Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  PIERRE FRANCIS DE Marigny Berton, the only son of Francis Berton, a civil engineer, and Laura Berton (née Thompson), a part-time reporter, was born in Whitehorse, Yukon, on July 12, 1920. His father, a graduate of the University of New Brunswick, had gone to the North seeking adventure; his mother was the daughter of newsman and socialist T. Phillips Thompson. Berton probably inherited his fearlessness from his father and his crusading journalism from his mother.

  When he was less than a year old, his parents moved to Dawson City, where their daughter, Lucy, was born in the fall of 1921. Like many Canadians, the Bertons suffered during the Depression, surviving with frugality, homemade clothing, and scanty provisions. The radio was their conduit to what was happening in the world.

  The Boy Scouts became a huge outlet when Berton was an adolescent, inspiring a lifetime of loyalty. He said later that joining the Scouts was the only thing that kept him from turning into a juvenile delinquent. After graduating from high school in 1937, he headed south to Victoria, B.C., for university.

  His first conscious move towards moulding himself into “Pierre Berton, famous Canadian” was transferring from Victoria College, across the Strait of Georgia, to the University of British Columbia in 1939 for his final two years. “Quite clearly, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was going into journalism. I switched my courses and did everything I had to do to get to UBC so that I could get to the Ubyssey,” he said in a 2001 interview. During the summers, he worked in Yukon gold mines.

  He embraced the student newspaper and its swashbuckling tradition of chasing stories and skirts and skipping class. He wanted to be editor, but was considered “too loose a cannon” for the UBC administration to accept as overall editor, according to A. B. McKillop, author of Pierre Berton: A Biography. Still, he had a strong influence, redesigning the layout, writing his own pieces, and editing the Tuesday edition of the twice-weekly paper.

  He also became a campus correspondent for the Vancouver News-Herald. In 1940 he was taken on full-time for the summer and got a permanent job there after he graduated from UBC in 1941. Editors were in short supply because many younger journalists had enlisted to fight in the Second World War. So Berton, at age twenty-one, became the youngest city editor in Canada.

  He was not on the job for long. The Canadian Army beckoned and Berton served, first as a private in the Canadian Information Corps. He rose through the ranks, ending up as a captain and an instructor at the Royal Military College in Kingston.

  After the war he returned to Vancouver, where on March 22, 1946, he married Janet Walker, an aspiring journalist whom he had met at the Ubyssey. (She edited the Friday edition of the paper and was later promoted to news manager, according to McKillop.) He quickly found a job at the Vancouver Sun, where his front-page scoops and headline-making adventures — including a series on the Nahanni Valley, which, with typical hyperbole, he called Headless Valley — caught the eye of Arthur Irwin, editor of Maclean’s, the best magazine in the country. Irwin sent journalist Scott Young from Toronto to offer Berton a job as an associate editor, giving him the authority to negotiate a starting salary between $4,000 and $4,500. “I’ll take $4,500,” retorted Berton, clinching the deal that moved him from the sidelines to the centre of the journalism industry in Canada.

  “He was huge and shy and brash and we didn’t know what to make of him,” said June Callwood in a 2004 interview. Like her husband, Trent Frayne, Callwood was a “regular” freelancer for the monthly magazine. At a “casserole and bottle of rye” party, soon after Berton arrived in Toronto in 1947, he recited Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” like “a kid trying to make a good impression.”

  Performing the Service poem became one of Berton’s party tricks. In September 2004, two months before he died, he rose from his wheelchair at a fundraising dinner in Toronto for the Berton House Writers’ Retreat and recited the whole thing off the top of his head.

  At Maclean’s, Berton was a writing dynamo. He banged out stories on the Arctic, Canadians serving in Korea, discrimination against Japanese and Jewish Canadians in the 1940s, and the need to end capital punishment. Editor Ralph Allen “used to say that Pierre had ten ideas every day for articles and two of them were brilliant,” according to Callwood.

  At the time, Berton thought of Toronto as merely a way station to a larger career south of the border. “My idea was always to go to the States and work for Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post,” he said later. In the end he stayed here, and instead of becoming part of the brain drain he became, under the tutelage of Allen and journalist Bruce Hutchison, instrumental in fostering a home-grown cultural nationalism. He never regretted that decision. “I’ve done much better here than I would have done in the States. I became a big frog in a little puddle.”

  By the mid-1950s the Bertons had several offspring (eventually they would have eight children, two of them adopted and seven of them given first names starting with the letter P). After a tip from broadcaster Lister Sinclair, a friend since Ubyssey days, the Bertons bought three and a half hectares of land in Kleinburg, northwest of Toronto, and built a sprawling house for their expanding family. The pressure to provide for all those mouths soon saw Berton moonlighting on radio programs such as Court of Opinion, becoming a panellist on Front Page Challenge (from 1957 until the program finally went off the air in 1995), and pounding away at book manuscripts. He got up very early, typed until it was time to go to Maclean’s, and hit his keys again at home in the evening, establishing a twelve-hour workday regimen that he followed for the rest of his life.

  By 1958 he had written three books, two of which, The Mysterious North and Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, earned him Governor General’s Awards. That was the year that Berton was lured away from Maclean’s to become a daily columnist for the Toronto Star, his third significant career switch.

  His output was staggering. He wrote 1,200 words a day, five days a week, and on the sixth day he ran a column of letters. The column, which was by turns investigative, crusading, ruminative, and domestic, combined the best aspects of the rabble-rousing local journalist and pushed the genre in new directions. His writing hummed with energy and enthusiasm and was as interactive with readers as it was possible to be in those pre-Internet days.

  After four years at the Star (and two books based on his newspaper columns), he went back to Maclean’s as a columnist, a gig that was short-lived because of a notorious column he wrote in 1963 under the heading “Let’s Stop Hoaxing the Kids about Sex.” The column was really about hypocrisy, and Berton soon learned a lesson on that very subject from his employers.

  As the father of four daughters, he wrote, he hoped his girls would be sensible, but if they wanted to have sex he wished they would do it in a comfortable bed rather than the back seat of a car. The public was outraged and all hell broke loose. “Church groups were formed to attack Maclean’s, to cancel subscriptions and to withdraw advertising, and I was fired,” he said later. “I didn’t quit, I was fired. They published the goddamn thing, and now they were pushing me out.”

  Leaving Maclean’s gave him more time to concentrate on books and his burgeoning career in radio and television. Besides regular radio debates with his friend Charles Templeton and his Front Page Challenge gig, he hosted The Pierre Berton Show on CTV from 1962 until 1973. His panoply of controversial guests included prostitutes, dope addicts, professional divorce co-­respondents, and once, a Playboy bunny. Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, should have been on the list, but skittish executives killed the program.

  Mainly, though, he wrote books. For the next three decades he produced a book every autumn as regularly as the leaves fell from the trees. Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896–1899 (1958), a heroic book about the common people who went north seeking their fortunes, remained his favourite. “It is a lively book, it says something about human nature and I put my heart into it,” he explained i
n 2001. That fondness was shared by historian Ramsay Cook. “That is where he came from and where his mother taught him how to write,” he said in a 2004 interview with the Globe. “It is a wonderful book on almost every level. You can dig around and find a lot of things he probably didn’t pay attention to and he probably tells some stories that are a little larger than life, but still it is a book that anybody who is going to visit the Yukon would have to read.”

  In the mid-1950s, Berton hooked up with legendary publisher Jack McClelland because his publishing house, McClelland & Stewart, was the Canadian distributor for Alfred A. Knopf, for whom Berton had written his book on the royal family in 1954. It was only after Klondike that M&S became his originating publisher. The two men shared an appetite for drink and the company of women and were co-founders of a notorious luncheon society, coyly called the Sordsmen’s Club, in the early 1960s. Only men could belong; wives were not invited — except as the guests of men other than their husbands. Nobody enquired too closely when dalliances took place and couples sought secluded rooms after several courses and many libations.

  For a while, Berton added editor-in-chief of M&S to his many titles. McClelland wanted to start an illustrated books division and persuaded Berton to head it up by promising him it would take only one day a week. When this proved illusory, Berton told McClelland that either he could stay on as editor-in-chief of M&S or he could quit and write another book. That book turned out to be The National Dream (1970), the first volume of his history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and a mega-hit for Berton and M&S.

  He wrote the manuscript in three weeks, although he took a year to revise it. The second volume, The Last Spike (1971), took longer to draft — a month — and the same amount of time to polish. Historian Michael Bliss agreed to be the academic reader for the CPR books. “I came to that job with much skepticism, thinking he was probably a phony who relied on researchers, and then was quite surprised that the manuscripts were so good and that in conversation he clearly knew his material extremely well,” Bliss said in a 2004 interview with the Globe. “He obviously had high intelligence, good writing skills, and a flair for story-telling, and what more does one want in a popular historian?”

  The Last Spike won Berton his third Governor General’s Award. Both books sold about 130,000 copies each. It led to another triumph when the CBC produced The National Dream in 1974, eight dramatized documentaries based on his bestselling books. The series, introduced by Berton, netted 3.6 million viewers, a mammoth audience in English Canada at the time.

  Flamboyant, daring, and fiercely patriotic, McClelland was the perfect marketer for Berton’s colourful narratives about the building of the railroad, the opening of the West, the Great Depression, the War of 1812, and the Dionne quintuplets. Together they rode the roller coaster of cultural nationalism, with Berton providing the content and McClelland supplying the razzmatazz.

  The relationship with M&S continued through dozens of books and the sale of the financially beleaguered firm to real-estate developer Avie Bennett in 1985, and only ended a decade later, when Berton took his memoir My Times to rival publishers Doubleday in a dispute about money. Bennett, who had taken a hard look at the balance sheet for Starting Out (1987), the first volume of Berton’s memoirs, was unwilling to offer the advance that Berton demanded.

  The blockbuster sales for Mr. Canada were over. So, too, were the days for the kind of history that he had made his own. When his forty-seventh title, Onward to War, a history of Canada’s dutiful response to declarations of war in South Africa, Europe, and Korea, was published in 2001, it was less well received than earlier titles. Reviewing the book in the Globe, historian Modris Eksteins asked: “If the world changed in the last century as dramatically as Berton insists, can — or should — history be written in much the same way Carlyle and Macaulay presented it over a century ago?”

  Eksteins had a point. Berton will not be remembered for any great archival discoveries or new theories or interpretations. His skill was in creating a large popular following for his re-creation of the characters and events of the past.

  In his last years, Berton suffered from congestive heart failure, diabetes, and a slew of other lifestyle ailments. Although he had slowed down, he continued to work — he wanted to go out writing. In the fall of 2004, aged eighty-four, he began a monthly column for the Globe and published his fiftieth book, Prisoners of the North, a quintet of profiles of Arctic adventurers that included Klondike Joe Boyle, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Robert Service.

  He also continued to make radio and television appearances, demonstrating his technique for rolling a joint on Rick Mercer’s Monday Report on CBC TV, using a copy of The National Dream as a flat surface. Some viewers were reminded of the time he almost severed a finger on 90 Minutes Live back in 1978, demonstrating the workings of the then-revolutionary Cuisinart food processer while aghast host Peter Gzowski watched his guest’s blood flow onto the studio floor. The Monday Report segment was Berton’s last television appearance, and it was a classic: self-parodying, flamboyant, and a poke up the nose of the Canadian lawmakers who refused to legalize the smoking of recreational marijuana.

  In the middle of October 2004, Janet Berton fell and broke her hip. As soon as she was admitted to York Central Hospital for what turned out to be a prolonged stay, Berton’s own decline accelerated. By the end of the month both Bertons were in separate wings of the same hospital. He was transferred on November 29 to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. There, with his wife Janet and his daughter Peggy Anne at his bedside, the man everybody called Pierre died the following afternoon of complications from heart disease and diabetes. He was eighty-four.

  Maurice “The Rocket” Richard

  Hockey Player

  August 4, 1921 – May 27, 2000

  MAURICE “THE ROCKET” Richard always insisted that he was just a hockey player. No matter how heartfelt and accurate, those denials didn’t stop fans, politicians, team owners, and opportunists from appropriating his name and power for their personal, political, philosophical, and commercial goals. Even after he died of abdominal cancer on May 27, 2000, his state funeral — extremely rare for an athlete — threatened to become hijacked by politics. Should the coffin be draped with the fleur-de-lys flag, symbolizing the nationalist aspirations of Quebec, as Premier Lucien Bouchard wanted? Or should it be covered with the maple leaf of Canada, as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien desired in that tempestuous era of national unity debates? Wisely, Richard’s family chose the apolitical route that the hockey legend himself had always tried to skate: they ordered a blanket of yellow roses, insisting that the final public ceremony be about the man, not other people’s expectations or ambitions.

  His career statistics are still staggering: He was the first player to score fifty goals in a fifty-game season and to amass a career total of five hundred goals, achieving 544 markers in regular play and 82 in the playoffs in his eighteen years skating with the Canadiens. He helped win the Stanley Cup eight times for Montreal, was captain for four winning years in a row between 1957 and 1960, and played in every annual NHL All-Star game from 1947 to 1959. He was also the only hockey player to single-handedly spark a riot in the streets of Montreal, on March 17, 1955 — St. Patrick’s Day — after league president Clarence Campbell suspended him for the rest of the season after a violent altercation with a linesman four days earlier in Boston.

  Why was it that Richard became more than just a hockey player in the hearts and imaginations of Canadians? Sure, Howie Morenz was already a star before Richard laced up his skates for les Canadiens in 1942, but Morenz was an anglophone from Ontario. The Rocket was the first French-Canadian hockey legend. He emerged as a jet-propelled scoring ace in the 1940s and early 1950s, when radio controlled the airwaves. An entire generation of Québécois boys, including future teammates Jean Beliveau and Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, grew up listening to the play-by-play, visualizing the Rocket tearing up the ice (
and any defencemen) in his zigzag path as he roared from the blue line, eyes blazing, to slap a puck into the opposing team’s net.

  One of those kids was Roch Carrier, the distinguished playwright and short-story writer (La guerre, yes sir! and Floralie, où es-tu? among other titles), arts administrator, and author of the classic children’s book The Hockey Sweater. Born in May 1937, Carrier turned eight the year that Richard scored fifty goals in fifty games. In The Hockey Sweater he describes his adulation for Richard and his chagrin when his mother ordered him a new sweater from the Eaton’s catalogue and the retailer sent a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. “We all combed our hair like Maurice Richard . . . We laced our skates like Maurice Richard, we taped our sticks like Maurice Richard. . . . On the ice . . . we were ten players all wearing the uniform of the Montreal Canadiens . . . [and we] all wore the famous number 9 on our backs.”

  Although Richard is often forced into the heroic mould of a hero of the Quiet Revolution, he is a reluctant and imperfect fit. He did grow up in Quebec at a time when anglophone commercial and cultural dominance was pronounced and he played in an era when the ultra-nationalist Maurice Duplessis was premier of the province, but Richard was always his own man. Moreover, he retired from hockey a year after Duplessis died in September 1959, just as the not-so-Quiet Revolution was beginning.