Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge
Tom Bower
The riveting tale of how the wanabee aristo Conrad Black and his social-mountaineering wife Barbara gulled their way into the City, the Tory party, Wall Street and High Society. This new paperback edition will be fully updated to include details of Black’s high-profile trial for corporate fraud, sure to claim international attention.The rise and fall of the media tycoon Conrad Black is rivalled in its spectacular extravagance only by the machinations of his social-mountaineering wife, Barbara Amiel. Together their story of overweening ambition and greed is a modern-day classic of hubris.There is no bolder or better-informed chronicler of the follies of the rich and powerful than Tom Bower. Fearless in the approach which has brought him accolades for his gripping exposés of Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Fayed and Richard Branson, Bower reveals how the Blacks financed a billionaire’s lifestyle and won friends and influence in London and New York.Born into considerable wealth in Canada, Conrad Black bought and sold (but never effectively managed) several businesses, from mining and tractors to broadcasting companies and newspapers. In 1985 he bought the Telegraph group in London, where very little was known of the controversy over his past financial dealings.In 1992 he married Barbara Amiel, who later famously said, ‘I have an extravagance that knows no bounds’. Besotted with his wife, he began living way beyond his means. Fabulous parties, jewellery, clothes, private jets and homes followed. In 2003 an independent report in America accused him of ‘outright fraud’, ‘ethical corruption’ and ‘corporate kleptocracy’ – allegations that he will vigorously deny at his trial in Chicago in 2007. This edition will be updated to include the full story of the trial in all its sensational detail.Tom Bower’s book, based on over 150 interviews with bankers, politicians, celebrities, power-brokers and close friends, is packed with intimate revelations. It is a hugely entertaining account of gullibility in high places.
Conrad and Lady Black
Dancing on the Edge
Tom Bower
DEDICATION (#ulink_e5fd7f8b-2260-55ce-a6d5-e5b7f3ccb959)
For Ruth
CONTENTS
Cover (#uce9aab6b-dff0-5373-8c02-f56ee15d4f0c)
Title Page (#ue94fff1e-0e14-51db-999f-d153ada6c955)
Dedication (#u9a9d8cb8-9349-550f-9f19-d38634f036eb)
Preface (#u8f9a0463-13cc-5e5c-99b9-60f87e49287c)
Introduction: The Wedding, 26 January 1985 (#u2c511486-5ee5-527d-961d-da7c8ceacd70)
1 A Timely Death (#ub4c837d1-dfdc-59ea-9b20-7e6926e194c2)
2 The Stain (#u442ebb1c-b51e-5519-90fa-502819ef97f4)
3 The Survivor (#ucc35d46d-fda7-5d85-b0ed-8ff0bd127801)
4 Salvation (#ub093fd20-beb4-5dfc-bcb4-595632247f11)
5 The Visit (#uc047f892-3a2b-54ca-a931-61104e8a95aa)
6 Inevitable Union (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Demons (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Bliss (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Torpedo (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The A-List (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Sliding Towards the Edge (#litres_trial_promo)
12 ‘Thief!’ (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Purist (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Resurrection (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Trial (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_f38d3d95-2702-5756-b469-f8fbf2d37b3c)
Conrad Black’s email arrived at 1.15 a.m. on 1 April 2006, April Fool’s Day in London. Black, whom I had known since the mid-1980s, was well aware of this book’s progress, and said he had been contacted by many of his and his wife’s acquaintances, seeking his advice as to whether they should talk to me. His response was nothing if not graphic:
Dear Tom,
Many people have contacted Barbara and me asking if they should talk with you. Our usual response is that you have made it clear that you consider this whole matter a heart-warming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I am on my way to the prison cell where I belong. It is the false rise and well-deserved downfall of crooked charlatans; a variant on your treatments of Maxwell, Fayed, and Rowland. You have expressed essentially this view many times that have been reported to me.
He asked me to prove that I was not writing ‘a pompous, defamatory celebration of the supposed demise of people you personally dislike’. In justification of his indignation, and keen that I should understand his innocence, he continued:
The rough facts are that I am an honest businessman; the chances of my committing an illegality are less than zero, this will be clear when my accusers have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of innocent people and not just manipulate the agencies of the US and Canadian governments to act on the pre-emptive presumption of guilt and conduct a prolonged assassination of careers and reputations.
Conrad Black believes that he is the victim of political and personal prejudice. He has damned those seeking ‘a big scalp (mine)’, and believes his persecutors first sought his social ostracism and bankruptcy, and later destroyed his ‘fine company’. Under his ownership, he commented with some reason in his second email during the night, the two Telegraph newspapers in London were better ‘compared to what preceded and followed us’. In his opinion, the only victims of his personal and corporate downfall were the creators of a successful enterprise. Other than himself, he argued, no one lost money – shareholders, traders or pensioners. His critics and his American prosecutor contest that claim.
Convinced of his acquittal, Black pledged himself to ‘turn the tables on our oppressors’. He would wreak vengeance upon those responsible for his demise: ‘We will bring this entire, gigantic, malicious persecution down around the ears of its authors.’ He was, he wrote later that night, proud of his robustness. Three years after the news of his predicament emerged, and one year before his trial, he observed that no one could deny that ‘despite my wildly applauded setback I am completely undaunted, and that I am not a tight-lipped source of “no comment”’. Indeed, his high-profile appearances around Toronto had become the stuff of gossip.
In another email during that night, Conrad Black keenly anticipated the stardom that he would achieve at his trial, which was due to start in Chicago in March 2007:
My trial will be timely; Thermidor will have dawned, and legally responsible capitalism will survive, like Talleyrand and Fouché.
He concluded:
I promise a spectacular trial …
Regards, CONRAD BLACK.
Conrad Black’s life story is not the familiar tale of a tycoon’s ‘rise and fall’, or the tragedy of a self-delusional fantasist. Rather, it is the drama of a plutocrat and aristocrat who stands accused as a kleptocrat. He will arrive in Chicago preceded by two damning findings: the first by a court in Delaware, the second by a special committee of investigators appointed with his approval. The investigators’ withering 513-page condemnation of Black’s business methods would have destroyed most men, and his vigorous protestations of innocence have won him some sympathy. The riddle is just how he has found himself in this position. In the search for an answer it is important to understand his marriage to Barbara Amiel, and her own behaviour.
Beautiful, intelligent and vivacious, Barbara Amiel appeared over the years to follow her husband in promoting herself and her opinions. In Toronto, London and New York she became famous for aggressively advancing her libertarian, conservative and politically incorrect philosophy. Exceptionally, she based much of her distinctive and lauded journalism upon her own remarkable life, provocatively describing her personal experiences, especially in relation to drugs, sex, personal relationships and cash. Her 1986 article ‘Why Women Marry Up’ is one of her many prophetic, self-fulfilling accounts of seeking fame and millions which would climax sixteen years later in her immortal admission, ‘I have an extravagence that knows no bounds.’ Quite consciously, she invited the public to examine every aspect of her private life, and in turn wrote revelatory accounts of others’ lives. In many respects she is a unique woman, which was precisely her attraction to Conrad Black.
However, to blame Barbara Amiel for Conrad Black’s apparent downfall would be simplistic. Black is responsible for his own fate, although Amiel undoubtedly influenced the circumstances which have led to him facing his destiny in a Chicago courtroom. She is, of course, not accused of any crime; nevertheless, she did closely accompany him during his meteoric rise after 1992 in London, New York and Toronto. She not only shared his desire for the spotlight, but assumed serious responsibilities in the management of his six hundred newspapers. As a well-paid director of his corporation, she influenced the choice of the papers’ editors, their policies and their appearance. Barbara Amiel is not known ever to have cautioned the staff of those papers to restrain their invasion of other people’s privacy. Her power was never in doubt, not least because she allowed no one to forget her status. In recognition of her contribution, the corporation paid over $1 million of her salary to Black-Amiel Management, an offshore account in Barbados. She also earned substantial sums from stock options, and charged the corporation millions of dollars in expenses for the use of jets, homes, staff and much more. Her conduct made her an important factor in the series of events which has led Lord Black to what for him will be a unique experience – judgement by a jury of twelve common men and women.
Conrad Black’s story is emphatically not a Shakespearian tragedy or the struggle of a flawed hero. In every respect, Black was consciously responsible for his conduct. In the course of the last twenty years, there is no evidence of him confronting dilemmas or crises of conscience about right and wrong. On the contrary, he is proud to have followed his principles. Both Lord and Lady Black are convinced of his inevitable acquittal. But that judgement depends upon an anonymous jury, and there is more than irony in the fact that a man who isolated himself amid privilege throughout his life should now have to rely on the common people to decide his fate. Considering his disdain for the mass censure he has received over the past months, Conrad Black’s certainty that he will be acquitted by a jury is remarkable. The well-educated subject of this book has not taken to heart the lines of John Dryden, the seventeenth-century poet:
Nor is people’s judgment always true:
The most may err as grossly as the few.
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e6e41c80-663c-5971-aa17-69c8ca16ce36)
The Wedding,26 January 1985
‘Six months at most. I give this marriage just six months.’
‘Come off it, Posy. How do you know?’
‘Because I lived with David Graham in London. Every night he came home with a different girl.’
Posy Chisholm Feick, a sixtyish Canadian travel writer and socialite, had grabbed the attention of every guest around the table: ‘They came in every shape and size. Even a black girl with a shaved head.’ The band struck a high note in the crowded ‘Stop 33’ room at the summit of Toronto’s Sutton Place Hotel, but, encouraged by her audience, Posy continued uninterrupted. ‘I saw them every morning. He’d rush off to work, leaving the girls to struggle by themselves.’
‘So what?’ asked Allan Fotheringham, the veteran political columnist.
‘Well,’ smiled Posy, with the confidence of an expert in sex and marriage, ‘one of them said he’s a lousy lay. Barbara won’t like that.’ Eyes narrowed and mouths pursed.
‘Just hold on for the ride,’ smiled Peter Worthington, the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Sun.
‘Barbara wants what’s best for Barbara,’ added one man, recalling painful rejection. ‘She’s too restless,’ sighed another failed suitor. ‘And David’s so boring,’ chimed a new voice.
‘Let’s take bets,’ said Posy, spotting the bride swaying in her white, backless Chanel dress. Posy’s wager was certainly high, but the loud Latin American music and the alcoholic haze prevented anyone hearing the size of Allan Fotheringham’s risk. ‘It won’t last long,’ shouted Posy, throwing back another glass. ‘She’s a wild and crazy girl,’ said Fotheringham, speaking with the benefit of carnal experience of the bride. ‘She’s got an eye for the big chance. This is it. She won’t let it go.’
The forty-four-year-old bride now interrupted the jousting at the large round table. After fluttering around a room filled with sober politicians, famous millionaires, rich professionals and Canada’s media moguls, including Conrad Black and his wife Shirley, Barbara Amiel appeared to welcome the sight of the group of rowdy journalists. For twenty years that crowd had represented her social and professional background, but her marriage indicated her removal from them. Famous throughout Canada as an opinionated columnist, Amiel had just resigned as comment editor of the Toronto Sun to join her third husband, David Graham, in London. The rollercoaster years of drugs, adultery and emotional mayhem were over. She was, she had admitted, ‘ashamed of my personal life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She had shared beds with too many ‘beach boys and wildly unreliable bohemians’. They were good for ‘steamy novels but short unions’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Years of notoriety would be replaced by domesticity, motherhood and fidelity.
For the uncynical at the wedding party, Barbara Amiel’s choice was understandable. David Graham was handsome and seriously rich. Shrewd investments in the fledgling cable network business had produced a company worth US$200 million,
(#ulink_c0964bbd-1621-502d-8bac-6e092860695d) and homes in Toronto, New York, Palm Beach, St Tropez and London worth another $100 million. For the former middle-class north London girl known to plead, ‘My father was very poor and unemployed,’ the prospect of returning home in style was irresistible. Graham’s motives also appeared unimpeachable.
Barbara Amiel was renowned not only for her beauty, wit and intelligence, but also, among the favoured, as a remarkable sexual companion. ‘Sex is great with Barbara,’ confirmed one of her wedding guests. ‘A great body, and her breasts are big and beautiful. Like lovely fried eggs.’ ‘Yeah,’ agreed another connoisseur. ‘She wants to be admired for her brains, but she keeps pushing her breasts into men’s faces.’ Amiel would be the first to admit that sex, ‘the key to our entire being’, was her trusted weapon.
(#litres_trial_promo)
During the evening, for most men gazing at a seemingly tough, unemotional personality, Amiel’s thin waist, long dark hair and Sephardic looks were alluring but unobtainable. Only David Graham and her former lovers realised that her harshness was a masquerade, honed during a tough battle for survival, to gain protection from rejection. Behind the façade the bride was a vulnerable woman, desperate to fulfil her lovers’ fantasies. Like cosmetics applied every morning, she relied on her chosen man’s image to project herself. After dallying in the past with left-wing politics, a hippie lifestyle and impoverished men, she had chosen to be reincarnated by marrying class, wealth and looks. ‘You can’t believe how good David is in bed,’ she had said to a girlfriend just days before her wedding, with seeming conviction. ‘I couldn’t do without this man. I had to have him.’
Few believed that Graham, a quiet, unexciting man, matched Amiel’s description. Rather, many assumed, her head had been turned after researching an article for Maclean’s magazine entitled ‘Who’s Who in Canada’s Jet Set’. Gushingly, she had written that the rich, with their private planes and pampered lifestyles, ‘live our fantasies in a world which has no borders, just locations’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To join that world, she had decided to ‘marry up’, a phrase she would use in the headline of a subsequent confessional article.
(#litres_trial_promo) The ‘trade-off’, she admitted, was crude: ‘her looks for his money – his power as her meal ticket’. Together, Barbara Amiel and David Graham could present themselves around the globe as a ‘power couple’, rich and influential.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Established ‘power couples’ were scattered across the Sutton Place’s party room. Sitting with Ted Rogers, head of the Rogers Communications empire, was Conrad Black, the owner of an expanding newspaper group. Like many of Canada’s establishment, Rogers praised Black’s intellect, but voiced suspicions about the pompous businessman’s eagerness to make money. Branded as a ‘bad boy’ or a ‘bad joke’, Black had not won admirers since saying in the early 1980s, ‘Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated, unfairly in my opinion … It is a motive that has not failed to move me from time to time.’ Strangely, he seemed impervious to the impression his admission had created. Bad publicity was nothing new to the ambitious Black. Over the previous two decades, while seeking the spotlight as a supporter of right-wing causes, the aspiring media baron had placed himself in many firestorms. His outspokenness was a characteristic which he shared with Barbara Amiel.
Black’s admiration for the bride was curious. Professionally, she represented much that he despised. Rather than writing on the basis of careful, measured research, she was famous for spewing out gut prejudices. Years earlier, her left-wing sentiments had been interpreted by Black as envy of the rich and powerful, but after changing boyfriends, her politics had somersaulted. The former Marxist had changed colours, and now chanted her praise for capitalism. Meeting Amiel for the first time at a dinner party in Toronto in 1979 had converted Black into a fan. How could he resist a woman who professed her admiration for his blockbuster biography of the right-wing former Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis? Like so many men in ‘Stop 33’ that evening, he had become enamoured of her star qualities. There were also similarities between them.
Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel had both been afflicted by depression, insecurity and exposure to suicide. Both their fathers had killed themselves, and both Black and Amiel had had moments of the deepest despair at certain points in their lives. Neither imagined that the wedding reception was a mere interlude before the consummation of their own explosive relationship, but with hindsight their eventual union seems almost inevitable.
Fate determined a strange climax for both of them at the end of the reception. Sharing a limousine, Conrad Black and Allan Fotheringham argued violently, and parted on bad terms. Across town, lying in bed after her wedding celebrations, Barbara Amiel was presented by her new husband with a pre-nuptial agreement that had been drawn up earlier. ‘Sign here,’ said Graham. Amiel did as she was ordered. She was in love.
* (#ulink_db9fbeb6-9c48-541a-ab02-85513ed8b93a) Unless the context indicates otherwise, throughout the book monetary values are given in American rather than Canadian dollars.
1 A Timely Death (#ulink_f77c9bcd-1f50-5f8f-b8e1-8ef16f738971)
FLOPPED IN HIS ARMCHAIR, regularly refilling his glass with neat vodka, George Black sermonised to his thirty-one-year-old younger son Conrad throughout the night of 29 June 1976. Despite the appearance of civility presented by the chintz and the solid furniture in the grand house in the Bridle Path, Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhood, the resentful sixty-seven-year-old regularly vented his bitterness on the subject of wealth and power. Frustrated by isolation and depression, the ailing recluse had astutely accumulated substantial capital from his business activities, but his withdrawn personality and habits had deprived him of any influence, with one exception: his son Conrad.
Over the years, his father’s lectures on history, power and finance had inculcated in Conrad similar feelings about supremacy and manipulation. Systematically, George had dragooned the youthful Conrad to utilise his photographic memory by giving boastful theatrical performances at social occasions. With little prompting, the precocious boy had paraded his expertise on Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle and other political giants. Similarly, if the opportunity arose, audiences were amazed by his encyclopaedic recitations of battleships, armies and warfare stretching back to the eighteenth century. Without hesitation, as a party piece the teenager could recite the names of all the ships, armies and generals engaged in the most obscure European battles, or of successive prime ministers and monarchs over two centuries, or, if allowed, repeat keynote speeches of statesmen long dead. ‘Reel off the fifteen leading ships in the Spanish Armada,’ George Black would order, ‘and the names of all the admirals in the First World War.’ His son’s memory was infallible. Late into the night, amid a mist of tobacco smoke, those tutorials and memory games about world history infected the loner’s mind with the importance of defying the vulnerability of human weakness.
Stifled by depression, George Black failed to appreciate the burden he was inflicting upon his son. The father offered his children no physical affection, and his wife Jean, always known as ‘Betty’, was similarly cold and remote. In that loveless atmosphere, Conrad compensated for his emotional insecurity by revelling in the lives of historic heroes. At eight, he had been smitten by the memoirs of General de Gaulle, the underdog who rebelled against unpopularity and overcame adversity to become a national hero. Defiance was a trait Conrad Black was encouraged to admire by his father, an outsider cruelly spurned by lesser men.
Ever since George Black had been unceremoniously dismissed in 1958 from the Argus Corporation, a sprawling Canadian conglomerate, his resentment had festered. During their all-night sessions, Conrad Black was imbued with a mission to exact revenge upon those responsible for humiliating his father. He knew them well, because, despite his reclusiveness, George Black had introduced his son to a remarkably privileged lifestyle.
Few could have imagined the transformation of George Black over the previous thirty-six years. In 1940 the tall, articulate, aggressive twenty-nine-year-old accountant was managing a factory in Montreal producing propellers for Allied war planes. With pride, he recounted how his company was the only Canadian government-owned manufacturer during the war to earn a profit. But there was also frustration. The graduate from Winnipeg, a provincial outpost, damned his work as unglamorous and his colleagues as ‘a hopeless bunch’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In July 1944 his future appeared lacklustre, until the banker Edward P. Taylor, also from the Canadian provinces, offered an escape. Unlike George Black, Taylor had identified a recipe for great personal wealth.
Ten years older than Black, Taylor enjoyed the expensive lifestyle of a clever but unpopular speculator who paraded as a prominent racehorse owner at the Jockey Club of Canada. In 1944 he was convinced that the end of the war would unleash huge prosperity. To exploit that opportunity, he established Argus with a group of like-minded Toronto investors, including Eric Phillips and John ‘Bud’ McDougald. Based at 10 Toronto Street, an elegant, two-storey, neo-classical building not far from Bay Street, the city’s financial area, the partners pooled their assets invested in Canadian companies. Among those investments was Canadian Breweries, which George Black was invited to manage on the company’s behalf.
During those all-night sessions, which started in Conrad’s childhood, George Black regaled his son with stories of his struggle to transform Canadian Breweries into an international success. Promoted as the company’s president in 1950, he had savagely cut costs, dismissed staff and created success from disaster. The prize was phenomenal growth – sales and profits had tripled – delivering Taylor’s ambition to control the world’s biggest brewery, embracing Canada, the USA and Britain. The downside was the effect on Black’s health. Insomniac and increasingly intoxicated, he would arrive in his office at midday, boasting that because he delegated authority his presence was not required. Management of the empire, he insisted, could be achieved by telephone, without the need for him to visit the factories. The essence of business, George emphasised to his son, was strategy rather than micro-management. In reality, ‘delegation’ had become George Black’s excuse to recover from hangovers and the morning’s vodka.
High among Black’s priorities was the need to confront the trade unions, which he despised. In 1958, by forging an alliance with other brewers, he challenged the unions to remove their restrictive practices, provoking an acrimonious strike. As his profits evaporated, Taylor lost confidence in Black. He wanted to avoid strikes and reverse the decentralisation. ‘You’re out of your skull,’ Black told Taylor. In October 1958 George Black was fired. He damned Taylor, cleared his desk and went home. At forty-seven, he was unemployed, and had received no thanks for his achievements. From the sidelines he watched as Canadian Breweries declined. No longer the world’s biggest brewer, the company was sold in 1968 to a competitor.
Bitter but realistic, George Black noted how greed, arrogance and dishonesty had become the hallmark of Argus’s directors. While some in Bay Street embodied the best of Presbyterian honesty, Taylor and Bud McDougald, the company’s president, were financial cowboys enjoying a reckless lifestyle, avoiding taxes and cheating the minority shareholders. At the hub of that intrigue, McDougald used intimidation and flattery to disguise rampant dishonesty, known in Toronto Street as ‘pushing the envelope’. As George Black understood so well, McDougald was using Argus, a company floated on the Toronto stock exchange, as his private piggybank, spending shareholders’ money to fund a tycoon’s way of life.
Well-dressed and shamelessly ostentatious, McDougald played the mogul to perfection – serving dinner on gold-plated china, hanging chandeliers in his garage, travelling in custom-built cars and private planes, and walking with an undisguised swagger to impress his audience. Teetotal, uneducated but shrewd, the former bond salesman posed as Canada’s pre-eminent social and commercial aristocrat, suavely speaking way above his financial weight, and accustomed to fawning treatment. Unlike other Canadians, McDougald drove around London like royalty in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, mixing with nobles like the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Abergavenny and Lord Crathorne, and standing near the Queen when she inspected her racehorses being trained in his stables at Kingsclere in Hampshire.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Palm Beach, McDougald was the President of the Everglades Club, the social centre for the local super-rich, where Jews were not admitted as members, or even for lunch. In future years this did not diminish Conrad Black’s apparent awe for McDougald’s technique of buying people off with presents and perks.
Argus’s operations were fundamentally dishonest. In their private capacity the company’s directors bought shares in companies involved in the media, catering, retail, chemicals, forestry and agriculture, including Massey-Ferguson, one of the world’s biggest farm equipment manufacturers. They then resold those same shares to Argus, at a profit. The casualties of this insider dealing were Argus’s public shareholders. The directors’ dishonesty, as George Black had impressed upon his son, was compounded by another ruse.
Argus controlled assets worth $4 billion, but that control did not reside with the shareholders. Instead, the company was run by the six principal shareholders of a private company called Ravelston, named after a Scottish estate owned by McDougald’s ancestors. Before his dismissal, George Black had bought 22.4 per cent of Ravelston’s shares; McDougald and Phillips each held 23.6 per cent. Aware of George Black’s astute investment and his acute understanding of the Argus directors’ subterfuge, McDougald had, from an early stage, understood the benefits of flattering Conrad Black.
In 1965, on Conrad’s twenty-first birthday, Bud McDougald gave the precocious young man a painting of Napoleon and, unprecedentedly, membership of the Toronto Club, the meeting place for the city’s elite, entry to which was zealously controlled by McDougald himself. The advantages for Conrad Black were remarkable. Toronto’s commercial life was fixed by the club’s members as they ate, drank and played within the protected building. Finance for their deals was supplied by Canada’s leading financial institution, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), substantially influenced by McDougald, who was a director. To help his protégé’s career McDougald arranged for Black to become, at thirty-two, the youngest director in the bank’s history. That generosity split Conrad’s loyalties. Despite his father’s anger, he practically worshipped McDougald’s mystique and power. While puffing a cigar in the Toronto Club, Black would enjoy repeating McDougald’s homily, ‘If these bankers had any brains, we’d be lending them money and they’d be getting rich, instead of the other way round.’
Although George Black resented McDougald’s success, he retained his stake in Ravelston. At some stage, he calculated, there would be an opportunity for revenge and profit. That ambition was inculcated into Conrad Black. Steeped in the minutiae of Argus’s personality conflicts and financial dubieties, Conrad emerged with a sophisticated understanding of the inherent deception of the way in which the company was run. Argus rarely held more than a 25 per cent stake in a company, yet McDougald and Taylor behaved like the proprietors, as if they were the owners of the whole lot. Similarly, by assertion and performance, they intimidated Argus’s minority shareholders into believing that they were entitled to behave as the proprietors of the whole company. Their successful intimidation of the little people was a seminal inspiration to Conrad Black.
Besides his father and Bud McDougald, there was a third formative influence on Conrad Black: the lessons of history. Even before his teens, Conrad admired from his copious reading the rise from obscurity to immortal fame of giants who irreversibly changed mankind’s fate. Egoistic self-righteousness, he realised, could overcome adversity, and popular acclaim bestowed permanent glory. The mere appearance of Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln among soldiers and supporters had raised hopes and entrenched loyalty to the leader. History’s heroes, Black learned, exploited their opponents’ weaknesses, outwitted their deceptions, manipulated their ambitions and assembled a coalition of allies to secure victory. Nurturing his own fantasies of eventually standing in the limelight and enjoying similar grandeur, he awaited his chance for revenge. Patience, planning and perfidy would be required to destroy his father’s tormentors.
On most days George Black would awake in a melancholic daze at lunchtime, spend the afternoon speculating on the markets, and after dinner would watch television while drinking himself into a stupor before his long night-time conversation with Conrad. Just before daybreak he would climb the stairs to his bedroom. His wife Betty, a sports enthusiast from the Riley family, whose wealth came from insurance and finance, had little in common with her husband. In recent years, barely tolerating a man who rarely emerged from his house or met visitors, she had condemned her husband as a self-righteous snob and disappeared into her own rooms. Their unpleasant co-existence was interrupted in September 1975, when Jean Black was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.
Eight months later, Conrad, Monte, his elder brother by four years, and their father, accompanied by a nurse, flew with the dying woman in a private plane loaned by Argus to Bermuda, which Jean had always dreamt of visiting. Shortly after their return, on 19 June 1976, she died. George Black declared himself too ill to stand by her grave. After the funeral the mourners returned to the family house, to be told that George was too sick to appear at the wake. Only his closest friends remained when he finally emerged, depressed and showing little will to live. ‘Are you planning a trip during the summer?’ asked one, Douglas Bassett. ‘Yes,’ replied Black. ‘To the dentist in late July.’
Ten days later, after another night-time discussion with Conrad, George Black slowly climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, his son heard cracking wood, and saw his father fall over the banister onto the ground floor.
(#litres_trial_promo) Carried by Conrad into the library, George Black said that he no longer had the will to live. ‘Life is hell,’ he told his son as they awaited the doctor. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ The doctor’s diagnosis was bleak. His father, Conrad was told, was unlikely to survive. Despite the prognosis, Conrad returned to his own home and watched a Charlie Chan film. His viewing was interrupted by a telephone call. George Black, the doctor announced, was dead. Many, occasionally including his son, believed that he had committed suicide. At thirty-two, Conrad Black was an orphan with a purpose.
Toronto’s financial leaders gathered for George Black’s funeral. The pall bearers, who included all Ravelston’s directors, were led by Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor. Conrad watched McDougald with particular interest. While he admired ‘the ultimate Canadian tycoon’,
(#litres_trial_promo) he recognised that he represented Canada’s ‘corporate rot’, and that his fortune had been earned in a uniquely dishonest manner called ‘tollgating’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Conrad’s later pious denunciation of the legend’s ‘venality and self-delusion’ at his father’s graveside did not undermine his endorsement of McDougald’s crushing piety: ‘Some are chosen, some are not.’ In the jungle, Conrad Black was committed to stand among the chosen.
Bud McDougald, like Ravelston’s other major shareholders, Black noted, had no children. Their wives were uninterested in business. Those circumstances would be his opportunity. Ingratiating himself with the older directors was not a chore, but rather an investment. Among Conrad Black’s skills was flattering old, lonely, rich people.
After their father’s funeral, Conrad and Monte Black called on Bud McDougald, who controlled the fate of the two young men’s assets. To Conrad’s relief they were ‘welcomed most graciously’. Whereas Conrad had condemned McDougald as a ‘snob, bigot … and an unlearned reactionary’ who had succumbed to ‘jet-addicted decadence’, on that particular day he encountered ‘an elegant and considerable figure’.
(#litres_trial_promo) After a brief discussion the brothers emerged with a satisfactory deal. Conrad was given a directorship of Argus and Ravelston, while Monte was given directorships of other companies. As if to confirm his younger brother’s intellectual superiority, Monte agreed that Conrad should inherit their parents’ grand house amid seven acres in Bridle Path’s Park Lane Circle. The house matched Conrad’s ambitions. Unlike Monte, an unthreatening bon vivant with a fondness for big cigars, fast cars and good food, Conrad’s dream was to join the establishment and to control an empire matching those of Canada’s principal families, including the Eatons, the owners of the country’s dominant department store chain; the Westons, who owned a food and retail business; the Bronfmans, whose fortune was built on alcohol during the Prohibition; the Thomsons, the media family whose assets included the Times newspapers in Britain; and the investors Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation and Hal Jackman, the inheritor of a large investment fund.
(#litres_trial_promo) Stuck on the periphery, Conrad Black hoped to use his inheritance to become a power on Bay Street and a member of Toronto’s financial mafia. His life over the previous thirty-two years had been a preparation for that struggle.
Privilege and prejudice had been Conrad Black’s roots since his birth in Montreal on 25 August 1944. By the age of five, when the family moved to Toronto, he was cosseted by cooks, butlers, nannies and chauffeurs. In the winter holidays he escaped Toronto’s freeze in the Bahamas. At Nassau’s Porcupine Club he gazed with his father at the Mellons, du Ponts and other American magnates. Although George Black did not rank among the super-rich, he was a successful businessman with an astute intellect. Well-read, and always irritated by those who misused the English language, he noted his son’s exceptional gifts and became preoccupied with creating an extraordinary individual out of him.
Obsessively he ordered Conrad to recall facts, both relevant and irrelevant. After intensive games of chess, his son was encouraged to read encyclopaedias and, like himself, recall what he read. Conrad’s bedrooms were filled with books about the military, wars and politics. He learned not only the names of the world’s ships, both commercial and naval, but their weight, armour thickness and guns. In the midst of the Korean War Conrad Black sat transfixed listening to David Brinkley’s news broadcasts, and watched the television reports of the McCarthy hearings in Washington targeted at unearthing Communist sympathisers. Influenced by his father in favour of capitalism, he grew up with a hatred of those on the left, whom he later damned as ‘phoney, envious and mediocre bleeding hearts whining and snivelling about meritocratic Darwinism’. Nowhere in Black’s education or experience was there any sympathy for the anonymous, simple, honest masses born underprivileged and without special talents. On the contrary, there was boastfulness when in 1952 his father arranged his purchase of a single General Motors share costing $59. The eight-year-old Black had dollar bills spilling from his pockets. When one fell into the mud, he carefully washed it. His journey across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth the following year to watch the coronation in London enhanced the image of a spoilt child taking luxury for granted.
From the age of eleven the unsporting, overweight Black was driven every day to Toronto’s Upper Canada College, one of the country’s elite private schools, in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. Awkward and isolated, he was not a natural enthusiast for a society focused on conformity and obedience. During his school day he could be certain that his family’s servants were cleaning his room, washing his clothes and preparing his dinner. Occasionally the chauffeur returned to serve lunch in the limousine. Voices, books and images conjured up for the young Black a romantic fantasy of enjoying the same unlimited power as history’s titans, assured that whatever he willed would be carried out. Entitlement bred defiance and insolence, fashioning a personality which enjoyed a fight and savoured inflicting defeat. Black’s childhood, remarked John Fraser, a school friend, was like prison for a pre-teenager convinced that he was smarter than the system.
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The scoffs directed at the tubby outsider, Conrad believed, were driven by ‘spite and envy’, one of the oft-repeated phrases that encapsulated his life’s credo. His encyclopaedic knowledge, he assumed, was resented, reinforcing his sense of superiority and hatred of regimentation. He construed his teachers as remote from reality, and their authority as a misuse of power. History, he believed, showed how those exercising authority were flawed. Success was won by those who were unwilling to obey laws. Those who failed to admire him were dismissed as despicable. Teachers whom he judged to be inferior excited his contempt. Defiance, in Black’s interpretation, showed courage. His insolence did not pass unpunished. Regularly he received corporal punishment on his backside or hands with rulers, slippers and even a riding crop. The ‘official terror’, he later recalled, imposed by flagellators, homosexuals and failures transformed him from a ‘sceptic to a rebel, an insurrectionist and an anarchist’.
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There was equal hatred of his fellow pupils who succumbed to the teachers’ tyranny. Black promoted himself as the spokesman against the sadism of his inferiors. ‘This school is like a concentration camp,’ he told John Fraser in the midst of a typical fury. ‘E.P. Taylor could buy this silly place fifty times over. He’d subdivide and make some money off it.’ Fraser and others were baffled by Black’s anger. Life at Upper Canada was little different from that at other schools. The school’s summer camp motto: ‘In the boy is seen the man’ – would prove to be remarkably pertinent.
In May 1959 the school was being rebuilt, and the fourteen-year-old Black spotted lax security in the administrative offices. One night, with little consideration of the consequences, he returned to the building and picked the lock of a room containing the records of the cadet corps. In the hope of avoiding military duty and sport, he removed his own records. On a subsequent night he broke into the room of a teacher whom he particularly disliked and altered the records of some pupils, and in another break-in he copied out the academic records of many pupils. His success bred an outrageous plot to steal and sell the school’s final examination papers.
With two other pupils, he broke into the school’s main office, pocketed the examination papers and used his knowledge of other students’ weaknesses to offer them the relevant papers for an appropriate price. Those in greatest need paid the most. With an exaggerated sense of his own skills, the trademark of any buccaneer, he was excited by the risks he was running. He staked everything on an attempt to demonstrate his bravado and his uniqueness. Thirty-four years later, he would proudly admit to having ‘completely undermined the system’ and to have caused ‘utter chaos’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Blinded by contempt to the possibility of any flaws in his genius, his last throw was calculated to extract revenge for his injured innocence. He gambled that either the authorities were too stupid to discover his deeds, or that his expulsion would be a painless pleasure.
The extraordinary examination results that followed provoked questions, and Black’s role was discovered. Expulsion was inevitable. He felt no shame, and resisted accepting any blame. He dismissed the school’s principal as an ‘insufferable poltroon’, and derided his wife, whose parting words were that his ‘life was over’, as a ‘desiccated old sorceress’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He consoled himself that he had received ‘much moral authority by my failure’, and even John Fraser felt that he was ‘the hero of the hour’. Later, Black described his crime as ‘a fundamental subversive’ plot intended to undermine and overthrow a regime which he compared to that of Nazi Germany. His contempt for those pupils who had exposed his dishonesty matched his scorn for those who were outraged by it. The boys who had bought the stolen papers had wasted their money, but the honest students were also forced to retake the examinations. Black’s condescension towards the innocents, combined with a genuine grievance against those who burnt his effigy on the lawn outside his home, reflected his cavalier arrogance. ‘As I walked out of the gates,’ he wrote self-servingly thirty-four years later, ‘a number of students who literally twenty-four hours before had been begging for assistance – one of them on his knees – were now shaking their fists and shouting words of moralistic execration after me. I’ve never forgotten how cowardly and ungrateful people can be.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He blamed the teachers, the school and the system, denying any personal responsibility for his wrongdoing. On the Day of Judgement, Black expected those vilifying him to have to answer for their lack of faith in himself. He was entitled to their praise, not their scorn.
There was a distinctive aspect to Black’s crime. His home environment – the vengeful father, the ineffectual mother and his solitary adoration of history’s heroes – had created an individual who worshipped bronze effigies. Steeped in the blood and glory of history’s heroes, Black’s self-glorification justified trampling on the weak. In his philosophy, society’s masters were permitted to break laws. Veering off the beaten track was imbued in his character. With that notion implanted in his mind, he had lost the only impediment to committing a major crime – a conscience. Black the schoolboy imagined himself to be an unacknowledged genius entitled to break the law. ‘I am neither proud nor ashamed of what happened,’ he wrote. ‘It was an awful system whose odiousness was compounded by banality and pretension.’
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George Black excused his son as a ‘compulsive insubordinate’ eager to prove his credentials as a capitalist.
(#litres_trial_promo) The school rejected that explanation, believing that the father was blind to his son’s reckless disregard for rules and morality. Spared any proper parental reprimand, Conrad waited for his mother and father to find a new school. Lonely, he remained in his bedroom listening to long-playing gramophone records of Franklin D. Roosevelt winning the wild applause of a crowd in Madison Square Garden for denouncing American capitalism, the rich and politicians’ deviousness, on his way to becoming President. Roosevelt, he would say admiringly, was a misunderstood hero, defiantly ignoring his physical paralysis to shape the world’s future.
Over the next four years Black passed through two more schools – leaving each because of misbehaviour – before being coached in a crammer to scrape a pass in his final school exams in 1962. His mediocrity reflected his laziness. His reliance on his father’s indulgence and finances was reflected in his unwillingness to focus on his study of journalism and then history at Carleton University in Ottawa, an inferior college. Lodging at the expensive Savoy Hotel in Ottawa rather than in student accommodation, he spent his days sleeping or listening to parliamentary debates, and sharing the hotel restaurant in the evening with senators. The consequence was inevitable. During the summer holidays in 1963, while he was visiting historic and literary sites in France with his elder brother Monte, the college warned that he risked expulsion. His schoolboy notions of genius had been shattered. Laziness had bred failure. Instead of returning to study he remained in France as a tour guide, and later travelled to Spain to meet Brian Stewart, a Canadian friend.
Black arrived in Spain depressed, admitting his inability to cope with life’s normal challenges. His initial escape from despair was to read a biography of the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The combination of politics, history and power appealed to a dilettante seeking a purpose. In his fantasy, the ostracised upstart dreamt about basking in public adoration. Whatever he said would be believed because he uttered the last, irrefutable word. Undecided whether he should become a historian or try to earn some money, he resolved at least to overcome his laziness and improve his performance at college.
Back in Ottawa, Black had the good fortune to meet Peter White, the ambitious assistant of a minister in the federal government. Through White, six years older than himself, he was introduced to Canadian politics and politicians. At parties, political meetings and in committees, he became immersed in the country’s political system. In the era of ruptured dreams after President Kennedy’s assassination, White, Black and Brian Stewart drove to Atlantic City to witness the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential election campaign. Standing among 23,000 people stirred by Bobby Kennedy’s speech urging support for the civil rights campaign, Black sensed that he was present at a moment of history, adoring the image of a towering politician, serene among the excited masses. The theatre of leadership transformed Johnson into Black’s latest hero.
The daydreams barely changed after his graduation from Carleton University with a poor degree in 1965, and the completion of his first year of a law degree. Financed by some profits earned on the stock exchange, an inheritance of over $200,000 from his grandparents and regular income from his parents, Black spent part of his summer in Ireland with Galen Weston, the future head of the retailing family, and later drove to Eastern Europe. The news from Ottawa was bad. After failing his law exams, he had been expelled from the university. At twenty-two, he was categorised as a flop. ‘It was time,’ he decided, ‘to outgrow mischief and debauchery.’
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Peter White offered Black salvation – a half interest in two small weekly papers, the Knowlton Advertiser and a French-language paper, serving townships near Montreal. The investment would cost Black $500. He settled in Knowlton, a small lakeside community, and single-mindedly began editing the small-circulation newspapers. Living in a poorly heated boathouse, he spent the day struggling to find news and advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors in the hope of furthering his quest to understand life, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets. At dawn, George Black looked across the lawns to the willow trees and swimming pool, and decided to go to bed. In Knowlton, his son also went to sleep, establishing a lifelong habit of rarely rising before noon.
The escape from ‘mischief and debauchery’ was consolidated the following year, when Montreal hosted the world fair Expo 67, and General de Gaulle visited Canada. The combination of parties and witnessing de Gaulle’s provocative remark that Quebec should declare its independence from Canada taught Black, he would later claim, that he had been ‘a rather silly and undiscriminating rebel’. He enrolled for a law degree at Laval University in Quebec City, an additional challenge because he was one of few English students among the French, although this was a test he endured in comfort. He rented a superb penthouse overlooking the St Lawrence river in the fashionable Port Royal Building close to the entertainment quarter, and drove a Cadillac. Since Peter White had become an assistant to Daniel Johnson, the Premier of Quebec, Conrad Black could combine studying, social life and involvement at the heart of Canada’s political life.
As a conservative in a leftish-liberal country divided by the French and English languages, Black suffered a double frustration. The Conservatives had repeatedly failed to offer any solution to Canada’s permanent problem of containing the separatist demands of the French in Quebec; and secondly, as he was told by a Liberal politician, ‘We’re the party of government here. The Conservatives are like mumps. You get them once a lifetime.’ Nevertheless, Black engaged self-confidently in politics, supporting the English-speaking Conservatives, and to his delight people took seriously his self-conscious party pieces, cultivated since childhood. Using unusually complex vocabulary, he effortlessly recited endless historical details from memory in performances which, he persuaded himself, convinced audiences of his genius and his political acumen.
In 1969, Peter White once again offered the next step. The Sherbrooke Record, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 8,000 published near Montreal, was offered for sale. John Bassett, the owner, was distressed. His marriage had disintegrated and his investment in a new office building and new printing presses had plunged the business to the verge of bankruptcy.
(#litres_trial_promo) On the eve of completing the purchase, White introduced a twenty-six-year-old business-school graduate, David Radler, into the deal. Radler, described by some as mischievous and with few pretensions, was a rough, ambitious fortune-hunter who had learned trading from his father, a restaurateur, and who had recently been selling native handicrafts from a shop at Expo 67. His ratty, sharp manner and his spartan lifestyle emphasised his preoccupation with money. In background and manner Black and Radler had little in common, but they complemented each other’s ambitions. Black wanted influence and wealth, while Radler enjoyed mastering the mechanics of creating that wealth. Black brought the vision of a strategy, while Radler was keen to sweat their assets. The chores at the Sherbrooke Record could be easily divided. Radler would be responsible for the financial management, including advertising and printing, while Black and White filled the space between the advertisements with editorial reports. They borrowed C$18,000 from a bank, and inherited thirty-two employees and a business which had lost $180,000 over the previous twenty-two months.
‘Rape and kill’ was the journalists’ metaphorical judgement about the impact of Black’s arrival. Archives were dumped, photographs were destroyed, wages were frozen, expenses were slashed and half the employees were fired. The remainder were squeezed into a smaller building. Under Radler’s merciless penny-pinching, employees were fined for wasting paper, pencils and their own time. Radler and Black scrutinised any expenditure over $5, and the staff’s written complaints resulted in two-cent fines for wasting paper. Any other conduct deemed to be unacceptable was punished by a $2 levy. Stories of Black and Radler’s nastiness became legion. Helen Evans, the newspaper’s social diarist, was docked three days’ pay for taking time off to bury her husband.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black was proud of his ‘oppression’, claiming that his employees departed qualified for better jobs.
(#litres_trial_promo) Suppliers discovered that their bills would only be paid after repeated threats. ‘A good newspaper,’ Black would be heard later to say, ‘is one that makes money.’ After just two months, the new owners were delighted by their results. In Radler, Black had discovered his ideal partner. While he enjoyed journalism and pontificating about the world, Radler focused on maximising advertising revenue and restraining the journalists. ‘I just screwed that bunch of journos,’ Radler loved to joke. He inflicted similar parsimony upon himself, taking packets of sugar from restaurants for his personal use. His frugality was mirrored in his pride at discovering a newspaper’s ideal manpower: ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Despite a declining circulation because it ignored local stories and reported politics prejudicially, the Sherbrooke Record, with vastly reduced costs, earned a profit. Instead of losing $10,000 a month, it made $15,000. A further loan for Black and Radler to acquire their next newspaper was agreed by their bank, based on them applying a similar formula.
Ownership of newspapers, combining money, politics and the opportunity to win influence, was a natural sanctuary for Black. Posing as a putative press baron he appeared at political conventions in Canada, and contacts among the staff of LBJ, by then retired from politics, arranged remarkable access for Black during a trip to South Vietnam in 1969. With the help of the American ambassador he interviewed President Nguyen Van Thieu, and to his glee his account in the Sherbrooke Record was republished across the USA. Soon after, he travelled through South America, his journey culminating in a stopover in Cuba to witness a marathon five-hour speech by Fidel Castro to his poverty-stricken admirers. Next stop was a visit to Bud McDougald in Palm Beach.
Ever since the sixteen-mile island became colonised in the late 1800s as a winter refuge by the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Carnegies – America’s oligarchs and robber barons – Palm Beach had been a haven for celebrities and the world’s richest players. Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome. Some would carp that Palm Beach, populated by ‘up and down folk’, was ‘a sunny place for shady people’ enjoying an extravagant social life of dinners, dances and parties – and that was precisely the attraction for Conrad Black. The principal qualification for newcomers to mix with the old dynastic fortunes was money. ‘Some people are offended by extreme opulence,’ Black would later tell Peter C. Newman, his first biographer, ‘but I find it sort of entertaining.’ McDougald was Black’s mentor in his quest to achieve that affluence. McDougald had the nerve to travel unashamedly to London for private visits at Argus’s expense, and generally to pilfer the company’s assets. Among his prizes was the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which he ‘purchased’ from Massey-Ferguson at a dishonestly low price. McDougald’s traits, described later by Black as ‘lassitude, greed and vanity’, encouraged Black’s own ambition to possess $100 million and to have the means to escape Canada’s winters.
(#litres_trial_promo) The handicap in 1970 was his psychological turmoil.
Throughout the 1960s Black had revealed a lack of sympathy with the era. Buttoned up in suits, and rarely seen without a tie, he arrived at raucous Friday-night parties stiff and solemn. Rather than enjoying the sexual and cultural revolution, he castigated youthful rebels as ‘banal’ and ‘superannuated poltroons’, and showed disdain for men wearing frilly shirts and pink bell-bottom trousers.
(#litres_trial_promo) Some interpreted his reticence as shyness, an inferiority complex or a sense of inadequacy concealed by his remarkable vocabulary. Others, like the journalist Hubert Bauch, were unsympathetic. ‘Black’s the most arrogant, obnoxious man I ever met,’ said Bauch.
In March 1970, Black awoke to a massive anxiety attack. Sweating profusely, hyperventilating and racked by apprehension about his fate, he was on the verge, some believed, of committing suicide. The accumulation of his loveless childhood, his academic failure and his social insecurity had become an intolerable burden. He sought help in psychoanalysis. Over the next two years he consulted W. Clifford M. Scott and Vivian Rackoff in his efforts to examine what he called ‘my altruism and the dark side’. Subsequently, he also attended the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto for help to cope with his demons. One diagnosis suggested a narcissistic personality disorder – defined as an exaggerated sense of one’s own self-importance and uniqueness. The sufferer, according to experts, has a propensity to take advantage of others in the interest of self-aggrandisement. Others diagnosed Black’s problems as arising from his loveless, dysfunctional home. Intense psychiatry cured Black of his immediate self-destructive urge, but several personality traits remained, including a sense of his entitlement and a lack of conscience. He frivolously described that combination as the ‘Nietzschean philosophy’ that ‘all that does not kill me makes me stronger’. The mention of Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose anti-Christian arguments in favour of the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘superhuman’ made him attractive to the Nazis, revealed the essence of Conrad Black as a self-important hunter for celebrity.
By 1972, Black felt that all his ‘guiding principles were in place’. He believed in God, and in human and economic freedom, and condemned those who prospered from the high taxes paid by others.
(#litres_trial_promo) Echoing his father, he regarded trade unionists as ‘self-seeking frauds who cared little for the workers and often were gangsters or Communists’. Union leaders he characterised as ‘corrupt Luddites’ and ‘advocates of feather-bedding’. Pertinently, he was silent about honesty, respect for the law and help for the disadvantaged.
(#litres_trial_promo) Fixed firmly on the right wing, he was on the losing side of the Conservatives’ defeat in Canada’s 1972 general election by Pierre Trudeau, a popular Liberal who, as Black saw it, campaigned against America and capitalism and in favour of the East European Communist states. In Black’s opinion, Trudeau, ‘more than anyone, turned Canada into a people of whining, politically conformist welfare addicts’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Cut off from Canada’s mainstream politics, Black felt surrounded by Quebec’s aggressive nationalists and anti-Vietnam war deserters from America, whom he scorned as ‘insolent and contemptible’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Conventional and right-wing, Black focused his support on the conservative rich. Supporting minority causes appealed to a man who identified his own plight with underdogs. In a reflection of his own unpopularity at school, he sought to discover the goodness in other disliked personalities. That quest presented a contradiction. While venerating Roosevelt, Lincoln and Napoleon, he also pleaded for the understanding of charlatans, especially those symbolising the tradition of Huey Long, the notoriously corrupt but populist Governor of Louisiana in the 1920s and thirties.
Searching for other lost causes, Black alighted on the life and career of Maurice Duplessis, the dominating political leader of Quebec from 1936 to 1959. In popular opinion, the former Attorney General and Premier was condemned as a rude, drunken, corrupt dictator who ruled the province as a quasi-fascist in alliance with the Catholic Church. To resurrect Duplessis’s reputation, and in the process to rescue his own appalling academic record, Black registered at McGill University after finally graduating in law to produce a thesis for an MA degree about the rogue’s life.
Diligently, Black obtained exclusive access to Duplessis’s private papers, and fleshed out the background of the era by interviewing Duplessis’s contemporaries. In pursuit of the truth he travelled to Cameroon to meet one of them, Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, an eloquent French Canadian missionary. For days they sat in the African bush discussing religion, poverty, life and the fight against disease. Entranced by Léger’s intellect, self-denial and altruism, Black could have been influenced by his understanding of morality, the poor and society. Instead, while he found a new hero, whom he would nominate for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize (it was won by Henry Kissinger), he rejected the purity of Léger’s philosophy. The encounter in Africa was nevertheless a turning point. Inspired by Léger, and with the help of Bishop Carter of London, Ontario, he witnessed the power of the pulpit. Rather than being the enemy of authority, Black was transformed into a man of authority himself. The confirmation of his conversion was the conversation he began with God. In this continuing dialogue, Black would consult the Almighty and be reassured that whatever course of life he decided upon – any plan, ruse or conspiracy – would improve mankind. How far, he would ask, could he go without becoming unstuck? ‘If I go so far, will you still love me?’ His Maker’s approval was crucial if Black was to face down those who vilified him. And God always gave His approval. The integrity of Black’s credo was the life of Duplessis, who had also suffered personal abuse. Through that corrupt leader’s life, Black sought the answers to his own purgatory, and he was rewarded. His vilifiers, God assured him, would have to answer for their lack of faith in Himself.
On his return to Quebec from Africa in 1971, Black began his attempt to restore Duplessis’s reputation. ‘Much of what his critics decried as dictatorship and corruption was really a puckish love of farce,’ wrote Black, who credited Duplessis’s authoritarianism with building new roads and power plants. ‘Maurice Duplessis had too great a sense of the farcical to be arrogant,’ he added admiringly about a politician who accumulated an estimated C$100 million from corrupt payments. In an exhaustive seven-hundred-page text, Black suffocated the reader with endless quotations intended to support every argument in Duplessis’s favour. Unable to focus on the essential facts and crystallise both sides of the argument, the reader was exposed to a tidal wave of prejudice.
After reading Black’s thesis, Ramsay Cook, McGill University’s external examiner, criticised the apparent rehabilitation of Duplessis. He brushed aside the smokescreen of Black’s elephantine effort, and identified the flaws in his scholarship and the fallacy of his conclusions. Black’s belief that history was determined by leaders, not by mass movements or a battle of ideologies, was, Cook declared, as unconvincing as his undisguised admiration of dishonest power-brokers. In particular, Cook was unsettled by Black’s excusing of Duplessis’s criminal character, and he was minded to block the award of the MA. In order to secure his degree, Black had no alternative but to make the necessary alterations, although his anger about Cook’s ‘offensive’ opinions and ‘fairy-land view of Quebec’ reflected his intolerance of criticism. In 1976 the thesis would be published as a 684-page book.
(#litres_trial_promo) Inevitably, Cook was asked by a newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, to write a review. Unhesitatingly, he expressed his dislike of the book’s unstructured length and verbosity. ‘Anyone,’ he wrote, ‘who can endure this ramshackle volume to the end will likely conclude that though … Duplessis triumphed rather easily over most of his enemies, he has finally come a cropper in the hands of an admiring biographer.’ Black was incensed. ‘A slanted, supercilious little twit’, he called Ramsay, after personally confronting the newspaper’s publisher. Black’s modest manner hid violence towards anyone questioning his work; he damned anyone who questioned his sympathy as a ‘quasi-fascist Jesuit myth-maker’ or an ‘illiterate bootlicker’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His self-esteem led him to neglect compromise in his arguments. To prove his superiority he even bought substantial quantities of his book in order to conceal its sluggish sales.
Similar aggression was directed against the Quebec nationalists after the Liberal Robert Bourassa won the 1970 election to become the province’s Premier. Contrary to his election pledges, Bourassa abolished English as an official language, discriminating against English Canadians. There was no future for Black in a state intent on separation from the country. Damning the ‘hypocrisy, narcissism and obfuscation’ of the French Canadians and mocking the placid English-speaking community as ‘gin-swilling grumblers of no consequence’,
(#litres_trial_promo) he resolved, after eight years in Montreal, to return to Toronto. The notoriety he had gained after his expulsion from three schools had, he assumed, been forgotten. He arrived in the English-speaking city in July 1974 as a comparative stranger.
Conrad Black’s homecoming was opportune. Argus’s finances were deteriorating, and relations among the company’s ageing directors had become fraught. Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor, while still enriching themselves at Argus’s expense, had become bitter rivals. Much to McDougald’s dissatisfaction, Taylor had been encouraging Paul Desmarais, the controller of the multi-billion-dollar Power Corporation, to make a bid for Argus. Desmarais’s failure, and the antics of Bay Street’s cowboys, were a foretaste of the turmoil once Argus’s old directors began to die. In anticipation of that future battle, Black resumed his relations with old friends including Fred Eaton of the department-store chain dynasty which he identified as ‘Canada’s ultimate establishment family’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their affection was mutual. ‘Jesus Christ,’ gushed Eaton, ‘Conrad’s got a spectacular mind working there.’ Invited to roast-beef lunches with Eaton were Galen Weston, Hal Jackman, and George Black’s old friend Douglas Bassett. Black spoke lengthily over wine and whisky about history and politics, and explained how he intended to extend his influence in politics by purchasing newspapers considered too small by Roy Thomson, the country’s dominant publisher and owner of The Times and Sunday Times in London. Systematically, Black and Radler telephoned owners with offers which, over the next three years, harvested twenty titles, including such local papers as the Alaska Highway News and the Daily News of Prince Rupert, all financed by loans secured against the Sherbrooke Record. Proudly, Black would assert that besides his original $500 investment, all his expansion consolidated in Sterling Newspapers, a new company, was financed by loans and profits. The Sherbrooke Record would be sold in 1977 for C$865,000, forty-eight times its purchase price eight years earlier, which did not account for $1 million profit used to buy other newspapers. During those years, the partners rarely met. ‘I know exactly what he’s going to do without going near what he’s doing,’ said Radler about Black. Their shared ambition for money – and Black’s for fame – cemented their relationship.
Black was seeking the celebrity of an influential politician. Exaggerating the importance of his twenty tiny newspapers, and concealing his dependence upon his inheritance, Black’s cultivated manner – relaxed, self-indulgent and opinionated – suggested a man of influence and independent wealth. His articulate advocacy of raw capitalism in an increasingly socialistic society attracted television producers eager to stage debates. Frequently he appeared on TV to support Claude Wagner, a politician renowned for accepting bribes and acknowledged by Black as suffering from petulance, superficiality and indecisiveness. The eccentricity of his opinions, and the charade of his eminence, obscured Black’s insecurity. In 1977, to satisfy his need for companionship, he asked Shirley Walters, a secretary in his office, to marry him.
The daughter of an accountant, Walters possessed an incomplete education, little ambition and no interest in politics or history. A decent, solid woman, following the breakdown of her marriage she was vulnerable to her employer, who had limited sexual experience. Although Black would claim to have been the surprised target of predatory women when he was young, eyewitnesses suggest few carefree relationships before he met Walters.
(#litres_trial_promo) His proposal of marriage was hastened by the discovery of Walters’s pregnancy. There was, however, a complication: Walters’s divorce could not be completed before the child’s birth. Black was fearful of the criticism of Toronto’s social leaders, especially Bud McDougald, if the existence of his illegitimate child was discovered.
(#litres_trial_promo) After he had overcome Walters’s prevarication, they resolved to keep the pregnancy a secret and to withhold Black’s name from the birth certificate.
Jonathan Black’s birth in November 1977 was followed by the news on 15 March 1978 of Bud McDougald’s death in Florida. The chatter around Bay Street was deafening. Few of those gazing at McDougald’s face in his open coffin were filled with sadness. Only McDougald’s widow wept; others were preoccupied by the succession. Skilfully, Conrad Black moved closer to the grieving woman, reminding her of his affection for her husband, whom he later described as ‘a very elegant kind of con man’, a judgement possibly of admiration rather than condemnation.
(#litres_trial_promo) McDougald, championed as Canada’s supreme business leader, epitomised so many of Black’s ambitions. ‘Bud was very skilful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn’t within anyone’s grasp,’ Black noted.
For more than twenty-five years, George Black’s son had been nurtured for the moment of vengeance. ‘I appear,’ Conrad Black said in self-congratulation, ‘to have been the only person who took note of the fact that Mr McDougald had died on the Ides of March. He always had a Caesarean bearing, and his succession was not much better organised.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The lesson of his father’s dismissal was to foresee deception and to marshal sufficient force to out-manoeuvre any rivals.
The empire’s immediate fate was to be decided at Argus’s first board meeting after McDougald’s death. As usual, Conrad Black arrived late, and was surprised to find that the three elderly directors had taken advantage of his unpunctuality, voting to deny the Black brothers executive directorships. ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ Black was told. Youth would need to wait its turn. ‘It was an utterly disgraceful performance,’ Black publicly proclaimed. Yet quietly he welcomed the rebuff.
(#litres_trial_promo) By demonstrating his true status, the other directors had compelled him to focus on the only worthwhile outcome – seizing the whole empire for himself; and, he puffed, they underestimated his abilities.
Argus, although valued at C$4 billion, was financially troubled. The controlling stakes in the various companies had produced good dividends for the shareholders, but bad management had wrecked the businesses. Dominion Stores Ltd was an old-fashioned chain of supermarkets; Hollinger Mines was managed by a lazy director who undertook no activities other than collecting $40 million a year in dividends from iron-ore mining; while Massey-Ferguson, with 45,000 employees, would lose C$257 million in 1978.
(#litres_trial_promo) Argus’s directors were certainly incapable of reviving the group. Black’s quandary was how to organise the old guard’s removal.
The ownership of Ravelston and Argus was diffuse. To obtain a majority vote depended upon a matrix of complicated relationships and trusts. In that quagmire there were potential allies, enemies and neutrals. To win control, Black would require dexterity and genius, seducing some and flattening others. Events, Black reminisced, needed to be treated ‘with a certain rhythm, maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Since his relations with most of the directors were bad, there was nothing to lose from a gamble.
From his study of history, Black had learned how simple gestures could lead to critical alliances, especially a show of concern for the beleaguered. In preparation for the struggle Black had targeted Dixon Chant, a chartered accountant employed by the late Eric Phillips, one of the key shareholders. Chant had suffered a heart attack, and Black visited him in hospital. Sympathising with the distressed came naturally to the unhurried, verbose aspirant. Chant would prove to be Black’s critical ally as the dust dispersed after McDougald’s funeral.
Black’s objective was two widows – Maude ‘Jim’ McDougald and her sister Doris, the widow of Eric Phillips. Together with the Blacks’, their shareholdings in Ravelston would amount to a controlling interest in Argus. Living together in Palm Beach, neither woman was blessed with intelligence or an understanding of business. McDougald, believing in his own infallibility, had never bothered to appoint a reliable, trustworthy lawyer or to explain to his wife how to cope after his death. Isolated in Florida’s sunshine, neither woman guessed that Black felt no pity for their weaknesses when he arrived to offer his assistance. Nor could they imagine the seducer’s thrill he must have felt.
Conrad Black was dressed conservatively, his animal cunning concealed behind a warm embrace of gentle assuredness. Some would carp at his cultivated condescension, but that would be a mistaken view. Rather, Black had perfected an approach towards the distressed that would serve him well over the coming years. Now he won the widows’ trust by obsequiously trimming his manner to put them at ease. He too appeared to be ‘grieving’. The tone of his voice and his gestures persuaded his prey that the three of them shared a common cause. The other major shareholders, explained Black, were crudely manoeuvring against the widows’ interests. ‘You’re being marginalised,’ he warned them. ‘We must do something about this.’ After uttering reassurances about his desire to protect their interests, he urged them to pool their shareholding with his. The two women believed his colourful reports about their husbands’ former colleagues, and were gradually persuaded to trust their gracious, wise visitor. Black’s next step determined the remainder of his life.
He asked the widows to sign a contract which empowered his use of their Ravelston shares in any vote against the other factions. Combined, their 70 per cent stake could compel the remaining shareholders to sell out to himself. That extraordinary power had originally been crafted by the widows’ late husbands to control the empire in their own interests. Puzzled and ignorant, the widows hesitated on the brink, uncertain about the financial advantage of Black’s proposition. He suggested they consult Doris Phillips’s adviser Dixon Chant, who Black knew had become irritated by the behaviour of Argus’s executives. Unlike Black, who had visited Chant in hospital, the other executives were disdainful of him. Just as Black had planned, Chant encouraged the widows to trust him.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the conversation which followed, Black performed the role encapsulated by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment: ‘An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eating – and then eats you up.’ Black listened and spoke, and eventually the women signed the agreements without extracting any payment in return. He had achieved power for nothing except the cost of a flight to Florida and the emission of a lot of hot air. Events now assumed a momentum which his adversaries would struggle to halt. ‘My brother and I,’ chortled Black, ‘were in a position to blow the … factions away when we wished.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He laughed about those arrogant old Bay Street habitués who underestimated young men, and about the ‘grieving disinterested widows’. His coup was a masterstroke.
As the news seeped out, Ravelston’s other directors were flummoxed. Tasting his first blood, Black enjoyed comparing himself to those heroic military geniuses whose biographies he devoured. ‘Never interfere with an enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself,’ he liked to quote from Napoleon.
(#litres_trial_promo) Adopting military stratagems against weak foes like the widows and Ravelston’s other directors satisfied Black’s fondness for self-congratulation.
News of his victory at the widows’ expense prompted calls from Canadian journalists to Florida. Their questions were the widows’ first inkling of their mistake. ‘I have a bird brain about business,’ admitted Maude McDougald, ‘and I don’t know anything about it.’ Doris Phillips was equally disarming. ‘You know more about it than I do,’ she confessed after admitting ignorance about the ‘hundreds of documents’ she had signed since her husband’s death.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the interviews increased, the widows began denouncing Black as a trickster, claiming incomprehension. ‘Like absolute idiots and birdbrains,’ said Maude McDougald, ‘we signed and signed and signed without reading at all.’ In Toronto, Black dismissed their pleas of innocence as ‘an utter fraud’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was not prepared to accept any blame. He was always in the right.
Inside 10 Toronto Street, Black confronted the director who had told him, ‘Don’t rush your fences.’ Empowered with the widows’ shares, the young rebel announced that he had not appreciated the snub. That director and all the others were ousted forthwith. In Black’s imagery, his rivals were ‘trussed up like a partridge to their guillotine. I would not fidget and fumble with the blade levers … Off with his head.’
(#litres_trial_promo) News of their resignations sparked uproar. Bay Street had never in living memory witnessed such a coup. As the owner of newspapers, Black assumed that he had the expertise to orchestrate sympathy from the media. To win over Patrick Watson, who was producing a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) television documentary about him, he posed in Hal Jackman’s basement in front of a gigantic model army to illustrate his prowess as a strategist, spawning the false illusion that he regularly engaged in war games. ‘I was asked by the widows,’ said the hero, ‘to pull the trigger and decapitate the enemy because the ladies would not hear of moderation.’ As the criticism of his actions increased, newspaper journalists were introduced to another Blackian tactic – his unusual eloquence in conjuring up images which could only be contradicted by accusing him of lying. Black insisted that he had acted ‘neutrally’ in dismissing the old guard, and that it was the ‘rapacious’ widows who had taken the initiative by asking for the transfer of authority to himself. Experts, he claimed, had ‘explained laboriously to them in monosyllables and with examples adapted to the mind of a child of ten, and they understood and approved every letter of every word of the agreement’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To those who remained doubters, he exclaimed, ‘Any suggestion that I would hoodwink two bereaved septuagenarian widows is patently ridiculous.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Those newspapers which still stubbornly dared to repeat the widows’ assertions received the threat of a writ for defamation. Several newspapers surrendered, but Black was powerless to prevent CBC TV transmitting its documentary, which featured the widows expressly denouncing him. Their appearance created an unfortunate legacy as he approached his next hurdle.
The document signed by the widows gave Black the power to vote on their behalf, but did not give him the right to buy their shares. While he could remove rival directors, he could not ultimately control the company’s governance. To resolve the confused situation Black sought total control and complete ownership. In the summer of 1978 the fate of Canada’s biggest conglomerate was a cliffhanger, dependent upon Black’s strategy.
All the players, including Black, were minority shareholders. Black’s fate depended upon the decision of two of these. Moving between Winston’s, Toronto’s best restaurant, the Toronto Club and 10 Toronto Street, he sought to break the deadlock in a manner which was previously unseen in Bay Street. Black’s ace was his unique grasp of the complexity of the Argus and Ravelston empire. In the daisy chain of companies, few understood the flows of cash and power. Only Black’s photographic memory could make use of the intricate jigsaw of different people with minority interests in all the companies in order to outwit other shareholders. He understood that by seizing control of Ravelston, he would automatically control Argus.
Throughout the exhausting battle, the widows were buffeted by suitors, professional advisers and the other besieged shareholders. In Black’s subsequent description, ‘the fate of some of Canada’s most famous companies now unfolded in an atmosphere of almost unrelenting buffoonery’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The reality was intimidation, stormy meetings, and vicious threats of dismissal and lawsuits. Around the clock Black cajoled shareholders, directors and employees to support him, or at best not to sell their shares to his opponents. Black’s survival depended partly on the success of two friends, Fred Eaton and Hal Jackman, in gathering support for himself. On 2 July 1978 the battle reached its climax when the widows agreed to sell their Ravelston shares to Black for C$20 million. Black offered $18 million, and the deal was settled at $18.4 million. Winning total control thereafter was purely mechanical, and cost just $12 million. For a total of $30 million, Black now owned a corporation controlling assets worth $4 billion. He compared the defeated old guard to ‘generals fighting a war by methods of the last one. They could not conceive of any corporate alternative to trench warfare, attrition and promotion by seniority. They were completely over-confident.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s final hurdle was to find the money, and the entire $30 million was borrowed from two banks.
(#litres_trial_promo) To reduce his debt he sold off parcels of Ravelston shares to trustworthy friends, especially Fred Eaton, Doug Bassett and Hal Jackman.
With victory came the spoils. Number 10 Toronto Street, constructed as a post office in 1853, became the Black brothers’ headquarters. A huge bronze eagle in full flight was hung over the fireplace to reflect Conrad’s ambitions. To fulfil his Hearstian fantasy, other rooms were furnished with historic symbols and mementos, especially of battles and generals. At the age of thirty-four, Black embellished his performance as a Bay Street player by holding court in Winston’s, at the Toronto Club or in his own dining room. Comparisons with Orson Welles in Citizen Kane were not resented by a prototype tycoon eager to pull the levers of power. ‘If my father knew what I’ve done,’ he confided with pleasure, ‘he’d roll in his grave.’
Propelled into the spotlight in that prestigious building, Black enjoyed the controversy he had invited. Some ‘old money’ families recalled his theft of the school’s examination papers. Others, including members of the Toronto Club, suspicious of the speed of his rise to wealth and celebrity, dubbed the new star ‘Conrad the Barbarian’. His coup may not have been dishonest, they carped, but Black was certainly ‘cruel’. Any such judgements, in Black’s mind, were buried by his nomination as ‘Man of the Year’ and ‘Boy Wonder’. The Globe and Mail, Toronto’s leading newspaper, anointed him ‘Businessman of the Year’. Having outfoxed the establishment, Black felt himself assured of victory in every future battle. Compared to other businessmen in Canada’s small pond, he ranked himself as a star. Convinced that he could manipulate journalists, a breed he disdained, he portrayed himself in interviews as a historian lamenting society’s ‘moral torpor’ and the ‘decline of civilisation’.
(#litres_trial_promo) With pleasure he pontificated, ‘I suspected I was starting ticking a public and press-relations time bomb.’
(#litres_trial_promo) To his glee, his clever asides were published uncritically. He would, he smiled, continue the traditional Argus dinners, inviting the country’s 150 most important men. No one, he guessed, would refuse the invitation of a man with unique style, so superbly erudite among bankers, politicians and intellectuals, able to articulate the advantages of capitalism over the creeping socialisation of their country.
Reflecting on his victory, Black suggested that he drew pertinent lessons from the criticism he had received then for the remainder of his career. ‘The lesson of June is to be wary of setting out in the most cynical way to use people you have underestimated. The pickpocket whose pocket is picked receives, and deserves, little sympathy … In finance, only proprietors can consistently act like proprietors.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That statement exposed a confusion in Black’s attitude towards business. He was suggesting that only a ‘proprietor’ – someone who owned 100 per cent of a company – could behave selfishly, regardless of others. ‘My natural sympathies are with the proprietors whose own money is at stake,’ he said, admiring the personal control of companies enjoyed by Galen Weston, Fred Eaton, Ken Thomson, Hal Jackman and the American moguls. With their substantial control of their businesses, they shone in Black’s eyes compared to mere professional managers. Black’s misfortune was that he was not a proprietor. He lacked the money to buy out Argus’s other shareholders. Yet, as a raw capitalist, he was emphatic that proprietors and investors were bound to live by the laws of the jungle. ‘There is not,’ he emphasised at this critical moment in his career, ‘and should not be, any safety net for the rich.’
Amid the excitement, on 14 July 1978 Conrad Black married Shirley Walters. Considering his aspirations, Black did not arrange the society wedding some had expected. His old friends understood the socially insecure groom’s desire to be certain of a loyal, unstrident wife who would provide him with a domestic refuge. After the small ceremony, witnessed by a handful of friends, twenty people gathered at Black’s house for dinner. At 10 p.m., exhausted by the takeover battle, he left his guests and bride and went to bed. On the wedding certificate he listed his profession as ‘historian’. That was a critical claim for what would follow.
(#litres_trial_promo)
2 The Stain (#ulink_08d0e5a1-2ab5-59a8-85ca-e73546dadcb0)
ON 15 JULY 1978, the day after his wedding, Conrad Black sat with David Radler and Peter White by his swimming pool to discuss the future. Becoming a billionaire was a possibility. With hard work and astute management, Argus could evolve into a global business. Serious hurdles, Black knew, needed to be overcome. After years of exploitation, Argus was short of cash and the companies had been bled dry. Transforming the lame ducks would be exhausting. Living off dividends and expenses in Bud McDougald’s fashion was no longer possible. Black was faced with a choice: either hard work and the possibility of creating enormous wealth, or limited work and a good life. Sitting in the sunshine in the midst of his seven-acre garden, Black did not welcome the prospect of devoting mind-numbing attention to the intricate details of production, finance and markets. His ambition was to become a man of influence, enjoying the luxury of a cash machine. Getting money, not least to repay his debts, was a priority. His candid confession about ‘not gambling more than my original $500 in 1966 on the Argus project’ was largely accurate.
(#litres_trial_promo) Other than his inheritance, his wealth depended upon drawing cash from the companies he controlled.
Black’s entry into the huge chairman’s office at Massey-Ferguson headquarters in Toronto was a symbolic moment. Over 131 years the corporation had symbolised Canada’s virility, although the image had become flawed. With over C$1 billion of debt, the company was on the verge of self-destruction. Poor products, strikes and a recession among American farmers jeopardised its prospects. Conrad Black had placed himself in the spotlight with the aim of saving the jobs of 48,000 employees. Although Argus owned just 16 per cent of the company, Black was empowered by the shareholders to act as the sole owner.
(#litres_trial_promo) Within hours of his welcome, delegations of bankers, politicians, trade union representatives and journalists arrived to hear about his intentions. He compared his plans with the tactics of his military heroes. Alternately he summoned the image of Napoleon transforming a rabble into a victorious army in Italy in 1795, or he cited the British tactician Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the inventor of tank warfare after 1917. The military analogies suited his temperament. Succumbing to the vision of himself as the genius executing a brilliant victory, he spoke to the media about rescuing Canada’s jewels. All his visitors departed reporting the chairman’s optimism and his pledge to rescue Massey-Ferguson from the brink of collapse, if necessary by investing his own fortune.
(#litres_trial_promo) They agreed that having fought hard to take over Argus, Black was accountable for saving Massey, possibly with government help.
Simultaneously, Monte Black became responsible for Dominion Stores Ltd, which employed 25,000 employees in 376 supermarkets. Dominion was a substantial business with annual sales of C$2.4 billion, but bad management had reduced its annual profits to just $24 million. Monte Black was not the natural choice to revive a decrepit supermarket chain’s fortunes. Decent and genial, he preferred not to have to rise early in order to undertake the grinding routine of visiting each shop to improve its profit margins, ensure regular supplies of fresh food and supervise its refurbishment. Rather, he enjoyed playing around in planes and big cars, and hosting uproarious parties. ‘Monte’s idea of management,’ said a fellow director, ‘was saying, “Let’s have a good lunch,” stepping into his chauffeured car and afterwards enjoying a long snort of whiskey in the Toronto Club.’ Since Conrad rarely got out of bed before noon and was congenitally unpunctual, there was little pressure on Monte to change his own habits. Within weeks he was floundering. The pressure fell on Conrad, and he spontaneously announced his discovery of a cancer in Dominion. The company, he declared, was plagued by employees who were ‘notorious crooks’, stealing about $30 million every year and thus destroying the business. But instead of quietly recruiting good staff and improving controls, Black publicly denigrated the company’s executives.
(#litres_trial_promo) He pinpointed chief executive John Toma, describing him, without supporting evidence, as the architect of ‘murky relationships’ with suppliers and accusing him of overseeing staff whom he damned as ‘trained reptiles’ whose ‘financial ethics’ were similar to ‘the profligate corruption of looters’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Few understood how humiliating the staff could save Dominion Stores, but Black regarded ‘shock’ and the consequent ‘conspiracy of embarrassed liberal silence’ as an effective management tool.
When that failed he fired Toma, who disputed the allegation, and appointed David Radler as the chief executive. Among the bewildered observers was Galen Weston, the head of a rival retail chain. Neither Weston nor others, however, noted Black’s unannounced agenda. Unnoticed, Ravelston began levying management fees on Dominion which would total $40 million over the next seven years, denuding the company of cash. Commercially, Black’s strategy was folly, but any criticism would be a misunderstanding of Black’s purpose. He was unwilling to undertake the necessary work – he wanted cash – and in his conversations with the Almighty, his Maker agreed that as the victim of ungrateful and dishonest employees, he was entitled to reward himself with substantial fees.
By January 1980 Black was also struggling to save Massey-Ferguson from bankruptcy. He resisted undertaking fact-finding tours of the company’s plants across America and Europe to discover the cure for its inability to match its competitors. Out of his depth, he remained in Toronto, dismissing the cynics and reassuring those concerned about the future of the remaining 30,000 employees, despite the growing recession. By early May, as the company’s plight deteriorated further, Black publicly insisted that he could save it if he received help from the government and his bankers. In fact, however, he was calculating the tax advantages of abandoning Massey-Ferguson.
Black’s friend Hal Jackman, the manager of a major fund and a substantial investor in Ravelston, had become alarmed. Black’s intentions and promises to invest in Massey-Ferguson were puzzling, not least because Jackman knew Black had no real money. He was a man, Jackman realised, prone to overestimating his worth. During a ‘boozy night’s drinking’, Jackman was candid. ‘Your hubris and ego,’ he said, ‘are getting in the way of running this business.’ Black nodded. ‘Conrad,’ continued Jackman, ‘there’s nothing in this for me. I want out. Buy my Ravelston shares.’ ‘Right,’ replied Black.
In September 1980 Black executed a dramatic stunt to avoid a costly disaster. After blaming the government for refusing to offer adequate help, he simply gave Argus’s shares in Massey-Ferguson to the employees’ pension companies and announced that he was walking away. Such acts would be characteristic of a career notable for dramatic entries and exits. Just before leaving the chairman’s office, Black removed from the wall a painting showing a gun carriage moving through a battle-scarred street in Arras, France, past a Massey dealer in 1918. Conrad Black appreciated trophies.
Canada was shocked by Black’s conduct. He was no longer a whizz kid but another Bay Street cowboy abandoning his responsibilities to thousands of families and the nation. In the media, Parliament and even among members of the Toronto Club, he was criticised as a profiteer without a social conscience, exploiting legal loopholes and manipulating companies’ assets for his personal profit. ‘I gave them no comfort at all,’ was all Black would say in his contradictory accounts of his negotiations with the government about the future of Massey-Ferguson.
(#litres_trial_promo) Arousing suspicions did not trouble Black, but he was intolerant of the consequences. In the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington, the editor, accused ‘Conrad Tricky’ for incurring Massey-Ferguson’s horrendous debts. The criticism stung Black. His vilifiers deserved punishment for not recognising his glory. The Toronto Sun received a writ for defamation – the first of dozens which he would issue over the next twenty-five years – and a carefully crafted letter written in his unique style: ‘For the record (not that the Sun is a newspaper of record to anyone who does not suffer from severe lip-strain after half a minute of silent reading), the Sun’s theory that we should mortgage all the assets … to bail Massey out of a mess that none of us had any hand in creating, is too asinine to merit further reply’.
Reading his published letter in the Toronto Sun and contemplating the legal battle pleased Black. He had uttered, he imagined, the last word on the subject, and his critics were forever silenced. He could not imagine that his would-be peers – the Bronfmans, Westons and Thomsons – were embarrassed by his retreat at the expense of his employees and his refusal to rebuild the business. Observers noted that Victor Rice, Black’s successor at Massey, was fighting to save the company: he would succeed in increasing the share price from $1 in 1980 to $78 in 1999. They carefully considered Rice’s judgement of Black – ‘His perception of what he was doing and reality were two different things’ – and concluded that Black was ‘a flash-in-the-pan’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Conrad Black resented any disparagement. Others, he believed, were always to blame for his misfortunes. Spoilt as a child, he protected himself by accusing his critics of jealousy. ‘All those pent-up forces of envy and disbelief,’ he sneered, ‘finally showed their true colours.’
(#litres_trial_promo) To bolster his sense of his own infallibility and innocence he damned his critics for resenting his ‘unbroken string of successes’. Verbal flourishes, he believed, would cover his escape. ‘The only charge that anyone can level against us,’ he would say, ‘is one of insufficient generosity to ourselves.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Attracting envy to himself, he reasoned, confirmed his success.
Conrad Black was thirty-six-years old. His morality was as rigidly fixed as his ambition. He wanted wealth and influence. Preoccupied with manipulating his debts, his developing plan appeared to critics to transfer Argus’s real wealth from the public shareholders into Ravelston, the private company which he controlled. In his self-proclaimed ‘campaign of manoeuvre’ he initiated a bewildering succession of loans, dividends and special payments, shifting the ownership of companies and debts between Argus and Ravelston. In the process, Ravelston got richer while the price of Argus shares fell.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘This policy,’ he would boast, ‘led over that time to what was probably the greatest compression of corporate dealing in Canadian history.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Outsiders, confused and suspicious, sold their Argus shares. As the price of the shares fell, Black used the cash which Argus earned from selling its assets to finance his own purchase of the company’s shares, so increasing his personal stake in the company.
(#litres_trial_promo) Pushing up prices and selling at the peak, the Bay Street cowboys were infamous for ‘pumping and dumping’ shares. Black did the opposite. As one of his managers quipped, ‘Conrad went to the dentist and ordered him to drill. When the dentist said that he could see no cavities, Conrad told him, “Drill anyway. I feel lucky today …”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Peter Newman, Black’s first biographer, credited him with ‘taking rabbits out of apparently empty hats’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Others saw a magician waving an empty hat, treating employees as ‘toy soldiers’ and, for his own self-enrichment, ignoring the interests of minority shareholders. ‘We originally created wealth out of thin air,’ he boasted, ‘but in a way that was perfectly licit.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Legality had assumed special meaning for Black. The repercussions were immediate.
The public debate about his conduct fed Black’s ambition to buy more newspapers and to become a broker of influence. His targets were publications whose owners, he asserted, were alcoholics and incompetents who had either succumbed to damaging strikes or had failed to fund the necessary investment in new plants and buildings. Included in his wish-list for purchase were Toronto’s Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Journal, and the Montreal Star. Repeatedly, the vendors rejected his offers and preferred to deal with Roy Thomson.
(#litres_trial_promo) Frustrated and needing money, Black lurched in the opposite direction and agreed to sell Sterling Newspapers for $14 million. But after scrutinising the figures, the prospective purchaser withdrew, pronouncing his dissatisfaction with the accounts.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s consolation was a conference organised by the Economist Intelligence Unit in Toronto. ‘Massey-Ferguson’s former chairman has agreed to sponsor the conference,’ Andrew Knight, the Economist’s editor, told Peter Jay, the recently-retired British ambassador to Washington. ‘Can you arrange for Henry Kissinger to make a keynote speech?’ Jay succeeded, and was talking to Kissinger in the conference hall’s ante-room before his appearance. Black seized his chance. As Jay began to escort Kissinger onto the platform, he was powerfully pushed from behind. Reeling to the side, he noticed Conrad Black striding up to Kissinger. ‘This way,’ smiled Black, engineering his introduction to a relationship which would bless his career. Before he returned to Washington, Kissinger had been seduced by Black’s profound knowledge and charm. Making use of this new relationship depended upon Black increasing his wealth.
With the option of buying more newspapers closed to him, Black identified mining as a certain profit-maker, and resolved to expand Argus’s investments in that field. Argus owned Labrador, an iron-ore extractor. For tax reasons, Labrador could benefit by involvement in oil exploration. After careful research, Black targeted Norcen Energy Resources, an undervalued oil and gas explorer. In December 1979 he had bought 10 per cent of the company’s shares from an investment group. The following day he telephoned Ed Bovey, the company’s chairman, to discuss his investment. Black would insist that, with Bovey’s agreement, he raised his stake to 40 per cent by February 1980.
(#litres_trial_promo) The investment was financed by bank loans, but essentially, in a complicated, tax-efficient procedure, Black used Norcen’s own money to finance his purchase. Next, using Norcen as his vehicle, he searched for another mining company in the United States. His motives were partly financial, but they were also social. Ever since he had visited London in 1953 and Palm Beach in the 1960s, and had left Montreal in disgust with Quebec’s separatist politics, Black had been dissatisfied with Canada. The country, in his opinion, was a narrow-minded backwater, and its politics were boring. America, by contrast, was exciting. For a social adventurer, Palm Beach was a natural stage on which to launch his presence in America.
In 1980 Conrad Black took his first step towards joining America’s rich set. He bought an unimposing colonial house at 150 Canterbury Lane, on the north end of Palm Beach island. The comfortable 8,700-square-foot house did not enjoy a sea view, but it was located near the resort’s nobility. Shirley Black employed an interior designer to decorate the house in Colefax & Fowler style, and although there were grumbles among local tradesmen about Black’s ‘ungentlemanly’ quibbles over their bills – like any shrewd businessman, he carefully examined the accounts – the social rewards were gratifying. Assiduously, Black cultivated Jayne Wrightsman, a former manicurist who had married an oil billionaire. After her husband’s death Wrightsman had used her inheritance to become Palm Beach’s patrician hostess. Invited for cocktails and dinner parties, Black worked hard to establish himself as a guest guaranteed to amuse others by reciting from his encyclopaedic memory of history and politics. ‘Come for dinner in Palm Beach,’ Wrightsman said to the London merchant banker Rupert Hambro. ‘I’ve met this hugely intelligent man who is so wonderful. He’s called Conrad Black.’ Hambro knew Black from summer weekends staying at the businessman Bob Dale-Harris’s farm north-east of Toronto. Meeting him again in Florida, he noticed how Black had changed. Touched by the glamour of big money, Black was flattered that Wrightsman, a kind, generous person, was attracted to him, and that by turn he had become a subject of conversation.
The proof of Black’s social acceptance was his proposal for membership of the Everglades Club, the meeting place of Palm Beach’s elite. The obstacles were Maude McDougald and Doris Phillips, the two Argus widows. Both still resented their humiliation, and campaigned to blackball their tormentor. Their tactics were in vain. Imperceptibly, Black organised his nomination and election without any formal notification. ‘Clubs are not democratic,’ the widows were told.
Shirley Black was uninterested in the Everglades Club and her husband’s social ambitions. Politics and business provoked indifference in the modest woman who appeared to some in Palm Beach as shy and ‘childlike’, relying on her husband to book babysitters and make other domestic arrangements. While he excelled at the formal dinners, lecturing on the refinements of French furniture or the career of an obscure general, she sat awkwardly, unappreciative even of his sense of humour, which occasionally, with the help of a few glasses of wine, reduced him to tears while he hilariously mimicked characters and accents. Regardless of Shirley’s disenchantment, with Wrightsman’s patronage Black was introduced into the society he yearned to emulate.
Cultivating the right image, Black knew, was essential to acceptance. Walking into a room, he took care that his large, physical presence captured the space around himself. Gracious but also aloof, his self-assured manner left onlookers in no doubt of his attitude: ‘I’m Conrad Black, take it or leave it.’ His quiet voice and gentle movements suggested that he was neither bombastic nor nasty. With studied stateliness suggesting coiled energy, he intimidated some, but never succumbed to an intemperate outburst. Speaking quietly, his big, intelligent, slightly oriental grey eyes fixed in an immobile face, he aroused curiosity whether his fluent, verbose language was expressing anger or pleasure, never using a short word if a longer one was appropriate. His new friends were impressed by his seamless prose and his prodigious memory.
Black’s next step was to accumulate the level of wealth so abundantly evident on the island. During his first holiday in Palm Beach he attended a rousing election speech by the Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, whom he supported against President Jimmy Carter, a politician he loathed. Black’s enduring memory, besides Reagan’s appearance, was of the limousines parked outside the Breakers Hotel. As far as the eye could see were the biggest Mercedes and the most expensive Rolls-Royces, some lengthened, Black noted, ‘in proof of their owners’ ingenuity at devising methods of spending an additional $100,000 on a $200,000 automobile’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He himself had begun indulging his appetite to join the high-spending class. As well as his small yacht he had already accumulated several cars, including a Cadillac, a Mercedes and McDougald’s Rolls-Royce in London. On some of the bonnets he mounted a gold-plated eagle killing a snake. The symbol matched his goal.
Houses reflect their owners’ characters, and Black’s plans for the demolition and reconstruction of his parents’ home in Toronto confirmed his taste for grandeur. The Bridle Path had become the city’s ‘Millionaires’ Row’. Black’s architect produced plans to match his client’s aspirations. The mansion’s new entrance hall would be two storeys high, and a distinctive, high-domed rotunda modelled on the roof of St Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican was to be erected over a library that would house at least 20,000 books. The story was spread that Black intended to repose on an eighteenth-century cardinal’s chair while reading about Napoleon in the midst of a palace that could host Toronto’s biggest parties. Others suggested that the chair was the one Napoleon sat on when signing treaties. Black’s illustriousness was confirmed when he persuaded Archbishop Carter of Toronto and Bishop Aloysius Ambrozic, both future cardinals, to formally bless the new library. Black was not a Catholic, and since he was not noticeably religious, outsiders believed that the prelates were invited as props in his developing plan to present himself as a serious player. Those cynics did not appreciate his dependence on conversations with God to justify the realisation of his entitlement. The priests’ presence validated his relationship with his Creator.
Black’s growing self-confidence of his ranking among the elect was enhanced in 1981 when he accepted an invitation to attend the Bilderberg Conference, an annual gathering of over a hundred of the world’s rich, famous and influential personalities. Dubbed by critics as the ‘Burnt-Outs club’, the conference was created in the mid-1950s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to improve relations among members of NATO. As a representative of Canada, Black flew to Holland, where he began a series of special intellectual and personal relationships. Among those with whom he eventually bonded were Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, the newly appointed US Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, the conservative American columnist George Will and Andrew Knight, the British editor of the Economist. He also renewed his acquaintance with Henry Kissinger. The participants at the conference were impressed by the studiously casual Canadian businessman, sauntering into meetings to regale his audience with his remarkable memory. ‘I’m a fatalist,’ he explained in one conversation. ‘I believe that people’s destinies are always more fascinating than their day-to-day reactions.’ His heroes, he continued, were common men whose dreams of greatness materialised after they had overcome huge adversity – Napoleon, de Gaulle, Abraham Lincoln, Marshal Foch, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Whatever their personal faults, they were vindicated by their success. Historic acclaim, he argued, excused treachery. Eventual vindication after widespread hatred was the qualification for his worship. He preferred to forget that the rest of mankind lived by other rules – namely contemporaneous judgement.
Mixing with multi-millionaires and power-brokers fed Black’s fantasies. Bilderberg was a magnet for romantics, social climbers and conservatives, and like his new associates Black was aghast that America had surrendered in Vietnam rather than staying on to secure total victory. Their common Saviour was Ronald Reagan, the restorer of conviction to political life. As Black spoke, endlessly reciting juicy historic details, he visualised the prospect of becoming celebrated himself, providing quotations for later generations to savour. That surely was his destiny.
The following year Black invited Kissinger to address a group of Canada’s elite in Toronto. The former US Secretary of State, attracted to expensive meal tickets, was easily flattered by Black’s material generosity and scholarly praise. That Christmas Fred Eaton would give a copy of Kissinger’s memoirs to Black, and thereafter he would often hear from his friend, ‘I’ve just had lunch/dinner with Henry, and he says …’ Having gained an entrée to both the Bilderberg cast and Palm Beach’s aristocrats, Black sensed his opportunity to join the American establishment. Stepping up would require his own fortune.
Expanding into American mining seemed the perfect way to realise his financial and social ambitions. In January 1979 he had identified Hanna Mining, the world’s second-largest iron-ore producer, based in Cleveland, Ohio, as an ideal target. After secret discussions with Fred Eaton and Edward Battle, another director of Norcen, they agreed to accumulate enough shares covertly to buy Hanna at a bargain price.
Hanna was owned and managed by the Humphreys, a long-established family which was embroiled in numerous feuds. Argus and Hanna both owned an interest in the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which was run by Hanna with a 26.5 per cent stake, compared to Argus’s 10.5 per cent. That connection provided Black with the opportunity in June 1980 to initiate a conversation with George Humphrey, Hanna’s vice president. Humphrey, Black knew, was disgruntled by the Hanna board’s refusal to appoint him as chief executive. Instead, the family had selected Bob Anderson, a professional mining expert. Humphrey’s mother, a widow, shared her son’s anger. As a master of exploiting dissatisfaction, Black called on George Humphrey, offering his condolences and help. Seducing dissatisfied shareholders, Black knew from the capture of Argus, was an ideal tactic in take-over battles. With that chore completed, Black made use of repeated opportunities to meet other vulnerable members of the Humphrey family across America – in country clubs, boardrooms, restaurants and at a society ball. In August 1981, believing that his credentials were established, he sought the family’s approval to buy shares in Hanna. He would claim that both George Humphrey and Bob Anderson had offered no objections to his purchase of ‘some shares’,
(#litres_trial_promo) but the family and the company’s directors would insist that his proposal was firmly rejected.
(#litres_trial_promo) Events would bear out the family’s version.
During August 1981 Black’s company Norcen secretly bought 4.9 per cent of Hanna’s shares. The purchase was entirely financed by a C$20 million loan from CIBC. In securing that loan, Black, a director of the bank, demanded special treatment, stipulating that ‘secrecy was paramount’. No statements regarding the loan and the purchase were to be delivered by the bank to Norcen’s office; and Hanna’s shares were to be bought by the bank, using an undisclosed numbered account. On 9 September, after the shares had been bought, Black summoned a board meeting of Norcen directors in Toronto. Fred Eaton, Edward Battle and others were in no doubt about his intention. ‘We want a friendly take-over,’ Black agreed with his directors. Bill Kilbourne, the company’s secretary, accurately recorded in the minutes of the meeting that the purchase of shares in ‘the target company’ was completed, ‘with the ultimate purpose of acquiring a 51 per cent interest at a later date’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black signed those minutes.
Having secretly agreed his company’s objective, Black took a decision which could have increased his personal wealth. If the take-over of Hanna was successful, the value of Norcen’s shares would rise. To benefit personally from that increase, Black offered to buy back Norcen shares from his own shareholders. By law, he and his directors were required to tell their shareholders the full truth about their intentions regarding Hanna. Yet their letter, sent on 16 October 1981, did not reveal their secret purchase of Hanna’s shares or their resolution on 9 September to mount a take-over bid.
During October, again in secrecy, Black increased his stake in Hanna to 8.8 per cent. As soon as the second purchase was detected, Bob Anderson telephoned Black and accused him of breaking the rules. Black was prepared for the onslaught. Conjuring a performance as a helpful, innocent and sincere intellectual, he sought to smooth-talk the American into believing that his intention was simply cooperation. Only Black could have feigned surprise that Anderson’s response was, in Black’s own description, ‘an antagonistic, hostile and even frenetic reaction’.
(#litres_trial_promo) A meeting was summoned in Cleveland. Black flew south, to be told by Anderson to retreat and to sell off his shares. He ignored the warning. To enhance the impression of his virtue, he expressed his ‘hurt’ and ‘outrage’ that Anderson, a ‘rather underwhelming’ person, treated him with disdain and condescension.
(#litres_trial_promo) Undeterred and eager to raise his interest to 20 per cent, Black approached other Hanna shareholders, including old female members of the Humphrey family. He offered them all ‘an alliance’ against Hanna’s directors. War had been declared.
In Black’s opinion, his secrecy was consistent with normal trading in Toronto. Bud McDougald and the other Bay Street players had never considered behaving in any other fashion. In the heat of battle, he said, companies often misrepresented their intentions. Such tactics were aided by Canada’s weak regulators. Toronto’s stock market was supervised by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), which had never, in Black’s experience, so much as slapped a reprobate’s wrist in punishment for a crime. Reared in that wild-west monoculture, the aspiring tycoon did not understand that the stakes and rules for playing in the United States were different from those in his own crude backwater.
The investment by Norcen required Black to disclose his intentions to America’s all-powerful Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC. In his submission, he described the purchase of nearly 13 per cent of Hanna’s shares as ‘an investment position’, concealing his intention to mount a take-over bid. Convinced that his cultivated performance, combining his eloquent vocabulary, benign demeanour and forceful personality, would steamroll the opposition, he flew on 2 April 1982 to Palm Beach with Rupert Hambro on Black’s Challenger, the private plane he had inherited after the Argus coup. At the same time, Monte Black was dispatched to Cleveland to deliver a threat. Unless, said Monte, Bob Anderson and the Humphreys agreed to Norcen owning 30 per cent of the company and acquiring an influential position on the board of directors, Norcen intended to launch a take-over bid for 51 per cent of Hanna on 5 April. This was the Blacks playing hardball. Anderson’s response to the ultimatum was emphatic. Amid raised voices and papers flung on the table, Monte’s offer was rejected. Twisting the screw, Anderson applied to the Cleveland court for an order preventing the bid. Black was so exposed, Anderson reasoned, that any shot was guaranteed a hit. In his claim, Black was accused of ‘fraud and racketeering’ because he and Norcen had submitted false information to the SEC.
The counterattack surprised Black. Lawyers representing Hanna unexpectedly invaded Norcen’s headquarters. Their trawl of documents produced the board minutes of 9 September 1981, describing Black’s ‘ultimate purpose’ to take over Hanna. Anderson’s lawyers were thrilled. It was ‘like a grenade with the pin pulled’, admitted Black.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s deception broke the US Securities Act and exposed him to prosecution. Hanna’s share price plummeted from $74 to $26.
Black’s cabal had been caught red-handed. ‘Bill, you dumb idiot,’ Black screamed at Kilbourne, Norcen’s company secretary, at an emergency meeting of his fellow directors. ‘Why did you put that in the minutes?’ ‘Horseshit,’ replied Kilbourne. ‘That’s what you said at the meeting. You signed it. You should have read it.’ Black calmed down. The thrill for his partners was watching ‘such a bright guy at work’. After some thought, Black fashioned his response: ‘I’ll say, “I’m innocent. This is ridiculous. This is a misunderstanding, a technicality.”’ His audience were impressed by his apparent calm under fire. Black the performer always conjured up a mask of sublime assurance of success.
The threat from America coincided with mixed fortunes in Canada. The shuffling of assets at Argus had not ceased. To avoid tax and to marginalise the minority shareholders, Black was constantly reorganising his companies. The complexity of the changes provoked fears among shareholders that Argus’s money was disappearing into other companies in which the group had an interest, including Hollinger, a mining company, or that Argus was heading for bankruptcy.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those fears were compounded by Black’s self-aggrandisement. In 1982 Argus earned profits of C$7.6 million, but nearly C$2 million was spent on the directors and their expenses. The generosity to himself and his associates was part of Black’s calculated plan to ensure that everyone would ‘remain friends’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Protestors found their voices drowned out. The company’s annual general meeting on 26 May 1982 lasted fourteen minutes – one minute longer, Black was disappointed to note, than Bud McDougald’s record.
Inspired by Napoleon, Black’s doctrine – kill or be killed – was deployed in self-justification and self-defence. Contemptuous of his critics, he had been flattered by featuring in a television series as a member of the Canadian establishment; and by Andy Warhol’s visit to Toronto, where Black had commissioned him to paint his portrait. The decisive accolade was his coronation as Canada’s ‘Establishment Man’ by Peter Newman, the editor of the weekly Maclean’s magazine, who promoted ‘Canada’s leading capitalist’ as the personification of the Conservatives’ rebirth, with brains. Others reflected that Newman could more accurately have pronounced Black as the anti-establishment man.
Emboldened by his glorification in Toronto, Black repelled the questions hurled by American lawyers and SEC officials with stubborn denials of any blame. ‘I relied,’ he told his questioners, ‘on Norcen’s overworked company secretary to record accurate minutes of the board meeting, and he made a complete mistake because he had wrongly surmised that a take-over was intended.’ The directors’ discussion, he continued, was ‘hypothetical’. Challenged that he signed the board minutes as accurate, Black replied, ‘I signed the minutes without reading that part of it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) To outwit his accusers he relied on his confident mastery of English, a parade of the power of his memory and a loquacious reinterpretation of the facts. To friends, however, he expressed terror. ‘They’re out to get me,’ he railed to Peter White. Black was humiliated by what he conceded was ‘a mess’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To his good fortune, the Americans did not interview Fred Eaton. ‘I was at the meeting,’ he told Black, ‘and the minutes were accurate.’ ‘Well,’ replied Black, ‘we’d better watch ourselves in the future.’
In the weeks before the trial was due to begin in Cleveland, Bob Anderson’s lawyers were publicly vilifying Black, with wild allegations – which he robustly denied – that he was a criminal, a racketeer and more besides. Over four days of cross-examination in a packed court in early May 1982, he defiantly denied his accusers’ explanation of all the events. At the end of his testimony he returned to Toronto convinced that Judge John Manos would accept his interpretation. Denying the truth and rewriting history had been a tool of the world’s greatest leaders – dictators and democrats alike. To survive and succeed, Black adopted their doctrine.
On 13 May Black was entertaining Toronto’s establishment at Hollinger’s annual dinner. Judge Manos’s judgement was still awaited. In the middle of the evening a messenger whispered to Black that Canadian police had started a criminal investigation of himself and his lawyers for conspiring to defraud Argus’s shareholders. Black knew precisely what had aroused police suspicion: Norcen’s inaccurate offer on 16 October 1980 to buy back its own shares. The circular to shareholders, signed by Black, stated that he could not envisage any new circumstances which could influence the share price. At that precise moment, he had been planning his bid for Hanna. Issuing misinformation could be a criminal offence. By the end of the dinner Black had formulated his defence. He had become, he would claim, the target of a conspiracy between his rivals, Canadian politicians and the police. He would denigrate the investigation as an ‘Orwellian drama’ and ‘a charade’, because the legal case was ‘too fatuous and preposterous’ to merit any discussion.
(#litres_trial_promo) Finally, he would castigate the familiar motives of his critics: the police investigation, he would say, reflected ‘the destructive complex of envy at its most ignorant and visceral’; his enemies were ‘manipulating’ the system by ‘a smear job’. Creating an aura of aloofness, he walked from the dinner telling those enquiring about his fate, ‘There is no evidence. There is absolutely nothing.’ His forceful indignation was intended to suffocate doubters and to confirm his admirers in their belief of his innocence. His last word, he persuaded himself, had silenced his questioners.
Unlike in America, Black personally knew those involved in the investigations in Toronto, and understood the regulators’ frailties. ‘I’ll talk to the Attorney General,’ he announced. Just hours after the dinner he was sitting in the office of Roy McMurtry, Ontario’s Attorney General. The politician met Black without any officials, even those directing the investigation. In his quiet, mellifluous manner, Black cast blame on a range of people, including even the future Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at that time a rising politician in Ottawa and a director of Hanna. ‘The powder trail from this trumped-up charade of an investigation leads straight to Brian’s door,’ Black told the Attorney General.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘He was far enough along in the chain that generated the Norcen investigation that his fingerprints wouldn’t be on the knife.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In his quiet tirade, Black made a series of allegations against politicians, law officers and the police – which they in turn would describe as figments of his fertile imagination. Over the next days, McMurtry and the police resisted Black’s pressure to stop the investigation.
The reality check was Judge Manos’s decision. On 11 June 1982 he found against Black, declaring that Norcen had committed ‘manipulative violations’. ‘[Black’s] construction of the record,’ declared the judge, ‘is strained and unpersuasive.’ The evidence, he continued, ‘established conclusively’ that the take-over had been contemplated at the board meeting on 9 September 1981, ‘if not earlier’. Black was tarred as unreliable. Inevitably, he was terrified. There could be severe repercussions in Canada, including a photograph of him being arrested in handcuffs. He regularly called his lawyer Peter Atkinson to ask for reassurance. Hal Jackman had no doubt that Black was the architect of his own misfortune. ‘Conrad’s a poseur,’ he sighed. ‘He’s always pushing the envelope to get away with it. Pushing beyond reasonable bounds.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s terror was concealed from public view. To journalists he coolly returned Jackman’s criticism, characteristically describing him as drunkenly playing war games in his library. ‘Not an easy partner,’ said Black, with the air of reluctant wisdom. While Jackman posed as a great businessman, continued Black, he had sold his Ravelston shares ‘risibly cheap’.
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The civil judgement in Cleveland threatened to spiral into a criminal prosecution. The SEC charged Black with having ‘made untrue statements of material facts’ to both Hanna and the SEC, and to having ‘engaged in fraudulent, deceptive and manipulative acts and practices’. Black was on the edge. To prevent a prosecution he agreed with the SEC to formally sign a ‘consent decree’, promising to abide by American laws in the future. The process required no admission of wrongdoing by Black, but there was a sting: if he broke American laws again, the SEC could reactivate the criminal prosecution.
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Once it was agreed and signed, Black had no intention of allowing the verdict to remain unchallenged. Those who asked Black about the saga were regaled by tales of his victory as a witness against Anderson’s lawyers. Later, going further into fantasy, he described in his autobiography how, at the end of his testimony, Judge Manos had invited him into his chambers and gushed, ‘In twenty years as a judge, you are the finest witness I’ve ever had in my court. Whatever my verdict, from what I’ve seen this week, it won’t reflect unfavourably on you as a witness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Not surprisingly, Manos had no recollection of such a bizarre encounter, but seeing the story in print convinced Black that his critics had been silenced.
The settlement in America was a relief. In Canada, however, the process continued. The investigators, Black knew, were considering charges, and were determined to send him to prison.
(#litres_trial_promo) Assiduously, he began working among Toronto’s establishment to terminate the embarrassment. He prided himself on smooth-talking the regulators into accepting that he was blameless, and shoving newspaper critics aside with the brash, self-confident quip: ‘These people are demagogues of the marketplace without a stake in anything.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But his oratory was unexpectedly ineffective.
Black had become a target of hate among a section of Toronto society. The ‘Black Factor’ mentioned by a critical analyst was cited as evidence that Black was merely a manipulator of shares, rather than a master of management.
(#litres_trial_promo) Bankers distrusted his restructuring of the share ownership of his companies, which gave him control without a majority of shares; some institutions questioned whether he had any motives other than self-enrichment, which he barely denied; antagonistic politicians were suspicious of his assumption of special influence among power-brokers; some journalists suspected his assertion of his own special position; others criticised his complete lack of managerial experience, including at the Sherbrooke Record, which was actually run by Radler; and journalists repeated the government’s announcement that the police investigation was ‘ongoing’. In reply, Black categorised some of his critics as the hard, political left, and others as the ‘grumbling detritus of the Establishment Old Guard in the billiard room of the Toronto Club’, due for an early appointment with the undertaker.
Fighting for his reputation, he hired Eddie Greenspan, a criminal lawyer, and accused his critics of waging a vendetta against him. He conjured up conspiracies between the American regulators, the prosecutors, the police and all his critics. Convinced that his telephones were being illegally bugged, he approached Paul Godfrey, a senior member of Toronto’s Police Commission, and demanded that the investigators should be investigated, rather than himself. No bugs were discovered. He then told Roy McMurtry, the Attorney General, to stop the feud against him, but to his surprise he was ignored.
The investigation, Black decided, could only be defeated by using the media. Summoning journalists, he explained that he was fighting not for himself but for the poor underdogs who lacked the money to defend themselves against similar ‘injustice’. His refusal to cower and hide, he repeated, was provoking the investigators’ conviction of his guilt. ‘It’s the fascistic mentality of an element of the police,’ he opined. The police, he continued, were behaving like ‘Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Koestlerian thugs’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The imagery of ‘Conrad Black – The People’s Champion’ attracted some publicity: and then came the stunt.
In the midst of the investigation Black invited John Fraser, his old school friend, for lunch at Winston’s, Toronto’s best restaurant. As the two men entered, Black saw a slew of the city’s power-brokers – politicians, newspaper publishers and bankers – scattered across the room. ‘Half this restaurant already imagines me wearing a prison suit,’ he growled to Fraser. Sitting with his back to the crowd, he spotted a cockroach above Fraser’s head. ‘Ariana!’ he bellowed, calling the manager. ‘Look at that cockroach! I told you that if you let McMurtry in here I wouldn’t give you my business.’ The whole restaurant burst out laughing.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black was a master of theatrics. As the laughter died away, he quietly confessed to Fraser, ‘The whole trauma sometimes stops me getting out of bed.’
The police were unimpressed. Nine criminal charges were drawn up against Black, endorsed by the Attorney General. Until the last moment it seemed that Black would be indicted and tried. He was perilously balanced on the brink. But, literally at the last minute, during a midnight meeting on 9 July 1982, the charges were dropped. The reasons were never explained. Black was ecstatic. ‘I have been absolutely exonerated,’ he exclaimed the following morning, adding, ‘There’s not one shred of evidence of any kind.’ Overnight, he resumed his stance as the master of cool. ‘The jackals and piranhas smelled blood,’ he quipped. ‘They thought they had me, that I was about to go up the chimney in a puff of smoke. [But] I never had any fears how it was going to end up. It’s all atmospherics in the United States. They never believed a goddamn word of all that bunk about racketeering.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Behind the reasonableness was real anger towards those who refused to accept his distortions. In particular, he accused Roy McMurtry of being ‘malicious as well as pusillanimous and incompetent’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and he damned Linda McQuaig, a Canadian journalist who had revealed details of the police investigation. ‘I thought McQuaig should have been horsewhipped,’ he commented, ‘but I don’t do those things myself and the statutes don’t provide for it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Losing the battle in Cleveland had furnished him with a lesson. ‘For years,’ he later told a Canadian, ‘I wondered what the difference between Canada and the United States really was – apart from the French Canadians and the monarchy. Now I know. This is a gentle place, and that’s a real hardball league down there.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As the heat diminished, his self-confidence returned. ‘Tittle tattle,’ he told questioners dismissively. ‘It’s all unimportant.’
Black’s poise was vindicated by Bob Anderson’s agreement in late July 1982 to a settlement. Wiping away the blood, Black thought that he emerged the victor. He paid a further $90 million to become Hanna’s dominant shareholder, bringing the total price to $130 million.
(#ulink_6c266ce4-ea86-512c-8716-c59f5dbecfb4) Anderson became a director of Norcen and Black became a director of Hanna. Pertinently, the investment would prove to be disastrous. Hanna did not fulfil Black’s expectations, and the company’s share price tumbled. The Humphreys had the last laugh. By then, Black’s bandwagon had moved on.
Conrad Black emerged having perfected an infallible method for removing the stains on his reputation. As a prolific student of biography, he knew that general impressions were more important than unfavourable details. The trick was to offer reasonable explanations, persuasively interpreting the worst in a more positive light. Over dinner with old friends, he spoke of rewriting his father’s failings, boasted about his theft of the school exam papers as ‘my first true act of capitalism, but no big deal’, and praised Radler’s ruthlessness in sacking newspaper employees. ‘The lobsters don’t get up and walk out of the tank,’ he laughed, enjoying a quip he would use many times thereafter. To propel his self-promotion he had given regular access over the previous years to Peter Newman, the editor of Maclean’s. Every Dr Johnson, thought Black, requires a Boswell. Newman, he recognised, was intelligent but awestruck. The resulting biography, called The Establishment Man, published in October 1982, suited Black’s purpose, not least because it was well written and favourably reviewed. ‘The biggest blow job in Canadian history,’ commented Larry Zolf, a television presenter.
Newman had been encouraged to cast his subject as an intellectual and a philosopher. ‘Every act must have its consequences,’ Black told Newman, posing as the profound historian who did not believe in redemption or atonement.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Hal Jackman and I agree,’ he continued, ‘that we’re basically more Nietzschean than Hegelian.’ Black ‘revealed’ his sympathy with the ‘exquisitely sad comment by the seventeenth-century French satiric moralist Jean de la Bruyère that “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) Newman was encouraged to conclude, ‘He has trouble working out any form of understandable motivation for himself.’ Blessed with that smokescreen, Black’s disarming confession, ‘I may make mistakes, but at the moment I can’t think of any,’ was recorded without comment.
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite Newman’s talent, several of Black’s fundamental flaws remained concealed. The cosmetics were impenetrable.
Initially, Black was delighted by the book. Reading his own interpretation of himself fed the conviction that journalists were easily beguiled. Self-interest, however, dictated that he maintain a chasm between himself and potential critics. The publication in Newman’s own Maclean’s of articles describing his Norcen troubles justified that caution. In 1983, fearing further allegations of dishonesty, he issued a writ for defamation against Newman and the magazine. His prosperity depended upon suppressing any objective examination of his fortune-hunting and perpetuating the myth of his being self-made, unblessed by any inheritance: ‘I’m rich and I’m not ashamed of being wealthy. Why should I be? I made all my money fairly.’
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In 1983 Black was, by the scale of his own ambitions, neither rich nor powerful. His gross wealth was about C$200 million, but most of that was used as collateral against loans. His debt was increasing, and he decided that he would sell Argcen’s (Argus’s successor) stake in Standard Broadcasting and Dominion Stores Ltd. Just as he had failed in mining and oil, so he had proved ineffectual at Standard Broadcasting, the owner of several radio stations, and Radler’s attempts to save Dominion had proved dismal. Newspapers, he agreed with Radler, were their best option. By slashing costs they could make profits, and newspaper ownership would satisfy his craving for political influence. His passion was to own the Washington Post, but more realistically he wanted Southam, Canada’s biggest newspaper chain. The owners, Radler spotted, had borrowed large sums to modernise and expand, but the business was deemed to be unprofitable. Only by making massive cuts would the group earn satisfactory profits. Black and Radler bought a small stake in the company, and made an offer wrapped around an uncongenial pronouncement. Southam, Black sneered outrageously, was run by long-haired, dope-smoking freaks left over from the 1970s. His offer to buy the company was rejected. Black was stuck. Frustrated by Canada’s politics and concerned about his image, he was aware of his shortcomings. ‘I’m a great believer,’ he had told Peter Newman, ‘in not becoming hypnotised by the rhythm of one’s own advancement. I have always felt it was the compulsive element in Napoleon that drew him into greater and greater undertakings, until he was bound to fail.’
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The ‘compulsive element’ was a characteristic Conrad Black shared with Barbara Amiel. Another common quality was living behind a mask. A third similarity was incompatibility with their spouses. After seven years of marriage the Blacks were irreconcilable, but were in mutual denial about their inevitable fate. Similarly, on 26 January 1985, Barbara Amiel also denied the obvious. Like Conrad Black, she had hoped that happiness would follow her marriage vows to the multi-millionaire David Graham. The expensive wedding party on the thirty-third floor of the Sutton Place Hotel, with a spectacular panoramic view of Toronto, was intended to seal her bliss. Instead, her itinerant search for permanence was doomed. Fate determined that Conrad Black should witness the beginning of her predicted disappointment.
* (#ulink_6ddb429b-41f1-5ee0-9163-20b2d2249b6d) In an agreed swap of shares, Norcen bought 20 per cent of Hanna shares while Hanna sold its shares in Labrador.
3 The Survivor (#ulink_b1973511-f94a-5801-afa2-e36843648e90)
THE ORIGINS OF A WOMAN later renowned as a ‘drama queen’ were remarkably ordinary.
In summer 1940, Barbara Amiel’s parents, middle-class Jews, moved from central London to Chorley Wood near Watford, north of the capital, to escape the Luftwaffe’s remorseless bombardment. On 4 December 1940, the day of her birth, the area around her grandparents’ homes in the East End was blazing. Among the subsequent victims of the incendiary bombs would be Isaac Amiel, her paternal grandfather, the owner of a sweet shop and an air raid warden.
Harold and Vera Amiel greeted their daughter’s birth with joy but understandable fear. The Blitz was the prelude to an anticipated German invasion, and if Britain was defeated, the fate of the country’s Jews was uncertain. Harold Amiel, a twenty-five-year-old solicitor, had joined the Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment, and was due to be posted to the 8th Army in North Africa. In his absence his wife Vera, a strikingly good-looking woman of twenty-four, could rely on her family: her sister Katherine, a doctor, and Harold’s three younger brothers and older sister Irene, had also left London. Several of them, including Harold and Vera, had settled in Chorley Wood.
In common with all their relations, Harold and Vera had been born in London’s squalid East End, but long before the outbreak of the war most of the Amiels and the Barnetts (Vera’s family) had escaped from the Jewish ghetto. The new generation, including a midwife, a doctor, a school teacher, an actuary, lawyers and businessmen, had abandoned regular attendance at synagogue and had consciously assimilated into British society. Although the Amiels stemmed from a well-known family of Sephardic Jews from Spain, and the Barnetts were descended from Vladimir Isserlis, an Ashkenazi scholar in Russia, Barbara and her cousins growing up in Chorley Wood were only vaguely aware that their family’s arrival in Britain had followed the discovery of great-grandfather Isserlis floating in the River Dnieper with a knife in his back. To escape the pogroms his widow had sold valuables to buy tickets on a boat sailing to Britain. Sixty years later, the fate of Europe’s Jews was rarely discussed in Chorley Wood. Rather, some families were preoccupied with persuading Britons to support the socialist or Communist parties in the next elections. Irene Amiel’s husband Bernard Buckman, the owner of department stores, was particularly close to two rich Jewish families, the Sedleys and the Seiferts. Together they championed and financed the British Communist Party. Barry Amiel, Harold’s younger brother, was also a member of the Communist Party. Among that group, Harold and Vera Amiel were known to be markedly uninterested in politics.
Vera was also noted as a neurotic, which caused tension during Harold’s return on leave in late 1942. Since their marriage in June 1939 the articulate and intelligent lawyer, now newly promoted as a major, had become disturbed by his wife’s emotions. That concern appeared to be brushed aside as he regaled his nephews and nieces with stories about the war and handed out epaulettes taken from captured Italian generals. The prizes from the battle-front would remain an indelible memory among the boys after they had bade Harold farewell on his return to Africa. In Harold’s absence his second daughter Ruth was born in 1943. One year later, Lieutenant Colonel Amiel’s war ended. Shot in the shoulder by a sniper while riding in a Jeep in Italy, he was repatriated as an invalid. Dressed in his colonel’s uniform, he spent time playing with his four-year-old daughter Barbara, who had struck up a close friendship with Peter Buckman, her older cousin. ‘Will you marry me?’ Peter asked Barbara. ‘We can’t,’ she replied. ‘We’ve both got dandruff, and that means that our children will be bald. I learned that in biology.’
During the last months of the war, Harold arranged to establish a solicitors’ partnership with his younger brother Barry. At the same time, he fell in love with a woman called Eileen Ford. Some would blame the tensions of the war for the breakdown of Harold and Vera’s marriage in 1945; others said that Vera was an uneducated neurotic and an unsuitable wife for a cultured lawyer. Divorce was common in the immediate post-war period, but Vera was unusually incandescent about Harold’s infidelity, not least because she had partly financed his new law partnership.
Despite the Amiels’ ugly arguments about money, Barbara Amiel was more fortunate than the many children who had lost their fathers in combat. Nevertheless, her early childhood was insecure. ‘I’ve suffered from insomnia all my life,’ she would write. ‘My earliest memory as a child of four was being sedated to sleep.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There was, however, support from Mary Vangrovsky, Harold’s mother. After the divorce in 1946 and Harold’s marriage to Eileen in 1948, she gave her son money to set up a new home, and cared for her two granddaughters. By then Vera and her daughters were living in Hendon, in north-west London.
Barbara Amiel’s early school years were comfortable. Although affected by the general post-war austerity and the rationing of food and clothes, she attended North London Collegiate, one of England’s best state schools for girls, and enjoyed the privileges of a middle-class upbringing. There were ballet lessons, excursions to the theatre and cinema, visits to the new Festival Hall to hear Dame Myra Hess play Grieg, and regular meetings with her father at weekends.
(#litres_trial_promo) Forbidden by Vera to entertain his two daughters in his new home, Harold would take the girls to visit their cousins – Anita Amiel in Swiss Cottage and the Buckmans in Hampstead – for lunch and tea before returning to Hendon. In the era of the nationalisation of major industries by the Labour government and the Cold War division of Europe, politics was passionately discussed in many homes, especially by Jews, a number of whom ranked among the leadership of the left-wing parties. Stimulated by the arguments, especially while visiting the Buckmans, Barbara Amiel would recall her growing understanding of their ‘interest in creating a more just society … through socialism’.
(#litres_trial_promo) At thirteen she was an intelligent, socially aware schoolgirl enjoying a stable life. Her mother was considering transferring her to Roedean, the expensive private boarding school on the south coast, but instead opted for a more dramatic change.
In the early 1950s Vera had begun a relationship with Leonard Somes, a non-Jewish draughtsman. Among the Barnetts and Amiels, Somes was regarded as decent and unassuming, but intellectually unimpressive. In 1953 Vera married him and declared that they would emigrate to Canada to find a new life. Amiel would later write that emigration was her mother’s only option, because the British class system discriminated against working-class men like her new stepfather, but that was fanciful. Many ambitious working-class Britons earned fortunes in the post-war era. Leonard Somes’s difficulties were his lack of talent and purpose, and his social unease. Canada, promised the advertisements, was a guaranteed escape from austerity and offered an idyllic future. Barbara’s fate was decided. By then her father had two more children, the elder of whom, a boy, was mentally handicapped. There was no possibility of Harold Amiel caring for his elder daughters.
The emigrants arrived in Hamilton, near Toronto, at the end of autumn 1953. There was disillusion rather than a honeymoon. The job Leonard Somes was expecting had disappeared, and after their savings were spent he was compelled following a long period of unemployment to work as a labourer at a local steel mill. Home life in Tragina Avenue, recalled Amiel, was a desperate ‘rat race’ to ‘make ends meet’. The family’s plight worsened when her mother went into premature labour. Although she and her son survived after weeks in hospital, Amiel was horrified that her mother’s wedding ring had been ‘wrenched from her finger’ by a robber in the hospital’s parking lot.
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At fifteen, Barbara Amiel was angry. In place of a comfortable home in London, an excellent school and endless cultural excursions, she found herself marooned in a grim wasteland surrounded by uneducated, insular provincials. Her mother, she screamed, was responsible for the calamity. Relations between Leonard and Vera deteriorated. They decided to move to St Catharines, a nearby town where there was the promise of a better job and a bigger home, a necessity since Vera had discovered that she was again pregnant. The only obstacle was Barbara, and there were furious arguments. Vera condemned her daughter’s behaviour as unreasonable. For her part, Barbara judged her mother to be neurotic and unstable, and she was equally dissatisfied with her stepfather’s lacklustre achievements. Although she would write twenty-five years later that her stepfather was ‘a handsome, warm man of whom I was enormously proud’, at the time she was infuriated by his responsibility for her plight.
(#litres_trial_promo) In her mother’s version of events, there was concern about Barbara’s education. She was settled at the local school, and was ambitious to attend university. The best temporary solution, they agreed, was for Barbara to stay with neighbouring friends and to visit her family at weekends. Accordingly, her clothes were packed and carried to her temporary home.
(#litres_trial_promo) Barbara’s version is more apocalyptic. She describes arriving home from school one day at the age of fourteen to discover all her possessions ‘packed in a cardboard box next to the front door. My mother was very apologetic. “Your stepfather and I can’t cope with you any more, so you have to move out.” They found me a room in a house on a council estate and paid my rent until the end of the school term.’ The publication of Barbara’s account in 1980 would cause great hurt to Vera and Leonard, and to many others in her family who disputed her recollection of events.
Growing up alone without a family became increasingly difficult. In Amiel’s various descriptions, she lodged in a part-time brothel while revising for her high-school exams at St Catharines Collegiate, or was a tenant with an unpleasant Polish family. She kept her concentration by stuffing her ears with wax earplugs, but after the ‘hurt had passed and I had cried a bit, after I got over the fright of sleeping in cellars underneath the furnace pipes, I came to cherish my freedom’. During her adolescence, she would also write, she found herself ‘in the middle of a room, stranded, sitting in my own urine, sitting for hours, too frightened to cry and too frightened to move’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her occasional companions in sexual experimentation and drinking alcohol were the children of Polish émigrés and Canadian aboriginals. To accommodate that lifestyle she moved into a boarding house during the week, and stayed with a succession of girlfriends’ families at the weekends. To finance herself, she worked in the evenings and holidays, in a drugstore, a fruit-canning factory and clothes shops. Illness forced her once to return temporarily to her parents’ home, but she soon resumed life in Hamilton. Told she was entitled to a ‘secure home’ by a social worker, she later commented, ‘I had never thought about what I was entitled to. Things were simply taken as they came.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Her brave struggle was rewarded by her securing the grades to study philosophy and English at the University of Toronto. Amiel had become a toughened, streetwise survivor. Her ‘wild’ days, she would write thirty years later, left a legacy. ‘Something decent died in me, or perhaps was stillborn: I would never be able to create a successful family life.’ Incorrect reports suggested that she never saw her mother again.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her anger at Vera was compounded by another surprise. In 1959, on the eve of going to university, she and her sister were invited by their family to return to England for their summer holidays.
Unknown to Amiel, in early 1956 her father had become severely troubled. Harold Amiel, the practice’s accountant, had been stealing money from clients and from his solicitors’ partnership. Exposure was imminent. Fearing disgrace and the anger of his younger brother Barry, he went on 19 April to his mother’s flat in Marylebone while she was on a winter cruise, and took an overdose of barbiturates. A verdict of suicide was declared by the coroner one week later. In their grief, the families decided not to tell Harold’s two daughters in Canada, partly because he rarely talked about them, and also because he had not mentioned them in his last will, signed the day before his death. Barbara’s cousins were told that Uncle Harold had died of his wartime wounds. Amiel’s sole memento of her father was a photograph of him dressed in a colonel’s uniform. Many years later she described her father swallowing the tablets while listening to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
(#litres_trial_promo) In contrast, Barry Amiel recalled that his brother was reading a good book and eating an apple before his death.
Considering her hardships over the previous six years, Barbara Amiel’s arrival at university had been achieved at a price. Emotionally she was unstable. To relieve her stress and tiredness she swallowed a dozen Codeine 222 tablets a day, and took antidepressants to help her sleep. The physical result was an undernourished, sultry young woman with deep black shadows under her eyes. Sprawled across the bed in her room in the students’ hall of residence were panda bears and other soft toys. On a shelf was the solitary photograph of her father in uniform. ‘Welcome to the Jewish Common Room,’ laughed fellow-student Larry Zolf as the thin Barbara entered the Junior Common Room. ‘The most beautiful fellow-travelling Marxist I have ever seen,’ was Zolf’s conclusion after a few conversations revealed her fascination with Stalin, ‘and certainly the most intelligent.’ Curious about her past, Zolf asked the shy girl about her family. ‘Oh, my father was very poor and unemployed,’ replied Amiel, ‘and we were kept afloat by a rich uncle.’ Other family members do not recall those circumstances.
Sitting regularly in the JCR, the centre of her social life, with her new best friend Ellie Tesher, Amiel confessed her need for security. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked when a handsome, dark-haired student walked in. ‘That’s Gary Smith,’ replied Tesher. ‘He lives in Forest Hill’ (an affluent area of Toronto). ‘I think I’ll marry him,’ said Amiel flatly.
Gary Smith, a gentle, quietly-spoken law student, was the son of Harry Smith, the owner of the once-famous Prince George Hotel in Toronto and a member of a well-known family. In 1958 Harry Smith had opened the luxurious Riviera Hotel in Havana, Cuba, in partnership with Meyer Lansky, the Mafia boss, who owned the hotel’s casino. Fidel Castro’s revolution one year later terminated their investment. In an attempt to recoup some of their money, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr and Sophie Tucker were booked to appear at the Prince George Hotel, and the income their performances generated was substantial. The downside was Harry Smith’s chronic and unsuccessful gambling in casinos across the USA. Nevertheless, to Barbara Amiel, the Smiths appeared a wealthy, stable Jewish family who might offer her salvation.
Amiel enjoyed Gary Smith’s adulation. Silently, he admired her skills in political argument – the legacy, she said, of those family debates in north London. As her self-confidence grew, she became the centre of attraction in student debates as a fiery supporter of neo-Marxism and Leon Trotsky. ‘You don’t know the difference between Trotsky and a hole in the ground,’ laughed Zolf. Once their relationship had become established, Smith was untroubled by Amiel’s frequent indifference towards him, even when she treated him like an imbecile. Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly. ‘Sex is good with Barbara,’ Smith confided, albeit that it invariably took place in the back of the car he borrowed from his parents – by no means an uncommon experience among their age group. Her thin waist and large, high breasts were breathtaking. ‘If anything,’ Smith murmured, ‘Barbara needs breast reduction, they’re so huge.’ Many years later, Conrad Black was to make the same type of comment publicly. Smith had never met such a sexually experienced woman who frequently took the initiative. His placid temperament could easily cope with her dramatic, even histrionic moods, but while Amiel was vitriolic in criticising others, she was vulnerable to even friendly mocking of herself. In those helpless moments he provided the support she needed, especially during the weeks when she consulted the college psychiatrist about her hallucinations and her growing addiction to Codeine. A doctor prescribed Elavil, an antidepressant. ‘The drug,’ she wrote, ‘was to be my undoing [and the cause of] my erratic emotional life … I never realised quite how drugged I was for those seven years.’
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Amiel’s erratic life had started long before the summer of 1962, but that year was a landmark. Isaac Barnett, her grandfather, died and bequeathed her £400. She flew to London with Gary Smith to collect the money and see her family. In the new, exciting environment, Amiel’s imagination let rip. Smith was under the mistaken impression that she had found her father’s corpse after he committed suicide, and she suggested that she had been brought up as a Marxist, mixing with the Seiferts and Sedleys, the rich Jewish Communist families who lived in mansions in Hampstead, although neither family could recall her presence in their homes, or her being invited to their frequent parties. She would later recollect that she was met at Heathrow by ‘my Maoist uncle’s chauffeur’, while Gary Smith recalls them taking a bus into the city and walking to a hotel.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Amiels and the Buckmans recall trying their best to care for their niece whose innocence had, it seemed, been irretrievably lost. As a gesture of their consideration, her uncle Bernard Buckman suggested that she join the British delegation to that year’s World Youth Festival in Helsinki, a Soviet-sponsored summer camp for Communist supporters. Amiel bade farewell to Gary Smith and set off, passing through the newly-built Berlin Wall, to compare the theory of Communism discussed at university in Toronto with the reality.
Eighteen years later, Amiel would assert that the Helsinki experience had immediately and fundamentally changed her political opinions, although the student who returned to Canada still spoke as a Marxist. The noticeable difference was her change of personality. The shy trepidation had been replaced by a flaunting of her sexual attractions. With her family’s support, she did not need to work that summer. Instead she stayed with Florence Smith, Gary’s aunt, while he continued to live with his parents.
Despite her growing dependence on the Smiths, Amiel’s visit to Helsinki did bring about one basic change – she began to live a double life, which would continue until she married Conrad Black. She would travel to Montreal, moving in circles where people played with ‘real drugs’, and discovering that she got high on marijuana more quickly if she used a pipe. While apparently faithful to Gary Smith, she also enjoyed other sexual relations.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Canadian idol of the era was Leonard Cohen, the brilliant, handsome poet and singer. Cohen’s philosophy appealed to countless female admirers who flocked to the star in the hope of seducing him. Amiel suggests that she joined the queue. Cohen, she said, could offer women ‘everything, except of course fidelity … In his own terms he is not unfaithful to anyone because he cares for them all.’ The poet’s attitude towards free love and open relationships, while caring for all his lovers, appealed to Amiel’s gypsy temperament.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The secret that Leonard shares with Casanova,’ she would write, ‘is the one that costs him dear: it is real desire.’ Amiel showed the same unfaithfulness, but in her case it was to satisfy different requirements. She always needed a man, but hated relying on other people. Her dilemma was how to balance her dependence and her desire for independence. Unlike Cohen, she would not advertise her roaming, astutely compartmentalising her life.
Just after completing her final university examinations in 1963, Amiel opted for financial stability. ‘I wrote a message under the seal of your degree,’ she told Gary Smith, referring to a romantic gesture she had made while preparing the degree certificates in the university administrator’s office. ‘It’s a love message,’ she confided. Days later, at the end of a sexual session in Gary’s father’s car, she unexpectedly snapped, ‘Let’s get married.’ Gary understood the reasons. Barbara was fed up with sex in the back of a car. She wanted a bed, security and, above all, money. Their first date for the ceremony was abandoned. ‘We’ve got cold feet,’ Gary told his parents. A few weeks later they were married in a rabbi’s study in front of eight witnesses including her mother and Leonard Somes, Gary’s parents and Larry Zolf. At the party afterwards in the Smiths’ family apartment, Zolf pushed through gamblers, bookmakers and scam artists to ask a small man, ‘Are you Meyer Lansky?’ ‘So what if I am?’ he growled.
The newly married couple rented an apartment on Toronto’s Spadina Road, and while Gary Smith began his career as a lawyer, Amiel was employed as a secretary and script assistant in the television section of CBC. Not long afterwards, there was a terrible shock. Harry Smith, having lost all his money gambling, was arrested with his brother and accused of fraud. Soon after, he was convicted and imprisoned. Instead of joining a stable Jewish family, Amiel had associated herself with criminals. It was not long before she realised that her decision to marry Gary Smith had been short-sighted. Domestic life with the modest lawyer was dull compared to the thrills at CBC, especially following her appearance on the cover of Toronto Life magazine. Increasingly, she returned home late and too tired for sex. Just nine months after their marriage she asked her husband, ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ ‘I would not presume to know what’s going on in your head,’ replied Smith. ‘This isn’t working. I’m off.’
Late that night in summer 1964, George Jonas, a twenty-nine-year-old Hungarian émigré also employed by CBC, was driving along Spadina Road and spotted Amiel crossing the street, ‘weighed down with more baggage than a ten-hand army mule’. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Jonas. ‘You just robbed a dwelling and can’t remember where you parked the getaway car.’ ‘Close,’ she replied. ‘I just split up with my husband.’ ‘Great,’ said Jonas. ‘Let’s go have coffee.’ ‘Can’t,’ said Amiel. ‘Have to unload all this stuff before seven. Call me tomorrow if you like.’
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Jonas, a right-wing intellectual, was an unusual character in Toronto. Alternately, he dressed in black leather and rode a motorcycle or assumed the mantle of a Central European, carrying a silver-headed cane as a prop to his hand-kissing and heel-clicking. In London or New York his act might have been ridiculed, but Amiel was attracted to the ambience of an East European intellectual’s home filled with books, music and passionate arguments. Since her visit to Helsinki she had moved from the far left towards the political centre, and Jonas’s fervent anti-Communism was appealing. For his part, Jonas said, ‘I found her very attractive and thoroughly unpleasant.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That was not a barrier to a relationship, and nor was Sylvie, Jonas’s wife. Jonas and Amiel began an affair, although Amiel did not regard it as an exclusive attachment. She was now better fed and dressed, making her breasts appear larger. ‘The bigger and more pronounced they are,’ she would later write, ‘the more attractive they are.’ Depending on her mood, she could appear flat-chested, while on other occasions the size of her breasts fuelled speculation about implants. ‘I’ve got one thing you haven’t got,’ she boasted to male journalists vying for the same interview: ‘cleavage.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Shamelessly, she would ask a colleague for advice about something she had written, and while he read her pages, rest a breast on his shoulder. As she self-consciously walked through CBC’s corridors like a queen with an entourage, her remarkable physique excited drooling and gossip. At parties, men were mesmerised by her sexuality. ‘Holding her thin waist was so erotic, so powerful,’ sighed one admirer. Some of her relationships ended with her ‘seeing stars’ after being hit by a boyfriend;
(#litres_trial_promo) one ended in an abortion;
(#litres_trial_promo) but almost invariably her men, including cameraman Ed Long, discovered that after one night, they were forgotten the following morning. Long’s attempt to seek an explanation was spurned by Amiel, who turned her back as he approached. ‘I could cope with three men a week at CBC,’ she would later jokingly tell a boyfriend. ‘Each man was satisfied with two nights, and that left me one night to wash my hair.’
‘She’s gorgeous,’ announced Ross McLean, regarded as CBC’s most brilliant producer. Moses Znaimer, another producer, agreed that Amiel, who was then employed as a secretary by Perry Roseman on The Way It Is, a current affairs programme, should be turned into a star. Glamour photographs were distributed to promote the new celebrity interviewer. Her debut was not a success. The autopsies of Amiel’s on-screen abilities were merciless. ‘She comes across as affected but not stylish,’ said one producer. ‘She’s too guarded, not sharing her personality with the audience. She’s not a natural.’ Another senior producer agreed: ‘Her fine-boned chiselled features make her attractive but you can’t take her seriously.’ ‘Too nervous and lacks gravitas,’ concluded a third, who carped that her prominence had been won by manipulating Ross McLean. Unexpectedly, Amiel’s overt sexuality had undermined her professional ambitions. Producers were reluctant to use a woman whose appearance and manner were distracting. The struggle for success increased her insecurity, although initially she ignored her failure. ‘All in all, I learned to be a reasonably smart-ass interviewer,’ she would recall in self-praise.
(#litres_trial_promo) Appearing in a 1966 TV satire as a bikini-clad temptress of Eddie Shack, a wild ice-hockey player, did not enhance her image as a serious journalist.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her on-screen career was in jeopardy. In her search for blame she would admit that she had been ‘too self-conscious’, and she later conceded that her appearance as ‘a lacquered apparition with bouffant hair, glazed smile and detachment bordering on the unconscious, often reinforced by the mandatory dosage of Elavil’, was not a winner.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the real cause of her misfortune, she decided, was a CBC ‘syndrome’ that excluded ‘non-leftists’ from appearing on the channel. Although it was not a full left-wing ‘conspiracy’, she said there was a prejudice against her anti-Communism. She also perceived another bias. ‘I’m unhappy with my nose,’ she told Claire Weisman, an artist who was temporarily answering telephones in the building, ‘and I’m having it fixed.’ Weisman was surprised. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you noticed it?’ said Amiel. ‘Noticed what?’ ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Haven’t you noticed the anti-Semitism here?’ ‘No,’ replied Weisman. ‘Absolutely not.’
Amiel had long been unhappy about the shape of her nose. Variously described as ‘Roman’ or ‘soft Jewish’, it curved gently down, whereas she wanted the ‘turned-up’ nose prevalent among the gentile, white Anglo-Saxon community. She confided her dissatisfaction to George Bloomfield, a gregarious CBC producer whom she had ‘spotted’ a year earlier. Soon after introducing herself, she rented a flat in Bloomfield’s block in Toronto’s High Park, and a few weeks later she moved into his apartment. ‘I don’t like my nose,’ she had repeated for a year. ‘It’s a perfect nose,’ replied Bloomfield mechanically, but eventually he agreed to pay for the surgery. The doctor produced a nose described by Bloomfield as ‘pug’ and by Larry Zolf, now also employed at CBC, as a ‘button nose’ and ‘an insult to the Jewish people. Amiel was ashamed of the perfectly good Jewish nose she had. Now she looks like a crazed Shirley Temple.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Amiel’s depression intensified. ‘It’ll improve,’ the surgeon assured her. Frequently plunging into her handbag to take pills, Amiel set off to California as senior CBC producer Eric Koch’s script assistant to film a documentary, Culture Explosion. ‘She’s a bright, moody Jewish girl cursed by her mental fragility,’ concluded Koch, who became disenchanted with Amiel at a family dinner hosted by his brother. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she announced, clearly bored. ‘Take me home.’ ‘Out of the question,’ Koch replied, outraged by her selfish behaviour towards his family. ‘Sit down.’ Refusing to obey, Amiel asked a member of the film crew to drive her to her hotel. Clearly she was prepared to live only on her terms. She had, Koch heard, walked out of concerts if a more exciting alternative sprang to mind.
Back in Toronto in 1968, George Bloomfield was preparing to move to New York and make feature films. One night he and Amiel were disturbed by the doorbell. Bloomfield stumbled out of bed. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. ‘Telegram,’ said the voice. Bloomfield opened the door, and was pushed aside by Gary Smith. Finding his way into the bedroom, Smith saw Amiel. He then left. Soon after, Amiel’s mother and stepfather visited the flat for an unemotional but civilised reconciliation. The ghosts of her ‘wild years’ were being interred. To break from her past, she decided to abandon CBC and move with Bloomfield to New York. ‘I’m a camp follower,’ she admitted.
(#litres_trial_promo) Soon after their arrival she found a nose surgeon used by Hollywood’s stars. Bloomfield agreed to pay for the second operation. This time she declared the result ‘great’.
Life in New York suited Amiel. Bloomfield was fun, and paid for all her needs. ‘Ten seconds after waking up,’ he recalled, ‘we’d both be laughing.’ She began to read voraciously, stretching her intellect. Unlike in Toronto, she was surrounded by the ‘chic world’ of film celebrities, and came eagerly close to anti-Vietnam war and pro-feminist agitators, notably Jane Fonda and Alan Alda, who were working with Bloomfield. Hovering around Fifth Avenue, she watched the rich buy furs and jewellery, envious of how they recognised each other and could ‘trade fashion names and tips’.
(#litres_trial_promo) At length, she justified to Bloomfield her considerable expenditure of his money on exclusive brands: ‘You’ve got to have the right belt, purse, shoes and scarf. The dress doesn’t matter.’ Her easy-going manner, friendliness towards everyone, and willingness to engage in any fantasy Bloomfield suggested in their bedroom, suggested a happy woman. Unseen by others, however, there was another side.
The prescription of the antidepressant Elavil, described by Amiel as ‘my undoing’, had neutralised her sense of responsibility. ‘Nothing was my fault,’ she recalled, because ‘everything is socially or chemically determined’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Drugs, Bloomfield complained, had become a routine part of his girlfriend’s life. Screaming in her face, he discovered, grabbed her attention. ‘When you take drugs you look just like your mother,’ he shouted at her. Amiel stood silently, pushing both wrists upwards. Like make-up, the image of the independent and tough woman evaporated, replaced by a vulnerable individual requiring direction to cope with her confused emotions.
Bloomfield would be editing his latest film with Alan Alda in London, where the producers were providing a luxury flat near Buckingham Palace for three months. Amiel was excited. Since her own career as a freelance writer had ground to a near halt, the change would be stimulating. Her relationship with Bloomfield was friendly but no longer passionate. She could use the trip to develop her skills as a hostess. In anticipation of dinner parties, she invested heavily in weighing scales, cooking dishes, recipe books and measuring spoons. To the surprise of Lazlo Kovacs, a guest at one of her London dinner parties, she wore a stopwatch around her neck. Anxiously she watched the seconds tick away. ‘Quick, finish your plate,’ she urged, ‘the next course is coming.’ Everyone, including Bloomfield, would recall the fuss rather than the meal.
Life in London offered a good chance for Amiel to renew her relations with the Buckmans, especially Irene, her father’s older sister, and Peter, her cousin. ‘Do you think it’s too scandalous?’ she asked, modelling a revealing bikini in front of Peter Buckman. Did her choice, she was anxious to know, defy the propriety expected of a Jewish princess? Buckman assured her that she looked beautiful. Meeting the Buckmans was fun, especially Uncle Bernard, the businessman and property developer. ‘You’re very proud of him, aren’t you?’ said Bloomfield. Amiel nodded. Her uncle’s large house in Hampstead, the country home he had bought his son, his own houses on the Côte d’Azur and in St Moritz, his big car and a suspected Swiss bank account excited a woman who wanted wealth but also remained committed to some socialist ideals. In one respect, Bernard Buckman was a mini-idol for both George and Barbara. During his many business trips to China he had met Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, the Communist leaders, whom they both venerated. Plaintively, Amiel urged Bernard Buckman to negotiate Mao’s approval of a film which would feature Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star Over China, a eulogy of Mao’s revolutionary war. Bloomfield would be the producer. Buckman agreed, but Snow’s death terminated the plan. Amiel’s disappointment revealed no suggestion of disapproval of her uncle’s profitable combination of business and politics.
Amiel’s return to Toronto in 1972 was auspicious. She started writing for local magazines, a divorce was arranged with Gary Smith, who cited her adultery with Bloomfield, and she began searching for a new life after what Bloomfield would later call ‘five aimless years’. By then her sexual relations with Bloomfield were rare. He was focused on his work, and was unconcerned whether she was sleeping with other men. He had steadfastly ignored her desire for children. In need of a man, Amiel approached George Jonas to resume their relationship. Her politics were shifting sharply to the right, she needed intellectual stimulation and a totally different life. By living with Jonas, she could concentrate far more on her own work.
George Jonas had been living for several years with Beverley Slopen, a literary agent. Amiel’s appearance in their apartment did not immediately alarm Slopen. She knew Amiel as ‘a hypochondriac who George might take for a weekend to the Bahamas but could not afford to take shopping’. She did not anticipate that Amiel would provoke a very public split between her and Jonas, after which Amiel returned to her apartment in Chestnut Park Road. ‘I’ve decided to leave,’ she told Bloomfield calmly. Bloomfield was not surprised. ‘Found someone else?’ he asked. ‘I’m going back to George,’ said Amiel. That news did shock Bloomfield. How, he wondered, after five years living with supporters of the feminist and anti-war movements, could she live with such a right-wing man? He never received an answer. Soon after, Bloomfield was called by Jonas and invited to meet at the Coffee Mill, his favourite Hungarian restaurant. According to Bloomfield, while they spoke Jonas took out a gun and showed it under the table. ‘I can’t live without her,’ said Jonas. ‘Don’t try to take her away.’ Jonas describes Bloomfield’s scenario as ‘ludicrous, the invention of a film producer’. Whatever the truth of the matter, the emotions of twenty-five years previously are evidently undiminished.
In her new life Amiel worked frantically, laboriously writing acclaimed magazine articles on various social issues throughout the night, carefully choosing each word in her efforts to express original opinions in a cautious climate. Simultaneously, she reemerged as a popular television pundit to disparage Marxism, feminism and Canada’s dependency culture. Trading on the image of a sexy intellectual, she showed off bruises at a dinner party and declaimed, ‘Sex is no good without pain.’ Together with Jonas she posed as a star with brains and beauty, charm and attitude. Those unconvinced by her self-education during her years with Bloomfield credited Jonas as her Svengali, dubbing her ‘the finest second-hand mind in Canada’. This further eroded her self-confidence, already undermined by the painful withdrawal symptoms after she had given up Elavil. She became fearful of cancer and other illnesses. Her critics spoke of borderline narcissism – which she interpreted as evidence of her growing importance.
Living with Jonas, a poet, journalist and political philosopher, was ideal for an aspiring writer. In October 1974, having discovered that Jonas was also Jewish, she announced, ‘I’ve made an appointment with the local rabbi.’ They were to marry later that month, in a synagogue, with only six guests. Over the following months Amiel’s self-confidence soared. Although she voiced a fear of being disliked, and hesitantly dismissed her urge for children as premature, she asserted absolute certainty about her political convictions. Having shed her last vestige of sympathy for compassionate government, she placed herself in the vanguard of the cause of restoring red-blooded capitalism to socialistic Canada.
Peter Newman, the mercurial editor of Maclean’s, Canada’s only popular political magazine, was impressed by Amiel’s right-wing, anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic criticism of modern fads. In 1966 she had written an astutely argued article, ‘Let’s Reinstate Debtors’ Prisons’, for the magazine, advocating that debtors who failed to pay their bills should be imprisoned.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ten years later Marci McDonald, a star columnist, resigned, and there was a vacancy. ‘Marci was a bitch,’ said Newman admiringly, ‘but we’ve got a bigger bitch to take her place.’ Amiel’s extreme conservatism, he calculated, would attract profitable controversy.
National prominence enhanced Amiel’s visible self-confidence. ‘She was the sort of woman,’ Newman noted, ‘who kept spilling out of her dresses, then blamed the dresses.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Her response to those who whispered about implants was savvy. ‘If I used silicone,’ she told Newman, ‘my breasts would be twice as big. I don’t do things by halves.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Fame and independence sparked her weariness with Jonas. Marrying a Jew, she discovered, was not such a good idea after all. His emotional needs were too similar to her own, and rather than partying, he preferred staying at home. Jonas was not the first man to discover the truth of her confession, ‘I’m polyandrous.’ One man could not satisfy her. She was constantly propositioned by men and women, married and single. The ferociously heterosexual Amiel wanted to experiment with most kinds of relationships and sexual antics.
Hanging around the Maclean’s office late one evening towards the end of 1976, Amiel noticed Peter Brimelow, the magazine’s handsome twenty-nine-year-old business editor, born in Lancashire, England. Drawing on her consummate experience, she made signals to encourage his approach. The long dark hair and green eyes of the seductress who had just been named ‘Canada’s most beautiful woman’ by a magazine was irresistible to the younger journalist, unaware of the licentious world he was entering.
‘I’ve got to go for an appointment,’ Amiel often told Jonas, with whom she was writing By Persons Unknown, a prospective non-fiction bestseller about a Canadian businessman who hired killers to murder his wife, a fashion model. In great secrecy she visited Brimelow’s flat. If she went away overnight, Jonas believed she was travelling on an assignment. Her infidelity evoked no crisis of conscience. As with her other relationships, Amiel’s self-indulgence was to please her latest admirer. ‘You’re a luxury,’ she told Brimelow in bed. ‘You’re of no use to me other than for sex and passion.’ Bites and scratches were his badges of her eroticism. ‘What makes people good lovers,’ she later reflected, ‘is not their sexual technique but their sexual being. Extremes of ineptitude aside, it is not how a man touches you, but who the man is that determines your sexual response.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The rawness was her attraction: ‘No matter how many times the act is performed, one is still in awe of its potential … whether it is done for love or for money, for spite of for kicks, the sexual act remains the key to our entire being.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Whether fooling around with Brimelow, joking about another affair with a Hungarian bankrobber who ‘stored gelignite under my bed’, or mimicking mutual friends, Amiel blessed her eternal youth. ‘I’ll never get old,’ she said. ‘That’s a battle I’ll never lose.’ The chilling implication was her preference for death rather than looking at a wrinkled face in the mirror. Inevitably, the relationship bore a cost. Brimelow was not the first to discover that losing one’s heart to Amiel meant a loss of self-control, and she enjoyed witnessing helplessness in her men. Lying in bed with Brimelow early on New Year’s Eve in 1976, she knew that later, while she was celebrating with her husband, Brimelow would be partying with a girlfriend. Seized by a mixture of insecurity and fury at her inability to control Brimelow, she dug the nails of both hands deeply into his chest, drawing blood. Brimelow’s girlfriend, Amiel smiled, would get the message.
Hard work, stylish writing, deep thought, exceptional looks and unconventional opinions had transformed Barbara Amiel into the nation’s conservative star. Describing herself with relish as a ‘very merchandisable’ right-wing pundit or ‘the redneck in a Givenchy dress’, she invited notoriety and a reputation for bitchiness as the Jew who criticised Israel, the advocate of personal responsibility and the critic of equal-opportunity politics.
(#litres_trial_promo) Without loyalty or deference to the Canadian establishment, the outsider reproached the natives. While pouting about her need for privacy, revelations about her sentiments in Maclean’s became the cornerstone of her journalistic shock. Like many celebrity pundits, she occasionally confused intelligence with wisdom. Her prominence transformed a spat with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after she described Germans during the First and Second World War as ‘Huns’ into a national debate. ‘You’d have saved us a lot of trouble,’ said Newman, ‘if you’d called them “Sauer Krauts”.’ To Newman’s surprise, Amiel burst into tears. ‘She’s a woman without a sense of humour about herself,’ the editor concluded,
(#litres_trial_promo) puzzled by her insistence that ‘harsh words can’t harm me’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her sensitivity did not always extend to thoughtfulness about others. Careless about the magazine’s schedules, she delivered articles with trembling hands at the editorial office after the deadline, clutching her head to relieve the pain of giving birth to a masterpiece, and awaited the applause. ‘A drama queen,’ concluded Peter Newman, ‘and a whining pest over each lost comma and adjective.’ For sympathy, she constantly telephoned Peter Brimelow. Even in the middle of the night she required an audience to hear about her work, her upsets and the praise she had attracted.
The relationship between Amiel and Brimelow was intense, yet to Brimelow’s despair she would not abandon Jonas. In revenge, Brimelow began an affair with Amiel’s assistant Dia, an attractive Anglo-Indian. ‘You’re having her, aren’t you?’ screamed Amiel. ‘How could you?’ Brimelow was unapologetic. Amiel refused to leave Jonas, he retorted, so why could he not also have an affair? Walking a tightrope, Amiel justified her own infidelity while condemning her lover’s.
In early 1979, Brimelow accepted a job in Washington, where his latest girlfriend, called Maggie, lived. In recent weeks he had described Maggie to Amiel as a potential wife. Amiel was given a choice. If their relationship was to survive, she would have to leave Toronto and her husband. Still undecided, she arrived at Brimelow’s flat with her sister Ruth. After Ruth’s departure, Amiel remained to say farewell. In bed, she announced a game of noughts and crosses on Brimelow’s chest. Her scratch marks were deep, the blood oozed. She knew that Maggie would understand.
A transitional moment in Amiel’s life had arrived. She was still married to Jonas, but she visited Brimelow three times in Washington, and at the same time started an affair with Sam Blyth, thirteen years younger than herself, and with similar looks to Brimelow’s. After two months, her decision was final. ‘It’s time to see Sam,’ she told a friend. She abandoned her husband and long-time lover, and moved into Blyth’s dilapidated Toronto home. The dalliance, she reckoned, would extricate herself from her marriage. Handsome, charming and poor, Sam Blyth offered new excitement. ‘A big adventure,’ said Amiel. ‘A lot of fun, like a journey in a big cookie jar.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Brimelow took the news calmly, while Jonas was distressed about no longer meeting Amiel’s requirements. ‘She was not a housewife,’ he said, ‘and I am not a house-husband. We agreed what we should do is find a wife, for both of us.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Jonas soon recovered. ‘How would you like to go to Paris for breakfast?’ he asked a Korean woman managing a restaurant. They eventually married.
Amid that hiatus Amiel began writing Confessions, her autobiography, a mixture of political polemic and attention-seeking striptease. ‘I am a wandering Jew,’ she wrote. ‘I always have my toothbrush handy. My allegiance is not to any piece of earth or particular set of rock outcroppings. My allegiance is to ideas, and most especially to the extraordinary idea of individual liberty … My suitcase is packed. I do not feel bound to any country or any popular will more than to my own conscience.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In an article published simultaneously in the magazine Chatelaine called ‘Nothing Succeeds Like Excess’, she confessed to being a shameless, self-promoting exhibitionist who enjoyed intellectual domination. Her critics unfairly classified such confessions as proof of the ‘borderline personality disorder’ suffered by attention-seeking addicts, or narcissism. Amiel’s sophisticated political arguments, however, protected the book from ridicule when it was published in 1980.
Rescuing Canada from socialism and ‘the spiritual and moral bankruptcy into which it has fallen’ was the heart of Amiel’s cause.
(#litres_trial_promo) Like Conrad Black, she condemned the Globe and Mail and the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau for distorting the policies of anti-Marxists and conservatives. The Liberal ‘thought police’, she wrote, were conducting a ‘witch-hunt’ against those championing the individual against the state. She railed against the bureaucrats promoting political correctness, multi-culturalism and the conditions of working women, and their fellow travellers who were championing sexual harassment prosecutions, denigrating prostitutes, inventing child abuse as a political weapon, lamenting men’s abuse of the clitoris and generally suppressing opportunities. Her black cleaner in New York, she complained, had refused to move out of a poor neighbourhood and seek a better education for her children because she expected improvements to be brought to her at public expense.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Canadian media and political establishment, she protested, were deliberately concealing the horrors in China and the Soviet Union. Forgetting her former support for the anti-Vietnam war movement, she confessed to having ‘little sympathy or respect for draft-dodgers’, and ‘loathed the sight of pretend-moralists’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She was, she wrote, thrilled that Jane Fonda had been arrested by US Customs for carrying drugs which turned out to be Codeine given to her by Amiel for a headache. ‘I was filled with a warm glow,’ she wrote. ‘It was my contribution to the war effort.’
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Confessions also included a florid description of Amiel’s English roots. After interviewing most of her family during her stay in London in 1971, she described herself as born into a family of British Marxists. The exaggeration justified what she admitted were ‘snide remarks’ about Bernard Buckman. In ungrateful language, she condemned her uncle as an unprincipled, rich hypocrite, living in his big, sunlit Hampstead home where ‘the clichés bounced off the cut crystal’ while indulging in ‘wilful blindness’ about China and the Soviet Union’s repression and bloodshed.
(#litres_trial_promo) One assertion which hurt the Buckmans was that the family was ‘financed by mainland China’.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘She’s abused our hospitality and twisted the family history,’ Bernard Buckman told his wife Irene. ‘Forgive her,’ urged Irene, uneasy about her niece’s mistreatment by the Amiels. But even Irene was puzzled by Barbara’s inaccurate reconstruction of her background in her attempt to prove her new values. In a book extolling the importance of a journalist’s honesty, complained Irene, Barbara’s inventions were surprising.
The contrast between Amiel writing her book in Sam Blyth’s unkempt home, even wearing a coat when the electricity was cut off, and her personal credo was notable. ‘I knew what I wanted,’ she wrote about her time in London in 1971. ‘To be dropped at Selfridges’s or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for quails’ eggs,’ besides taking lessons to be a hostess and sharing a masseur with Lady Weidenfeld.
(#litres_trial_promo) She had become envious of the Canadian jet set’s use of private planes, ‘clubby travellers wafting across borders with sleek impunity’, living ‘our fantasies’. Her reality check was a conviction that those birds of paradise had no ‘durability’ and that few would survive.
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More revealing, considering her future conduct as Lady Black, was her attitude towards materialism. ‘The true spirit of liberalism,’ she wrote, ‘simply judges everyone on his or her own merit … We are all responsible for ourselves. That is not callous. That is liberation.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Transgressors, she warned, would be punished: ‘Greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Her most pertinent comment, in the light of Conrad Black’s problems twenty-three years later, was her reproach, in Maclean’s, of John Dean, Richard Nixon’s dishonest legal adviser in the White House during the Watergate scandal. Amiel was scathing about Dean’s ‘moral myopia’ as a party to the President’s cover-up. Instead of accepting personal responsibility for his conduct, she wrote, he ‘still clings to the soothing thought that it was all somebody else’s fault’, blaming ‘the environment [for his crimes] rather than a person’s own morality’.
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In January 1981, soon after the book’s publication, Amiel and Blyth visited Mozambique. She wanted to witness the damage wreaked by Western aid on native agriculture while sustaining Marxist regimes. The journey ended in embarrassment. Attempting to enter the country without visas, they were arrested and imprisoned for some days. She would later claim to have eaten her press pass to avoid recognition. ‘That would have been difficult,’ said Peter Newman. ‘It’s plastic.’ Others quipped that the hardest bit to swallow would have been Newman’s signature, or her own. Amiel’s plight, and her melodramatic plea that her life was in danger, provoked anger from the Canadian ambassador, who was irritated by her behaviour, and from rival journalists. But Peter Worthington, the editor of the Toronto Sun, was surprised by the apparent jealousy. ‘She’s sailing through life like the Spanish Armada,’ he said, apparently unaware that the Armada was destroyed by the English navy and a storm. Amiel’s values and humour, he decided, were ideal for his newspaper. On her return she was appointed a columnist on the Sun, and her life became even more hectic.
Living in squalor with Blyth while renting a comfortable apartment in Forest Hill, she wrote regularly about her abortion, her drugs, her family feuds and her love life. Playing the Jewish card, the impoverished Jew became the aggrieved Jew championing prejudice. Her private life became as varied as her writing. ‘I’ve got this penchant for young men,’ she told a girlfriend. Blyth became just one of several young boyfriends, including twenty-four-year-old journalist Daniel Richler, whom she met during a radio debate. Their affair began soon afterwards. Arguing and laughing in restaurants, Amiel was carefree about her reputation. Just a month after starting the relationship with Richler, there was a silence followed by a sigh during a telephone conversation. ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she declared. The relationship was over. Her ‘penchant’ was for other young men, including Eric Margolis, a freelance journalist specialising in the Middle East whom she met at a lunch hosted by one of her many admirers. The host’s misfortune was that Amiel, impressed by Margolis’s charm and expertise about Islam, decided to pursue him. ‘I’m coming over,’ she announced in a telephone call. ‘I’ve got another date,’ replied Margolis. But finally he succumbed, and discovered what he called ‘an Act of God’, Amiel’s breasts. To her irritation, Margolis was too independent, frequently rejecting her suggestions that she visit his flat. ‘Is there someone else there tonight?’ she asked. If Margolis answered ‘Yes,’ she was sufficiently liberal to cope. But if he replied ‘No, I’m working, babe,’ she became incensed, repeatedly calling, seeking to change his mind. ‘You’re like one of the boys,’ laughed Margolis.
At the age of forty-one, Amiel had reached a crossroads. Fearing loneliness, she was seeking marriage in order to have children and embed her social and professional ambitions. Margolis, she decided, was ideal to give her life that structure. He was intelligent, independent and good fun. Frustratingly, he did not show the obedience she liked in her men, and was patently weary that she always wanted to win her point. Amiel could not resist bickering that he should be rich and famous. A fraught ten-day trip to Hong Kong and China ended with her demand, ‘Marry me!’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’d end up in jail.’ ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because I’d wring your neck.’ Amiel did not give up her marital ambitions despite an overture from a new admirer. In 1983 Peter Worthington offered her the editorship of the Toronto Sun’s comment section. She would, Worthington believed, succeed as the newspaper’s ambassador for ideological conservatism, providing a public profile on TV shows to attract the Thatcherites among Canada’s East European migrants. To celebrate her appointment she was taken by Doug Creighton, the Sun’s publisher, to Winston’s. There are two versions of what followed during the lunch.
In the first version, Creighton asked Amiel in a loud voice, ‘Are you fucking Peter?’ The restaurant fell silent to hear the answer. Amiel jumped up and ran to the lavatory. According to the second version, Creighton kept naming Worthington. ‘Why do you keep mentioning Worthington?’ Amiel asked. ‘Well, he was your predecessor, he hired you, and he trained you as editor. I’m just trying to say he’s gone.’ Waiting for a moment of silence, Amiel screeched, ‘You think I’m fucking him, don’t you?’ Creighton was nonplussed, but replied, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’ Worthington’s explanation of the exchange is benign: ‘Doug was mesmerised by her. She dazzled him. He was persuaded that she was a bombshell.’
Worthington issued the invitations to Amiel’s appointment party: ‘The Sun has a new editor. It’s a girl.’ Transfixed by Amiel, Worthington became unhappy that Eric Margolis was asked by Amiel to edit the comment section in her absence. The triangle could lead to the farce of Worthington calling at Amiel’s flat while she was at Margolis’s. There was gossip that on one occasion Amiel was standing outside Margolis’s flat, waiting for another woman to leave, while Worthington stood outside Amiel’s flat, waiting for her to return. Amiel’s eccentric personal life and odd hours spread into the editorial newsroom. Either she arrived dressed in a chocolate-brown velour tracksuit, looking harassed with unkempt hair and sunglasses, or she appeared as carefully groomed as a Vogue model. ‘Either a bag lady or a $1 million outfit,’ commented Worthington. On one occasion she strode purposefully past Christie Blatchford, one of Canada’s notable columnists, wearing an ‘open trenchcoat, under which could be clearly seen a black bustier, garter belt and fishnet stockings’. Amiel’s gyrating moods were experienced by Allan Fotheringham, another columnist and an occasional boyfriend, during a trip to Vancouver. After flying 3,000 miles to a gathering of theologians, Amiel felt inclined to shock. Ten minutes after arriving at the party, Fotheringham was surprised to hear her shrill ‘Fuck!’, followed minutes later by a loud ‘Cocksuckers!’ Soon after, the two were standing alone in the garden. The theologians had fled into the house.
By 1984 Amiel’s limitations as an editor were causing even Worthington unease. While she was appreciated by some women journalists as an intellectual, fun, right-wing babe, Worthington marked her down as ‘a dangerous writer’. She was, he decided, ‘not an original thinker but a clear thinker. She marshals other people’s ideas and then personalises them. She knows how to get under people’s skin and find their Achilles heel.’ That talent was inadequate when the news broke of Britain’s response to Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in April 1982. Amiel needed guidance about ‘our line’. Repeatedly she tried to call Worthington, who was out of reach climbing mountains in China. In desperation, she telephoned George Jonas. ‘I’m against the British,’ said Jonas. So that was the Toronto Sun’s line, and Jonas was given a column as a poet and later as a commentator. Amiel’s attitude did not inspire loyalty. ‘Her people skills are not great,’ sighed Worthington. ‘She’s focusing on people she likes, and she’s not happy working in the background instead of the spotlight.’
Amiel had reached yet another crossroads. Margolis, she decided, was a bon vivant, uninterested in commercial success. The relationship, she concluded, just like her other concurrent affairs, was pointless. In 1982 she had met David Graham, the good-looking, rich stepbrother of Ted Rogers, Canada’s leading communications mogul. Four years older than Amiel, Graham represented upper-class wealth from the Ottawa Valley. Relationships with WASP businessmen, she decided, were less complicated than with men of mixed European backgrounds. ‘A relatively simple person,’ she would write, ‘can be a very attractive quality in a lover.’ By ‘simple’ she did not mean ‘unintelligent’, just not ‘psychologically complex’. Complexity, she decided, ‘is an awful pain in the neck in lovers. It can create mood swings, whining and sometimes meanness [because] good lovers paradoxically want to please no one but themselves.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Graham was, she decided, uncomplicated, and therefore a good lover. To keep everyone on their toes, she introduced the new to the old. Margolis met Graham, and smiled his lack of concern. Amiel chose Graham, not suspecting that twenty years later Margolis would own a multi-million dollar vitamin company with over three hundred employees. ‘I’m hankering for David,’ she told a friend. Committing herself to Graham reflected her desperation for domesticity and a child.
Graham, renowned for his many relationships with glamorous women, wanted a home-maker in London, but was casually unspecific about his other requirements. A beautiful, intelligent woman was appealing, but marrying a forty-four-year old Jewish libertine who paraded her ‘erratic emotional life’, implying sexual promiscuity, was an untested experience. At least there was good reason to believe that Amiel had abandoned her pose as an opinionated, left-wing hippie. Recently she had praised the virtues of wealth and comfort. ‘I so loathe the permissive, promiscuous society,’ she had written, ‘and so long for fidelity, stability and monogamy, but it is always just out of my reach. There is a thing called discipline. I have tried to inflict it on my work. I’ve tried to inflict it on me. But all that emerges is self-indulgence. Really, I won’t talk about my personal life, because I am ashamed of it.’
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One minor forewarning for Graham of the perils of cohabiting with Amiel occurred at the wedding of Roy Faibish, a Canadian television producer and political adviser, at Chelsea Register Office in London. Amiel arrived with Graham, and met the CBC TV producer Patrick Watson with his girlfriend Caroline. ‘She’s so cute,’ said Amiel. ‘You’ve been together for some years. I always marry the men I sleep with.’ This carping comment to someone who was familiar with Amiel’s career at CBC provoked a blistering argument in front of thirty guests. Graham noted his fiancée’s independent spirit. Unlike other women, she had achieved fame on her own account, without depending on a rich husband’s wealth. Marrying her would not expose him to a financial liability – in fact she could be generous – but harnessing her strong character would be a challenge .
On 2 July 1984, while visiting Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, Barbara Amiel and Graham married. Soon after the ceremony, Graham was badly injured in a car crash in France. After his recovery Amiel decided to celebrate the marriage again in Toronto, and to host a party at the Sutton Place Hotel.
No man in ‘33 Stop’, the hotel’s summit banqueting room, could have appeared to be less attractive to Barbara Amiel than Conrad Black. The two had met in 1979, at a dinner party in Toronto hosted by Black’s friend John Bassett, and had since discovered that they shared conservative opinions. The eventual union of two insecure Canadians dreaming of glamour, fame and fortune among the jet set could have been predicted by no one.
4 Salvation (#ulink_e8704fbe-d53a-5805-aa05-8aa3ea06025c)
CONRAD BLACK DROVE AWAY from Barbara Amiel’s wedding party in a bad mood. Having agreed to give Allan Fotheringham a lift in his limousine, he discovered that his companion was drunk. He didn’t like Fotheringham. The journalist had a habit of telling the truth about the aspiring press tycoon, and one truth was that Black’s finances were not in good shape. He was determined that in the future he would have his revenge. ‘As [Fotheringham] stepped out of the car,’ Black would write years later, ‘he fell flat in front of the doorman.’ Although the story was denied by Fotheringham, Black ordered his editor to run it anyway: ‘Let him sue.’
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Black disliked most journalists. Their ‘sanctimonious and tendentious’ assertion of independence while greedily grabbing his dollars was as irksome as their refusal to accept his own judgement of himself. In public testimony he had once damned journalists as ‘a very degenerate group. There is a terrible incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.’ Since then, his contempt had increased as he and David Radler struggled to build a newspaper business.
The original $500 investment in the Knowlton Advertiser in 1966 had grown into the American Publishing Company. The slender profits depended upon Radler’s constant criss-crossing of the country searching for savings and imposing cuts, and monitoring the financial results on a primitive central computer. Radler’s gospel never changed: ‘Count the chairs,’ he habitually ordered. Halving the number of employees was his familiar recipe, regardless of the consequences for the newspaper’s quality. Having exhausted the search in Canada, the two men began scouring America for small community newspapers with circulations as low as 5,000. In particular they wanted free shopping publications, weekly and community newspapers enjoying monopolies and a lot of advertising. By 1986 they owned eighty daily newspapers in thirty states, and fantasised about creating an empire to rival the two Goliaths, the Washington Post and the New York Times. In the meantime Black would have been satisfied with Toronto’s Globe and Mail, but he had recently been outbid by Ken Thomson, not least because under Black’s control the newspaper would have been made to reflect his conservative opinions. ‘I hate its leftish, pompous tenor and the editor’s smarmy pretensions,’ he had said. Ever since, the Globe’s journalists, he believed, had been unfairly scrutinising his business. He heard that the newspaper’s editors were planning an article describing ‘a rapacious, right-wing Bay Street baron’ who ‘milked’ his businesses, ‘destroyed public companies’ and oppressed minority shareholders ‘in a series of complex corporate shuffles designed primarily to fill his own coffers’.
Throughout his life, Black had cared little for the working classes. Politicians, he believed, should encourage and protect the rich rather than mollycoddle the poor. His true colours had been shown at Massey-Ferguson, and in 1985 he expressed similar ire against the employees of Dominion Stores. Radler’s attempt to revive the supermarket chain had failed. Selling the whole company to one buyer had proved impossible. The shabby supermarkets, Black knew, could only be sold piecemeal and the workers given compensation for losing their jobs. He blamed the staff for his predicament. Accusing them of gross larceny, he sniped in public, ‘Lobsters are walking out of my stores.’ The suggestion of theft was akin to throwing fuel on the fire, but Black enjoyed watching the effect of his provocation. ‘I’ll win,’ he told a friend, ‘because I say these things in such an erudite way.’ His verbal assault disguised the true reasons for the sale. Ravelston’s debts had risen to C$150 million, and the banks were pressing for repayment of loans worth C$40 million advanced to Dominion. Some whispered that Black was on the verge of bankruptcy.
(#litres_trial_promo) His salvation, he decided, was the Dominion Stores pension fund. To profit from the company’s sale, he anticipated using much of the fund’s C$62 million surplus for redundancy payments and to repay the company’s loans, a potentially permissible if controversial move. With skilful negotiation, he persuaded the Pensions Commission of Ontario to authorise his appropriation of those funds.
(#litres_trial_promo) The commission’s approval provoked outrage among trade unions. ‘He’s the representative of bloated capitalism at its worst,’ complained one prominent politician. Thrilled to engage in verbal combat, Black accused his critics of being ‘a symbol of swinish, socialist demagoguery’. The trade unions sued the Pensions Commission, claiming that legal requirements were unfulfilled. At the Globe and Mail journalists began investigating Black’s handling of his employees’ pension fund. The article would conclude, ‘He has been wrong when found with his hand near the cookie jar.’
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Black was once again a hate figure, and the banks were alarmed. Under pressure to sell his assets, including his private plane, he became ill, damaging his relations with his brother Monte, who was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. Unexpectedly, Monte agreed to sell his equal interest in the business for $22.4 million, some suspected because he had proven to be unhelpful to his brother’s schemes. Conrad later justified the transfer as a scheme to help Monte avoid a more expensive divorce settlement. Black raised the purchase money by mortgaging his homes in Palm Beach and Toronto. The comparatively small amount exposed the limited value of the Blacks’ business. Their inheritance and the opportunities after the Argus coup had been squandered. Instead of glorying in his status as a global billionaire, Black was slithering along Bay Street sucking a lifeline.
Monte’s replacement as finance director was John ‘Jack’ Boultbee, an aggressive tax planner.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Jack will bring some imagination to our accounts,’ Black told a friend. Physically, Boultbee was hardly attractive. His hair was dyed black, his suits fitted badly over a paunch, and there were ugly gaps between his teeth. For professional rather than aesthetic reasons, he remained hidden from public view, known as ‘the man behind the curtain’. After his appointment, Black and Radler made no decisions without Boultbee’s scrutiny and approval. He became the brains behind all their schemes, and expected to be rewarded accordingly.
Jack Boultbee had little time to settle into his new position. A Canadian court overruled the Pensions Commission and ordered Black to return C$37.9 million to Dominion’s pension funds. Simultaneously, Don Fullerton, the head of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, told Black, his friend and a fellow director, to repay a C$40 million loan. After selling his 41 per cent stake in Norcen for C$300 million to repay his debts, Black once again reassessed his business. Eight years after the Argus grab, everything had been sold except the collection of small newspapers. Some of Argus’s shareholders complained about the fate of the company’s assets, although Black denied any wrongdoing. Posing as the great capitalist entrepreneur, he had accomplished a vanishing trick, and everyone appeared to have lost money.
During 1985, with Radler and Boultbee’s help, Black again restructured his business. In discussions between them, Boultbee offered ‘scenarios’ to produce profits and avoid taxes. Each one was offered to lawyers and accountants with a request: ‘Will it play?’ If approved, there was a professional’s letter – a ‘good housekeeping certificate’ – giving the trio approval to proceed to the edge of legality. In the succession of complicated transactions, Black once again appeared to his critics to have legitimately profited from asset stripping and insider dealing.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sterling, the company controlling his newspapers in Canada, was sold to Hollinger, also owned by Black, for $37 million, which he took in Hollinger shares. Most of the cash ended up as management fees in Ravelston, his private company.
Those events had spurred the Globe and Mail to finally publish their investigation, under the headline ‘Citizen Black: Can a Right-Wing Tycoon Buy his Way into the Press?’. Black did not appreciate the criticism. He blamed the ‘Canadian spirit of envy’ for failing to glorify tycoons like himself. With delight, he announced that he would sue the Globe to ‘painfully punish’ his critics by forcing them to prove that his dealings were dishonest. That hurdle, as the newspaper’s lawyers soon discovered, would be more than difficult to surmount.
Black drew strength for his battle from the like-minded supporters of raw capitalism gathering in May 1985 for the Bilderberg Conference at Arrowhead, near New York. He regarded his fellow guests as close friends, akin to his family. Among them was Andrew Knight, the editor of the Economist. Knight was more than an intelligent, genial, successful editor. As a global networker, he was entrusted with indiscretions and secrets. ‘Let’s have another fiery Armagnac,’ Black suggested. Over several drinks after midnight, Black confided his frustration at having failed to buy a major Canadian newspaper. Naturally, he omitted mentioning the distrust of himself in his own country. ‘Canada’s a backwater,’ he complained. ‘I sometimes wish I was an American and could own the Washington Post.’ ‘If you’re looking for a big newspaper, Conrad,’ replied Knight, in what would undoubtedly be the most decisive sentence ever uttered in Black’s career, ‘the Daily Telegraph might be a possible target.’ Too much Armagnac had flowed for Knight to notice Black’s reaction.
The Telegraph was among the world’s most successful broadsheets, selling 1.2 million copies daily, 750,000 more than the London Times and 300,000 less than the New York Times. But the headline success disguised dire problems. The Telegraph’s sales were 300,000 lower than five years earlier, and the company was losing about £1 million a month. The reasons were painful. Compared to its rivals, the Telegraph’s advertising revenues had fallen steeply, and the trade unions were effectively blackmailing the company. Every year the employees hired to compose, print and distribute the newspaper were illicitly pocketing millions of pounds, either by threatening to strike just before the paper was due to be printed, or by signing on under names like ‘Mickey Mouse’ and disappearing to work in another newspaper or as taxi drivers. Within its decrepit headquarters in Fleet Street, the Telegraph’s ageing executives appeared helpless, and refused to recruit younger experts to stem the haemorrhage of money.
Isolating himself in a sanctum on the top floor of the Telegraph’s building was Lord Hartwell, formerly Michael Berry, the newspaper’s seventy-five-year-old chairman and editor-in-chief. Abstemious and shy, Hartwell cared passionately about journalism, reading every word he published. His solution to the trade unions’ theft was radical. Two modern printing plants were under construction in London’s Docklands area and in Manchester. By using computers rather than traditional printing craftsmen, he could expel his dishonest employees from the industry forever. Hartwell’s experts had estimated the modernisation would cost £130 million.
One aspect of the Telegraph’s poor management was the inaccurate accounts prepared by Coopers Lybrand, the auditors. Consistently, the company’s costs were underestimated. The Telegraph’s drift towards insolvency had remained unnoticed until, halfway into the Docklands plant’s construction, Hartwell was told that the building costs had increased by £89 million. Unperturbed, he asked his old friend Evelyn de Rothschild, the chairman of the merchant bank N.M. Rothschild, to find lenders on the market. Trusting the famous bankers to care for his interests, Hartwell approved Rothschild’s prospectus to raise the money. The result was disappointing. A group of banks agreed to lend £50 million only if Hartwell provided a further £30 million. To Hartwell’s surprise, by May 1985 he had found only £20 million. A further £10 million was needed before the loan could be secured. Sketchy rumours about Hartwell’s plight had reached Andrew Knight before he flew to America for the Bilderberg Conference. He returned to London with the news of Black’s enthusiastic interest.
Travelling on the Tube from Heathrow airport to London, Knight was surprised to read a Times report of the Telegraph’s failure to find sufficient money. He immediately telephoned Evelyn de Rothschild. ‘I think Michael Richardson must have leaked it,’ said Rothschild. Richardson was the bank’s director responsible for raising the loan. Greedy and sly, Richardson would in later years find it difficult to prove his integrity, but in 1985 he was still trusted. ‘We need another £10 million,’ continued Rothschild, ‘and can’t find anyone.’ ‘Would any money be welcome?’ asked Knight. ‘Even from a North American?’ ‘I would see no problem,’ replied Rothschild. By the next day, Knight had received the prospectus and other reports. ‘Horrendous,’ he muttered. At the outset, Richardson had failed to warn Hartwell that £130 million would be insufficient to build the new printing plants, and had subsequently refused to seek out other reputable investors.
Excited by the news, Knight telephoned Black. The time in Toronto was 8 a.m. on Monday, 20 May, and it was Victoria Day, a public holiday. Black was asleep, and to Knight’s surprise refused to take the call until lunchtime. Knight interpreted that rebuff as an amusing idiosyncrasy rather than the lazy arrogance he would later perceive. For a fleeting moment he considered telephoning Katharine Graham, the impeccable owner of the Washington Post who would make an ideal proprietor of the Telegraph. The thought soon evaporated.
Once awake, Black rapidly understood his latest chance of taking advantage of another’s distress. ‘I’ll fax you Rothschild’s papers,’ said Knight. ‘I don’t have a fax machine here,’ replied Black. Noting his casualness, Knight sped to meet Lord Hartwell. ‘Would you be prepared to accept a Canadian investor?’ asked Knight. Trusting the emissary, Hartwell agreed to meet Black in New York. Knight was doubly delighted: first by Hartwell’s eagerness, and second by Rothschild’s failure to undertake any enquiries about Conrad Black’s reputation and probity. Unbriefed, Hartwell flew by Concorde to New York on 28 May, under the mistaken assumption that the money was being offered by Conrad Ritblat, a London property developer. Behind him in the aircraft sat his directors and Michael Richardson, uncertain of his loyalties.
Conrad Black had not yet arrived when the group entered a scruffy suite in the Hilton Hotel at Kennedy airport. Twenty minutes later, he appeared. He was struck by the Dickensian eccentricity of Hartwell and his entourage, seemingly carrying the dust and smells of olde London from which they had reluctantly taken a day’s leave. Hartwell resembled the battered Ford Cortina car in which he daily drove himself to Fleet Street. The others looked like characters from The Pickwick Papers. Sitting next to Hartwell was Black’s old friend Rupert Hambro, who had been in the plane from London. Frustratingly, Hartwell had spent the entire flight scrutinising every word of that day’s Telegraph, which prevented the banker from initiating a probing conversation. His misfortune was rectified by Richardson’s opening remarks: ‘Lord Hartwell needs an investor offering £10 million,’ said the banker, confirming the Telegraph’s plight.
Black required no advice about his tactics. His cultivated performance, concealing a burning ambition to become a media tycoon, suggested a gentle knight coming to the rescue. ‘All I have to worry about is which pocket the money’s coming from,’ he told Hartwell as he described his achievements and his limitless cash flow.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was no hint that his bankers in Toronto were demanding the repayment of loans, or that he was being publicly described in some quarters as dishonest. Nor did he reveal that he would need to borrow the £10 million he was offering Hartwell. Before committing himself, however, he wanted to tilt the odds in his favour. He and Hambro excused themselves and went for a walk, despite the heat and humidity, in the hotel garden. Hartwell, they agreed, was clearly on his last legs. The question was how to use the loan to capture ownership of the Telegraph. Knight had suggested that Black should only agree to invest £10 million in exchange for one strict condition: if Hartwell needed more money, he would be contractually bound to first ask Black, who would then become the Telegraph’s majority shareholder. ‘It could take five years before he needs the money and you get the newspaper,’ Hambro cautioned. There was, he explained, uncertainty about Britain’s newspaper industry. Eddie Shah, a printer, had provoked a bitter battle outside his premises at Warrington in Lancashire by using non-union labour. If Shah won, the trade unions’ grip over the Telegraph might be weakened, but nothing more. Neither Hambro nor Black knew that Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times and the Sun, was building a new printing plant in Wapping, near Tower Bridge, and was secretly planning to destroy the print unions by printing all his newspapers with non-union labour. Better-informed than Hambro, Knight had estimated Hartwell’s eventual downfall within two years. Either way, the two men agreed as they returned to the suite, the opportunity was astonishing. ‘It’s a wonderful entrée,’ concluded Hambro. Black nodded. He scented blood.
Hiding his excitement in a performance that would have been worthy of an Oscar, Black formally made his offer of £10 million for 14 per cent of the Telegraph’s shares, on condition that if Hartwell needed to raise more money, Black should have the right of first refusal, and that any investment would give Black a majority shareholding in the company. At that moment Michael Richardson ought to have intervened to warn his client about the possible consequences. Instead, he remained silent. Hartwell, he had decided, was beyond saving. ‘My role,’ he would later say, ‘was to ensure the successful placement of the loan, not to care for the Berry family’s interests.’ Unprotected by Rothschild’s, Hartwell replied without fully understanding the implications of Black’s condition, ‘I don’t think, Mr Black, we can resist that.’ Convinced that he would not need more money, Hartwell agreed to gamble his empire for just £10 million.
As Black watched Concorde take off for London carrying Hartwell and his entourage, he understood the astonishing opportunity organised by Andrew Knight. He had cast the bait, the reel was running, and once the pressure slackened he would jerk the rod and wind in the line. There was a risk, but it was limited. As he returned to his plane he could reflect that only six years after the turmoil and aggression following Bud McDougald’s death, he might be about to become a legitimate media tycoon in London. The outstanding hurdle was whether Hartwell would honour his verbal agreement within a formal contract. Black entrusted the final negotiations and drafting to Dan Colson, a friend from McGill University who was now working as a lawyer in London. Colson was to ensure that the pre-emption clauses giving Black an irrefutable right to the company were watertight.
If anyone in the City or the British establishment had wanted to protect the Telegraph from a foreign predator, there was still time to do so. Black was not entirely unknown in London. In the early 1980s he had appeared at a dinner held by Charles Price III, the American ambassador, and was introduced to Tim Bell, the famous publicist who had been at the heart of organising Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory. Bell, well connected and liked, was among those needed by Black if he was to persuade the establishment in London of his wealth and honesty. Gratifyingly for Black, that was unnecessary in 1985. Although Knight was aware of Black’s reputation, he remained silent, while others did not bother to attempt to discover the truth from contacts in Canada. Unlike the protests that had greeted Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of The Times in 1981, no one in London understood or even cared about Hartwell’s fate, least of all his financial advisers. ‘Rothschild’s,’ the banker David Montagu would say, ‘handed the Berry family’s balls to Black on a silver platter.’
Hartwell’s fate was inescapably sealed on 13 June 1985. After the agreement was signed, Black’s behaviour was orchestrated by Knight. ‘Don’t say a word when the announcement is made,’ he ordered, ‘and stay in Toronto, out of sight.’ Without protest, Black obeyed. If his reputation was discussed in London, he knew, there could still be problems once Hartwell’s plight became terminal.
In anticipation of the crisis, Andrew Knight organised a group of advisers to represent Black on the Telegraph’s board. Besides Rupert Hambro and David Montagu, employed by Jacob Rothschild’s small merchant bank after his family bank had been sold to Merrill Lynch, Knight selected Frank Rogers, an experienced newspaper executive, and Lord Rawlinson, a former Conservative MP and law officer. If anyone in London could have understood Black’s pedigree it was Jacob Rothschild. Renowned for combining his serious patronage of the arts with partnerships alongside buccaneers like James Goldsmith and Lord Hanson, Rothschild had in 1969 advised Saul Steinberg, a rising New York tycoon, during the takeover of the Labour MP Robert Maxwell’s publishing business. In the course of the negotiations Rothschild had publicly exposed Maxwell as a crook, causing his downfall and disgrace. Yet in 1985 neither Rothschild nor David Montagu appears to have considered asking about Black’s reputation in Canada, or to have looked at old newspaper cuttings. Even among the City’s most honest scions there was a laissez-faire response to the foreign incomers passing through the capital, even to someone who had landed a remarkable deal at the Telegraph.
At Knight’s suggestion, David Montagu was appointed chairman of the Telegraph’s audit committee. Within weeks he unearthed Coopers Lybrand’s negligence. The prospectus issued by Evelyn de Rothschild’s bank to raise the original £80 million had stated that during the following six months the Telegraph would earn £5.5 million. Instead, it had lost £14.4 million. ‘An unutterable shambles,’ Montagu told Black, confirming that the Telegraph’s financial problems were worse than anyone imagined.
Black arrived quietly in London in early September 1985. Over the following days, with Knight as his guide, he was introduced to his new team. In an interlude, he telephoned the Telegraph’s classified sales department from his hotel room. ‘I want to place an advertisement,’ he told the saleswoman. Her reply was staggering. The newspaper, she announced, was full for several weeks. She advised him to try the Guardian or The Times. This was better than Black had imagined. On 24 September Black set out for dinner at Lord Hartwell’s house in Westminster, where at Richardson’s suggestion Hartwell was hosting a celebration to mark the completion of the financing arrangements. ‘There’s a need to tiptoe,’ Knight warned Black, ‘so the deal doesn’t get busted.’ Black was seated next to Nicholas Berry, Hartwell’s forty-three-year-old younger son. He intended to present himself as a family man offering help to another family in unfortunate distress.
The dinner was Nicholas Berry’s introduction to the fate of his inheritance. Until then, Lord Hartwell had excluded his two sons from the family business. During his conversation with Black, Berry concluded that the Canadian had ‘taken advantage of an old man’, and was untrustworthy. Looking across the table at Richardson, he was equally shocked. Not only had Rothschild’s issued a misleading prospectus and failed to protect his father in New York, but Richardson appeared to be courting Black as a potential new client. ‘Anyone but Black,’ he told his father. ‘We’ve got to find an alternative source of money.’ Reports of Berry’s renewed hunt for money soon reached Black. Lord Hanson, the Australian tycoon Robert Holmes à Court and representatives of the Australian Fairfax group were regaled with disparaging comments about Black, and all announced their interest in financing the Telegraph. To their dismay, they all discovered that the contract was watertight. Berry was powerless, but was also angry about N.M. Rothschild’s original failure to introduce these more suitable investors. ‘Sour grapes,’ said Richardson in reply to Berry’s protests. Nicholas Berry, Black concluded, had become ‘a pestilential irritation to us’.
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Two months later, Hartwell was sinking. By November the Telegraph’s costs were out of control, and the banks refused to advance more money. On the brink of insolvency, only one source of finance was available. From Toronto, Conrad Black offered to advance £20 million in return for 50.1 per cent of the shares and control of the company. At one stage during the tense negotiations conducted by Dan Colson, Hartwell agreed to Black’s take-over, only to reverse his decision soon afterwards. At a critical meeting, the peer appeared first oblivious to his imminent downfall, and then helpless. He collapsed under the stress, and was carried comatose from the boardroom. ‘If he dies, it will save time,’ quipped David Radler from Toronto. While he was careful never to say anything cruel in public, Black did not shed any crocodile tears over his quarry. Gleefully he reported that ‘Lord Fartwell’, Private Eye’s caricature, was sinking. ‘It had become surrealistic,’ he concluded, ‘as tenacious resistance to the inevitable eventually always does, the surest sign that the endgame was finally afoot.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Conrad Black could not have anticipated how his scathing homily would become appropriate to himself eighteen years later.
As the hours ticked by, Black and Colson applied the pressure, humiliating Nicholas Berry and forcing his father’s capitulation. On 11 December 1985, the decent amateur surrendered. For just £30 million, Black had won control. To appear magnanimous, he agreed to Knight’s suggestion that Hartwell should remain as the company’s chairman and editor-in-chief, and that it was he who should announce the transfer of ownership at a press conference. Among the journalists gathered was John Fraser, Black’s old school friend, who was now working for the Globe and Mail. ‘He does not want to be any sort of newspaper tycoon,’ Fraser heard Hartwell say. ‘We have not sold out.’ Fraser’s smile widened as Hartwell continued, ‘I’m happy to report that Mr Black is an entirely passive investor with no known interests in the British newspaper business.’ Fraser’s smile grew broader. ‘They’re finished,’ he thought. ‘Everyone from Newfoundland to Victoria will be laughing and cheering Conrad on. They couldn’t even be bothered to make just one phone call to Canada.’
In Toronto, Black would have agreed. Overnight he had been transformed from a small-time publisher into an international star. ‘I’ve hit the jackpot,’ he laughed to a friend in a telephone conversation. ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s critics wrongly assumed that he had ‘pulled a fast one’, while he himself portrayed the deal as the product of genius, ‘maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’. In reality, he had merely grasped an offer created by an old man’s short-sightedness and a bank’s incompetence. All that remained was to find £20 million. Despite his claim a few weeks later to have ‘earned more than $100 million’ over the years, he did not possess any meaningful sum of money.
(#litres_trial_promo) At first he asked his closest friends, including Fred Eaton, ‘Do you want a piece of the action?’ Eaton prevaricated, while others, wary of Black since the Norcen scandal, refused outright. Finally, having sold his other assets, Black scraped together £20 million, helped by his directorship of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
In his hour of triumph, Black was elated but realistic. He knew his personal handicaps. He was unqualified to combat the British trade unions’ regular blackmail, and his financial experience of small newspapers across North America was inadequate to resolve the Telegraph’s plight. ‘Let Radler sort them out,’ he suggested to Andrew Knight. ‘Out of the question,’ replied Knight. The appearance in Fleet Street for just one hour of the ratty, uncouth hypochondriac, obsessed by fetishes about germs, would raise destructive questions about Black himself. ‘Radler is forbidden to come to London,’ ordered Knight. ‘He’s not the sort of person I’d like to see inside the Telegraph building.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Black. ‘I don’t think the Telegraph is quite ready for David.’ A few days earlier, Knight had been invited to attend the Hollinger board meeting in Toronto summoned to approve the Telegraph deal. The sight of Radler, Peter White and Monte Black plotting like cronies about ‘a scheme to finesse this’ and ‘get control of that’ had shocked him. ‘They sniggered like bad schoolboys,’ Knight later told David Montagu. The worst, reported Knight, was Monte acting like a buffoon. Before leaving Toronto, Knight heard about the details of the Dominion pensions and Norcen controversy. Black, he realised, would not survive in London without his help.
Knight agreed to become the Telegraph’s managing director, on condition that he was given the option to buy 5 per cent of the Telegraph’s stock for £1 a share. ‘Outrageous greed,’ snarled Colson. Knight’s request, Black chorused, was a sign of ‘avarice’, and displayed ‘impenetrable arrogance’. In his experience, journalists never had the upper hand. Knight’s insistence was a novelty, but Black reluctantly acknowledged that without Knight the deal would not have occurred, and without Knight he risked losing his £30 million. Wherever he went in Washington and New York, the power-brokers always asked, ‘How’s Andrew?’ Everyone praised Knight, and he realised he was fortunate to have him as an ally. Reluctantly, he succumbed. ‘If you’re Canadian you start with one strike against you,’ he conceded. The price of being a fish in the big pond was to obey. He accepted the contract submitted by Knight, and headed to Palm Beach for Christmas.
In the sunshine he could reflect that, after seventeen years, he now owned a substantial business. The formula for his partnership with Radler remained their complementary differences. Black liked networking and loathed pernickety chores, while his partner, alias ‘The Refrigerator’ because he was cold and hard, enjoyed sweating the profits by repeatedly probing each newspaper’s finances. Their trusting relationship was cemented by distance: Radler moved to Vancouver, 2,000 miles from Toronto, where he could be with his family, while Black constantly commuted between cities, anticipating the public glory after he took control of the Telegraph. In Florida, mixing with Jayne Wrightsman and the other Palm Beach aristocrats, his fantasies expanded. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson, the two outstanding Canadian newspaper proprietors, had been treated with deference in Britain. Both had won access to Prime Ministers, and there was every reason, one day, to expect ‘Lord Black’ to follow in their footsteps. Status symbols meant a lot to Black, and although he acknowledged Knight’s warning not to appear as a lusting social mountaineer or a foreign profiteer, he did not intend to emulate Roy Thomson, whose chauffeur would buy a Tube ticket for his employer at Uxbridge station on the Metropolitan Line so he could travel the eight miles to Fleet Street. Black intended to use the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which Bud McDougald had appropriated from Massey-Ferguson. Repeating over cocktails in Palm Beach, ‘I’m the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph,’ the image of his destiny unfolded. Not as a mere press baron, but as a world leader – like the power-brokers who featured in countless history books in his library. His youthful fascination for visiting the graves of the famous had not been forgotten. Only the name and the dates were carved on the tombstones of Churchill, de Gaulle, Bismarck and Napoleon. One day, in the long-distant future, his grave might be similarly stark and potent, reflecting his influence on mankind’s fate.
The formal approval of the Telegraph’s shareholders was due on 20 February 1986. In anticipation, Andrew Knight was executing a revolution. At Knight’s suggestion, Black approved two new editors. Max Hastings for the Daily Telegraph, Black agreed, was a brilliant albeit surprising choice. The military historian, writer and broadcaster was a maverick, but could prove to be inspired. Knight’s selection of Peregrine Worsthorne for the Sunday Telegraph caused Black more concern. Unaware that his life’s ambition to be a newspaper editor was about to be fulfilled, Worsthorne had just lamented in the Spectator, then not owned by the Telegraph group, about the nightmare of a Canadian ruffian and asset stripper buying the Telegraph. Knight overcame Black’s reservations. ‘To my amazement,’ Worsthorne recalled, ‘he offered me the opportunity of my lifetime.’ Others had agreed with Worsthorne that Black’s imminent arrival in London was not a blessing. Charles Moore, the editor of the Spectator, commissioned John Ralston Saul, the noted Canadian writer, to write a piece introducing the Telegraph’s new owner. ‘While Mr Black personally grows ever richer,’ Saul wrote witheringly, ‘some of his companies grow ever poorer.’ To prove his argument, Saul cited how, over the previous five years, Black’s six publicly quoted companies had lost 21 per cent of their value. He observed that by posing as a historian, regurgitating huge amounts from his prolific reading and immersion among the famous at Bilderberg, Black assumed that he possessed unique insight. Black confused, suggested Saul, proximity and scholarship with understanding, and mistook bombastic proclamations for wisdom: ‘The driving force of his personality and his brilliant sense of applied historical perspectives will impress all who meet him. Only with time may they feel that the driving force deforms the perspective so that the masterful conclusions are wrong.’ Considering the fate of Conrad Black’s shareholders, his brother and the Argus widows, Saul concluded: ‘One searches for the spirit of sacrifice in Mr Black’s career and finds self-help.’
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Black was outraged. There was too much truth in Saul’s assessment for comfort. Personal denigration normally provoked an instant writ for defamation, but on this occasion Black was urged by Knight to be cautious. Media owners in Britain did not issue writs, he was told, and if, just days after his coup, his first reaction to criticism was nuclear, people would become suspicious. Accepting the advice, Black confined himself to a letter to the Spectator which, he preened himself, would alert London to his erudition. Saul was accused of being ‘dishonest and malicious’, and possessed of ‘sniggering, puerile, defamatory and cruelly limited talents’. By contrast, in a sanitised version of his own past, Black presented himself as ‘unaware of any minority shareholder discontent’. He continued, ‘I have never had any difficulty with … any regulatory authority.’ No one in London, he assumed, would know about the SEC’s ‘consent’ terms linked to his bid for Hanna, or about the complaints from Argus shareholders. London tasted, for the first time, Black’s ‘truth’.
Charles Moore did not regard Saul’s analysis as anything more than a provocative and forgettable point of view which entirely failed to prove Black’s dishonesty. Those who did ask Knight about Black’s ‘sketchy reputation in Canada’ were reassured, ‘It’s in the past and isn’t relevant.’ There seemed every reason to accept that endorsement. David Montagu was less sanguine. ‘There are all sort of strains arising,’ he told Black, ‘not least the Spectator article. We must take care. Here’s a list of how to stay clean.’ Radler was to have nothing to do with the Telegraph; Black was to restrict himself to two visits a year to London until he was given the all-clear; and he was to limit himself to 60 per cent ownership of the Telegraph. In return, Montagu had negotiated blue-blooded seal of approval. Cazenove’s, the London establishment’s stockbrokers, would represent the Telegraph, and Sir Martin Jacomb, a respected City personality, had accepted a directorship. Altogether, said Montagu, the Telegraph’s new ownership was blessed with ‘a clean bill of health’. Black congratulated him, relieved that Saul’s warning had been ignored. ‘Am I doing all right?’ he asked Montagu, Jacomb and Hambro individually, reflecting his lack of self-confidence; and they, pleased by his civility, his care for Hartwell’s feelings and their impression of Shirley as ‘a perfectly nice, unambitious wife’, agreed that Black could be trusted.
John Ralston Saul’s warning also made no impression among the Telegraph’s staff. As Black walked for the first time through the rabbit warren of dusty, dimly lit offices, he was reassured by the blank faces that confirmed his anonymity. ‘I’ve just seen a very sinister man in the corridor,’ said a breathless journalist, diving into the cartoonist Nicholas Garland’s office. ‘He looks like a mass murderer. Do you think we should tell security?’ ‘Oh, no,’ replied Garland. ‘That’s the new proprietor.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The few who met Black, including Hastings and Worsthorne, were intrigued by a proprietor who enjoyed discussion, was intelligent and informed and, at Knight’s insistence, promised to make them rich. The senior executives were given share options, chauffeurs and generous expense accounts. ‘It’s like the heavens opening,’ proclaimed Worsthorne. Black could afford to be generous. During the night of 25 January 1986, Rupert Murdoch had moved his entire newspaper operation to Wapping. Confronted with barbed wire and an army of aggressive police, the trade unions’ grip was shattered. Instead of 2,000 printers, Murdoch’s newspapers would now be produced by 570 electricians. With government support, Murdoch was certain to succeed eventually, and Conrad Black would be one of the beneficiaries, although Murdoch’s new strength as a competitor added urgency to Black’s task.
The Telegraph’s circulation was sliding, and the finances were precarious. To attract new and younger readers, Max Hastings introduced features about rock music and fashion, and special pages for women readers. Dozens of older journalists were fired. ‘Max is good at drowning kittens,’ smiled Black, appreciative of his editor’s ruthlessness in his quest to improve the newspaper and earn profits. One of Black’s early contributions was a suggestion to consider employing a Canadian journalist who had recently arrived in London. ‘I think you ought to take a look at her,’ he told Andrew Knight. ‘What’s her name?’ asked Knight. ‘Barbara Amiel.’ ‘I’ll see her,’ Knight replied, but he discovered that Amiel was not interested, and the suggestion came to nothing.
More importantly, Black was concerned about Hastings’s politics. ‘Rupert Murdoch called,’ he told Knight. ‘He told me I was crazy to appoint Hastings as editor.’ ‘He told me the same,’ replied Knight, ‘but I’m ignoring him.’ Hastings’s unpopularity with Thatcherites like Murdoch and the Spectator columnist Paul Johnson justified his appointment, said Knight. Under Hastings, the newspaper would cease to be the Conservative Party’s mouthpiece, and would become more combative and original. ‘One more thing, Conrad,’ said Knight. ‘When you’re unhappy about something in the papers, don’t telephone the editor. Write a letter for publication.’
5 The Visit (#ulink_adc2f20f-31c0-5f71-bd7b-18740cfb349d)
‘CAN YOU ARRANGE IT?’ Conrad Black repeatedly asked Andrew Knight during March 1986. Impatient to reap the prizes due to the Telegraph’s proprietor, Black yearned to meet Margaret Thatcher, one of his idols.
During the few weeks since he had become recognised as the Telegraph’s owner, Black’s lifestyle had changed markedly. Friends had begun introducing him to London society. Jennifer d’Abo, a successful businesswoman, hosted pizza dinners in her kitchen. Witty and light-hearted, Black amused d’Abo’s guests with his endless insights and information apparently gleaned from many sources – either his newspaper editors or politicians. The word spread that the Telegraph’s new owner was a desirable social catch. David Metcalfe, an insurance broker, grandson of Lord Curzon, was another eager host. At a succession of cocktail receptions, dinners and weekend parties, Black’s warmth and intelligence were noted and he was embraced. ‘A loyal and good friend,’ concluded Metcalfe and others who accepted Black at face value. ‘Conrad believed,’ Metcalfe would tell a friend, ‘that the world was his oyster, and London society reassured him that his performance was acceptable.’ Since the City establishment had been joined by Max Hastings, Peregrine Worsthorne and the veteran former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes in endorsing their employer, there seemed no reason to dig into his past.
When Black was in London countless invitations to parties, dinners and opening nights at the theatre and Covent Garden began arriving, flattering his self-esteem. His lust for more than ‘a ringside seat at everything’ grew, inflating his opinion of himself and validating his importance in Canada. The opportunities to meet British and foreign politicians in London fed his hunger to consort with the mega-rich and the powerful in the White House, Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. The Telegraph was not merely the means to earn an income and propagate his ideas, but had become his passport to social climbing. ‘Who’s that?’ Black asked Paul Johnson’s wife Marigold when they met at a party in the French Embassy. ‘And who’s that? And that person, is he important?’ Marigold Johnson was shocked. ‘I realise the allegation is about that I am somewhat of a seeker of celebrities,’ Black later admitted, ‘and in one sense I suppose that’s true. But my purpose is that celebrities who are justly celebrated can be very useful to you.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The casualties were the celebrities’ wives, including those of Jacob Rothschild and the Duke of Marlborough. ‘I won’t again sit next to a man who lectures me throughout dinner,’ said one wife, ‘about the layout of the navies at the Battle of Jutland or reels off a list of all the kings of Sweden since the eighteenth century.’ Black’s new friends were undecided whether his amusing lectures reflected arrogance, insecurity or insensitivity. Like others, the Johnsons were puzzled by Black’s parochialism. On his first visit to their house he looked shocked by a plate of mussels, especially when other guests ate them by hand. As a preliminary to meeting Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Knight arranged to call on Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, in Downing Street. ‘What do you think Powell thought of me,’ Black repeatedly asked Knight afterwards. The judgement in Downing Street, Knight did not reveal, was that Black was ‘a provincial hick’.
‘Hello Margaret,’ smiled Black as he entered Chequers with Andrew Knight on 2 April 1986. Thatcher’s close staff, accustomed to calling her ‘Prime Minister’, were surprised by Black’s assumption of equality. They were to be even more surprised by his conduct. After the pleasantries, Black embarked on a monologue, lecturing his hostess about her place in British history alongside Pitt and Disraeli. His fluent performance was honed as much to massage his own ego as to flatter his audience. He was too enraptured by his own verbal elegance to notice his hostess’s astonishment. Propriety required that she mask her impatience and ‘listen carefully’. The Conservative Party relied on the Telegraph group, and it was politic to humour its owner. Her concealment succeeded. Unknown to her visitor, Thatcher rarely listened to what she was told. Her only interest was what she would say in reply. Impervious to her true sentiments, Black was pleased, as they bade farewell, that Thatcher ‘patted me most considerately on the shoulder and said, “That is very good, Mr Black. Do come back.”’ As his Rolls-Royce drove down the gravel driveway, Black asked Knight impatiently, ‘How did it go? What do you think she thought of me? Do you think she respected me?’ For several days he repeated the questions. ‘I’m sure she thought you know more about the history of the Tory Party than she does,’ replied Knight, protecting Black from the truth, ‘but that only goes so far.’
Before their meeting, Thatcher had been aware of Black’s opposition to hanging, not because he was against capital punishment, but because he felt hanging was ‘too good for them’. She had wrongly assumed that that was said in jest. After their meeting, she told her aides that compared to Black, ‘I’m a liberal wet.’ An intimidating bore, she concluded of the new proprietor. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, whom she genuinely liked, she decided to tolerate Black because the Telegraph was important, but he would be classified as ‘low profile’.
Over the following days Black regaled many about his successful visit. Among his listeners was Peter Munk, a self-made Canadian billionaire whose company, Barrick, would become the world’s biggest gold extractor. Shortly after visiting Chequers, Black flew with Munk by helicopter to Highgrove to lunch with Prince Charles. Munk had skied with Charles at Klosters, and offered him an opportunity to persuade a friendly newspaper proprietor to treat the royal family with more consideration. ‘You’ll like Prince Charles,’ Munk told Black. ‘He’s a good guy and you should help him.’ Their encounter began with a tour of Highgrove’s organic garden. At the beginning of lunch Charles explained his vegetarianism. Black seized the cue. Throughout the meal, a torrent of history poured from him, describing the British royal family’s eating habits. Ignoring Charles’s obvious distaste for the excruciating details of his grandfather George VI’s tendencies, Black did not stop until minutes before he departed. ‘Not a success,’ Charles later told an aide. Gossip about Black’s behaviour spread around London. ‘He’s such a heavy personality to escort around,’ Knight told a friend. ‘I have to keep him away from the paper to prevent revolt.’ Black himself was sensitive to that danger. Without protest, he even obeyed Knight’s instruction to stay away during the Queen’s visit to the newspaper’s new premises as part of her tour of London’s Docklands. That was a worthwhile price to pay if he was to shed his tarnished reputation in Canada. With patience he could emerge as a cleansed, acceptable character in London, and become influential and rich.
Max Hastings, an excellent journalist, historian and analyst, was a valuable ally in that quest. Energetically, Hastings was transforming the Telegraph into a respectable mouthpiece for independent Conservatism. Black, however, was not wholly enamoured. There were, he noted, some unattractive aspects of Hastings’s Toryism. The editor was critical of Margaret Thatcher’s strident antagonism towards the public services; he bore an Englishman’s mistrust of American politicians; and he was convinced that the Telegraph’s future depended on abandoning its blind support for the Conservative Party. As proprietor, Black was entitled to express his opinions and to seek to persuade his editor to reconsider his newspaper’s position on any issue. His profound knowledge of history and his ability to recite tidal waves of obscure political facts strengthened the credibility of his opinions. The correlative was his myopic intolerance of contrary views and his distrust of those who wrote for his papers. ‘I’m not a particularly great admirer of journalists,’ he said. ‘A great many of them are irresponsible. They have great power, and many of them are extremely reckless.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Among those he most distrusted was the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who had suggested in the Spectator in July 1985 that the announcement of President Reagan’s cancer treatment deliberately concealed his more serious Alzheimer’s. In a protest letter to the Spectator, Black criticised Hitchens as ‘a disgrace to the profession [who] should not be employed’. Hitchens’s article, Black continued, was motivated by ‘nasty, macabre, vulgar and insolent claptrap’ which revealed the ‘lack of integrity and serious analysis in British and most foreign reporting of American affairs’. To silence Hitchens, Black threatened to buy every newspaper that offered him employment. Although Hitchens’s article would prove to be accurate, Black showed no remorse. He espoused, as Max Hastings discovered, his own version of the truth.
Black’s disagreement with Hastings’s opinions remained restrained until the US Air Force bombed Libya on 14 April 1986 in retaliation for Colonel Gaddafi’s support of a terrorist attack in Berlin. Black, preparing to fly to Britain to attend the Bilderberg Conference at Gleneagles in Scotland, was infuriated by the Telegraph’s condemnation of President Reagan’s bombardment. His newspaper, he believed, should reflect his own unquestioning support of America. He admonished Hastings for his ‘seriously fallacious analysis of what was really happening’. Colonel Gaddafi had after all, said Black, supplied the IRA with weapons. Black wanted a warmer embrace of Reagan and America. Hastings disagreed. Black’s brand of American Republicanism, he said, was unsuitable for a British audience. On that issue, Black won. ‘Since Conrad was the principal shareholder in the paper,’ Hastings would concede, ‘it would have appeared discourteous to trample gratuitously on his most cherished convictions.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That exchange was a precursor to more intervention. Black would forbid the use of the word ‘Irangate’, referring to the secret and illegal supply of weapons by President Reagan to Iran, on the grounds that the Watergate affair was far more serious; and while tolerating Hastings’s support for sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid and his opposition to capital punishment, he would criticise his ‘incorrect thinking’ about Northern Ireland. To Black’s credit, he did not countermand Hastings’s dismissal as a columnist of Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol for working as a freelance without permission. The Prime Minister was livid, and pledged never to invite Hastings to Downing Street again.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black was embarrassed, but tolerated his editor’s authority, although increasingly Hastings received not only letters of complaint but midnight telephone calls from across the Atlantic, during which Black would nitpick at length, regardless of the time.
(#litres_trial_promo) Black’s intolerance towards journalists matched his fierce reaction to those in Canada who had questioned his honesty in business.
Black’s political certainties concealed his personal insecurity. Despite the psychoanalysis thirteen years earlier, he continued to suffer ‘bouts of miscellaneous obsessive fear’ and depression. One cure was his growing interest in religion, especially the mystical teaching of Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth-century English theologian and philosopher.
(#litres_trial_promo) In Newman’s view, a man’s personality cannot be called into question, because God reveals Himself in a man’s conscience. Black’s interest in Newman provoked intense conversations with God, drawing him closer to the hierarchical Catholic Church. His need for spiritual assurance from the font of undisputed authority was matched by his wife Shirley’s own increasing attachment to the Catholic Church, but this only widened the schism in their marriage as they stumbled over their incompatibility.
At Knight’s suggestion the Blacks had bought a house in Well Road in Hampstead, in north-west London, near Knight’s home. The leafy district had been historically fashionable with writers and artists, but not among London’s social elite. To the inhabitants of Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Black’s choice of neighbourhood, a twenty-five-minute drive from Harrods, reflected his provincialism. Some assumed that he knew no better, while others correctly judged that Shirley felt more comfortable living a middle-class life beyond the carping gripes of London’s socialites. In the interests of his marriage and Knight’s stricture to remain out of sight, Black endorsed his wife’s desire for modesty. Their principal home, they agreed, would remain in Toronto. Their divided lives intensified her misgivings and his turmoil. Her concerns were ignored while he sought to resolve his own confusion. His solution, after long conversations in England with the writer and scholar Malcolm Muggeridge, and in Toronto with Archbishop Carter, was to formally convert to Catholicism. ‘I was resistless against the benign temptations of religious practice,’ Black wrote, but he recognised the need for Catholicism’s ‘sane, rigorous and consoling’ teaching to comfort his spirit. Catholicism’s inflexibility about morality and conscience perfectly suited a man who enjoyed breaking the rules. Notionally, he accepted Cardinal Newman’s opinion that a man’s conscience was the ‘powerful, peremptory, unargumentative, irrational, minatory and definitive [words of] God speaking in our minds’.
(#litres_trial_promo) That was precisely the process of self-justification that preceded all his misdeeds. On 18 June 1986 Black was formally converted, and thereafter he wanted to be known as a passionate and uncompromising believer. Conrad Black had crossed another Rubicon.
Under the management of Andrew Knight and Max Hastings, the Telegraph’s losses of £15 million in 1986 were transformed in 1987 into a small profit. The paper’s circulation began to increase, and Black bought the conservative weekly the Spectator from the Australian Fairfax Group, which had plunged into financial crisis. Hollinger’s shares in Canada soared as the value of Black’s coup and Rupert Murdoch’s victory in Wapping became evident. ‘I want to build a first-class newspaper company,’ Black told a London newspaper, and added, ‘I am not a seeker after status here,’ denying his expectation of a peerage. No one cast doubt on his claim to possess assets worth C$650 million, and no one queried the huge loans against which he had used his assets as collateral.
(#litres_trial_promo) Although Black was wealthy, he lived in a comparatively modest home in Hampstead, and while his journalists shared some of the profits, there were limits. Journalists who compared his income with their own when asking for a pay increase were lampooned. ‘I earn a lot because I’m a capitalist,’ he said gleefully, ‘and you are a seeker after the truth.’
In the summer of 1987 the Telegraph moved from Fleet Street to South Quay in London’s Docklands. Under Knight’s plan, the company’s 2,200 printers would be reduced to 507 men supervising automated machines and robots, while the 413 men currently employed to compose the hot metal plates would be replaced by twenty-seven technicians. If the plan succeeded, the Telegraph’s profits in 1988 were projected to rise to £29 million. At that moment, the first fissure in Black’s hitherto unruffled performance opened. ‘They’re mad,’ Dan Colson told him. ‘Don’t let them de-man. There’ll be strikes.’ Colson had assumed a special role in Black’s business, but Knight was appalled by his interference. ‘You’ve got to back myself and the management,’ Knight insisted during a telephone call to Canada. Without an alternative, Black agreed. The redundancies were achieved without strikes, and the Telegraph’s annual profits were projected to rise to £40 million.
This was the beginning of Conrad Black’s halcyon era, and he was flying. His income from the Telegraph, and the prospect of selling his 5 per cent stake in the Southam newspaper group in Canada at a considerable profit, reinvigorated his appetite for deals and expansion. In that atmosphere, he decorated his new office in Docklands with the symbols of tyrants and inspirational leaders, including busts of Cardinal Newman and Napoleon. Few could understand his fascination for the ruthless French warmonger, but the media’s attention to his passion for a despot tickled Black’s self-importance. ‘I’ve never found him an attractive personality,’ Black said about Napoleon, while admitting his fascination for ‘a great talent … a military commander and a mythmaker’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hero-worship fed Black’s illusion of his own growing importance among the world’s leaders.
At the 1987 Bilderberg conference by Lake Como in Italy, hosted by Gianni Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat, Black was treated like a head of state, speeding around the area with a police escort. For the next twelve months, in anticipation of the leaders of the Group of Seven countries’ meeting in Toronto, Black assiduously cultivated Margaret Thatcher. 22 June 1988 was his red-letter day. In her speech to the Ottawa Parliament in the morning, Thatcher praised Black as the most important Canadian in London. That evening she appeared as guest of honour at the Hollinger annual dinner. Surrounded by Canada’s elite, Black introduced the world-famous leader, and in reply Thatcher praised her host as a star who was continuing the tradition of Canadians in Fleet Street, mentioning Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson. After great applause, Thatcher was in turn thanked by Henry Kissinger, who also referred to Black in glowing terms. No one could ignore that night’s adulation of their host. Certainly, Black believed, his fellow countrymen would be persuaded to forget their earlier slurs. He anticipated a peerage and much more. He had already called at 10 Downing Street and asked Charles Powell, ‘What does one have to do to get a peerage?’ Unfortunately, Powell had not been helpful, so Black put out feelers among Thatcher’s advisers. His peerage, he believed, would not take long. Like Roy Thomson, he too might be posthumously remembered in St Paul’s Cathedral, although he was unsure whether Thomson’s commemorative plaque in the crypt – ‘He gave a new direction to the British newspaper industry. A strange and adventurous man from nowhere, ennobled by the great virtues of courage and integrity and faithfulness’ – would do him sufficient justice. Only Hal Jackman, bemused by Hollinger paying a fortune to entertain politicians, offered a reality check. ‘Why do you have all these people for dinner, Conrad?’ he asked. ‘Good for business,’ replied Black. ‘More like social climbing,’ laughed Jackman.
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