WE FIRST MET over his manuscript for Home Country, an eclectic collection of his thoughts on people, places, and politics in Canada. Peter C. Newman was the editor of Maclean’s magazine, then a monthly that he was planning to transform into a weekly. He believed Maclean’s was part of the fabric of Canada, “a country that lies out there, magnificently unknowable” but ready to be known and written about. And he was just the man to do that.
He was slim, almost bald, with stunningly bushy eyebrows (in a hilarious parody of Newman’s face, writer Alison Gordon compared them to “a pair of woolly caterpillars curled up for the winter on the egg of his forehead”), energetic, quite formal, serious though with a rare, infectious smile that made him seem many years younger and much more vulnerable than the self he otherwise presented. Even on hot days he dressed in a suit. He had begun life in Vienna and, to me, he still seemed quintessentially middle European. His parents were Czech Jews. He was ten years old when German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous declaration that Britain wouldn’t interfere in “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Peter’s family came to Canada in 1940 as “immigrant farmers.” They knew nothing about farming, but it was the only category of refugees Canada was willing to accept. For similar reasons, my mother had worked as a cleaning woman in a Polish hostel in Wellington, New Zealand. Like Peter, I had watched tanks roll into my country and, like Peter, I had seen the carnage in their wake. We had both come from old countries with more baggage, more regrets, and much more bloodshed than our adopted home. That helped create some common ground.
In 1944 Peter had been admitted to Upper Canada College as a “war guest” boarder, as I had been a “charity” boarder at the Sacred Heart Convent School. Neither of us was ecstatic about the experience, but we both learned English and Peter got to know several scions of Canada’s power structure who would later grant him access to their inner circles.
I loved that he had worked, for a while, as assistant magician at Eaton’s Toytown. I have had a soft spot for magicians ever since I watched my grandfather make coins disappear and pigeons fly out of his pockets.I
Peter didn’t have time to come to East York, so we often had lunch at the elegant Courtyard Café on St. Thomas Street. We used to talk about Europe and Canada. He didn’t drink. Given how much alcohol was consumed by most of our authors, I found it a welcome change. Unlike most people, he made no effort to fill long pauses in our conversations. I learned to sit with him and watch him eat sparingly but with great concentration.
I discovered that his wife, political journalist Christina Newman, who was researcher, fact-checker, and sometimes rewriter of Peter’s prose, was not his first wife. I had met Christina at a couple of publishing parties and found her shy, but once engaged, she was voluble and exceptionally well-informed. Peter’s first wife, to whom he was still paying alimony, was an Irish girl from County Antrim. As Peter said, and later wrote in his memoir Here Be Dragons, they had “had nothing in common but loneliness.”
He kept a sailboat at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club and often invited Julian and me for a few hours of sailing on Lake Ontario, the only time that I saw Peter really relaxed. Having volunteered for active duty back in 1947 and received his commission a few years later, Peter was still a reserve officer in the Canadian navy. He wore a sailor’s cap that would become his trademark in years to come. A couple of times we were there for the RCYC “sailpast,” a peculiar tradition that required us to stand still in a rolling, moving boat while Peter manoeuvred it into position to sail past “the commodore,” a man in uniform on another boat, so they could salute each other.
Peter was a workaholic. In addition to conducting exhaustive interviews and research, writing his columns, and writing and promoting his books, he gave speeches for fees in the very impressive five-thousand-dollar-plus range. Peter had been editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star before Maclean’s. His books had sold more than three-quarters of a million copies by the time he came to collect his best columns into Home Country: People, Places and Power Politics, published in 1973.
I had been reading him since I arrived in Canada. I admired his style, a gossipy, opinionated, minutiae-observant technique usually the purview of novelists. For example, he wrote of Richard Nixon: “in a small stillness of insight, I recognized a man so terrified . . . that he could barely keep himself under control.” Or of the political magic of Pierre Elliott Trudeau: “a cool man in a hot world.”
He wrote of his love affair with Canada, a brand of nationalism that did not manifest as anti-American, though he was in favour of placing restrictions on foreign investment before we were “reduced to minority shareholders in our own country.” He was one of Jack’s partners in the Committee for an Independent Canada. “As a nation,” he wrote, “we are drowning in American dollars, American culture, American know-how, and the American dream.”
We need our own dreams. I knew I had become a Canadian nationalist when I made this same argument in Ottawa to then Secretary of State (and Pierre Trudeau’s friend) Gérard Pelletier and to Bill Davis when he was premier of Ontario. The choice, I said, is clear: either you want to have a nation or not. If you do, there are some sacrifices you have to make. One of those, I believe, is to take fewer American dollars and encourage, by whatever means are at your disposal, our own culture.
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WHILE WE WERE discussing the various chapter headings for Home Country, Peter was already at work on his mega bestseller, The Canadian Establishment, Volume One. The original plan had been for Peter and Christina to write the book together, but their marriage broke apart while Peter was still conducting the interviews. He blamed their too-busy schedules and their youthful ambitions for the breakup.
His approach to his subjects was flattering and cajoling, on the surface, but in reality, very tough. He referred to it as his “take-no-prisoners” way of writing. “I grovelled to pry open the Canadian establishment’s secrets but never told them mine.”II
Most of the Establishment invited Peter into their homes and sat still for invasive interviews. Men like Bud McDougald, “the archetype of tycoon,” Paul Desmarais, “head of the largest agglomeration of economic power in the hands of a French Canadian,” E. P. Taylor, “the ultimate personification of riches gained and power wielded,” the heads of the five banks, press lord Roy Thomson, investment guru Stephen Jarislowsky, Noranda’s Alf Powis, Leo Kolber of Cemp Investments, shoe magnate Tom Bata, the Eatons, the Westons, and the Southams, those entitled men in corner offices, the men with resonant voices and “eyes of surpassing indifference”—astonishingly, they all talked to Peter.
Peter described them, their milieu, their schools, and their clubs, gave colourful examples of their manners and preoccupations, their valued possessions, even their families. Nelson Davis showed him his meteorite-paved driveway; Galen Weston told him about his father, the one-time baker who founded the Weston dynasty; Charles Rathgeb showed off his gold-and-leather bracelets, each one denoting his killing of one of the great animals (a lion, a leopard, an elephant). These were the men who really ran Canada, the inbred, secretive, puritanical, iron-willed businessmen dedicated to preserving their status whatever the cost. They were heads of large corporations, big banks, or traditional family businesses. Peter made them all seem compellingly interesting.
The country had never seen a book like this, packed with detail, highly entertaining, a real inside look at the world of the very rich. Peter’s style flowed with metaphors and long, rolling sentences. There was dialogue, personal observation, and some delightfully purple prose. Despite its girth and high retail price, the book flew out of bookstores at such a rate that we had to reprint almost as soon as the first 100,000 copies had been shipped. What else flew were threats of lawsuits. I read the letters to Julian over the phone, imagining that all of M&S’s senior staff would end up in jail. As a libel lawyer who was used to litigation, Julian just laughed. Most of the thirty-seven letters were merely sabre-rattling, he said. Few if any of these men would want to go to court.
The only successful plaintiff, in the end, was Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation, who insisted on a rewrite of page 74. Rather than reprint the book, which we certainly couldn’t afford to do, we took Julian’s suggestion that we paste over the offending page in copies still in the warehouse and in those that could be found in stores. Desmarais accepted the proposal and most of us spent the weekend pasting. Of course this correction and the attendant publicity only served to promote the book.
Julian’s proposal for avoiding costly litigation over the second book, The Canadian Establishment, Volume Two: The Acquisitors, was even more original. The judge had accepted his argument that we could not recall all the books already in stores and could not possibly reprint (he would have gone down in history as the judge who bankrupted M&S). We shipped black felt pens to all bookstores and libraries and encouraged them to black out a passage that had to do with a swimming pool and a chauffeur’s uniform, that I won’t risk repeating.
Unlike the men profiled in the first book, the “acquisitors” had acquired their wealth themselves. Many of them—Jimmy Pattison, Firp Taylor, Peter Bentley, Jack Poole, Smiling Jack Gallagher, George Cohon (McDonald’s), Nelson Skalbania—were tireless in their pursuit. They enjoyed fortunes that allowed them to spend ten thousand dollars a day and have ultra-thin wives with a taste for the finest things money could buy.
It’s interesting to view the two books from a distance of more than thirty years. Some fortunes have been spectacularly squandered. Some of the new breed of elite have joined the old in their private clubs and send their kids to the same schools. The tinge of arriviste no longer attaches itself to most of the newcomers—as long as they are still very rich. Much of the old money has remained in the hands of “the inheritors.” The most colourful of them is, without a doubt, Conrad Black, who increased substantially the fortune he inherited.
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AFTER HIS DIVORCE from Christina, Peter enjoyed the company of several enamoured women. I remember his wedding to the very beautiful Camilla Turner at a private ceremony at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. She looked angelic with tiny white angel’s breath flowers in her blond hair. Both Jack McClelland and Brian Mulroney gave speeches. The place was packed with Peter’s admirers and I was thinking that, at last, Peter was going to be happy.
I was wrong. He didn’t become happy until many years later, when he married Alvie, his fourth and last wife—“absolutely the last,” he told me over scrambled eggs in 2016 in the King Edward Hotel’s refurbished lobby restaurant. By then he had written thirty-five successful books; several had been made into TV series, and some of them had been published internationally. Even the Soviet Union had given The Canadian Establishment a keen reception.
Pierre Berton may have been the most successful journalist/non-fiction writer in Canada, but Peter was for many years the most talked about. Everyone had Peter Newman stories—his battles with Beland Honderich at the Star, his playing Stan Kenton while he wrote, the women who claimed he was the best lover they had ever had, his fellow writers who watched his every move and prided themselves in becoming Newmanophiles.
Julian tells the story of going to Newman’s house in the Annex at four thirty in the morning to review legal issues and hearing Stan Kenton as soon as he opened the front door. At a party at journalist/activist June Callwood’s house, I overheard two women talking in great detail about Peter’s talents in bed. Then there was the man who packed up his wife’s clothes and dumped them on the street in front of Peter’s office. He may have been the same guy who threatened to sue him for “alienation of affection.”
Yet Peter still “hungered after the full banquet of recognition, money, access, and influence,” all of which he already had but failed to recognize.III He wore his insecurity like a badge or a lapel pin, obvious to everyone who knew him. Though some of his books reveal bits of Peter Newman, he kept most of his secrets to himself, until his highly entertaining (Peter is always entertaining) memoir, Here Be Dragons.
I. Magic was also the basis for our friendship with Standard Broadcasting’s Allan Slaight. Music lover, media mogul, philanthropist—Allan was the best card magician I ever met.
II. Peter wrote about the technique in Here Be Dragons, his memoir published in 2005.
III. Peter C. Newman, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2004), 206.