Here she is in a baby-blue hooded coat, tired-looking but punctual, the CBC's It Girl, still, at 45 and after more than 20 years. Only Wendy Mesley can make a bad chest cough and a runny nose, which she sniffs loudly several times, seem cute. She is intrepid, even when she doesn't want to be. Upon arriving in an uptown Toronto café, she tells me she frantically tried to cancel our morning meeting but, when she couldn't reach me, came anyway, feeling lousy with a cold.
It's a very Mesley moment. So clear is her persona in the media that someone could design a clothing line bearing her name, or better yet, a perfume. She is a bouquet of toughness and vulnerability, determination and fragility. One trait doesn't always mask the others. Rather, they co-exist, despite each other almost.
Even when she is acting flinty and professional there's a hint of hardship in the unflinching gaze of her brown eyes and in her tendency to suddenly sit back from the table and cross her arms around her slim torso -- giving herself a hug, in effect. This trait reveals itself when she answers a question about her recent shift from the flashy, high-profile CBC investigative show, Disclosure, now in its second season, to the long-standing and more pedestrian consumer affairs program, Marketplace
"Marketplace is closer to the kind of stories I want to tell," she says, arms in hug mode.
Well, that's brave. So it wasn't about a reported creative tension between Mesley and veteran producer Susan Teskey, who was asked to take over Disclosure after the one-hour current-affairs program failed to attract a large audience? "Nothing was wrong," Mesley states. "[The show]just wasn't me." But Tony Burman, director of CBC Television's current-affairs division, was the one who said they were at loggerheads. "I certainly speak my mind," she begins tentatively, then, after a lengthy pause, adds: "It's hard to disagree with that when your boss is quoted as saying there were creative differences."
And how does she feel about his comment that she left Disclosure and its gruelling travel schedule so she could be at home more? Mesley and her husband, Liam McQuade, have a 4-year-old daughter, Kate. "Um, I was surprised he said that," she says slowly, "It's not completely untrue that I want to spend more time [with my family]and Tony knows that I was really sick last year [with pneumonia] but he also knows that's not the reason I left." Did she confront him about his remarks? She remains silent for more than a comfortable pause. "I just want to be positive," she says in a small voice.
The management of ambition within CBC is an interesting topic, though. How the public broadcaster placates, promotes and shuffles its stars is intriguing. Witness the recent contract saga of Ron MacLean, co-host with Don Cherry of Hockey Night in Canada. Mesley deflects any further questions by demeaning them, suggesting they are too gossipy and beneath her. Pressed, she relents. "There's a lot of strong personalities and Tony Burman is one of them, and I'm one of them, and there are lots of others, and we don't always want exactly the same thing, but ultimately, we end up in a good place overall, and I'm grateful that I'm at Marketplace, and I'm not going to crap on anything that's happened. I'm not going to be angry and bitter."
Still, the move is widely seen as a demotion. How does she feel about that? "Not thrilled."
Mesley became CBC-TV's It Girl long before every network realized they could use one. It's the combination of her looks and her questions that's so compelling. With her girl-next-door charm, that smile, that hair -- the tough questions she asks are a shock, a little like seeing an apron-clad Mom pull a gun rather than a cookie from her pocket. But it's not a self-conscious ploy. At least, it doesn't seem to be.
Watching Mesley, a viewer feels that her principles come before her vanity, whereas for some female on-air reporters a question seems more like a trendy fashion accessory than a desire to dig for truth. Mesley's tenacity, whether she's in a media scrum around a politician or trying to nail some corporate player, makes us want to protect her. She's the quintessential girl hero of popular young-adult fiction, a Nancy Drew type, with the spunk and smarts to get to the bottom of things. Which is why the state of Mesley's fly-away hair endears her to her audience and tends to become a focus of national preoccupation.
Geez, you know she has something when you devote a whole paragraph to whatever It is.
Born in Montreal, Mesley credits her mother, Jean, with instilling the strong values she carries into her work. Her parents split up shortly after her birth. "We were on our own and my mom always made sure I could look after myself. And she always taught me that just because people are rich and powerful doesn't mean they're better than you. I was brought up to think that what matters most was that people be given a fair shot and to be tolerant of others and to stand up for what you believe in." Her mother, who worked as a physiotherapist, is about to turn 71 and remains an inspiration. She kayaks, teaches skiing at Ontario's Blue Mountain, and last year climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Mesley is also physically active. She had her husband windsurf in the summer and into the late fall, wearing wetsuits when the weather turns cold. "I don't go out unless the wind is 12 knots," she says, adding that she has been windsurfing since her 20s.
Right from the start of her career, Mesley was drawn to serious issues. She never had to weather a weather-girl phase, in other words, although she did read traffic reports, among other things, part-time at various radio stations while studying journalism at Toronto's Ryerson University, then called Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Upon graduation, she set off for Montreal to work for CFCF, a CTV affiliate, "because that was where it was most exciting. It was just before the referendum. It felt like Cuba or something," she recalls. She didn't know the French language, separatist politics, or the medium of television, but she learned quickly. It is her ability to handle complex stories that has marked her career ever since.
For the CBC, she has been in a variety of jobs, as national reporter, parliamentary correspondent, host of Sunday Report and of Newsworld's This Day. At the height of her political reporting she was referred to as Miss Meech Lake for her impressive coverage of the constitutional debate. She was also married to CBC anchorman Peter Mansbridge, a union that helped both their images. She made him seem less stodgy and he affirmed her serious sexiness.
But when the high-profile marriage ended, Mesley emerged as feisty as ever. She got her own show, the successful six-season UnderCurrents, for which she won a Gemini Award. It was Mesley as mature, experienced journalist whose reporting instincts were sharply defined. "It took me two or three years for me to persuade [CBC]to do UnderCurrents," she says. "I had to fight." She was able to pinpoint the stories she wanted to tell. "It's the grey area I'm interested in," she says. "Not the black and white. Stories others aren't telling or that others don't think are important but that the public wants and haven't heard before."
That's what she wants to resume doing on the consumer-affairs show Marketplace. "To me, the biggest gap in journalism these days is with these kinds of stories that help us understand what's happening in society," she explains.
If Mesley is comfortable with her place in life and within the CBC, marriage and motherhood have played a role, she says. She met McQuade, who is seven years her junior, through Steve Paikin, a host of TVOntario's weeknight current-affairs show, Studio 2. He is a marketing executive who was helping the network re-organize at the time. Her five-year marriage and late motherhood ("I work to deadline and that's what I did with motherhood, too," she says with a chuckle) has made her "much more efficient, much more grounded," she says. "I'm really happy just going home." Later, in a telephone conversation, she confesses that "going through a divorce has made me a better wife."
Confessional then tight-lipped, girlish then professional, Mesley moves from mood to mood when it pleases her. She sets the pace. She can be deadly serious about what she terms ethical behaviour. For instance, she is highly critical of celebrities who show off their homes and children as a way to make themselves "seem more human or more colourful," but she is also quick to laugh. Asked if she reads about herself in the media, she leans across the table and says, "I must confess to buying [Frank, a low-brow satirical magazine]when they did that shag contest [about me]just because when I'm 1,000 [years old]and Kate thinks I'm 2,000, I can show her that I was actually considered a sex symbol once."