ED MIRVISH (1914-2007) "Toronto’s greatest bargain"
His theatrical empire changed the face of our city, but many also recall an open-hearted entrepreneur who gave food to the needy
The Star
Jul 12, 2007 04:30 AMRichard Ouzounian
Theatre Critic
JOHN MAHLER/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
Ed Mirvish and son David celebrate the opening of Miss Saigon at the Princess of Wales Theatre in May, 1993. The 2,000-seat theatre was built by the Mirvishes at a cost of $22 million.
He may have begun by showing us where to find a bargain, but he wound up giving us much that was priceless.
Edwin Mirvish, known universally as “Honest Ed,” died yesterday morning in St. Michael’s Hospital, less than two weeks shy of his 93rd birthday. Although he first came into the public eye as the merchant king whose giant Bloor St. discount store, with its thousands of blinking lightbulbs, is still thriving after nearly 60 years, Mirvish will be remembered best as the man who created the most successful theatrical empire in Canadian history.
“Ed was a terrific example of someone who makes a success in one area, the business world, and then turns around and makes an even greater success in another, the arts,” said John Sewell, mayor of Toronto from 1978 to 1980. “Instead of turning his back on Toronto once he earned his fortune, he turned his front to us instead, and thank goodness for that.”
Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of Miss Saigon, said, “He ran an extraordinary empire as if it was a corner store. He will be hugely missed and never forgotten.”
It seemed as though everyone in the city claimed Ed Mirvish as a friend. He was known for his warm smile, his quick wit and his open-hearted generosity to individuals and charitable causes.
His smile was a tonic, his laughter a vacation, his handshake a benediction.
The man who did all this was born on July 24, 1914, in Colonial Beach, Va., to David and Annie (née Kornhauser) Mirvish. He was given the name Yehuda, but his cousin Frances persuaded the family to change it to “Edwin.”
Show business made its presence felt shortly after Ed’s birth, when he was circumcised by Rabbi Moses Reuben Yoelson, whose son went on to be known as Al Jolson.
The Mirvish family business was a grocery store.
It was doing so terribly, however, that in 1923 David and Annie moved to Toronto with Ed and his year-old brother, Robert.
Initially, the elder Mirvish worked as a travelling salesman, hawking The Encyclopedia Of Freemasonry at $50 a set to lodges in the region. That proved to be such a flop that he re-entered the grocery business with a store on Dundas St. W.
Ed went to work there, opening at 6 a.m. each day and helping out with the deliveries after classes at King Edward Public School.
Eager to supplement the store’s meagre receipts, his father started moonlighting as a “candy butcher,” selling soft drinks and confections on trains between Toronto and Winnipeg. The extra workload contributed to his ill health, and David Mirvish died in 1930 at 42.
Ed was 15 at the time. He was attending Central Tech High School but quit to take charge of the family business. He had already learned his first lesson: “Never give credit. My father gave credit and he died broke.”
After struggling to keep the store afloat for nine years, Ed finally closed it to work for Leon Weinstein, who owned a supermarket chain. Over the next two years, Ed worked in all of Weinstein’s stores, formulating ideas that were to shape his future empire.
“I learned that people wanted value, quality and honesty,” he once said. “If you gave them that, it didn’t matter how ratty the package was. If you didn’t give them what they wanted, then you could wrap it up in the finest box you ever saw, but they wouldn’t buy it.”
Romance entered Ed’s life when he fell in love with Anne Maklin, a sculptor from Hamilton. They married in 1940 when she was 21. Besides providing him with a happy and stable family life, she also guided him to more artistic interests, although not without a struggle.
Much later, Ed would recall an incident in “the first year of our marriage when my wife had me attend a symphony concert at Varsity Stadium. It was a sweltering hot summer evening with the temperature nearly 90 F. I had put in a full day’s work and, as we did not own a car at the time, we boarded a Bloor street car, jammed with sweltering crowds of people.
“At the stadium, we sat on hard benches right behind the drums and percussion section of the orchestra. When they started to play Beethoven’s Fifth right in my ear, I can tell you our first year of marriage almost did not make it to a second year.”
At this point, business was Ed’s major concern. He wanted to implement the entrepreneurial philosophy he had formed while working for Weinstein.
He and Anne took some of wedding-present money, cashed in Anne’s insurance policy, got a bank loan and put $600 into a store they called The Sport Bar. It specialized in low-priced sportswear aimed at young women flooding into Toronto to work at munitions plants, and was instantly successful.
The location – on Bloor St., just west of Bathurst St. – was to prove central to Ed’s career. By 1946, he had bought all the stores between Bathurst and Markham Sts. The Sport Bar expanded, changing its name to Anne & Eddie’s.
Another addition to the Mirvish enterprise was their son David, born in 1945. Anne stayed home with their son and Ed found himself growing bored with the women’s clothing business.
He began buying all sorts of odd merchandise from fire sales and bankruptcies. When he had enough, he filled his Bloor St. property with it, putting a hand-painted sign over the door: “Name your own price. No reasonable offer refused.”
The self-mocking ads that would later become a Mirvish trademark made their first appearance. “Our building is a dump! Our service is rotten! But our prices are the lowest in town!” On an April Saturday in 1948, “Honest Ed’s” was born.
When asked why he chose that name, he said, “I opted to buck the trend. Rather than sound self-serving, I decided to take the mickey out of all the usual sanctimonious slogans.”
His approach worked, and soon the store – which sold everything from frying pans to flannel nighties – was open and bustling seven days a week.
Its tremendous success, in fact, led to the expansion of the Mirvish empire. People living on Markham St. complained about the constant noise and activity generated by Honest Ed’s. Mirvish bought their houses, intending to tear them down and build a parking lot, but the city wouldn’t allow it.
At his wife’s suggestion, he created an assortment of galleries, studios and stores that became known as Mirvish Village. His son, David, already a connoisseur of fine art at the age of 18, opened the David Mirvish Gallery in 1963.
The year before, Ed had turned his attention to a fading stretch of King St. W. On it, the once-grand Royal Alexandra Theatre (built in 1907 for $750,0000) lay crumbling.
Mirvish bought it for $215,000 and spent more than twice the cost of the building to restore it to its former glory.
Once he had it fully operational again, he learned to his chagrin that “as long as you keep the theatre locked up you know exactly how much it costs you every week. Once you open the door and put a production on the stage, it could be risky to the point of putting you in bankruptcy.”
By the end of the fifth season, the Royal Alex was turning a profit, and Mirvish kept it going through thick and thin. For many years, it ran as a touring house, welcoming shows and stars from around the world, all of them treated with gracious hospitality by Ed and Anne.
Autographed pictures of stars from Robert Morley to Peter O’Toole line the theatre walls, indicating their reciprocal affection.
By 1988, the Royal Alex boasted 52,000 subscribers, the highest figure in North America, and since then productions of such long-run shows as Les Miserables, Crazy For You and Mamma Mia! have brought in millions of people.
At one point, Mirvish also operated six restaurants nearby and, for several generations of theatregoers, the dinner he offered of prime rib, mashed potatoes and peas constituted the perfect pre-show meal.
But economic realities and labour problems caused Ed to close them one by one, until the last survivor – the gaudily baroque Ed’s Warehouse – shut its doors in September 2000.
While the restaurant empire was shrinking, the theatre empire was expanding, including an expensive flirtation with running London’s famed Old Vic Theatre, beginning in 1982. Mirvish hired internationally renowned directors such as Peter Hall and Jonathan Miller to run seasons there.
“Ed Mirvish showed great generosity and imagination in allowing me to present the kind of classical repertory theatre that wasn’t available anywhere else in England at that time,” said Miller, artistic director from 1988-1990. “He took great pride in the fact that he had saved the Vic from its derelict state and bought it a new and vital existence.”
Despite its artistic triumphs, the Vic proved a financial millstone and Mirvish sold it 16 years later, after hemorrhaging millions of dollars.
Far more successful was the construction of The Princess Of Wales Theatre for $22 million. It opened in the spring of 1993 with Cameron Mackintosh’s production of Miss Saigon, which ran for two years.
“There has never been anyone like him in the theatre,” Mackintosh recalled. “Completely down to earth and one of the only people in this business you never needed to sign a contract with. Win or lose, he stood by his deal.”
With the 2001 purchase of the Pantages Theatre (renamed the Canon), Mirvish further solidified the theatrical power base he ran with his son David, stronger than any outside New York.
Not every show was triumphant. The 2006 failure of The Lord of the Rings came as a substantial setback, but the current hit production of We Will Rock You and the upcoming Dirty Dancing, with its record advance sales, augur well for the future.
During his lifetime, Mirvish received honorary degrees from five Canadian universities and Tel Aviv University, was inducted into the Canadian and American Business Halls of Fame, the Order of Ontario, the Order of Canada, and the Order of the Commander of the British Empire.
But in the hearts of Torontonians, he will remain the elfin figure who dispensed hundreds of free turkeys to the needy every Christmas, or footed the bill for a bash on his birthday every year to which thousands of happy partygoers flocked.
“Someone once asked me what I would like on my tombstone and how I would like to be remembered,” he told the Empire Club in 1989. “I said I would like to erect a huge throne in the centre of Honest Ed’s.
“I would then like my body cremated and the ashes put in an hourglass. I would then like someone sitting on the throne to keep turning the hour glass up and down, up and down, and the employees would point to the hourglass and say, `There’s Ed. He’s still running!’”
David Crombie, mayor of Toronto from 1972-1978, summed up Mirvish’s accomplishments. “He did amazing things for all of us. To use his own expression, he was a great bargain for Toronto. If it hadn’t been for Ed, the face of this city would look a lot different today.”
He gave us a world of commerce where we could buy whatever we needed and he gave us a world of art where we could dream of everything else. But most of all, he gave us himself.
Edwin Mirvish leaves his wife Anne and son David, and a sister, Lorraine.
The funeral service will take place at Beth Tzedec Synagogue, 1700 Bathurst St., on Friday at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Ed Mirvish Educational Memorial Fund, c/o The Benjamin Foundation, at 3429 Bathurst St., Toronto, M6A 2C3. The fund is to support young entrepreneurs.
Photos: Remembering Ed Mirvish
CP Video: Toronto remembers Honest Ed
BORIS SPREMO, CM/TORONTO STAR
Ed Mirvish in front of Royal Alexandra Theatre on Aug. 23, 1977. Mirvish bought the theatre in 1963.
APPRECIATION - Mirvish set the scene for success
Impresario paved way for the thriving theatrical landscape we now enjoy
TheStar.com – entertainment
Jul 12, 2007 04:30 AM
Richard Ouzounian
What would the theatre in this city have been like without Ed Mirvish?
Don’t think about it.
When the master impresario died yesterday at the age of 92, he was frequently praised for having renovated the Royal Alexandra Theatre and built the Princess of Wales Theatre, but his contribution to the theatrical life of Toronto was far more complex than that.
Until he saved the Alex from the wrecker’s ball, the only viable option facing a touring show that wanted to perform here was what Irish playwright Brendan Behan called “that sanctified garage,” the 3,200 seat O’Keefe Centre.
Barry Humphries (a.k.a. Dame Edna) had to perform Oliver! there back in 1962 and equated it to “the black hole of Calcutta,” a feeling shared by many performers.
Had Mirvish not made the Alex available in 1963, Toronto audiences would have missed out on hundreds of theatrical experiences over the years, from performances of the classic Canadian revue Spring Thaw, to long runs of shows like Hair and Godspell.
But the most important thing to remember is that Mirvish didn’t just present shows, he built audiences. By 1989, he could boast 52,000 subscribers and although there are no statistics to prove it, one would be surprised if that didn’t have a significant impact on the increasing vitality of all Toronto’s theatres during that period.
From a climate in which theatre going was an occasional activity for the few, Mirvish helped turn it into a regular habit for the many.
And, in 1989, it also set the stage for the next important step, when Mirvish actually produced a Canadian version of a hit show (Les Misérables) instead of importing it.
The phenomenal success of that production not only made subsequent local versions of hit musicals a viable option, but it encouraged Mirvish to build the Princess of Wales Theatre to house Miss Saigon in 1993.
Throughout that decade during which Toronto audiences flocked to the mega-musicals, our city came to be known as the Number Two market for theatre in North America, a distinction that the long stewardship Mirvish served helped bring to reality.
Since then, we’ve known good times and bad in the world of commercial theatre, but the reassuring thing is that the Mirvish empire didn’t cut their sails when the winds grew too severe.
Yes, they were there to reap the benefit of multi-year runs of shows like Mamma Mia! and The Lion King, but the surprise failures of The Producers and Hairspray didn’t send them running for the hills, as they might have done with producers who weren’t in it for the long haul.
They came back with their greatest gamble to date, the $28 million musical of The Lord of the Rings, which they promoted with every ounce of energy at their disposal. When it failed, they shook their heads, tightened their belts and readied for the next wave.
Now We Will Rock You is solidly holding the stage while anticipation builds for Dirty Dancing’s opening this fall, with its record-breaking sales.
It’s a real shame that Ed Mirvish didn’t live to see this last show open the 100th season at his beloved Royal Alexandra Theatre, because if there was ever a number that he could have claimed as his theme, it clearly would have been “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.”
Thank you, Ed, for saving the Royal Alex 45 years ago and paving the way for the theatre scene we celebrate today.
PASSING OF AN IMPRESARIO – Ed Mirvish put show in retail business
‘The community marketplace has always been the greatest show on earth’
TheStar.com – Business
Jul 12, 2007 04:30 AM
David Olive
KEITH BEATY/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
As much a showman as a businessman, Ed Mirvish passed away on July 11, 2007, at the age of 92. Mirvish and his business partner and only child, David, have been integral in building two of Toronto’s entertainment districts.
Before there was Sam Walton, there was Ed Mirvish.
Mirvish pioneered the basics of today’s discount drygoods retailing at Honest Ed’s, the soup-to-nuts emporium he opened at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor Sts. in 1948. Fifty-nine years later, countless retail trends have come and gone, but Mirvish’s famous store is still going strong.
Walton launched his first Wal-Mart, in Rogers, Ark., 14 years after Mirvish cut the ribbon on his landmark Annex store.
Mirvish, who died yesterday at age 92, was Toronto’s first “big box” merchant, the term for the specialty hardware, business supplies, furniture and other warehouse-type stores that began popping up across North America in the 1980s.
While Simpsons and Eaton’s, the dominant Toronto drygoods retailers of the day, catered to a middle- and upper-class clientele, Mirvish turned the merchandising of essentials for lower-income customers into an event.
Beginning in 1948, shoppers of limited means had a bustling emporium of their own, offering the same wide variety of dinnerware, linens, apparel and toys to be found at Simpsons and Eaton’s, but at prices rarely above $5 per item.
Before Honest Ed’s opened for business each day, a line of as many as 200 customers had formed outside the Bloor St. entrance, under a sign the read: “Don’t Just Stand There — Buy Something!”
On entering Mirvish’s store, they were obliged to descend a long, sloping narrow passageway lined with deep-discount impulse items before entering the first of a series of display rooms that had to be accessed sequentially.
That layout, similar to today’s Ikea, drew customers through the entire store, exposing them to every category of goods Mirvish had accumulated from distributors’ warehouses that had suffered a fire, flooding or bankruptcy, and were selling off undamaged goods at pennies on the dollar.
Mirvish introduced “loss leaders.” He skimped on décor, introduced self-service, and sold only those goods he was able to find at rock-bottom cost, passing the savings to his loyal shoppers.
You could usually count on finding socks at Honest Ed’s, at $3 for six pair, but they might not be the blue socks you’d prefer. If you didn’t see it, Ed didn’t have it. There was no special ordering of goods not in stock, and no white-glove service by a nice lady behind the cosmetics counter as on Eaton’s main selling floor.
Sam Walton eventually adopted all these techniques. In his rusting pick-up truck, he traveled the bumpy roads of Arkansas and Texas on news of a distant wholesaler abruptly forced to immediately clear all his inventory. Walton came back to his store with whatever he found — a mountain of stockings, 18 racks of plaid hunting jackets, but, alas, no cutlery this time. And so Wal-Mart that week would have no cutlery to offer.
Among the differences between the two trailblazing merchants was their role models. Walton’s was James Cash Penney, a traditional drygoods merchant for whom Walton once toiled as a lowly clerk. A prime influence on Mirvish, by contrast, was a revered uncle, Harry Mensh, who owned practically everything worth owning in the resort town of Mirvish’s native Colonial Beach, Va.
Mensh was an impresario who exulted in playing host to pleasure-seeking visitors to his hotels, restaurants, shooting galleries and other amusements. He was an outsized figure, impeccably dressed, who regarded his empire as an entertainment extravaganza.
Hence the Mirvish trademark of theatricality and publicity stunts, which generated the best kind of advertising — stories in the Toronto papers about Mirvish recruiting 21 sets of triplets for his “Triplets Fashion Show,” and his appearance at the bedside of the mother of the first infant born each year, bearing an outsized gift certificate.
Mirvish’s challenge was a bit tougher than Walton’s. Mirvish plied his trade in a city of millions where alternative shopping venues were many. In the first decades of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the chain’s outlets were monopoly or near-monopoly stores in very small towns of no interest to Sears, Roebuck & Co., S.S. Kresge Co., Woolworth Corp. or J.C. Penney Co.
Eventually Wal-Mart would surpass all those firms in size, becoming the world’s largest commercial enterprise by revenue. But as it has grown, Wal-Mart’s stock price has flattened, because for the sake of growth it has moved out of the sparcely populated U.S. heartland into major cities and abroad, where competition is fierce and local shopping preferences vary. Wal-Mart is now a complex firm that has strayed from the bare-bones formula that brought its early success.
Wary of the dangers of overexpansion, Mirvish and his business partner and only child, David, followed the same cautious path in building their live-theatre operations, consisting of the Royal Alex and the Princess of Wales Theatre, built by Mirvish. A third theatre, London’s fabled Old Vic, was renovated but relinquished after more than a decade of losses. Mirvish knew his limits, while his overextended rival, Garth Drabinsky’s Livent Corp., flamed out inside a decade. The Mirvishes added a third Toronto venue to their stable in 2001, taking on management of the former Pantages, now the Canon Theatre.
For Torontonians, the most important distinction between Mirvish and Walton is that Mirvish was content with his one store, in which he toiled daily well into advanced age, and rather than build a national chain, he chose instead to try his hand at architectural rehabilitation (rescuing the Royal Alex from the wrecking ball) and building two entertainment districts.
If Mirvish couldn’t quite replicate Henry Mensh’s resort paradise, he would at least satisfy his own urge to play host by creating Markham Village, an Annex collection of restaurants, art galleries and art-book stores near his store; and turning a then-desolate stretch of King St. West anchored by his Royal Alex into an entertainment district.
Mirvish lived his life out loud — still not done by enough of us in this sober city — because, as Mirvish wrote in his memoir, “The community marketplace has always been the greatest show on Earth.”
He’s back
Exclusive: Honest Ed talks after illness Mirvish to attend Hairspray openerJul 11, 2007 01:03 PM
Martin Knelman
This article originally appeared in the Star on May 5, 2004.
Move over, Hairspray.
The delirious musical about a TV teen dance show, circa 1962, opens tonight at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
But the Tony-winning Broadway show will have to compete for attention with the owner of the theatre. After being out of commission for almost a year, Ed Mirvish is poised to make the showbiz comeback of the year. And he is definitely ready for his closeup.
“This is going to be a big, important opening, and I’m really looking forward to being there,” the man known as Honest Ed explained in an exclusive interview with the Star – his first since illness struck.
It was last May when double pneumonia knocked out the 89-year-old merchant who had turned a little store into Canada’s most famous bargain mecca and then went on to create this country’s liveliest theatre empire.
Mirvish has been away from his beloved store, Honest Ed’s (at Bloor and Bathurst Sts.) since then. He has been away from the theatre, too.
He spent months in Mt. Sinai Hospital, then moved to chronic care before returning to his Forest Hill home, where has been more or less under house arrest since January.
Yesterday, returning to his ramshackle office on the second floor of Honest Ed’s for the first time since last May, the Honest One, looking dapper in a suit and tie, immediately cracked a joke to demonstrate that taking care of business is still at the top of this agenda.
“Who’s looking after the store?” he asked with feigned alarm as more than 20 employees squeezed into his office to present a “Welcome Back – We Love You” cake, and sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
He seems slightly frailer than before, and the familiar voice is not quite as forceful, but a year of illness has not affected his wit or his comic timing.
“They’re better than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” he commented at the conclusion of the employees’ serenade.
On a more serious note, he said: “It’s nice to be back, because I really missed the store, and I really missed all of you.”
At tonight’s opening, Ed will be in the orchestra in a special wheelchair location along with his wife, Anne. Among the special guests who will join them: Ken and Marilyn Thomson, Irving and Rosalie Abella, Ronnie Hawkins, George Chuvalo and Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino. Both Mayor David Miller and Premier Dalton McGuinty are planning to attend. So will John Waters, who not only wrote the show but also created the 1988 movie from which it was adapted.
Hairspray is set in Baltimore, and that is a city with which Ed Mirvish has a connection. He lived in Washington, D.C. (40 minutes from Baltimore), until moving to Toronto at the age of 9.
“We had relatives in Baltimore, and used to visit often,” Ed recalls.
Yesterday, his return to the store turned into a family affair.
Anne Mirvish, his wife of 63 years, fretted about the need to straighten Ed’s tie for the camera, and gave detailed instructions to their son, David Mirvish, on exactly how to straighten the tie.
Looking forward to their wedding anniversary next month, Ed joked: “Of course, 63 years with me is like nothing. I’m so easy to get along with, and a joy to be with.”
Asked about his long illness, Ed said: “I didn’t feel any pain, but I was a little bit bored.”
As David Mirvish explained, his father’s lungs were damaged by his bout of pneumonia. And he had a tracheotomy that left him unable to speak.
“When you can’t talk, it’s not good,” quipped Ed.
Last summer, as a result of his illness, Ed missed the big outdoor party the Mirvishes have been throwing on Markham St. next to the store every July since he reached the age of 75. According to Russell Lazar, general manager of Honest Ed’s, 60,000 people turned up for seven hours of hoopla, including live entertainment, souvenirs, free hot dogs and kiddie rides.
Yesterday, Ed explained why he is looking forward to making a personal appearance at his 90th birthday bash on July 25.
“It’s the first time I’ve had a 90th birthday,” he said.
