Juul Haalmeyer

The best worst dancer in television has left the stage.

Amsterdam-born Juul Haalmeyer was part of one of the most brilliant shows of all time to come out of Canada, SCTV. He may have played an inept dancer and choreographer on the show, but his actual costume designs were incredibly stunning and creative. He put together an outfit for Andrea Martin as Edith Prickley as Queen Elizabeth I in one day. It took 36 people to make it. He even out-Divined Divine, creating an over-the-top outfit for John Candy as John Waters’ favourite drag queen.

He was Anne Murray’s personal designer. He came up with outfits for Phyllis Diller for her Vegas shows. He got a call out of nowhere in 1979 from Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, performing at Maple Leaf Gardens, asking him to redesign the band’s stage-wear. His answer was leather and mediaeval style capes, and went on the road with the group for two weeks. He had never been to a rock show before and never went to one after.

Reports today on Facebook say Juul has passed away. He had been suffering from cancer.

Juul told me he had been in musicals in high school. He was a loud singer but a mediocre dancer. I had an affinity with him. I explained to him in my chorus boy days in high school, I danced like a lawnmower and fumbled with a recalcitrant prop that seemingly mocked my inabilities on opening night.

The Toronto Star came out with a fine feature story on May 14, 2000, when Juul was 51. It’s a little long, so I’ll quote from the last half.

Haalmeyer came to Canada a draft dodger in 1969.

“I was a singer, but I took every job that didn’t require a university degree,” he reminisces, exhaling ciggie smoke. “My first job was as a shipper at the McCaul location of Malabar where Michael Scheider hired me as his apprentice. At that time, Malabar was dressing 94 per cent of the operas in North America: the San Francisco Opera, the Seattle, even the Met. They were so good.
“(Designers) Bob Mackie and Ret Turner came in to do Sonny & Cher, and I became their liaison with Luigi Specca at Malabar to buy fabric. I asked to come to see how the show was put together in the studio. ‘Hey! I could do that.”
“I auditioned for the CFTO costume department. They said, ‘We realize you’re not a costume designer. If you sweep the floor in the carpentry shop for six months, ...’ I was so excited. I was in showbiz.”
His first gig was Kenny Rogers Rollin’ On The River. Here he had to dress Mr. Rogers, and he’d never so much as sewn on a button.
“I locked myself in a room with a rented sewing machine and a pattern. I learned to sketch — my father was an artist, and he told me to take the catalogue and sketch every model. So I did.”
And he points out a sketch of Todd Eldridge, world champion figure skater, in one of his designs.
Haalmeyer likes the variety of doing film and TV. “There is always something different — one day it’s a Hollywood babe and 40 American cops. The next day, a children’s show. Someone comes up with a script, and you can come up with something more suitable.”
And sometimes you come up with yourself. Haalmeyer fronted the legendary Juul Haalmeyer Dancers on SCTV.
“I was a bad dancer at SCTV,” he says proudly. “They couldn’t hire dancers as bad as me, so I got dragged around into sketches as the Juul Haalmeyer Dancers.
“It all started when I was costume designer (he got the gig through attrition: the former designer moved on), and Catherine O’Hara was doing a number as Lola Heatherton. They were auditioning dancers, but they couldn’t move badly enough, so I was told to take five or six guys from the crew and form a dancing group. I picked Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, two of the writers, a grip or prop guy. And the six of us were the worst.
“So every time they needed cheesy dancers or a bad singer. . . .I also appeared as myself, a costume designer.”
He offers up a photo of himself, Catherine O’Hara and Rick Moranis as the Polyesters, a takeoff on the Nylons. Haalmeyer looks alarmingly like early Robert Goulet.
“I still get stopped on the street,” he grins. “I was shopping at the Salvation Army in Bowmanville, and this woman was checking out in front of me with a stroller. All of a sudden, she let out this blood-curdling scream: ‘I know you — you’re that bad dancer.’”
He’s the bad dancer that Carol Burnett adores.
“She was on the set of SCTV while she was in town doing Between Friends, that movie with Liz Taylor,” he explains. “She came right over to me, kissed my feet and said. ‘Juul Haalmeyer, I want to bear all your children.’
“She did a walk-on as herself in a court scene. She is a fabulous woman, just so warm.”
Ah, but then there are the stars who were not so hot. “The ones that made me wish I had gone into props,” Haalmeyer groans.
Like the sitcom star who had a hissy fit over her “stolen” dancing shoes. She made such a scene that Ruth Buzzi, who had the adjacent dressing room, stepped in, slapped her face and demanded, “Are you a jerk-off or a professional? Pull yourself together!”
Meanwhile, Haalmeyer spray-painted 30 pairs of dancing shoes and told her to choose.
He shops for wardrobe everywhere from Kmart to vintage stores to lawn sales from Bowmanville to upstate New York.
He has worked on more than a thousand shows, dressing the famous and infamous. In 1974, he worked with Margaret Trudeau doing Perils Of Pauline.
One of his last projects was outfitting extras for the Nathan Lane film Laughter On The 23rd Floor.
“I did all the ‘70s variety shows,” he calculates. “I made Anne Murray’s Vegas clothes, all the beaded stuff. Every lamp in our house (where he lives with his mom, Trudy) is beaded with fringe. It takes 2,000 hours to do a gown. You go blind, and you have to charge the price of a car and still don’t make any money.”
He worked with the series CODCO for four years and considers it his hardest gig.
“We did 26 episodes in five weeks; it was breakneck speed,” he says, stubbing out another cigarette. “They needed 27 Elizabethan costumes in primary colours within 24 hours.
“Or they’d call and say, ‘I’m the last cod in the ocean. We need the costume in the morning — with cod-piece.’ So I bought a wetsuit and a smack of sequins and glued the sequins to make it scaly — he was a fish. It was scary. I came out (Codco was shot in Halifax) with 112 wardrobe containers. After I saw the scripts, I had stuff flown in every say from Toronto.
He produces a pair of fabulous ‘50s cat’s-eyed glasses trimmed with rhinestones.
“They belonged to Eugene Levy’s mother. When she died, Fred Levy, Eugene’s brother, who is my accountant, gave them to me.”
Which brings up finances. Haalmeyer did the Alice Cooper Welcome To My Nightmare special, and it lived up to its name.
“I never got paid,” he shrugs. “The company folded as soon as they called ‘wrap.’...
“I am owed over $300,000 for 30 years; I could have owned a house by now.”
And he needs one.
“My aim is to have a very large building and have most of what any body needs for a movie. My home is floor-to-ceiling with clothes. I have three racks around my bed; I have to move a rack to get into bed.”
If he had to do it all over again, he would be an opera singer.
“I had the pipes and the potential scholarship from Juilliard. Then I took up smoking and drinking, and it was game over.”
Besides, if he were an opera singer, he could wear outrageous hats like the ones he designs for Noddy.

Noddy was a live action/animation kids show produced in Ontario in the late ‘90s.

Besides collecting a mountain of awards for his costume design, Juul was a humanitarian. The Star of March 16, 1989 reported on it:

Stories in The Star and on CBC radio prompted a flurry of calls to The Star’s Halifax bureau asking for information about how to help some of the New Brunswick families living in appalling housing conditions. Some of the calls are starting to bear fruit.
Toronto costume designer Juul Haalmeyer has sent two batches of clothing to a New Brunswick self-help organization for unemployed rural workers. [...]
When Haalmeyer read a Star story detailing the squalor in which one such family lives, he telephoned the newspaper’s Halifax bureau and asked how he could help.
Haalmeyer designs costumes for stage and television shows, and has to dispose of them when the productions are finished.
“We donate a lot of clothes to a home for battered women,” he said. “And any time there’s an international disaster we send clothes off.”
Then he read about New Brunswick’s rural poor.
This week, he sent two bundles of clothing for distribution by the Unemployed Workers of Rural Canada, based in Woodstock, N.B.

On a Christmas promo during an episode of SCTV, Juul was part of a subtle commentary on Hollywood phoniness and the closet. He and Lola Heatherton cozied up like they were the ultimate heterosexual show biz couple. But when Lola got to her usual declaration about wanting to bear his children, reality broke through. Juul gave a look of repulsion and walked off. Lola dropped her show-bizzy façade, using a normal voice while following after him, saying “it doesn’t mean anything.”

His design work may be summed up in a review in the Ottawa Citizen of Nov. 23, 1982. A staff writer panned a stage play, except to observe “the outrageous costume designs by Juul Haalmeyer were far wittier than any of the lines.”

That was never the case at SCTV, where everyone abounded in talent that meshed together perfectly. That included the deliberately hackneyed terpsichory of Juul Haalmeyer and his troupe of enthusiastic, but less-than-able, dancers.