EVERY YEAR THE challenge for Peter Taylor was to come up with new ideas to promote Pierre’s books. He created some of the craziest scenes book reviewers and columnists had ever witnessed. One early example was the massive cake with ten thousand candles intended to celebrate the ten-thousand-copy first printing of Berton’s The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881–1885 in 1971. It was wheeled in to Les Cavaliers on Church Street, the only restaurant brave enough to risk the fire that would surely follow.
It took two fire extinguishers to put out the conflagration.
I have a photograph from the event, taken just before the fire. Pierre, Peter Newman, and I are outfitted in period costume. The photo, appearing in Toronto Life’s social column, prompted a recently divorced young lawyer to phone and ask me for a date. Since we hadn’t met before, he suggested I talk to theatre critic Nathan Cohen, who would vouch that he was a fine fellow. At the time M&S was courting Cohen, the most popular, wittiest theatre reviewer in the country, trying to persuade him to write a book about Canadian theatre. It was a strange call. Julian Porter, Cohen assured me, was a likeable, good-looking, quasi-establishment figure—“quasi” because he chose to be—who could be trusted to keep his distance on a first date. He had been a star of the Hart House debating team, had a fine legal mind and, Cohen said, a quick wit.
It turned out to be much more than a date, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. Julian seemed to be everything Cohen had promised and somewhat more. He was attractive, big, blue-eyed, with thick, silvery-brown hair and a firm but not bone-crushing handshake. He had the build of a football player. He had been school captain at UTS, a football player in high school, and a member of the Varsity Blues at university.
I didn’t realize how nervous he was until we arrived at his chosen restaurant on Yorkville and he had some difficulty helping me out of my coat. Our date went steadily downhill after his preordered meal of pheasant in plum sauce arrived. As a rule, I disliked men who ordered meals for me and I have hated pheasant ever since a weekend in Scotland with my Scottish boyfriend in 1967. He had been quite charming but his family loved to shoot things. Spending most of the day with the “beaters,” I managed to shoo some of the smarter pheasants in the opposite direction from where the men with guns waited for them to rise from the gorse and be blasted to smithereens. To top it off, the stupider pheasants, baked still full of buckshot, were served on pretty blue-and-white plates for supper.
Luckily Julian had also preordered the wine: a fine Montrachet, which came in a silver bucket of ice. Luckily because Julian, even more nervous after hearing about my Scottish experience, kicked over the bucket, the ice skedaddled across the floor, the wine spilled, and we fell in love.
His pedigree was, indeed, as establishment as Nathan Cohen had told me. His father had been chief justice of Ontario and minister of several portfolios in Leslie Frost’s cabinet; his mother was the daughter of an admiral in the British navy. Julian was born in deepest Rosedale and could give a guided tour of the area, including who lived where and what they all did. But he was also fond of carnivals—he was Jimmy Conklin’s lawyer—and took me for a ride on the then-highest roller coaster in North America. He had been lead counsel in a case defending art dealer Dorothy Cameron against obscenity charges over her 1965 erotic art exhibition Eros 65. The police had raided her gallery and seized several pieces of art deemed to be obscene. We still own one of those pieces: a large black-and-white of two nude women by Robert Markle.
He told me he had stammered when he was a child. As head boy at UTS, his job included reading out the list of boys in attendance. Those whose names started with sibilants never made the list.
He was a reader. He usually had two or three books on the go at the same time, and in 1971 he had been reading Raymond Chandler, Dante’s Inferno, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and one of the James Bond books. He had been a young tour guide and talked about art and artists with great passion and knowledge. He still does. Like all the people I have loved, he is a terrific storyteller.
He had already been married to the daughter of another scion of the Toronto establishment (her father was senator, politician, former cabinet minister, and Tory leadership contestant Wallace McCutcheon) and was divorced with two children, so I felt reassured that he wouldn’t want to marry again. I had no interest in marriage. His two daughters, just four and eight at the time, viewed me with overt suspicion. They had not been keen on the divorce and were still hoping that their parents would be reconciled one day. We would travel to various small-town Conklin carnivals, the girls sitting in the back in stony silence until it was late, when four-year-old Jessica would climb to the front seat to sleep on my lap. Suse, the eight-year old, preferred to sleep in the back.
I contrived to be less absorbed in my work than usual.
After the fire, the rest of Pierre’s author tour was a resounding success. It featured Winnipeg goldeyes, New Brunswick fiddleheads, and wild blackberry pie, plus Last Spike cocktails—champagne, Curaçao, and orange bitters—served at breakfasts of buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup to bleary-eyed media types across the country.
There were massive lineups outside stores where Pierre was signing his books. At Bolen’s in Victoria he managed to sign more than four hundred copies of The Last Spike before they ran out of books. Independent bookstores across the country (and there were many of them in the seventies) featured both history books in their windows, and the bookstore chains placed massive orders that they backed with advertising at their own expense. Today the one remaining bookstore chain tends to look for advertising dollars from publishers who want their books to sell.
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WHEN JULIAN CALLED to ask whether I would accompany him on a trip to France, I didn’t even think before I said yes. While he was representing Canada at the UNESCO Copyright Convention, I walked about Paris trying to come to terms with my staying in Canada for the rest of my life. We drove south from the city, meandered along the Gorges du Tarn, and got to know each other. By the time we reached Moissac, it seemed inconceivable that we would return to our previous lives.
Julian and I were married in January 1972, a few months after we first met. Alfons’s brother, Fritz, who lived in Canada, kindly volunteered to walk me down the aisle. Julian’s mother, who had hoped he would come to his senses before marrying a Hungarian, seemed to have resigned herself to the occasion. Our wedding photographer was Toronto boulevardier John Reeves, who talked almost incessantly while he took his black-and-white pictures and reassured me—because I needed reassurance—that marriages were not necessarily forever. There was a moment when I called Qantas to check flight departures for Sydney—in case I needed a quick getaway—but my mother, who had endured three weddings of her own, said I could always go to Australia later if this didn’t work out.
Marriages in our family had not been particularly fortunate. Except for my grandfather’s, they made no one happy and didn’t last. My grandfather’s lasted only because my grandmother Therese had been determined not to notice Vili’s philandering. Vili had warned me that marriages rarely worked for women. His own mother, Jolan, could read and write in four languages, including Greek and Latin, but in her time, young ladies had few choices. “In the nineteenth century, it was pinafores and piano lessons and waiting for the right man to come along,” he had told me. “You, on the other hand, you have a choice. Don’t bother with marriage.”
At the reception, Jack presented us with a massive goblet full of contraceptives, in case I was so thoughtless and uncaring about M&S that I planned to have children. Fritz’s wife, who had been kind enough to host the reception, a lady with a private school background, was as horrified as my mother-in-law was at the crudeness of Jack’s gift.
Aviva and Irving Layton gave us a Greek silver cake-slicer I still cherish, and Irving presented me with a poem called “For Anna”:
You wanted the perfect setting
for your old world beauty postwar Hungarian
a downtown Toronto bar sleazy
with young whores pimps smalltime racketeers . . .
I have it framed in my office. It is a wonderful poem to reread during bad times.
Despite my sense that adopting a man’s name deleted a woman’s self, I changed my name to Porter with a great sigh of relief. I owed no allegiance to the name Szigethy, and Porter was so much easier to pronounce.
Julian’s two daughters were both at the wedding, and though they were not thrilled with the new arrangements, they looked brave, hopeful, and quite splendid in the green velvet dresses Julian’s mother had sewn for the ceremony. They would spend weekends with us for the next many years, at least until their new stepfather sent Suse to a Colorado boarding school. Jessica, who was shy in public, among family had a natural ability to charm and to put on one-person shows with tumbling, impersonations, and funny voices.
She is now an actor, a writer, and a macrobiotic chef. Suse became a counsellor, a teacher, and eventually a school principal.
I had met their mother, Susan McCutcheon, shortly before the wedding. She was polite and friendly, though puzzled by my decision to marry Julian. The divorce, she told me, had been her idea. Despite her negative assessment of my brand new husband, I liked her enough that I subsequently invited her to all our family get-togethers.
We moved into an apartment on Walmer Road, where my big piles of manuscripts could occupy our dining room table and the floor next to my side of the bed. Julian rarely brought his legal briefs home.