An early Sunday evening in Toronto. The rain that fell throughout the day is starting to let up, and Eric Malling has the house to himself. His son, Leif, is away at university, his wife, Pat Werner, is out of town and his daughter, Paige, is at her job at a local drugstore. It's late September 1998 and Malling has grudgingly faded from public view. Two years earlier, CTV fired him as host of W5 — the same show he once helped to save. Malling still hasn't recovered from the shock. He aches to be back in the limelight, to once again have a regular platform for his acerbic perspectives on current events. He does, however, have a few documentary projects in the works, which go some way toward soothing the pain and giving him an answer for the often-asked question "What are you doing now?" Indeed, he would have spent part of this day preparing for a Monday meeting with Dick Nielsen, an independent producer, if the session hadn't been rescheduled for Tuesday. Now, with some unexpected free time, he pads around the house and decides to head to the basement, to its spare bedroom and makeshift office, the place where Malling, an alcoholic, does most of his drinking. As he begins his descent, steps he's taken countless times before, he trips. If there'd been a railing on the open side of the staircase, he might have been able to grab it and break his fall. Instead, he crashes down and is knocked unconscious.
Later that evening, an acquaintance passing by notices that the front door to Malling's house is open. Concerned, the acquaintance walks up to the house, calls out, goes inside and discovers Malling at the bottom of the basement stairs. Within minutes, an ambulance takes him to Sunnybrook Hospital, where a day later, on September 28, Eric John Malling, age 52, dies of a brain hemorrhage.
In the weeks that follow, there's much public praise for Canada's most famous journalist-contrarian. "I was at his funeral and the who's who of journalists showed up. Why? Because they respected that kind of audacity," says reporter Susan Ormiston, who worked with Malling at W5 and saw him at his worst and best. Among his career accomplishments: one Gemini and six ACTRA awards, three Gordon Sinclair awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, and the infamous tainted-tuna story for the fifth estate in 1985, which led to the resignation of Federal Fisheries Minister John Fraser. But the qualities that fuelled Malling's rise also became his undoing. Opinionated, controlling and stubborn, often called an asshole, he refused to believe he was ever wrong about a story — or that he had a problem with alcohol.
When Eric Malling first headed east from his home province of Saskatchewan and the Regina Leader-Post for The Toronto Star, his main goal was to grab front-page bylines. Over five years, 1969 to 1974, there were many, but the one that indirectly led to TV Stardom was on the invocation of the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis in 1970. The piece caught the attention of a man who'd already become a journalistic legend, Ron Haggart. Haggart would go on to help fashion the fifth estate, but at the time was working on a book called Rumours of War. "I thought Malling had a hold on the situation and the events that went beyond the drama and the rhetoric of the time," says Haggart, now the co-executive producer of Counterspin on CBC Newsworld.
In 1974, after three years at the Star's Ottawa bureau, Malling moved to CTV's Canada AM, where he did live interviews with Parliament Hill politicians and sharpened his aggressive style. With a ferret-like face, thinning hair and big owl glasses, Malling didn't have standard-issue TV looks, but Haggart didn't mind and saw enough promise to bring him aboard the fifth estate for its second season in 1976. The transition was sometimes difficult. "Too many words," says Bill Cran, then a producer at the fifth estate, of Malling's first efforts. He had to learn how to talk more conversationally to the camera instead of barking at it, and to get rid of his habit of leaning into his interviewees, then wagging his finger and demanding answers.
Co-host Adrienne Clarkson privately called him Eric Mauling. He was a "very aggressive interviewer," says Phil Mathias, then a fifth estate associate producer and now a senior correspondent for the National Post. "She had the impression that it was overdone."
But otherwise, his flair for interviewing "was the thing that distinguished him and moved him ahead," says Mike Lavoie, who became friends with Malling at the Star and worked with him as a producer at the fifth estate and W5. "He knew what to ask and when to depart from his prepared questions and when to listen, and he made his interviews into conversations."
He also knew when to ambush. In 1978, Malling and Cran teamed up for a one-hour documentary on the illegal export of artillery shells from Canada to South Africa during apartheid. At one point, Malling confronted an unsuspecting representative of Gerald Bull, an arms smuggler, with shipping documents that all but proved Bull's guilt. The story displayed Malling's talent for confrontation and his knack for developing a clear narrative. "He was a very direct person," says Haggart, "and he was skillful at making sure that stories like South African arms — that were really complicated — made sense."
Malling hated the term investigative journalism. It was redundant, he'd say, because all reporting is a form of investigation. He preferred to call his work enterprise reporting, which meant, says Anthony Westell, an old friend and former head of The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau, "stepping outside the normal news agenda and finding stories which other people hadn't done, being enterprising about what constitutes news." According to Pat Werner, who met her future husband at the University of Saskatchewan while he was completing his B.A. in English literature, Malling would often repeat a phrase he picked up from Haggart: "That which 'everybody knows' is usually false."
In 1983, the fifth estate did a story on Canadair, a company much praised by politicians and businesspeople. But when Malling revealed that the Crown corporation had, in effect, given away one of its Challenger jets and $4 million in cash in a failed attempt to entice business, many Canadair executives resigned. The segment caused a commotion in government, but to Malling's surprise it barely registered with the public. Two years later, one of his stories did raise a public outcry. In "Product of Canada," Malling revealed that Fisheries Minister John Fraser had overruled his own health inspectors and allowed the sale of tainted tuna on the recommendation of an outside company. Afterward, Malling marvelled at how the government can blow millions and no one seems overly concerned, but if it "fucks with their lunch," then everyone cares.
Malling was inherently suspicious of government, a notion that grew out of the political environment of the Prairies, where he felt most rooted. "The populism of the old Social Credit movement and of the CCF originally was really against the vested interests, which they saw was Central Canada," Westell explains. "They felt that they were being oppressed by unseen interests, and that feeling is still there — Western alienation — and that was a part of Eric."
In 1989, Malling criticized the government's Unemployment Insurance program, as he often did. "He would detach himself from the human misery aspect of it and look at it more clinically," says Lavoie. After working only 10 weeks, Newfoundland fishermen could collect benefits for the rest of the year, reported Malling, who saw things not as good or bad, but as smart or stupid. Who, then, could blame the fishermen for taking advantage of a program that failed to offer anything other than a short-term solution?
Malling, however, couldn't detach himself from his own developing miseries, the origins of which were a mystery to those who worked with him. Ever since his days at the Star, he drank regularly with his colleagues. At home, Malling had a shelf full of aquavit. It was a way of recognizing his Danish roots, remembers Gordon Stewart, a former fifth estate producer. Malling liked to go on a binge every once in a while in remote cities, says Cran of the fifth estate years. "He'd like to sort of disappear for a night and get up to God knows what. 'Check out the sleaze,' as he'd say. Our euphemism was jetlag. I'd always say, 'How's the jetlag, Eric?'"
Booze wasn't Malling's only problem. In the early 1980s, he began an affair that lasted about 10 years. "Eric was terribly in love with her," says a friend and colleague, "but he never really had the emotional courage, if that's the right word, to leave his wife, and I think that he regretted that really, really a lot."
Robert Fripp, former fifth estate coordinating producer, detected a vulnerability in Malling around the studio. "I really did get the impression that the hard shell was concealing a soft centre. I thought he was a bit sensitive in a way, a bit insecure in the way a lot of actors are."
When it came to journalism, though, he was relentless. Everything had to be explored brazenly and without delay, an impulse that carried over into day-to-day activities. "He'd park his car two wheels on the sidewalk facing the wrong way," says Lavoie. "He'd drive the wrong way down a one-way street — not caring — just to get there." Even if he was in his Porsche, he drove hard and fast. "You'd come up to a border point. There'd be a lineup of cars. He'd keep driving till somebody with a gun stopped us. He just bulled ahead until he heard glass break."
Still, he could slow himself down when the situation demanded it. In 1985, for instance, Malling showed a delicate touch in an ACTRA award-winning fifth estate piece called "A Journey Back," in which Holocaust survivor Jack Garfein returned to Auschwitz. At the end of the complex one-hour story, Malling tenderly put his arm around Garfein, who had just shrieked in agony upon learning that the soil he had picked up contained human bone fragments. "It was Malling finally turning into a human being," says Robert Fripp.
In 1990, CTV had a problem. Since 1985, ratings for its flagship current affairs show, W5, had declined to 850,000 viewers from 1.2 million. What's more, the network had a new president, John Cassady, who'd come over from Campbell Soup with a mandate to reinvigorate the program schedule. "I soon discerned that the show was going to be axed," says Peter Rehak, its executive producer at the time. "So something had to be done quickly if it was going to be saved."
Meanwhile, over at the CBC, Malling had become disenchanted with his role. "He wanted the fifth estate with Eric Malling, which didn't please any of the other hosts, as you can well imagine," says a former colleague and one of eight long-term staffers, including Malling, who left the show a year after Kelly Crichton took over as executive producer in 1989. "They were at polar opposites," says another. "She was often off in la la land, as far as what he wanted to do, and that would add to his reasons for taking the W5 job."
Rehak thought a change would benefit Malling and give W5 the star power that would appeal to Cassady. Malling, he hoped, would bring over the large following he had established during his 14 years at the fifth estate. A deal was worked out: the show would be renamed W5 with Eric Malling. "It certainly gave him what he wanted," says Haggart, "which was more control. It was, in essence, his program."
At the CBC, Malling had proposed a new show called Edges, which was rejected. He took the concept with him and it became the basis of W5 with Eric Malling. His intention was to challenge public perception of accepted beliefs: "Edges will speak the unspeakable even if it seems like heresy in today's polite television climate," stated Malling's proposal. "Through stories, it will examine sacred values like bilingualism, regional development, multiculturalism and universality. It rejects the elite notion that ordinary viewers have to be protected from critical consideration of these righteous principles lest they turn overnight into flaming radicals or frothing rednecks." The bold approach worked. The show's ratings increased to 1.26 million viewers within three years of going to air in 1990.
The man who found fame as a contrarian now had the platform and power to be even more contrary. In the first season, for example, South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu visited a native reservation in northern Ontario. During his tour, he made several remarks about natives and the poor conditions in which they lived — comments the journalists surrounding him agreed with. Malling was the exception. He directed his cameraman to get shots of the new telephone polls and TV satellite dishes to suggest that, perhaps, they weren't so poverty-stricken after all.
There were many who believed that Malling's attitude was too cavalier, that in his quest for edge he could cause real harm to people. His hour-long "New Zealand" documentary for W5 in February 1993 was one such example. Journalist and author Linda McQuaig was infuriated by the program. "It was just full of misinformation," she says. Malling argued that Canada should follow New Zealand in dramatically restructuring its government to reduce debt. In New Zealand's case that meant, among other measures, an end to universal medicare and the sale of state-owned forests. McQuaig says he distorted the situation in New Zealand by presenting what was really a short-term currency crisis as something else: national bankruptcy and the loss of credit. The real issue — an overvalued currency — she says, was never brought up. "I'm talking about confusing the issues," she says, "making people believe things that aren't true because that's the point that he wanted to make. You don't need to come out with a technical lie to do that."
"New Zealand," which drew an audience of 1.6 million, had a huge influence on Canadians. Indeed, politicians used it as justification for slashing social services in the name of debt-reduction. Ralph Klein's Conservative government in Alberta, for example, included transcripts of the program when it sent back rejected grant applications.
By the 1994-95 season, Malling's supporting team of on-air reporters — Susan Ormiston, Elliott Shiff and Christine Nielsen — wanted to broaden W5's mandate. "The problem was that in the end, we had too much of one angle," says Ormiston, "and what the show needed in years three, four and five was a variety of points of view, because we had run out of the most interesting targets of Eric's vision." Malling didn't agree, says Rehak, and thought the threesome was in some "kind of a conspiracy against him."
"He had this idea that all his problems could be solved if he could just get the right group of people together to basically do what he wanted them to do," says Lavoie. "He tried to control every environment he was in." But control was something he had already started to lose.
In the summer of 1992, for instance, Malling broke his arm when he fell into the water between the dock and his boat after returning from a day of sailing. "He drank beer on the boat often," says a close friend. But the cast and sling didn't stop him from going on air for the first show of the 1992-93 season. "He didn't want to let it go," says Rehak. "It was W5 with Eric Malling, and if your main guy wants to host, you've got to let him host."
Then in May 1993, Malling was arrested for impaired driving when police found his car in a ditch. Later, in court, he testified to having drunk "two or three shots of Scotch" in Toronto before heading north to Penetanguishene. Though acquitted of the impaired driving charge, he was convicted of being in the care and control of a vehicle while impaired. Eventually, on appeal, that too was dismissed.
Drinking began to affect Malling's on-air presentation as well. "I would say that he was hard to watch towards the end," says Rehak. "Early on, he would say, 'Okay, look what I found and I'm mad about it,' and then toward the end it was just, 'I'm Eric Malling and I'm mad.'"
The 1995-96 season would be his last as host of W5, when ratings sank to 749,000 viewers, down from 859,000 the previous year. Whether people had tired of Malling's views or constant schedule changes had undermined the show's popularity, Malling took the firing personally.
In June 1996, Malling's world turned even bleaker when Frank magazine published files from his notebook computer, which he claimed had been stolen from his home. Friends, however, suspected that he'd forgotten it in Ottawa following a bash for CTV anchor Lloyd Robertson. "It had to be someone who knew who he was at least, and that would have been another press person," a colleague says. The notebook included both professional and private correspondence. One letter, to his wife, detailed the breakdown of their marriage. When Malling learned of the publication, he was at his summer place in Salt Spring Island, B.C. He couldn't face reading the issue himself so he called Rehak's cell phone. "Could you read it to me?" asked a desperate-sounding Malling. Rehak agreed and winced as he read such passages as "All that keeps this 'living arrangement' together is real estate and money. There are no dreams" and "I refuse to take everything that me and my family has worked to put together and turn it over to you and whatever interests you today." After Rehak finished, Malling's reply was, "Well, it could have been worse." "That was really a wound," says Ron Manes, an old friend. "I would say that that was as stunning a blow as Eric ever had in his life."
Since he still had two years remaining on his contract with CTV, Malling agreed to continue hosting Mavericks, his own series of documentary specials that focused on people with new solutions to old problems. The first two, a piece on Iceland and a New Zealand update, had been broadcast in his last year as host of W5. A third, "Boomtowns," about the way Moncton, Saskatoon and Hamilton, Ont., had reinvented themselves, was just about done. "It was all finished, but we needed a stand-up," says Rehak. "We went to a park, and 17 takes later he was shaking like a leaf and he couldn't do it. Eventually we got him to the studio. He was drunk that day, too, which you see in Mavericks. He was not sober when he did the studio part."
After "Boomtowns," which aired in December 1996, no one would work with Malling until he tackled his alcoholism. "He had a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that his drinking was getting out of control," says Lavoie. "Because he was no ordinary person, he couldn't bring himself to be labelled as a garden-variety alcoholic." In January 1997, concerned friends decided to intervene: Get help, they told Malling, or never talk to us again. The day they were to assemble, he surprised them and checked himself into Homewood, a rehabilitation centre in Guelph, Ont. But he only stayed a week, then discharged himself. "He didn't go as a patient — he went as a reporter," Lavoie says. "He was revealing it and criticizing it instead of buying in."
A year later, Malling went to the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, where doctors referred him to a nearby hospital. "He wound up in a ward full of people who were going to trial, busted for this or that, and he asked me to come over to see him," says Anthony Westell. "I thought it was going to be terrible and that he hit skid row, but actually he was quite up, and we had lunch in a greasy spoon."
In the summer of 1998, Malling decided not to go to Salt Spring Island for his usual escape. Instead, he stayed in Toronto, and he got together with Dick Nielsen — the independent producer with whom he had planned to meet on the day he died — to discuss proposals for documentaries, 17 pages worth, which he had written in May. "We had presented them to some networks that were considering them," says Nielsen, who had become a confidant.
They had something in common: both were first-generation Canadians of Danish extraction. "We ended up talking about it a lot," says Nielsen, who observed that Malling's confidence had been shaken by his dismissal from W5, which he saw as a failure. "He didn't know whether to persist with what he was. He didn't know the extent to which his rejection was him or his style."
The only child of a Danish butcher and a mother of Swedish descent, Malling, born September 4, 1946, grew up with the Scandinavian inclination to speak without reservation or embarrassment. "It's almost a gaucheness," says Nielsen, of Scandinavian custom. Accordingly, Malling took this blunt approach to all his dealings and never knew why other people thought it so unusual. Not a person with a lot of self-knowledge, Malling ploughed ahead, although beyond his home life he had little connection to his cultural inheritance. In fact, Malling wasn't his family's real surname. His father, John Malling Sorensen, dropped his last name on arrival in Canada. He must have thought that, like back home, the country would be flooded with Sorensens, says Pat Werner, and he wanted to distinguish himself.
Nielsen has a theory: Since Malling was a part of an invisible minority, he never had the opportunity to feel natural in front of people who understood him and could provide the "ultimate reassurance" of his character. "If I had worked with Eric as a host, if we had gotten far enough, I would have tried to have him face that issue, that the way he was behaving was a product of his background and therefore overcomeable."
One obstacle that could never be overcome, however, was his appearance. "He had a glass ceiling because of his looks," says Manes, who points out that American TV, which regarded his work highly, never pursued Malling, as it did some "pretty" broadcasters from Canada. "It disturbed him because he was a person who believed in substance so ferociously that that kind of superficiality offended him greatly."
Since he couldn't break into the U.S. market, Malling stayed on in Canada, where he had already reached the pinnacle of TV current affairs. He should have moved on from W5 sooner, says Manes, but when he didn't, he started questioning himself. A career of battling the tide had also taken its toll. "He liked to push the envelope in every bloody way," says Kit Melamed, a trusted co-worker at the fifth estate and W5. "Whether it was bad for his career, his health or his emotional state didn't matter."
Westell says that as Malling got older, he increasingly adopted an attitude of the good old boy from Saskatchewan, the guy who ate red meat and worked the land and fished: "It was almost in some ways an affectation, a persona he put on." It was also in keeping with his nature to ask the often tough and embarrassing questions. And on the nights he was at home and his shows aired, he'd sit with his family and look at the image he projected on screen, reaffirming who he was for himself. He had pushed like mad to stay in the spotlight. Pushed to say he was right. Pushed despite and because of who he was.
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