Reel Beach: East Toronto’s many links to The Sound of Music

By BERNIE FLETCHER

What’s your favourite film musical? This year’s Academy Awards showed a montage of photos from popular musicals, including The Sound of Music (1965).

Only one musical has won Best Picture since the 1960s. Oddly enough, Chicago (2002) was filmed in Toronto!

The Sound of Music may be the most beloved of our “favourite things”. The Rodgers and Hammerstein classic became a huge success, running at Toronto’s Eglinton Theatre for 142 weeks.

Sadly, a number of the stars have passed away in recent years, including Christopher Plummer (Captain von Trapp), Charmian Carr (Liesl) and Heather Menzies-Urich (Louisa).

Ten years ago Heather wrote me about her fond childhood memories of living on Fernwood Park Avenue down by the lake.

Plummer’s father, John, spent three decades living near St. Aidan’s Anglican on Queen Street East and writing a history of the church.

The child actors from the cast became like family. The music brought them all together, but what fate led them to the film?

I was surprised to learn the Toronto roots of their own families.

Carr is famed for singing Sixteen Going on Seventeen in her first film role: “You wait, little girl, on an empty stage for fate to turn the light on.”

She was born Charmian Farnon in 1942 shortly after her family moved to Chicago from Toronto. Robert Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, suggested she change her name.

The Farnons were a Toronto musical family with three sons becoming renowned orchestra leaders and arrangers.

After the father died in 1924, the Farnons moved to Cassels Avenue near Woodbine Avenue and Gerrard Street East.

Money was tight, but widowed Elsie Farnon (nee Menzies) bought instruments for her kids. Beach Hill was alive with the sound of music!

Brian Farnon (1911-2010) married vaudeville performer Rita Oehman in 1941. Daughter Shannon Farnon was born in Toronto before the showbiz family moved south, first to Chicago then to L. A. in 1955.

Youngest sister Darleen sang background vocals on The Sound of Music, even hitting the high notes on Kurt’s So Long, Farewell.

The Second World War disrupted everyone’s lives. Brian and Robert Farnon (1917-2005) served with the Canadian Forces Band entertaining troops overseas.

All three brothers, including Dennis (1923-2019) went on to stellar careers as composers and music directors with great singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole and Lena Horne.

While Charmian Carr loved the filming experience in Austria and Hollywood, show business also tore her family apart. Her mother was an alcoholic and her parents divorced in 1957.

How do you solve a problem like marriage?

How did Julia Elizabeth Wells (Maria) get her surname Andrews? She was also deeply upset by divorce.

Her stepfather was Ted Andrews (1907-1966), a singer and guitar player from East York (Chester and Fulton avenues.) who moved to Britain and billed himself as the “Canadian Troubadour”.

He was “as colourful and noisy as show business itself,” said Julie.

The Sound of Music is all about love and family in the face of adversity, but Julie’s childhood was turbulent with an alcoholic mother and stepfather.

Her mom was a vaudeville performer who left Julie’s teacher father for Ted Andrews and the three became an act when Julie was very young. Her parents finally divorced in 1943; her mom married Andrews and Julie took on Andrews as her surname.

“Life, however, is not a fairy story.”
— Julie Andrews.

Julie was born in 1935 and survived harrowing nights of the London Blitz. It wasn’t until Julie was 14 that her mother told her that her dad was not her biological father. This is reminiscent of Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell. Family history can be messy.

Two other von Trapp “sisters” also have roots in Canada.

Angela (Brigitta) Cartwright’s father worked for Eaton’s in Toronto as an artist in the early 1950s, the same job Heather’s father had when the Menzies family lived in the Beach. Heather is also a distant cousin of Charmian, according to IMDb.

Debbie (Marta) Turner’s parents were both originally from Manitoba, so you could say The Sound of Music has a maple-flavoured tune.

The music lives on in our hearts.

In her memoir Forever Liesl, Charmian Carr wrote that the wonderful musical helped her through some stormy times in her own life.

“If the film has touched them in some way, it is because it represents the world as they want it to be. If it makes them feel love or happiness or hope, it is because they have these feelings inside them,” she wrote.