For the past 40 years, Marilyn Denis has been waking up the city, her voice on CHUM FM a comforting, familiar part of the rhythm of Toronto’s mornings. Since she announced her retirement from the station on air last Thursday, her life has been a whirlwind of congratulations and memories shared by colleagues, friends and longtime listeners.
“It has been an emotional week,” she told the Star by phone on Monday, just after stepping out of the broadcast booth. “I had a good run.”
Denis, 67, is set to hang up her mic this summer. The transition comes three years after she stepped away from her daytime TV gig on CTV’s “The Marilyn Denis Show,” which she hosted for 13 years. Prior to that, she helmed “Cityline” on Citytv for 19 years. But all along, she has simultaneously kept up the CHUM morning radio gig, in various iterations, since “Roger, Rick and Marilyn” began airing in 1986.
That kind of longevity is rare in broadcasting. It’s rarer still, in the current media landscape littered with layoffs and shutterings, that a media personality gets to retire on their own terms. Many wondered: Why is Marilyn Denis leaving, and is it of her own volition? She assures that it is, and that she chose this timing. “I feel like I’ve hit a benchmark,” Denis said, “and people seem extra happy for you because these days a lot of people in our business are not.”
So what’s next for her? “Honestly, I am just stepping away, not a thing on my horizon,” she said. “And that feels great. Making the announcement, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders.”
When Denis left her TV show in 2023, it was a seismic shift. At the time, she was used to waking up at 3:30 for the 5 a.m. radio show start, speaking on air until 9, then running to the makeup chair and straight into a TV taping. “That first day, I got in the car after radio and said to myself, ‘What do you want to do?’” The answer wasn’t clear. “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” She decided to go to the bakery, then to the dry cleaners. This completely mundane morning was so unusual for her that it was a thrill.
Over a total of 50 years in broadcasting, the special sauce Denis has brought is an oft-touted quality that’s hard to pin down: relatability. What does it mean to be relatable? “Real life is about texture; the everyday, the routine,” she said. “I’m a big one for routine.”
She was never going to be a shock jock. “I was always aware of little kids listening in the back seat of the car. The hustle in the morning when we are getting our act together.”
On TV, the audience sat an arm’s length away, and Denis could see their reactions in real time. But “radio is very intimate” in a different way. “It comes in the shower with us, making breakfast, putting on makeup.”
Denis relished getting to know her radio audience when the show did a travel broadcast segment called Breakfast in Barbados. “We would be down there with listeners — the guy who worked for the TTC; the pharmacist; the women who brought their sisters on the trip or their mom; the teachers who really weren’t supposed to take that time off.”
She was always mindful of who was tuning in, and of “how far the signal went out.” One morning, driving to visit family in Pittsburgh so early it was still dark out, Denis came to a toll booth in Dunkirk, N.Y. “When I spoke to the woman in the booth, she heard my voice and said, ‘Is that you? I was wondering why you weren’t on the air this morning.’” The woman went on to explain that she brought the radio along when she fed her horses before work each day.
“Radio is your buddy,” Denis said. “It is my buddy, too.”
Looking back on her first day at the station, Denis grows nostalgic. In the 1970s and ’80s, before the online multimedia explosion, CHUM was a giant in Toronto and DJs such as Roger Ashby and Rick Hodge were big stars around town. It was a dream gig.
Denis, who had been working in Calgary, pursued the station manager to ask for a job. “I was hounding him,” she said. She sold her Subaru, moved into a Toronto apartment and took her shot. “We went into the production room with Roger, and it felt like just the two of us, though I’m told there were other people in the room,” she said. The chemistry, that indefinable quality that makes radio hosts’ banter connect with listeners, was there. “Roger went down the hall and said, ‘She’s the one.’ I didn’t know I had gotten the job, but I felt it.”
For her first show, the day after her 28th birthday in July 1986, Denis showed up at 1331 Yonge St. in a purple outfit with a matching scarf and high heels. Ashby’s response: “You aren’t going to dress up all the time, are you?”
That studio was a beacon in the city, its big red sign lighting up the Yonge strip at night with its neon glow. Denis regrets that she didn’t snap a photo of the sign on a flatbed truck when it was moved down to Richmond and Duncan in 2009. “But you know I touched every letter on that sign. I will never have a chance to do that again.”
Working live radio for so long has meant riding a lot of personal and public highs and lows on air. Even the birth of her son, Adam Wylde, was part of the show. “The guys called me live in the hospital and told me they had decided to call him Little Elvis,” Denis said. This was about two years into her time at CHUM. As a working mom, she did the afternoon shift, taking care of sports and activities after school, and evenings. “His dad got him ready for school every morning.”
Today, Wylde is a broadcaster and podcaster himself, and Denis has a 6 ½-year-old granddaughter to dote on. She also has a later-in-life romance; she married her husband, Jim, an anesthesiologist, eight years ago. Back in the day, he was her prom date.
Denis was born in Edmonton but spent her high school years in Pittsburgh, where she and Jim were in the same group of friends “from grade 9 to 11 — oh, I’m going to get that wrong again and he’s gonna tell me about it,” she said, laughing. “He moved away without telling anybody. Then he called me up and asked me to prom senior year. I thought, ‘Great, no drama, he’s my friend.’”
Life ensued, but Jim reached out again 40 years later, from Seattle. Calls turned into dinner, which turned into a big move to Canada and then marriage. Their lives slotted together. “He understands shift work; he’s adapted to this new world and the wacky media people in it,” Denis said. “We are loving life and are really lucky, we know that.”
Leaving the world of radio after half a century will mean more time together, but also another massive life shift. “I will need to go see a therapist,” Denis joked. “But seriously, if I could have told 28-year-old Marilyn she would still be here in 40 years? Wow.”
