Heroes

by Peter C. Newman

  His ventures into sports and broadcasting have been less spectacular. Pattison purchased Vancouver’s CJOR in 1965, but the radio station lost most of its listeners when hotliner Jack Webster moved to television. Pattison offered the slot (at $100,000 a year) to NDP leader Dave Barrett, who in the end decided to opt for the calmer world of politics. Jimmy had to settle for Social Credit health minister Rafe Mair, who was an immediate hit— and whose place in the B.C. cabinet was promptly taken by Jim Nielsen, himself a former CJOR commentator. Pattison bought the WHA Philadelphia Flyers in 1973, moved them, and renamed them the Vancouver Blazers. Later, he relocated and rechristened them once more as the Cowboys in Calgary, where they mercifully expired. He also bid unsuccessfully for the Vancouver Canucks as well as the B.C. Lions. (Pattison is the only member of the Vancouver business community who uses the Texas word “bidness” for “business,” as in “Will someone please tell me why I ever got into the hockey bidness?” He lost at least $2.5 million on his hockey ventures.

  Pattison has always maintained that the only companies he owns that are not for sale are his radio station and the original car dealership on Main Street. Every year there are fresh rumours that he’ll sell CJOR (which keeps losing money), but he has kept his promise. The general manager of the station (three of them in the past three years) is required to phone Pattison’s head office and report his daily advertising cash flow.

  All these corporate activities employ six thousand people, though only twenty-two executives report directly to Pattison. He manages his empire with a head office staff of fourteen, coordinated by Maureen Chant, his talented and enlightened administrative assistant. Four times a year, Jimmy goes on fortnight-long personal inspection tours.

  HIS OWN WORK habits are legendary. Jimmy (nobody calls him anything else) puts in fifteen-hour days, though he sometimes quits by 4 p.m. on Saturdays. He seldom uses his condo in Waikiki because he feels too frustrated being out of touch with his office during the long flight to Hawaii. He takes few holidays. He remembers uncomfortably pacing a Barbados beach for two weeks in 1964, impatiently longing to be back at work. A leisurely fortnight he scheduled in Spain for the winter of 1971 lasted just five days, at which point he bolted for Zurich to negotiate some financing for one of his deals. His toys are two private jets and seven cars, including a 1939 Packard V-12; a Grand Ville, the last Pontiac convertible off the GM assembly line; and two limited-edition Bicentennial Cadillac Eldorados. He loves cars and bought his first model (a 1936 Austin two-seater) for $297 on his fifteenth birthday. “If I really want to relax,” he says, “I jump in my car and just drive. One night I went all the way from my office to Banff.”

  He tries to get home on weekends for Saturday night dinners with his wife, Mary, though he doesn’t always make it. In everything he does, there is reflected not so much the ambling geniality of the West Coast ethic as the supercharged tenacity of a biggame hunter who never abandons the trail. Allan Fotheringham once described Pattison as “a freckled little buzz-saw—he dresses like Nathan Detroit and thinks like J. Paul Getty.”

  It’s not without significance that Jimmy’s favourite painting is a luminous landscape of railway tracks stretching toward infinity, an appropriate reminder of his deprived Prairie childhood. When he was seven years old and Saskatchewan tumbled into the bear pit of the Great Depression, the family moved to Vancouver, where his father tuned pianos and tried to sell Packards. Young Jimmy hustled packages of garden seeds, won magazine subscription contests and eventually got a job washing cars (at twenty-five dollars a week) with the right to sell used cars for Fred Richmond Motors. That was when he also worked as a bellhop at the Georgia Hotel.

  Pattison left the University of British Columbia in 1952, after having sold each of his fraternity brothers a car, three courses short of his commerce degree. He spent the next ten years or so as a used-car sales manager. In 1961 he went to see Harold Nelson, his Royal Bank branch manager, and borrowed $40,000 against the $7,000 equity he’d built up in his house and the $15,000 cash surrender value of his life insurance policy. He had to pledge all the shares of the new General Motors dealership he intended to incorporate. His first month in business, he was down $13,900; the second month he lost $12,000; the third month he made a profit of $2,000. There followed a long decade of developing his acumen, turning himself into one of the largest Pontiac-Buick dealers west of Toronto, with his automobile business eventually encompassing two blocks—just fifteen streets away from the lot where he had started out as a car washer. He introduced an unusually simple incentive for his salesmen. At the end of each month, their sales totals were tallied; the last man on the list was automatically fired.

  HIS FIRST PLUNGE into the major leagues came in 1967, when he used a roundabout route (through brokers’ offices in New York and Toronto) to acquire a controlling stockholding in Neon Products from a group of leading Vancouver businessmen. “It would have been impossible for me to take over the company from these men, because they were the Establishment.” Neon had been formed in 1928, with the members of the original board reading like a bluebook of Vancouver society at the time: wholesaling pioneer J.P.D. Malkin; E.E. Buckerfield of the feed company; Gordon Farrell, then president of B.C. Telephone; lawyer George E. Housser; Harold E. Molson, a member of the English branch of Montreal’s Molson clan who had married into the Malkin family; W.C. Woodward of the department store chain; and R.H.B. Ker, a Victoria investor. “Neon Products was made to order for a guy like me,” Pattison remarked. “It was a company with the depth, history and strength for what I wanted to do—build a Canadian growth company. Besides, they turned me down for a job selling signs when I was nineteen. They told me I was too young and too small.”

  “He’s a man with gumption, and that’s why he’s so successful,” Jack Clyne, the province’s former chief justice, said of him, while deal maker Bob Wyman defined more precisely what makes Jimmy run: “There are very few people prepared to brave the kind of risks he’s taken.” Peter Brown, when he was B.C.’s ace stockbroker, called Pattison his best client: “He’s fantastic to deal with, very fair, very straightforward. When he’s pleased with you, he tells you; when he’s angry, he calls you first. Everything is always on the table. I’m a big Jimmy fan.”

  Perhaps the most treasured salute to the remarkable Jimmy came from, of all people, a former president of the United States. On October 14, 1980, the Pattisons were the only Canadians invited to attend Gerald and Betty Ford’s thirty-second wedding anniversary at their residence in Palm Springs, California. The seventy-five guests included Frank Sinatra, Tony Orlando, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller, Ed McMahon, Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey. Ford had grown fond of the feisty Canadian during their occasional meetings. But even so, it came as a surprise when, halfway through the ceremonies, the ex-chief-of-state slipped the ex-used-car-salesman an exquisitely appropriate gift of his own: a money clip embossed with the presidential seal.

  Being Jimmy’s employee is not easy. Because work to him is the main (some say, only) reason for breathing, Jimmy tends to expect from his staff not only perfection, but also the same single-track dedication that he expends on his business affairs. His high standards can unhinge some underlings. When one of his middle-management people had a heart attack and ended up in hospital, where his pulse was closely monitored, I happened to be there when Jimmy walked in to pay a friendly visit—and, watching the wall-mounted monitor, I could see that the smitten employee’s pulse rate doubled. He later told me that he felt guilty being caught resting instead of helping the Pattison Group meet sales quotas.

  Except for manning the Wurlitzer at corporate singsongs, Jimmy doesn’t indulge in any spare time activities. He belongs to three golf clubs but has played the game precisely three times since leaving university. His pride and joy (to the extent of having white broadloom in the engine room) is his multi-deck megaluxury motor cruiser that his crew takes on daytime jaunts to the spectacular inlets around Vancouver. Y
et during the first twenty-one months he owned the boat, he slept aboard only four nights. The only annual holiday he schedules for more than five days is a dash to Nanaimo with his wife, Mary, to celebrate their wedding anniversaries.

  He has been and remains the West Coast’s premier deal maker. His roots are in the tough East End used-car business, where most salesmen are born with silver tongues.

  Jimmy’s is platinum.

  —1986

  Ted Rogers: The Tycoon Who Never Rested

  THE LAST TIME I felt the presence of Ted Rogers, who died of heart failure at the end of 2008, was the previous April, when I spotted his floating communications capsule, disguised as the luxurious thirty-five-metre, $10 million yacht Loretta Anne, anchored off Belize, a tiny Mayan republic wedged between Mexico and Guatemala. At the time the underdeveloped Creole paradise was the in-vogue destination for pre-Crash sophisticated billionaires.

  Along with a few colleagues, I was in a small motor boat powered by a 150-hp outboard engine, captained by Bob Dhillon, a senior Calgary real estate operative with major investments here. We were about to venture up an alligator-infested river that snaked through a rainforest where jaguars roamed free, to visit a wilderness spa. I had thought vaguely of visiting Ted’s floating vacation HQ but decided against it—not because I might be disrupting his holiday, but because I would be interrupting his latest business deal, possibly negotiating wireless rights for the planet Mars. I remembered Tony Fell, when he was head of RBC Dominion Securities, telling me that he had been invited out on Ted’s vessel several times but had never seen him at rest: “Being on that boat of his was no holiday. He had a satellite telephone and was on it all the time.”

  Ted and I attended Upper Canada College together, and I had written up his various daredevil exploits, dubbing him the Canadian corporate world’s “Riverboat Gambler,” a title he amply earned by creating the country’s most innovative, most quixotic and most influential media empire, based entirely on his nerve and bank loans.

  This time, afloat in the Caribbean Sea, it turned out that he had a more intriguing private agenda. While I was there, Rogers secretly negotiated to purchase an island from Dhillon in the same archipelago where the Four Seasons chain was already building its first “green” hotel and near another private isle that had just been bought by Leonardo DiCaprio.

  The utopia that Ted Rogers had in mind might have been his final escapist domicile, but he didn’t live long enough to complete that purchase. Perhaps after half a century of galley-slave devotion to deifying his late father’s inventive spirit, Ted finally realized it was time for him to take a break. That sun-washed island in far-off Belize would have been his ideal sanctuary.

  On second thought, that was a dubious prediction. The Rogers mega-yacht could easily have circled the globe, but Ted never spent an uninterrupted week aboard her and even missed his own wedding anniversary after promising to spend a “second honeymoon” with his wife Loretta aboard their enchanted floating palace. Twice.

  Summing up Ted Rogers’ career is impossible because it had no discernable trajectory except the predictable arc of a yo-yo; never still, down and up, constantly veering between stunning fiscal triumphs and spine-chilling bankruptcy threats. He didn’t just sell the farm—he sold it over and over again. He prided himself on being a fearless entrepreneur, the kind who thrived as much on the risk as its rewards.

  In truth, he was a one-man brand being run by a one-man band.

  Ted Rogers only occasionally slowed down long enough to be called an incurable workaholic, but most of the time he made that choice of category comically inadequate. To him, doing deals was life itself; everything else (except his family) was extraneous. His work habits more closely resembled the schedule of one of those donkeys that used to drive water pumps in tropical penal colonies. He never stopped. ‘‘My idea of slowing down is putting a fax in my car,’’ he once told me. He perked up when I mentioned that I’d heard new fax machines for use on pleasure boats would soon be available—and promptly ordered one.

  NO ONE EQUALLED his daring. He spent most of his fifty years in business guided by his viscera and the message on his personal business card, which identified his occupation as “TED ROGERS, SENIOR SALES PERSON.” His profession was selling himself, and he succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. By the end of his life, he had created a $25 billion world-class communications empire from a standing start in a whirlwind of activity that even in retrospect seemed hard to credit. His unindicted co-conspirators were Canada’s bankers (mostly at the Toronto-Dominion and Scotiabank) who treated him as a black hole—in a nice way. He could extract almost any loan he demanded, and in the process somehow made these virago number crunchers feel graced that they had been asked to finance his latest flyer. Still, each transaction took its toll. Robin Korthals, then president of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, where Rogers did most of his initial banking, once confided in me that Ted had burned out fourteen of his most senior credit officers during their twenty-year association. One of his closest scrapes happened to coincide with the similarly endangered financial status of Brazil, then a Third World country that for some long-forgotten reason Canadian banks felt duty-bound to return to solvency. “No problem,” Ted told a startled TD credit officer, who had questioned his suitability for yet another big, fat loan. “Just think of me as Brazil.”

  Rogers cited many Golden Rules to live by, but fundamentally his belief system came down to one axiom: that persuading any fiscal sorcerer with substantial amounts of moola available for borrowing was mainly a matter of convincing him that there was no point in maintaining things as they were. He preached that loans in his capable hands created opportunities—the chance to sponsor and exploit the profit side of newness. In Ted’s lingo this implied that negotiating profitable deals was the result of an endless string of chance outcomes. If that sounded suspiciously like a lottery, he would courteously point out that you couldn’t win if you didn’t hold a ticket—which was why his loan applications deserved to be approved. (Do not try to reread this slowly; it still won’t make any sense—but that was the kind of levitational logic that made Ted’s fortune.)

  The closest I came to a suitable metaphor was a passage in the journal of Simon Fraser, the North West Company fur trader, who in 1808 explored the “Mysterious Great River” on the Pacific shore (later named after him) to see whether it could be used for floating inland merchandise down to the Pacific. To reach tidewater, Fraser and his party had to negotiate the snarling cataracts that characterized the Great River’s progress. They were forced to clamber across the precarious footholds in the rock faces of the canyons overhanging the raging stream, all the while portaging their canoes. “I cannot find words to describe our situation,” Fraser lamented. “We had to pass where no human being should venture.” During the acrobatic passage of Hell’s Gate Canyon, he confided in his journal that he felt as though he was “hanging on by my eyebrows.”

  That phrase described Ted Rogers’ financial tactics perfectly. That was why I labelled him the great Riverboat Gambler. With his corporate debts—which at one time totalled $5 billion—Rogers operated his business in a constant state of barely suppressed hysteria while—just like Simon Fraser—hanging on by his eyebrows.

  Looking back, his antics contained an element of self-destruction because he always had to keep running faster in the pursuit of ever more elusive goals. But for him, that was where the excitement resided. The difference between a bird and a kite is that while both fly, only one is free, but Ted never allowed his obligations to tie him down. At one point, he ran not only out of collateral, but also out of words. He had no negotiable assets left with which to bargain. Even his usual last resort for funds— taking out third mortgages on his house and cottage—wasn’t available, since he had already done that.

  To cheer him on, Korthals and his TD team issued Rogers with a very special framed document that visitors to Ted’s office were proudly shown, with an accompanying explanation: />
  We are pleased to inform you that the Toronto-Dominion Bank on the occasion of your fiftieth birthday is prepared to make available the following line of credit for your personal use, subject to the terms and conditions generally as outlined below:

  Borrower: Ted Rogers.

  Amount: $50 billion.

  Lender: TD Bank.

  Purpose: to help promote and prolong the state of good cheer and good health.

  Availability: in amounts of $1 billion per year on demand subject to normal bank conditions, margin requirements and other security, interest rate to be negotiated in an amount consummate with risk.

  Security: one cottage, other considerations as appropriate.

  Co-signers: Loretta Rogers with John Graham [Ted’s stepfather] repayment in full at maturity, May 27, 2033, when you reach a hundred.

  We are pleased to have had this opportunity to express our appreciation and look forward to continued utilization throughout the terms of this loan.

  “What prompted that offer,” Rogers told me, “was a very critical loan in the company’s early days. It was my wife, Loretta, who guaranteed it. But we didn’t have much security, so we offered our cottage. Korthals told us to keep it, because it had such a good view.”

  That little joke was hardly typical of Canadian bankers, whose sense of humour ranks just behind that of undertakers and police sergeants. But Edward Samuel Rogers Jr. was always special. He was treated as the author—and hero—of his own soap opera instead of just another panting loans supplicant. Apart from his solid credentials as a patriotic Canadian, Rogers relied on his pedigree to get him through a wondrous life, filled equally with singular achievement, the almost sensual thrills of risking his reputation and livelihood, plus an eternally boyish sense of wonderment that he got away with it all.