ON DAYS WHEN not much was happening at Seal, I began to hang around in Michael’s downtown offices, using a spare desk he had offered. My window faced the famed Gooderham (also known as the Flatiron) building, a historic site with an extraordinary mural by Derek Michael Besant on its wide west end. There is a stunning photograph of the mural in André Kertész’s bookI that we produced a couple of years later.
The offices were a warren of loosely connected spaces stretching a block south to The Esplanade and, as I traversed them I discovered a wealth of creative enterprises and extraordinary talent. Toronto Life was on the second floor, at the Front Street side. By the time I started to spend more time there than at Seal, John MacfarlaneII had been succeeded by Don Obe as editor. Don had been at Maclean’s, The Canadian (a weekend supplement launched by the Toronto Star and Southam Press in 1965), the Vancouver Sun, and The Toronto Telegram. He was a soft-spoken, small man with a rounded back and a large sense of humour, a character right out of Damon Runyon or W. P. Kinsella. He had the most unruly eyebrows of anyone I knew, and that includes Peter C. Newman. His moustache was an old-fashioned “tell” that often betrayed his response to a question before he spoke. He was catcher on the Toronto Life “boys’ baseball” team, and while he couldn’t throw worth a damn, he excelled at scowling into submission any opponent trying to steal a base. Of course he smoked too much and may have drunk too much, but he loved talking about writing and writers and knew how to make an interesting magazine. I envied the students he taught at Ryerson’s journalism classes.
Marq de Villiers, a former reporter, feature writer, and Moscow correspondent for The Toronto Telegram, was executive editor. He was an Afrikaner with a virulent dislike for the apartheid policies of his former country. We shared an interest in the Soviet Union and its Gulag prison system.
Years later I would persuade Marq to write a book for Key Porter called Into Africa: A Journey through the Ancient Empires. It required a lot of travel—on the cheap, because we didn’t have much money. Sheila Hirtle, his wife and a fellow journalist, did the research for nothing. It’s a brilliant book that sheds light on little-known pieces of history, the vanished empires of the African continent, their rulers who traded with the Egyptians and the Romans, and the few remnants of their times. Murray Frum, a collector of African art, thought it the best book on the subject.
About halfway between Front Street and The Esplanade, after several narrow corridors and stairs, was CB Media, publisher of Canadian Business magazine. It was a joint venture of its editor Sandy Ross, Michael de Pencier, and politician-diplomat-historian Roy MacLaren.III Unlike other business magazines, Sandy’s Canadian Business was entertaining as well as informative. An experienced journalist—the Vancouver Sun, Maclean’s, CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days, the Toronto Star—with a keen sense of humour and a Vancouverite’s healthy disrespect for old Bay Street money, Sandy loved entrepreneurs, enjoyed their gossip, and followed their successes and failures, some of which he recorded in his book The Risk Takers.IV
Sandy’s windowless office featured piles of manuscripts, most of them on the floor, and a vintage pinball machine. He was boyish, in a 1960s sort of way, with old-fashioned round glasses obscured by floppy dark hair, always a lit cigarette, ash on his jacket, and a perpetually messy desk. His conversation flitted from subject to subject, idea to idea, with only a tenuous connection among them. He was constantly in motion, fingers tapping, eyes shifting. He bit his nails, wrote lists of items to remember, and left trails of his discarded notes wherever he went. He played drums in a jazz band and was fired, reluctantly, by his bandmates for speeding ahead of the music. A number of talented young women were crazy in love with him. We may have become friends in part because I wasn’t.
About a year later, Peggy (Margaret) Wente, later columnist with The Globe and Mail, took over the editor’s chair. Hired by Sandy, she was the first woman editor of a business magazine in Canada, and maybe in the entire English-speaking world. Sandy moved to Calgary to launch Energy, an offshoot of Canadian Business, which seemed to have run into Albertan resistance. Perhaps the fact that it came out of Toronto was a problem, though Sandy didn’t think so. He was bristling with ideas and usually in exceptionally good cheer during our long lunches on The Esplanade. He barely touched his food as he gesticulated his way into new strategies that could, maybe, work. Sadly, in the end he had to recommend they suspend publication of Energy.
Key’s art director and all-around guru was Ken Rodmell. He had trained under Toronto’s legendary graphic designer Allan Fleming, perhaps best known then for creating the CN logo and designing Canada: Year of the Land, the bestselling Centennial book.V Ken had been art director at The Canadian when Harry BruceVI—one of the best writers in Canada—was editor. Balding and sturdy, Ken walked about eight kilometres to work every day from Moore Park, wearing his trademark running shoes, blue jeans, and all-weather-and-occasions jacket. He, too, played in a jazz band and on the “boys’ baseball” team. Ken was viewed as preternaturally wise. Sometimes you had to wait for him to tell you what he thought of a particular idea, but it was worth the wait. He was generally right.
Michael Rea was the accountant or CFO—Key was not much on titles. Already an environmentalist (later he became COO of the Nature Conservancy), Rea tended to be conservative about new ways to spend money, and he too was usually right.
Annabel Slaight ran Greey de Pencier Books, Architecture Canada, and a few other small magazines, but she was looking for something she could really get excited about. That turned out to be children’s magazines. She and Mary Anne Brinckman, an old friend of Michael’s, took over the Young Naturalist, a children’s magazine owned by the Young Naturalist Foundation, and turned it into OWL, a colourful, fun magazine for kids aged eight to twelve.
Mary Anne, who was beautiful in a languid, French sort of way, and Annabel, who was intense and very persuasive, headed across the country to raise money and build circulation. The trip worked beyond our expectations. I know, because for many years I was on their board. Circulation grew, grandparents subscribed, and OWL spun off Chickadee for the younger kids, books, videos, French language and Italian editions, and a television series on TVO. I have a few stills from an early show with my daughter Catherine investigating giant bubbles with Dr. Zed.
Annabel, Mary Anne, and I spent long evenings that stretched into early mornings, sitting on the floor of the Brinckmans’ Rosedale home, drinking wine and dreaming up new ways of presenting information to kids and of attracting investors to a Canadian nature magazine. In 1985 Phyllis Yaffe, a former executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, took over as the operating boss of what had become OWL Communications.VII
There were so many bright young people in those shabby, interconnected offices, so much talk about opportunities, a general sense that something exciting might be just around the corner, why not meet it halfway. Michael, supposedly at the hub of all that activity, had a small office in what seemed like a passageway to the lavatories.
He had the strange notion that if you invite bright people to inhabit your space, they will eventually produce bright ideas, a few of which may even be good for business.
It was obvious that Key had the creative energy, the imagination, and the potential to launch a terrific book company.
* * *
FOR THE FIRST few months at Key, I shared an office with Peter Gzowski. Neither of us was paid. There was a shoulder-high divider between his area and mine and Peter delighted in pretending it was a French pissoir, with himself peering over the top with the faraway look of a man taking a leak. He was generally good-humoured, with occasional lapses into general gloom and flagrant self-pity.
Peter was a three-pack-a-day smoker with brown-framed, drooping glasses, short beard, floppy hair, and a pock-marked, sallow complexion. He was an atrociously bad dresser. He wore sweaters with holes and shirts that popped out of his belts. There was not a word of exaggeration in the very funny story he wrote about his clothes habits for Canadian Living.
He regretted his decision to host 90 Minutes Live. He thought he should have known that, unlike Barbara Frum and Adrienne Clarkson, he was not cut out for television. He had seemed exactly how he had felt on camera: ill at ease and almost embarrassed. It was the only complete failure on an ever-steeper upward climb: the youngest managing editor of Maclean’s, editor of the Star Weekly, a competitive jock, a quick, perceptive writer with a flare for minute observation, a CBC star.
When M&S commissioned Peter to write the story of two young people who survived a plane crash only to face horrifying pain, hunger, and the prospect of cannibalism, I was surprised he accepted. It was not the kind of story I imagined he would like to write, but I was wrong about that. He was, as he saw it, “between gigs” and seemed to enjoy writing as a reporter, without expressing opinions of his own. The Sacrament was published in 1980.
Most of the time our shared office resembled a day in the London fog, which I didn’t mind though I began to develop watery eyes and occasionally had to go outside for a breath of air. I had been a one-pack-a-day person since I left the convent but cut the habit after Julia was born, and now did not seem like a good time to start again.
Peter desperately wanted to be back at the CBC and I kept reassuring him that they would call, but each day that they did not he lost more confidence. Meanwhile he kept writing for Canadian Living. He won a National Magazine Award for his 1981 profile of Wayne Gretzky and started to write The Game of Our Lives, about his own love of hockey and about Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers.
A couple of times Peter took me to Woodbine. He loved the races and knew something about a few of the horses and trainers. He won and lost a few times, but betting wasn’t why he went. It was at Woodbine where he first met Gillian Howard, the woman he finally settled down with for the rest of his life. She was warm, affectionate, funny, and thoughtful, a perfect partner for Peter.
Now and then we would go down to one of the restaurants or bars along The Esplanade or on lower Church Street and he would test book ideas on me, such as a biography of his great-great-grandfather Sir Casimir Gzowski, a rather romantic figure who was born into Polish nobility and emigrated to Canada after the Russian invasion of Poland. An engineer, soldier, businessman, and statesman, he had overseen the building of our roads, bridges, and railway lines during the nineteenth century. Peter was proud of the Gzowski name. He explained that for a few years during his childhood he had lost it when his mother had married a man called Brown who had insisted that Peter should take his name. Fortunately, he changed his name back to Gzowski before he graduated from university.
Peter was as take-no-prisoners competitive on the golf course as he had been when angling for jobs he wanted. His home course was at The Briars on Jackson Point, Ontario, but he played many of the courses in Canada and a few elsewhere. The PGI, or Peter Gzowski Annual Invitational Golf Tournament has now raised, I am told, about fourteen million dollars for literacy.
Of course the CBC did finally call and Peter did go back to radio in 1982, to host Morningside. Though 1982 was the year we launched Key Porter Books, I didn’t offer a book contract to Peter (much as I would have liked to publish his memoir and a book about his grandfather), because Jack and I had agreed that I would not poach M&S authors. Peter Gzowski was an M&S author.
By 1987 Morningside had more than a million listeners. Peter’s gravelly voice, his enthusiasms, his delight when discussing someone’s prize pumpkin or a new novel with Mordecai Richler have become legendary. Then there were the political pundit segments, the lively letters to the show (such as for the “duke and the fork” question, when hundreds of people chimed inVIII), the memorable meals, the light verse, the “torrent” (Peter called it) of short stories, and of course the personal reports from across the country.
For the next fifteen years, an interview on Morningside meant a noticeable jump in book sales. I remember driving our first authors to the CBC for their chance to talk with Peter on the air. His producer invited me on his show when my second novel, Mortal Sins (yes, I would become a writer as well), was published. He was confident and charming, shifting with surprising ease from topic to topic in a broad-ranging interview, but he made sure that the title of my novel was mentioned every few minutes.
He produced several Morningside Papers spinoffs, won a ton of awards and appointments, and had he lived long enough, he might even have won the competition he thought he had with Bob Fulford for the most honorary degrees. We miss him.
I. André Kertész: A Lifetime of Perception was produced in 1982 to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of his photographs. André, who was another Hungarian expat and a famous artist, would phone me frequently to complain about his life, his dealers, and his sense that time was passing him by, that his kind of photography was no longer valued.
II. In 1988 John Macfarlane partnered with Jan Walter and Gary Ross to form the publisher Macfarlane, Walter & Ross (Stevie Cameron’s On the Take was a notable release). He continued to have a storied career in magazines and journalism, including a second stint at Toronto Life from 1992 to 2007, and as editor and co-publisher of The Walrus 2008–2014.
III. Roy had been a Liberal member of Parliament and spent twelve years in the Canadian foreign service with postings in Saigon, Prague, and at the United Nations. In 1978 he published Canadians on the Nile, 1882–1898.
IV. Sandy—like Pierre Berton, Peter Worthington, Earle Birney, Helen Hutchinson, John Turner, Joe Schlesinger, and Allan Fotheringham—had worked for the University of British Columbia’s The Ubyssey. Joe Schlesinger would go on to a long career in television and journalism. John Turner was finance minister in Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet and, briefly, prime minister of Canada. Helen Hutchinson became anchor of W5 and Canada AM. Publishing may not be a profitable business, but where else can you spend time with such extraordinary people?
V. Fleming was a genius at typography, advertising, and magazine design (he had been art director at Maclean’s), and creative director at the University of Toronto Press. He designed stamps and logos (for the Ontario Science Centre, for example) and posters. It would have been difficult to walk down a major street in Toronto in the late sixties without seeing some of his handiwork.
VI. Harry’s Down Home: Notes of a Maritime Son is one of Key Porter’s best books, and the book Jonathan Webb is proudest to have edited for us.
VII. Later she moved on to Alliance Communications, where we met again while I was on the Alliance board. She led the team to win the television licences for Showcase and History Television. When Atlantis bought control of Alliance, she was appointed CEO of Alliance Atlantis and oversaw the company’s worldwide operations. As I write this, Phyllis has assumed the role of Canada’s consul general in New York.
VIII. Who said, “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie,” and where was it said?