StJohnSmythe.com

St. John was born in New Brunswick, Canada, on June 20th, 1963 to parents Sandra and Bertram. Soon after, his parents separated and St. John relocated to New York with his father, who’s new boyfriend found a job for him ushering at the Radio City Music Hall. He never saw his cherished mother again.

The sixties in New York agreed with St. John, who “absorbed all it had to offer like a hungry sponge”. Though reading, writing, composing poetry and painting by age of six months, an early drugs habit meant that St. John had to live with the humiliation of diapers until his mid teens. With his now characteristic good humor, and artistic flair, St. John learned to turn this disadvantage into an impressive comedic powerhouse.

Bertram’s job allowed the young artist (and critic) unprecedented access to the wealth of talent flooding through the doors of the iconic Radio City Music Hall. But it wasn’t long before the gregarious and prescient St. John was spending most of his spare time and pocket money on immersing himself in the East Village scene.

By his eighteenth birthday, St. John had a string of failed stage shows to his name, and a dozen unpublished novels -- that he continues to this day to “shop around”. So he, reluctantly at first, took a job writing reviews for “The Village Voice”. His column rapidly built in popularity, achieving syndication all over the nation, as well as in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

A year later, two days after his nineteenth birthday, his father was taken violently ill from consuming a suspicious kielbasa in Little Italy. The hospital fees quickly consumed all their savings, and St. John had to take out a large loan. These additional commitments forced St. John to drop out of college and take on additional work as a runner for the local studios.

It was on a delivery job to ABC that he encountered the legendary Mika Bernstein.

As with many apparently random meetings, this one marked a major change. Mika was so impressed by the young St. John, that he offered him a job as a researcher on the ill-fated late night talk show “Live at the Fringe”. When the regular host, Jules Mandrake, was suddenly taken ill, it was St. John who was offered the daunting task of anchoring the night’s show. Although this promotion was only for two nights, St. John was smitten by it and began approaching other stations with a proposal for a new show that he called initially “Conversations in Art”, which he would host.

Being no stranger to rejection, St. John continued his hunt for over two years, eventually finding a new job -- and home -- working on the show for a new station called Omni Dazzle, in Los Angeles. The night before it was due to premier, the show was re-named “The Art of Conversation”, and it has remained so ever since. St. John’s father even managed to travel all the way from hospital, in New York, to LA for the first day’s filming.

In the intervening years, “The Art of Conversation” has become a household name, and introduced generation after generation to the personalities and personal practices of artistic greats from across time and around the world.

To this day, St. John’s father demands that the wards TV be tuned into his son’s show every night.

He is a licensed pilot.