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2009
March 15, 2009 The Premiers cpac Movie
Known as "The Boss", two-time Premier Maurice Duplessis governed with absolute control and political tactics some considered corrupt. Although his era became known as "la Grande noirceur" (The Great Darkness), Duplessis delivered roads, hospitals, and prosperity for Quebecers. Featuring rarely seen archival footage and lively interviews with notables, including biographer Conrad Black, the documentary captures the drama of the Duplessis era. Heward Grafftey, William Weintraub,
15 Mar 2009  Maurice Duplessis - Quebec
Monday, April 13 at 11PM ET / 8PM PT
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Known as “The Boss,” two-time Premier Duplessis governed with absolute control and political tactics some considered corrupt. Although his era became known as La Grand Noirceur ("The Great Darkness"), Duplessis delivered roads, hospitals, and prosperity for Quebecers. Featuring rarely seen archival footage and lively interviews with notables including biographer Conrad Black, the documentary captures the drama of the Duplessis era. |
2005
William Weintraub
as a McGill student is infatuated by an exotic dancer
Crazy About Lili Nicholas Hoare book Launch 22 Sept 2005
McGill student is infatuated by an exotic dancer
PAT DONNELLY The Gazette
September 10, 2005
Crazy About Lili
By William Weintraub
McClelland & Stewart/ Douglas Gibson, 262 pages, $29.99There's nothing quite as intoxicating as youthful infatuation from afar. In William Weintraub's Crazy About Lili, an aspiring young poet named
Richard Lippman finds his muse in the person of Lili L'Amour, an exotic
dancer with artistic aspirations. Introduced to Lili by an
embarrassing uncle who runs an illegal gambling operation in Cote St.
Luc and prefers chopped liver to haute cuisine, Richard instantly
succumbs to her charms. In lieu of an autographed picture, she hands
him a blue pasty stripped from her breast as a souvenir. That night, rendered sleepless by passion, Richard composes an ode that begins: "When Dante did sweet Lili espy/ He said to Beatrice, 'Goodbye, goodbye.' "
Three
days after dropping it in the mailbox, he receives a call from Lili,
who invites him to lunch - at the Ritz. Thus begins Richard's year-long
adventure under the influence of an older woman who recognizes his
budding talent for showbiz. Much to his disappointment, she takes him
on as a scriptwriter and confidant rather than a lover. But she does
introduce him to another dancer named Freckles, who desires more than
choreographic advice. Lili, meanwhile, has incurred the wrath of
a conservative faction of the Catholic church by distracting a growing
segment of the male population of Montreal with her semi-nude
performances. Here Weintraub excels at the farcical. He lets us
eavesdrop on a meeting at the Lafontaine Club where a rather worldly
priest has been summoned by the conservative elite in order to sic him
like a dog on poor Lili. The priest, who clearly disdains the lot of them, reluctantly agrees to write a scathing letter to Le Devoir. This
is very close to what actually happened to Lili St. Cyr, who served as
the key inspiration for this book. During her stripping days at the
Gayety Theatre in Montreal in the 1940s, St. Cyr was denounced, then
hauled into court on indecency charges, and acquitted. In the
book, Weintraub, ever the gentleman, has spared her the witness box and
allowed her to skip town with the help of a wealthy Canadian Pacific
Railway executive. (St. Cyr's oft-quoted motto was "What's the use of
being beautiful if you can't profit from it?") By the end of the
school year, Richard thinks of himself as a man-about-town, even though
he's still living with his parents and lying to his mother. Thanks to
the burlesque girls, he has developed the confidence necessary to
become a ladies' man, a con artist and/or a poet. Weintraub is
adept at playing the historical tease, sprinkling in enough actual
facts and local colour to give a soupcon of credence to his jocular
coming-of-age tale. In Crazy About Lili, all is revealed one tantalizing page at a time, with a nudge and a wink.
When sex was mysterious
PAT DONNELLY The Gazette
Saturday, September 10, 2005
"I live in the past," William Weintraub confessed as we entered
his third-floor study in the spacious Westmount home he shares with his
wife, Magda. He waved his hand at the walls where vintage photographs
are displayed, giving evidence of a life lived among the key Montreal
literati of his generation. When Weintraub talks about his friend
Brian, he's referring to the late Brian Moore. When he mentions a
Mavis, you know the last name is Gallant. And yes, that's a picture of
the late Mordecai Richler and his wife, Florence, capturing them
forever young. "We had no money but we lived so well," he said,
recalling a time when opportunities abounded and the cost of living was
low. "There were lots of ways to make a buck and keep going." A
mini-highway of a treadmill commands the centre of the study. An
otherwise hale and hearty 79, Weintraub has recently recognized the
need to keep his knees nimble. No need to worry about his mind,
however. That remains in mischievous good form, as evidenced by his
latest book, Crazy About Lili, an entertaining novel about a McGill
University freshman who falls hopelessly in love with a glamorous
stripper named Lili L'Amour. A McGill-educated man himself,
Weintraub downplays the autobiographical elements in the book. But
there's no denying that the character Lili L'Amour is but a thinly
disguised version of the legendary exotic dancer Lili St. Cyr, whom
Weintraub had the privilege of viewing in all her uninhibited glory
when she performed at the old Gayety burlesque theatre in Montreal,
back in the 1940s. It was a pivotal moment of his life that has
remained with him over the years. "But I never met Lili," he admitted,
with sincere regret. "And I never had an affair with a girl called
Freckles, either." In Weintraub's rollicking tale, Richard, the
student poet, becomes an intimate adviser to the ladies of the
clothes-shedding trade. And a girl named Freckles takes it upon herself
to tutor him in other matters. Therein lies the beauty of fiction.
Puerile fantasy can be revisited and improved.
The lighthearted
Crazy About Lili represents a new genre for Weintraub, who has mastered
many along the way. He began his career as a reporter at The Gazette, a
position from which he was subsequently fired for the "small, small
sin" of calling the managing editor a "pig." This experience provided
fodder for his first satirical novel, Why Rock the Boat?, about a
chaotic newsroom where nothing was fit to print. It was published in
1962 and made into a successful feature film in 1974. From print
journalism, Weintraub soon moved into cinematic circles, working as a
scriptwriter, producer and director, primarily with the National Film
Board, until he took early retirement, after about 150 films, in 1986. Crazy
About Lili is Weintraub's third novel and the first that strays from
the satirical. His second novel, The Underdogs, which presented a
gloomy view of the future for anglophones in Quebec, gained additional
notoriety when the play version had difficulty finding a producer.
But Weintraub's most recent works, Getting Started: A Memoir of
the 1950s and City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and
'50s, have been historical non-fiction. "You can't satirize the
past," he said, "you can only be amused by it." In City Unique, he
devoted several pages to the "real" story of Lili St. Cyr, a woman
whose entire identity was fabricated. Although she liked people to
believe she was French, her heritage was Swedish-Dutch, she was born in
Minneapolis and was raised under the name Marie Klarquist. Like Gypsy
Rose Lee before her, she brought a special theatricality to her work.
She was a headliner in major U.S. cities and reigned supreme in
Montreal for about seven years, from 1944 to 1951. In her latter years,
she sold lingerie in California. She died in 1999, at the age of 80. After
the release of City Unique, Weintraub began receiving phone calls from
"old codgers" who wanted to share their memories of Lili St. Cyr. "And
one or two of them hinting darkly that they'd known her more than
somewhat." The thought occurred that it might be a good idea to spin a yarn in her honour. Fiction is tougher to conquer than non-fiction, he said. "Writing
non-fiction is kind of a steady, daily thing. But writing fiction is
full of extreme highs. And then the next day it looks terrible, you're
plunged into depths. When it's working it's great. When it's not
working it's terrible. It's an emotional roller-coaster, for me." He began with the premise that a young man, not unlike his younger self, gets to meet the sex icon of his dreams. "So
I arranged the meeting between them and went on from there," he
explained. Through Richard, he explored the themes of sexual obsession,
deception and loss of innocence. While the story is the fluff of dreams, the historical context, thanks to Weintraub's thorough knowledge of the era, is solid. "Lili
was Montreal's sweetheart, that's what the ads called her," he said.
"This was the golden age of striptease, which lasted from the jazz age
in the 1920s and was all over by 1960. After 1960, in Montreal and all
across North America, burlesque theatres closed." The sexual revolution
had arrived. Nudity was everywhere. "It was all out in the open," he
said. But during that golden era, according to Weintraub, many
stripteasers thought of themselves as modern dancers, of the Isadora
Duncan school. And a few, like Lili, had the talent to prove it. Modern stripping doesn't impress Weintraub. "There's no 'show' to it," he said. If
Crazy About Lili is nostalgia fare, he added, "it's a nostalgia for
when sex was mysterious, forbidden - and virtually unavailable." Other
factual elements in the book include the existence of an underground
casino, possibly frequented by Lili, located in Cote St. Luc. "It
was a village in those days, very sparsely settled," he said. "There
were farms. They grew great melons out there. There was only one
policeman to the village so there was only one policeman to pay off.
There was a lot of illegal gambling in Montreal, all over the place."
Some of Weintraub's characters are made up, others are based on real people. What rules are there to this game? "One rule is that you don't want to get into any libel suits." How do you avoid that? "You do that by basing your characters on dead people who are not able to sue you. Unfortunately, the dead have no rights." But in Lili's case, it's hard to imagine that her ghost would have any objection whatsoever to Weintraub's book. A
launch of William Weintraub's Crazy About Lili will be held at Nicholas
Hoare Westmount, 1366 Greene Ave., on Thursday Sept. 22, from 5 to 7
p.m. For information: (514) 933-4201.
pdonnell@thegazette.canwest.com
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005
Vice, gaiety and spangled pasties in old Montreal
Kildare Dobbs Weekend Post
September 17, 2005
CREDIT: Dave Sidaway, CanWest News Service
Nobody can portray the wild and wooly period of Montreal's history before the Quiet Revolution better than William Weintraub.
CRAZY ABOUT LILI
By William Weintraub
McClelland & Stewart272 pp., $29.99
It's
a happy publishing season that includes a new book by William
Weintraub. The Sage of Montreal, a dignified presence with laughter in
his eyes, is sure to provide pleasure, both in the matter and in the
manner. No one can more brilliantly evoke the great period of
Montreal's history, just before the Quiet Revolution, when it was the
northern capital of vice and gaiety, with its nightclubs, brothels,
bars and naughty burlesque houses, a nocturnal playground to rival New
York and Chicago. Weintraub is the author of the novels Why Rock
the Boat and The Underdogs and also of two volumes of non-fiction of
classic rank, City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and
'50s and Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950s. This time it's another
novel, set in Montreal in 1948. It's the story of a 17-year-old McGill
freshman's struggle for adulthood. Richard comes from a Jewish
family that's comfortably off in the anglo enclave of Westmount. When
we first meet him he's with friends discussing their painful efforts to
be rid of the burden of virginity. They're devouring sundaes in
Gagnon's ice-cream parlour, "the extravagant Pistachio Surprise, the
reliable maple walnut with hot fudge sauce, the understated but
seductive Choco-Mint Parfait." Richard is saved from these frustrating
sessions by his Uncle Morty, an unreconstructed slum Jew without
cultural affectations. Uncle Morty knows all the right people, not only
in the shmatte trade but in the dives and boites as well as City Hall
and police headquarters. He takes his nephew to the Gayety burlesque
theatre to see the stripper Lili L'Amour and visit her in her dressing
room. Lili is mad at Morty (who denied her entrance to his gambling
joint "for her own good"), but she takes to Richard, who is a poet and,
as it turns out, an excellent choreographer and PR man. Lili gives him one of her spangled pasties, and in no time the boy is in love with her. A
group of pious businessmen is set to clean up the city, to shut down
the dens of iniquity, the stews and whorehouses that give Montreal its
meretricious glamour. This alarms the priest whose help they enlist.
Such a campaign would endanger the powerful benefactors whose
contributions are fuelling the archbishop's frenetic building of
churches and convents. His Excellency hopes to make cardinal with his
building. The priest suggests an alternative assault on vice: Arrest
Lili L'Amour. Thanks to Morty, the stripper gets out of town just in
time. Richard is in despair when he learns his true love has
hitched a ride to New York with the head of the CPR in his private rail
car. But she sends a friend of hers to take advice on her act from the
boy. Richard writes a press release that changes her whole career,
bringing her fame and fortune. But not before she skillfully relieves
him of that painful virginity. He's consoled by letters from Lili --
consoled and tormented. We're given a fascinating view of a
McGill education, to which Richard now devotes himself. A gorgeous rich
girl admires his poetry. She's literary editor of a new magazine,
and tries to recruit him for the Communist Party. He's told to work
some Communist doctrine into his poetry. Reading a book by Stalin he
finds it so crushingly boring that his interest in Communism begins to
fade. Uncle Morty points out the dangers of a Communist record.
He argues that Richard only wants to get laid, and Communism is not the
way. I don't want to give away the story, which is full of
surprises. What gives the novel its charm is partly the attractive
personality of the protagonist, but also the author's extensive and
detailed knowledge of Montreal, including pastry and other comestibles,
not forgetting the arts of striptease and public relations. The Sage
was in his day a newspaperman, magazine writer, playwright and for many
years a filmmaker. Like his friend the late Mordecai Richler,
he's well placed as a Jew to see the ridiculousness of many francophone
obsessions, which he mercilessly lampoons. At the same time his
affection for his native place is boundless. In common with many others
of his city, he is capable of a certain lightness of sensibility, a
readiness for fun, which makes him the best of company.
Kildare Dobbs's memoir, Running the Rapids: A Writer's Life,
will be published next month by Dundurn Press.
© National Post 2005
The real (old) Montréal
Getting Started by William Weintraub
A Memoir of the 1950s
Getting Started is a wonderful memoir, a collection of extraordinary letters, and a brilliant recreation of a time when Canadian writers were set to make their mark in the world for the first time.
William Weintraub weaves together his own memories of the 1950s with letters both to and from his literary colleagues: Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore. The letters and his recollections are always fascinating, often hilarious, and provide intimate insight into the lives and work of some of Canada's finest contemporary writers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William Weintraub was a reporter for the Gazette and a writer for Weekend magazine. Later, as writer, director, and producer with the National Film Board, he was involved in the making of some 150 films. He is the author of Why Rock the Boat?, The Underdogs, and City Unique.
Get, William Weintraub's
City Unique [McGill Review] : Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and '50s Today!
link from W-N Used Price: $17.89us
William Weintraub introduces the reader to many of the extraordinary characters who gave Montreal its singular flavour. In the prosperous 1940s and 50s, Montreal was Canada's largest, richest, most vibrant city -- and its vice capital. Weintraub describes a cosmopolitan city composed of three solitudes -- the English, the French, and the Jews -- and the changes that gradually took place in these communities. He portrays a city where amply bribed police and politicians resisted attempts at reform, and he introduces the extraordinary characters who made the city what it was. City Unique is an extraordinary evocation of a momentous era in the history of a city that is truly unique in North America.
Sun Feb 20 2000: City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and 1950s, William Weintraub
A well-written account of Montréal history, with the 1930s as prologue, 1960 as epilogue, and two decades of critical change in between. At the start of that time span, Québec was a static and conservative society, dominated by the Catholic church and Duplessis's Union Nationale. By the end society was far more liberal, and the turbulence of the Quiet Revolution was soon to arrive. Weintraub does a good job of sketching society, from the urban poor up to the commercial élite.
AND: Uproarious nightlife... seduction..graft and corruption. Here is post-war Montréal in its wildest epoch, when it was Canada's largest and richest city. The Capital of Vice was "uniquely sinful in strait laced Canada." Filled with outrageous characters and scandalous tidbits, Weintraub's portrait of this party town is a grabber from the first word.
 Tendon and Ligament Healing: A New Approach Through Manual Therapy $14us
A study of the benefits of manual therapy in healing serious tendon and ligament injuries, this book describes the body's healing mechanisms and presents his manual therapy model.
William Weintraub M.A. has a Masters degree in Biomechanics from Antioch University. He has practiced and taught structural/osteopathic therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area for 25 years. His extensive training in osteopathic and related techniques includes Practitioner Certifications in Body-Mind Centering, Counterstrain technique, and acupressure therapy. About the Book
WILLIAM WEINTRAUB AND THE ENGLISH COMMUNITY
As author (Why Rock the Boat, City Unique) and film maker William Weintraub was introduced by his good friend and film maker Harry Gulkin, the guests were treated to very short clips of his recent and controversial film "The Rise and Fall of English Montreal". He has focused for a number of years on the lost/diminished communities and the missed opportunities. He emphasizes that he chronicles the English community, as others who write about the French Canadians often overlook, or neglect the importance of the contributions of the English (Scots and Irish, too).
Books found in the new Westmount Library Search system
Author/Title Year
1. Weintraub, William, 1926- 1996
City unique : Montreal days and nights in the 1940s and '50s
/ William Weintraub.
2. Weintraub, William, 1926- 1979
The underdogs / William Weintraub.
3. Weintraub, William, 1926- 1961
Why rock the boat.
Dec 4th 1997:
Royal Bank Prize for non-fiction was Won by William Weintraub for City Unique: Montréal Days and Nights in the 40s and 50s, McClelland & Stewart
Wednesday-Night #845, May 13th, 1998 Bill Weintraub was wished success on his upcoming play, "The Underdogs"
the life of the Anglophone community in Québec twenty years after separation "where you need a government permit to buy an English Muffin". It opens July 16th at the Gesù Theatre as part of the Just for Laughs Festival. Group discounts are offered to organisations wishing to have a fund raiser.
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