You’ll probably run into Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and TV personality of four decades, at least once in the next 10 days, as he swoops in from his native Chicago to attend the Toronto International Film Festival. Maybe you’ll pass him on “the escalator of terror,” as he calls the steep lift up to the Scotiabank Theatre. He won’t be able to speak to you, unfortunately – thyroid cancer and its treatments have robbed him of his lower jaw, along with his ability to eat or talk. But he’ll make some agreeable sign or other, and his steadfast spouse, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, likely will be on hand to interpret.
Ebert, 69, has been coming to TIFF since its beginning, and this year he’s bringing something extra – his new memoir, Life Itself, which hits bookstores Sept. 13. It’s a warm, open wander through his life as a student (in Chicago and Cape Town), newspaper man (in the days when the building shook as the presses rolled), drinker (wild nights in subterranean Chicago bars), traveller (he remembers every walk he ever took), ex-drinker as of 1979 (he attended the second through the sixth Alcoholics Anonymous meetings of his life in Toronto during TIFF that year), cancer survivor (he had to learn to walk four separate times), and admirer of women (self-explanatory). In print, his voice is both jokier and more contemplative than the bulldoggish debater we’ve come to know on his TV shows. It presents a man who values memories, rituals and silly jokes, but who never wallows in self-pity.
For example, numerous operations to repair Ebert’s jaw failed, and he tried wearing a prosthesis. “But I dunno, I was happier with my own face, troubled as it was,” he said last week in an e-mail exchange. “There are no metaphors for not eating or speaking. There is only the reality.”
You may be surprised by what’s not in the book, however – much of anything about going to movies. The countless hours Ebert spent in the dark watching film unspool occupy only a few paragraphs here and there. “It's a memoir, not a book about the cinema,” he said. “When I write I find myself in the ‘zone,’ and say I'm taking dictation from that place inside that tells me the words.”
The zone has a remarkable memory. Ebert grew up as an only child in Urbana, Ill. His dad, an electrician for the University of Illinois, and his mother, a secretary (both now deceased), took him to his first movie, the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races, and sent him to Catholic grade school, where, he said, “the emphasis on mortality” gave him a life-long, keen awareness of the passing of time. As a self-professed high-school know-it-all, he started writing for newspapers and never stopped. He arrived at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1966, and in 1967, his bosses made him the movie critic. “ ‘The movie generation’ made the cover of Time,” he said. “I had written features on the movies. I was young. I needed a haircut. Case closed.”
He’s much more romantic about the newspaper world than that of movies. His book brims with stories about the controlled chaos of the open newsroom and his cynical yet idealistic colleagues. My favourite anecdote involves advice columnist Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers to readers) and TV-radio critic Paul Molloy, who sat side by side in the thick of everything.
