Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
Conrad Black was to make the same type of comment publicly. Smith had never met such a sexually experienced woman who frequently took the initiative. His placid temperament could easily cope with her dramatic, even histrionic moods, but while Amiel was vitriolic in criticising others, she was vulnerable to even friendly mocking of herself. In those helpless moments he provided the support she needed, especially during the weeks when she consulted the college psychiatrist about her hallucinations and her growing addiction to Codeine. A doctor prescribed Elavil, an antidepressant. ‘The drug,’ she wrote, ‘was to be my undoing [and the cause of] my erratic emotional life … I never realised quite how drugged I was for those seven years.’11
Amiel’s erratic life had started long before the summer of 1962, but that year was a landmark. Isaac Barnett, her grandfather, died and bequeathed her £400. She flew to London with Gary Smith to collect the money and see her family. In the new, exciting environment, Amiel’s imagination let rip. Smith was under the mistaken impression that she had found her father’s corpse after he committed suicide, and she suggested that she had been brought up as a Marxist, mixing with the Seiferts and Sedleys, the rich Jewish Communist families who lived in mansions in Hampstead, although neither family could recall her presence in their homes, or her being invited to their frequent parties. She would later recollect that she was met at Heathrow by ‘my Maoist uncle’s chauffeur’, while Gary Smith recalls them taking a bus into the city and walking to a hotel.12 The Amiels and the Buckmans recall trying their best to care for their niece whose innocence had, it seemed, been irretrievably lost. As a gesture of their consideration, her uncle Bernard Buckman suggested that she join the British delegation to that year’s World Youth Festival in Helsinki, a Soviet-sponsored summer camp for Communist supporters. Amiel bade farewell to Gary Smith and set off, passing through the newly-built Berlin Wall, to compare the theory of Communism discussed at university in Toronto with the reality.
Eighteen years later, Amiel would assert that the Helsinki experience had immediately and fundamentally changed her political opinions, although the student who returned to Canada still spoke as a Marxist. The noticeable difference was her change of personality. The shy trepidation had been replaced by a flaunting of her sexual attractions. With her family’s support, she did not need to work that summer. Instead she stayed with Florence Smith, Gary’s aunt, while he continued to live with his parents.
Despite her growing dependence on the Smiths, Amiel’s visit to Helsinki did bring about one basic change – she began to live a double life, which would continue until she married Conrad Black. She would travel to Montreal, moving in circles where people played with ‘real drugs’, and discovering that she got high on marijuana more quickly if she used a pipe. While apparently faithful to Gary Smith, she also enjoyed other sexual relations.13 The Canadian idol of the era was Leonard Cohen, the brilliant, handsome poet and singer. Cohen’s philosophy appealed to countless female admirers who flocked to the star in the hope of seducing him. Amiel suggests that she joined the queue. Cohen, she said, could offer women ‘everything, except of course fidelity … In his own terms he is not unfaithful to anyone because he cares for them all.’ The poet’s attitude towards free love and open relationships, while caring for all his lovers, appealed to Amiel’s gypsy temperament.14 ‘The secret that Leonard shares with Casanova,’ she would write, ‘is the one that costs him dear: it is real desire.’ Amiel showed the same unfaithfulness, but in her case it was to satisfy different requirements. She always needed a man, but hated relying on other people. Her dilemma was how to balance her dependence and her desire for independence. Unlike Cohen, she would not advertise her roaming, astutely compartmentalising her life.
Just after completing her final university examinations in 1963, Amiel opted for financial stability. ‘I wrote a message under the seal of your degree,’ she told Gary Smith, referring to a romantic gesture she had made while preparing the degree certificates in the university administrator’s office. ‘It’s a love message,’ she confided. Days later, at the end of a sexual session in Gary’s father’s car, she unexpectedly snapped, ‘Let’s get married.’ Gary understood the reasons. Barbara was fed up with sex in the back of a car. She wanted a bed, security and, above all, money. Their first date for the ceremony was abandoned. ‘We’ve got cold feet,’ Gary told his parents. A few weeks later they were married in a rabbi’s study in front of eight witnesses including her mother and Leonard Somes, Gary’s parents and Larry Zolf. At the party afterwards in the Smiths’ family apartment, Zolf pushed through gamblers, bookmakers and scam artists to ask a small man, ‘Are you Meyer Lansky?’ ‘So what if I am?’ he growled.
The newly married couple rented an apartment on Toronto’s Spadina Road, and while Gary Smith began his career as a lawyer, Amiel was employed as a secretary and script assistant in the television section of CBC. Not long afterwards, there was a terrible shock. Harry Smith, having lost all his money gambling, was arrested with his brother and accused of fraud. Soon after, he was convicted and imprisoned. Instead of joining a stable Jewish family, Amiel had associated herself with criminals. It was not long before she realised that her decision to marry Gary Smith had been short-sighted. Domestic life with the modest lawyer was dull compared to the thrills at CBC, especially following her appearance on the cover of Toronto Life magazine. Increasingly, she returned home late and too tired for sex. Just nine months after their marriage she asked her husband, ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ ‘I would not presume to know what’s going on in your head,’ replied Smith. ‘This isn’t working. I’m off.’
Late that night in summer 1964, George Jonas, a twenty-nine-year-old Hungarian émigré also employed by CBC, was driving along Spadina Road and spotted Amiel crossing the street, ‘weighed down with more baggage than a ten-hand army mule’. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Jonas. ‘You just robbed a dwelling and can’t remember where you parked the getaway car.’ ‘Close,’ she replied. ‘I just split up with my husband.’ ‘Great,’ said Jonas. ‘Let’s go have coffee.’ ‘Can’t,’ said Amiel. ‘Have to unload all this stuff before seven. Call me tomorrow if you like.’15
Jonas, a right-wing intellectual, was an unusual character in Toronto. Alternately, he dressed in black leather and rode a motorcycle or assumed the mantle of a Central European, carrying a silver-headed cane as a prop to his hand-kissing and heel-clicking. In London or New York his act might have been ridiculed, but Amiel was attracted to the ambience of an East European intellectual’s home filled with books, music and passionate arguments. Since her visit to Helsinki she had moved from the far left towards the political centre, and Jonas’s fervent anti-Communism was appealing. For his part, Jonas said, ‘I found her very attractive and thoroughly unpleasant.’16 That was not a barrier to a relationship, and nor was Sylvie, Jonas’s wife. Jonas and Amiel began an affair, although Amiel did not regard it as an exclusive attachment. She was now better fed and dressed, making her breasts appear larger. ‘The bigger and more pronounced they are,’ she would later write, ‘the more attractive they are.’ Depending on her mood, she could appear flat-chested, while on other occasions the size of her breasts fuelled speculation about implants. ‘I’ve got one thing you haven’t got,’ she boasted to male journalists vying for the same interview: ‘cleavage.’17 Shamelessly, she would ask a colleague for advice about something she had written, and while he read her pages, rest a breast on his shoulder. As she self-consciously walked through CBC’s corridors like a queen with an entourage, her remarkable physique excited drooling and gossip. At parties, men were mesmerised by her sexuality. ‘Holding her thin waist was so erotic, so powerful,’ sighed one admirer. Some of her relationships ended with her ‘seeing stars’ after being hit by a boyfriend;18 one ended in an abortion;19 but almost invariably her men, including cameraman Ed Long, discovered that after one night, they were forgotten the following morning.