When sex was mysterious

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