When I had the chance to meet Peter Ustinov, I jumped at it. An Academy Award-winning film actor, Ustinov was also an accomplished writer. His 1977 autobiography, Dear Me, I had thought brilliant. In the fall of 1989, he was to be in Toronto to tape a television retrospective of the 1980s for the CTV network. I asked my fellow editors at Saturday Night if I could work on a piece on the show.
The two days I spent with Ustinov in a television studio, listening to his stream of anecdotes and clever wordplay, were among the most memorable days of my writing life. Between takes, his conversation leapt around the world, often landing in Russia, where he had hosted a television series a few years earlier.
The best story from his time in Russia was an anecdote about an ancient Bolshevik who was running state television in Moscow. This party apparatchik, a life-long political hack, told Ustinov that Vyacheslav Molotov, one of Stalin’s senior henchmen, was still walking his dog at the age of ninety-three. “Furthermore, he’s touching five hundred rubles a month,” the old Bolshevik went on, “the same as our best ballerina.”
Ustinov replied, “And he’s not even that good a dancer.”
The old Bolshevik looked at his guest earnestly and said, “You know, I wasn’t aware that Molotov danced at all.” What made the anecdote even better was Ustinov’s uncanny ability to summon up the pitch-perfect accent of any European language.
“You know, I wasn’t aware that Molotov danced at all.”
He told another comical story about preparing the TV series on Russia, during which he dictated a telex to be sent to Moscow asking for supplementary information on Lenin. “A very pretty Canadian girl with freckles sent off the telex. She had apparently never heard of Lenin and so misspelled the name. When the reply came back from Moscow, it said, “We can’t understand why you are asking us for supplementary information on Lennon. We suggest you call Yoko Ono.” Which was really very surprising coming from Moscow.”
Ustinov as Nero in Quo Vadis (1951) From Wikipedia
We often say of people as multi-talented as Ustinov that they are larger than life, and in his case, this was more than a metaphor. A huge man both vertically and horizontally, he gave the impression of bouncing around the set like an oversized inflatable effigy of himself. His hands were enormous. He explained to me that the small Minitel control boxes, pre-Internet digital devices that had been introduced to telephone subscribers in France, were of no use to him. His large fingers would always press two buttons when he wanted to land on one.
The script for the 1980s show had been written by Gary Michael Dault, a Toronto artist, art critic, and skilled magazine writer. Gary had created a lively tour d’horizon of the decade. Ustinov found most of it readable and actable, but, being a connoisseur of languages (he spoke six fluently), he rejected anything that he felt sounded unnatural. So, occasionally there was a tussle over a word or phrase. Reaching a little too hard for originality in one instance, Dault had written “ulcify” into the script in his commentary on the deteriorating ozone layer.
“Is that a word?” Ustinov objected.
“Sure.” But then Gary looked doubtful.
“Isn’t it? Or is it ulcerate?”
“I’m not sure even ulcerate is a word.”
“Can’t you push it into usage?” Gary pleaded. “Give it a standing start?”
“You’d have to have a thesaurus to pull it,” Ustinov joked. He preferred something without an ulcer in it.
“How about ‘fester?” he suggested finally.
It was a tonic to be around this man who was such a stickler for le mot juste, even if his talent seemed almost too rich for such a pedestrian project. I imagine Ustinov’s Canadian producer John McGreevy—in my experience an unpleasant man, but whom the big-hearted Ustinov seemed to like—knew that the show itself was a trivial, cheesy bit of fluff. I’m sure Gary Dault knew it, although he had attempted to rocket it aloft with surges of eloquence. Ustinov did his best to sprinkle his own verbal condiments through the voice-overs and on-camera soliloquies. But in the end, no one could hide the fact that this was an hour of ephemeral television made for easy money.
What I most enjoyed was all the downtime between takes when we could talk. Knowing that Vladimir Nabokov had lived in Switzerland, as did Ustinov, I asked if they had been friends. (Nabokov died in 1977.) Ustinov said they had known each other well. I asked what he thought of Nabokov’s writing, and his answer was one of the better pieces of criticism of the great Russo-American novelist I had ever come across: “Nabokov’s English has the same effect on me as Richard Strauss’s music. So full of cream and so lacking in oxygen that I sometimes have to stop reading because I begin to feel queasy.”
What I most enjoyed was all the downtime between takes when we could talk.
He described Nabokov as “difficult, a real eccentric. When the Russian Sputnik went up, he didn’t believe it. It seemed to him that everything that happened subsequent to the Russian Revolution just didn’t exist. I said to him that the Sputnik had been tracked by a Portuguese observatory. And he said, ‘Portuguese! Of course! Which other country would bother?’”
A polymath, a dazzling mimic, a word magician, Ustinov exhibited none of the hauteur I would have expected. He seemed no different on camera than off. When describing Nabokov, he observed, “The trouble with great eccentrics is that they’re all terribly similar to each other. They’re all rude. And they’re all intolerant.”
None of this could be said of Ustinov, at least not in the days I spent with him. He obviously loved to be centre stage, but he was no egomaniac. One time between takes, Gary Dault mentioned that his biological father was Greek.
“Oh really? Daultopoulos,” Ustinov mused.
“No. Moskos,” Gary went on. “But he was embarrassed by his Greek background and changed his name to Moore.”
Without missing a beat, Ustinov picked up the thought and turned it around, “The irony is that there’s a gentleman now sitting in Knossos saying, ‘My father’s name was Moore, but he was embarrassed by it and so he changed it to Moskos.’”
I thought this neatly exemplified the playfulness of Ustinov’s mind, but also his empathy, and his wise, bird’s-eye view of human foibles.
After escaping from his ultra-conservative Montreal family, George Galt found ultimate success as a poet, non-fiction writer, and editor. As much about people as it is about the written word, Line Breaks offers vivid portraits of many of the characters Galt encountered during his literary life, from Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, and Peter Ustinov to Charles Ritchie, Jan Morris, David Frum, and Pierre Trudeau.
""Charming, astute, witty, and insightful. Line Breaks is a lovely book about books by someone who knows intimately the form, and content, of the writerly heart."" —Charles Foran, author of Mordecai and Just Once, No More
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