In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  * * *

  I. Peter has recently retired from his successful wholesaling company, North 49 Books.

  II. Tom now runs First Book Canada.

  III. Jonathan moved on to M&S and a distinguished career as an author. Krys has spent some thirty years in senior positions in the book business, including CEO of eBound, Canada.

  IV. Gary wrote the bestsellers Take My Family . . . Please! and How Pierre and I Saved the Civilized World.

  1984

  WHILE THERE HAD been perilous times before, Jack McClelland nominated 1984 as the worst year in his life. M&S had, quite simply, run out of money. The bankers were concerned about the debt, printers had stopped delivering books unless they were paid in advance, and authors were agitating about royalties. On annual sales of about $10 million, the cumulative debt had risen to $5 million. Had the Ontario government not stepped in with a $2.5 million aid package, the firm would have gone into an irreversible tailspin. That Jack was able to secure an additional million from friends, many of whom were writers (including Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Farley Mowat, Peter Newman) and one property developer: Avie Bennett, should have given him reason to celebrate. It hadn’t. He had hated asking friends to invest in a firm with such a terrible financial record. He described his efforts to sell shares in the company as akin to selling shares in his own wife. Every day, he dosed himself with alcohol to endure those calls. By the end of the process, he had concluded he had become an alcoholic.

  While his hardy group of employees opened bottles of sparkling wine in the warehouse to celebrate the cash infusion, Jack brooded at home in Kleinberg. He claimed he had an abscessed tooth, but when he called me, all he would say was that he was utterly depressed. While grateful for the support, even the good wishes from competing publishers, he didn’t think he could carry on much longer. The industry he had loved was now a very different beast from the one he had entered in the 1950s. This is how Farley summed it up, at the time: “There is no long-term cure. Eventually, everything will be owned by the conglomerates and run by accountants.”

  Farley was right, but that time hadn’t arrived yet. In 1984 there were still a lot of independent bookstores and there were still three book-buying chains, and the 1970s enthusiasm for starting new publishing ventures hadn’t evaporated. Michael and I were confident enough in Key Porter’s ability to thrive that we purchased the list and inventory of Fleet Books, an imprint of Van Nostrand Reinhold, owned by the Thomson organization.I

  Fleet had a smallish Canadian non-fiction backlist we thought we needed for a bit of stability while we continued to publish books that made headlines. The acquisition meant that we could also hire Phyllis Bruce, who had overseen the Fleet list. She is a superb editor with the kind of equanimity that made our chaotic new venture seem manageable.

  With her boxes of books and contracts, Phyllis had initially moved to the Key office I once shared with Peter Gzowski. Her desk was hidden behind a bookcase so my visitors would be surprised when she emerged. It was a great arrangement because Phyllis could comment on book projects and conversations without having to leave her desk. Within the year, she would move to our new offices on The Esplanade with a view of the parking garage.

  Canoeist Bill Mason and photographer Freeman Patterson were the stars of the Fleet list. Bill’s Path of the Paddle was a classic, and he was already working on Song of the Paddle. He was a naturalist, conservationist, and filmmaker produced by the National Film Board: his Paddle to the Sea had been nominated Best Short Film in the 1968 Academy Awards. His Cry of the Wild, the most moving film about wolves I have ever seen, should be required viewing for all schoolchildren, in case they are learning to be hunters.

  Patterson was Canada’s most successful nature photographer, but he was more than that. For him photographing nature was a form of religious experience. He had a master’s degree in divinity; his thesis was “Still Photography as a Medium of Religious Expression.” He had once been dean of religious studies at Alberta College and was one of the National Film Board Still Photography Division’s busiest artists. The NFB’s Lorraine Monk featured his work in her big photography collections. His Photography and the Art of Seeing was already a classic teaching text for would-be photographers, and Freeman organized photography courses all over the world. His students were so inspired by him that many returned for more sessions. I was amazed to learn that even his Namaqualand: Garden of the Gods, the book that was in mid-production when we took over Fleet, would find a ready market. Two South African publishers vied with two British publishers for the right to sell it in South Africa.

  Freeman’s series Photography for the Joy of It, Photography and the Art of Seeing, Photography of Natural Things, Photographing the World Around You, and later, Photo Impressionism all found ready markets, as did his sumptuous coffee-table books, Portraits of Earth and The Last Wilderness (which he edited for us). He always strives to connect the natural world with what the human eye is capable of seeing. He maintains that photography is, essentially, a right-brain, instinctive activity, but only after you master the left-brain craft that allows you “to stop thinking” and just do.

  Every one of Freeman Patterson’s books was a Key Porter event. We would meet with him in our badly lit boardroom to discuss his vision for the book, his reasons for wanting to present it, and his hopes for its audience. Afterwards, we would go to one of the bars to celebrate.

  After Phyllis left to start her own imprint at HarperCollins, Clare McKeon took over the care and handling of Freeman’s work. Clare, who had worked with me at M&S (Linda McKnight believes she was my second hire), joined Key Porter in the early nineties as our managing editor. Both Freeman and Clare were Maritimers, she from Cape Breton, he from Shampers Bluff, New Brunswick. She admired both his talent and his ideas and was a fierce advocate of his books. She told our sales force that Freeman was a visionary genius.

  His photographs do, indeed, lead one to that conclusion. My only experience of working with Freeman had not seemed like work. I went to his home in Shampers Bluff to discuss new book ideas, but instead we ended up going for a long ride on his motorbike, both of us wearing his leather chaps, helmets, and visors, while he talked, as much to the wind as to me, about the inspiration for his work. When we returned to the house, he showed me several hundred photographs that recorded the life of his garden.

  Freeman’s next book was called The Garden.

  * * *

  I. The vendor, oddly enough, was the Ontario government, since it had precipitated the bankruptcy of Clarke Irwin by cancelling its guarantee of Clarke Irwin’s operating bank loan, right after the sale of Fleet/VNR to Bill Clarke.

  Journalists and Politicians

  NO PUBLISHER CAN be good at every genre and, as I had learned from the best of them, if you spread yourself too thin, you will accumulate too many unsold books. You have to mark your territory.

  After Allan Fotheringham launched us into politics, we knew that there was a large, curious audience for books about what went on in the backrooms of the nation. That ever-elusive book-buyer, “the general public,” was interested in issues and events that influenced the buyer’s daily life. And people loved gossip. Stevie Cameron’s Ottawa Inside Out was filled with it. Claire Hoy’s Friends in High Places: Politics and Patronage in the Mulroney Government catalogued the most egregious scandals of the Mulroney government: Tunagate, the sinking of a cabinet minister, Sinclair Stevens, Mila Mulroney’s renovation bills, and the cronies who had the inside track to the PMO. Brian Mulroney was enraged by Hoy’s allegations, though there was nothing he could hang a lawsuit on. Adding insult to injury, Julian, a fellow Tory, had made sure that we were legally safe.I In a later unguarded interview with Peter Newman, Mulroney alleged that he would have appointed Julian chief justice but for that “unfortunate” Hoy book. Luckily, Julian didn’t take that comment seriously.

  I remember some of the legal threats we received, and that few of them ever made their way to trial. Saskatchewan po
litician Colin ThatcherII served notice of legal action over a quickie mass-market book by journalist Heather Bird that suggested he had his wife killed (he was serving time for that offence in an Alberta jail). There were lawsuits by the two men hired by Mr. BuxbaumIII to dispose of his wife (they were in jail for that offence); by the Scientologists over The Bare-Faced Messiah; and by coroner Morton Shulman over allegations in Ken Lefolii’s Claims: Adventures in the Gold Trade. I had a tendency to panic when I saw writs arrive, whereas Julian thought writs were just a way of scaring publishers into cancelling books. They shouldn’t work, and with us, they rarely did. We lost in our bid for an early release of the book about the Buxbaum killers but won against the Scientologists. We backed down when threatened by Morton Shulman because Julian advised we would not have the necessary funds for a prolonged court case.

  I approached Vancouver Province columnist Allen Garr to write about British Columbia premier Bill Bennett, “the kind of leader,” Garr wrote, “who makes people feel comfortable about their prejudices.” Tough Guy got national coverage and even Jack Webster congratulated us on the success of the book. Bill Bennett was a great deal less enthusiastic, but at least he didn’t sue.

  * * *

  I HAD MET Premier Peter Lougheed through Julian’s Conservative Party connections and spent several days, both in Edmonton and in Toronto, trying to persuade him to write a memoir. He was a brilliant politician, a tactician with charm, persuasive, tough, perceptive, and almost always ready to listen to other opinions. He was an attractive combination of modesty and bravado. He had played football with the Edmonton Eskimos, had been to Harvard, and had the debating skills and sharp mind of a business school graduate. He enjoyed the limelight, though not the presence of his minders; he was embarrassed by the adulation of Albertans but missed it when it was no longer there.

  Progressive Conservatives had ousted Alberta’s Social Credit, after thirty-six years of uninterrupted rule, in 1971. He had become premier on a wave of Western self-confidence and desire for change. He set up the Alberta Heritage Trust Fund to try to “ensure the prosperity of the future generations of Albertans.”

  Contrary to Toronto’s suspicions, Peter was not a Western separatist, but he fought for Alberta’s place at the negotiating table where energy was discussed. “The blue-eyed sheik of Alberta,” as he was called by Southam Press’s Charlie Lynch, did not invent the slogan “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” though I suspect he was amused by seeing it on Albertan bumper stickers. He promoted provincial powers without wishing to destroy the federal system. In that, he was not much different from other premiers I have known. He viewed his tactics as fair in light of the federal grab for Alberta’s resources.

  When Robert Stanfield gave up on the leadership of the national Progressive Conservatives, Peter could have seized the opportunity. Despite his lack of French, newspaper surveys declared him to be the clear favourite. After a lot of thinking and discussion with various advisers, including Dalton Camp and Julian, he decided he could not win against Pierre Trudeau. He was probably right about that.

  The Lougheed Legacy had started life as Peter Lougheed’s memoir, ghosted by David Wood, but Peter decided that the person who wrote the book should take all the credit. David Wood had earned his stripes not only in media and public relations but also as the older man who had befriended Peter when he was just a young lawyer. Peter had trusted David with his secrets but, in the end, despite its access to the backrooms, the book lacked emotional insights that no amount of cajoling could elicit from David.

  When I was working on the manuscript, Peter drove me to the airport a couple of times. I think walking on the red carpet to a movie premiere with the star would have been rather like my experience walking with the premier of Alberta at the Edmonton airport. People shouted, cheered, called his name, and Peter waved and shouted back, as if greeting old friends. Years later, when he was no longer premier, we walked along a Calgary street and I looked at passersby, but now there were few cheers. Though Peter continued to serve on many corporate boards after he left politics, he was no longer the emblem of Alberta’s ambitions.

  * * *

  I. Julian did a great deal to keep us safe and relatively calm during both the M&S and the Key Porter years.

  II. Not Above the Law, by Heather Bird.

  III. Conspiracy to Murder: The Trial of Helmuth Buxbaum, also by Heather Bird.

  Looking for Trouble

  BIG JOHN, AS most people called John Bassett, former newspaper publisher, was a Hearstian figure, loose-limbed, wide-shouldered, handsome with a toothy smile and a large handshake. He had been a tennis champion, but when his knees started to give him trouble, he hired tennis pros to partner with him for doubles games that Julian and I had no hope of winning. Nor did Peter Worthington and Yvonne Crittenden, though we all enjoyed losing on the courts at the Bassetts’ impressive Caledon home.

  Some years we would dine in the great hall while a chamber orchestra played at the top of the grand staircase. Isabel was an attentive and welcoming hostess; John was ebullient and edgy, wanting to debate and argue about obscure British history, long-forgotten wars, and the politics of the day. John had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Progressive Conservatives in two elections, once in Quebec and once in Ontario. Julian had worked in both federal and provincial elections, and Ontario premier Bill Davis had been trying to persuade him to run for Parliament.

  Peter was thinking about announcing his candidacy for the nomination of the Progressive Conservative Party in a Toronto by-election. He was outspoken, opinionated, charming, and looked remarkably like Harrison Ford in the later Star Wars movies. The roles he had played were as swashbuckling as Ford’s, except that Peter’s were real and genuinely life-threatening. His father, Major-General Worthington, “Worthy” or “Fighting Frank” to all who knew him, had fought in the First World War. Peter had been an air gunner in the Second World War and had fought with the Princess Patricias in the Korean War. As a correspondent for The Toronto Telegram, he’d reported on wars, coups, and revolutions in the Congo, Iraq, Algeria, Angola, Lebanon, New Guinea, Biafra, Israel-Egypt, and Vietnam.

  Peter had a gift for being on the cusp of history. He had interviewed Iraq’s Sandhurst-trained Brigadier Abdel Karim Kassem, and he was there when King Faisal’s uncle, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah, refused to surrender and his whole family, including the children, was massacred. He had met one of the world’s “most durable monarchs,” King Hussein of Jordan, over Coca-Cola and coffee. Alone in Gamal Abdul Nasser’s study, he interviewed Egypt’s strongman for about three hours. Nasser joked about cartoons of himself in the British papers. When Peter mentioned Israeli fears about being driven into the sea, Nasser just laughed. “That’s just Arab rhetoric,” he told Peter.

  He interviewed the Dalai Lama, India’s Nehru, both Mobutu and Lumumba in the Congo, and a very drunk Soviet spy, Kim Philby, in a bar in Beirut. Once he was trapped in a firefight between the French Foreign Legion and the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria. Astonishingly, you can see Peter in the famous photograph taken by a news photographer at the moment Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. Peter helped and supported Igor Gouzenko, the man who first revealed the extent of Soviet spying in Canada and was disbelieved by many. Peter believed him, and Peter was right. He also interviewed Gouzenko and wrote the story.

  When Peter was stationed in the USSR for The Toronto Telegram, Olga, the intriguing, seemingly eccentric, but pretty wife of a senior Soviet KGB man, asked for his help to defect. Though he was initially suspicious that Olga was a double agent, Peter found a way with the help of James Leslie Bennett, then head of Canadian counterintelligence (he would later sue writer Ian Adams), and after a few narrow escapes, the pair reached Canada, where Olga settled and managed to eke out a living, mostly from Peter and Yvonne.

  Not surprisingly, Peter’s favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling.

  I had been trying to persuade him to write a book sinc
e the seventies. Having heard all these stories, wouldn’t everyone? But he was too busy to write a memoir and he thought he still had a lot of life to live. He had launched the Toronto Sun in 1972, with two other former Telegram staffers, Don Hunt and Donald Creighton. They had the advantage of the Telegram’s subscriber list from John Bassett and a bit of money they had scraped together. Eddie Goodman—political insider, founder of the law firm Goodman and Goodman, and another Bassett friend—had been the first outside investor to put his money on the table.

  With Peter as the Sun’s editor, the new tabloid was irrepressibly feisty, innovative, entertaining, irreverent, and outspoken. While it drew attention for its “Sunshine Girls,” it also championed democracy. “Democracy is valued most by those who have lost it,” Peter wrote. When many liberal idealists continued to see the USSR through rose-coloured glasses, the Sun remained deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union. It also challenged Pierre Trudeau’s sympathies for Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong.

  In 1978, after his first triple-bypass surgery, Peter hired journalist Barbara Amiel to replace him as editor. Barbara, then still married to George Jonas, with whom she had co-authored By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter, was a columnist at Maclean’s and a very glamorous woman about town. Peter continued as a columnist.

  He resigned from the Sun’s board of directors in 1982, when they voted (unanimously, except for Peter) to sell the tabloid to Maclean Hunter. He assumed that the paper would lose its independence and become dull. He thought that success had already made it less than it should and could have been. It would no longer be breaking stories, no longer strutting its opinions across the front page as it had done during the first years.