In 1964, Peter Kastner burst onto the scene in Nobody Waved Goodbye, with a role some compared with The Catcher in the Rye character Holden Caulfield.
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On Jan. 26, the film we think of as our bittersweet family home movie kicks off TIFF's year-long sesquicentennial celebration of Canadian cinema.
Nobody Waved Goodbye, director Don Owen's 1964 drama that stars our late brother, Peter Kastner, was the most celebrated Canadian feature film of its time. It was the first Canadian feature to break through in the U.S., where critics went wild for it.
The New Yorker compared it with The Catcher in the Rye and "the fantastically gifted Peter Kastner" to Holden Caulfield. Life magazine called it a "gem on a shoestring." The young (pre-Godfather) Francis Ford Coppola saw it and cast Peter in the leading role in the director's first mainstream feature, You're a Big Boy Now.
Seeing Nobody Waved Goodbye at the Bell Lightbox in Toronto, on the big screen again for the first time in more than 50 years, will bring back that giddy time we last saw it, all of our family, still all together. It will bring tears, too, seeing Peter come back to life on the screen; our brilliant, exceptional and beloved 20-year-old brother, as he was all those years ago, before we lost him.
Because it is the real Peter Kastner on the screen. The dialogue that helps make Owen's film so moving and special was entirely improvised, and Peter's drew heavily from real life. At the time, it was diverting that some of the squabbles he was having with our parents one day would turn up in film dialogue the next. No one who knew our close-knit, exuberantly creative family would ever have imagined it contained the seeds of the cataclysm to come.
Kastner’s future looked bright, but his showbiz career went sideways and eventually fizzled.
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But after great early promise, Peter's career fizzled fast.
By 1968, barely four years after Nobody Waved Goodbye, Peter was reduced to doing a silly, gimmicky TV series called The Ugliest Girl in Town. He would continue to work intermittently into the seventies and eighties, but never on anything of distinction, and he was frequently short of money. At one point, we would learn much later, he became a bike courier, occasionally making deliveries to the studios where he once had been a budding star.
As his career faltered, so did his relationship with our family. Hardly the bourgeois duo his character railed against in Nobody Waved Goodbye, Martin and Rose Kastner were anthologized translators of Bertolt Brecht; our father was a sculptor and a poet; and our house was the scene of fabled parties with le tout Toronto.
While Peter's career was stalling, ours were going forward, and our parents had long been urging him to quit showbiz. Our mother had pleaded in letter after letter that he forget acting, get his degree, get a "real" job. After our father's death in 1976, she redoubled her efforts. Peter was her favourite, and she was desperate about his decline. Enraged, he turned on her. Finally, in 1979, after a terrible episode in which he embezzled money from her bank account, she broke with him, writing that she couldn't bear what he had become, and she was cutting him out of her will. By the time she died, on New Year's Day, 1983, Peter had long been estranged from us all.
The last time we saw our brother was 10 years ago, on the night of another family milestone: the 2007 premiere at Hot Docs of Susan's son Jamie Kastner's documentary, Kike Like Me.
Before our disbelieving eyes, there, suddenly, was Peter. It was the first time we had seen him in 20-odd years. Working the lineup to the sold-out show, he was proffering leaflets to his own video series: Meet The Kastners! Learn the Truth About My Nephew Jamie Kastner's Grandmother Rose Kastner!" At that point, she had been dead for 24 years.
As Kastner’s career faltered, so did his relationship with his family.
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We were gobsmacked, heartsick at the change in him. He was haggard and almost unrecognizable. We've agonized so often since: What must he have gone through to put its stamp on that tormented, contorted face?
Ironically, after Rose's death, Peter had finally quit showbiz: among other things, he taught English as a second language, worked in an audio-visual library, and became a private videographer. But his Kastner family videos never gained traction, and his virulent mass e-mails continued. In September, 2008, he died of heart failure in downtown Toronto, a few days short of his 65th birthday.
On Jan. 20, for our family, another bittersweet confluence: At that very theatre, now the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, where a decade ago our brother hawked his desperate leaflets, Jamie Kastner's documentary The Skyjacker's Tale will have its Canadian theatrical premiere.
We are working together, Peter's still-grieving siblings, on a memoir to try to deconstruct the tragedy, recapture the joy, understand how it is that one special family can nurture three who flourish and cleave close, but lose the cherished fourth, the one who seemed effortlessly to possess the secret of the world but who, with all the love in the world, could not be saved from his demons, from his great fall, from himself.
Susan Kastner is a journalist and author of two biographies; John Kastner is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian; and Kathy Kastner is a patient advocate and author of the e-book Death Kills!
Nobody Waved Goodbye screens Jan. 26 at the Bell Lightbox in Toronto as part of TIFF's Canada on Screen series (tiff.net). Admission is free.