It’s the

early shift

Liza Fromer.

for the perenially

perkyor bust

By Darren Gluckman

Photography courtesy of Shaw Media

122 lifestyles magazine fall 2012

nslumping yourself,” accord-ing to Dr. Seuss, “is not easily

done.”The line is from Oh, the Places You’ll

Go!, the last book Theodor Seuss Gei-sel published, a year before his death in 1991. It’s also one of Liza Fromer’s favorites. Though she seems to have become a semipermanent fixture on Canadian morning television, it wasn’t always the case. After a rapid ascent and an ill-advised moment with a bottle of dye, she slipped into a serious slump, slinging nachos and beer to drunken businessmen and wondering where her once-bright fu-ture had gone.

Now co-anchoring The Morning Show on Global Television, Fromer, having long since unslumped her-self, gets out of bed at 3:30 in the deep, dark a.m. in order to be at the station an hour later. The show runs from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m., and post-show discussions, including pitches for future shows, keep her at the office until about noon. For the record, she doesn’t mind queries about her sleep/wake schedule.

“Not at all,” she says. “It’s the num-ber one question I get asked. By ev-erybody. But it’s also what I ask when I run into other morning show peo-ple.”

Okay, so do you stick to the early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine on week-ends, too?

“When I was doing Breakfast Tele-vision, which I did for five years, I was single, with no kids, and found that I could almost revert to a nor-mal schedule on weekends, go to bed late, sleep in. Now, with kids: no, gone, done. I’m a little bitter on Fri-day nights, when I fall asleep on the couch at 9:00 p.m.,” she says, laughing, and sounding anything but bitter.

Born and raised in Kitchener, On-tario, Fromer is the only child of Da-vid, a salesman in the printing busi-ness, and Liz, who worked with an insurance company. She had what she describes as a relatively idyllic childhood. “I grew up in the same house my dad grew up in,” she says. “And my parents are still in it.”

After high school, she moved to Toronto to pursue a degree in radio and television arts at Ryerson Uni-versity, and it was around 1990, in her third year of the program, when she landed her first gig in broadcast-ing, driving classic-rock radio station Q107’s Community Cruiser to vari-ous events around town, giving away prizes and doing two one-minute spots each day. For a girl who’d grown up listening to the station, the oppor-tunity was a godsend. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ I thought all the DJs on it were so cool, and now they were letting me do it.”

That led to her first job on televi-sion, as co-host of two shows on the YTV network: Video & Arcade Top 10 and Clips. Straight out of Ryerson and she’s in front of the camera, ful-filling the good doctor’s prediction: “You’ll be famous as famous can be / with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.”

Except, of course, when they don’t. Because sometimes they won’t. Be-cause sometimes, after doing two shows for several years, you dye your hair black, they have a corporate heart attack, and decide that, Ms. Liza, you will not be allowed back.

“It was the craziest thing,” she says of the reaction to the dye job. “They flipped out” (‘they’ being the outside production company that produced the two shows). The company re-fused to countenance her return to work even if she re-blondified herself. Blackening her golden tresses “was a deal breaker. Amazing, huh?”

You might have had a human rights complaint.

“But I was 23 and what did I know?”

Was that a frightening moment in the arc of your career, which until then had traced a rising curve?

“It’s funny because my roommate at the time was Stacie Mistysyn, who played Caitlin on the Degrassi series, so she was very well known, and had a Gemini for best actress in her bed-room, and we were both waitressing at Joe Badali’s. It was scary because I thought, ‘Have I already reached the end of the road in this career?’ That did scare me, for sure.”

Say what you will about Joe Badali’s

“U

123lifestyles magazinefall 2012

Profile Liza Fromer

125lifestyles magazinefall 2012

Ristorante Italiano & Bar, but it’s not typically considered a promising way station for a budding broadcaster. “I was a charming yet sucky waitress,” Fromer recalls. “I think I was really nice to people, but I remember ask-ing patrons to open their own wine bottles because I couldn’t do it. I could never carry the plates along my arms the way good servers do. Math is not my strong suit, so mak-ing change was a nightmare.”

But, as she acknowledges, she was fortified with the optimism of youth and, sure enough, a year and a half (and countless spaghetti carbonar-as) later, her best friend, Martine Gaillard (now on Sportsnet), was then a host on Canada’s The Weather Network, and was about to transition out of hosting and into a reportorial position. Gaillard suggested that the producers audition Fromer. They did, and from 1995 to 1997, Fromer greeted the sleepyheaded citizenry of Toronto with cheery predictions about the day’s weather. This was fol-lowed by three years in Calgary, re-porting for and anchoring a morning news show on A-Channel, and then a brief sojourn in Los Angeles. “I was actually dating someone who was also moving there, from Calgary. So we moved down together. I was there for a year. And did freelance report-ing for CBS.”

She shot a pilot while in L.A. “for a talk show that was very similar to The View, with Jane Pratt, who had started Sassy magazine. It was based on her magazine. But the problem was it was for ABC,” which aired The View and which felt that Fromer’s pilot was too similar. It was then, in 2001, that she received a call from a friend, who’d read that Ann Rohmer was leaving Breakfast Television, the

Toronto morning show juggernaut on Citytv. She sent in a tape and got a call from Bud Pierce, the show’s cre-ator and producer, who told her that he’d initially tossed her tape in the garbage, but had had second thoughts and retrieved it. He told her that Citytv had a number of qualified internal candidates, but that if Fromer had a reason to be in Toronto, he’d meet with her. “Well,” she replied, “when would you like me to have a reason to be in Toronto?”

She flew down, did an audition at 5:00 a.m. with co-host Kevin Frankish be-fore the show went on the air, and was kibitzing with Pierce when the second of two planes hit the World Trade Center. When the dust settled, Pierce asked her to do another, more serious audition, to see if she could handle the weightier mo-ments that occasionally intrude on the usual morning show lineup. Shortly after returning to L.A., she got the call: She’d be the new co-host on Breakfast Television, a prized position that she held until the birth of her first child, Samson, in 2006.

In the interim she’d met Josh Gerstein, a Toronto-based invest-ment banker, whom, she readily admits, she lustily pursued around a downtown club on the evening of their first encounter until he finally got the hint and asked for her num-ber. Gerstein, she says, is very ana-

125lifestyles magazinefall 2012

Profile Liza Fromer

126 lifestyles magazine fall 2012

Profile Liza Fromer

lytical, so the romance wasn’t quite a whirlwind, more of a soft summer breeze. “Maybe that’s why we’re mar-ried,” she speculates. That said, they were engaged 11 months later. The wedding was delayed, however, so she could complete her conversion to Ju-daism, which involved weekly classes for both her and Gerstein. “I had to learn to read Hebrew and learn about the religion. You had to take a test at the end. And I do believe I scored bet-ter than my husband.”

Given your schedule, when do you see him?

“I barely do during the week.” May-be that’s a recipe for success? “It may well be. We had Connie Chung on and I asked her, because she’s been married to Maury Povich for so long, ‘What do you attribute the success of your marriage to?’ And she said, ‘Not seeing each other very much.’” Fromer laughs. But, she says convincingly of the father of her (now) two children (Samson has a little sister, Ever), “He’s just great. I knew from the get-go. Josh was always supercool” about her demanding schedule “and continues to be.”

Between BT and The Morning Show, Fromer—in addition to adjusting to life as a mother—has done a stint on Toronto’s Newstalk 1010, served as a spokeswoman for the interna-tional charity SOS Children’s Villages, which provides shelter and care for the world’s orphaned and abandoned children, and (because why not try your hand at everything?) has co-authored a series of children’s books with her sister-in-law, Dr. Francine Gerstein. The series, which focuses on children’s relationships with their bodies, saw two books published last September, with two more scheduled for release this fall.

How do you feel about them?“Staggered. I’m a huge reader and

have huge respect for authors, so the fact that anyone would refer to me as an author just blows me away.” She hasn’t read the staggeringly good Ol-ivia series, by Ian Falconer (though she promises to), but she confesses to really digging Jamie Lee Curtis’s Is There Really a Human Race?, Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, and, of course, Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Back to The Morning Show, which debuted in October of last year. What’s your impression of how the program is faring?

“It’s so interesting because with BT, I joined a very established, popu-lar show. It still evolved while I was there, but it had an incredibly strong foundation. But this has been from scratch. So the evolution has been so interesting to watch as we get to know one another better—the four hosts—and as the audience gets to know us and starts to participate a little bit more, and as we discover what works and what doesn’t, what people want to see. So we’re getting to a really good place now; we’re really starting to fig-ure it out.”

Highlights?“Day One. Just getting it on the air.

I was astounded by how smoothly things went. And we had Jim Cuddy on, who I think is fabulous. Having Regis Philbin here was a huge high-light.”

Who are some of the models that you look to in terms of morning show hosts?

“I love Matt Lauer. I think he is just phenomenal. He is so conversational, so approachable, but he can also do a really serious interview and ask re-ally hard questions without seeming

confrontational.”Any Canadian models?“I don’t know if I can single out

one person, per se, but I think that so many shows do certain things so well. Jian Ghomeshi, on the CBC, is a great interviewer. I listen to him a lot. You can tell he’s done a ton of research. I think, as a storyteller, he works in the States now, but he’s Canadian—Keith Morrison. The way he tells a story as a reporter is phenomenal.”

Other non-morning TV shows that you like?

“House. Totally addicted. Mad Men. Love with a capital L. And I worship Tina Fey. And have since well before the Tina Fey bandwagon started, if I may say.”

But this season of 30 Rock’s been a bit disappointing, no?

“I think I’m so in love with her that she can do no wrong for me.”

What do you think you need to work on as a host?

“I started in TV when I was 20, 21, and now I’m 42, so it’s been over 20 years. So it’s more a big-picture thing where I’m trying to figure out, ‘Am I being honest?’ I hate watching televi-sion where people seem like they’re so aware they’re on TV.”

How do you divorce yourself from that superconsciousness?

“I really have a respect for our view-ers and I don’t want to waste their time, and so I don’t want to ask a B.S. question, and I don’t want to talk nonsense. We do talk about some very frivolous things, but I want it to have some purpose. I always try to picture myself as that person sitting on the couch.”

But it’s exceedingly difficult to pic-ture Liza Fromer just sitting on a couch. The places she’s gone. The places she’ll go.