I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-Nine

When it came to high-class Italian restaurants in Toronto in the early 1970s, La Scala was the only game in town. It was located in a large renovated house at the southeast corner of Bay and Charles Streets, which made it nicely central, and it served beautifully cooked Italian cuisine. To anyone who knew Italian restaurants in New York or Los Angeles, La Scala might not have quite cut it; osso bucco, for example, wasn't on the menu. But La Scala still ranked number one in Toronto, and it featured, behind the main dining area, a separate space with plenty of room where a pianist could play for the customers.

    A Toronto musician I knew fairly well was working the piano gig when I moved to the city. He was Hagood Hardy whose main instrument was the vibraphone; he was a fine all-round jazz musician who played over the years in the bands of people like Herbie Mann and George Shearing. When Hagood left La Scala, he recommended me to the place's owners as his successor on piano. The owners were a father and son, John and Charles Grieco. Charles, the son, had pretty much succeeded his father as the overall boss, and Hagood's recommendation went a long way with him because the two had known each other as students at the University of Toronto. Hagood's recommendation was great, but I passed muster with Charles for three other reasons: I dressed well, I didn't drink, and I played pretty good piano.

    I stayed at La Scala for seven years, working from six-thirty in the evening till about ten-thirty. The major listening time for the audience came in the after-dinner period when the patrons had finished their meal and moved into my part of the restaurant for coffee and liqueurs. For the most part, the people gave me the benefit of close attention, and I developed a solid base audience of patrons who came in regularly at least in part to hear me.

    For those who didn't listen, who talked loudly through my performance, I had a standard line.

    "Thank you very much, ladies and gentleman," I would say at the end of the set, "it's been so nice listeining to you."

    Charles, to his credit, always got a laugh out of the line.

My evenings fell into a satisfying rhythm. I arrived at La Scala in time to have early dinner with the waiters and other staff. The chef cooked meals for us that were off the menu, osso bucco being one of the dishes the chef served only to the staff that I especially loved. Then I played for most of the next four hours, taking breaks only to drink a delicious espresso or two, usually while I sat with some of La Scala's regulars. Typically, Murray Chercover who headed CTV ate at the restaurant with his beautiful wife Barbara every Friday night. I always had time for them. Bill Davis of the Progressive Conservative Party was the Ontario premier in the 1970s, and his people came up from the Legislature a few blocks to the south for dinner practically every night. They were always part of the mix in the room, though I'm sure they didn't know they had a left-wing piano player entertaining them.

    Whenever gigs brought musician friends of mine to Toronto, I made sure they dropped by La Scala. Lena Horne came for dinner, and so did Peggy Lee, the great pianist Teddy Wilson, Victor Feldman, the singers Jackie Cain and Roy Kral. Charles Grieco loved it when talented people like them showed up in his restaurant. He acted like they were royalty. The night that Tony Bennett and his wife of the period arrived for dinner, Tony ordered spaghetti and meatballs, but his wife wanted something off the menu, essentially a vegetarian thing. It was Charles himself who walked to the grocery store down the street to buy the vegetables for Tony's wife's dinner.

    There was just about nothing I could object to about La Scala. "I have never seen an artist treated in such a unique fashion," Murray McEachern said to Charles one night. Murray was a great trombone player with Benny Goodman and in the Los Angeles studio bands, and though he may have described my situation in a rather solemn manner, he was right. My treatment at La Scala was unique.

The restaurant gig was beneficial for me in musical terms. Essentially I played a repertoire from the Great American Songbook, and the longer I worked at La Scala, the deeper my knowledge of the songs became. I developed medleys of tunes, divided not just by composers but also by cities. I put together a medley of New York songs that included work by Vernon Duke (Autumn in New York), Stephen Sondheim (Another Hundred People), Richard Rodgers (Manhattan) and especially my dear friend Billy Strayhorn (Johnny Come Lately, Lush Life and Take the A Train). This kind of thing went over very well with the listeners, and they satisfied a part of me. I loved shaping medleys, and I developed them for other cities. London was one of them, made up of such songs as A Nightngale Sang in Berkley Square, London By Night and Here, There and Everywhere. The third tune indicated that I could venture well outside the Great American Songbook when a song justified its inclusion in a medley. Here, There and Everywhere was a number by John Lennon and Paul McCartnery, two of the rock era people who helped make the older composers seem dated and passé to a younger generation of listeners. 

    At La Scala, I played the work of all kinds of composers who may not have been well known but whose songs deserved attention. Ray Noble was one of them, an English born bandleader who happened to write a few beautiful songs. My Ray Noble medley included The Very Thought of You and The Touch of Your Lips, which were not exactly shabby tunes in anybody's book.

While my role at La Scala brought me nothing except pleasure in the 1970s, the decade also marked a period of terrible loss in my personal life.

    In 1973, Pat, Michelle and I moved into a unique apartment complex close to Lake Ontario in the Beach section of Toronto's east end. The complex was called El Pueblo Apartments, and as the name indicated, the architecture was in a Spanish style. Everything was built around a huge open courtyard, enclosed by an arrangment of the apartments in the two-story high building. The apartments were designated not by numbers but by names in alphabetical order. During our years at El Pueblo, we rented two apartments, first Casa Angelina, then moving next door to Casa Bonita.

    Not long after we settled there, Pat was diagnosed with cancer. She'd had the same diagnosis a few years earlier in California, but had beaten back the disease. Now the cancer returned, and this time, after a hard struggle and despite wonderful treatment from many doctors and nurses at Women's College Hospital, Pat died of the disease. It was an unspeakably sad event in my life and in the lives of our two daughters.

Somehow we kept going.

    I bought a house on Scarborough Road, not all that far east of the El Pueblo Apartments, principally for Michelle and me but also for Denise over short periods. Michelle finished high school at Malvern Collegiate, the great pianist Glenn Gould's old school. When she graduated, Michelle moved to Los Angeles where she studied fashion. She worked for a few years in that field, then switched to court reporting, which she studied and worked at. When neither fashion nor court reporting entirely satisfied Michelle, her older sister told her to get a job at The Gap.

    "You'll love the work and you'll meet your husband," Denise said.

    She was right about both. Michelle married Adam, and on February 4, 1993, she gave birth to her son Alex.

   

Denise, meanwhile, gradated from Simmons College, then worked her way through jobs in Toronto as a staff writer for CTV's morning show Canada AM and as a reporter for the independent station Citytv. In 1980, she moved to movies, first as the unit publicist for a film titled Final Assignment, starring Genevieve Bujold, then to a Montreal-based production company called Film Plan where she had a hand in nine different feature movies. In1983, Denise moved to Los Angeles, and in no time, she was producing movies like the cult favourite, Heathers, and a whole slew of Tim Burton movies including Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and James and the Giant Peach. Denise was launched on a career as one of the more successful independent producers in Hollywood. She married a movie director named Christopher Taylor and gave birth to two kids, Mac and Nicholas.

   

Both of my daughters shaped fulfilling lives for themselves.

    And, me?

    I made my permanent home in Toronto with no thoughts of relocating anywhere else, and I found plenty of music to fill my life.