In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Margaret Laurence, who had joined the M&S board only because Jack begged her to do so, was horrified that M&S was publishing Persia, Bridge of Turquoise, but at least that was a celebration of Persia past. Iran, Elements of Destiny, a “paean of praise to the vision of the Pahlavi dynasty,” was inexcusable. She spoke passionately about the Shah’s brutal tyrannical regime and the violence of SAVAK, his internal security force. The experience of opposing Jack in public pained her so much, she was shaking all over, but she persisted. M&S directors’ meetings were now mired not only in sorrow about our financial situation but also in outrage over Jack’s desire to make up our shortfall from his deal with the Pahlavis. In the end, Margaret resigned from the board, as did Farley Mowat. Much as we needed the money, I found it hard to be supportive of a project that celebrated a regime as repressive as the Shah’s. But since he was determined to proceed, I urged Jack to collect the money for the books in stages, starting with when he signed the agreement and ending when the books went on press.

  Sadly, neither Persia nor Iran made money for M&S: Persia because of Roloff’s ongoing demands to improve the quality of the paper, the binding, the colour separations (it was the most beautiful book M&S ever produced); Iran because the Shah’s rule was overthrown in 1978. He and his family were forced to flee by the time the Arabic edition had been air-freighted to Tehran. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was not interested in meeting the exiled Shah’s obligations. M&S lost about $350,000. It was a huge amount at a time when the firm was already in the red. Jack was so distraught that though I had been very tempted, I managed not to say anything like “I told you so.”

  * * *

  ROLOFF’S NEXT ADVENTURE was to be Egypt. He had outlined a grand book on the beauties of the country—its past, present, and future, the pyramids, the dam—and President Sadat was sufficiently interested in funding the project that he invited both Roloff and Jack to lunch in his presidential retreat. Though I had never wished the president of Egypt any harm, I was relieved when his assassination prevented yet one more of Roloff’s wildly unrealistic projects from costing M&S another fortune.

  Roloff died in the marble bathtub of his Trastevere apartment in 1984. Though the Rome police declared it was death by natural causes, Jack remained unconvinced. There had been too many people partying and staying over in Roloff’s apartment, too many of them had keys to get in unobserved, and Roloff, by then, had begun to seem more like a target for ruthless opportunists and less like the great artist he had aspired to be.

  I recently looked at Roloff’s People: Legends in Life and Art, published posthumously by his friend Mitchell Crites. It features such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, Ezra Pound, Leontyne Price, Rudolf Nureyev, and Margot Fonteyn. There are a couple of superb portraits of Peggy Guggenheim, taken at her elegant palazzo in Venice where Roloff had been a frequent guest. The book, I believe, refutes critics’ charge that Roloff didn’t know how to photograph people. These surprisingly intimate images, including the one of Noel Coward on the cover, display his unerring eye as well as his affection for his subjects.

  * * *

  I. He is now at George Washington University.

  II. Julian had done much the same during our 1973 visit to Hungary when he shouted at presumed microphones in our room in Budapest’s Gellert Hotel. It was Julian’s first trip behind the Iron Curtain.

  The Establishment Man

  I LIKED HIM from the moment we met in early 1976. Amazingly, that was right after I read his 1,530-page manuscript (not including the notes) on Maurice Duplessis, once premier of and certainly the most powerful man in Quebec. Barely thirty-two years old, Conrad Black already had the deportment of a corporate man. He was immaculately dressed in a pinstriped suit that looked as though it had been especially crafted for his six-foot, broad-shouldered frame. His dark curly hair had a perfect part.

  I was impressed by his dexterity in turning his master’s thesis into a book that was, for all its unwieldy length, readable and interesting. He spoke both English and French with a nineteenth-century bravado that would have been admirable in an ambassador. Barely out of university, he had bought The Sherbrooke Record with a couple of partners and said he planned to expand his media holdings.

  Our introductory lunch with Jack to discuss Duplessis was a disaster. Jack drank a lot, Conrad did not. Jack talked of economic nationalism and the Canadian business elite’s greed and self-interest, its easy sale of the country’s assets to the Americans. Conrad, self-confident and loquacious, was already a member of that elite. When he suggested that the solution to Canada’s Quebec separatism problem might be for the nation to merge with the United States, Jack was outraged. Conrad tried to explain that he had not been seriously promoting such a merger; he was merely pointing out that the Americans would take a much tougher stance with a breakaway state than English Canada had taken with a province that wanted to leave Confederation. We, the rest of Canada, must stop trying to appease Quebec by acceding to its unreasonable demands. Still, Jack departed in high dudgeon, leaving Conrad and me to finish the wine and discuss publishing his book. The main topic then and later in my office was how to diminish the sheer size of the manuscript. He agreed to some proposed cuts but resisted others, and the manuscript was still way too long when it went to production.

  During that year, I got to know Conrad better. I was impressed with his feats of memory. He could describe historic battles in detail, knew the name of every ship in the Spanish Armada, and talked about Bismarck, Disraeli, and Cromwell as if he had recently dined with them. His portrayal of US presidents and Canadian prime ministers was memorable and often acerbic. As Peter Newman said, “He could recite anything he had ever read and mimic almost anyone he had ever heard.”

  * * *

  JULIAN AND I hosted a modest book launch at our home and invited Isabel and John Bassett, formerly part owner of The Toronto Telegram, and journalist Peter Worthington with his wife Yvonne Crittenden, book reviewer for the Toronto Sun. John at that time owned Baton Broadcasting and was part owner of CFTO-TV, later CTV. We were frequent guests at their Rosedale home.I

  A couple of years earlier, John had closed his newspaper and sold its subscription lists to the triumvirate that started the brand new Toronto Sun. Peter Worthington, its editor, was one of the owners. The book launch turned into a long evening with memorable speeches, toasts to Conrad’s success, and jokes about the Tories’ chances at the next election.

  Most of the reviews of Duplessis were excellent—in part, I think, because none of the reviewers knew as much about the subject as Conrad did and most of them were astonished by his erudition. Sales in English Canada surpassed our expectations, and it was a bestseller in Quebec. That Conrad could engage in discussions and debates in French was a happy surprise for the Quebec media. The 1978 CBC/RadioCanada television miniseries based on Conrad’s book drew sizable audiences.

  Eventually Jack and Conrad settled their differences, but Jack remained suspicious of Conrad’s views about Canada.

  * * *

  WHEN PETER NEWMAN decided to write a whole book about him, Conrad was only thirty-seven. I confess that I tried to dissuade Peter from writing it. It was too soon, I argued. Conrad had a long way to go before he reached his full potential both in business and in life. Peter countered that Conrad was the quintessential establishment figure and would form a perfect part of his Canadian Establishment series.

  We were both right. Conrad did go on to lead a storied life well beyond the 1982 publication of The Establishment Man but the book was, as Peter predicted, a bestseller. Conrad was already famous for having completed his takeover of one of Canada’s most significant financial empires, the Argus Corporation, thus increasing his fortune twenty-fold. Argus had been founded in 1945 by E. P. Taylor, with minority partners Bud McDougald, Wallace McCutcheon,II and Eric Phillips—all portrayed in The Canadian Establishment. Its assets included Dominion Stores, Hollinger Mines, Domtar, Standard Broadcasting, and Massey Ferguso
n. A photograph of its pillared and porticoed headquarters at 10 Toronto Street was featured on the cover of Peter’s The Canadian Establishment.

  The Establishment Man was launched on a passenger ferry moored in Toronto’s harbour. There were several speeches and free booze for the media. Everyone except Conrad wore casual clothes, and a couple of the over-refreshed media members jumped or fell overboard. It was one of the last big-budget M&S launch parties I attended. The interest-free loan of $961,000 had been used up long ago, and additional loans had now run the company’s debt to the province to $2.9 million. Jack’s many efforts to find outside investors had failed, the Iran adventure ate up what little was left in M&S’s coffers, and Jack’s deep unhappiness cast a shadow over everything he said.

  By then, of course, I had left the company.

  * * *

  I. Isabel, Yvonne, and I were all second wives. Divorce was still anathema among the Rosedale set but not at the Bassetts’ table. Isabel’s The Parlour Rebellion was published by M&S.

  II. Wallace McCutcheon had been Julian’s father-in-law while Julian was married to his first wife, Susan. Julian had worked on Wallace’s election campaign. Susan and I became friends after we met and I was delighted to be able to share her and Julian’s children with her. They grew up to be two remarkable women.

  The Uneasy Balancing Act

  WE STARTED 1977 with long meetings in New York and Toronto, hammering out the details of a new venture Jack imagined would add considerable cash to the M&S coffers. We were discussing a joint venture with Bantam’s president Oscar Dystel and editorial director Marc Jaffe. It—the new venture—would be publishing inexpensive mass-market paperbacks written by Canadian authors. Jack was certain that the key to profitability was having direct access to supermarket and convenience store racks, where casual browsers could pick up books. He had tried to market a cheap paperback line in the 1960s but found that those racks were controlled by mass-market wholesalers with big bucks and needed an endless supply of new “product.” His efforts were defeated not only by a requirement to pay for rack space and the need to constantly resupply books, but by a system where unsold books were destroyed, rather than returned for possible resale. The stores would simply tear the covers off the books, as proof they were unsold, and return them to the publishers for full credit. This worked relatively well for publishers who were printing millions of books at a fraction of the cost Jack incurred for much smaller print runs.I Big multinational publishers such as Bantam were the most successful. M&S, on its own, hadn’t a chance. Hence, the creation of our joint venture, McClelland-Bantam Limited, publisher of Seal books. Both Jack and I were to be on the board with Dystel and Jaffe.

  Jack was sure that with Dystel and Jaffe he had found the right formula. Not only did they know how to sell a lot of cheap books, they were likeable, entertaining guys with flair: Dystel, the scrappy businessman, and Jaffe, the patrician expert in commercial fiction.

  Dystel had grown up the hard way in the Bronx, pioneering publishing paperbacks in uniform inexpensive formats, beating the competition to such multimillion-copy bonanzas as Peter Benchley’s Jaws, Judith Krantz’s Scruples, and James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small—a book that spawned an entire series of Herriot titles. Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls alone had sold more than 8 million copies. Marc Jaffe, the Harvard grad, deserved credit for millions more, including books by J. D. Salinger, William Styron, William Peter Blatty, and Louis L’Amour. In 1971 alone, Bantam sold 10 million copies of Blatty’s The Exorcist.

  “We’ll have the best of two worlds,” Jack announced. And for a while, it looked as though we did. Dystel and Jaffe supported Jack’s newest make-waves-for-young-writers venture, the Seal First Novel Contest, agreed to publish the winners and add more Canadian books to their US lists, hosted us to dinners in fine restaurants, and expressed nothing but joy at the prospect of increased Canadian sales. I was appointed to the McClelland-Bantam Board and ran our end of Seal as a sideline to my M&S job. For the first couple of years, Seals were M&S bestsellers: Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Brian Moore’s The Doctor’s Wife, some Farley Mowat titles, and of course Charles Templeton’s The Kidnapping of the President and Act of God.

  * * *

  MY DAUGHTER JULIA was born in July 1977. In a moment of unbridled generosity and, possibly, with an eye to legislation regarding maternity or parental leave, Jack gave me five weeks off. And once again, a child of mine was celebrated in verse, this time by noted poet A. J. M. Smith:

  Dear Julia Porter, happy child,

  born of a lovely mother, worthy sire,

  I wish you all things joyful, all high-styled.

  I build a sacrificial fire

  of fragrant cedar to make my wishes

  magic spells. May all your hours

  and days be gentle and delicious—

  with love and laughter filled, sunshine and flowers.

  But I knew there wouldn’t be many “joyful” days for me at M&S.

  Most of the staff were women, which was the case for all publishing houses, but few were in management positions. Having babies was frowned upon and asking for raises when a woman was at the age of having babies was detrimental to promotions. Women, of course, earned much less than men.II Jack maintained he had hired more women not because they were cheaper but because he had “discovered that women are generally more efficient.” I still have a copy of Jack’s hand-written memo to me explaining why my salary would stay at ten thousand a year, about thirty per cent lower than that of senior male employees. Even John Neale, who had started as sales manager after a couple of years as M&S sales rep in Ontario, was earning more. I was pissed off and let Jack know it, but I didn’t quit, at least not then.III I loved working at M&S. It seemed like the perfect job: being paid to read, to comment on interesting manuscripts, to spend time with extraordinary people. I wasn’t angry at Peter and John; they were part of a delightful, usually inseparable trio, including John’s black lab, and my low income was not their fault. It was Jack’s.

  By this time I was both running M&S’s publishing program of more than a hundred books a year and involved with Seal Books. There were many meetings in New York, book fairs in Frankfurt and London, the American Booksellers’ Association’s annual affairs in a variety of cities, sales conferences, and seemingly endless editorial and marketing meetings. In addition there were long discussions with Charles Templeton, Richard Rohmer, Matt Cohen, Margaret Laurence,IV Peter Newman, Farley Mowat, Marian Engel, Birney, Purdy, Layton, Pierre and Elsa, of course, and many other authors on our unwieldy M&S lists. The creation of the fifty-thousand-dollar Seal Books First Novel Award added an extra bit of excitement to our lives, but now the reading of the hundreds of manuscripts submitted for the prize deprived me of whatever sleep a new mother is able to snatch between late-night feedings. Seal’s partners in the award, Andre Deutsch in the UK and Bantam Books in the United States, had agreed to publish and promote the winners. Selecting the short list and arguing with Andre Deutsch and Marc Jaffe about the eventual winner took nerves of steel, which I lacked that year.

  I remember one long, tempestuous debate with Andre over the possibility that W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe might win the First Novel Award. Andre said trying to sell that book in the UK would be akin to our promoting a novel about an imaginary cricket team in North America.V It was an argument I couldn’t win.

  Jack’s assessment that being M&S’s editor-in-chief was more than a full-time job was correct. I had been working about ten to twelve hours a day, and now, with two children, I tried to get home early enough to read a few stories to Catherine, walk about with Julia till she nodded off, put them to bed, and then start reading manuscripts. I rarely slept more than four hours. My big white take-home bags expanded on Fridays for extra reading time on weekends.

  For several months I tried to convince myself that I could manage everything. Jack encouraged me to imagine it could be
done. He even offered to have Catherine do her drawings in his office while I ran meetings in the boardroom, and a couple of times he took Julia in her portable bassinet and stashed her under his windows while I ran off to do presentations to major accounts. Since Julia was still nursing, I used to pump milk in the women’s washroom. Once, when I was in Imperial Oil’s boardroom, trying to talk them into sponsoring a big new Canada book, I noticed that all the men had stopped looking at me and were staring fixedly at my end of the glossy table. I had misjudged the time and milk was pooling rapidly between my elbows.

  I didn’t finish my sales pitch, I just ran.

  I was a seventies feminist. I believed that women could do it all, but I was losing focus, wore the same clothes most days, seldom washed my hair, and began to lose my sense of humour. In a Saturday Night article Bob Fulford asserted that the major event of the 1970s was “the triumph of feminism.” At the beginning of that decade, I would have agreed with him. The sixties had included the sexual revolution, the birth control pill, and a general feeling that now everything would be possible for women. Yet at the end of the seventies, I was too exhausted to feel any sense of triumph. Our hiring a new charming German babysitter did little to assuage my constant anxiety.

  Once when Marian Engel was coming back from a TV interview, she told me that the other woman on the show had had her hair done, looked svelte in a tight black sweater, wore very high heels, and had perfect makeup that didn’t run under the strobe lights. Marian was hot and sweaty after a sleepless night with her twins, her hair was damp, she wore something beige she had pulled on in a hurry, and she had not noticed the baby vomit down both shoulders where she had burped the babies—two at once. In addition to taking care of the twins, she was busy advocating for the Public Lending Right for authors, was involved with the Writers’ Union, whose early meetings were often held at the Engels’ Brunswick Avenue home, was a member of a couple of book prize committees, and carried on lively correspondence with Hugh MacLennan, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, and several other writers. Her home was a cluttered confusion of books, dishes, letters, baby bottles, and notes spilling over the edges of tables and rearranging themselves on the carpet.