by Anna Porter
Surely he would, at last, be ready to write that book.
But no, he tried to get the federal Progressive Conservative nomination in Broadview-Greenwood, and when he was blocked from that, he ran as an independent. He lost to the NDP,I giving my book yet another chance to be completed. I have kept two of Peter’s campaign posters and one five-foot-high photo of him, taken when he climbed to Mount Everest’s base camp after his second coronary bypass.
We published Looking for Trouble in 1984. To my surprise, while Peter was on his publicity tour for the memoir, he was fired by the paper he had helped start. He thought he could be critical of the Sun when it deserved criticism. As it turned out, he couldn’t.
Of course, we issued a new edition of Looking for Trouble, featuring Peter’s dismissal and its aftermath.
Eventually, when tempers cooled, Peter returned to the Sun as a columnist, filing his stories well ahead of the deadlines, and filing at least twice as many as he was paid for. Being Peter, he couldn’t resist what he called “the boy scout stuff,” so he took off for Angola to write about the fighting, to Eritrea to see the war of independence for himself, and to witness a few incidental skirmishes along the way.
Peter’s last column was published on May 14, 2013. This is how it began:
If you are reading this, I am dead.
How’s that for a lead?
Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.
* * *
I. I suspect Joe Clark’s Tories gave a sigh of relief as Peter was never going to be a silent backbencher.
I’ve Always Told Stories
MY MOTHER, MY aunts, my grandfather, and his mother and grandmother all told stories. Some of them were even true. I still remember the awesome tales about dragons, magic trees, and fearless princesses my mother told me when we were in jail.
My grandfather Vili, like many good Hungarians during Communist times, had also spent time in jail. He used to tell me long, historical stories set in past centuries, starring members of our family who seemed to be more interested in brandishing swords than in writing, but he believed their stories lived on in the telling. I had always sensed that the time would come when I would write about him and his strange tales—that book was The Storyteller—but in the early eighties, I was not yet ready to deal with my grandfather’s tales. His death was too recent.
Instead I wrote a murder mystery, set in the book business, starring a Canadian journalist and her childhood friend, a publishing executive in New York. It was territory I knew well and one I enjoyed skewering. The two leads were loosely based on people I knew, as were some of the dead bodies whose demises were investigated by my team of unlikely detectives.
I had so much fun writing the book that I had quite forgotten one of the basics of mystery writing: you have to know, in advance, who the culprit is, so you can tie up the loose ends in the end. I was close to four hundred pages when I realized that no one in the book could possibly have been responsible for all the murders. Ken Lefolii read the manuscript, and while he enjoyed the writing, he noted that it was important I should present a plausible killer and plant hints throughout. Mystery lovers did not like some new character sprung on them at the last minute. They needed a chance to guess who had “done it.” I had to go back to the beginning and rewrite the entire manuscript! The lesson I learned was that the author always had to be in on the secrets, even if she chose not to show her hand.
After I had rewritten it, John Irwin published Hidden Agenda in 1985, another wretched year for Jack at M&S, but he sent me an enormous bouquet of flowers, even though he suspected that at least one of the victims was based on him. My editor, John Pearce, was able to sell rights in some fifteen countries. I was presented with two copies of the Japanese edition at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
When I began to write my second mystery, Mortal Sins, I knew who had done the deed and why. That made the process less exciting for me, since I knew where the story was going, but it was easier not to have to guess what the end would be.
Both mysteries feature a journalist and a book publisher. The journalist is a little like Marjorie Harris. I even used Marjorie’s Annex neighbourhood street in Toronto. The character is also a little like me. I used bits of my own life, such as the scene where Judith sits on the floor between her two children’s beds, making sure they are breathing.
The publisher, Marsha, is a little like Carole Baron of Dell-Delacorte and a little like I might have been, had I accepted Marc Jaffe’s suggestion and moved to New York. I admired Carole because she fought hard for her authors and never backed down even when her bosses insisted she should stop being pushy. Marsha attends the kinds of sales conferences I went to in New York when I was with Seal. She works in corporate offices not unlike Bantam’s and tries to persuade her tougher-minded colleagues on Fifth Avenue (yes, that’s where Bantam’s head office was) that books are more than just “units” and the author is more than just one of the “elements” that make a saleable “product.”
My Candidate
I SHOULD NOT have been surprised when Julian told me, over a Sunday lunch with the kids, that he wanted to be a provincial candidate in our Ontario riding in 1985. I knew Julian had been involved in party politics since he was a child. His dad, a lifelong Tory, had served in nine Ontario portfolios, including Minister of Education, Treasurer, and Attorney General. Premier Leslie Frost had been a regular visitor at the Porter home on Pine Hill in Rosedale. Julian had been on Wallace McCutcheon’s 1963 campaign team and was with him at the 1967 leadership convention when McCutcheon lost to Robert Stanfield. Apart from shared Conservative sympathies, Wallace was, at the time, also Julian’s father-in-law.
In 1968 Julian had handled the advertising for Bob Stanfield’s hopeless campaign against Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals. He travelled across the country with Stanfield and managed (not very well, he thought) the Leadership Debate anchored by Charles Templeton. The country was wild about Trudeau. Crowds followed wherever he went. Stanfield’s strengths—thoughtfulness, stability, consideration for others—did not have a chance. Julian used to tell stories about Stanfield’s good humour, his self-deprecating wit no matter how discouraging the situation. Once, when the small plane had just made a hazardous landing somewhere in the Maritimes, Stanfield asked, “Have I spoken here before?” When he was told yes, he said, “In that case, I hope you rented a small hall.”
During the mid-1970s Julian was one of Peter Lougheed’s speechwriters, a late-night drinking companion of former premier John Robarts, and later an occasional member of Premier Davis’s famous breakfast club at the Park Plaza Hotel.
Julian was, no doubt, the reason why Key Porter was chosen to publish the big blue Ontario sesquicentennial book in 1984. I have a photograph from the launch: Bill Davis and me, sitting side by side but looking in opposite directions. He is very handsome and I seem very uneasy. In another photograph, likely taken at the same event, a grinning Brian Mulroney is holding up Ontario so that the camera can record his delight with the book. He dedicated it to me “with admiration and warm wishes.” Three years later, when we published Claire Hoy’s Friends in High Places, he would not have held up any book published by Key Porter.
In 1984 Julian seemed to spend more time on the phone with Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, and Dalton Camp—not at the same time—than usual, and he did mention that he thought if he didn’t run now, he never would. Dalton was the ultimate Conservative Party insider. He had helped John Diefenbaker win the 1957 federal election against Lester Pearson and ten years later manoeuvred the end of the Diefenbaker era by insisting that party leaders had to be subject to the membership’s vote. At the ensuing leadership review, an outraged Diefenbaker was denied another automatic term as leader.I
Dalton then switched to provincial politics in Ontario. He and his brother-in-law Norman Atkins were part of the Big Blue Machine that had managed four elections for the provincial Conservatives and won them all. Dalton and Bill Davis, Julian told me, thought that he sh
ould take a chance now, but I was so busy with publishing that I was astonished when he asked me to join him at the nomination meeting.
It was a grand occasion with band music and balloons in the Royal York’s Canadian Room, Julian looking impressive in a charcoal-grey suit and me smiling fixedly at everyone who came by. He was thrilled with winning the nomination and fairly confident that he would do well in the elections. Though I had watched Jeanne Lougheed be pleasant and charming, laugh at the right times, and look solemn when called upon, I didn’t know how political wives were supposed to behave.
Once he was declared the Progressive Conservative Party’s candidate for our riding of St. David in Toronto, he got organized. By then Bill Davis had left his party with the dubious gift of one of the most divisive issues of the day in Ontario: publicly funded education at Catholic schools. The Anglican bishop had Julian stand in his living room while he delivered a verbal assault that my husband thought lasted a full three minutes. Undeterred, Julian made stirring speeches, jogged along all the area’s streets from house to house and from apartment to apartment, including in the Jamestown area south of Bloor Street, where residents seemed to have more existential concerns than who would win the next election. Catherine, Jessica, and Julia posed with us for photographs, our journalist friends wrote flattering columns, while we tried to imagine how our lives would change if he won. It was not a comforting picture.
Our friends in the media wrote glowing columns about Julian. Margaret Atwood mentioned his “integrity,” Roy Peterson drew a flattering picture of him roller skating in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Fotheringham called him “a heavy,” and Bob Fulford weighed in with praise for “the sort of man who makes the room he enters a better place to be.” June Callwood said, “I would trust him with my life.” Peter Lougheed sent an encouraging note: “The first twenty years are the hardest.”
“Julian Porter for St. David” signs went up on lawns; brochures and posters were distributed. We wore our Julian Porter buttons.
Then, on the first weekend of April 1985, there was a terrorist threat in Toronto: a self-styled Armenian Army threatened to blow up the subway system to draw attention to the Armenians suffering under Turkish rule. The police made the deeply unpopular decision to shut down fifty-nine kilometres of track. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the stunt, Julian, chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, decided to ride the trains during the rush hour. Fortunately, the bomb threat turned out to be a hoax.
On April 19, we hosted a dinner for Peter and Jeanne Lougheed, and everybody came. There were politicians (both federal and provincial), novelists, journalists, broadcasters, moguls, artists, and Susan, Julian’s first wife, and her brothers. The press sent photographers and gossip columnists.
By election day, May 2, 1985, the provincial Conservative Party had enjoyed forty-two years in office. It would have been a proud record even for Albania, Julian said, trying to be philosophical about his loss to Liberal lawyer Ian Scott. We held hands on the way to Ian’s victory party central, they said all the right words to each other, hugged, and that was the end of Julian’s political ambitions and of the PCs’ uninterrupted rule in Ontario.
Julian called his six major clients, including the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and told them he would never run for political office again. We went to Rome for a week, stayed in the Teatro di Pompei on Campo de Fiori, Julian’s favourite small hotel, enjoyed the outdoor market noises in the mornings while drinking our lattes, then walked to Julian’s favourite churches to see his favourite frescoes, ate in his favourite restaurants near Piazza Navona, and absolutely did not talk about politics. Always a choice after-dinner and book launch party speaker, Julian now added Pierre Trudeau and Bob Stanfield to his John Diefenbaker and Robert Kennedy impressions.
I returned to my office and commissioned a bunch of political books, including Larry Zolf’s Survival of the Fattest: An Irreverent View of the SenateII and Eddie Goodman’s Life of the Party, which was launched in that fusty old Tory hangout, the Albany Club. Everybody who was anybody in the Conservative world came—some of them just to look themselves up in the index, others to take home a signed book.
* * *
I. Dalton remained, forever after, a pariah in Conservative territory west of Toronto, and even in Toronto he was regarded with suspicion.
II. Larry had the endearing habit of phoning late in the day to read me long passages in his manuscript to make sure I would find them funny when presented with the complete work. One person who did not find them funny was Senator Anne Cools, who sued us both for libel and won.
The Right Honourable Jean
IN 1984, WATCHING on CBC television as Jean Chrétien was defeated at the Liberal Convention, I thought he was the classiest, least affected man in the Ottawa Civic Centre that day. I was with a roomful of Conservatives, all of whom were keen to know who would succeed Trudeau, but no one expected to become teary after Chrétien conceded. He was magnificent in defeat.
Instinct told me that thousands of people would want to read a book from this man. I was also sure he would make a comeback. I wrote him on November 7, telling him as much and promising that the book would sell more than 100,000 copies. By the time I finished writing the letter, I knew how we were going to achieve that target. I mentioned Key’s magazines, saying that we had published Allan Fotheringham and Peter Worthington. Though he didn’t like either of them, Fotheringham because of his pesky wit and Worthington because he was a right-wing Tory, at least Chrétien would have heard that both books were bestsellers.
I promised him simultaneous French and English publication, a cross-Canada promotion tour, and a big Montreal launch. During my many trips to Montreal and to the Frankfurt Book Fair, I had become friends with several Quebec publishers. One of them would surely take a chance with a Chrétien memoir. He was a native son of Shawinigan, he had grown up in Quebec, and he had made a huge—though disliked by many—name for himself when campaigning on behalf of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty for Quebec. He was a patriot, one who was willing to go to any lengths to save the country he loved.
Fortunately, I was not the only person who was persuaded of Chrétien’s appeal. Ron Graham, political journalist and author of One-Eyed Kings, had the same idea, and he was interested in helping Chrétien write his book. His 1981 Saturday Night profile “Jean Chrétien and the Politics of Patriotism” was balanced and thoroughly researched. He agreed to write the book if we could sign a contract.
I first met Jean Chrétien in his Lang Michener law office in downtown Toronto. I was surprised that “le p’tit gars de Shawinigan” (“the little guy from Shawinigan”) was over six feet tall, athletic, highly intelligent in both official languages, and without most of the linguistic foibles that had characterized his popular speeches. He had studied law at Laval and had run his own law firm in Shawinigan before entering politics at age twenty-nine on Lester Pearson’s team. One of nineteen children (ten of whom did not survive infancy), he had had to fight for everything he achieved. His family had always been Liberal, anti-clerical, anti-establishment. Though he always had the support of his parents, nothing came easily. He had overcome what many viewed as a handicap—partial paralysis of his face—and had to learn English quickly in order to fit in with his peers in Parliament.
He had held seven portfolios, run and won his seat in two elections, and was Trudeau’s front man in Quebec, tasked with keeping the country together despite René Lévesque’s extraordinary appeal to those who liked the idea of being maîtres chez nous. I had watched him, as had many of us, on May 20, the night of the 1980 Quebec Referendum: he was exhausted, his voice was hoarse, his shirt soaking wet, but he was still forceful and convincing.
Chrétien had been at the centre of the battle to patriate the Canadian Constitution, and though he had crossed swords with Peter Lougheed over the National Energy Program (an effort by the federal government to redistribute Alberta’s oil revenues to the rest of the country), he had persuaded Pe
ter to support the Constitution in 1982. To everyone’s surprise, and despite John Turner’s newsletters criticizing his performance, he had successfully managed the Finance portfolio. I do not think the relationship with Turner ever recovered from what Chrétien felt was a betrayal. He once told me that the biggest mistake young politicians make is that of blind trust. The warring between the two men never entirely subsided.
Based on a short description of the proposed book, my friend Pierre Lespérance of Les Éditions de l’Homme guaranteed the French edition would appear at the same time as the English, if we would send each chapter as it arrived. Pierre owned the biggest publishing business in Quebec, Sogides,I with Éditions de l’Homme as one of its several imprints. Pierre was an impressive presence at book fairs, a big outspoken guy, not given to flattering government officials, even when they distributed impressive subsidies.
* * *
CHRéTIEN LIKED RON Graham’s essay sufficiently to agree that he would do the talking and Ron would do the writing. After we signed the contracts, I asked him to come to our office to meet the staff. I walked with him down Bay Street, across King, and down Church Street to The Esplanade. It was a cool day but his jacket was unbuttoned and he wore no overcoat. He walked fast, almost at a jog, now and then stopping to shake hands, waving to people who called out to him, shouting his responses in both English and French, while I struggled in my heels to keep up with him.
Phyllis Bruce, who later edited the manuscript, remembers his arrival at our decrepit boardroom, the plastic plants and the ceiling both shedding dust. He asked for a beer, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and told our small group what he wanted to say in the book and why he was writing it. He talked about the country with the same conviction I had seen on television when he fought for a united Canada.
