Past & Future

When first hired at Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper, I was the youngest critic in the arts section and the only female in a newsroom that, let’s say, was eons away from political correctness. I felt like a long-necked swan in a den of wolves.

But those hard-boiled reporters taught me a lot about how to write and how to survive the vagaries of a very subjective craft.

From the get-go, I was enterprising and productive and was soon promoted to having my own national column, with my byline displayed in big bold letters.

I was known as a good interviewer, and was sent out to cover all the celebrities who came to Toronto. I met everyone who was important: all the great dancers, from Rudolf Nureyev to Mikhail Baryshnikov, fashion designers the filmmakers and actors at the Toronto International Film Festival, from Robert de Niro to Michael Caine to Sophia Loren. Some assignments were more memorable than others. I wined Bob Geldof, rode in a limo with Paul Simon and smoked a reefer with fashion photographer Peter Beard. I partied with Sandra Oh, Ally Sheedy and Molly Ringwald (not in that order), sat enraptured at the feet of Arthur Miller, lunched with Raymond Burr, and hugged Ringo Starr, after which the earth literally did move when a quake hit the venue where he was scheduled to perform. I earned the respect of Camille Paglia (known to hate her interviewers) and the tolerance of Joni Mitchell (another prickly type) when I interviewed her for hours in her Bel-Air mansion. I fended off the advances of Christopher Plummer and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes (a not so charming story) but lost focus when paired up with Jon Bon Jovi; I was barely able to concentrate on my notes for the tightness of his pants. Shirley MacLaine, the high priestess of Hollywood, once performed a spontaneous past life reading on me, telling me I had been a Russian ballet dancer in a former life. Which explains a few things.

While happy to rub shoulders with the famous and the talented, at one point in my career I wanted to shift gears, do stories not dictated by a press release, or by someone else’s ego. And so, in the late 1990s, I created a new beat for myself as an investigative reporter specializing in visual arts. Art crime, to be specific; theft and fraud on an international scale. I outed thieves on the front pages of the nation’s leading newspaper and helped to locate looted art in some of the country’s leading art institutions. I got crooked dealers arrested and others to leave town. It remains one of my proudest achievements.

I wrote on the repatriation of native artifacts from Canadian and foreign museums, and I helped find art stolen by the Nazis from prominent European Jewish collectors and families in Canadian museums. Along the way, I discovered that notorious British double agent and spy Anthony Blunt had acted as Canada’s art consultant after the end of World War Two, helping to facilitate and cover for the Nazi’s art crimes in my home country. Fascinating.

I also applied my investigative reporting skills to the National Ballet of Canada, writing a series of front page stories for my paper on the wrongful dismissal of a leading ballerina who was said to be, at age 38, too old to perform anymore. But actually the truth was that she was being punished for speaking out for her fellow dancers’ rights at board meetings where she was permitted to do so as an elected representative. The company denied it. It blamed the dancer and then blamed her again when she dared to speak up again, this time for herself. It was sexism and ageism at the ballet and it sold newspapers.  My articles made national and international headlines. This was a labour story as much as an arts story and it sparked a heated debate across Canada on the role of artistic directors today. Do they obey the laws of the land and treat their workers with due respect and consideration? Or are they throwbacks to another era, tyrants and bullies who are allowed to abuse and alienate in the name of art? The country was divided. In the end the ballerina won and he National Ballet was forced to alter its workplace practices.

In 1999, I went to Belgrade to report first-hand on the break-up of the Balkans, writing a series of stories for the news section on the impending break-up of Yugoslavia, and its victims.

Returning from my first maternity leave in 2000, I was reassigned to fashion, becoming the Globe’s reporter covering the collections in Paris, Milan and New York.

While in New York reporting on the fashion in September 2001, I  was close to ground zero on the day of the terrorist attack. I reported on the crisis, dictating stories into my cellphone (one of few working that day — Americans were routinely offering me money to use mine to call their loved ones to say goodbye — all of us wondered if it was indeed the end)  because power in New York City was mostly cut off on that terrible day. I delivered a number of exclusives while stranded for days on the island of Manhattan, unable to get home. Next to covering an organized crime hit on a Canadian in Moscow (a murder story I wrote freelance for Toronto Life), being in New York on 9/11 counts as one of the most harrowing experiences of my journalistic career.

Following my second maternity leave, I returned to the Globe in January, 2006 as a features writer, reporting on a number of sections, among them real estate.

In 2017, I left the paper after 32 years to become Editor of The York University Magazine. I have since won the alumni publication numerous national journalism awards and recognition from the likes of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPAs) and the National Magazine Awards, B2B division.

In 2022, the University of Toronto honoured me with an Alumni of Influence Award for my pioneering work as a female arts critic and journalist advocating for greater diversity and inclusion in the performing arts.

I continue to write on the arts for the Toronto-based e-zine, Critics at Large. My dance reviews there have won two Nathan Cohen Awards for critical writing, one in 2014 and another in 2020.

I also write books. My first, Paris Times Eight, is a travel-based memoir that came out in 2009.  My second, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, is featured in the Misty Copeland documentary, A Ballerina’s Life. It was named the number one ballet book on a Top Ten list published by the Guardian newspaper in 2021. My next book, Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks that Shook the World, comes out in the fall of 2023.