by Anna Porter
Jack Batten and Marjorie Harris turned out to be fearless boaters. Jack had been friends with Bob since his early days at Maclean’s. He was a jock with a passion for hockey, jazz, movies, and tennis, a former lawyer who had no desire to practice law, and a freelance writer who could make any subject interesting. He has now written about forty books, but back then he was merely at number five. Marjorie Harris had worked in art galleries and at the CBC, and freelanced for Chatelaine. She took (what I thought odd at the time) a strange interest in our Georgian Bay vegetation and rocks. As it turned out, she became a gardening maven with a huge following of would-be green-thumbers. The Georgian Bay rocks she collected along the shore were to be a feature of her much-photographed garden. But back then, she didn’t talk much about gardens. We sat on the dock dreaming up ideas for books that would sell, such as Historic Canada, Toronto: City of Neighbourhoods, and Farewell to the 70s, all of which appeared later.
Peter Worthington and Yvonne Crittenden visited less often, because their Jack Russell terriers had taken an instant dislike to Lilo. They felt the same way about our long-haired dachshunds who succeeded the ill-fated vizsla.
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson visited occasionally, paddling to the back of the island to see the osprey nest and the big rock where the snapping turtles sunned themselves.
We, in turn, often visited Charles and Madeleine Templeton in their imposing new house built over the ruins of an old railway hotel. Charles had designed it himself. It required brand new furniture to go with the grey stone and glass, and the stylish Madeleine had been happy to oblige. She had spent years in Paris, looked like an Ingres portrait, and spoke softly with a French accent. We happily took their discards.I
Charles’s stories about his life as an evangelist, a political candidate (never successful, though a couple of times he came close), a journalist, cartoonist, inventor, editor, playwright, and television and radio interviewer were fascinating. He was still very fond of Billy Graham, spiritual adviser to various US presidents and a bevy of congressmen, but they no longer talked about faith. He had gossipy stories from his time as a television producer and interviewer (of, among others, Evelyn Waugh and Rebecca West).
Since Charles co-hosted DialogueII with Pierre Berton on CFRB radio, the Bertons too were frequent visitors. Pierre and Charles could debate any topic vociferously, even when they agreed with each other. Afterwards, we would take the Bertons around the lake in our boat to cool off, while Charles got back to his writing.
* * *
IT TOOK LESS than a couple of months for me to recognize that I was completely bored. It took even less time for Julian to come to the same conclusion because I had begun to take an unhealthy interest in the law. He had been hired by James Leslie Bennett, former RCMP officer and one-time head of Canadian counterintelligence, now living in Australia, to sue Ian Adams and Gage Publishing over Adams’s novel S: Portrait of a Spy: RCMP Intelligence—The Inside Story. Peter Worthington had brought the book to Julian’s attention, pointing to similarities not only between S and Bennett, but also between himself and a character called Hazlitt. Hazlitt is the editor of a right-of-centre tabloid “claiming to represent the working people’s interests,” as was Peter. S, a KGB mole used as a double agent by the CIA, is investigated by his own team and cleared only because he has some damaging evidence against members of the Canadian intelligence service. Julian intended to fiercely defend James Bennett’s reputation. I, on the other hand, supported Ian Adams, the writer. In fact, he was a writer we had published at M&S. Worse, other writers, including many of my friends, aligned themselves with his defence when the judge demanded that he reveal his sources. There was even a fundraising drive to pay Adams’s legal fees.
In the end, Bennett settled out of court.
It was one of the few times that Julian and I were firmly embedded on opposing sides of an issue. Very likely the true test of a good relationship is when two people passionately disagree on something but continue to dine, laugh, and live together.
In early 1978 Peter Worthington hired Julian to defend him against the charge of violating the Official Secrets Act. RCMP officers descended on the Toronto Sun’s offices and demanded to see the “leaked” documents. The case was seen as a test of the freedom of the press in Canada, and it was good to see my various friends of all political persuasions cheer Julian when the case against his client was dismissed.
* * *
WHILE I PONDERED Jack’s proposal that I run Seal, I decided to consider other options.
Before I was married, I was often invited over by David (the English expat) and his friend, Alan Edmonds. Edmonds, another English expat, ex-Fleet Street journalist, would later became a most unlikely, dishevelled television success with his quirky interviews for CTV’s Live It Up. Alan invited me to do a screen test interview for Live It Up. I had to go into a variety store on King Street East and pretend to purchase some item I neither needed nor wanted and engage in a bit of banter with the merchant. There were at least four takes, the store owner becoming less and less co-operative each time and finally asking whether he could go home now. I had no difficulty turning down Alan’s job offer.
I thought about calling Moses Znaimer, now head honcho at Citytv, but he was in the middle of negotiations with new partners—first Multiple Media, then CHUM—and gossip had him grumpy and combative.
Then I thought I would apply for work at CBC Radio, because I loved the CBC. I had been a keen listener to This Country in the Morning under its various hosts, but particularly Peter Gzowski, because he loved to interview authors and he offered them lots of airtime to promote themselves. Unlike most radio and TV hosts, Peter actually read the books, listened to the authors, and tailored his follow-up questions to what they said. Listeners were keen to share their feelings and ideas with Peter. It was as if he were a personal friend, a confidant, someone who would love to come by for a piece of cake and a story or two on a rainy afternoon. I used to drive M&S authors to his interviews and keep them coffeed and entertained so they would not be too nervous. But when I talked with Peter, I didn’t know how to introduce the subject of a job.
At one of the Frums’ frequent parties that often spilled onto their patio and into the garden, I approached Barbara Frum’s producer, Mark Starowicz, and the head of CBC radio and television’s current affairs programming, Peter Herrndorf. Neither of them seemed to know what to do with my question about a job at the CBC, but both of them were eager to talk about M&S authors and about M&S’s relatively new venture with Bantam Books. The CBC was soon to air a television series based on Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment books, and they were both interested in Peter’s progress with the Bronfman Dynasty.
Then they wanted to discuss the Seal First Novel Award and how the next prize would be presented. Was there a way of topping the Aritha van Herk performance?
Julian had been at university with Adrienne Clarkson, who was then co-hosting The Fifth Estate, but I didn’t know her well enough to ask whether she thought I could be a plausible candidate for a CBC job. I got to know her better later when she was Ontario’s Agent General in France. We rented a house near their summer place in Provence and stayed with her and John Ralston Saul in Paris. But by then I was back in the book business.
* * *
I REMEMBER TAKING a long walk through the Mount Pleasant Cemetery with Julia in her stroller, Catherine running ahead and back, making whooshing noises and lifting her arms like the wings of an airplane. It was a few months before Christmas of 1978 and Catherine was very excited about the potential for “amazing” gifts.
I thought about how much I missed the excitement of new manuscripts, the hours I spent with writers discussing their work, the delight of holding a printed and bound book when it arrived. I even loved the smell of freshly printed pages. I still do. Who was I kidding? As Jack had foretold, I was hooked on books.
In January 1979, I accepted the appointment to become Seal’s president and publisher. Accord
ing to Jack, it was to be a two-days-a-week kind of job, leaving me plenty of time for children. Seal’s offices were in a dull 1950s building about five minutes’ walk from our home and practically adjacent to my daughters’ school.
Soon after I moved into my new office, Bill Deverell won the second Seal Award, for Needles. Jack and Peter Taylor decided it would be fun to deliver the fifty thousand dollars in cash, and I had the honour of presenting him with his unwieldy reward. Bill, a BC criminal lawyer with impeccable courtroom credentials, was equal to the task of hamming it up for the audience. There is a photo of Jack, Bantam’s Alun Davies, Bill, and myself, ill at ease but grinning in very dated outfits. Mine is a horrid long poufy skirt and matching top.
Needles was a natural for the paperback market we had hoped to conquer, a fast-paced page-turner, perfect for the commercial fiction market. But even Bill was somewhat stunned when Taylor’s team delivered hypodermic needles with each press kit. The book was set in the international drug trade, starring a sympathetic protagonist with a heroin habit. Bill, who had been counsel in a thousand trials, including about thirty for murder, was magnificent on tour. This was, we thought, a great way to attract more commercial fiction writers with flair.
* * *
I. We still have the worn brown-and-beige couch Charles donated to our unfinished living room and the trundle beds we used when we were his guests.
II. They did more than four thousand Dialogue sessions before the program was cut in 1983.
Sealing
MY DAY-TO-DAY CONTACT at Bantam was the dapper Welshman Alun Davies, their designated hitter for all international markets. Alun was charming, argumentative, always well-informed about the world’s book markets and about who was doing what to whom and why, including the sexual proclivities of employees from London to Sydney, from New York to New Delhi. He had once worked in Canada for Longman’s and thought he had a good grounding in what Canadians wanted to read. As a Welshman living all over the world, he thought nationalism, particularly that of the cultural kind, was a passing fad.
When I agreed to take over Seal in 1979, Alun was in Australia. Later, when I met Bantamites from Australia and the UK, I discovered that their Alun problems were pretty much the same as mine: he tended to know more about what they were doing than they did. In fact, I liked him rather more than many of them seemed to. Alun, I thought, had shown remarkable resilience when dealing with the Lucy Maud Montgomery estate’s implacable lawyer, Marian Hebb, and with Kevin Sullivan Productions’s Anne of Green Gables series.I But he had a penchant for countermanding my decisions, sometimes as if by accident, other times after long perorations on how certain kinds of books (Matt Cohen’s, for example) never worked in mass market paperback. To illustrate a point, he would cite examples from other countries. I discovered from colleagues in those other countries that he did pretty much the same there, using Canadian examples. They sometimes called him “the wily Welshman.”
In an effort to find those elusive commercial fiction writers (we were thinking of Blatty, Benchley, and L’Amour), we thought Richard Rohmer was an ideal candidate. His first novel, Ultimatum, had been at the top of the bestseller lists. Plus, he was a war hero. He had flown 135 missions and taken part in D-Day. As a young fighter pilot on a field mission during the invasion, he had reported seeing Field Marshall Rommel in a German staff car. Headquarters sent a Spitfire to strafe the car, thus wounding one of the Germans’ top commandants. He was now a lawyer, an honorary lieutenant general of the Canadian Armed Forces, chief of the Canadian Reserves, honorary adviser to the Canadian Defence Staff, an advocate of culture, former chair of the Royal Commission on Book Publishing, a Conservative political insider, and a recipient of numerous honours and awards, including Commander of the Order of Military Merit. He was tailor-made for the M&S-Bantam promotion machine.
However, his potboilers, Exxonoration, Exodus/UK, Separation, and so on, were short-lived, despite Bantam’s marketing moxie. Richard didn’t care about style. He wanted to get his stories told and his ideas out. The writing (hasty, since he dictated the novels) and the characters (wooden) were of little interest to him.II
I remember Richard coming to my office one day to tell me that he had analyzed bestsellers and now realized that his books needed to have more sex scenes. Since he had no idea how to write them, he wanted me to refer him to some well-written sex in other books that he could use as a guide. Seriously.
We experimented with thrillers like Ian Slater’s Firespill and Leo Heaps’s The Quebec Plot and several exceptional mysteries by L. R. Wright,III who had won the Edgar Award for The Suspect.
I also tried historical fiction by commissioning a series called The Canadians that promised a “gripping saga of the conquest of a continent,” as well as the ensuing “consuming loves and raging hates, fierce loyalties and unyielding vows of revenge.” The books sported what we thought were stirring titles, like Bloodbrothers, Patriots, and Birthright. Because they sold well, author Robert Wall, who had five children and a not-too-well-paid teaching job at a university, kept them coming at the rate of about one a year.
I had failed to persuade George Jonas and Barbara Amiel to come to Seal with their By Persons Unknown, about a famous murder case in Ontario, but George did give me the chance to publish his novel Final Decree, a thoughtful exploration of a simple immigrant’s deterioration in the “new world.” It was not, however, in any sense commercial.
Looking back, I suspect that neither Jack nor I had the right instincts for commercial fiction. With literary fiction, even if it sells fewer than five thousand copies (the number Jack thought we should be able to sell of Matt Cohen’s and Adele Wiseman’s novels), you have the satisfaction of a book of lasting value. With commercial fiction, more often than not, you have published something with only a few months of shelf life.
Since Jack and I wanted to increase the number of new Seal books, I had to reach outside the M&S lists.
* * *
I THOUGHT I would finally have a chance of attracting W. O. Mitchell. I already knew him from Banff, where he had been friendly, and I enjoyed our talks about his retinue of young Canadian writers. He was magnificent when he had an audience, a natural storyteller with a plethora of tales, some of which found their way into his books, while others did not. I was particularly fond of the one—true or not—about Joe Clark, long before his brief stint as prime minister of Canada, sitting in an outdoor crapper while W. O. and other pranksters tied the wooden shack to a pickup truck and towed it away, leaving the déshabillé Joe and the toilet behind.
W. O. would never publish with M&S while Farley Mowat was one of our stars because he and Farley had not been on speaking terms for decades. W. O. believed that he had helped the young Mowat get published both in Canada and the United States and that his good deed was rewarded by Farley’s “churlish” denial that such help had existed.IV In a Saturday Night article, Farley had accused Bill of rejecting his stories that would later become The Desperate People and advising him to write simple boy-meets-girl romances. In the 1981 NFB film In Search of Farley Mowat, Farley repeated the accusation. I don’t know what really happened but I suspect that, as with most things in life, there is more than one version of the truth.
I was then and still am an avid fan of the way W. O. talks his way into readers’ hearts with just a few words early in his stories and never lets go. Of all his books, my favourite is How I Spent My Summer Holidays, the compelling, terrifying tale of a young boy robbed of his childhood.
We bought paperback rights to five of his books—Jake and the Kid, Who Has Seen the Wind, The Kite, The Vanishing Point, and How I Spent My Summer Holidays—from his hardcover publishers, Macmillan. The advance of $125,000 seemed like a lot at the time, but it turned out to have been a good investment. Mitchell barely needed promotion. At sixty-seven, he was at the pinnacle of his career both as a writer and as a performer. He gave readings to packed houses across the country, his white hair flying, his voice rising and fal
ling as the story required, enjoying the applause, getting ready for the next tale.
Sometimes when he was in Toronto, he would drop by our home, pour himself a drink, and settle into a living room armchair, stretching out his long legs, leaning his head back, telling stories. My kids loved them, as did his wife, Merna, who had heard them all before but still enjoyed these occasions to listen again. His voice had such range, from a whisper to a high pitch to a gravelly rant, that I could hear it from outside even before opening our front door.
I experimented with non-fiction, to see if we could establish a non-fiction line without buying the rights from another publisher. Jimmy: An Autobiography was such an experiment. Convincing Bantam that Jim Pattison was a “big name” had not been easy, but I got lucky when Bob Hope called him “a sort of Lee Iacocca with frostbite.” They certainly knew Iacocca.
Most people west of the Rockies knew Jimmy by reputation. Thousands shopped in his Overwaitea stores, travelled on his ferries, listened to his radio stations; hundreds of thousands knew of his Ripley Entertainment and had heard of his modest early start as a used-car salesman. Jimmy, ghosted by journalist Paul Grescoe, was beautifully written and had a great golden cover with Jimmy grinning while he adjusts his bow tie.
It’s interesting to see how often interviewers asked him when, having achieved all that success, he was going to retire. He had not given the matter a single thought. Nor had he done so ten or so years later when I visited him in his Vancouver office. He was still a man in a hurry. His impressive collection of photographs covering one whole wall was still missing a few presidents, prime ministers, and corporate kings. To mark the occasion of showing me his city’s skyline, he played some tunes on his trumpet. He seemed ageless and tireless. You can watch a 2015 video of Jimmy playing “Happy Birthday to You” at the hundredth anniversary of his Overwaitea Food Group.
