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She was part of the jet set—the big exciting world

of glamour and money and creative people—and she

introduced me to it. Even though she was eight years

older than me, my father, my pastor and my business

partner all encouraged me to marry her. We used the

ring she’d been given by her ex, the actor Peter Sellers,

for a down payment on a house in North Vancouver.

How suburban, right? We got a cute dog named Freddy

Fluevog. We had a son named Jonathan. We had it all,

for a little while at least.

It was a refreshing time in a lot of ways, and a good

time. For instance, there was the time we visited Mexico.

In 1971, someone came into Fox & Fluevog and told us

about these amazing antique shoes in a warehouse in

Mexico City. I went down there with my extraordinary

just-married wife and found these boxes of mostly baby

shoes from the 1920s. We sold them all, like trinkets.

But despite the myth everyone tells about us, they

weren’t actually part of our shoe stock.

Instead, Peter and I went to England and got our

shoes made there with the help of people like George

Cox. We’d go to shoe shows, and Peter would find

a factory that he liked. Then we’d take the different

components of the shoes they produced and mess

around with them, trying different colours and stitching

and heel shapes, and get the shoes made the way we

liked. I wouldn’t call that designing, I’d call that line

building. But we created unique shoes that you could

only buy at Fox & Fluevog, like the knee-high boot

that the director Robert Altman bought when he was

in Vancouver filming the movie McCabe & Mrs. Miller,

with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

Then there were the clogs. In 1972, we attended

St. Margaret’s Anglican, a charismatic hippie church

near the Pacific National Exhibition grounds, where the

street kids would go. We hired the kids to work in the