Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Although originally just friends, Hulcoop says that he and Rule eventually became lovers, an ill-fated coupling that was complicated by the coincidental arrivals of Hulcoop’s girlfriend and Rule’s lover, Sonthoff. Initially Sonthoff came to Vancouver for a visit with Rule, but that trip extended into a lifelong commitment after an “amicable” divorce from her husband.

  In 1957 Sonthoff was hired as a teaching assistant at UBC, the beginning of a long university career. Rule held a variety of jobs to buy herself time to write — she read scripts, did freelance broadcasting and temporary administrative jobs, and taught as a sessional lecturer in English literature and creative writing. Both women became Canadian citizens in the early 1960s.

  As a couple, Jane and Helen, as they were invariably called, had their share of spats, infidelities, and illnesses, but they were bound by a deep and abiding love. They relished travel, conversation, food, friendship, and drinking and smoking — one friend said Rule “smoked like a furnace and drank like a fish and enjoyed every minute of it.” Their lives incorporated an expansive circle of friends, including many poets who embraced the avant-garde Black Mountain and Tish poetry movements swirling around Warren and Ellen Tallman at UBC.

  For decades they also operated an unofficial welcome-wagon service for newcomers to Vancouver. “They were the first people I met,” recounted Margaret Atwood, who arrived at UBC as a sessional lecturer in 1964. “They helped me rent an apartment, they lent me a card table — I wrote The Edible Woman on it — they lent me plates, they invited me to parties. They were just terrific and they were like that with tons of people.”

  Rule produced more than a dozen books, beginning with the novel Desert of the Heart. Set in Reno, Nevada, it juxtaposes the arid, empty, and starkly beautiful desert with the tawdry, commercial, and exploitative casino strip. Even after accepting the novel in 1961, her publisher, Macmillan, demanded many changes that included deleting dates to avoid libel suits from casino employees who might claim to have been implicated as lesbians. When the novel finally appeared three years later, it was received warily by Rule’s academic colleagues. Rule liked to comment that her more liberal colleagues had defended her against charges of moral turpitude by comparing her to a writer of crime fiction, arguing that if writing about murders doesn’t make you a murderer, then writing about lesbians . . . (leaving the listener to complete the illogical syllogism).

  Despite a chilly official reception, the book generated a flood of “very unhappy, even desperate” letters from women who sensed that Rule was the only person in the world who might understand them and their lives. It wasn’t only closeted lesbians who sought her out. Rule quickly became the “go-to” spokesperson for journalists writing or broadcasting on issues involving homosexuality.

  “I became, for the media, the only lesbian in Canada,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay, “a role I gradually and very reluctantly accepted and used to educate people as I could.” She was not above editing her own life to suit the cause, according to her old friend and lover Hulcoop, who claimed after her death that he was “excised from all interviews” because “it didn’t fit the picture, that she had come to Canada to live with me.”

  After director Donna Deitch made Desert of the Heart into the film Desert Hearts in 1985, it became a cult classic. Starring Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau, the film is one of the first and most highly regarded works in which a lesbian relationship is depicted favourably. The film gave to the novel a new life, which sold thousands of copies and secured translation rights from several European countries.

  In 1976, when Sonthoff retired at sixty from UBC, she and Rule moved to Galiano, one of the Gulf Islands, a fifty-minute ferry ride from Vancouver. Some weeks before the move, Rule suffered a severe attack of arthritis in her spine and neck. Told she would soon be in a wheelchair, she turned to self-help remedies, especially swimming, a physical activity she had loved since childhood. The couple built a lap pool for Rule’s daily regimen in 1979. As a bonus, the children of Galiano enjoyed free swimming lessons in the summers, with Rule as the volunteer lifeguard. And many of their parents benefited from preferential mortgage rates from the “Bank of Galiano,” as Rule was affectionately called because of her largesse with the money she had inherited from her parents, a legacy which had grown because of her canny investments in the stock market.

  Arthritis meant that she had to change her writing habits. Instead of sitting hunched over a typewriter for hours at a time, she had to complete first drafts in longhand, lying on a couch with a board in her lap, before quickly typing up what she had written at the end of each day. In 1989 she began taking anti-inflammatory drugs. Two years later she announced that she “no longer felt driven to write,” at least partly because of the dulling effects of the medication.

  Sonthoff died in January 2000, five years before Canada legalized same-sex marriage. Rule, an icononclast to the core, insisted they had never wanted to marry anyway. “To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship,” she wrote in the spring 2001 issue of BC Bookworld. “With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.”

  When Rule was diagnosed with liver cancer in September 2007, she refused any radical treatment that would involve leaving her island home. Instead, in the middle of November, she retreated to her bed with a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and a bar of good chocolate on her bedside table, hundreds of love letters from friends and admirers, and a circle of friends and family who cared for her until her death, on November 27, at age seventy-six.

  Ted Rogers

  Communications Czar

  May 27, 1933 – December 2, 2008

  IN THE FIRST week of May 1939, Batman made his inaugural appearance as a caped crusader in a comic book, and Lou Gehrig, the Yankee first baseman known as the “Iron Horse,” quit baseball, hanging up his mitt because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neuron disease, and ending a record run of 2,130 consecutive games played. The following day there was a thunderstorm in Toronto. Of these three events, that is the one that Ted Rogers, who was only five years old at the time, remembered all his life.

  His parents were having a dinner party that evening in their home on Glenayr Road in Forest Hill. From his bed he could hear laughter and voices wafting upstairs as he drifted off to sleep. His mother kept from him the details of what happened next until he was an adult, but the trauma was so vivid he could visualize the scene as though he had actually been present.

  After the guests left, his mother got into bed and his father went downstairs to his basement workshop to tinker with one of his radio inventions. In the middle of the night his mother woke up to find her barely conscious husband hunched over the bathroom sink, blood spattering the wallpaper and the floor, according to Rogers’s account in Relentless: The True Story of the Man behind Rogers Communications. He was raced to hospital by ambulance, underwent emergency abdominal surgery, and was given massive transfusions — his radio station, CFRB, broadcast an appeal for blood from listeners. He appeared to rally until a second aneurysm burst twenty-four hours later. He died on Saturday morning, May 6, 1939, at age thirty-eight.

  Rogers left a sickly wife — she had suffered a heart attack four years earlier — and an even sicklier skinny and bespectacled red-haired son. He had no life insurance, and most of his money was invested in his companies. The widow took solace in drink and succumbed to the interfering advice of her in-laws. They persuaded her to sell her late husband’s businesses, a wound that festered in the hearts and psyches of both mother and son. Forever after, Rogers attributed his own drive to succeed to the early loss of his father and what he believed was the denial of his birthright: radio station CFRB.

  Throughout a roller-coaster life of vertiginous successes and
several near-bankruptcies, Rogers was propelled by the fear of dying young as his father had done, and of losing control of Rogers Communications Inc., the conglomerate he had built in memory of the man known as an electronic genius. Rogers also had an obsession with regaining ownership of the radio station his father had founded. It didn’t matter how many fortunes he made, how many cable companies, magazine empires, wireless networks, or sports franchises he owned, CFRB was the prize that eluded him. He couldn’t let it go until his wife, Loretta, over a glass and a heart-to-heart, finally persuaded him to move on when Rogers was in his seventies.

  The same was not true of his corporate baby, Rogers Communications Inc. A visionary who solved the convergence dilemma by packing content and delivery into one corporate entity, Rogers had a mercurial personality and a hair-trigger temper. He had his finger on every aspect of the company and his colleagues on speed dial 24/7. Delegation and consensus were not part of his administrative lexicon.

  When Ryerson University acknowledged a $15-million donation by naming its business faculty the Ted Rogers School of Management, one of his senior executives quipped: “Shouldn’t that be the Ted Rogers School of Micro-management?” No matter how far the stock price plummeted, how egregious his demands, how insulting his tongue-lashings, or how risky his pitches, Rogers would offer the rainbow promise “The best is yet to come” and flash his boyish grin.

  “If my dad had lived a normal lifespan, I am sure I would not have had that emotional drive . . . If your drive is simply to make money, it peters out after a while,” he told biographer Robert Brehl in Relentless. “In Canada we’ve seen people come from abroad and want to prove themselves to their parents who are still back in the old country. They start by digging trenches and end up owning thousands of acres and are huge developers . . . We all know these stories. What drives them is that emotional need to prove to their parents, whether they are still alive or not, that they have achieved something in their name. The same applies to me.”

  By most accounts, Rogers left his company in good hands when he died of heart disease on December 2, 2008. He was seventy-five, nearly twice the age his father had achieved, the president and CEO of Rogers Communications Inc., and one of the richest people in Canada, with a net worth of approximately $5 billion.

  Among its bundle of assets, RCI owned the country’s largest wireless telecommunications and cable companies, the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, the Rogers Centre, more than fifty radio stations, and more than a dozen television outlets — including five Citytv and as many Omni television stations, Sportsnet, and the Shopping Channel — as well as some seventy trade and consumer magazines, including Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Canadian Business.

  Although not in charge of operations, his family is still deeply involved in Rogers Communications. Son Edward was made deputy chair of the board of RCI in 2009, and daughter Melinda, who is also a corporate director, is senior vice-president of strategy and development, while his widow, Loretta, also sits on the board of directors. Unlike in Rogers’s lifetime, when he was both president and CEO of RCI, the executive reins were handed over to chartered accountant Nadir Mohamed on March 29, 2009.

  Mohamed, who had worked under Rogers in several branches of the hydra-like conglomerate, has since turned arch-rival Bell Canada into at least a partial ally. The two telecom megaliths purchased a majority stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment in December 2011, giving them ownership of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, the Toronto Raptors basketball team, the Air Canada Centre arena, the Toronto FC soccer team, and the Toronto Marlies of the American Hockey League. By letting an outsider in, Rogers ensured that his family’s interests and his own legacy would be protected — two things he valued much more highly than mere money.

  EDWARD SAMUEL (TED) Rogers Jr. was born on May 27, 1933, the only son of Edward S. Rogers Sr., an inventor, an entrepreneur, and founder of radio station CFRB, and his wife, Velma Melissa Taylor. His father’s family were Quaker Loyalists and abolitionists who had come north in the 1780s. They had made their money in oil and coal and were part of establishment Toronto; his mother’s family were Baptists who hailed from Woodstock, a small town in southwestern Ontario.

  At twenty-one, Ted Rogers Sr. became one of the first ham radio operators to send a signal across the ocean to Europe. By twenty-five he had invented the alternating current (AC) radio tube — he called the result the Rogers Batteryless Radio. He displayed his invention at the Canadian National Exhibition that summer with the catchy slogan “Just plug in — then tune in.”

  By 1927, the same year the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey franchise was launched and two years before the stock market crash, Rogers had built the first radio station powered by electricity. Thanks to two powerful transmitters located north of Toronto, “Canada First Rogers Batteryless Radio,” or CFRB, was capable of emitting a clear long-range signal. A canny entrepreneur, Rogers pumped content from the radio station to encourage listeners to buy his radios, a crossover marketing scheme that his son would later perfect. By 1931 he had been given an experimental television licence. Eight years later he was dead.

  While he was still grief-stricken, seven-year-old Ted was sent to Sedbergh, a boarding school in Montebello, Quebec, to be toughened up. After he had run away a couple of times and his grandmother had intervened, he was allowed to go to Upper Canada College, again as a boarder, even though the school was within easy walking distance of the family home.

  Two years after his father’s death, his mother remarried, and this time she didn’t consult her in-laws. The choice was hers and it was a good one. Lawyer John W. Graham, a kind, stable man, was a calming and nurturing influence on his bride, his stepson, and his daughter, Ann (Rooney), who was born in 1943. Graham got his wife off the bottle and his stepson through school. He used to say: “It’s up to you to get out, but I’ll get you in if I can.” Graham — Rogers called him his second father — provided steadying counsel and support until he died in 1998.

  After UCC, Rogers went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto and then Osgoode Hall Law School. To say he was an indifferent student would be flattering. He simply wasn’t interested in attending lectures and slogging through case studies. When his mother and stepfather complained about his marks, he argued that “if you get 50 percent you’ll get ahead just as fast as the person who gets 90 percent.”

  He always had a business on the side. At UCC he hooked up an antenna outside his dorm room to broadcast rudimentary television shows to an audience of other boarders; as a teenager he organized dance bands and supplied sound systems for social events to which he sold tickets to his classmates and then took Polaroid snapshots of them and their dates. In 1960, while he was still in law school, he bought FM station CHFI, using an inheritance and a loan to come up with the price tag of more than $85,000.

  Undaunted by the fact that fewer than 5 percent of listeners had FM receivers, he bought the new radios in bulk and offered them at bargain prices to increase the listening audience for his station — echoing the move his father had made decades earlier with CFRB. He also bought CHFI-AM, later changing its call letters to CFTR in memory of his father. In the 1970s it morphed into a Top 40 station and in the early 1990s into 680 News, a twenty-four-hour all-news station that became the model for other news stations across the country.

  Despite his dismal law-school marks — Rogers often sent an assistant to class to take notes for him — he found an articling position with J. S. D. Tory and Associates, the corporate law firm that later became Torys LLP. When Rogers approached J. S. D. Tory in 1962, the lawyer initially thought the brash young man was looking for investors for his radio station. Eventually Tory’s son Jim took him on as an articling student. He was so unimpressed by Rogers’s aptitude for and dedication to the law that he agreed to sign his articles only after securing a promise that the brash young lawyer would never practise.

  Two years later, Rogers asked
Jim Tory’s twin brother, John, also a lawyer, to sit on the board of his fledgling company. Tory, who later became a stalwart advisor to Roy and then Ken Thomson, agreed and remained as loyal and calming a force for Rogers as his second father, John Graham, had been when he was a boy. Rogers was far too risk-embracing to heed all of Tory’s sage advice, but he trusted and respected him. A few months before Rogers died, he gave a $7.5-million donation to the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Tory’s name, a gift Rogers knew that Tory couldn’t refuse.

  From radio, Rogers became interested in television and especially in cable, winning television licences for several stations in and around Toronto in the late 1960s. By 1974 Rogers Cable Television had more than a dozen channels, including several multicultural ones catering to an increasingly diverse immigrant population. Six years later, he had acquired enough other cable companies to lead the pack across the country. Rogers, who always wanted more, even if he didn’t have the cash to pay for it, had a keen eye for the future direction of the communications business.

  Early on he realized that the market for cable was finite because most people, especially younger ones, didn’t want to be tethered to a stationary television that was plugged into a wall. They wanted mobility but they also wanted to be connected; that led him to mobile phones and wireless networks and nearly disastrous ventures on both sides of the undefended border. Others lost faith but Rogers never did, and he came out on top in the end — the only place that mattered to an entrepreneur like him.

  His best personal investment was marrying his wife, Loretta. They met in Nassau in 1957, the year after he graduated from U of T. The daughter of British MP Jack Robinson and his wife, Maysie, Loretta was blonde, attractive, and six years his junior. He shared an affiliation for Conservative Party politics with her father. Rogers’s early political hero was the populist Red Tory John Diefenbaker, and he later became close friends with Brian Mulroney. But he found it even more significant that Loretta had been born three weeks before his own father died.