For someone renowned for showboating clothes on television, Jeanne Beker is surprisingly comfortable getting naked on the page. Heart on My Sleeve: Stories From a Life Well Worn is the candid, chatty third memoir from the celebrated Toronto-based broadcaster, 72, famed for the long-running, globally syndicated show FashionTelevision and, before that, years of music journalism.

Heart on My Sleeve’s narrative thread is propelled by Beker’s fashionista persona, deployed these days on Style Matters, a weekly e-commerce show on TSC. In the book, she uses specific garments and accessories – each illustrated by daughter Bekky O’Neil, 37, and most still in Beker’s possession – as springboards to personal and professional recollections. 

These include good rock star interviews (plaid shirt, Paul McCartney), bad rock star interviews (designer pants, Madonna), fateful first encounter with her current beau (black fishnet tights) and her successful treatment for breast cancer (silver wrist cuff). 

“The cancer journey changed my perspective on absolutely everything, including how I see myself moving through the world,” Beker says in a phone interview about the memoir. “And fashion is a part of that. On one hand [with the cancer diagnosis] it was, ‘Fashion, so superficial. It doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things.’ But it can be empowering.” Beker chokes up. “A week or so before my first chemo appointment, I bought myself a cuddly sweater because I thought creature comforts were going to be important sitting in that chemo chair.” 

Just six weeks after her diagnosis in May 2022, Beker writes, a lifelong friend abruptly succumbed to lung cancer. It’s one of several deaths, including that of Beker’s beloved mother, Bronia Beker, and her dear friend, figure skating legend Toller Cranston, that seed gravitas amid giddy tales of covering Canadian and international pop culture with The NewMusic, MuchMusic, Movie Television and FT across six decades. 

Beker, who splits her time between Toronto and a “beautiful country house” she shares with partner, Iain MacInnes, in Northumberland County, Ont., also reflects on the trials of single parenthood in the book, recounting how she raised Bekky and her sister Joey, 35, after her second marriage to former Toronto radio personality Denny O’Neil, a.k.a. Bob Magee, crashed in 1998. There are recollections of meeting luminaries from Pierre Trudeau to Keith Richards and, rather unexpectedly, flashes of the paranormal.

Some stories recounted in Heart on My Sleeve have been detailed previously: an early-70s stint in Paris studying mime with Étienne Decroux, who also taught Marcel Marceau; her on-camera work at the groundbreaking Citytv under Moses Znaimer, now the president and CEO of ZoomerMedia Ltd., who Beker credits with broadcasting innovations like, for example, introducing entertainment segments (hers) to nightly newscasts. 

Video archives and YouTube clips allowed Beker to revisit and quote memorable interviews as she was writing, but the book reveals more behind-the-scenes details about her sit-downs with designers like Alexander McQueen and Patrick Kelly and musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. 

Beker recalls finally being granted an in-person interview with the reticent musician in 1986. Lightfoot was so impressed with the resulting piece that he invited Beker, then pregnant with Bekky, to dinner at a local steak house, then back to his home in Toronto’s tony Rosedale neighbourhood. 

“Of course, if that came from any other musician… I might have balked,” she writes. “But this was definitely not a come-on, so I agreed.” Once there, he graciously offered to play any song she wanted to hear. “I blurted out, If You Could Read My Mind, which he unspooled as the pair sat on his living room floor. 

Beker also recounts strange occurrences that she characterizes as “just… whoa.” In 2011, she was invited to host the Toronto launch of Oscar de la Renta’s new fragrance at the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was their last encounter before his 2014 death from cancer. “Serendipitously – I say this because I’m sure angels were involved – I was at a Toronto vintage boutique trying on dresses for an upcoming event when I got the call with the news. The dress I had on [at that moment] was a bright red Oscar de la Renta gown.”

She also says her late mother, who had been nagging her to partner up, helped unite her with MacInnes. Just two weeks after Bronia died in May 2015 at 94, Beker, then 63, was hesitating about going to an event at the McMichael Art Gallery in Kleinburg, Ont. Since it was one of Bronia’s favourite places, she decided to go in her honour, and that’s where they met. 

“It was love at first sight,” she says, noting that MacInnes, a widowed financial advisor and stockbroker who was then living in Port Stanley, Ont., wasn’t someone she would have crossed paths with otherwise. That “magical night,” she accepted his invitation to accompany him to his native Scotland. “I suspect Toller had some [mystical] bearing on that meeting as well,” she says, describing her friend as “one of the most colourful people I’ve met in my life, and I’ve met a lot of them.” 

In the book, Beker recalls a dinner party Cranston threw where he “practically ordered” her to dress like a dominatrix. He then cheekily sat her next to broadcasting exec Ivan Fecan, then head of CBC TV. “I didn’t suddenly make it to mainstream prime time the way Toller was convinced I would,” she writes, “Still, I had a grand time [though] it may have hurt my credibility with our national broadcasting network.”

Her parents, Bronia and Joseph Beker, were Holocaust survivors, and taught her “one of life’s great lessons: forgiveness.” In an especially poignant chapter, Beker details how Bronia – who was 18 when war erupted in Europe – hid in a secret underground bunker at her father’s house in Kozowa, eastern Poland. 

“While trying to locate the bunker, the Nazis plugged up some pipes through which my mother and her relatives were getting air. All of her family suffocated right in their own home. My mother was the sole survivor.” 

If further proof was needed that Bronia didn’t hold a grudge, Beker fondly recalls the relationship between her mother and a “remarkably skilled” German seamstress named Mrs. Olson, forged in their adopted country of Canada, which resulted in years of beautiful bespoke dresses for the Beker women.  

Some of those are sure to be on display at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum when, starting in June 2026, a year-long Jeanne Beker retrospective launches. Beker, who is co-curating the show with acclaimed Calgary-based designer Paul Hardy, says the eye-popping ephemera will include fashion show invitations, backstage passes, notes from designers, archival footage and some truly vintage pieces. 

“I’m such a packrat,” she laughs. “I have the first radio my parents bought when they got off the boat from Austria in 1948 and which was an iconic symbol to me. And I’ve got all the clothes, of course.”