Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
house in Colefax & Fowler style, and although there were grumbles among local tradesmen about Black’s ‘ungentlemanly’ quibbles over their bills – like any shrewd businessman, he carefully examined the accounts – the social rewards were gratifying. Assiduously, Black cultivated Jayne Wrightsman, a former manicurist who had married an oil billionaire. After her husband’s death Wrightsman had used her inheritance to become Palm Beach’s patrician hostess. Invited for cocktails and dinner parties, Black worked hard to establish himself as a guest guaranteed to amuse others by reciting from his encyclopaedic memory of history and politics. ‘Come for dinner in Palm Beach,’ Wrightsman said to the London merchant banker Rupert Hambro. ‘I’ve met this hugely intelligent man who is so wonderful. He’s called Conrad Black.’ Hambro knew Black from summer weekends staying at the businessman Bob Dale-Harris’s farm north-east of Toronto. Meeting him again in Florida, he noticed how Black had changed. Touched by the glamour of big money, Black was flattered that Wrightsman, a kind, generous person, was attracted to him, and that by turn he had become a subject of conversation.
The proof of Black’s social acceptance was his proposal for membership of the Everglades Club, the meeting place of Palm Beach’s elite. The obstacles were Maude McDougald and Doris Phillips, the two Argus widows. Both still resented their humiliation, and campaigned to blackball their tormentor. Their tactics were in vain. Imperceptibly, Black organised his nomination and election without any formal notification. ‘Clubs are not democratic,’ the widows were told.
Shirley Black was uninterested in the Everglades Club and her husband’s social ambitions. Politics and business provoked indifference in the modest woman who appeared to some in Palm Beach as shy and ‘childlike’, relying on her husband to book babysitters and make other domestic arrangements. While he excelled at the formal dinners, lecturing on the refinements of French furniture or the career of an obscure general, she sat awkwardly, unappreciative even of his sense of humour, which occasionally, with the help of a few glasses of wine, reduced him to tears while he hilariously mimicked characters and accents. Regardless of Shirley’s disenchantment, with Wrightsman’s patronage Black was introduced into the society he yearned to emulate.
Cultivating the right image, Black knew, was essential to acceptance. Walking into a room, he took care that his large, physical presence captured the space around himself. Gracious but also aloof, his self-assured manner left onlookers in no doubt of his attitude: ‘I’m Conrad Black, take it or leave it.’ His quiet voice and gentle movements suggested that he was neither bombastic nor nasty. With studied stateliness suggesting coiled energy, he intimidated some, but never succumbed to an intemperate outburst. Speaking quietly, his big, intelligent, slightly oriental grey eyes fixed in an immobile face, he aroused curiosity whether his fluent, verbose language was expressing anger or pleasure, never using a short word if a longer one was appropriate. His new friends were impressed by his seamless prose and his prodigious memory.
Black’s next step was to accumulate the level of wealth so abundantly evident on the island. During his first holiday in Palm Beach he attended a rousing election speech by the Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, whom he supported against President Jimmy Carter, a politician he loathed. Black’s enduring memory, besides Reagan’s appearance, was of the limousines parked outside the Breakers Hotel. As far as the eye could see were the biggest Mercedes and the most expensive Rolls-Royces, some lengthened, Black noted, ‘in proof of their owners’ ingenuity at devising methods of spending an additional $100,000 on a $200,000 automobile’.19 He himself had begun indulging his appetite to join the high-spending class. As well as his small yacht he had already accumulated several cars, including a Cadillac, a Mercedes and McDougald’s Rolls-Royce in London. On some of the bonnets he mounted a gold-plated eagle killing a snake. The symbol matched his goal.
Houses reflect their owners’ characters, and Black’s plans for the demolition and reconstruction of his parents’ home in Toronto confirmed his taste for grandeur. The Bridle Path had become the city’s ‘Millionaires’ Row’. Black’s architect produced plans to match his client’s aspirations. The mansion’s new entrance hall would be two storeys high, and a distinctive, high-domed rotunda modelled on the roof of St Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican was to be erected over a library that would house at least 20,000 books. The story was spread that Black intended to repose on an eighteenth-century cardinal’s chair while reading about Napoleon in the midst of a palace that could host Toronto’s biggest parties. Others suggested that the chair was the one Napoleon sat on when signing treaties. Black’s illustriousness was confirmed when he persuaded Archbishop Carter of Toronto and Bishop Aloysius Ambrozic, both future cardinals, to formally bless the new library. Black was not a Catholic, and since he was not noticeably religious, outsiders believed that the prelates were invited as props in his developing plan to present himself as a serious player. Those cynics did not appreciate his dependence on conversations with God to justify the realisation of his entitlement. The priests’ presence validated his relationship with his Creator.
Black’s growing self-confidence of his ranking among the elect was enhanced in 1981 when he accepted an invitation to attend the Bilderberg Conference, an annual gathering of over a hundred of the world’s rich, famous and influential personalities. Dubbed by critics as the ‘Burnt-Outs club’, the conference was created in the mid-1950s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to improve relations among members of NATO. As a representative of Canada, Black flew to Holland, where he began a series of special intellectual and personal relationships. Among those with whom he eventually bonded were Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, the newly appointed US Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, the conservative American columnist George Will and Andrew Knight, the British editor of the Economist. He also renewed his acquaintance with Henry Kissinger. The participants at the conference were impressed by the studiously casual Canadian businessman, sauntering into meetings to regale his audience with his remarkable memory. ‘I’m a fatalist,’ he explained in one conversation. ‘I believe that people’s destinies are always more fascinating than their day-to-day reactions.’ His heroes, he continued, were common men whose dreams of greatness materialised after they had overcome huge adversity – Napoleon, de Gaulle, Abraham Lincoln, Marshal Foch, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Whatever their personal faults, they were vindicated by their success. Historic acclaim, he argued, excused treachery. Eventual vindication after widespread hatred was the qualification for his worship. He preferred to forget that the rest of mankind lived by other rules – namely contemporaneous judgement.
Mixing with multi-millionaires and power-brokers fed Black’s fantasies. Bilderberg was a magnet for romantics, social climbers and conservatives, and like his new associates Black was aghast that America had surrendered in Vietnam rather than staying on to secure total victory. Their common Saviour was Ronald Reagan, the restorer of conviction to political life. As Black spoke, endlessly reciting juicy historic details, he visualised the prospect of becoming celebrated himself, providing quotations for later generations to savour. That surely was his destiny.
The following year Black invited Kissinger to address a group of Canada’s elite in Toronto. The former US Secretary of State, attracted to expensive meal tickets, was easily flattered by Black’s material generosity and scholarly praise. That Christmas Fred Eaton would give a copy of Kissinger’s memoirs to Black, and thereafter he would often hear from his friend, ‘I’ve just had lunch/dinner with Henry, and he says …’ Having gained an entrée to both the Bilderberg cast and Palm Beach’s aristocrats, Black sensed his opportunity to join the American establishment. Stepping up would require his own fortune.
Expanding into American mining seemed the perfect way to realise his financial and social ambitions. In January 1979 he had identified Hanna Mining, the world’s second-largest iron-ore producer, based in Cleveland, Ohio, as an ideal target. After secret discussions with Fred Eaton and Edward Battle, another director of Norcen, they agreed to accumulate enough shares covertly to buy Hanna at a bargain price.
Hanna was owned and managed by the Humphreys, a long-established family which was embroiled in numerous feuds. Argus and Hanna both owned an interest in the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which was run by Hanna with a 26.5 per cent stake, compared to Argus’s 10.5 per cent. That connection provided Black with the opportunity