THE NARCISSISM OF JIAN GHOMESHI

By Trevor Cole

(Originally published in Macleans Magazine, November 2014)

Precisely why Jian Ghomeshi found it so entertaining to hurt the women in his life (allegedly), we may never know. But there are people out there who understand why he thought it was okay. Those are the people who, like me, have lived with a clinical narcissist.

My father was a man very much like the disgraced CBC star. He didn’t share Ghomeshi’s sexual proclivities, but he was a performer himself, he flashed an equally practiced smile for the camera, and he was governed by the same personality demons. After many years of close observation and a lot of expensive therapy, I came to understand those enough to write a novel—Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life—that explored the thought process of the narcissist.

Let’s be clear. Despite the way the term is commonly used, a narcissist isn’t merely someone with a big ego, someone who “thinks highly of himself” or takes too many selfies. The true narcissist is a more complex creature and, as we can see with Ghomeshi, more damaging to the people in his life.

Essentially, a narcissist is an emotional toddler dressed in an adult’s sophistication. The child’s urgent “Look at me, Mommy!” impulse drives the narcissist’s quest for attention, his inflated sense of entitlement, his expectation of admiration. You can see all of that in Ghomeshi’s apparent urge to trumpet his successes. To invite women to watch him at his glamorous work (a number of his alleged victims have said he asked them to tapings of Q). To have someone tweet about his being named one of “Canada’s sexiest men” in 2012, as a former intern says she was asked to do.

Almost inevitably, in my experience, the narcissist treats people cruelly. He does this not necessarily for cruelty’s sake, but because in the course of getting what he wants, the needs of others do not enter his head. Even when the narcissist pays attention to you, with that twinkle in his eye—as some of the women in Ghomeshi’s life found, the attention of a narcissist can be an intoxicating thing—he is not thinking of you. He simply wants something, and he expects to get it. It is confusing to the narcissist if someone resists his needs. When women reacted badly as he allegedly struck them, Ghomeshi apparently criticized them, belittled them, asked them to leave. What the narcissist wants is okay, because he wants it. So if you have a problem with it, there’s something wrong with you.

My father was a dark-haired and handsome actor. A singer too—he once self-released an album with not one, but nine pictures of himself on the front cover. And, like Ghomeshi, he could be devilishly charming. (Recently a CBC producer, watching a 1970s TV interview with Dad, described him as “magnetic.”) Being charming is a useful tool, and for some 30 years my father found moderate success in Canadian theatre. He spent five years at the Stratford Festival, starred for several more in the Charlottetown Festival, played the dashing El Gallo in many productions of The Fantasticks, and appeared occasionally on CBC TV. But from an early peak his career and opportunities withered. His sense of entitlement and delusions of grandeur, combined with the deep-seated insecurity common in narcissists, meant he stopped auditioning for new roles. “People know what I can do!” he’d often say.

The trouble was—and here Ghomeshi’s colleagues might relate—many of those people couldn’t stand working with him. They, at least, had the luxury of being able to keep their distance from my father. We, his family, were not so lucky.

Dad’s personality overwhelmed all of us—me, my little sister and my mother. His voice filled the room and dominated every conversation. He was a force that absorbed all light and sound. To get attention he would make everything a performance; it seemed Dad couldn’t butter toast or tie a scarf without a stagey flourish. He never stopped talking, never paused to ask what was new in someone else’s life. He would sometimes talk at me till two in the morning on a school night while I lay in bed, trying to sleep. And though he often declared love for his family, he was a Ghomeshi of indifference to our feelings.

In the summer of 1969, for example, he forced us all to go naked, even around visitors, because he’d decided he was a nudist. My mother was mortified, but she hadn’t the emotional strength to resist. It lasted a few weeks until he lost interest. During blizzards in the winter, he made me, at 11 years old, shovel our long rural driveway while he stayed warm and drank Scotch. He named the family dog after a favourite character he’d played—so, in essence, after himself. One night, when my mother went to my father’s dressing room after a show, he introduced her to his mistress, then left the two of them alone to sort things out themselves.

We, his family, often felt we were being treated unfairly, but he was adept at making us feel the fault was ours. In the face of our anger, he would smile and dismiss us, or rise up in terrifying fury. He exploited the women in his life—a series of them, after my mother finally divorced him—expecting them to support him while he sat around in his robe. And to my knowledge, until the day he died, he never experienced shame.
I suspect this is also true of Jian Ghomeshi. We veterans-of-the-narcissist know why Ghomeshi showed CBC brass the visual evidence that ended his career, thinking it would absolve him. He assumed they would see things as he did, because he couldn’t fathom another point of view.

That they didn’t will make him angry. He will feel badly treated. And it’s unlikely he will ever come around. The narcissist is highly resistant to change, which made it a challenge writing a novel about one. Fiction demands that the main character develop, learn from experience, and come to see things differently. A true narcissist remains, like Ghomeshi with his CBC bosses, “unrepentant.”
Unlikely as it might seem, Jian Ghomeshi’s conscience these days is probably quite clear. He might even be enjoying how much we’re talking about him.