Downtown Girl

After Mick and the sweatshirt both resurfaced on television that fateful evening of October 25, 1964, the plan went into full gear. My mother had to be in on it. Otherwise, six months later, there would not have been a visit from the now notorious lead singer of the band that vied with the Beatles for the hearts of girls around the world. 

The only caveat, and the key to this psy op, was that I was not to know. I was in the dark, thanks to the doctors at McGill who owned my future. To realize this only now is like stepping back into time on an elevator heading straight down at warp speed. I feel a wave of drowsiness come over me at the prospect of trying to write about it. It's like slipping into a trance, once again, and boarding the Titanic, oblivious to what awaited out there on the ocean. 

 Back then I had no idea what my mother did all day, confined to a sterile suburb miles from anywhere. It never entered my head that, at 51, she had anything to occupy her other than house cleaning, shopping, meal preparation and hours of daytime TV. 

As for my dad, he was writing a novel -- and had borrowed my portable typewriter for that purpose. My parents' lives were almost as blurry to me as the rows of identical brick houses in our featureless neighborhood . The only time we came alive as a family was during summers in the country where we socialized, swam, fished and lived outdoors in nature. Our city lives were all about schools and schedules, and my mother (who was French Canadian and came from small town aristocracy and the political class) adapted to living in our shadows. She still had a few friends from her youth who would sometimes phone; as an only child she had cousins who disapproved of her marrying a Protestant who spoke only English, the language we used at home. 

My mother's erasure was something I took for granted. A born diplomat, she rarely asserted herself unless arguing politics with my father, when her cleverness surfaced, and also her sincere convictions. There was nothing cynical about her, but she did harbor typical prejudices -- she had a steak of anti semitism that was common in Quebec. And here I was now enrolled at Baron Byng high school which for decades had catered to the children of working class immigrants, mostly Jews. The very same school where my father had landed his first job teaching music in 1947. 

 It is disturbing to think that as I pursued the normal routines of a 13 year old high school freshman, commuting downtown and back daily on the bus, an hour each way, and doing my best to cope with a new multicultural world inhabited by warm blooded Greeks, wisecracking Jews, sexy Moroccan and Algerian francophone refugees (two of whom were my teachers), the corner pool hall, live chicken market, and other features of downtown slum life -- while my senses and emotions were flooded daily with all these new and exciting impressions, not to mention the sudden emergence in my life of a circle of girls who shared my interests and secret passions and began coaxing me out of my shell ... 

To think that while I was totally entranced and occupied by my new world downtown at Baron Byng, a 10 minute walk from Mount Royal, a stone's throw from McGill and the psychiatrists who depatterned my dad only two years earlier -- and still controlled our family -- To think that as I was finding my bearings in this dark and fascinating landscape, my mother was weaving my destiny out of the cloth of her dreams and the limited knowledge she possessed at the time of the massive Plan being hatched in London that would ensnare my entire generation.

 

That year, 1964-65, my girlfriends and I witnessed an endless string of new bands on TV -- usually on the Ed Sullivan Show. In March, we saw, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, singing their unsophisticated but catchy hit, "This Diamond Ring."  Initially we confused them with a local band, J.B. and the Playboys,  Nevertheless, the song's hook haunted me: an honest boy buys a diamond ring for a girl who coldly returns it, and now "it doesn't mean a thing." Yet he goes on hoping for true love, holding onto the promise of the ring and the enduring diamond. Which also happens to be a theme of the Titanic.

 

 

 
The next evening after hearing This Diamond Ring on Ed Sullivan, I must have watched Episode 25 of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. -- "The Never-Never Affair" with featured guest Barbara Felton. The following week was "The Love Affair" -- I'm sure I saw that one, too. Like millions of North Americans, I was fixated on that series and never missed a chance to ogle Ilya Kuryakin.
 

Like everyone else of my generation, I was being programmed -- and these shows and performances belonged to the world I dissociated into. I was not unusual among my peers, except for the fact that I had been chosen for the program. My girlfriends and I openly fantasized about becoming spies when we grew up. To us, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. represented the real world we hoped to join someday.

 

 

The Never-Never Affair: Mandy and Solo

To say I was being "programmed" by the Man From UNCLE is definitely a stretch- however I suspect it's true. Looking back at the content of those shows, it becomes clear that in 1964 certain people in Hollywood knew about MKULTRA, while a few blocks from BBHS in Montreal the program had folded under pressure from outside and inside the CIA following JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963. The ubiquitous Dr Ewen Cameron had unceremoniously decamped with all his files, and moved to Albany NY -- this was in August 1964, while our family presumably was spending one of our last summers together at our cabin on the Ottawa River.

As I skim Episode 25 (the Never-Never Affair) at Daily Motion, the first detail that jumps out at me is those triangular number badges worn by Mandy (23), and later very visible on Napoleon (2) and Ilya (22) in the first segment, subtitled The Eighth something...

For what it's worth, those were all my numbers. I was born April 11 1951 which is 4-11-7 = 22, my life path number. I also notice 4×11 = 44+ 7 = 51.  11 reduces to 2, and 2x2 is 4. And so I find those numbers odd, not necessarily meaningful but perhaps indicative of something going on in the scriptwriter's mond. Kennedy's assassination happened on 12/22. During his time as a Cameron patient over the winter of 1962-3 my dad had brought home a book on Numerology and I read it, along with one on Handwriting Analysis. Back then I used to say my favorite number was 8. Then it was 23 - for some odd reason.

Just the way the camera zeroes in on those they number tags, which I had never noticed until now (but then I don't sit around watching old Man From UNCLE episodes) - causes me to wonder if they weren't intentional, a message of some sort aimed at operatives, possibly inside the CIA, connected somehow to JFK.

I have mentioned already that Lee Harvey Oswald came to Montreal in the summer of 1963, a few months before he became the "lone assassin" and soon afterwards a dead man.

The last thing I'll mention is Barbara Feldon who plays Mandy -- who I could not have failed to notice resembled an older version of me, in height, hairstyle and general appearance. That must have made an impression on me at the time, contributing to the mystical force that emanated from the weekly spy show that we were all glued to, no matter how silly and amateurish the production.

In the fall of 1965, the second season of UNCLE, CBC Montreal moved the show to a 1 am slot on Sunday night, making it accessible to us high school girls, and I was furious. In fact I borrowed back my typewriter and banged out an outraged letter to the Programming Director, accusing him of not being in his "right mind" for making such a blunder and ruining the lives of fanatical viewers like myself. I already had a wicked pen, but was just letting off steam at a faceless bureaucrat, until a letter arrived from the man himself, who turned out to be the father of a girl I knew at school. In fact she was even best friend of a friend of mine. Not long afterwards, I bumped into her in the hallway at school-- I could see she knew all about my letter. Never had I imagined the world could be so small. I stammered an apology, that didn't impress her. I never saw her again and our mutual friend also distanced herself.

By then we had been transferred from the downtown cauldron of Baron Byng to another small high school near Cartierville airport, where I believe Mick landed on his first visit to Montreal in 1956. The same airport I took off from en route to London in June of 1963.

It's too ironic that the Stones were products of Tavistock programming, a grey eminence unknown at the time but pulling the strings of major rock bands and their managers. My dad's Air Force bosses were prime movers in this huge project, and all of us children were little more than innocent munchkins who had to go down the path laid out -- which led me to my "nervous breakdown"