and he told us of his fear. Still his respiration continued to fail. The "inflammation" did not respond to any antibiotics. (In retrospect, it was the drug, Amiodarone, that killed him, bringing on these pulmonary symptoms. And his doctor here at the Toronto Hospital would not even receive a call from his long time Cardiologist in LA to discuss the medication!) The doctors decided to sedate him so he wouldn't "fight" the artificial respiration.
     Ted gestured down his torso to indicate the irritation the urinary catheter was causing him. I spoke of this to the nurse bustling among his bedside tubes and wires.
     "Oh yes. My uncle too, just before he passed away, complained about the catheter," she said: the last words he heard before he went under the sedation.
     "He's got to recover," I thought. "That can't be the last thing he'll hear."

     And last words spoken before the intubation?
     Ted and Julie and her daughters would sing - as Ted and Kate had sung to us in childhood - but in this era it was songs from Broadway musicals.
     "Shall I sing you "Carousel"? " asked Gab.
     "Mercy," said Ted.

Ted and Jack Berry spent a lot of time together those last two years working on the movie script for "Secret…" With Ted unconscious in hospital Jack flew back to T.O., and he nurtured me. The actress, and friend, Shirley Douglas came and stood for forty minutes by Ted's bedside. And Marilyn Lightstone (who was Mama in "Lies…"). And our cousins and, of course, Gab and Bron, who had lived with him this last year. And Julie and I - me waiting on the miracle.
     He passed away in the early hours of June 30th, 1995.
     He left an "obituary" or "epitaph": last words. Several versions. That which we have deemed the official "last words" told us to persevere - never to give up - he hadn't. He never gave up. And they, his last words, his auto-eulogy, they said he had a special thing for "trees…" (we laughed) "and puppies and kittens, children and women." That, that was true enough. And "sometimes…" he said, "sometimes he wrote like an angel." He went on to enjoin us, and everyone, to read and reread Hamlet and Lear.

Now I know this has turned out pretty much to be a "Ted and me" book, at least in the later pages, but its intention is to tell Ted's story as best I can. I recall again sitting one evening in the Putney apartment, above the Thames, listening to Ted speaking of Spain. "I want my son, Seth, to hear this," I thought. "What a life! The world should know of this."
     If I were telling my story, Norman's story of Ted, there would be a lot more to say, but we'll leave that for another day. I know I've obtruded more and more into the story as it's progressed, but it is the best I can do to tell his story, The Life My Father Told Me.

Epilogue