Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  They dated for six years, while she finished her bachelor’s degree at the University of Miami, before marrying on September 25, 1963, in a lavish ceremony at St. Margaret’s Church Westminster, adjacent to Westminster Abbey. Their honeymoon trip to Kenya was cut short so that he could attend a regulatory hearing back home about his AM licence. Eventually they had four children, Lisa, Edward, Melinda, and Martha.

  Before the wedding, Robinson, who later became Lord Marton Mere and governor of Bermuda, had told his prospective son-in-law: “What’s Loretta’s is Loretta’s, and what’s yours is negotiable.” In practice, the opposite was true. The Robinsons advanced money to the young couple to buy their first house from a trust fund in Loretta’s name, albeit with the proviso that Rogers would never mortgage the house to finance his business interests. As Rogers himself has admitted, he was so desperate for money over the years that he and Loretta triple-mortgaged the house several times to meet payroll and other financial hemorrhages.

  If she resented or worried about their precarious finances, she kept it to herself, appearing to be the most loyal and stalwart of spouses. “His wife Loretta has been his staunchest ally and sounding board,” Caroline Van Hasselt wrote in High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire That Debt Built. “Without her moral and financial support, especially in the early days, Ted Rogers might not be where he is today.”

  Rogers was always scrawny and sickly, suffering from celiac disease as a child and nearly going blind in one eye before he was a year old. His workaholic lifestyle didn’t mesh with his genetic predisposition to heart disease, especially as the years passed. He survived skin cancer, a coronary aneurysm, a heart attack, and a quadruple bypass, and was so seriously ill in late October 2008 that he relinquished oversight of the $2-billion-plus company to Alan Horn, chair of the board of directors, before entering hospital — the first time he appeared to recognize his own mortality. He weathered that crisis, but his body was worn out. Less than two months later he died of congestive heart failure, at home surrounded by his family. Ted Rogers’s big adventure was finally over.

  Dorothy Joudrie

  Housewife and Criminal

  March 16, 1935 – February 14, 2002

  THINGS HAPPEN IN marriages that outsiders can never know or comprehend. The private life of businessman Earl Joudrie and his wife, Dorothy, went scandalously public after she shot him six times with a .25 calibre Beretta handgun in her Calgary condominium on January 21, 1995. Lying in a seeping pool of his own blood, promising not to testify against her, he finally persuaded his wife to put down her drink, pick up the telephone, and call 911. Joudrie recovered, but he walked with a limp and carried four bullets in his body until he died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in November 2006, having outlived his former wife by four years.

  On trial for attempted murder in 1996, the elegantly dressed silver-haired woman, dubbed “Six-Shot Dot,” pleaded not guilty, arguing that she was in a robotic state when she wielded the gun, a defence that was buttressed by her complaints of violent physical abuse in the early years of her nearly four-decade-long marriage. Although their marriage and her estranged husband’s character were on trial, he was not officially a defendant, so he could not call character witnesses to refute his wife’s testimony. But there was another, even more telling circumstance, according to his supporters. He wanted to protect his children from being caught in a vicious battle between their parents, and that meant doing whatever he could to keep his wife out of prison.

  One fact was never disputed: Dorothy Joudrie shot her husband in the back, not because he was beating her but because he was divorcing her. Nevertheless, the jury of eleven women and one man found her not criminally responsible by reason of a mental disorder. Joudrie’s lawyers argued, and the jury agreed, that she was suffering from non-insane dissociative automatism and therefore not capable of murderous intent when she tried to kill her husband.

  Several women have used variations of that argument since the Supreme Court ruled in 1990 (with Madame Justice Bertha Wilson writing the unanimous decision) that a severely battered woman doesn’t have to be in “imminent” danger from her abusive partner to claim self-defence against a murder charge. Joudrie pushed the argument to the extreme and the judge didn’t grant an outright acquittal. She was ordered to undergo a psychiatric assessment and was later confined to an Edmonton mental health facility for five months of treatment before being granted an absolute discharge in 1998.

  How a supposedly successful couple like the Joudries had unravelled so disastrously was the stuff of gossip, newspaper and magazine articles, and even a book. A feminist account, Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie, was written by a childhood friend, Audrey Andrews, who used her own life experience to paint Joudrie as the victim in her marriage to a powerful corporate executive.

  If you were born in the 1930s and you were smart, capable, hardworking, ambitious, and male — and Earl Joudrie was all of those things — success and affluence were pretty much a given in the Canadian postwar economic boom. Before the shooting, Earl Joudrie had a reputation as a self-made Calgary businessman who was sought out by dysfunctional or financially troubled companies such as Canadian Tire, Algoma Steel, and Dome Petroleum as a corporate fixer, strategist, and restructuring guru. After the trial, his status in the business community remained intact. Although he was often publicly reviled as a wife-beater, he remarried and remained close to his children and grandchildren.

  The outcome was very different for Dorothy Joudrie. She had bought into the prevailing corporate male model — as most North American women did back then — on a subservient, unequal footing, willingly suppressing her own career ambitions for marriage and motherhood. Her husband made the money and she reared the children, and she derived her social status from his position as a rising gas and oil executive. She believed that whatever happened behind closed doors should stay there, and she was determined to keep up the pretence that she and her husband were still a couple, even while living separate lives — he in Toronto with his new partner, the daughter of his wife’s cousin, and she in a luxurious Calgary condominium. What she couldn’t tolerate was the prospect of being officially supplanted by another Mrs. Earl Joudrie.

  DOROTHY DAY JONASON was born in Camrose, Alberta, on March 16, 1935, and grew up in Edmonton. Her father, Joe Jonason, was a Second World War vet who earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Oregon and taught at the University of Alberta. Dorothy was a lively, high-spirited young woman with an impish smile. She met Earl Joudrie at Westglen High School when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. The elder son in a tough working-class family, he’d left home at sixteen to escape his brutal, authoritarian father and moved in with friends while finishing his secondary education.

  Jonason and Joudrie became engaged on Christmas Eve — she was nineteen and he was twenty — and married in August 1957, two months after they had both earned undergraduate degrees from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. As a young married couple, the Joudries lived in Edmonton but were frequently apart because he had a job with Pacific Petroleum in Fort St. John, negotiating drilling rights with farmers.

  After they moved to Calgary in 1960, she continued her teaching career at Viscount Bennett High School. Outwardly they seemed a happy couple who went to church together, sang in the choir, played cards with friends, and were active in the community. Nevertheless, they were distraught at their seeming inability to have children, and their frequent fights sometimes turned physical.

  After adopting a baby boy they named Neale in 1961, she gave up teaching and focused her energy on her children — daughter Carolyn was born in 1963, followed by two sons, Colin (1968) and Guy (1970) — and her husband’s escalating career. By the late 1960s he was president and chief executive officer of Ashland Oil Canada, a subsidiary of a Kentucky-based oil giant, and was making enough money to build a house in an exclusive Calgary suburb. The downside was that he was often away bec
ause of business commitments and she was stuck at home rearing four children and managing a large house.

  The stress magnified in 1971 when Earl Joudrie was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes, and given six months to live. Probably to protect his career prospects, he insisted on keeping his illness a secret, even from her parents, while he underwent aggressive experimental treatment at Stanford University Medical Centre in California. She lived in a nearby motel with four children under ten, returning to Calgary when the school year began. The odds were bad — the other two patients in the treatment program died — but Joudrie survived and continued to sprint up the Ashland Oil executive ladder.

  By 1976 he was senior vice-president, group operating officer, and chair of Ashland Oil at its headquarters in Kentucky, and travelling extensively. Far away from family and friends, she was finding solace in copious amounts of Seagram’s rye whisky. A double VO on the rocks was her drink of choice; apparently she could tell with one sip if a bartender had tried to slip her Canadian Club instead.

  Privately the Joudries were mired in guerrilla warfare. His homecomings were punctuated by vicious late-night arguments and shoving and pushing matches, and on several occasions — as he admitted at his wife’s 1996 trial — the fights ended with him hitting her, evidence that was corroborated on the stand by a former nanny. Two of the Joudrie children, Carolyn and Guy, testified about their mother’s drinking and their parents’ frequent arguments, but they did not corroborate her allegations that their father beat her so badly in the first two decades of their marriage that she suffered a broken nose, bruised ribs, and blackened eyes.

  After a particularly stormy Christmas, he decided to quit Ashland, move everybody back to Calgary to work in the corporate towers that controlled the oil patch, and spend more time at home, skiing with his children at Banff and holidaying at a condo in Scottsdale, Arizona. While he was turning around companies and sitting on corporate boards, including Canadian Tire, Algoma Steel, and Gulf Canada Resources, she was making her own career as a fundraiser, working as a volunteer with Easter Seals and the Children’s Hospital Aid Society and sitting on the boards of cultural and artistic organizations and the organizing committee for the Calgary Olympics.

  Outwardly she was a wealthy socialite who entertained lavishly and travelled to lush vacation spots with her husband and family. Behind the doors of the couple’s seven-thousand-square-foot home in the Bearspaw area of northwest Calgary, they were both miserable, although she continued to believe that her life revolved around the marital vows she had made as a bride in the mid-1950s.

  By October of 1989, with their four children grown, he had moved out. Publicly they pretended the marriage was intact. In the early 1990s he began a relationship with Lynn Manning, an executive with Kelly Services and the daughter of his wife’s cousin. They had become friendly after he appointed her to the board of the Public Policy Forum, an entity that he chaired.

  After Joudrie and Manning began living together in Toronto in 1993, he initiated proceedings to divorce his wife. She was aghast and in denial that her troubled marriage was on the shoals. Earl Joudrie travelled to Calgary on January 20, 1995, and met with her the next morning at her condo to give her copies of the divorce papers. As he turned to leave, she redirected him to the garage, pulled out the Beretta she had hidden under the driver’s seat of her Jaguar, and shot him until the magazine was empty. While he lay on the cement floor pumping blood, she sipped her drink and mused aloud about how much she would inherit and where she would dump his body.

  After the trial he completed the divorce negotiations. She got $1.9 million plus $2,000 monthly support payments for two years. When she emerged from her enforced stay in the Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, she returned to Calgary and tried to pick up the shards of her former life. She opened an Icelandic wool shop and publicly excoriated the province’s mental-health-care system, claiming she had endured mental, emotional, and physical abuse and had seen other patients being “demoralized, degraded and dehumanized on a daily basis” while in the hospital.

  As her health declined — she was diagnosed with breast cancer and a thyroid condition — her drinking continued apace. Despite sojourns at the Betty Ford Clinic and other rehab institutions, she never conquered her alcoholism. Nevertheless, she finally reconciled with her four children, all of whom were at her bedside at Foothills Hospital in Calgary when she died, at sixty-six, of liver and kidney failure, on February 14, 2002. She was still wearing her wedding ring, but there was no happy ending to her fairy tale.

  Peter Jennings

  Foreign Correspondent and News Anchor

  July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005

  BEFORE 9/11 2001 in New York, there was 5/11 1972 in Munich, and both times, Peter Jennings was there. Those two terrorist attacks, twenty-nine years apart, bracket the stellar career of the Canadian-born ABC foreign correspondent and news anchor.

  On September 5, 1972, Jennings was ABC’s Middle East correspondent and covering the non-sports events at the 1972 Summer Olympics. Security was deliberately lax at the “friendly games,” the first Olympics the Germans had hosted since the infamous 1936 Nazi-dominated competition in Berlin.

  Before dawn on that day, eight Palestinian terrorists, dressed in tracksuits and carrying assault rifles and grenades in their duffel bags, climbed over a two-metre chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter of the Olympic Village and stealthily entered two apartments housing members of the Israeli team. The terrorists, who belonged to Black September, shot and killed coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano. They took nine other Israelis hostage and demanded the release of more than two hundred Palestinians held in Israeli jails, as well as the founders of the Baader-Meinhof gang, who were imprisoned in Germany.

  Jennings and his camera crew hunkered down close to the compound and reported live throughout the ordeal to anchor Jim McKay. The correspondent drew upon his knowledge and expertise in Middle Eastern politics to explain the realpolitik while the camera crew provided footage of the armed guerrillas, including a chilling image of a terrorist, his face obscured by a balaclava, leaning over the balcony of an Israeli apartment. The rescue attempt was bungled and in the end eleven Israelis were murdered, but as Barbara Matusow wrote in her 1983 book, The Evening Stars: The Making of the Network News Anchor, ABC’s coverage of the Palestinian hostage-taking at the Munich Olympics “was among the most gripping episodes ever shown on live television.”

  By September 11, 2001, Jennings had been the network’s defining face and voice on the evening news for nearly twenty years. At the peak of his popularity, in 1992–93, Jennings, a man of exceptional physical grace and charm, drew an audience of close to fourteen million viewers to ABC’s World News Tonight. In the days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, he anchored ABC’s coverage for more than sixty hours, sitting in the anchor chair that first day for seventeen hours as viewers watched his chin grow stubbled and his face paler as the fatigue and strain took their toll. TV Guide called him “the center of gravity,” while the Washington Post said: “Jennings, in his shirt sleeves, did a Herculean job of coverage.” ABC News later won both Peabody and duPont Awards for its continuous broadcasting.

  Covering the two towers wasn’t the first time Jennings had relied upon his legendary stamina to go the distance for the network. Counting down to the turn of the millennium in December 1999, he was on the air for twenty-five hours, winning a Peabody Award for ABC and an audience of 175 million for the biggest live television event ever.

  Among his many other resumé-enhancing assignments, he was the first Canadian journalist to arrive in Dallas after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and he was in Berlin in the 1960s when the wall went up and there again in the 1990s when it came tumbling down. The same was true of Poland. He reported from Gdansk at the naissance of Solidarity in 1980 and at the death of the country’s communist government in 1
989, and he led the network’s extensive coverage of ethnic cleansing and military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

  A high school dropout who loved to learn on the ground by following his nose, he was as restless romantically as he was intellectually. He said “I do” four times: to childhood sweetheart Valerie Godsoe; to Lebanese photographer Anouchka “Annie” Malouf ; to writer Kati Marton, the mother of his children, Elizabeth and Christopher; and finally to former ABC producer Kayce Freed.

  He loved the camera as much as it favoured him. In the early part of his career, his crisp good looks and forthright demeanour damaged his credibility as an anchor. Later, after time and wrinkles had weathered his beauty, critics quipped: “He’s now as good as he used to think he was.” Another said: “He’s 10 times better than people have a right to expect because he’s so good looking.”

  Being a Canadian had always set Jennings apart. He had an innate leeriness about the American confidence and enthusiasm for everything American, which made some people think he was standoffish and superior. Back in the mid-1960s, in his early days at ABC, his accent — the way he said “leftenant” instead of “lootenant” and “aboot” instead of “abowt” — irked some viewers. When he mispronounced Appomattox, an iconic Civil War battle, and misidentified “The Marines’ Hymn” as “Anchors Away” at Lyndon Johnson’s presidential inauguration, critics sniffed blood.