All of Me - Softcover

Murray, Anne; Posner, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307398455 ISBN 13: 9780307398451

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2010

Synopsis

In this revealing autobiography, Canada’s first lady of song, for the first time, tells the whole story of her astonishing 40-year career in show biz. It is a candid retrospective of the extraordinary success achieved, and the prices that had to be paid.

“After ‘Snowbird’ hit, I was swept up like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and catapulted into a strange new universe ... If I thought for a moment that I was really in control of events, I was deluded.” Anne Murray

An unflinching self-portrait of Canada’s first great female recording artist, All of Me documents the life of Anne Murray, from her humble origins in the tragedy-plagued coal-mining town of Springhill, Nova Scotia, to her arrival on the world stage. Anne recounts her story: the battles with her record companies over singles and albums; the struggle with drug- and alcohol-ridden band members; the terrible guilt and loneliness of being away from her two young children; her divorce from the man who helped launch her career, Bill Langstroth; and the deaths of two of her closest confidantes. The result is a must-read autobiography by Canada’s beloved songbird.

About this title

About the Author

Born and raised in Springhill, Nova Scotia, Anne Murray has enjoyed an unparalleled career, delighting millions with her signature voice and time-honoured songs. Over a four-decade-long career, she’s sold 54 million records, putting more than 30 pop hits, 50 country tunes and over 40 adult contemporary songs on the Billboard charts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
 
My mother had prayed for a little girl.
 
Every day during her fourth pregnancy, Marion Murray entreated Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, to deliver a girl to join her three young sons. This was not an idle request. Mom took her prayers-and her Catholicism-very seriously. She lit candles, said novenas and promised Saint Anne that if she were to be blessed with a girl, she would call her Anne. In the end, when I was delivered by Dr. Harold Simpson on the morning of June 20, 1945, at All Saints Hospital in Springhill, Nova Scotia, I was named Morna Anne-Morna after my paternal grandmother. Morna came first because Morna Anne Murray flowed a lot better than Anne Morna Murray-my first lesson, perhaps, in the importance of rhythm. My mother had no doubt that it was prayer alone that had been responsible for my arrival. Such was her gratitude that virtually until the day she died, she stayed in touch with priests at the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré shrine in Quebec, sending regular donations.
 
With three older brothers-David, Daniel and Harold-and later two younger ones-Stewart and Bruce-my childhood fate was largely predetermined. I didn't have a chance. Even before I could walk they had laced a pair of boxing gloves onto my hands for a family photograph. I never actually donned them for a fight, but they are an apt metaphor. I was a tomboy and relished the role, wanting to do everything my brothers did, stubbornly resisting the repeated well-intentioned efforts of my mother to transform me into a model of junior femininity. I did have dolls and I did play with them, but they were never a major part of my childhood. Only years later, long after I had left home, did my mother succeed in decorating my bedroom as she had long envisaged it, with frilly pinks and whites replacing my posters of Hollywood heartthrob James Dean and Tony Dow (Leave It to Beaver's older brother, Wally). I had it bad for Tony Dow.
 
Taught by my older brothers, I learned to catch, throw and hit a baseball with proficiency. Along with them I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Toronto Maple Leafs, though my loyalties shifted from time to time to Dad's favourite team, the Montreal Canadiens. The boys owned a vast baseball card collection that we stored in gallon ice-cream pails. In time I memorized the batting and earned-run averages of every major-league player. My brothers liked to quiz me-they would cover up most of the card and, from the portion that remained visible, I had to identify the player and what team he played for and recite all his relevant numbers.
 
Outdoors I was recruited for neighbourhood games and, because I had a good arm, later played centre field for our girls' softball team, the Top Hats. We won the town cham pionship, but my contribution to our victory was minimal. Despite my training, I was never a confident player, either at bat or in the field. I rarely swung at pitches and in the field I was often thinking, Please, don't hit it to me.
 
I would never be able to compete seriously with my brothers on the sports field, and I knew it. This is just a theory, but it's possible that when I discovered in my early teens that I could sing reasonably well, I worked hard at it precisely because it was one thing that I could do better than they could. I couldn't get enough of singing; it was a tonic for my otherwise deflated sense of self-esteem. But that was later. In my early years we were a sports-mad family. We swam, played baseball and hockey (Dad would rent the local skating rink for an hour on Sundays after church), and on Saturday nights during the winter and all through the Stanley Cup playoffs, watched hockey games religiously around the family TV. It was a nineteen-inch black-and-white Westinghouse with chrome legs that sat in my parents' bedroom; all eight of us and assorted friends sprawled in awkward configurations on the bed or the floor to watch it. (In his later years, whenever the Canadiens were playing, Dad would don his official Guy Lafleur number ten jersey.)
 
They were an active bunch, my brothers; they loved to box and wrestle with each other, and often roughhoused with me as well. Until Harold went off to college, I don't think he ever missed an opportunity to slug me in the arm if I was within his considerable range. He was merciless with all of us-on the day he left, Stewart, Bruce and I cheered lustily from the back porch of our big Main Street home. On my sixteenth birthday two of the older boys administered the traditional sixteen slaps to my butt with such enthusiasm that I was brought to tears. I would fight back-writhing, wriggling, flailing, screaming and complaining frequently to Mom, but usually without results. The precise circumstances of one incident are lost in the mists of memory, but Harold had pushed me a little too far, and in a moment of anger I picked up a small rock and hurled it at him, nicking his ear (I think I was eight or nine at the time). He put his hand to his ear, felt the blood trickling down and flashed me a big, wicked grin-not because he was proud of me for fighting back, but because he knew he would need a few stitches to sew it up. And, since I had drawn blood, he knew that some form of parental wrath would be expressed and that I, for once, would be its recipient. He was going to savour that moment.
 
Much of the time, I'm sure, I was either a nuisance or a burden to my brothers-or both. Once when I was an infant, the boys wheeled me down the street in my pram and left me while they went inside a store. One small problem: they had neglected to put on the brake-and Springhill is built on a cluster of steep hills. So down the hill I went, gathering speed, until an alert neighbour spotted the careening carriage and raced out to save me. But for that timely intervention, my music career might have been aborted very early. On another occasion, while I was still a toddler, I was again consigned to the less-than-scrupulous care of the older boys. They wanted to play baseball. These two imperatives-play and supervision-conflicted, so they cleverly arrived at a solution that would keep me from wandering off: they thoughtfully tied me to a nearby tree and the game continued. At other times I was a victim of their pranks. Walking home at night from movies at the community hall in Northport, where we spent our summers, they would run ahead and hide in ditches and behind trees, leaving me alone in complete darkness. Then they'd jump out and scare me half to death.
 
In turn, when I was charged with their care, I often regarded my younger brothers as an unwelcome responsibility. I was three years older than Stewart and six years older than Bruce, and I could be as inattentive as my older brothers had been. Once when I was ostensibly babysitting four-year-old Bruce, he decided he wanted to use the record player. To do so he had to move a lamp, which he laid down on a foam pillow, which then caught fire-while I was busy playing cards downstairs with a boyfriend. I smelled burning rubber and, Dad being at work and Mom out, my boyfriend ran to get his father. The local newspaper, the Record, reported the story of menacing Master Murray, the four-year-old arsonist, but no serious damage was done.
 
My brother Daniel was the family tease. He enjoyed pinning me to the floor, his knees firmly pressing down on my shoulders so that I was immobilized, and then threatening to lick my face, inching ever closer. He denies these accusations today, but his memory is clearly flawed. Daniel had other idiosyncratic methods of torture as well. With a doctor for a father and a nurse for a mother, their six germ-carrying kids were repeatedly instructed never to drink from each other's glass or eat food the others might have touched. Daniel exploited these instructions ruthlessly. Typically Mom would have us all sit at the kitchen table while she rushed back and forth with plates of food. Even before we'd finished the main course, she'd set out the dessert as well. One of our favourites was date squares. She'd be fussing with something, her back turned, and Daniel, slowly and methodically, would take each square and carefully lick both sides, effectively claiming them as his own. After that we couldn't and wouldn't touch them. But, if we knew what was good for us, we also couldn't snitch on him to Mom. So Mom would ask, "How come no one but Daniel is eating the squares?" and we could say nothing-Daniel's withering glare warning us of dire consequences if we dared. That kitchen table, incidentally, contained a small drawer in which Bruce and I hid bread crusts, which we hated. I'd been told they put hair on your chest, and I didn't want any part of that.
 
To be completely candid, I should confess that my treatment of my younger siblings occasionally reflected the treatment I had been accorded by the others. I once teased Bruce to the point where he threw a pair of scissors at me. At other times I had a tendency to treat both him and Stewart as living dolls, dressing them and coiffing their schoolboy hair as I-and sometimes my friends-pleased. (Hair, in fact, became something of an avocation. I used to cut Dad's hair at our cottage at Northport in the summer, and at university I ran a virtual salon, offering trims and dye jobs to my dorm-mates.) Later my attentions to Bruce and Stewart became more practical and well-intentioned: I taught them both to dance.
 
Afraid of being ridiculed by the others, no one really expressed their fears. I certainly didn't. I vividly recall hearing, either through some fundamentalist proselytizers at our door or on the radio, that the world was coming to an end on a given day. Somehow I took this warning very seriously, but instead of articulating my mounting fear, I took refuge under my bed on the appointed day. Only when it became clear to me that the forecast had failed did I reappear.
 
Having five brothers, I should add, was not without its benefits. They taught me far more than just how to read a box score. I had to learn self-reliance because they had better things to do than cater to me. They taught me by example how to recognize and cut through spin and bullshit, a skill that would come in handy more than once during my life in the music industry. And they made sure that whatever success I might achieve, in school or elsewhere, wasn't going to swell my little head. I wasn't inclined that way in any event, selfconfidence being in short supply, but they'd have cut me down to size quickly if I had been. When, years later, I walked onstage at Radio City Music Hall to a rousing standing ovation, my brother Harold looked around in some astonishment, as if to say, "What's going on? It's just Anne."
 
 
My parents' marriage was, first to last, a script lifted from a fable. My mother, Marion Burke, was a nurse in training at All Saints Springhill Hospital when, in 1934, James Carson Murray arrived. He was a handsome young Dalhousie medical school grad who had just completed a year of surgical training at St. Luke's Hospital in Cleveland (later the Cleveland Clinic) and a year's practice with his father, a country doctor in nearby Tatamagouche. The nursing corps of Springhill Hospital was then administered by a group of strict and sober Church of England nuns, and they ranked doctors as not far below the angels. More importantly, perhaps, they were advised by Dr. Simpson, the chief of staff, to turn a blind eye to the courtship developing in front of them, between the handsome Presbyterian from Tatamagouche and the comely young Catholic coal miner's daughter with deep Acadian roots from nearby Joggins. In a sense, you might say that Dr. Simpson twice facilitated my birth.
 
My grandparents, on the other hand, took a decidedly more jaundiced view of this romance. Both sides were initially opposed to the union on religious grounds, such were the entrenched prejudices of the day. It was probably family pressure that led my mother, after they had been dating for a while, to ask for a time out. Three weeks went by; then Dad, who was always very quiet and shy, turned up at the nurses' dorm and asked my mother whether she might be interested in buying a set of encyclopedias. Mom declined the books but accepted his proposal. Not long after, they were married, although even then they could not be married in a church. In 1937 they exchanged their vows before Monsignor Currie in what was known as the Glebe, an annex of St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Joggins. None of their parents was present; Mom's sister, Erma, and John Burbine, Mom's first boyfriend, stood as witnesses. Although the laws of the Church kept them from the ceremony, Mom's parents did host a luncheon reception at their home. The honeymoon was a weekend in Saint John, New Brunswick, at the Admiral Beatty Hotel. The parental frostiness did not linger; in fact, it melted as soon as the first grandson, David, arrived about a year later.
 
Growing up, we didn't see much of Dad. His work ethic was legendary. On a typical day he'd be up at dawn to start surgery, delivering babies (4,500 over the decades) or tending to the dislocated or broken limbs routinely sustained by the city's two thousand coal miners, the mainstay of Springhill's principal industry. Then he'd do rounds at the hospital and return home for lunch. He took lunch, as he took breakfast and dinner, in bed; the only times the family gathered all together for a meal were Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. After lunch he'd take a short power nap, then go to his office above Wardrope's drugstore and see patients for three or four hours. Then he'd come home for dinner-again in bed (we kids would have eaten already)-take another twenty-minute nap, and then set off to see more patients at his office and make final rounds at the hospital. Dad did this every day except Saturday and Sunday, although he was always on call and worked one Sunday in four in rotation with other doctors. He also made house calls. In the summers, when we were at the family cottage at Northport, it was not unusual for people to pull up to announce that he was needed (we had no phone). He'd then drive to the nearest telephone office for a consultation or back into town for an emergency procedure.
 
Dad kept up professionally by reading exhaustively, often late into the night, from medical journals he kept stacked beside the bed. And his dedication was matched by his extraordinary surgical skills. To cite just one example, I received a letter a few years ago about a man who, as a child of two or three, had managed to get his forearm stuck in the rollers of an old wringer washing machine. Muscle and bone had been badly damaged, and the medical consensus was that amputation would be the best and most efficient course. Dad had disagreed, saying there was no way he was going to allow the little boy to lose an arm without trying to save it-which is exactly what he proceeded to do. The surgery was successful and the little boy grew up to become a welder, a profession that would have been virtually unthinkable with one arm. When Dad died in 1980, dozens of people came forward with stories like this, about how he had saved this or that part of them. And, quite freq...

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307398455
• ISBN 13: 9780307398451
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384