by Anna Porter
I became a member of the WWF board and supported Monte’s vision for more than twenty years. In time, Key Porter would be known worldwide for its books about the environment.
The First Lady
WHEN WE FIRST met in 1980, Margaret Trudeau was stunningly beautiful, in her mid-twenties, too young to be the mother of three little children, and much too young to be the wife of Canada’s prime minister. Pierre Trudeau, despite all his dashing ways, was thirty years older and unable to share in her sense of fun, her lightness of being a former “flower child.” That thirty-year age difference was one of the factors in their publicly failing marriage, but only one. Her resistance to the coddled, formulaic existence expected of the wife of a prime minister, his highly intellectual approach to problem-solving, her desire to be free of constraints, her insensitivity to embarrassment, his natural superiority to those he regarded as intellectually less capable (most people) than he was, his frequent long absences, and his unrelenting work schedule all contributed to their breakup. Margaret’s first memoir, Beyond Reason (Grosset & Dunlap), did not help the situation. Her US promotion tour, with interviews on Phil Donahue and Merv Griffin’s talk show, her star treatment—appearing with actresses Liv Ullman and Hermione Gingold—and all the questions about her secret lover added to her notoriety.
But here she was in my office with chapters of a new book and there I was thinking it would be an easy sale. Even Alun Davies, who had been optimistic that I would settle for maybe one new book a month, had no doubt that Margaret Trudeau’s memoir would be a bestseller. She was front-page news wherever she went. Washington was scandalized when she wore a short dress to a White House state dinner; in Venezuela she sang an impromptu accolade to the country’s first lady; in Mexico she gave a passionate speech—uninvited—about women’s rights. People magazine ran a feature on her “Manhattan escapade,” which turned into a plea for freedom. She made the covers of Look, Time, People, and Maclean’s (“The Margaret Factor” and “Margaret and the Rolling Stones”).
She was angry at her situation and she felt let down; her sense of having been wronged was reason enough for a second book. Hadn’t she been a big part of Pierre’s first election campaign? She felt she had “humanized” him. She had made him seem less of the cool intellectual and more like the charming father of cute children, the romantic husband of a beautiful wife. But by the 1979 election, she was no longer at his side.
The manuscript itself was not nearly as salacious as the public expected, but it did mention Margaret cavorting with the Rolling Stones, her appearances at New York’s Studio 54, her wild “freedom trips” to jet-set parties in New York and London, and her usually swift returns because she desperately missed her children.
Consequences also revealed her affairs and her addiction to drugs and to the limelight. She was drawn to Hollywood, thrilled with meeting the stars, with giving in to Jack Nicholson’s irresistible “sneering charm.” She dined with Ryan O’Neal in a Polynesian restaurant in Beverly Hills and thought she had fallen in love, only to become disillusioned with O’Neal’s inexhaustible self-regard. She accepted an invitation from a Peruvian race-car driver to visit South America while Pierre was in the thick of an election campaign. Her every move brought out the paparazzi. She had come to share the view, widely held by the media, that her presence would only detract from Pierre’s chances of reelection.
In a moving passage, Margaret wrote about wanting to destroy Joyce Wieland’s colourful quilt Reason Over Passion, hanging on a wall in the prime minister’s residence. Its message was a reflection of one of Pierre’s sayings, one that had become absolutely hateful to her.
Later we talked about the coincidence of our both having Christmas babies—Justin and Sacha Trudeau were both born on December 25, and both my stepdaughter Jessica and Catherine were born on December 26I—and about her ambition to become a photographer. I thought she was talented, troubled, insecure, and undisciplined, too anxious to stay still, always wanting to be on the move. I liked her courage and her honesty, her refusal to take either herself or her position as wife of the prime minister seriously. Sometimes she left one of her little boys at our house for a few hours while she visited friends in Toronto. He was a charming child with a minor problem around toilet training but he was not a bawler and we got along fine.
After Joe Clark’s short-lived occupation of 24 Sussex Drive as prime minister, Pierre handily won the 1980 election and Margaret returned to Ottawa. She took pains to acknowledge Pierre’s affectionate bond with their three boys, their shared values of honesty and loyalty, and the way all three boys adapted to the separation.
At the end of Consequences, Margaret also became more thoughtful. She wrote of her regrets for having “robbed Pierre of his dignity at various stages of our life together,” and she acknowledged her own failings, her need for an audience, her romantic delusions, and her “outbursts of despair.” She relished the time she spent with the children, then nine, seven, and five, the “warm cocoon of happiness” she helped build for them.
I had no idea then that she would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but in hindsight, all the symptoms were there, I just hadn’t recognized them. Once when I visited her in the Ottawa house she shared with her second husband, Fried Kemper, the other Margaret greeted me at the door. She was depressed, almost immobilized, seemingly trapped in a vortex of what she called her “tunnel of darkness.” It was not until 1998, when her son Michel was killed in an avalanche in BC, that Margaret was finally diagnosed and could get the help she needed. In her third memoir, Changing My Mind, she wrote about facing her demons. It had been, she said when we met in Saanich, BC, during the summer of 2010, an excruciatingly painful book to write but one that had helped her and was going to help others with mental illness.
If the tearfully applauding audience at the Sunshine Coast Festival was any indication, her message has been welcomed, as has her presence at the side of her eldest son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
* * *
I. We usually celebrate their birthdays together and they both hate having birthdays so close to Christmas.
Michael’s World
EARLY IN 1980 my mother lost her job when the firm where she had worked as a draftsman was sold to a larger firm and the company sought what they called economies of scale. After some weeks of contemplating her future, she decided to take a few years off and volunteered to help look after Catherine and Julia. We agreed that this would give us a chance to travel without anxiety about a babysitter. By and large, we had been lucky with babysitters, but not always, and I was plagued with guilt every time I left on another business trip.
Julian and I signed up for a Butterfield & Robinson cruise up (not down) the Nile with a group of friends, including George and Martha Butterfield, pioneers of luxury travel, Peter Worthington, his wife Yvonne, Bill Graham,I and his wife Cathy. We could afford to join them because Julian had had a good year in law, including a famous obscenity case about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and we could leave the kids in my mother’s care.
It was a slow, peaceable journey that took us back some three thousand years to a time when the pharaohs ruled the known world and had the power to command armies of slaves to build monumental structures to remind them of death. There is nothing quite like walking through the ruins of an ancient civilization, in some ways not unlike our own, to put your life into perspective. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“king of kings / look upon my works ye mighty and despair”) had helped me when I was struggling with English during my last year of university in Christchurch (earning a meagre living in a stamps shop, attending school at night). I was then still very much a Hungarian refugee, dropped into a foreign land, trying to figure out how to exist. What saved me was reading poems and stories that offered a more universal experience. Now, on this floating hotel, out of my ordinary existence, I was drawn back into the appeal of stories, some of which I had read before, some of which were new, and many not yet written. I knew I want
ed to be back in publishing, not the limited Seal kind I had just signed up for, but publishing the way Jack had first taught me—the only way I knew—where you publish authors, not just books, and certainly not “units,” as the Bantam boys used to refer to books at sales conferences.
When we returned to Canada, I decided to talk to Michael de Pencier (Julian had known him since the University of Toronto, and Michael and his wife, Honor, were the only friends from Julian’s former marriage who attended our wedding) about publishing books, and Michael, a magazine publisher, seemed mildly interested. He confessed that he had once asked Jack how long it would take him to learn the business and Jack had said about ten or fifteen years. Michael assumed that he was joking!
Michael was old Ontario, a philosophy grad, entrepreneur, always on the lookout for new ideas that either could be fun to develop or could make a lot of money, or both. He was slim and sporty (an effortlessly good tennis player, a nimble hockey player, and a competitive golfer), with longish hair, and judging by his choice of clothes, proudly colourblind. Honor used to set out his socks in the evening so he would not leave home wearing different colours.
He had bought Toronto Life, then a dull, money-losing magazine, for a dollar and the assumption of its debts. His journalist-broadcaster friend Peter Gzowski anted up the last five thousand dollars and recommended John Macfarlane,II fresh from Maclean’s and not yet thirty years old, as editor. Both Peter and John admired Milton Glazer and Clay Felker’s brash, stylish New York Magazine, and Macfarlane proceeded to remake Toronto Life into the kind of lively city magazine that Glazer and Felker would have run in Toronto.
Michael added Key to Toronto and a few others: Keys, Quill and Quire, OWL and Chickadee, Fashion Magazine, and Canadian Art (with Maclean Hunter as fifty per cent partner). He would buy a piece of Canadian Business and later Canadian Geographic (in partnership with the Royal Canadian Geographic Society), Wedding Bells, and a bunch of other magazines I have quite forgotten. By the 1980s the company was the largest private magazine publisher in Canada.
Michael’s partner in various ventures, including Key and a small book publishing company, Greey de Pencier Books, was Phil Greey, who was also old Ontario, but with real estate holdings including the downtown buildings now inhabited by their various enterprises. Phil and Michael had initially set up in a tiny rented office on University Avenue, buying, fixing, and selling trade magazines, such as a monthly dog lovers’ magazine, a curling magazine, and The Apartment Owner. Now, they were running a highly successful enterprise.
Phil took little interest in the day-to-day. He was busy acquiring and refurbishing old buildings on Front Street, The Esplanade, and Church Street. He was an unusual landlord, easy about collecting rent and always ready for a friendly chat. What he may have lacked in attention to detail, such as cleanliness of his rental spaces, he made up for in good humour and a casual attitude to landlording. His tenants trusted him and would not have left even if something cheaper were offered.
Bantam’s office on St. Clair Avenue was arid and modern, with no sense of excitement about books, just a few guys running the Canadian operation, often unexpected visits from Alun Davies, and salesmen dropping in to pick up samples. The Seal office was one narrow, dreary white-painted room. Michael’s Front Street offices were full of creative people, lots of talk, books everywhere, magazine covers on the walls, big windows, sunshine, and bars and restaurants on the streets below. Visiting those offices was stimulating. There was always someone to talk to, and Michael usually had some project on the go he wanted to discuss.
Coincidentally, the Front Street entrance to Key was not far from the Royal York Hotel, where I had started my Canadian life. The lonely Newfoundland lad who had asked me for bus fare home was still in the small triangular park I would pass on my way to the subway. But now I felt completely at home. The St. Lawrence Market’s fresh food stalls were a block away, as was the bar Coasters,III where Marjorie Harris and I would sit at a small table near the windows, drink wine, and make lists of book ideas. If I was going to start building a publishing company, I was going to need some books.
The challenge was enormous. There would be no proven authors to submit new manuscripts, no backlist that could generate income while I figured out how to make a name for myself as a book publisher. On the other hand, there would be no warehouse full of unsold books. No crippling debt. It would be a fresh start, and Canada was bursting with talented writers looking for a new home.
That year Jack, always inventive and desperate for new ways to raise money, came up with an idea for getting rid of his cash-absorbing warehoused books: he was going to bypass the booksellers and have a giant warehouse sale. The booksellers hated it, but many of them understood.
I volunteered for the checkout counter.
* * *
I. Bill Graham had been a friend of Julian’s since law school. He would become Canada’s foreign minister in the Chrétien administration.
II. John Macfarlane and I had first met at M&S when he and legendary athlete Bruce Kidd were proposing to write a book about “the death of hockey.” It was published by New Press with, as John told me, “disastrous results,” since Canadian hockey proved, in 1972, to be far from dead.
III. Coasters was also Peter Taylor’s and John Neale’s usual watering hole. Peter, after leaving M&S, had gone to work for the Toronto Star Syndicate, and John had gone on to work for Doubleday. Neither of them ever lost his boyish charm.
Finding the Key
ON DAYS WHEN not much was happening at Seal, I began to hang around in Michael’s downtown offices, using a spare desk he had offered. My window faced the famed Gooderham (also known as the Flatiron) building, a historic site with an extraordinary mural by Derek Michael Besant on its wide west end. There is a stunning photograph of the mural in André Kertész’s bookI that we produced a couple of years later.
The offices were a warren of loosely connected spaces stretching a block south to The Esplanade and, as I traversed them I discovered a wealth of creative enterprises and extraordinary talent. Toronto Life was on the second floor, at the Front Street side. By the time I started to spend more time there than at Seal, John MacfarlaneII had been succeeded by Don Obe as editor. Don had been at Maclean’s, The Canadian (a weekend supplement launched by the Toronto Star and Southam Press in 1965), the Vancouver Sun, and The Toronto Telegram. He was a soft-spoken, small man with a rounded back and a large sense of humour, a character right out of Damon Runyon or W. P. Kinsella. He had the most unruly eyebrows of anyone I knew, and that includes Peter C. Newman. His moustache was an old-fashioned “tell” that often betrayed his response to a question before he spoke. He was catcher on the Toronto Life “boys’ baseball” team, and while he couldn’t throw worth a damn, he excelled at scowling into submission any opponent trying to steal a base. Of course he smoked too much and may have drunk too much, but he loved talking about writing and writers and knew how to make an interesting magazine. I envied the students he taught at Ryerson’s journalism classes.
Marq de Villiers, a former reporter, feature writer, and Moscow correspondent for The Toronto Telegram, was executive editor. He was an Afrikaner with a virulent dislike for the apartheid policies of his former country. We shared an interest in the Soviet Union and its Gulag prison system.
Years later I would persuade Marq to write a book for Key Porter called Into Africa: A Journey through the Ancient Empires. It required a lot of travel—on the cheap, because we didn’t have much money. Sheila Hirtle, his wife and a fellow journalist, did the research for nothing. It’s a brilliant book that sheds light on little-known pieces of history, the vanished empires of the African continent, their rulers who traded with the Egyptians and the Romans, and the few remnants of their times. Murray Frum, a collector of African art, thought it the best book on the subject.
About halfway between Front Street and The Esplanade, after several narrow corridors and stairs, was CB Media, publisher of Canadian Business magaz
ine. It was a joint venture of its editor Sandy Ross, Michael de Pencier, and politician-diplomat-historian Roy MacLaren.III Unlike other business magazines, Sandy’s Canadian Business was entertaining as well as informative. An experienced journalist—the Vancouver Sun, Maclean’s, CBC’s This Hour Has Seven Days, the Toronto Star—with a keen sense of humour and a Vancouverite’s healthy disrespect for old Bay Street money, Sandy loved entrepreneurs, enjoyed their gossip, and followed their successes and failures, some of which he recorded in his book The Risk Takers.IV
Sandy’s windowless office featured piles of manuscripts, most of them on the floor, and a vintage pinball machine. He was boyish, in a 1960s sort of way, with old-fashioned round glasses obscured by floppy dark hair, always a lit cigarette, ash on his jacket, and a perpetually messy desk. His conversation flitted from subject to subject, idea to idea, with only a tenuous connection among them. He was constantly in motion, fingers tapping, eyes shifting. He bit his nails, wrote lists of items to remember, and left trails of his discarded notes wherever he went. He played drums in a jazz band and was fired, reluctantly, by his bandmates for speeding ahead of the music. A number of talented young women were crazy in love with him. We may have become friends in part because I wasn’t.
About a year later, Peggy (Margaret) Wente, later columnist with The Globe and Mail, took over the editor’s chair. Hired by Sandy, she was the first woman editor of a business magazine in Canada, and maybe in the entire English-speaking world. Sandy moved to Calgary to launch Energy, an offshoot of Canadian Business, which seemed to have run into Albertan resistance. Perhaps the fact that it came out of Toronto was a problem, though Sandy didn’t think so. He was bristling with ideas and usually in exceptionally good cheer during our long lunches on The Esplanade. He barely touched his food as he gesticulated his way into new strategies that could, maybe, work. Sadly, in the end he had to recommend they suspend publication of Energy.
