Awash in Spicer’s spirited dinners
When Keith Spicer became editor of the Ottawa Citizen in 1985, he brought with him a different approach to journalism. Although Spicer had worked briefly, as a young man, at the Globe and Mail, he was not of the newspaper culture. This resulted in considerable innovation, some of it quite positive, with the promotion of hitherto unexploited talents at the paper, such as the writers Nancy Gall, Jay Stone and Nancy Baele. The paper’s book section got a new prominence and an increased budget.
It may seem impossible in this day and age, but these were times of great prosperity in newspapers and a lot of lavish spending went along with it. At the Citizen, Spicer spent thousands of dollars on projects that would be unimaginable today. He sent Ilya Gerol, a Russian emigré foreign affairs specialist discovered by publisher Paddy Sherman, to Iceland to cover a summit, on one occasion, and to many other places. Because actual writing to deadline was not among Gerol’s skills, an experienced reporter, Chris Cobb, went along. Later, Gerol and Cobb also toured the Middle East, in an attempt to being peace to that troubled region, or, failing that, at least win a National Newspaper Award.
Spicer brought the controversial Soviet dissident author Andrei Sakharov to Ottawa for reasons that were never quite clear. He published a special section, not full of advertising, to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. There was much more, some of it actually good. And as each project drew to a close Spicer loved to celebrate with his editors by renting a private dining room at the Cercle Universitaire for drinks and sometimes dinner. It didn’t have to be a significant occasion. Some said that the paper coming out on time was significant enough.
The Cercle was a mansion on Laurier Ave. near the University of Ottawa with a reputation for fine dining in a refined atmosphere. Just the kind of place that newspaper people are known not to hang out in. But it suited Spicer just fine and its private dining rooms were perfect for the kind of entertaining he liked to do.
It seems possible to those who knew him well that Spicer might have had an inaccurate view of newspaper people. He believed strongly in collegiality and he hoped, perhaps, that his time at the Citizen would be filled with stimulating, witty and profound conversations, a chortle or two over the wicked ways of the world over fine wines. The people he was to meet at the Citizen were not likely to provide that, at the Cercle or anywhere else. Their preferred topic of conversation was the Citizen itself. Their preferred beverage was whatever was available. One of the Cercle dinners would end in disaster, with the arrest for impaired driving of a senior editor.
Thus, the Columnists Dinner was doomed to be not what Keith Spicer expected.
He assembled us all at the Cercle, upstairs in a private dining room. The cast, as best I remember it:
Burt Heward, books editor.
Lynn McAuley, sports columnist.
Frank Howard, national columnist.
Roy MacGregor, national columnist.
Tony Coté, action line columnist.
These, along with myself, a humour columnist and non-drinker, would turn out to be the minor players. The others included:
Greg Weston, Parliamentary reporter and author.
Marjorie Nichols, national columnist.
Scott Honeyman, managing editor.
Ilya Gerol, international affairs columnist and world editor.
Earl McRae, sports columnist.
George Grande, editorial writer.
And Spicer himself.
It was 1988, the fall. A federal election campaign was on, John Turner of the Liberals trying to unseat Brian Mulroney of the Conservatives. That would turn out to be significant.
Weston was late. If he had known what awaited him, he would have been absent. He had just published a book about John Turner, called Reign of Error. Something in it deeply offended Marjorie Nichols. As I recall, she saw it as the betrayal of a confidence, and she was, let’s say, eager to talk with Weston about it.
And she wasn’t in a great mood to begin with. Marjorie had cancer, she was taking difficult treatments, she wore a scarf to cover her head, and she was on the wagon, too. Just that week, her column had been shifted from page two to page three. Now, for most people, page three, a right-hand page, is a lot better location, but Marjorie wasn’t seeing it that way. A person who took great pride in her work and in her independence, all she could see was that the management had done something to her without consulting her.
There would be no collegial chit-chat at her end of the table, especially after Weston arrived.
Frank Howard would soon join the ranks of the non-drinkers, but not on this night, perhaps mercifully for him. Frank’s column, The Bureaucrats, was a well-researched, must-read among Ottawa public servants but it wasn’t popular with some senior editors, who wanted it to be flashier. That wasn’t Frank. On this night, he didn’t say much, just kept his head down and quietly tried to read the mood of the people who employed him. Seated next to him, and equally confused, was Lynn McAuley, just starting out as a sports columnist and desperately trying to figure out what all these older gentlemen were going on about.
As well she might. The main action was at the head of the table where Spicer, Gerol and McRae sat. Spicer, now that we were all there, was interested in having a spirited intellectual dialogue with us, but the dynamic of the evening was working against it. To begin with, McRae, alone among us, recognized the resemblance of our waiter to the movie comedian Martin Mull. He began addressing him as such, frequently, mostly in requests to bring more wine.
“Hey, Martin Mull! Another bottle of red, please!”
This would have been a first for Martin Mull. In however many years he had spent at the Cercle Universitaire walking unobtrusively and with quiet dignity among tables of fluently bilingual senior bureaucrats and university professors, he likely had never been referred to as anything other than “monsieur.” Nevertheless, he did as he was requested.
McRae, a brilliant and funny writer, made some of the management at the Citizen uncomfortable with columns which at times were provocative in the extreme and would, on occasion cause small protest marches outside the Citizen building. The protest marches were small because the Citizen building had been located in the distant western suburbs since 1973, which made launching large protest marches difficult.
Like Marjorie Nichols, McRae took great pride in his writing and was suspicious of anyone who might think to improve his copy. Whenever we met, even years after he had left the Citizen for the Ottawa Sun, McRae would begin the conversation with a diatribe against the dimwits who would dare to tamper with the work of people like us, pros who knew what we were doing. As someone who had actually been treated rather kindly by editors, I could have disagreed but it was more fun to agree and feel like a real writer. For the moment, I wondered how Earl and Marjorie were going to enjoy listening to editors’ ideas on how columnists’ work might be improved.
The frequent visits of Martin Mull were popular with most of the participants, several of whom had a history with spirits and one of whom had, according to newsroom legend, driven a Citizen car onto a suburban lawn and had to be rescued by whoever answered the phone at the copy desk.
If you were looking for a word to describe Ilya Gerol, improbable might be the first to spring to mind. Described somewhere as a “high-ranking Soviet journalist,” he came to Canada in 1980 and was discovered by Paddy Sherman, then the publisher of the Vancouver Province, who liked his insights into the Communist mind. After Sherman came to the Citizen as publisher in 1982, Gerol appeared, too, and contributed many such insights, often dictated to a copy person late in the evening while Gerol strolled around the newsroom smoking his pipe. It was suspected that he did not type, or at least did not know how to type on a computer. There was probably not another newsroom in North America that contained someone like him. The Citizen could barely contain him.
Dinner was served, along with more wine, and a kind of plenary discussion began around the open square table. So many brilliant ideas for improving the paper emerged that one of the participants proposed that a Board of Columnists might be established to provide intelligent input on news coverage decisions.
Now, everyone knows, or should have known, about the separation of church and state in the newsroom: the opinion people and the news people are and should be separate, so as to prevent editorial bias from destroying the objectivity of news. This concept would come to be seen as quaint with the advent of Conrad Black in Canadian journalism, but that hadn’t happened yet.
Honeyman, the managing editor, did his best to prevent his eyes from rolling at the suggestion. It was Honeyman’s function, as managing editor and a veteran news guy, to implement Spicer’s more realistic enthusiasms and to cause the less realistic ones to quietly dematerialize. Honeyman would later refer to this as “skating Keith into the boards.”
You didn’t need to ask what he would think about an august Board of Columnists passing judgement on daily news decisions.
About a year earlier, the Citizen, in a demonstration of its new-found gravitas, published a special supplement on the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution called The Road to Bolshevism. As the presses began to roll, everyone who lacked the good sense to have fled the newsroom was pressed into service as proofreaders. Each was given a page to read, carefully. Among the proofreaders were many columnists and editorial writers, potential members of the Board of Columnists, had they known, but it was not one of those who caught the typo on the main cover line. Rather, it was an assistant photo editor, who said: “Is this the way you spell Bolshevism?” The press was stopped, sparing 500,000 readers the agony of seeing The Road to Bolshevisim in headline type.
Meanwhile, back at the Cercle Universitaire, minutes passed, in what seemed like hours, particularly to the non-drinkers. But eventually topics were exhausted, it was over and real life could resume at the Citizen. Strange things happened, but we were used to them. The Board of Columnists never materialized, mercifully. Looking back on that era, Citizen survivors find themselves smiling and occasionally laughing. Compared with much of what was to come, those four years have come to seem like a golden age. If only we had known we were working in a golden age we would have enjoyed it more.
Leaving the Cercle, Earl McRae and Roy MacGregor accompanied Spicer to his home, near which their cars were parked. He invited them in. In the context, it did not seem odd that the evening would end with the editor of the Ottawa Citizen teaching two of his star columnists to walk like one of his heroes, former French prime minister Pierre Mendès France. The three of them walked around the apartment like Pierre Mendès France for a while, then McRae and MacGregor went home. The next day, the Ottawa Citizen would come out looking as it usually did.
CHARLES GORDON worked at the Citizen from 1974 to 2005. He was briefly an editorial writer, even more briefly city editor, also a feature writer and books editor, but mostly a humour columnist.