DURING MY BRIEF but determined attempt at homemaking in 1978, I tried to immerse myself in what I considered domestic tasks, like gourmet cooking, baking, knitting, and decorating. As the only changes we had made to our house since we bought it had been the shiny new wallpaper with cheerfully cavorting blue and pink elephants in the children’s bedroom, there was a great deal of scope for my activities: the living room’s pale-beige flocked wallpaper, for example, the heavy yellow drapes, the plush grey wall-to-wall carpeting. I replaced the two single beds in Suse and Jessica’s bedroom (Julian claimed the originals were from the Salvation Army), and we removed old shelving to build bookcases for our thousands of books. Odd, Julian thought, that neither of us had objected earlier to leftovers from the previous owners. A magazine story about our hosting book launches at home refers to our house as dog-friendly but quite devoid of style.
The truth is we were both so busy, we hadn’t noticed. Now I was creating merciless havoc in our formerly peaceful spaces. I consulted (briefly) a decorator who suggested a coffee table covered with reptile skin (ignored that advice), had someone dispose of the grey broadloom, stripped the wallpaper, repainted the walls, bought several pieces of furniture and a new dog we called Lilo in honour of my aunt Leah (nicknamed Lilo), who had been the beauty of my family. Journalist Allan Fotheringham wrote later that our home was “decorated by dogs.”
It was around that time that I first noticed a pink-dressing-gowned, pink-slippered ghost in our dark basement. I had been on the point of dismissing the apparition as a postpartum mental twitch when Sylvia Fraser asked me if we had a tenant downstairs with a separate entrance. Then Catherine complained of a lady in the basement where I had hidden her birthday presents. Ruth Fraser, who stayed with us during a visit to Toronto in the mid-1980s, may have been the last to see her. Then the pink lady vanished with as little notice as had presaged her arrival. She may have been displeased with my redecorating. Or we were all delusional. In any event, I stopped revamping the house.
Nothing came of my knitting beyond a very long, brown-and-blue-striped scarf, as ugly as the orange sweater I had knitted for my mother when I was at the Sacred Heart Convent in Wanganui. The nuns believed that the way to deal with girls was to keep them busy, and knitting and crocheting were high on their list of activities. Once I had learned enough English to protest, they were inclined to let me read comic books instead. They were worried about my background as a child revolutionary, and I made sure they would continue to worry by looking very fierce. I have kept a few scary photographs of myself in school uniform.
At the cottage, I subjected Geraldine Sherman and Bob Fulford to my experiments in cooking. They would arrive with their two young daughters, who became friends with Catherine and Julia. I have a wonderful photograph of Bob and Geraldine sitting in the back of our boat, reading sections of The New York Times. They were both, essentially, city people, but they proved to be amazingly adaptable. Geraldine, who was a feature and short-story writer, book reviewer, and radio producer, was also a dab hand at fishing. Who knew?
Jack Batten and Marjorie Harris turned out to be fearless boaters. Jack had been friends with Bob since his early days at Maclean’s. He was a jock with a passion for hockey, jazz, movies, and tennis, a former lawyer who had no desire to practice law, and a freelance writer who could make any subject interesting. He has now written about forty books, but back then he was merely at number five. Marjorie Harris had worked in art galleries and at the CBC, and freelanced for Chatelaine. She took (what I thought odd at the time) a strange interest in our Georgian Bay vegetation and rocks. As it turned out, she became a gardening maven with a huge following of would-be green-thumbers. The Georgian Bay rocks she collected along the shore were to be a feature of her much-photographed garden. But back then, she didn’t talk much about gardens. We sat on the dock dreaming up ideas for books that would sell, such as Historic Canada, Toronto: City of Neighbourhoods, and Farewell to the 70s, all of which appeared later.
Peter Worthington and Yvonne Crittenden visited less often, because their Jack Russell terriers had taken an instant dislike to Lilo. They felt the same way about our long-haired dachshunds who succeeded the ill-fated vizsla.
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson visited occasionally, paddling to the back of the island to see the osprey nest and the big rock where the snapping turtles sunned themselves.
We, in turn, often visited Charles and Madeleine Templeton in their imposing new house built over the ruins of an old railway hotel. Charles had designed it himself. It required brand new furniture to go with the grey stone and glass, and the stylish Madeleine had been happy to oblige. She had spent years in Paris, looked like an Ingres portrait, and spoke softly with a French accent. We happily took their discards.I
Charles’s stories about his life as an evangelist, a political candidate (never successful, though a couple of times he came close), a journalist, cartoonist, inventor, editor, playwright, and television and radio interviewer were fascinating. He was still very fond of Billy Graham, spiritual adviser to various US presidents and a bevy of congressmen, but they no longer talked about faith. He had gossipy stories from his time as a television producer and interviewer (of, among others, Evelyn Waugh and Rebecca West).
Since Charles co-hosted DialogueII with Pierre Berton on CFRB radio, the Bertons too were frequent visitors. Pierre and Charles could debate any topic vociferously, even when they agreed with each other. Afterwards, we would take the Bertons around the lake in our boat to cool off, while Charles got back to his writing.
* * *
IT TOOK LESS than a couple of months for me to recognize that I was completely bored. It took even less time for Julian to come to the same conclusion because I had begun to take an unhealthy interest in the law. He had been hired by James Leslie Bennett, former RCMP officer and one-time head of Canadian counterintelligence, now living in Australia, to sue Ian Adams and Gage Publishing over Adams’s novel S: Portrait of a Spy: RCMP Intelligence—The Inside Story. Peter Worthington had brought the book to Julian’s attention, pointing to similarities not only between S and Bennett, but also between himself and a character called Hazlitt. Hazlitt is the editor of a right-of-centre tabloid “claiming to represent the working people’s interests,” as was Peter. S, a KGB mole used as a double agent by the CIA, is investigated by his own team and cleared only because he has some damaging evidence against members of the Canadian intelligence service. Julian intended to fiercely defend James Bennett’s reputation. I, on the other hand, supported Ian Adams, the writer. In fact, he was a writer we had published at M&S. Worse, other writers, including many of my friends, aligned themselves with his defence when the judge demanded that he reveal his sources. There was even a fundraising drive to pay Adams’s legal fees.
In the end, Bennett settled out of court.
It was one of the few times that Julian and I were firmly embedded on opposing sides of an issue. Very likely the true test of a good relationship is when two people passionately disagree on something but continue to dine, laugh, and live together.
In early 1978 Peter Worthington hired Julian to defend him against the charge of violating the Official Secrets Act. RCMP officers descended on the Toronto Sun’s offices and demanded to see the “leaked” documents. The case was seen as a test of the freedom of the press in Canada, and it was good to see my various friends of all political persuasions cheer Julian when the case against his client was dismissed.
* * *
WHILE I PONDERED Jack’s proposal that I run Seal, I decided to consider other options.
Before I was married, I was often invited over by David (the English expat) and his friend, Alan Edmonds. Edmonds, another English expat, ex-Fleet Street journalist, would later became a most unlikely, dishevelled television success with his quirky interviews for CTV’s Live It Up. Alan invited me to do a screen test interview for Live It Up. I had to go into a variety store on King Street East and pretend to purchase some item I neither needed nor wanted and engage in a bit of banter with the merchant. There were at least four takes, the store owner becoming less and less co-operative each time and finally asking whether he could go home now. I had no difficulty turning down Alan’s job offer.
I thought about calling Moses Znaimer, now head honcho at Citytv, but he was in the middle of negotiations with new partners—first Multiple Media, then CHUM—and gossip had him grumpy and combative.
Then I thought I would apply for work at CBC Radio, because I loved the CBC. I had been a keen listener to This Country in the Morning under its various hosts, but particularly Peter Gzowski, because he loved to interview authors and he offered them lots of airtime to promote themselves. Unlike most radio and TV hosts, Peter actually read the books, listened to the authors, and tailored his follow-up questions to what they said. Listeners were keen to share their feelings and ideas with Peter. It was as if he were a personal friend, a confidant, someone who would love to come by for a piece of cake and a story or two on a rainy afternoon. I used to drive M&S authors to his interviews and keep them coffeed and entertained so they would not be too nervous. But when I talked with Peter, I didn’t know how to introduce the subject of a job.
At one of the Frums’ frequent parties that often spilled onto their patio and into the garden, I approached Barbara Frum’s producer, Mark Starowicz, and the head of CBC radio and television’s current affairs programming, Peter Herrndorf. Neither of them seemed to know what to do with my question about a job at the CBC, but both of them were eager to talk about M&S authors and about M&S’s relatively new venture with Bantam Books. The CBC was soon to air a television series based on Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment books, and they were both interested in Peter’s progress with the Bronfman Dynasty.
Then they wanted to discuss the Seal First Novel Award and how the next prize would be presented. Was there a way of topping the Aritha van Herk performance?
Julian had been at university with Adrienne Clarkson, who was then co-hosting The Fifth Estate, but I didn’t know her well enough to ask whether she thought I could be a plausible candidate for a CBC job. I got to know her better later when she was Ontario’s Agent General in France. We rented a house near their summer place in Provence and stayed with her and John Ralston Saul in Paris. But by then I was back in the book business.
* * *
I REMEMBER TAKING a long walk through the Mount Pleasant Cemetery with Julia in her stroller, Catherine running ahead and back, making whooshing noises and lifting her arms like the wings of an airplane. It was a few months before Christmas of 1978 and Catherine was very excited about the potential for “amazing” gifts.
I thought about how much I missed the excitement of new manuscripts, the hours I spent with writers discussing their work, the delight of holding a printed and bound book when it arrived. I even loved the smell of freshly printed pages. I still do. Who was I kidding? As Jack had foretold, I was hooked on books.
In January 1979, I accepted the appointment to become Seal’s president and publisher. According to Jack, it was to be a two-days-a-week kind of job, leaving me plenty of time for children. Seal’s offices were in a dull 1950s building about five minutes’ walk from our home and practically adjacent to my daughters’ school.
Soon after I moved into my new office, Bill Deverell won the second Seal Award, for Needles. Jack and Peter Taylor decided it would be fun to deliver the fifty thousand dollars in cash, and I had the honour of presenting him with his unwieldy reward. Bill, a BC criminal lawyer with impeccable courtroom credentials, was equal to the task of hamming it up for the audience. There is a photo of Jack, Bantam’s Alun Davies, Bill, and myself, ill at ease but grinning in very dated outfits. Mine is a horrid long poufy skirt and matching top.
Needles was a natural for the paperback market we had hoped to conquer, a fast-paced page-turner, perfect for the commercial fiction market. But even Bill was somewhat stunned when Taylor’s team delivered hypodermic needles with each press kit. The book was set in the international drug trade, starring a sympathetic protagonist with a heroin habit. Bill, who had been counsel in a thousand trials, including about thirty for murder, was magnificent on tour. This was, we thought, a great way to attract more commercial fiction writers with flair.
I. We still have the worn brown-and-beige couch Charles donated to our unfinished living room and the trundle beds we used when we were his guests.
II. They did more than four thousand Dialogue sessions before the program was cut in 1983.