With the new documentary, ‘Following Harry’, Belafonte is on my mind…and I am transported back to 1977.. 

Harry Belafonte was coming to town. I was a television news anchor at CBC Halifax, the first female in that position, and I wanted an interview badly. I called his media people and was told, ‘no interviews, just show up at the news conference’. I found out that Belafonte was performing in Toronto, before his Halifax gig, so I called the better hotels in that city asking for him. One hotel operator finally said, “who’s calling?” 

“His daughter, Shari”, I told her. I knew that Belafonte had a daughter named Shari. 

“One moment please”, she said, ‘I’ll put you through to his room”. 

“Shari?”, an excited voice said. Bingo.

“Sharon”, I replied. 

“They said it was my daughter, Shari”, Belafonte said, obviously disappointed. 

“Oh, they must’ve made a mistake, but they were close”, I told him. 

“Oh, ok, he said, “Goodbye”.

“Wait, wait a minute”, I said, “now that I have you on the phone… I need a favor, a little interview for CBC television, when you’re in Halifax…”

“No”, he said, “come to the news conference with the rest of the media, I’m not doing any individual interviews”. 

“Oh, come on”, I persisted.

He was very polite but very firm and despite my protestations, he refused my request for an interview. “I’ll see you at the news conference”, he said. Apparently he had not given any ‘one on one’ interviews throughout the hectic tour and was trying to stick to that plan. Belafonte was at the end of a gruelling visit to nine Canadian cities, during which he performed, without payment, to raise money for local symphony orchestras. His appearance in Halifax would be his final concert. 

The day of the news conference, I went to the The Nova Scotian Hotel where it was being held, and peeked into the crammed conference room, quickly deciding that I wasn’t having any part of it. I’m shy in front of a group and knew that I very likely wouldn’t be brave enough to ask a question in front of the crowd of seasoned journalists. I know that must seem strange for a news anchor, but a live tv studio back then involved only about four people: two cameramen, a production assistant, and someone to roll the teleprompter. That I could handle, not a packed room. So I went to the hotel bar instead, ordered a soda, and watched the action from there. When the news conference was over, I waited until the media had filed out of the hotel, and then called the front desk from the bar, and asked for Belafonte’s room. I gave his daughter’s name again. Belafonte picked up. 

“Is this Shari?”, he asked, suspiciously. 

“Maybe”, I responded. 

“Who is this?”, he demanded to know, “is this Sharon?” 

“Maybe”, I laughed again, “at least you remembered my name.” 

“Why weren’t you at the news conference?”, he chastised. 

“I told you I wasn’t going, I was too scared”.

“What? Where are you?”, he asked. 

“Downstairs in the bar”. 

“You’re here”? he said, surprised. 

“Of course, I’m here”, I laughed, “Harry Belafonte’s in town, haven’t you heard?”  

“I’m on my way down”, he told me, adding, “how will I recognize you?” 

“Goofy, big teeth, bad hair…”, I said.

 He hung up, and a few minutes later, the man himself was standing in front of me. 

“Sharon?”, he said.

“No trouble finding me?”, I asked.

“None at all”, he deadpanned. We laughed. When I told him the truth, that I was too shy to come to the news conference, he got it, and admitted that, even though he was a seasoned performer, he, too, had those moments. 

That afternoon, I suggested that, if he agreed to a one on one interview, I would take him out to dinner, for fish obviously, as Nova Scotia is famous for seafood. This was long before the internet, so I knew that it would be a great way to do a pre-interview, to learn more about him… and besides, who wouldn’t want to have dinner with Harry Belafonte? He agreed to the interview, but added, “you don’t have to take me to dinner”.

“I want to, please,” I begged. He eventually agreed and I excused myself to make a call to my producer at CBC, “Listen’, I told him, “I’ve got us an exclusive with Harry Belafonte for tomorrow, but it’s conditional on me taking him to dinner tonight, so you’ll have to come up with some big money for this, it’s not going to be cheap”. I got the go ahead. I didn’t mention that it was me, not Belafonte, who was insisting on the dining condition. 

That night, I picked him up at his hotel and we went to one of the best restaurants in town. Me and the perfect gentleman. The patrons applauded when he walked in. I was so proud to be in his company, not only was he famous, he was such a dignified and elegant man.

“Order whatever you want”, I told Belafonte when we were seated, “lobster, steak, champagne, I’m paying for it”. He laughed. I don’t remember what he ordered, but he said he wanted to eat light because of the concert the next day. I do remember what I ordered – lobster, steak and a bottle of champagne. 

During the meal, it wasn’t easy getting Belafonte to talk about himself. He wanted to know about Nova Scotia, and asked me about my plans for my career. He told me that he was impressed how I had pushed him for the interview. “You’re the only one who wouldn’t take no for an answer”, he said, “you’ll do good”. 

“I thought I was annoying you”, I told him. 

“You were”, he laughed, “but it worked”. 

He asked me about the struggles of trying to get into news as a woman and he told me that I was breaking barriers. “You have to be tough to do this, right?”

 “Oh yeah”, I told him. 

“Keep taking risks”, he advised. 

When he tried to pay the bill at the end of the evening, which I figured he would, the waiter told him that it had already been paid. I had taken care of it on a visit to the ladies room. “Let me reimburse you”, he said, “because based on that car you picked me up in,  you can’t afford this.” I was driving my beat up ‘71 Chevy Vega, which was worth about fifty bucks, if anything.

“Don’t worry about me”, I assured Belafonte, “CBC’s paying, and they’ve got plenty of money. “Where’s that other bottle of champagne”, I yelled to the waiter. 

“What are you doing?”, Belafonte asked, aghast, “aren’t we leaving now?” 

“Heck no, we’re just getting started”, I told him, “waiter, please, send drinks to the other tables”. I explained to Harry that the taxpayers pay for the CBC, so, “I’m just giving them some of their money back”. He shook his head, but was amused, and we were off to a good start. 

The next day, we were ready to tape the interview for the evening news, onsite at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, where Belafonte would be performing that evening. He was upset with the auditorium director, something to do with the stage. I had been chewing her out as well, she had an attitude. Apparently, she had mentioned to the crew that, ‘Harry Belafonte and Sharon Dunn are both being unreasonable.” 

“This is great”, I said to the cameraman, “she’s putting me in the same league as Belafonte”. I was honoured.  

“She’s kind of a bully”, I told Belafonte when he sat down. “No, it’s not her,” he insisted, “it’s me, I’m not feeling well”. Belafonte was worried about his health and that’s why he was miserable. I was even forced to stop the interview several times because he kept coughing and trying to clear his throat. 

“I hope it wasn’t the fish”, I said. 

“No, no, this has been coming on for a few days’, he told me. 

“Your voice was bad yesterday, too”, I pointed out (apparently he always had a croaky speaking voice, but I didn’t know that then). “I don’t think you can sing with that voice tonight”, I announced. 

“I just have a cold”, he told me. 

Belafonte obviously wasn’t going to disappoint the crowd. So wouldn’t it be great if I could solve his problem, come up with a solution? He would be eternally grateful, I was sure of it. 

I had an idea. As always, I was carrying a vial of a certain cough medicine in my purse, a well known east coast tradition, invented in Toronto, that had gotten me through many newscasts when I had horrible colds. 

“I’ve got a last resort”, I told Belafonte, “something that just might cure you”, I opened my purse and pulled out the small vial. He took it out of my hand. 

“What is this?”, he demanded to know,

 “It’s an ancient east coast remedy”, I told him, laughing. 

“There’s no labels on it”, he complained.

“I rebottled it”, I told him, “so it would fit into my purse”.  

“Can I trust you?’’, he asked. 

“Of course you can trust me”, I told him, “remember last night?

 We even closed the place down…”

“Maybe that’s why I’m sick..”, he muttered.

“What? I didn’t force you to go out, did I?” He gave me a deadpan stare. 

“Ok, so maybe I did..”, I admitted, “but you told me that I was smart to take chances….so…” 

I took the bottle from his hand and started to shake it. I unscrewed the top, filled a tablespoon I kept in my purse and raised it to Belafonte’s lips. “The show must go on”, I said.

“Let me smell it first”, he wisely suggested, leaning forward.  

“No way, that’s cheating”, I told him, pulling the spoon back, knowing full well that if he took a whiff, he would never put this stuff in his mouth.. 

“Okay, open the hatch”, I said, offering the heaping tablespoon again.. He opened up bravely and swallowed all of the disgusting substance. 

Immediately, Belafonte’s face contorted, and with a terrible gasp, he leapt from his chair. “She’s trying to kill me”, he managed to croak to the crew, as he grabbed his neck while choking and gasping. 

“I’m not trying to kill you”, I laughed, “I’m trying to cure you”. The crew was laughing too because we were all from Nova Scotia, and had all been raised on the sadistic syrup. We weren’t worried because we knew that anyone taking it for the first time, would have an ‘oh god’ moment. As their tv promotion still goes, “It tastes terrible…”. When you make an admission like that in your ads, there’s a reason for it.

Eventually Belafonte stopped coughing, but he wasn’t happy,  eying me suspiciously for the remainder of the taped interview. He had said he left a concert ticket at the box office for me, but I could tell that he already regretted doing that. 

“You seem really upset”, I said to him after the interview. 

“Well, I thought I was safe with you and the crew”, he growled. 

“You are safe with us”, I responded, laughing again. “I thought you had a sense of humour?”

“Not when someone’s trying to kill  me”, he retorted.

“Oh my god, I’m not trying to kill you”, I repeated, adding, without conviction, “your voice is sounding..um, a lot better already..” 

He gave me a withering look. 

“Miss Dunn”, he said, curtly, “my speaking voice has always sounded like this”. Miss Dunn? There’s such a finality with the name Dunn.

“Sorry..” I said, contrite.

After the chilly interview, he asked for the vial of medicine, and as he walked away with it, I said to the crew, “he’s definitely going to have that analysed.” This was not good, Harry Belafonte, maybe the most beloved star on the planet, was mad at me. Not to mention how my producer was going to take it, and he hadn’t even seen last night’s restaurant bill yet. Why did I always have to push the envelope? Why did I force the medicine on him? 

A few hours later, I lurked around the lobby at the Rebecca Cohn Concert Hall, checking things out. The place was packed, so it looked as if Belafonte would show up and the show would go on. Finally, I gathered enough courage to approach the box office. “Sharon Dunn, uh, CBC”, I announced, hesitatingly, to the ticket agent, “I think there might be a ticket here for me, from, um, Harry Belafonte?” She didn’t hand me a ticket, instead she summoned security.  Was I being removed from the venue? How embarrassing! Belafonte must have told them to throw me out if I showed up? Shamed, I followed the guard through the lobby, he seemed to be heading towards the exit, but then he veered and turned left, going inside the packed concert hall. Down the aisle I followed him as the lights dimmed, it was just before curtain time. An usher took over and escorted me to the front row, centre, shining a light on my seat. Good lord, it was going to be difficult to hide here. Had Belafonte planned for me to be in the front row? Or was he going to be just as surprised as I was to see me here? I was so close, I was almost on the stage. If he comes out, and starts to croak and cough”, I worried, I’m done for, I’m right here in front of him, possibly the cause of it all. What if the medicine made his voice even worse? I slumped down in my seat. What if he’s unable to hit the high notes, coughing and gagging and glaring at me from the stage? What if he points to me and says to the audience, “it’s that crazy woman’s fault?” I couldn’t take that kind of pressure. I clocked the exits, just in case I had to escape in a hurry. 

Soon Belafonte came onstage, with a bang, his voice in full bloom. He sang like a bird, to a very appreciative audience. I started to relax a little. So far, so good. I saw that the ever present croaky speaking voice had nothing to do with his gorgeous crooning tones. During the show, he even seemed to be smiling directly at me, and did he really sing something that sounded like, ‘having fun when you’re out with Dunn?’, or was I getting sick?” 

When the show was over, an usher came to me and said that Mr. Belafonte wanted to see me backstage. He was elated that the show had gone so well, confirmed that he had thrown in the Dunn line, and that he was smiling at me from the stage. He thanked me profusely for my intervention, even asking where he could get a bottle of the nasty, but effective medicine before leaving the Maritimes. I made a deal with him. “I’ll buy you some, if you call my mother in Cape Breton. My mom, Marguerite, loved Belafonte, Perry Como and Engelbert Humperdinck, in that order. 

Before I delivered the bottle the next day, my mother called. “I just got off the phone with Harry Belafonte!”, she swooned, “he’s so sweet!”. Mom was thrilled, and Mr. B. got a very large bottle of the mysterious medicine to bring back to New York with him. The risk had paid off. Harry Belafonte now trusted me, saying that he understood, after smelling the elixir, why I had to trick him into taking it in the first place.

In Belafonte’s eyes, I quickly went from attempted murderer to heroine…

Friends for life? I like to think so. The wonderful Mr. B would call me periodically to ask for another bottle of the tonic, since it wasn’t sold in the U.S. then. I would never take payment. ‘Do you want me to call your mother?”, he would ask. And that was the trade off.  I could picture Mom playing bridge with her friends in Sydney, and saying nonchalantly, “Oh, Harry Belafonte called me again..” 

In later years he even gave me and my husband tickets to attend his concerts. Ok, so I called and asked for tickets but he always took my calls, meeting with us afterwards. Was all of this because of an ill tasting medicine? 

The cough syrup in question was invented over 100 years ago in downtown Toronto by a New Brunswick native. I’m told that the taste is caused by ammonium carbonate, which opens the airwaves very quickly. I’m not giving a testimonial here (you’ll notice that I havn’t even mentioned the name of the medicine, although I have given you a BIG clue), but I can confirm that it worked for me and for Harry Belafonte….at least we think it did..

When I first met Harry Belafonte, I was twenty three years old. And I had no idea of the depth of the man. I knew several of his songs at the time, Banana Boat, Jamaica Farewell, and Island In The Sun. And I knew that he was a big deal. I was fortunate to get to know the man behind the image. It has been said that he has a carefully scripted persona. I didn’t see that, I saw a wonderfully vulnerable and very sensitive man. He was so worried that he might not be able to sing in a benefit concert, where he wasn’t even getting paid, that he was literally sick about it. I could see then, that he wanted to push himself, to do more, and he would go on to do so much more. 

Belafonte was the force behind the song, “We are The World”, recorded in 1985 to aid famine in Africa. He wasn’t one of the featured soloists on the record when the song was being taped, he was actually standing in the back, in the chorus, next to Dan Ackroyd of all people. WTH? Ackroyd is more notable for being a Ghostbuster than a musician. Belafonte would have been fine with that, he was a star, not a grandstander. But I found his position in the back row rather strange. I can only assume that Belafonte volunteered so that Ackroyd, Waylon Jennings and the others back there would feel validated. And producer Quincy Jones could work his magic (without Waylon, by the way, who ended up walking out). 

Also in that wonderful Netflix documentary called, ‘The Greatest Night In Pop’, released in 2024, I noticed that Belafonte, at around 55 minutes, in the back row, is coughing, hacking, and clearing his throat, just like he did during my interview with him eight years earlier. I can only assume that he had forgotten to take his medicine that night…wait now… 1985… I had married, moved to the farm, had a child, changed my phone number…had I let him down? Had he tried to reach me and couldn’t? I would have made a terrible drug lord…

Millions upon millions of dollars was raised from the sale of the We Are The World record, which featured the biggest musical names of the time, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Dylan, Springsteen and so many more. In the doc, producer Jones says, “Remember the guy who started the whole thing, Harry Belafonte”. And Smokey Robinson follows up with, “Harry Belafonte was the most inspirational person for all of us who were there.” I believe that Harry Belafonte had one goal – and that was to feed starving children. I don’t think he cared less about the publicity, or that he was in the back row. As Belafonte himself has said, “I was an activist who became an artist, not an artist who became an activist.” He has proven that beyond a shadow..

Belafonte is well known for breaking down many racial barriers that were thrust in front of himself and others. He refused to perform in some southern US states for years because of discrimination, and before that, he and his friend actor Sydney Poitier were actually chased by the KKK while trying to fight racism in the south. Years later, when denied the opportunity to buy a condo in a building in New York because it was “a white building”, he bought the entire building with partners, offering units to both his black and white friends. Very close to Martin Luther King, Belafonte even helped King pay his living expenses for many years. King’s youngest daughter Bernice tweeted recently, “When I was a child, #HarryBelafonte showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings.” 

I could write so much about his kindnesses and accomplishments, but that would take an entire book in itself. 

Harry Belafonte was caring and humble, even as a superstar. It didn’t matter what colour you were, or if you drove a $50 car. He continually tried to help me, and gave me great advice over the years that has impacted my life. 

Harry Belafonte died in May 2023 at the age of 96. What a legacy he’s left behind! He is already one of those exceptional human beings who grows even larger in death. Of all of the interesting and influential people I’ve interviewed in my career, Belafonte is number one, impossible to beat…a driven and beautiful soul.                                                          

by Sharon Dunn