Back in the game, as the last vestiges of his youthful awkwardness faded away, Saul became attuned to the nuances of fine clothing and dressed in the latest fashions from New York. The outside world responded in kind. Respected by other men, he also began to receive attention from women who recognized him from the swarthy headshot splashed across most of his newspaper ads. Saul had always fared well with the opposite sex — while still in the family home on Wharncliffe Road, he somehow convinced his mother to allow his Dutch girlfriend to live in his room with him, despite her frustration at continually finding lipstick smeared all over his pillowcases. But now it seemed that every other week he had a different girl on his arm. Never one to retain what he learned only for himself, Saul then sought to pass on his knowledge of women to his nephew Larry Paikin, Sam and Ann’s son.
“If you want, I’ll take you out and get you laid,” Saul told Larry, who at nineteen years old was still a virgin and lived in a university frat house with about ten other guys, all of whom were big on talk and short on experience. Larry readily agreed, and, along with two friends, travelled with Saul to the nearby tobacco farming town of Tillsonburg, where there were a number of brothels.
“He took us to this farm house that had no electricity, they had kerosene lamps, and we walked in and sat down. I remember it was five dollars a shot. I went in and came out about ten minutes later with a big smile on my face and the second guy went in and came out, and the third guy went in and came out and the second guy went in again,” said Larry.
While all this was going on, Saul, ever the entrepreneur — and whose trunk was full of women’s clothes — seized the opportunity to offer some of his wares to the waiting prostitutes. “He sold all his samples to the girls while we were screwing our heads off,” remembered Larry with a laugh.
As Saul was growing up, his family had the rare distinction of being the only Jewish household in an all-gentile neighbourhood of wealthier and educated families, and as a result, Saul had long harboured a sense of inferiority that he channelled into a dedication to self-improvement and self-education. Deep into philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer since he was a teen, he consistently pushed himself ever further in his reading habits, and began to visit estate sales to add to the significant collection of books that was becoming his personal library. A subscription to Reader’s Digest offered him a monthly quota of new words that he regularly devoured and then worked to incorporate into his lexicon. Well-versed in a variety of topics, Saul soon developed into an adept conversationalist, which further broadened his affiliations. However, there were some circles that would always be closed to him, no matter how successful or charismatic he became.15
One day Saul decided to apply for a membership at the local YMCA, where he was active in a variety of capacities, such as their Speakeasy Club, Co-ed Club, and Fitness Club. On occasion he also modelled for a women’s organization. At his request, he was curtly informed there were “no openings.” Suspicious, he invented a different name and identity as an executive with General Motors Diesel, which had just set up shop in London, and phoned another department. Immediately the voice on the other end replied, “Come on in. Delighted to have you.” Armed with this evidence of discrimination, Saul took it to the board of the YMCA and, in the ensuing scandal, became their first Jewish member. But the exclusion stung, and it wasn’t the only example.
By then his clothing store had taken off, and Saul was a strong and regular customer at the Bank of Montreal. Naturally, he thought nothing of it when an invitation was extended for a special dinner at the long-standing London Club across the street from the bank. However, the hospitality would not last. “Some clerk had made an egregious error, and when they realized they had invited one of their clients that was Jewish, all hell broke loose as to how they could diplomatically un-invite me, so as to not cause some Colonel Weldon to have an upset stomach,” Saul later said in his diary.16
Amidst a sense he would never quite fit in no matter what level of success he achieved, the allure of Hollywood lingered. But what would his place be within that world? Saul decided to test his abilities onstage, and joined the London Little Theatre, where he performed in several plays, including Teahouse of the August Moon in 1957. “Saul Holiff, essentially a good actor and possessed of an easy stage presence, fell victim to a fault I have commented on earlier. This play was satire,” the London Free Press theatre critic said in his review of Little London Theatre’s production of The Torch-Bearers. “Mr. Holiff’s approach to the role was far too heavy. I wish he would smile now and then to let us know that he, too, is being made fun of by the playwright.” Of course, the reviewer couldn’t have known how his broken teeth made smiling an unpleasant endeavour.17
It felt as though the world was a finely tuned machine and Saul was the mechanic, with the success of his store and his venture into acting, which allowed him to finally enjoy the sensation of being liked — if not by all the reviewers, then at least by his fellow actors. But he soon began to wonder if the position he was destined to inhabit wasn’t on the stage, but behind it.
With that in mind, he turned to the emergence of a new music scene in Canada: rock ’n’ roll.
Teenagers in Canada were first introduced to rock ’n’ roll music via the radio, and there was no one more integral to this awakening of their senses than radio disc jockey Red Robinson. Based in Vancouver, Robert Gordon Robinson landed his first radio show at the age of seventeen, after he prank called CJOR’s afternoon teen show to deliver a spot-on impersonation of actor Jimmy Stewart. When the Vancouver Sun picked up the story as real, Robinson called again, in character as Peter Lorre, and host Al “Pappy” Jordan figured out the ruse. Invited on as a recurring guest, Robinson was then offered the show when Jordan left in 1954.
Immediately, Robinson began turning his audience on to doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll, and was one of the first white DJs in the country to play music by African American artists. “It was all black music, and this is where I faced a whole bunch of bullets — not real bullets, but verbal bullets. ‘How can you play all that nigger music?’ That’s what they said to me. And I said, ‘Because I happen to like it.’ And the kids at school liked it, I mean, that’s where I got the inspiration to play rock ’n’ roll, was the kids at school,” recalled Robinson, who wielded enormous power with his show and commanded an unprecedented 50 percent of the local audience.
The first-ever rock ’n’ roll concert on the West Coast took place in June of 1956 and featured Bill Haley & His Comets at the Kerrisdale Arena in Vancouver, emceed by none other than Robinson. “It was a rock ’em, sock ’em, knocked-out bunch of kids going crazy. It was nuts,” he said.
Out east, Saul thought he’d try his hand at promotion — and Bill Haley, whose smash 1955 hit “Rock Around the Clock” garnered him wide credit as the father of rock ’n’ roll, was high on his list. But first, he convinced two Hamilton-based businessmen to each invest $1,500 to bring jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong to Buffalo, New York, for a one-night engagement. Once the venue was secured, Saul felt he had a surefire winner on his hands. Armstrong was huge, and Saul was a fan himself. Then disaster struck. Elvis Presley was booked to play Buffalo on the same night, at the Memorial Auditorium. If there was a star bigger than Armstrong, or pretty much anyone in the biz at that time, it was Presley. It was a loss for all the promoters, and a personal embarrassment for Saul, as he had invited his brother Morris and his wife Joyce to attend the show. Ever the gambler — he was currently deep into penny stocks on the Toronto Stock Exchange — he shrugged off the losses and steeled his determination.
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