Ron Base | Updates

Elvis Never Left the Building

Ron Base — Mon, 2 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first of the three times I saw Elvis Presley in concert it was Friday, September 1l, 1970. He played to a crowd of seventeen thousand at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. I know this thanks to my very old and dear pal Ray Bennett, who was with me that night and who carefully records and remembers such things. The memory of that concert forms part of Ray’s soon-to-be published memoir, Mystery Train to Hollywood. In the book, he writes that we paid the princely sum of ten dollars each for our tickets.

Detroit was one of the stops on Elvis’s first concert tour since 1958 when the draft stopped dead the phenomenon he had created overnight. Until then, the only way most of us fans could see him was on a movie screen in blazing Technicolor in those mostly excruciating movies he made in Hollywood. Seeing him in person was a spellbinding experience. For forty-five minutes he put on an electrifying show, complete with relentlessly screaming fans—Ray and I restrained ourselves when it came to screaming. Fifty-six years later, we are still friends and we still talk about the night we first saw Elvis.

A mere seven years after that concert, we both also vividly remember where we were when we heard the news of Elvis’s death at the age of forty-two. Ray happened to be staying with me in Toronto on Sept. 11, 1977. Sadly, it was also the day Ray learned that his mother had died.

These memories and more came pouring back over the weekend after seeing Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s EPIC: Elvis Presley In Concert. The documentary—Luhrmann calls it the ultimate Elvis concert movie—puts the lie to the criticism back then that performing in Las Vegas diminished the king. Using lots of previously unseen and meticulously restored footage, Luhrmann presents the case for an even better Elvis in Vegas and on tour, even more magnetic and powerful than he had been in the 1950s. And that underrated baritone voice with its extraordinary range, never sounded better.

I saw Elvis for the last time in Buffalo a few years before his death. Amid reports about lackadaisical performances, forgetting lyrics, rambling on, I wondered what we were in for. He turned out to be great that afternoon, maybe a little slower and heavier, but still Elvis, very much attuned to his audience, even stopping to make sure an overexuberant fan was okay.

When he died at the age of forty-two, it was a shock of disbelief heard around the world. I found myself in tears. I actually thought of trying to somehow get to Memphis for his funeral. I pulled myself together and never went. I ran into my friend Earl McRae, a terrific journalist, gone now, and a fellow dedicated Elvis fan. I told him about how ridiculous I felt even fleetingly considering going to Memphis. “Don’t feel bad,” Earl said. “I went out to the airport and tried to get on a plane.”

In 1994, my soon-to-be wife, Kathy, and I were driving from Los Angeles to Toronto where we would start a new life together. In those days, you navigated across America with a map. Kathy had three of them open on her lap. We were driving through Tennessee when she looked up from her maps and said, “We’re passing Memphis. Let’s stop at Graceland.”

And we did. You could love a woman like that for a lifetime. And I have.

This past weekend we were with Elvis once again. I left the theatre a little sad, filled with bittersweet memories, buoyed by Luhrmann’s lovingly reimagined portrait. “Elvis ate America before America ate him,” U2’s Bono says in his ode to Elvis at the end of the movie. There was never anyone like him before, and there hasn’t been anyone like him since.

For Baz Luhrmann—and me—Elvis never left the building.

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ON AN UNMADE BED WITH NEIL SEDAKA

Ron Base — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Freelancing for the now defunct Ottawa Journal in the late Sixties I heard that pop singer Neil Sedaka was performing in the area. Neil Sedaka’s early hits were unshakable earworms (“If I should smile in sweet surprise, it’s just that you’ve grown up before my very eyes…”). You couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing one of his songs: Calendar Girl , Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Happy Birtday Sweet Sixteen, on and on.

But by the time I convinced my editor at the Journal to do a piece on him, Sedaka had dropped out of view, pushed aside almost overnight by the so-called British invasion, led by the Beatles. I hurried across the Ottawa River to the Gatineau Club where he was playing, staying at a rather rundown motel that was part of the club.

Sedaka met me in his room, a chubby, moon-faced, balding man, twenty-eight-years-old—I was so young and naïve at the time, I thought twenty-eight was old. He was not exactly the personification of a pop singer, but he was cheerful and welcoming. If he was feeling down on his luck playing this, to say the least, minor venue he gave no sign of it. Instead, he professed to be optimistic about his future.

“I’m starting a new career,” he said enthusiastically, “almost like a second time around.”

Sitting with him on an unmade bed, we spoke for the better part of an hour. Sedaka stopped going on about his future from time to time to regale me with great stories about the kid from Brooklyn who hung out with Carol King in high school was supposed to pursue a career as a classical pianist until he began writing the hit songs that made him a teen idol at the age of nineteen. In a much different era, he was a pioneer.

“You could count them (teen idols) on the fingers of one hand,” he remembered. “There were less than ten of us. They spent a hundred thousand dollars on me alone. The only other rock ’n’ roll singer they had then was Elvis Presley.”

We were talking away when the door opened and in came a young woman in a diaphanous blouse, wearing shorts. “Neil, honey…” she began and then stopped when she saw me. “Oh, she said, “sorry, didn’t know you had company.”

And away she went.

Sedaka had gone white. “Don’t get the wrong idea, that was nothing,” he announced in a panicked voice, jumping to his feet and pacing back and forth. “I’m a happily married man. I’ve got two kids.” This was one of his backup singers, nothing more to it than that.

I did my best to reassure him that I wasn’t going to write about what had happened, and I didn’t. But he was clearly rattled. I wondered back then, of course, and all these years later, hearing of his death at the age of eighty-six, I still wonder.

Later that evening Sedaka sat at the piano and smoothly performed his hits. As I recall, there was a good crowd but the Gatineau Club wasn’t full. It didn’t seem to matter. Sedaka gave it his all.

None of the record deals or albums he talked about happened. But six years after I spoke with him he met Elton John at a party. A huge admirer, John signed him to his record label and helped to resurrect his career.

Sitting on that unmade bed, thinking back on his teen idol years, Sedaka said that for the rock singers like him who fell so suddenly from grace, “There were lots of tragedies.”

Neil Sedaka, thankfully, wasn’t one of them.

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Working Actor

Ron Base — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Until I looked up one of the pieces I did on Robert Duvall back in the 1980s, I had forgotten about his supporting role in the Canadian production of The Terry Fox Story. Duvall had not even heard of Fox, and when we spoke on the terrace of the Majestic Hotel at the Cannes Film Festival, he admitted the reason he accepted the part: “I needed the work. That’s basically what it was. I mean it was a nice project, a very lovely project, but I hadn’t done a feature in a year and a half…I had to work.”

At the time, it seemed hard to imagine that Duvall, who had become regarded as one of the finest and most respected American actors, could be out of work. But it was a reminder that more than anything else, Robert Duvall throughout his career, despite all the accolades, was always a working actor. He was never the romantic lead, he almost never got the girl, but he always managed to stand out memorably no matter how short a time he was onscreen.

He only appeared for a couple of minutes as the reclusive Boo Radley at the end of To Kill A Mockingbird, his first film in 1962, but all these years later his performance remains the one that is most remembered. In True Grit playing the outlaw Ned Pepper he could project the menace required to go up against John Wayne. The movie also opened the way for him, particularly as he got older, to become one of the screen’s most convincing cowboy actors.

Part of a now legendary acting ensemble in two Godfather movies (he didn’t do the third because—you guessed it—they wouldn’t pay him enough), Duvall’s quiet authority dominated every scene he was in as Tom Hagan, the soft spoken consigliore to Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone.

Does anyone remember any other sequence in Apocalypse Now other than the one in which Duvall appeared as Colonel Kilgore, uttering one of the most memorable and endlessly repeated lines in movies: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.”

The Robert Duvall I met on a lovely sundrenched morning in Cannes, was handsomer than expected, a bit shy and nervous about doing interviews, sitting close to his wife Gail Youngs, whom he had married the year before and would divorce a couple of years later. He explained that his father, a rear admiral in the U.S Navy, wanted Bobby, as everyone called him, to follow in his footsteps. His father, he went on, was unhappy to hear that his son had decided upon a much different career path. “I just wanted to be an actor,” he told me.

Even then, money drove him. He loved the New York stage, but “I would be in an off-Broadway play, you’d get thirty-seven bucks a week. For television, you’d get like one thousand, two thousand dollars a week. So eventually you see that you’d rather not do TV, you’d rather do features because there’s a better quality. Oh, yeah, to make a living, travel, meet people.”

At the end of our conversation, I jokingly asked him if he’d like to play something romantic where Robert Duvall gets the girl. The question produced an unexpected glint in stony eyes that looked at you with disconcerting directness. “Yeah,” he said enthusiastically. “I used to do Naked City episodes on TV, and I was always the guy who walked away at the end with nobody.”

The working actor, who died Monday at the age of 95, had to settle for greatness.

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PRISCILLA HAS A NEW HOME

Ron Base — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

PRISCILLA'S NEW HOME: Milton finally has a badly needed independent bookstore, Wildwood Books, on Main Street in the centre of town. Owner Jacquie Puesta has been selling lots of copies of the Priscilla Tempest Mysteries. I dropped in Saturday to sign books. Please visit and support this invaluable addition to the commercial life of downtown Milton. Meantime, many thanks to Jacquie for being so supportive of the novels. Priscilla has a wonderful new home!

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LISTEN TO PRISCILLA

Ron Base — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ISTEN TO PRISCILLA: Audiobooks.com is offering the audio version of the first Priscilla Tempest Mystery at a great price. If you haven't already discovered the delights of Priscilla, our plucky heroine, this is a great opportunity, marvelously read by Eunice Wong...

https://www.audiobooks.com/promotions/promotedBook/597856/death-at-the-savoy?refId=236233

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Ron Base — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fifth instalment in the Priscilla Tempest mystery series, set in the glamorous world of 1960s London high society.

It’s midnight at the Savoy Hotel, and the doorman notices a Rolls-Royce parked in a spot where it shouldn’t be. In the back seat is a man who is, most regrettably, dead—clutching a love note addressed to a woman named… Priscilla. Could this be Miss Tempest, the feisty, trouble-prone Canadian who heads the Savoy’s press office?

Once again, Priscilla finds herself of great interest to the police. At the same time, she must juggle a cascade of crises. The infamously difficult Rex Harrison is living up to his reputation. Marlene Dietrich, the seductive Hollywood legend, is being—well—seductive, especially when Priscilla is around. To top it off, Priscilla’s hypochondriac younger sister, Phoebe, arrives unexpectedly from Toronto. Conservative Phoebe, the “good” Tempest sister, has come to bring Priscilla home. Good luck with that.

It’s a good thing Agatha Christie herself is hanging around—Priscilla is going to need the help of the world’s best-selling mystery writer to solve the murder and clear her name. That is, if she doesn’t end up dead or, worse, unemployed.

The fifth Priscilla Tempest mystery may just be her wildest, most unexpected, and most dangerous adventure yet!

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CLAUDIA THE FANTASTIC

Ron Base — Wed, 1 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, the thought of whose beauty kept me awake many nights in small town Ontario, came to Canada nine years ago.

At the height of her stardom in the 1960s, she was breathlessly described as an Italian icon, “something between reality and unreality.” She inspired such legendary filmmakers as Werner Herzog, Fellini, Visconti and Leone. The unreality of her on a movie screen certainly inspired me.

The icon had moved closer to the reality of a charming 78-year-old when she appeared at what was briefly called the Niagara Integrated Film Festival, founded by Bill Marshall and his wife, Sari Ruda.

My wife Kathy and I were among the attendees celebrating Cardinale’s career at Trius Winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, outdoors under a full moon. At that point she had made an astonishing 164 films and was still working. During the after-dinner interview, Miss Cardinale was a delight in her implacable insistence that she had never worked with a director or leading man she didn’t love.

Everything in her life had been, well… best to hear it from her…

What about Burt Lancaster with whom she made two movies, The Leopard and The Professionals. “Burt, ah, Burt was fantastic!”

Lee Marvin was also in The Professionals. “Lee was fantastic!”

How about John Wayne with whom she co-starred in Circus World? “John, he was fantastic!”

And Sean Connery, who appeared with her in The Red Tent? “Sean was so fantastic!”

Jason Robards who joined her in Once Upon a Time in the West. “Jason, ah yes, Jason. I had to talk him down out of a tree.”

The memory of Peter Sellers, her co-star in The Pink Panther, produced a pleased laugh. “Peter? Peter was crazy!”

And how was Henry Fonda her co-star in Once Upon a Time in the West? The question produced a rare frown. “When we were doing a love scene together, his wife was there. She gave me dirty looks.”

And what of Fellini who cast her in 8 1/2 as his ideal woman opposite Marcello Mastroianni (also fantastic!)? “He kept asking me if I was in love.”

The news of her death at the age of eighty-seven, not so fantastic. The memory of that perfect night under a full moon with Claudia Cardinale—fantastic!

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JUST...ROBERT REDFORD

Ron Base — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First thing in the morning at the old Gulf and Western building in midtown Manhattan, I was in the midst of a crowd of office workers waiting for the elevator. The doors opened and all but lost among those exiting was Robert Redford. No entourage, no bodyguards, just…Robert Redford. He smiled slightly, taking in the quietly stunned reactions of onlookers. Then he moved on. “Well,” someone said as we all crowded onto the elevator, “that was an interesting way to start the day.”

I thought about that encounter hearing of Redford’s death at the age of eighty-nine. As it was with Redford’s friend, Paul Newman, it was hard to imagine a movie world with these two icons of another, much more interesting, era of movie stardom.

Redford was at the height of his fame when he ducked out of that Gulf and Western elevator. Cinema’s last romantic hero as it turned out. He always denied it, and said he felt constricted by it, but Redford carefully nurtured that romantic image and went to great lengths to maintain it, most comfortably in a shimmering past, whether it was starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Way We Were, The Natural, The Great Gatsby or Out of Africa.

Margot Kidder played his girlfriend in The Great Waldo Pepper, another big budget epic also cast in the nostalgia of a bygone era, but less successfully at the box office. She told me that she saw firsthand how Redford protected his image. “I thought he wore too much makeup,” she remembered.

He did slip away from the past from time to time, most notably and successfully in Three Days of the Condor and All The President’s Men. But I got an earful from veteran producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown when they told me about the lengths to which Redford would go in order to protect his image in a contemporary film.

I knew Zanuck and Brown a bit over the years, and knew them to be extremely careful about what they said. When it came to their experience with Redford, however, they could not contain their anger.

The two producers had acquired the rights to a courtroom novel by a Boston lawyer named Barry Reed titled The Verdict. They quickly discovered that just about every actor in Hollywood wanted to play the part of the novel’s alcoholic hero, Frank Galvin. Frank Sinatra called about it, and even Cary Grant got in touch, seemingly willing to come out of retirement for the role. “Never before in our careers have we had a property that attracted that kind of attention,” Richard Zanuck told me.

While they were running 20th Century Fox, Zanuck and Brown had fought hard to keep Redford out of co-starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (they preferred Steve McQueen). Now they badly wanted his box office potency for The Verdict.

At first Redford seemed anxious to play Galvin. But then trouble started. Redford disliked David Mamet’s script. Other writers came and went. Redford still wasn’t happy. It eventually became apparent to Zanuck and Brown that their star did not want to tarnish his carefully honed movie star image. Specifically he did not want to play a drunk. “When he realized he’d have to let the warts show, let it all hang out, then he backed off,” Zanuck said. “Every time a scene was written in which he looked boozy and ill-kempt, unshaven, he resisted. He wanted to be a family man…a kind of boy scout version of the character. That was not what we conceived at all.”

Eventually, Zanuck and Brown were forced to do what almost never happens to a movie star of Redford’s magnitude: They fired him. “We were sick of it, quite frankly,” recalled Zanuck. Ironically, the producers then turned to Redford’s good friend Paul Newman. The Verdict won him an Academy Award nomination.

Maybe Redford was right after all. Audiences didn’t want to see him drunk. They flocked to the two sweeping romantic dramas he made after The Verdict, The Natural and Out of Africa. Redford clean shaven and blond, cast in a golden light, the last romantic movie star doing what he did best.

Many years after that brief New York encounter, I was present in Toronto when Robert Redford showed up late (notoriously, he always on what was known as Redford Time) to receive a donation for his Sundance Institute. He entered the room, a scarf was draped around his neck, his blondish hair was properly tousled, there was no security, no entourage just, briefly…Robert Redford.

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