Chamness New Song( JTha)
Title: Tuk Orkas
tukorkas - www.itoky.com
Pop singer and former child star Nathalie Simard. (Des Ruisseaux Communications)
Earlier this month, Nathalie Simard announced she was cutting short the cross-Quebec tour for her comeback album, Il y avait un jardin. After a final Montreal concert on April 18, the 38-year-old singer said she would withdraw from the spotlight for good. Her reason: the seven years of sexual abuse she endured as an adolescent at the hands of manager Guy Cloutier has turned her off show business. In November 2004, Cloutier was sentenced to 42 months in prison for sexually assaulting Simard and another unidentified minor; he is now out on parole.
“I came back to prove that I was still able to sing. But this process opened my eyes. I believed I was strong, but I’m still fragile,” Simard told the popular Quebec entertainment magazine La Semaine. What she was seeking, Simard confided, was “more real and human” than what a career in the entertainment industry can offer.
The Quebec media has been uncharacteristically reserved in covering the latest chapter in this dramatic story, which has captivated the province since it broke four years ago. Perhaps the Quebec media are according Simard some much-needed peace. More likely, their silence is related to how uncomfortable Simard’s tale makes Quebecers feel, particularly those working in the entertainment industry.
Simard is one of Quebec’s most tragic figures. Her story is a bleak reminder of the sometimes exploitive nature of Quebec’s star system, a publicity machine often held up as an example of how the province is able to sustain its indigenous culture. Quebecers watch their own television and movies and listen to their own pop songs because they strongly identify with the performers. If pur laine Quebec is a big family, its entertainers are among its most cherished offspring. Who needs Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears when you’ve got Céline Dion and Star Académie prodigy Marie-Élaine Thibert?
Simard's 2005 memoir, Breaking the Silence. (Libre Expression)
Cloutier is viewed as the architect of the modern star-making machine. Like Céline, Nathalie Simard and her older brother René came from a large rural Quebec family where money was tight; their father was an unemployed lumberjack. Cloutier signed René in the early 1970s, shortly after the nine-year-old soprano won a prize on Les Découvertes de Jen Roger, a Quebec television talent contest. At the time, Nathalie was still a toddler. By the time he was 21, René had recorded over 20 albums; at one point, he was selling more records in Quebec than Elvis or the Beatles.
Nathalie recorded her first album at nine, and at 13, was withdrawn from school. She essentially lived with the Cloutier family for most of her adolescence, enduring a relentless concert and recording schedule. By the age of 13, she had three platinum records (for sales of more than 100,000) and two gold records (50,000-plus). Before Céline and Cirque du Soleil, the Simards were Quebec entertainment’s big success stories.
Cloutier, who also managed other Quebec personalities (including actor Clodine Desrochers and singer Natasha St-Pier) and produced the popular TV series La Fureur and Loft Story, understood the power of media convergence long before Izzy Asper and Pierre Karl Péladeau. Like his longtime buddy René Angélil (Céline’s husband), Cloutier’s career as an impresario kicked into high gear in the 1970s. This was post-Quiet Revolution Quebec, when the province’s media was expanding amid a groundswell for homegrown pop culture. A combination music and TV producer, talent agent and concert promoter, Cloutier soon developed a winning formula: he found performers with the talent and stamina to perform live, on TV and in the recording studio, and publicized them on every medium available.
Born in Lac-Saint-Jean, Cloutier cultivated the image of a self-made man during the era of “Quebec Inc.,” when the province was promoting itself as an economic powerhouse. Cloutier shrewdly exploited Quebec’s appetite for American-style entertainment, albeit in French. “I’m not a separatist,” he once told L’Actualité magazine. “I’m an opportunist. I ignore U.S. pop culture just as the U.S. ignores us. I am here to mine the Quebec market.”
With her perky pageboy haircut and stellar voice, Nathalie Simard was an impresario’s dream. In addition to her bestselling albums, she starred in two television programs: Le Village de Nathalie and Les Mini-stars de Nathalie.She also promoted her own line of clothing and was a spokeswoman for the Metro grocery chain.
“All the little girls born at the beginning of the 1970s in Quebec wanted to be Nathalie Simard,” writes her biographer, Michel Vastel, in Briser le Silence (Break the silence) (2005), a book commissioned by Simard. Vastel caused an uproar while promoting his tell-all. During an appearance on the popular talk show Tout le monde en parle, he wondered aloud why Simard’s financial and sexual exploitation went unnoticed for nearly a decade. As Simard tells it in Briser le silence, Cloutier would rape her while she slept in his family home, which was often filled with guests who had spent the night partying. Vastel accused René, her legal guardian at the time, of turning a blind eye.
In the same show, the journalist took on other big fish in the Quebec entertainment pond, blasting Quebec’s ADISQ, the industry association that represents Quebec music producers and performers, for not taking away Cloutier’s lifetime achievement award after the impresario pleaded guilty to sexual assault. Vastel also alleged that Radio-Canada was “profiting from the exploits of a pedophile” by continuing to produce shows with Novem, the company Cloutier founded.
Rene Simard, left, accompanied by his wife, Marie-Josee Taillefer, arrives at a news conference to comment on allegations from his sister's biographer. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)
Vastel’s tirade was met with criticism from all corners. Ordinary Quebecers couldn’t believe he would dare to implicate René Simard, who remains a popular television personality. A few days later, René held a news conference denying the biographer’s allegations. Vastel’s fellow journalists accused him of not understanding Quebec or le monde du showbiz. Only veteran La Presse columnist Nathalie Petrowski commended Vastel, noting that it took an “outsider” to talk about the dark side of Quebec show business. (Vastel was born in Normandy, France.)
Quebec entertainment journalists are a strange breed. Sure, criticism and analysis exists, but those who earn their bread and butter writing for the tabloids and gossip magazines act, for the most part, like adoring fans. I once observed a rookie entertainment journalist apologize to actor Pierre Curzi (Les Invasions barbares) for asking him a political question backstage at an awards ceremony — even though Curzi had just declared he was running for the Parti Québécois. (He is now a member of Quebec’s national assembly.) A veteran reporter once revealed to me that he tries to be as neutral as possible when covering film and television, because he may want to write for the small screen some day. “Many of these people are my friends,” he said. “I’m not going to criticize what my friends are doing.”
This hesitation to criticize the big players in entertainment may be why Simard’s abuse went unnoticed for so long. As a journalist, disparaging Cloutier 20 years ago would have been akin to speaking ill of Quebecor Inc. president Pierre Karl Péladeau today. It’s possible, but it’s probably a career-limiting move. Taking on Cloutier would likely have been viewed as a form of cultural betrayal.
The Simard story is a reminder of the implicit understanding between entertainers, producers, publicists and the media that everyone will politely give each other what they need. As a result, stars are left alone as long as they pose nicely for pictures and answer a few banal queries. It’s a system that, for the most part, keeps the multimillion-dollar Quebec entertainment industry chugging along. But it also means that sometimes power goes unchecked.
