Nancy Phillips. Courtesy of the Phillips Family.
A great city needs great hostesses; they enhance the glamour of urban life. Their social and financial capital allow them to draw together disparate elements and encourage them to commingle in unexpected ways.
Nancy Phillips was a playful, imaginative, artistic spirit, perfectly coiffed and colourfully dressed, who created magic with her candlelit catered dinner parties in her Georgian-style home in Toronto's Forest Hill neighbourhood. These were nothing like the charity balls that wealthy people pay to attend; they were effervescent occasions of genuine private hospitality.
The party mood was often set before the guests entered, with lanterns and balloons along the path to the house. And it invariably ended with her guests giddily riding the vintage carousel that Ms. Phillips found in pieces in a junkyard, restored and placed in a glass pavilion in her backyard. She and her husband, Derek McLaughlin Phillips, had one of the only privately owned carousels in Canada.
In 2002, when she was interviewed about a musical production she had written that was about to open at the Berkeley Street Theatre, she told the National Post: "The carousel is a metaphor for my life, a wild and wonderful journey full of crazy animals."
The Globe's society columnist Zena Cherry reported on a Christmas party at the Phillips residence in 1984, at which the hostess led her guests through the falling snow to the heated pavilion, placed herself at the controls and pulled the lever to make the gaily painted wooden cats, rabbits, horses and roosters go round. Guests on that occasion, in addition to family members, included a balloonist, an architect, an antiques dealer, a gynecologist and several lawyers.
"She had her socialite friends with names such as Eaton and Bassett, and then she had her artist-actor-writer friends; she always called them pals," recalls Gary Roxborough, an architectural designer who met Ms. Phillips in the 1950s when she went to his firm, Gardiner Cowan, to have her dining room enlarged.
The pals included authors Pierre Berton and Alex Haley; actors Tom Kneebone and Barbara Hamilton; artist Harold Town; broadcaster Knowlton Nash and his wife, Lorraine Thomson; writer/activist June Callwood; and other celebrities, who came to her parties. After he designed the new dining room, large enough to hold 10 tables, with French windows opening into the garden, Mr. Roxborough, too, became a regular guest. Later, she had Mr. Roxborough's firm add a ballroom with mirrored walls for dancing.
"She looked for any excuse to have a party," he recalls, "and there was usually a theme. She decided to have a party before the new dining room was finished. The party was in the basement and her friends were asked to wear hard hats or construction clothes.
"Another time, her invitation included a password – Enigma – you had to say to get in. It was a casual party. Laid out all across a large table in her dining room there was a giant submarine sandwich spelling out the word Enigma."
According to Mr. Roxborough, Ms. Phillips kept small gifts near the door, beautifully wrapped, that she would hand out as guests left for some whimsical reason such as "funniest remark" or "best hair."
"Her house was otherworldly and her dinner parties sparkled," recalled her friend Kristin Basso, wife of Guido Basso, the jazz musician. "She always did the flowers herself and she seated groups of people she knew would get along. People couldn't wait to go out to the carousel – they pretended they didn't care, but they did."
Nancy Phillips died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis on March 10, at the age of 91. According to her son, Thomas Phillips, when she was diagnosed with the rare disease four years ago, the doctor asked, "Have you ever smoked? Have you ever worked in a mine?" No, on both counts.
She was born in Ottawa Nancy McClenaghan on Oct. 16, 1923, to Stewart and Gladys (née Gamble) McClenaghan, the middle child of three. Her mother was a voluptuous beauty, but a trial to her daughter. In a late-life interview, Nancy Phillips said of her that she was wonderful "when she was sober."
Her father worked for the Ford Motor Co. and his job brought the family to Toronto, where Nancy was a student at Bishop Strachan School, graduating in 1941. She enrolled in the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), to become a commercial artist. Here she met fellow student John Squire and married him at 20.
She landed a job in the advertising department of Simpson's, the grand Queen Street emporium, at a time when photo reproduction in newspapers was fuzzy and print advertising was illustrated with drawings. She could draw anything.
The Second World War was raging when she entered a contest to paint a large patriotic mural at Union Station in support of Canada's soldiers overseas. She won the commission and with it $100, worth about $1,400 today.
After the birth of their son Mark in 1944, the young couple moved to New York, where she found work as an advertising copywriter and artist at the Gussow-Kahn agency, known for its fashion ads. He produced ad copy for Rock Resorts and Pan American Airways, but by 1946 the marriage was over because of John's philandering. (He went on to marry three more times.) She stayed on working in New York.
Her time as a beautiful, vivacious divorcée was later alluded to in the racy song lyrics of her two cabaret musicals, Lies and Other Lyrics (1979), and Friends, Lovers, Husbands (2002). The song Nostalgia begins like this:
He was everything I thought I always wanted
He was masterful, amusing and well dressed
He could dance and sing like crazy
Played piano like Count Basie
And it ends:
He was so superb in bed, dear,
I completely lost my head dear,Regrettably I can't recall his name.
This number, set to music by Bob Ashley (an original member of The Guess Who), made it into Field of Stars, a selection of the best songs from Canadian musicals, published in 2005.
After five years in New York, Nancy returned to Toronto and met Derek Phillips at a wedding. He was instantly smitten and asked if he could drive her home. Derek's father was Colonel W. Eric Phillips, head of Argus Corp., and his mother, Eileen, was one of five daughters of Oshawa auto magnate Colonel Sam McLaughlin. Following their wedding in 1950, the young couple moved with six-year-old Mark to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Mr. Phillips, a mechanical engineer, was to build a dam for the Brazilian Power and Light Co. (Brascan).
Nancy was quickly hired by J. Walter Thomson, an international ad firm, to draw full-page ads for Sao Paulo's biggest department store. One ad showed pretty women popping out of a champagne bottle. A snapshot from this happy period shows them setting off for a party dressed as fish, in costumes Nancy had created.
Their son Tom was born in 1954, after they had returned from Brazil. Throughout the 1960s, Ms. Phillips wrote and illustrated a thrice-weekly column in the Toronto Telegram called "One Woman's View," about whatever took her fancy: the Old Favourites second-hand bookshop; meeting the artist Salvador Dali in an elevator; the need for birth control. In January, 1961, the Tely sent her to Washington to cover the inauguration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
After the paper folded in 1971, she wrote for Toronto Life magazine and briefly hosted a show on CFTO television. She found an abandoned merry-go-round in a wrecking yard in Newmarket with animals carved in the early 20th century. "I went with her," Mr. Roxborough recalls. "The wrecker told us it had been run by a Model A Ford engine, but we couldn't find it among the junk. The animals had been painted grey and khaki all over." Later Ms. Phillips stripped the old paint herself and repainted each one in pink, coral, white and soft green – her favourite colours – while her son Mark, an Air Canada pilot, and her husband, Derek, equipped it with with a turning mechanism using an electric motor and roller skates.
"Derek was a quiet, gentle person. He went along with all her ideas," Mr. Roxborough recalled.
Although she had no musical training, she turned her energy next to writing the musical Lies and Other Lyrics with Bob Ashley, a two-hander for the Charlottetown Festival in 1979. It was remounted in 1980 at a theatre in the Four Seasons Hotel, then on Toronto's Jarvis St.
"My mother never said, 'I have not done this before so I can't do it,'" her younger son Tom recalled.
Her 2002 second musical, Friends, Lovers, Husbands, in which a woman looks back on her younger self, was less successful.
Jazz kept her going after her beloved Derek's death in 2001. "She was a pretty swinging lady. She loved jazz and was on all my jazz cruises for 14 years," recalls Guido Basso, whose quintet was featured on the cruises. "She was my best fan. She had exquisite taste in music as in everything else."
Bob Ashley, whom she brought along on one of these cruises, recalls: "She charmed everyone. Everyone wanted to sit at our table because of her gift of having fun with people."
The musicians and fellow jazz fans she met aboard were, of course, invited to her parties as her older friends died off.
The final party Ms. Phillips threw was her own 90th birthday celebration. According to Mr. Roxborough, the invitations read "No presents but dress spiffy." Illness forced her to receive her spiffy guests sitting down, as witty and gracious as ever.
She leaves her sons, Mark Phillips and Thomas McLaughlin Phillips; granddaughters Caitlin, Robin and Emily; and two great-grandchildren.
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