September 1956, and ending with the Globe and Mail in January 2002, covered the period of eight Canadian prime ministers, most of whom he interviewed. It was also the second Elizabethan Age, and Peter even managed to interview Her Majesty. Or so he imagined. He was witness to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the growth of economic nationalism in the West. From the rise of state medicine to the decline of the patriarchy, Peter was there to comment, to resist, and to participate. Here was a man who was proud to call himself Canadian and who made millions of other Canadians realize that Canada was, in what he claimed was a Canadian expression, not a bad place to live.
Even though, in his memoirs, Peter twice hinted at a darker side, most of his fans, and a few of his colleagues, rejected the idea that behind that carefully honed persona, there was another Peter, an actual human being who was, as Sylvia Fraser wrote shortly after his death, a “troubled and a troubling man.”11 There were as many Peter Gzowskis as there are people who remember him. In fact, one person close to him admitted that there were days when she encountered a different Peter each time she ran into him. He was unpredictable. Michael Enright remembers being warmly invited to Peter’s cottage at Lake Simcoe. “He had been very insistent that I go and very attentive in giving me the right directions,” Enright noted. However, once Enright arrived at the cottage, Peter ignored him, preferring instead the company of eight or nine members of his inner circle.12
Peter was a complex man, full of contradictions. His affairs and flirtations with women were legendary, and thus his rather ambiguous notion of physical beauty is puzzling. Peter’s eye was attracted to the naked male physiques of athletes, particularly hockey players such as Mark Messier, whose perfect body, which Peter had observed at close quarters in the Edmonton Oilers’ dressing room, he described several times. On the opening page of The Game of Our Lives, Peter took note of the “handsome” Messier “with head thrown back, his eyes closed, his Praxitelean13 body naked, one hand cupped over his genitals.” In December 1981, Peter wrote that Messier had a body that “sculptors would kill for,”14 and in 1984, on Morningside, he likened Messier’s body to “a Grecian statue.”15 In The Game of Our Lives, Peter’s descriptions of other Oilers players are sensuous.16 None of this would be worth noting were it not for the fact that, in all his books and articles, there isn’t a single description of a nude female body. In fact, he said once that he didn’t enjoy looking at Playboy bunnies, whom he called “bovine.” Instead, he preferred the rather wholesome models posing in Eaton’s catalogues, models whose breasts and genitalia were suitably sheathed in bras and girdles.17
On air Peter was open and welcoming; in private he was carefully guarded. While most people considered him a success, Peter enjoyed dwelling on failure. Although he made it his life’s work to reveal the inner workings of the Canadian political system and to uncover the psyches of writers and politicians, he thought it an act of high treason if a friend even hinted at his ruthlessly competitive nature. He was a man who loved giving advice on recipes, books, and politics, yet he loathed taking advice, and the few friends who dared to suggest that it was time to stop smoking were given the silent treatment for days. Peter sympathized with the downtrodden and the illiterate, yet only rarely did he associate with members of this lower stratum of society.
Although he played the role of Father of His Nation and Captain Canada, guiding his listeners through one constitutional crisis after another, he found it difficult to be a good father. One afternoon in 1983 his daughter, Alison, discovered Peter watching a television game show called Family Feud, a program that blended fact and fiction.18 Peter’s imagination was racing. He announced that he wanted to drive his family to Los Angeles where they could participate in Family Feud. Peter even imagined, according to Alison, “how we would learn to jump up and down with enthusiasm.” Alison wasn’t impressed, for she had already seen her father’s imagination at work. When his wife and children objected, he “slammed a door in anger.”19 Peter had difficulty dealing with the real world.
On air Peter was usually a paragon of fairness. However, if a radio guest was of the wrong political stripe, and therefore didn’t agree with Peter’s definition of country or nation, he could grow petulant. He loved playing the part of the gregarious and generous host of golf tournaments that raised millions for literacy, yet in private he wasn’t above cheating at golf and swearing at an opponent. Peter loved to direct and manage, but he had trouble dealing with managers at the CBC, and with Cabinet ministers in charge of the network.
How did this shy, awkward, sometimes mean-spirited man who sought, indeed required, constant encouragement from producers, partners, and friends manage to define and refine, sculpt and weave a vision of Canada so powerful that many people still believe in it? How did he gain the confidence of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to such an extent that they often poured out their hearts to him in letters? It was, in fact, these very contradictions, these conflicts, these ghosts, that made him one of Canada’s best broadcast journalists. As psychotherapist Alan McGlashan once observed, “The depth of darkness into which you can descend, and still live, is an exact measure … of the height to which you can aspire to reach.”20
Truman Capote put it another way: “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.” In fact, without failure, real or imagined, can there be success? Without darkness, can there be light? Without that acquaintance with the night, an artist risks producing books or paintings, radio shows or theatre, that are superficial. Peter was well acquainted with darkness, and that is one reason why many of his radio programs are still worth listening to, and why many of his longer magazine articles are worth rereading.
Why a biography? After all, surely Peter told the whole truth in The Private Voice, his memoir published in 1988. Ah, the lovely treachery of memoir! Had he intended that memoir to stand as definitive, why did he carefully preserve his personal papers which, after the publication of the memoir, he deposited, with no conditions attached, at Trent University Archives? Would he approve of a truthful biography? Probably, for he was always opposed to censorship of any sort. On June 1, 1963, in Maclean’s, he damned managers and owners who forbade players to write about the darker aspects of hockey and baseball. In September 1981, he told students at the University of Guelph, “I oppose censorship absolutely. I don’t want anyone else telling me not only what I can and cannot write or publish or broadcast, I don’t want anyone else telling me what I can read or buy or attend — and I don’t want them telling my children either.” Publication of anything, even kiddy porn, was a right, he insisted.21
Furthermore, Peter loathed idealized figures such as Pa Cartwright in the television series Bonanza, the most popular TV western of the 1960s. Cartwright, played by Canadian Lorne Greene, was impossibly flawless, “kind, wise, courteous, strong, rich, loyal, honest, and fair to his sons,” who, as Peter pointed out with a wink, never left home. The real West, Peter added, wasn’t populated exclusively by courageous and heroic characters dressed in clean, well-pressed clothing. He preferred Dr. Ben Casey, the main character in a television series set in a hospital, for Casey was “rude, arrogant and believably human.”22
In March 1984, during an interview on Morningside with Michael Bliss, Peter and Bliss discussed the latter’s biography of Dr. Frederick Banting, whose private life was somewhat tortured but whose public life was full of honours, including a Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin. “Are you at all troubled for taking this great Canadian figure … and showing that he had feet of clay?” Peter asked Bliss. There was pain in Peter’s voice. And wasn’t to do so a Canadian phenomenon, Peter continued, to denigrate our own accomplishments? Above all, Bliss explained, biography must be honest. Peter agreed, and the two men concluded that they continued to admire Banting, warts and all. In no way, Bliss and Peter concluded, did exposing this less attractive part of Banting remove him from the pantheon of Canadian heroes. Nor should this biography of Peter Gzowski.
