IT SEEMED A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME – JAN 30/25

Ok, maybe the rubber duckie shot was a bad idea. But it started out innocently enough around 1982. The Toronto Star had contacted our PR department at CBC Toronto wanting to do a cover story of me for the tv guide. This was great, it was a coup to get such a request. Photographer Dick Loek from the Star would be taking the photos. Loek called me and said that he wanted, “a number of shots, one for the cover, one of me in the studio, and one of me doing a sport I love”. I’m not very sporty, I told him. “Do you play tennis?”, he asked. “No”, I answered. “What sport do you do?”. “Nothing really”, I told him, “unless you want to include the gym, I went there once ten years ago, but I have no intention of ever going back, it’s a god forsaken place”. “There must be something”, Dick laughed. “I hang out in the Jacuzzi a lot”, I told him, “that’s kind of sporty”. “Okay, let’s do it”, he said. I agreed. He promised it would be ‘tasteful’. “I trust you”, I told him.  The day of the shot, I wore a bathing suit, and along with the camera, the star photog showed up with a pink towel and a rubber ducky. I had brought the bubbles to obscure things. I went with the flow when he wanted me to wrap the towel around my head, and hold the rubber duckie for the shot. After all, as he pointed out, it was only going to be one small shot, in the corner of the page. 

Nyet! When the story came out, titled “Soaking Up Success”, other than the cover shot, the bathtub pic was the only photo used, and it was huge. I’d been had, used, tricked, bamboozled. And to say there was kickback, would be an understatement. So much so, that even the Starweek Editor felt sorry for me and wrote a follow up story defending my decision to pose in such a way, trying to help defer the flack I was getting. But, alas, I had to admit that when you go to a photoshoot and willingly jump in a hot tub in a bathing suit for the story, you really have no one to blame for the fallout but yourself. A whole slew of my coworkers tried to have me fired. They claimed it was a sexy shot. I was insulted. “If I was going to do sexy, I would have done sexy”, I told them. In this shot, I look more like Big Bird from Sesame Street than a femme fatale. 

I admit that maybe it hadn’t been my best decision, but fired? Our wonderful executive producer at the time, Henry Kowalski sent me a memo, stating, “while I probably wouldn’t have recommended it, had you asked my opinion, I want to take this opportunity to compliment your work on the newscast”. He ended by asking for an autographed copy, and I obliged. The great Knowlton Nash also supported me, as he always did. “They’re jealous”, he told me, “ignore them, you’re doing great”. The story died down. Vindication came shortly thereafter, when famous 70’s feminists Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem both appeared on the pages of People magazine in, of all places, a bubble bath photo spread! And their shots were a lot sexier than mine. Also featured in a tub in the same edition of People was the hardly frivolous Lech Walesa, you remember him, revolutionary Solidarnosk? He’s now known as the former president of Poland. So in the end, although it wasn’t perhaps my finest hour, I was keeping very good company in the tub…and I did it first, at least I thought I did when I dove in..   

Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem 1983, People Magazine below

Lech Walesa, revolutionary Solidarnosc 1981 and former president of Poland below, page called Star Tracks 

Moi Circa 1983, Starweek, Toronto created a helluva firestorm

Apparently Steinem and Greer also got some flack when their photos were published. What strikes me most in these photos is not that they are in the tub, but wondering if that is really Greer’s foot in her own mouth? If so, wow, that’s impressive. Other than that, we all look equally silly. Walesa actually did it again years later, there is a photo online of an older Lech in a bubble bath. Would I do it again? Hell yeah! Only this time, I’d hire my own photographer and keep creative control, so I could choose what gets published.` Which is why I became a writer in the first place. I was misquoted in so many articles that I decided to write about myself, instead of having someone else try to figure me out.