Elizabeth Taylor came over to try on his jewelry! Toronto main character Salah Bachir recalls celebrity encounters in new book

The book is 54 punchy chapters about the same number of famous players. The gamut runs from Taylor (“tries on my pearls” is the subhead of her chapter) to Princess Margaret (“lights my cigarette”). There is also Princess Diana, Muhammad Ali, Orson Welles, Liberace, Pierre Trudeau, Christopher Plummer, Aretha Franklin and Edward Albee. Oh, and Andy Warhol.

Warhol, who was close to his mother, gave Bachir a gift of 10 prints after Keith Haring told him that Bachir called his own mother twice every day.

Bachir and his husband, artist Jacob Yerex, are noted Warhol collectors, with some 70 or 80 works (the figure bounces around). They also collect Attila Richard Lukacs, Betty Goodwin, General Idea, Gordon Shadrach, Kent Monkman and Stephen Andrews, rotating around 3,000 artworks between their main residence in Paris, Ont., and a sprawling condo at Palace Pier.

Bachir made his name and art-collecting budget as an entertainment entrepreneur. His brother owned a video store, so he set up a magazine to support the video rental industry. That branched into a trade show and awards galas, and merged into Famous Players, which became Cineplex, of which he was president until 2021. Bachir is now a consultant and chair of Phamous Characters.

He grew up in Rexdale, where his family moved when he was 10, after emigrating from Lebanon in 1965. He was a football player and for a painful period, a closeted gay person. He channelled his energy into activism, becoming a one-teen boycott machine outside his local Dominion agitating for farm worker’s rights (there was an early encounter with Cesar Chavez). He protested the assassination of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko and the testing of cruise missiles.

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• Dec 31, 1969

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• Dec 31, 1969

All the threads of his life — human rights, gay rights and the arts — became lifelong causes. He’s a founding member for CANFAR, and fundraises for The 519, Casey House, the Inside Out film festival, the AGO and OCAD, where he is a former chancellor.

The book’s focus is the intimate moments he’s spent with celebrities, and what he learned from each one. Warhol stands out, and not just because the book recalls “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” with its tightly woven tales revealing a little about the teller. “A light turned on for me when I started collecting Warhols, when I saw how his work told me to be free and daring,” Bachir writes. “[It was] a license to be seen, to do whatever we want in a society that lives behind drawn curtains and rigid boundaries.”

One way Bachir carved out his identity, and displayed his comfort with himself to the world, was with that jewelry collection that was spectacular enough to get Taylor into a taxi cab. “Jewelry makes the man,” is a Bachir motto.

“Pearls are my badge of courage,” he writes in the Taylor chapter, adding her tip that bold jewels allow you to wear a plain dress: “They only notice the jewelry.” Bachir himself often wears custom black outfits from Toronto designers Hoax Couture, the better to showcase the baubles.

Bachir met Canadian acting legend Christopher Plummer when he was at Stratford rehearsing for “Barrymore.” At the behest of Norman Jewison, Plummer agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at a gala Bachir hosted. The gala went long and Plummer was late back to rehearsals. Irritated, he showed Bachir the rough edge of his tongue while leaving, but then, to Bachir’s astonishment, called to apologize the next day, leading to a long acquaintanceship. “I thought it was refreshing he was so normal,” writes Bachir, “no handlers, no pretension.”

The guy must have a Rolodex to rival a top Hollywood agent. Bachir recalled that a publicist once offered him a three-minute interview with Keanu Reeves and a stock photo to illustrate the story with. “Do you mind if I just text him?” Bachir asked.

He puts his connections down to a principle he learned growing up in a small town in Lebanon. “You check in on people. You hear they’ve been in the hospital, they’ve had a setback, you call them up. It’s as simple as that.”

In fact, the idea for the book was born when Bachir had himself been in the hospital; he was recovering from a kidney transplant. He wanted each chapter to be short and punchy, “something you could read in a hospital waiting room.” He spent so much time in them that he raised money virtually to spruce them up, resulting in the renovated Bachir Yerex Family Dialysis Clinic at St. Joseph’s Health Centre.

Bachir was most excited that Canadian author and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald agreed to record the “First to Leave the Party” audio book; he has been a fan since reading her 1996 novel “Fall on Your Knees,” but they had never met. He wanted a woman to read it, in tribute to the strong women in the book, and to his mother and grandmother. Besides, he said, “I couldn’t read it; it kept bringing me to tears.”

The book’s two final chapters are a collection of notes from celebrities over the years. These artifacts have a peculiar, poignant resonance: They include as many rejections and RSVP declines as they do yeses. He wasn’t fazed by either.

“Just being normal is how I connected with them,” he said. “They didn’t want me to cater to them, to make a fuss. They didn’t want to have to dress up and be on show.” People, famous or not, he said, “all go through the same things in life.”

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