Impact (Mar 1972)

They talk about the wide open spaces of California. You know, I think the population of California is about the same as the whole of Canada. You can imagine what it’s like, when you get in the car and drive for six, seven hours, across the Mojave Desert, back into the foothills, and then you get a packhorse, and you ride for another few hours, way up into the mountains, to where there’s a lonely, natural stream — and when you get there you find twenty people. The first interview was with the Varsity, the University of Toronto newspaper. He graduated from U of T in 1949, with a BA. It was the same era that produced Don Harron, Norman De Poe, Lloyd Bochner, Harvey Hart, Art Hiller, Eric House. Mainly they remember Norman for his campus reviews. In his final year he directed the first All-Varsity Review, starring Don Harron. After the Varsity interview, it was the Elwood Glover Show at the CBC and Norman kept telling anyone who'd listen about the parking lot out there, where he used to throw up. They laughed. They thought he was making jokes about his youthful booze-ups. He wasn’t though. He threw up in the parking lot from tension, before and after shows. Regularly. He wore a suit and tie for the Glover show. The studio audience was mostly women, wearing hats. Topol was there too. They told the Irving joke, with just as much relish and chuckling as when they told it on the David Frost Show the week before. They tell it, now, in the context of Fiddler, and a conversation between the Israeli star and the Gentile director. But as it appeared in a magazine article in 1968, it went something like this: Norman was just breaking into American television in New York (Hit Parade, Belafonte and Garland specials), and he looked like the hottest new variety director in town. One day his agent came to him, looking worried, and asked if he’d ever considered changing his name. ‘“‘Why?” said Norman. “Because it sounds too Jewish.” The fact that it wasn’t Jewish (it’s Eng lish) was beside the point, in the agent’s view. It started with JEW, and everybody would think it was Jewish. Norman said he’d think it over, came back the next day and said he’d decided to take the agent’s advice. “I’m going to change it to Christianson. Irving Christianson.” After the Glover show it took him twenty minutes to make his way to the lobby. The foyer was jammed with old CBC friends, wanting to say hello to old ‘“‘Normie.”’ Rich Little was waiting to introduce his new wife. Jack Duffy was there, and Norman invited him to the post-premier party. There was a lot of embracing, and cheekkissing. An old-cronies lunch at The Four Seasons. Then back to the hotel suite for a couple of fast telephone calls before the next interview. The calls were to United Artists executives in New York. They had good news. Box-office receipts in New York, one week after the opening, were the highest in cinema history. And the two femmes terribles of film criticism, Judith Crist and Pauline Kael, had both come out with long. ecstatic reviews. Fiddler was in. He came off the phone on a high that was to last the rest of the day and night. Every few minutes he’d throw his arms around Topol and they’d go into a little huddle with low, excited murmuring, erupting into great joyous hoots and slaphappy giggles. ‘“*Y ou have to understand what it’s like,” he said in the limousine, on the way back to the CBC for the Weekday show. ““This is the time, you know. When it all comes together. You spend two and a half years of your life, and you put everything you have into it, and you never know. You just never know. How it’s going to hit. The public. The critics. “It’s really fantastic, you know. Reader’s Digest is doing this thing on it. Pauline Kael took a full page in The New Yorker. And even Rex Reed liked it. He raved about it. It got to him. I mean, Rex Reed.”