Working the Dead Beat Read Online Free PDF

manager.” He had already chosen a cemetery plot and decided on his epitaph: “Soldier and Actor.”
    Ten days later I rang his Stratford doorbell. Wearing a loose brown patterned shirt over casual trousers and with terribly swollen ankles showing above a pair of moccasins, Hutt sat in a wing chair beside a window. He was attached to a portable oxygen tank and did not rise to greet me — an indication from an unfailingly courteous man that his strength was failing. His face had a waxy pallor and, having smoked for sixty years before he finally butted out, he was often racked with coughing spells. But his conversation was thoughtful and engaging.
    For ninety minutes we had a frank and wide-ranging conversation about his disaffection with his parents, the war and his introduction to death before he had had a chance to know much about life, his bisexuality, and how he had found a home on stage at the Stratford Festival. Although completely lucid, he seemed to have transcended the quotidian world and was in a contemplative space I felt privileged to share.
    Unlike so many young men who charge onto the battlefield deluded by visions of glory, Hutt was a pacifist. He had “no intention of shooting anybody” but he wanted to serve his country in the Second World War, so he enlisted in an ambulance unit as a corporal, thereby probably seeing more trauma and gore than the most gung-ho combatants. Just north of Monte Cassino, Italy, he volunteered to traverse a heavily mined and booby-trapped field, under constant mortar fire, to attend to wounded soldiers and to find a suitable site for a first-aid post. For his gallantry and initiative he was awarded the Military Medal in the field.
    Hutt had no false modesty about his capacity as an actor. “I will leave the word ‘great’ to history,” he said that afternoon, “but I do know that in some kind of way, my career as an actor has paralleled the growth of theatre in this country.” He said he had always been very practical as an actor, and that his decision to stay home rather than to chase fame in London and New York came from an “arrogant pride” in Canada. “I had no intention of leaving this country until I was invited. I wasn’t going to beg.” And by doing so, he showed that it was possible to have both a stellar career here and attractive offers to work elsewhere.
    Growing philosophical, he said there are three major stages in life: The first is adolescence, when things happen to your body and your mind. The second stage is when you are in your twenties and your parents become your friends rather than authority figures (the war had interrupted that process for him and left him divided from his parents). The third stage, the one he was entering, is death and wondering what that will be like. He wanted to go on living, but he wasn’t afraid of death.
    Sensing his fatigue, I turned off my tape recorder, put away my notebook, and walked across the room to shake his hand and make my goodbyes. “How are you going to use this?” he asked, locking my eyes with his and holding on to my outstretched hand. “By the time I write your obituary, in ten years’ time,” I said with what I hoped was a disarming smile, “this moment we have shared will have evaporated.” He nodded, and then, after struggling to get up, he pulled my face down and kissed me on both cheeks, a farewell that only later I realized was permanent. Fewer than five days afterwards he died, to the shock of friends, colleagues, and this obituary writer.
    How I wish now that I’d had a video camera in my journalist’s toolkit that afternoon, so that the final interview with Canada’s most majestic actor could have been captured for posterity. Would the magic connection that I felt with William Hutt that hot afternoon have been destroyed by cameras and technicians? I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think