Heroes

by Peter C. Newman

  Hey, you had to be there.

  Will his retail experience help him run a digital communications empire? “Absolutely,” he replied. “The retail business requires constant interface with the market in terms of the ability to read and respond to reality. The electronic delivery system to which we have moved opens up a different customer segment with endless possibilities.”

  A useful guide to David’s plans for the Thomson empire can be deduced from his favourite reading of the moment: Good to Great, a book that documents the road to corporate excellence by American business guru Jim Collins. Its main theme is that most successful organizations are led by eccentric individuals who feel passionately about their businesses and about the people who inhabit their companies. “For me that was not a revelation,” emphasizes Thomson, “but it was really thrilling to have that reinforcement and to understand how basically unknown these individuals are, even today, and yet they charted new waters and perpetuated the strength of their organizations. Their experiences and passions outside the business define their promise within.”

  His private office, where David has been patiently waiting to take over his father’s empire, features such incongruous objects as an original, dark green ejection seat from a Second World War Nazi Luftwaffe fighter and large canvasses by Patrick Heron, a contemporary British artist who specialized in jarring colour patterns. “The artist’s courage was phenomenal,” says Thomson. “He was like a father to me.” Heron’s work also decorates his house, hanging on either side of his vaulted living room. Every wall is crammed with paintings that include canvasses by Edvard Munch, Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Paul Klee. And then there are his art objects: facsimiles of the original texts of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and George Orwell’s 1984 showing the authors’ corrections in ink; a study of fences from the Middle Ages; an animation cell from Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; an Ethiopian book of holy scriptures in hippopotamus-hide binding from 1500; an original Schulz cartoon of Charlie Brown; and a small woodcut from Lower Swabia, dated 1420.

  In the past each new experience has provided the bounce that determined David Thomson’s direction. Now there is no escape from ultimate responsibility. “I feel that I have enough platforms in my life that level me,” he maintained, “whether it’s my little girls or my other passions. I hope I am able to balance all of these emotional forces for the good of all.” He is not a man who nurtures doubts about his past performances or future prospects. But a shadow hangs over him: can he channel all his high-fizz intensity and passion into corporate pursuits or will he one day quietly implode? He recognized that dilemma early, in 1975, when he chose the quote to place under his graduating picture from Upper Canada College: “We are never so much the victims of another as we are the victims of ourselves.”

  — 2002

  The Immaculate Passions of Nelson Davis

  ANY JOURNEY OF exploration deep into the land of Canada’s super-rich at one time led the traveller to the unusual driveway of a Federal-style mansion overlooking the Rosedale Golf Club in outlying Toronto. Running off at right angles from one of those fashionable cul-de-sacs that lattice the city’s northern reaches, the driveway had been carefully designed, with sharp twists that slowed a car down precisely to the speed at which it would glide to a noiseless stop before the front door of this museum-quality, multi-million-dollar house.

  What really set off this driveway—and gave a clue as to both the wealth and the character of its owner—was that the crunch beneath the tires of the visitor’s car was strangely muted. Even on the driest day, the slightly yellowed “gravel” yielded not a speck of dust. And for good reason. When Nelson Davis, who was this country’s most unusual and certainly least visible multi-millionaire, was building this house, he covered the driveway with the only rock that produces no dust: meteorite. It is chemically inert, so hard that it’s occasionally used to polish stainless steel. After a long search, Davis discovered an available cache of the rare substance that had plummeted to earth thirty miles southeast of Cleveland, Ohio. He paid $10,000 to have it crushed and brought to Toronto. Then he had no dust in his living room. Or so the story goes.

  Nelson Morgan Davis (“Nels” to his friends) looked and acted like a character straight out of a late John O’Hara novel. Yet he stood out among the super-rich Canadians of his generation as a man with unique ideas about money and its uses. Most of the Canadian wealthy are obsessed with the sheer “moneyness” of money—their fascination is in watching their investments reproduce themselves through sometimes more and often less immaculate financial transactions. They are much more interested in making money than in spending it.

  Not Nelson Davis. He sought all his life not so much the fact of becoming personally wealthy as the sensation of enrichment. The only validation of your fortune, he believed, was to spend it through an endless pursuit of perfection in its many forms. “Every time I make a dollar,” he explained, “I spend a quarter of it on myself. There’s nothing wrong with that.” (Nelson Davis’s gross personal income ran to at least $12 million a year.) striving for perfection in all things was an obsession with Davis: the perfect houses (he had four); the perfect cars (he had six); the perfect servants (he employed eighteen); the perfect boats (he owned twenty); and the perfect golf course. A long-time member of the Rosedale Golf Club, Davis had second thoughts about belonging in the early fifties when a duffer’s ball nicked his nose. “I’ll build my own,” he vowed. (Nelson is a man of few words.) He promptly bought a 350-acre tract near Markham, north of Toronto, dammed up streams, moved trees, threw up hills and built himself Box Grove, one of the best eighteen-hole golf courses in the country. Davis was the club’s only member and he employed his own pro (Jimmy Johnstone). Arnold Palmer flew up frequently to join them. Box Grove was sold for $3 million to IBM Canada in 1966 for use as the company’s private country club. Davis now plays most of his golf at the Laurel Valley Golf Club on the Mellon estate in Pennsylvania.

  He owned a 1933 Alfa Romeo in mint condition, but his most valuable vehicle was a 1904 Royce, made before Charles Rolls joined the firm. Because it was one of only two such cars still in existence, a few years ago Rolls-Royce attempted to obtain it for the company museum. Never having heard of Nelson Davis and presuming him to be a not-very-well-informed colonial, the company wrote him a mildly condescending letter, suggesting he trade his ancient car in for a more contemporary model at their expense. Davis, who had three new Rolls-Royces at the time, replied with a one-line note that may be a classic of its kind: “What would I do with a new Rolls-Royce?” (Davis eventually donated the Royce to an American automotive museum.)

  NEARLY AS POWERFUL as his passion for perfection was his yearning for anonymity. Men of great wealth are always shielded by unlisted telephones, family retainers, phalanxes of lawyers, as well as a species of hangers-on known as various counsellors. But Davis carried his insistence on privacy to breathtaking lengths. His Toronto house had five unlisted telephone numbers. His entry in the Canadian Who’s Who gave no personal information whatever. Even inside the higher echelons of the business Establishment, he was a figure of speculation and mystery. “Nelson is an enigma,” said Charlie Burns, Toronto’s Establishment stockbroker. “I’ve known him a little all my life, but I really don’t know very much about him.” American journalists who occasionally stumbled across his name and glimpsed the extent of his fortune offered to place him on the covers of Fortune, Time or the Saturday Evening Post if he would only speak to them. But he refused to be interviewed. The only time his name appeared prominently in Canadian newspapers was in 1969, when he provided the $200,000 in cash demanded by the kidnappers of his niece, Mary Nelles. “I have always believed in keeping myself anonymous,” he told me at the time, “and I don’t want to change that policy now.”

  Davis was possessed of a strong sense of identity and did not require any public presence to remind himself of who he was and how far he had come. There are those rich men who need publicity so they c
an read about themselves and be comforted that they are indeed alive and doing swell. Nelson Davis was a keeper of distances. He viewed the world with the undistracted gaze of a sentinel scanning distant fields through the battlement of a castle wall and moat that keep strangers at a safe distance.

  He had a slightly ruddy complexion and colourless eyes, the kind of appearance and bearing that made it difficult to pick him out in a crowd. Exquisitely mannered, precise to a fault, his formality was that of an Anglican deacon on Palm Sunday. He was a warm, honest and kind man, who placed great stock in friendships (“You’re judged by the friends you have,” he said). But at large parties, where men bear-hug each other and women air-kiss guests they barely know, his politeness could be cool. He wouldn’t have alcohol consumed in any of his houses. When the late Eric Phillips, who loved a drink, was spending a weekend at Davis’s large island home in Muskoka, the host insisted that the Argus Corporation partner climb aboard one of the many motorboats before “imbibing.” Davis was never known to swear. His strongest oath was “The heck with it.” His sense of perfection even intruded on his eating habits. One evening, when he was taking a group of guests to the Sunday night buffet at the Paradise Valley Country Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, he insisted on tackling the food precisely at the opening hour of six o’clock so they could all have the pick of the fare before anyone else had messed with it.

  Davis belonged to a dozen of the most prestigious private clubs in North America and was proud of the fact that he was the first Canadian invited to join the Rolling Rock Country Club built on the great Mellon family preserve at Ligonier in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. He rarely used his other club memberships, preferring to entertain a few close friends in one of his homes. He divided his year approximately into thirds, spending four months each at his main houses in Arizona, Muskoka and Toronto.

  Davis’s showpiece remained his house on Toronto’s Riverview Drive, a gallery of craftsmanship furnished with the sort of rarefied objects museums display behind stretched red velvet cords. Called Eagle House, and built exactly to Federal specifications (which was the American interpretation of Georgian architecture), it had model eagles perched everywhere—on walls and the back veranda, over the garage—and painted on car doors. The dwelling took seven years to finish—three years being researched, one year being planned and three years being built. It was decorated by John Gerald of New York, the garden and driveway planned by Stuart Ortloff, who executed most of the landscaping for the mansions lining the fashionable coast of Long Island.

  Everything about the dwelling was the product of its owner’s perfectionism. There were handmade mouldings from New York, entire fireplaces brought from England, gold door fittings taken out of Fifth Avenue mansions that had been pulled down. Glass cases lined the halls to display priceless collections of Georgian silver and Meissen china, which Davis took out and allowed guests to hold. The downstairs furniture was entirely English—some satinwood, some mahogany, all of museum quality—including a hefty Sheraton table in the dining room surrounded by Adam chairs. There were silk hangings framing the windows, in pale colours, with everything immaculate, somehow untouched and untouchable. Upstairs was a collection of American glass and furniture; the only Canadian objects in the house were two bedside tables in a guest room. Mrs. Davis’s bedroom was all done in pink; his suite resembled the quarters of a battleship captain, with a ship’s lantern, dark wood and small, flush drawers. One cupboard held thirty pairs of shoes, fashioned out of various reptile skins.

  It took a staff of eighteen maids, gardeners, chauffeurs and cooks to operate Nelson Davis’s various establishments. He had an easygoing relationship with his servants, despite the occasional strains. When his two children were growing up, their governess, a Miss Parker, who drove them to school and did the family shopping, felt she had to have a new car. Davis bought her a Buick station wagon. He was then asked for an audience by Warren, his chauffeur, who came in long-faced and said, “I may not have pleased you, sir, but what did I do that was so terrible that you would want to hurt me like this?” It emerged that he had been insulted, couldn’t hold his head up with the other staff, because he had to drive an Oldsmobile 88 while the governess had the new Buick. Davis’s wife, Eloise, said this was nonsense, that the chauffeur should be fired. But Davis decided that Warren was just too knowledgeable about the cars and the plumbing and wiring in the various households. Some time later, they were entertaining dinner guests when the cook sent word via the butler that the stove fuse was blown, so she couldn’t do the vegetables. Warren was sent for and arrived in white tie and tails. That made Eloise angry all over again, but Nelson was adamant. Warren stayed.

  NELSON MORGAN DAVIS grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the son of a manufacturer who served as deacon of a Congregationalist assembly. Everything his family had was of the best quality. He recalled, for example, that the only recordings allowed into the house were luxury sets on the Victor Red Seal label. Young Nelson’s main interest was mathematics. “When I went to high school in Cleveland,” he remembered, “the assistant principal, who was a lady and an excellent mathematician, invited six of us to take a special course in higher mathematics, which involved trigonometry, spherical geometry, analytics and calculus. We were a fortunate group. In fact, I can remember my first year at Cornell University, when I took the three-hour final examination in trigonometry, handed in my paper to the professor in twenty minutes and left the room to good-natured boos and catcalls from my fellow students. Fortunately, I never missed a problem during the whole year. I also learned a trick way of addition so that I could add three columns of figures at one time.”

  Instead of attending the required sixteen hours of lectures a week, he went to thirty, and in his graduating year, could have taken a degree in mechanical engineering, general arts, civil engineering or honours science, depending on which set of exams he chose to write. He also earned considerable pocket money by selling off the catering contract for the senior prom to the highest bidder.

  Family legend has it that after young Nelson left college, his father decided he should head for Canada, sending him on his way with fifty dollars, a railway ticket and his blessing. Nelson did arrive in Toronto just after the 1929 crash with few assets, but he came on a specific mission. His father-in-law owned Chainway Stores, a group of cut-rate variety outlets in southern Ontario that had been badly hit by the Depression. Davis restored their financial health and liked the country so much that he decided to stay. He began buying up middle-sized companies, financing his deals through loans from the old Imperial Bank. When he went to borrow his first $250,000, the bank manager had allotted Davis only a fifteen-minute appointment to state his case. He stayed three hours, outlining five different ways in which he could repay the money (“the sixth was up my sleeve”) and ended up borrowing an eventual $13 million, all of which was paid back within seven years. He spent the profits from his expanding operations buying up blue-chip stocks at their Depression lows. These investments provided the main source of his fortune

  Nelson Davis’s empire consisted of about fifty companies engaged in paving highways; transporting new cars; lending money; and manufacturing paint, varnish and nylon stockings. The complex was held together by N.M. Davis Corporation, which produced an annual sales volume of more than $200 million, and he had no other shareholders. His after-tax net was about $4 million, and his biggest worry (as he explained it to me) was trying to find ways of spending the cash fast enough before another $4 million came rolling into his private coffers the following year. This was no easy task, but he did his valiant best. “We could be a lot bigger if we went public,” he says. “But if you do, you live in a goldfish bowl, and I didn’t want anybody chasing me.”

  Davis administered his unique conglomerate from yet another mansion (Penryn House) at the bottom of a dead-end street in Toronto’s Bayview district. He worked in the Tudor dwelling’s former living room near a fireplace with a hand-carved mantel, surrounded by precious f
urniture (there was the inevitable elephant-sized Sheraton table in the dining room) and walls hung with canvasses by English masters. There was not much evidence on the main floor that this was an office instead of a residence. Monthly and annual operating statements from each of the fifty companies he owned were kept behind a yellow curtain in a mahogany cabinet. The telephone seldom rang. “I get paid for what I know, not for what I do,” he said.

  When F. Scott Fitzgerald coined his famous aphorism “The rich are different from us,” he could have had Nelson Davis in mind. For nearly forty years, he hunted perfection, placing few limits or conditions on its achievement. Only he knew how close he had come. His face was not the visage of a man much given to introspection or ecstasies. But neither did it bear the ravaged cast of misanthropy that distorted the countenance of so many men of his wealth and persuasion.

  Yet somehow it seemed symbolic that with all their possessions, the Davises’ favourite roosting place was their upstairs study. It was a modest bourgeois den—a television room, really, that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any suburban bungalow. Nelson and Eloise retired there after supper most evenings, watched a little TV, fetched each other some warm milk and retired early. Maybe Fitzgerald was wrong after all.

  Unobtrusive and gentle in his demeanour, he had a permanent twinkle in his eye, but practical jokes were not his long suit. He remained vaguely puzzled and disturbed for thirty years after his friend Bud McDougald pulled a great stunt on him in 1949. Davis had visited Herbert Johnson, the famous London hatter, and with a typically grand gesture, purchased two dozen models, one in every second shade the store had on display. When McDougald heard about Davis’s buying spree, he promptly ordered the other twenty-four hats and asked for the bill to be sent to his friend Nels. Davis paid the account but seldom donned any of the forty-eight pieces of headgear and never mentioned the receipt of the extra hats to his pal Bud.