Tyranno-journalist Rex

Robert Everett-Green

THERE'S a deep and permanent crease between the brows, which even in relaxed conversation are fixed in a ferocious double arch that only laughter seems able to disturb. The pale eyes, burning coldly in their wide sockets, dart rapidly from side to side as he speaks. Rex Murphy has the look of some bird of prey, habitually scanning the landscape for an unsuspecting rodent.

So must he have seemed to many a politician in his home province of Newfoundland, where for more than two decades Murphy has held the unofficial post of chief satirist and anatomizer of the body politic. Peering out from television screens as the Rock sat down to dinner, Murphy made a career of digging his talons into scraps of pork-fed flesh, holding them up and explaining all there was to see in a few surgical remarks that even his victims sometimes found funny. In Newfoundland, Murphy is part of the landscape, like Signal Hill, and is known to all as Rex, as Joseph Smallwood was always Joey.

Now, suddenly, Murphy is all over the CBC, making documentaries and commentary spots for TV's Prime Time News, hosting Radio's Cross Country Checkup and contributing to Definitely Not the Opera. He has sprung onto the national airwaves like a jack-in-the-box, alarming some, prompting others to wonder why no one had previously thought of exposing the Murphy mind to the mainland audience. To an extent, they had: Murphy, a perpetual freelancer for most of his 47 years, has jobbed in Halifax and Toronto before. But only now has the CBC felt that his brand of journalism - wry, opinionated, floridly articulate - is worthy of its own spotlight.

The CBC being what it is, that spotlight glows brightest in Toronto, where Murphy has found an apartment - his only current home - near Lake Ontario, in the most windswept, barren and Newfoundland-like area of the city. Encountered in a waterfront mall, at a coffee and croissant bar of anonymous cast, Murphy in the flesh is leaner and softer-looking than the hard-eyed apparition seen on Prime Time, but he is still far from the styrene norm of television beauty. His language sins in the other direction, being too beautiful for the taste of many in the business.

"There's a tremendous bias in the mind of almost everybody connected with the medium that rich and playful language doesn't work on TV," Murphy says, fingering the first of many cigarettes. "In my view, that's a fierce mistake."

His Prime Time commentaries argue the point persuasively. Reading to the camera in perpetual deadpan, Murphy muses on the scandal sheets of royalty or the hypocrisy of anti-smoking zealotry, in language whose baroque phrases and mischievous tropes run like a parade of Roman candles through the drab night of standard television reportage. The swirl and music of his writing make a point that stands independent of whether you happen to agree with Murphy's position on separatism, the justice system or the royal family.

"I don't believe people listen to me, if they do, because of what I'm saying, but because they recognize a little amusement, a little larkiness," Murphy says. Larkiness in language is a Newfoundland tradition, much prized even among people of little formal education. Murphy's late father, a cook at an American military base, left school after the third grade, yet he had an ability with words, according to his son, that few post-doctoral types could match. The fear TV executives express about what the broad audience will accept, says Murphy, is really a form of condescension.

For all his eloquence and erudition - he was a Rhodes scholar at 19 - Murphy is also an earthy speaker. He is fond, for instance, of describing politicians in metaphors of cross-breeding, which are not without an element of physical caricature. Jacques Parizeau is "a biological melt between the Canadian Tire Scrooge and Stephen Leacock with an attitude." In Lucien Bouchard he finds "Dennis the Menace with an overlay of Savonarola," and in Preston Manning "a low-key combination of the Man from Glad and John the Baptist." By that standard, Murphy himself seems the result of an unacknowledged tryst between Beetlejuice and Dylan Thomas.

Cross Country Checkup puts the Murphy wit on-line, without softening its edge. In a recent program on the alleged merits of The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Murphy listened patiently as a censorious parent demanded to know why children could not, instead, have something to challenge their imaginations and stir their creativity.

"We have those things," Murphy observed drily. "They're called books." When another caller confessed that she liked "watching something mindless once in awhile," Murphy quipped: "I like hosting something mindless once in awhile."

"He certainly has in his work what you might call a kind of arrogance, but he was never a prima donna," says Robin Taylor, who first hired Murphy to work on CBC Newfoundland in the early seventies. Murphy's conversation is full of polite self-deprecations, most of which seem genuine.

"He could do a tough, tough interview and always be polite," says Bob Wakeham, head of CBC current affairs in Newfoundland and Murphy's former boss on the supper-hour news show, Here and Now. "He'd have the dagger in his hand, and be tearing out your gizzard and flinging it around the studio, but he'd always be polite."

He could easily have turned out otherwise. Notoriety came to Murphy early, when, as a student at Memorial University, he gave a speech at a conference in Quebec in 1966, denouncing a student-aid package from the Smallwood government as a sham. Perhaps because it was summer, the story hit front pages all across the country. In response, Smallwood commandeered a half- hour of television time to warn "that curly-headed bastard" - Murphy - not to show his face in Newfoundland again. Murphy's mother watched the former premier's address and went to bed, where she stayed for several days. She did not dare to watch television again for five years, says her son.

Smallwood, meanwhile, was only warming to the fight. When classes convened again in the fall, the former premier appeared to announce to the whole student body that all classes would be free, and that each student would receive a cash supplement for attendance.

"He was in full flight," remembers Murphy, "when someone stood up and called for three cheers. He was absolutely beatific, till they called my name." Murphy had been elected student-council president an hour before. Smallwood got his revenge sometime later, when Murphy went to deliver a committee report to the minister of education. When Murphy arrived, he found the minister waiting with Smallwood, who began asking his colleague, "Who is that little fucker down at the university? Do you know him?" - and so on, for 20 minutes of expert invective and personal abuse, all of it delivered in the third person.

"After that, nobody can bawl me out any more," Murphy says. "There are no terrors left for me in that department."

But politics and things political reserved certain terrors, or allurements as they seemed to him at the time. After working as a teacher and media commentator, Murphy caught "the political virus" badly enough to want to run for office himself.

"It was a desire higher than whim and a little less than lust," he says. He won a federal nomination for the Tories in 1981 - improbably, given his lifelong Trudeauphilia. The election was delayed for 11 months, and Murphy, running out of cash, reluctantly took an advisory job with the provincial Tories under Frank Moores. There he witnessed the venality, foolishness and heartbreak of real politics, before quitting both job and nomination in disgust. He returned to television, where he picked up as before, wringing the withers of his former political comrades, and of many others besides.

"Toward the end there were members of Frank Moores' cabinet who were leery, if not scared, to go on the air with him," says Taylor. By 1985, having served as an assistant to Liberal leader Leo Barry, Murphy was ready for another electoral run, which he lost by just 154 votes. He now regards his defeat as tentative proof of the possibility of divine benevolence.

"To see a principled politician in office is a terrible thing," he says. "It's a form of purgatory from which there is no remission into a higher state."

Through all these public scraps and contests, Murphy pursued more private passions for music and especially for books. As a boy, he learned piano through a home-study course, and memorized many works of Chopin before he had ever heard a "proper" performance. He speaks with humility of his literary heroes: John Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, and a galaxy of others, whose works he reads with a searing, searching eye for the source of the magic. Murphy is, in the truest sense, a student of the language and its music.

"I'll read two hours before going to bed, even if I'm exhausted," he says. "It's just something that I do. I'll read eight or 10 hours a day, if I have the time. I believe in renovating the spirit on a continuing basis."

He has already nosed out the specialty bookshops in Toronto, a form of hunting more benign than the safaris he used to make as a young man in St. John's. In the late sixties, when some of his generation were turning on and dropping out, Murphy and a buddy would unwind by driving to a dump 100 kilometres away to shoot rats.

"We used to take a flashlight and a .22 rifle," he says. "You'd turn off the flashlight and find them by ear, then switch it on and shoot. It was standard outport outdoor stuff, a ventilating pastime you might say. There was nothing novel about it."

Such are the paradoxes of Rex Murphy, a bookish intellectual with a killer instinct, a self-confessed show-off who is also fundamentally shy. Freely as he speaks on any and every subject, he is not easy with words about the things and people closest to him.

"He's a very private individual," says Robin Taylor who has known Murphy for more than 20 years. "We're very close, but I've never had a discussion with him at all about his private life."

"I'm not a highly social animal," Murphy says tersely. "I always feel I could be doing something else. Maybe it's Catholic."

He will talk at length and with passion about all things concerning Newfoundland, whose current travails have prompted some remarkable documentary work on Prime Time. Unpeopled Shores, a 25-minute piece on the fishery crisis, is a memorial to Canadian tragedy of rare intensity and pathos. Murphy wrote it knowing that he and those in the film belong to a culture that may be in its death throes.

"Unpeopled Shores was something I had to do, because the story was being sold on the mainland as routine, and it's not routine," he says. "Maybe it won't do any good, but it's a marker, and it's important to set down markers."

Another paradox: Murphy's marker is laid down in the ephemeral medium of television. Maybe that's as it should be, for a man who has always grappled with the present moment, for all its terrors, opportunities and fundamental larkiness.

Published on November 25, 1994

Copyright © 1995
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