down to Mexico and all the camping holidays he had taken us on as kids in our trusty VW bus — to Calgary, Virginia, Myrtle Beach, New York, the Adirondacks, Yellowstone Park, Texas, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca, San Blas, Veracruz, and Acapulco. As a family, we had logged an incredible number of miles together!
My animal-loving sister, Vivien, ran a dental clinic she built thirty years ago in Cambridge, Ontario, and her son, Colin, had been travelling the world and was now teaching school at a private college in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Damien, for reasons known only to himself, had rejected our family five years ago in 2005, and refused all attempts at communication from any of us, to my parents’ despair. His cruelty to such loving and tolerant parents, who had let him live on and off at their home until he was in his forties, was something that Vivien and I found impossible to forgive.
We had always considered Damien the creative genius of the family, but he developed mental illness in his early twenties and had frequently derailed my parents’ happy life. After some very difficult years he did finally get things under control and has held a steady job in Toronto. He married a lovely Greek-Canadian girl, and I hear they still share a busy, happy lifestyle, filled with frequent international holidays. Losing a brother was terribly sad for Vivien and me, but for my parents losing their only son was tragic.
• • •
After what seemed like interminable unpacking and shopping, dealing with tedious paperwork involving my lease and the move from one state to another, fighting unbelievably high health insurance, and changing driving licences, I started to enjoy biking down to the Santa Monica pier and walking along the beachside paths. After arriving in L.A. and staying a few days with my close friend Devers Branden, my very first mission had been to visit Jack and my cherished cat, Muffin. I met Jack’s charming new wife, Maggy, a petite, bouncy blonde, and I was delighted to sense how absolutely perfect they were for each other. Jack had searched for five long years and now had a wonderful life companion who had grown to love him and his family and, of course, our “pussycat boy,” Muffin. Dervin, the houseman who was still working there, was beaming all over at the sight of his former “ma’am” and hurried off to the kitchen to make me his best Sri Lankan tea!
We enjoyed a pleasant visit, and when I left, both Jack and Maggy promised to stay in touch. And so it was that I became part of the Simons’ extended family. Maggy had a powerful natural singing voice, which at this point she had only used for amateur and charity performances, and one afternoon she offered me a private concert at the home of her piano accompanist. I sat beside Jack listening to his new wife belt out Broadway songs, marvelling at her talent, and realizing that even though she now had my husband, my house, the diamond wedding ring that I had returned to him, my housekeeper, my cat, and even my phone number, I felt great joy that they had found each other. I knew they were soulmates! The guilt of having left Jack had at last been lifted off my shoulders, and Maggy and I were to become great friends. Although she had never before sung professionally, she started to make biannual appearances at the Catalina Jazz Club in L.A. and has since developed a devoted following and huge online following. Little did Jack realize he was marrying another performer!
Jack’s son, Ken, and Ken’s Canadian wife, Marinette, and daughter, Nathalie, welcomed me back as family. It felt warm and cozy, just like old times, except that I was living alone, and it was often a struggle for me. At times I questioned my constant moving, wondered if perhaps I had made a mistake, sacrificing my secure, glamorous life to pursue music, but at other times I knew that I had to persist and use my music to give something beautiful to the world. In L.A. the traffic seemed more impossible than ever, and that year it was cold and damp in Santa Monica, where the “June gloom” hung around for months. I finally understood that Frank Sinatra song, “The Lady is a Tramp” and its description of California. Even my sister, who came to visit for two weeks in August, complained that she had to wear sweaters every single day.
I made new friends easily, and my neighbour Nancy, a pediatric neurologist, and I took walks each night to the beach or attended films with her singer-songwriter boyfriend. My Italian friend from years ago, the beautiful actress Mara New, and our mutual girlfriend, singer Barbi Benton, Hugh Hefner’s former wife, reconnected through the milongas we went to each Friday night to dance tango nuevo.
One of the dancers, a talented, long-haired sculptor whose works were in many important American collections, fancied himself a Sir Lancelot and saw me as Lady Guinevere. He invited me to spend an afternoon with him riding his horses in the flower-filled fields of the San Fernando Valley. Life was still offering me delightful experiences, but in spite of his eager pursuit of romance, it was not to be.
I saw my genius composer friend Hershey Felder, now the husband of Kim Campbell, a former Canadian prime minister who had shocked Canada by choosing a man twenty-one years her junior. Jack and I had been there in September of 1996 at the Canadian consular residence the night they first laid eyes on each other, and even though my husband laughed it off and told me I was crazy, I knew we were witnessing Cupid’s crafty wiles. The next thing we heard was that Kim had hired Hershey to be her chef at the residence since the young man happened to be a master in the kitchen. Who would have guessed that our first woman prime minister had an inner “cougar,” a term my writer girlfriend Valerie Gibson had first popularized in the eighties.
Today they are still together. Hershey has developed an amazing musical and theatrical career, and he and Kim divide their time between their château in France and a home in New York. He told me that the Israeli Guitar Concerto he started to write for me in the late nineties but never finished, has now apparently morphed into a work for piano and orchestra. As well as composing at the piano, Hershey Felder created and still performs his unique one-man shows, during which he impersonates various renowned composers. In each production he acts out and narrates the story of a composer’s life accompanied by their music. The first of his many brilliant shows I saw was based on George Gershwin, with subsequent ones based on Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Liszt, and Irving Berlin. I heard that this talented man has given over four thousand performances. No wonder he and Kim were instant soulmates — they both have boundless energy!
On the subject of “cougars,” I also became friends with Sylvester Stallone’s colourful mother, Jacqueline, who had married a surgeon, Stephen Levine, who is Sly’s age. I attended a few events with her, sometimes in the company of her other singer-songwriter son, Frank. Our friendship endures today, and at ninety-five Jacqueline is my role model for how to maintain a lively existence and never stop learning new things. Between her astrology, French, tap dancing, and piano lessons, this woman is a marvel!
Another friend, Lili Fournier, whom I knew from Toronto, invited me to a fundraiser at the elegant Spanish-style home of Antonio Banderas. There we were joined by Shirley MacLaine and Deepak Chopra, among others. I seated myself on Antonio’s patio and held his fluffy cat on my lap, but alas, Antonio, my dashing heartthrob hero of Desperado and Zorro, whom I had once conversed with in Spanish at a Beverly Hills fundraiser, was nowhere to be found. His wife, Melanie Griffith, chain smoking and looking terribly thin, remembered me from Acapulco and explained that her husband was out of town.
• • •
My time in California was not just a whirl of social events. Every day I diligently sang and played my guitar as, although not as tough as classical pieces, memorizing all my lyrics and songs required for a full program was still a challenge. In the fall Srdjan and I had a successful nine-city tour of Ontario, enjoying our new repertoire, the familiar visits to my parents’ Etobicoke home, and the warmth of our Canadian audiences. I was gaining confidence as a singer and kept thinking how much more fun I seemed to be having onstage compared to when I was a soloist. Of course I had enjoyed immensely the years as a purely classical player, but this was a lovely change.
Srdjan had been a godsend, helping me launch this exciting new chapter in my career, as had Peter Bond, who produced the albums and the tracks we often sang along to. They met each other for the first time at my parents’ house and we shared humorous stories over cups of tea and sips of my mother’s favourite sherry.
Regretfully, I knew that my time playing with Srdjan was coming to an end. He had a full-time job in New