A few seasons ago, Posy Chisholm, a sophisticated and vivacious Toronto socialite, who looks smashing in hats, has a profoundly developed sense of the absurd and possesses a remarkable memory, found herself at London’s Heathrow Airport, about to board British Airways Flight 93 to Toronto. When she spotted Ken, the two acquaintances decided to travel together, though Chisholm first had to trade down a class, wondering why Thomson was too cheap to travel in style and comfort.
“You know why I’m flying home?” Thomson asked when they were settled in their narrow seats.
“No, I don’t, not really,” Posy replied.
“To give Gonzo his evening meal,” the press lord matter-of-factly explained. “I’ve been away from my dog for five days now, and I miss him so terribly. We were half an hour late leaving London, and I’m really nervous because we had a late takeoff that they might give him dinner without me.”
“Oh, Ken,” Chisholm tried to reassure her agitated companion, “they’ll make up time across the ocean.”
“Gonzo is crazy in many ways but very, very lovable,” Thomson went on as Posy, crammed into a steerage seat beside the fretting billionaire, began looking longingly down at the heaving Atlantic. “Gonzo is the sweetest dog. He’s everybody’s pal, especially mine. He’s a Wheaton terrier, the colour of wheat, off-white. Actually, he’s got a little apricot.”
“How about some champagne, Ken? No? Oh, well …”
“Gonzo leads a good life. I plan my trips abroad around him. I never go to annual meetings unless I’ve got him covered. I couldn’t put him in a kennel; he’s a member of the family. He seems to have an understanding of what’s happening all the time. We communicate. We know what the other is thinking. We love each other.”
“I suppose you take him walking …”
“Oh, I take him out all the time. Early in the morning, late at night and every time I can in between. If I can’t get home for lunch, my man goes up and walks him. He might be there right this minute. Gonzo’s got to have his exercise.”
“Doesn’t he have a garden? “ asked Posy, grasping for relevance.
“He doesn’t want to stay out all day. Gonzo’s a people dog. He likes walking in the park, and then he wants to come back inside.”
It was going to be a long flight.
Chisholm remembered a friend joking that if she was ever reincarnated, she wanted to come back as Ken Thomson’s dog. So Posy told him, hoping the idea might amuse the single- minded tycoon.
“Well, she’d be well looked after,” was the earnest reply. “I tell you, Gonzo is a big part of my life. I know that sounds awfully funny. But it’s a fact. I think of him all the time. I look after him like a baby.”
“What about your wife—does Marilyn love Gonzo too?”
“One time, I was looking at Gonzo, and I said to Marilyn, ‘Geez, he wants something.’
“She said, ‘We all want something.’
“‘Yes, but he can’t go to the refrigerator and open the door. Gonzo can’t tell you he’s got a pain in his tummy. We’ve got to look after him, anticipate everything he wants. It might be a bit of food he needs, maybe to go out or just a show of affection.’”
At this point Thomson leaned forward to emphasize the significance of what he was about to reveal. “I tried to figure what Gonzo was really after,” he confided. “It’s a game we play.”
“So, what did Gonzo end up wanting?” Posy Chisholm halfheartedly inquired—purposefully fumbling under her seat, hoping that was where they kept the parachutes.
“A bikkie!” exclaimed the world’s eighth-richest man. “That’s what Gonzo wanted—a bikkie!”
There followed a lengthy silence. Thomson seemed satisfied there was little point trying to top that remarkable bit of canine mind reading.
About half an hour out of Toronto, the tycoon started to get restless because the 747 had been unable to make up its original delay and was not going to arrive at 17:35, as scheduled. He put on his coat and complained so bitterly about the possibility of getting home late for his dog’s feeding that Chisolm suggested she take his luggage through customs and drop it off at his house— while he dashed through the terminal, bound for Gonzo.
KEN THOMSON SIGHTINGS are like that. If he knows and trusts the person he is with, he will talk about his dog or his art collection, but that’s it. Unlike nearly every other rich and powerful individual of even a tenth his wealth and influence, he creates few contrails. “The smartest thing those who have more than anybody else can do is not to flaunt it,” he says. “It’s resented and it’s in terribly bad taste. It shows a poor sense of priority.
“Everybody has their own ways of doing things,” he allows. “It’s all a matter of temperament. A lot of people who make money fast spend it fast. It’s very difficult to live a simple life and love your dog as much as I do. I spend as much time as I can with my family, walking Gonzo, watching a fair bit of television. I like to get in my car and fill it up with gas. So if you add up running the business with all the personal things I do, there’s not an awful lot of time and energy left after that. I am as happy as can be.”
Walking your dog and filling your car with gas may well be the path to eternal happiness, but those who know Thomson best insist that he is not as content as he claims. “He’s not a man doing his choice of things,” his niece has emphasized. “If he’d had two or three brothers, he would never have chosen—or been chosen—to run the family empire. I get the impression of someone doing his duty. He is intensely loyal and was very attached to his father, so when my grandfather said, ‘I’m going to start a dynasty and you’re going to carry it on,’ Ken said, ‘Right.’ It didn’t really matter that he might have preferred to be the curator of an art museum—and now he’s training his son David to take over, just as his father wished. He’s doing it with goodwill but not much joy. Every morning when he wakes up, he must say to himself, ‘I’m unhappy being a businessman, but wait a minute, it’s bringing me all this other stuff like my art collection that I couldn’t otherwise have—so it’s a trade-off.’”
Everything Ken Thomson says and does underlines that he’s fundamentally decent, that he would be quite happy to have his epitaph read: “What a Nice Guy.” He really is a nice guy, but he is much more than that—and despite his pose as the ultimate innocent, his self-assurance can be devastating. For instance, he readily conceded to a New York Times reporter in early 1980 that “there is a limit to how many papers one man, or company, should own,” insisting that his own firm had yet to grow to such “ludicrous” extremes. “We will know ourselves, if and when we do,” he reassured the dubious commissioners on the 1980 Royal Commission on Newspapers. Thomson then owned forty daily and twelve weekly Canadian newspapers, one of the largest concentrations of press ownership anywhere.
The best evidence of Ken Thomson’s success in perpetuating his anonymity is that most Canadians, even fairly sophisticated businessmen, still regard him as the youthful and untried inheritor of the publishing empire built up by his father, Roy Thomson. They dismiss the current press lord as “Young Ken,” an immature figurehead, whose main accomplishment is to have been his father’s only son.
“Young Ken,” in fact, is seventy-four years old.
“I’m not young anymore, but I don’t really mind being called ‘Young Ken,’” says he. “My dad was such an unusual individual that nobody can expect to be anywhere near a carbon copy of him. He was one of a kind. He channelled his ambition in a single direction and everything emanated from that. Now it’s a different world we live in.”
YOUNG KEN he may be, but his record in office has been nothing short of spectacular. He force-fed his father’s business empire from annual revenues of $725 million in 1976, when he took over, to $11.5 billion a decade and a half later. The total equity value of the companies he controls has sky-rocketed from less than $1 billion to more than $11 billion, exponentially surpassing Roy Thomson’s impressive rate of annual growth and ranking second only to Bell Ca
nada in terms of market capitalization of Canadian corporations.
In 1989, following the sale of the Thomson Group’s North Sea oil holdings for $670 million, its publishing assets were combined into an umbrella organization (the Thomson Corporation). Ken uncharacteristically boasted that it would allow him to set his sights on any target. “I can’t imagine any publishing company anywhere in the world that would be beyond our ability to acquire,” he proudly pointed out.
Ken Thomson leads a double life and enjoys both. In Canada, he is a mega-wealthy commoner. In England—and most of nonNorth America, where titles still mean something—he is Baron Thomson of Fleet of Northbridge in the City of Edinburgh, the hereditary peerage bestowed on his father on January 1, 1964, two days before he lost his Canadian citizenship for accepting a British title. “I regret giving up Canadian citizenship,” Roy Thomson said at the time, “but I had no choice. I didn’t give it up. They took it away from me. They gave me the same reward you give a traitor. If I had betrayed my country, that’s the reward I would get—taking away my citizenship. Canada should allow titles. If you get a title from the pope, there’s no trouble accepting that.”
What happened was that Roy Thomson turned down Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s 1959 offer to appoint him governor general of Canada. “It wouldn’t have suited me very well because I’m too much of an extrovert for that,” Roy declared at the time. “I can’t conceal my feelings very easily. I talk too much, everybody says, but I talked myself into more deals than I ever talked myself out of, so I’m still ahead of the game. At any rate, it worked out for the best. Since then, I’ve got a hereditary peer age. And I’m a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, that’s a GBE, which is the highest degree of the Order of the British Empire. That entitles you to be ‘Sir.’ If I hadn’t got a peerage, I’d be Sir Roy, so I’m right at the top of the heap.”
During their visits to England, the present Lord and Lady Thomson roost in a four-bedroom flat (purchased for $180,000 in 1967) in Kensington Palace Gardens, off Bayswater Road, which was used for interrogating high-ranking Nazi officers captured during the Second World War. A secluded street with extra police protection, this is where many of the ambassadors to the Court of St. James have their residences. While abroad, the introverted Ken and Marilyn Thomson of Toronto are transformed into the introverted Lord and Lady Thomson of Fleet, using their titles, with two sets of clothing and accessories as well as stationery and visiting cards. “I lead a dual life and I’m getting away with it!” Thomson delights. “It actually works.”
One place it hasn’t worked is in the House of Lords. Ken has never taken up his father’s seat in Westminster’s august Upper Chamber. The older Thomson glowed with pride the day he received his title. After celebrating by queuing up at Burberry’s for a cashmere coat reduced from the British equivalent of $150 to $80, he had his official coat of arms carved on his office door (it featured the bizarre image of a beaver blowing a hunting horn under the motto “Never a Backward Step”). When one elderly London dowager persisted in calling him “Mr. Thomson,” he barked: “Madam, I’ve paid enough for this goddamn title. You might have the good grace to use it.”
Having been elevated to the House of Lords, Thomson seldom attended its sessions and didn’t particularly enjoy himself when he did. “I’ve made a lot of money, but I’m not the brightest guy in the world, by a hell of a long ways,” he once commented. “I’ve found that out since I’ve been in the House of Lords. About 90 percent of the things they discuss there, I’m a complete ignoramus about. I’ve got a one-track mind, but I bloody well know my own business.”
“For Dad, the title symbolized what he had achieved from nothing, and he made me promise I wouldn’t give it up,” Ken recalls. “He told me he’d like to see me carry it on because he rightly suspected I was the type of person who might not want to. I remember telling him, ‘Well, Dad, I think you’re a little naughty to ask me to do that because everybody should have the right to make his own decisions in this world. But after what you’ve done for me, if you really want me to, I’ll make you that promise.’ Now, I didn’t promise him I’d use the title in Canada or that I’d take up my seat in the House of Lords. So now I’m happy to have it both ways.”
ANOTHER OF THE INHERITANCES from his father was the attitude that while making money was holy, spending it was evil. The Thomson style of penny pinching—father and son— goes well beyond sensible parsimony. “Nobody has any sympathy for a rich man except somebody that’s richer again,” Roy once ruminated. “I mean, hell, I eat three meals a day and I shouldn’t. I should probably eat two. And I only have so many suits of clothes, and I’m not very particular about my dress anyway, and I can’t spend, oh, not a small fraction of what I make, so what the hell am I doing? I’m not doing it for money. It’s a game. But I enjoy myself. I love work. I like to be successful. I like to look at another paper and think, Jesus, if only that was mine. Let’s have a look at the balance sheet.”
Roy Thomson’s approach to spending was on exhibit in the marathon bargaining sessions he staged when he was renting space for his Canadian head office at 425 University Avenue in downtown Toronto. The landlord, a hyperactive promoter who had a tight-fisted reputation of his own to uphold, despaired of reaching any reasonable rental agreement because Thomson’s offer was so far below rates charged for comparable space elsewhere. When the press lord finally wore him down, the building’s owner gasped in reluctant admiration, “Mr. Thomson, you really are cheap!” To which an indignant Roy Thomson responded, “I’m not cheap! You’re cheap! I’m cheap cheap!”
The photographs of the original Lord Thomson weighing his baggage so he wouldn’t have to pay extra on his economy flights across the Atlantic, going to work on London’s Underground or lining up for cafeteria lunches created a comic mask that somehow took the hard edge off his business deals. His outrigger spectacles, with lenses as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms, magnified his glinting blue eyes as he peered at the world with Mister Magoo-like good humour. Seated next to Princess Margaret at a fashion show, he spotted a lamé gown on one of the models. “My favourite colour,” he told the princess. “Gold!” During Thomson’s 1963 encounter with Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian dictator teasingly asked what use his money was to him. “You can’t take it with you,” Khrushchev reminded him. “Then I’m not going,” Thomson shot back.
Young Ken’s scrimping habits are equally mingy, if less well known. Although he is a member of six of Toronto’s most exclusive clubs—the York, Toronto, National, York Downs, Granite and Toronto Hunt—he prefers to lunch by himself at a downtown yogourt bar. He does most of his shopping on department store bargain days.
Murray Turner, a former Hudson’s Bay Company executive who knew Thomson slightly, was shopping in the Loblaws store at Moore and Bayview when he heard a shout, “Murray! Murray!” and saw Thomson beckoning to him. As he reached the side of the world’s eighth-richest man, it was obvious that Thomson could hardly contain himself. “Lookit,” he exclaimed. “Lookit this! They have hamburger buns on special today. Only $1.89! You must get some.” Turner looked in disbelief at Thomson’s shopping cart, and sure enough, there were six packages of buns, presumably for freezing against a rainy day. “I’d walk a block to save a dime at a discount store,” Thomson readily admitted.
The press lord appears to dress well (his shoes are handmade by Wildsmith’s on London’s swank Duke Street), but his suits are made for him by a cut-rate tailor in Toronto’s Chinatown at $200 a piece from the discounted ends of bolts he picks up during his journeys to Britain. In Toronto he lives in a twenty-three-room mansion behind a set of handsome gates at the top of Rosedale’s Castle Frank Road, built in 1926 by Salada Tea Company president Gerald Larkin. A prime example of Ontario Georgian-style architecture, the dwelling is rundown, its curtains left over from its first owner. The Thomsons (Marilyn’s parents live with them in a coach house) usually eat in the kitchen to save electricity, and the family has been
unable to retain housekeepers because of the low pay. Even the help’s food is rationed. Cookies are kept in a box with the Thomson name lettered on it. A strict allocation of two of Mr. Christie’s best is placed on a separate plate to feed the rotating parade of cleaning women.
Besides the London flat, the only other Thomson residence is in Barbados, where he owns the Southern Palms Hotel. To maximize profits, Ken and Marilyn stay in a third-floor walk-up apartment whenever they visit instead of occupying one of the luxurious main-floor suites. Toronto travel impresario Sam Blyth occasionally books them aboard West Indies cruises on a travel agent’s discount.
Thomson owns a Mercedes 300-E but usually drives his ancient Oldsmobile (“it clunks around, but it’s the car that Gonzo prefers”). He once purchased a red Porsche turbo. (“Honestly, not one of my more practical expenditures. I was thrilled at first, but I hardly use it—I’ve probably driven not more than twenty- five miles in it this summer.”) The Thomsons seldom entertain and seldom go out. When they do, preparations include discreet calls to find out precisely what other guests have been invited, whether anyone will be smoking or drinking and how soon they might comfortably leave.
There has been much argument among his headquarters staff over how much cash Ken Thomson actually spends per week. Some insiders claim it’s twenty dollars; others insist it’s at least forty. No one bids any higher. He has credit cards but seldom, if ever, uses them. “It’s an idiosyncrasy,” says John Tory, his chief confidant. “It’s just very difficult for Ken to put his hand in his pocket and spend money. Yet he’s extremely kind and generous. When we’re rushing to a meeting and we’re late, if he sees a blind man, he’ll stop, miss a couple of lights and help him cross the street.” Tory didn’t need to add that the blind man got no money. Thomson wouldn’t discuss his spending habits. “I agree with my father that you should use only a small portion of your money on yourself and that you have some kind of obligation to do something useful with the balance. He thought the most beneficial thing you could do with money was to invest and reinvest it, to keep it growing—and so do I.”
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