The Girls of Canada

Canadian Champagne is sweeter than American, and it soothes the palate with a slightly softer touch. So, too, the girls of Canada. Though their eye shadow tends to be by Helena Rubinstein and their small talk by Dorothy Kilgallen, these exemplary examples of North American womanhood seem to ripen on more pliant vines than the American growth -- and to the connoisseur their bouquet is perceptibly sweeter and softer. In short: If the ambition of the American variety is to capture a man and use him, the inclination of the Canadian variety is still, as often as not, to capture a man and let him use her.

Americans have half-understood this happy distinction for at least three generations. In years past, when Hollywood sought a romantic symbol rather than a sex symbol, their intrepid scouts trekked north of the 49th parallel and brought back a Mary Pickford or a Norma Shearer or a Deanna Durbin. But this cinematic image of old-fashioned virtues -- once reinforced by Nelson Eddy's leather-lunged paean to Rose Marie -- has caused many American males to misinterpret modern realities. Where most U. S. enthusiasts, as well as many Canadians, go wrong today is in assuming that if the sex symbol stands for Instant Intercourse and not much else, the romantic symbol must stand for Prolonged Togetherness and nothing more.

It is true that the thinking of Canadian girls is still, by and large, more colored by 19th Century hearts-and-flowers sentimentalism than is the thinking of American girls. But this is not to say that an appetite for romantic love is the operative trait, or even a leading one, in every girl of the frozen north. Of late, Canada has had only slightly less than her share of the North (text continued on page 132) American female urge for sexual equality, a down-to-earth attitude that has led at one extreme to the proliferation of nonvirgin clubs in certain Canadian high schools.

This burgeoning duality of approach to affairs of the heart was reflected in the content and concept of the most talked-about book to appear in Canada last season. Love Where the Nights Are Long was published (by McClelland and Steward, Ltd.) in two editions, a limited one at $65 that sold out overnight and a paperback version that is still moving briskly. The book is billed as an anthology of Canadian love poetry, but in more explicit language it is also a metrical manual of sex. The anthologist, a poet named Irving Layton who writes and talks mainly about his own libido, says in the foreword that whatever Canada has not got going for her, love she has.

"Canadians are a backward folk," he says. "They have not yet heard that love is dead.... Think of those sprawling megalopolises whose monstrous, unstoppable advance converts fields and healthy forests into acres and acres of neurotics. Love cannot grow in this wreckage of human hopes, this junk yard; only psychoanalysis can, to explain why love doesn't." Layton's point, right or wrong, is that Canadians haven't got much on their minds worth brooding over but love -- and rather physical love at that. This is certainly all that is on the minds of the girls to whom the poets in his anthology are talking.

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Though Canada is the second largest country in the world (in square miles only Russia is bigger), her population is approximately equal to that of New York State. This means that for every square mile of Canadian real estate there are less than three women -- of any age. Such sparse distribution does not occur in actuality, of course, for practically all Canadians live within 200 miles of the U. S. border, and roughly two thirds of these may be found in the wedge made by Quebec and Ontario into the U. S.

Of the nearly 10,000,000 Canadian women clustered so close to American borders, about a million are between 18, the age of consent under Canada's criminal code, and 25, an age at which eight of every ten are married. Men marry later; only six out of ten have taken wives by the time they are 25. This tardiness is caused in part -- particularly in the minds of practical men -- by the extreme difficulty of obtaining a divorce in Canada. Until this year divorce in two of the ten provinces (the rough equivalent of American states) required a special act of the federal parliament.

For Canadians, the only alternative to this sort of governmental red tape -- aside from maintaining a discomforting union -- is divorce in Mexico or in one of the American states where the courts accept a reasonable number of the various grounds that can make divorce necessary. In view of such complications, it is not surprising that quite a few young Canadians decide to live together without committing themselves to marriage.

The girls, of course, are often more eager to seek the tie that binds than are their male friends, and like their American sisters, they have found the groves of academe to be a happy hunting ground. Each year finds an increasing number of feminine students going on from the high schools to the universities, and this year almost half the freshman classes in arts and sciences at the large English-speaking universities like McGill, in Montreal, the University of Toronto, or the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, are made up of coeds. Some are there to obtain bachelor of arts or science degrees; more are there to acquire bachelors. While less than 6000 Canadian coeds will earn degrees this year, over 6000 will legally get their man.

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If a man wished to investigate at first hand the quantity and quality of Canada's choicest girls, he might well undertake a coast-to-coast journey, starting on the shores of the Pacific and thence following the thin ribbon of densest population eastward, pausing at such likely places as shall be indicated in this essay. The trip would not be completely comprehensive, of course; no trip can be, nor can any written account thereof. But it would be eminently enjoyable.

A fine commencement address is Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver is less a large, modern city than an all-season playground where youth, beauty and high spirits have become a kind of secular religion. (In 1962 Playboy readers were memorably apprised of Vancouver's superb scenery by the appearance of two local girls on our gatefold: March Playmate Pamela Anne Gordon and July Playmate Unne Terjesen.) There is perhaps no city in the world where sporting blood can get a more vigorous workout in so short a time. When a stranger arrives in town, the natives often get their kicks by hustling him to the mountainous north shore of Burrard Inlet for a day whose schedule may include: nine holes at the Capilano Golf Club; a ride up the Grouse Mountain chair lift and a run on the Kandahar downhill course; a turn or two across Horseshoe Bay with the trolling tackle set for salmon; a swim in the low surf and a driving run under sail back across the bay in time to change for dinner. The native who sets the pace is likely to be an exuberantly healthy girl who comes closer than any female in Canada to endorsing casual assignations.

For a stranger who arrives knowing no one, the Bayshore Inn is a strategic place to headquarter. The tang of the sea is still on the king crab and Gulf of Georgia oysters, and the dinner-dance music is tuned to young and expert ears. During the summer a man and his date may stroll off among the evergreens of Stanley Park to an open-air bowl called Theater Under the Stars, an admirable stage for highly professional musical comedy. The sole drawback to this sylvan site is that it is set so consummately for the pleasant play of the sexes that a guy who doesn't have a girl in tow may not be inclined to dig the scenes, onstage or off. The surest antidote to such melancholy malaise is a brisk walk uptown to either Philliponi's Penthouse, the Arctic Club or the Quadra Club. Not so long ago all three were a peculiar local compromise between bootleg joints and legitimate private clubs (you bought your membership card at the door for the price of a double). Now, with the advent of cocktail bars in Vancouver, the old clubs have become respectable. But the aura of their misspent youth remains, and in the shank of the evening they are the likeliest places to find the liveliest girls still out on the town.

East from Vancouver, tucked within the scarcely believable grandeur of the Canadian Rockies, lie Banff and Lake Louise. These plush resorts are justly celebrated around the world for the tailoring of their golf courses, the sharp vertical drop of their ski runs and the chicness of their feminine guests. The real genius of their proprietors, however, has never been properly acknowledged. For years these entrepreneurs have been in the habit of recruiting their female staffs from among vacationing college students. Whether they are adroit in this task or just lucky is hard to say, but they always seem to recruit the best, so that even when the female guest lists offer slim pickings, the resorts are populated by several hundred of the country's prettiest young women. The proprietors, as it happens, are Canada's railroads, and this is exactly the way to run a railroad.

Beyond the Rockies, the great central plain stretches across the continent to the old rock of the Laurentian Shield. Fortunately, the women of the prairies are vastly more rewarding to look at than the landscape. Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg all claim to raise the loveliest girls in Canada, and at the right time and place one would be tempted to agree with each of them. Calgary's Petroleum Club, on a good night, sets crystal and silver for a dozen oil millionaires' daughters who all have the casual gloss that only money can buy. In the long northern summer twilight, Edmonton's Jasper Avenue becomes the promenade for a distinctive female breed that owes its beauty to the high cheekbones and high breasts of the full-bodied Slavs who settled the region two generations ago. (continued overleaf) Winnipeg's Portage Beach is said by experts to display more superlatively carved calves to a yard of sand on an average day than Laguna Beach on a sunny Fourth of July. There seems little doubt that the claim is worth investigating.

Wherever the loveliest girls are raised, or the brightest, or the most talented, or just the most hopeful, it is a certainty that to each and all of them the urge will someday come to try their luck in Toronto, Ontario. This is the familiar New York effect, on a smaller but no less intense scale. Toronto is where the television studios and the publishing houses are, as well as the advertising agencies and the model agencies and the artists' colonies and the big money. And so, in the natural course of events, Toronto is where the girls are, too. Most of them, in fact, aren't even widely scattered within the city. Through some mysterious feminine nesting instinct, they all seem to congregate within a few square blocks of the midtown intersection of Bloor Street and Avenue Road.

This intersection is the site of the Park Plaza Hotel, not the biggest hostel in town, but easily the most sophisticated. An affluent male who has already exchanged pleasantries with, say, a model from one of the agencies a block up Avenue Road, and has then been subtly informed that she hasn't got a thing to wear for cocktails in the Plaza Room, can proceed in one of two ways. He might make a speculative investment and cover her nakedness in a simple little frock flown in from Givenchy's current Paris opening, set it off with a square-cut diamond, and wrap the ensemble in a sable for warmth, all by taking her for a 10-minute stroll along Bloor Street. Or he can say to hell with it, kiss her goodbye, and walk north.

Within two blocks he stands a better-than-even chance of meeting: a warm-blooded University of Toronto coed sipping espresso in time to a guitar in one of half-a-dozen folknik clubs; a dusky-eyed avant-garde junior copywriter waiting for adventure at one of three sidewalk cafés that smack strongly, in color and commotion, of the Mediterranean; an abstract sculptress wearing pale lipstick, drinking ice water and relating to Life in one of many beatnik coffee cellars; a gorgeous interior decorator drinking brandy alexanders in a bar where the waitresses are imitation Bunnies and the entertainers apprentice opera singers; or, indeed, just about any kind of woman he wishes to find.

The only type of woman he will not meet in this female Casbah is the kind a wishful Canadian poet named Tom MacGinnis used to call daughters of joy; since early in its history the city has been known as Toronto the Good. It earned this title by fighting a losing battle against Sunday movies, and waging a winning campaign to restrict most of its many prostitutes to the environs of a single street, the thoroughfare called Jarvis. By making the hookers easy to find, the city fathers have subjected them to an ironic hardship. They share Jarvis Street with the television and radio studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is hardly the hookers' fault if they suffer by comparison with the actresses, dancers and fresh-faced hopefuls who constantly saunter through studios.

What Toronto is to the girls of English-speaking Canada, Montreal is doubly so to les québecoises. Montreal shares with a handful of North American cities the feel and flavor of a cosmopolis that can teach the world something about living at night. The city's style still owes a fading patrician edge to the English-speaking enclave, which is small, but rich by inheritance from the railway-building and fur-trading robber barons of the 19th Century. Watching the great-granddaughters of the great old thieves contrive to look like British aristocracy over gibsons at the copper-topped tables of the elegant old Ritz Hotel's Marine Bar is one of the pleasures that accrue from Montreal bistro-hopping.

But the leggy, smooth-haired girls at the Ritz are souvenirs of a style Montreal has almost discarded. In the 1960s the city's flavor is Latin, exuberant and contagious. You can taste the flavor of Montreal long before the first course reaches your table in the small but superb Continental restaurants on the terraced side streets not far from the Ritz. The girls here are all animated eyes and hands; their French is softer than the staccato tongues of Paris, but their love of life is the same in both worlds.

There is civilized education, for example, in the conversation of a québecoise over the choice of drinks during an evening on the town with her ami. At the bar she might deliberate between flavored wines -- Cinzano, St.-Raphaël a vermouth cassis -- but wijl spurn any offer of cocktails. Later, at dinner, she may participate volubly in the selection of the wines -- a Gewuerz-Traminer with the snails, say, and a Nuits-St.-Georges with the barely browned slivers of boeuf bourguignon -- but she will probably refuse cognac with the coffee and protest if her partner has more than one. For her, it is a matter of good breeding to titillate rather than anesthetize one's palate.

If a visitor lacks such charming company, he might spend an earthier evening at the Café St. Jacques, an oasis midway along a barker-infested east-end strip of gin mills, strip joints and bawdy cabarets. This is the belt of Montreal that is known from Kazabazua, Quebec, to Mexico City as the Pigalle of the New World. The St. Jacques is distinguished by its efforts to resist the temptation to clip customers on the same heroic scale its neighbors long ago adopted, and by its oddball design, which consists of five night spots placed one atop the other. The street floor is a serious drinker's layout with a few bar girls sprinkled about to brighten the decor. Above it is a Continental room where, on a lucky night, a Canadian thrush named Pauline Julien may be singing between appearances in Paris. Elsewhere under the same roof there is a supper-dance club, a dim bar for handholding, and a cabaret that runs to gutsy blue revues. In one or another of these rooms a man passing through Montreal can see, and with a little luck meet, a femme of almost any specification that appeals to him.

If Montreal is, to coin a cliché, the Paris of North America, it may be said with equal hyperbolic accuracy that this continent's answer to Switzerland lies half-an-hour due north of the city. Here, in a 15- by 40-mile resort Shangri-La known as the Laurentians, there are at least 80 tows and lifts and a score of lavish Alpine lodges where the skiers can relax regally between dusk and the next day's sport. If you belong to the growing school of thought that contends a girl rarely looks more enticing than she does on a ski slope in stretch pants with frost biting color into her cheeks, you should be advised that no place in the world has more such girls within a comparable area than the Laurentians. If, however, you are specifically seeking out Canadian girls who are great in the stretch, you have to know where to look. Americans find the Alpine flavor of the region so convivial that they greatly outnumber Canadians at many of the big lodges, such as the Laurentide Inn in Ste. Agathe, Chalet Cochand in Ste. Marguerite, Gray Rocks Inn near St. Jovite, and massive Mont Tremblant Lodge. In fact, of the big resort hotels only the Chantecler at Ste. Agathe des Monts (where most people speak English) and La Sapiniere at Val David (where almost everyone speaks French and the wine cellars are among the best-stocked, as well as the most colorful, in Canada) have more Canadian guests than American. Most of the instructors at these lodges are girls, and are worth a look as well as a listen.

Three hundred miles down the St. Lawrence from the Laurentians and Montreal, through the valley where the French have farmed for 300 years without finding it necessary to assimilate much more English than the handy word gazoline, is the steep fortress-city of Quebec. The capital of French Canada is built away from the riverbank up a rock escarpment; the large number of streets that are in effect flights of steps may help account for the figures of the local girls, which even Montrealers acknowledge (concluded on page 174) Girls of Canada (continued from page 134) to be extraordinary. Quebec, of course, has about it a pervasive Gallic aura. For example, at the Port St. Jacques, probably the most interesting of the city's dinner clubs, the leading entertainer is apt to be a chansonnier (a balladeer who sings topical verses composed by himself, dealing with French events in French): and an evening can go by without a word of English passing the lips of anyone in the house, including the customers. This pleasant flavor à la française extends to Quebec's comelier citizens, and has a tendency to lead them more readily than most girls into situations where familiarity hardly ever breeds contempt.

From Quebec, the St. Lawrence flows a thousand miles to the Atlantic through a land almost empty, save for some small but bustling iron-mining towns to the north, and the largely agricultural-and-fishing provinces of the Maritimes--Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island--to the south and east. Both the landscape and the people here are very much like their counterparts in northern New England: proud, frugal folk nursing proud, frugal traditions amid sternly beautiful countryside. The girls here have the virtues of country girls everywhere, a kind of clean simplicity and appealing freshness that happily tends to survive in the cities when the girls strike out for a larger share of the 20th Century than the Maritimes have to offer. Maritimers like to say, in a proud but wry tone of voice, that their leading export is the brains and beauty the rest of Canada needs not only to keep going, but going in style.

If there is some truth in the saying -- a disproportionately large number of distinguished men and stunning women seem to have come from the area -- it is also true that Canada has a second and at least equally rich source of beauty and brains. Like the U.S. before it, Canada was populated first by colonists, then by immigrants. The difference is that immigration has continued in Canada long after it was largely closed off in the U.S. -- more than a million Europeans have landed in Canada since the end of World War II. In addition, the Canadian pattern of assimilation has always varied importantly from the American pattern: National groups have tended deliberately to preserve their customs, traditional attitudes and even their ancestral languages, rather than choose to lose them as quickly as possible. One result is that today in Canada there are girls who bear some or all of the traits of almost every female genre the earth can offer: You'll find Sikhs in saris in Vancouver; Hutterites in Alberta; Chinese as well as Canadian Indians in Saskatchewan; Icelanders in Winnipeg; Japanese, Hungarians and Jamaicans in Toronto; Germans and Italians as well as Eskimos in Quebec. Canada is the traditional New World melting pot, but one in which many of the girls retain their own native flavor even as they become Canadians. So it can be said that an American who desires to cultivate an enlightened taste in women, and who has reached the point where he can refine his judgment of the domestic variety only by comparison with foreign strains, can go around the world -- or he can go to Canada.

If he does decide to visit this vast, ruggedly scenic land, in the course of rewarding events he will surely learn one central lesson: The precise location of the choicest females is largely unpredictable. From the twisting fiords of Vancouver to the salt-scented rock inlets of St. John's, a quest for quail invariably involves the unexpected. The prize, of course, is worth the hunt. No further motive is needed for pursuing a good-neighbor policy with those most fetching of females, the Canadian girls next door.