Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
Amiel burst into tears. ‘She’s a woman without a sense of humour about herself,’ the editor concluded,33 puzzled by her insistence that ‘harsh words can’t harm me’.34 Her sensitivity did not always extend to thoughtfulness about others. Careless about the magazine’s schedules, she delivered articles with trembling hands at the editorial office after the deadline, clutching her head to relieve the pain of giving birth to a masterpiece, and awaited the applause. ‘A drama queen,’ concluded Peter Newman, ‘and a whining pest over each lost comma and adjective.’ For sympathy, she constantly telephoned Peter Brimelow. Even in the middle of the night she required an audience to hear about her work, her upsets and the praise she had attracted.
The relationship between Amiel and Brimelow was intense, yet to Brimelow’s despair she would not abandon Jonas. In revenge, Brimelow began an affair with Amiel’s assistant Dia, an attractive Anglo-Indian. ‘You’re having her, aren’t you?’ screamed Amiel. ‘How could you?’ Brimelow was unapologetic. Amiel refused to leave Jonas, he retorted, so why could he not also have an affair? Walking a tightrope, Amiel justified her own infidelity while condemning her lover’s.
In early 1979, Brimelow accepted a job in Washington, where his latest girlfriend, called Maggie, lived. In recent weeks he had described Maggie to Amiel as a potential wife. Amiel was given a choice. If their relationship was to survive, she would have to leave Toronto and her husband. Still undecided, she arrived at Brimelow’s flat with her sister Ruth. After Ruth’s departure, Amiel remained to say farewell. In bed, she announced a game of noughts and crosses on Brimelow’s chest. Her scratch marks were deep, the blood oozed. She knew that Maggie would understand.
A transitional moment in Amiel’s life had arrived. She was still married to Jonas, but she visited Brimelow three times in Washington, and at the same time started an affair with Sam Blyth, thirteen years younger than herself, and with similar looks to Brimelow’s. After two months, her decision was final. ‘It’s time to see Sam,’ she told a friend. She abandoned her husband and long-time lover, and moved into Blyth’s dilapidated Toronto home. The dalliance, she reckoned, would extricate herself from her marriage. Handsome, charming and poor, Sam Blyth offered new excitement. ‘A big adventure,’ said Amiel. ‘A lot of fun, like a journey in a big cookie jar.’35 Brimelow took the news calmly, while Jonas was distressed about no longer meeting Amiel’s requirements. ‘She was not a housewife,’ he said, ‘and I am not a house-husband. We agreed what we should do is find a wife, for both of us.’36 Jonas soon recovered. ‘How would you like to go to Paris for breakfast?’ he asked a Korean woman managing a restaurant. They eventually married.
Amid that hiatus Amiel began writing Confessions, her autobiography, a mixture of political polemic and attention-seeking striptease. ‘I am a wandering Jew,’ she wrote. ‘I always have my toothbrush handy. My allegiance is not to any piece of earth or particular set of rock outcroppings. My allegiance is to ideas, and most especially to the extraordinary idea of individual liberty … My suitcase is packed. I do not feel bound to any country or any popular will more than to my own conscience.’37 In an article published simultaneously in the magazine Chatelaine called ‘Nothing Succeeds Like Excess’, she confessed to being a shameless, self-promoting exhibitionist who enjoyed intellectual domination. Her critics unfairly classified such confessions as proof of the ‘borderline personality disorder’ suffered by attention-seeking addicts, or narcissism. Amiel’s sophisticated political arguments, however, protected the book from ridicule when it was published in 1980.
Rescuing Canada from socialism and ‘the spiritual and moral bankruptcy into which it has fallen’ was the heart of Amiel’s cause.38 Like Conrad Black, she condemned the Globe and Mail and the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau for distorting the policies of anti-Marxists and conservatives. The Liberal ‘thought police’, she wrote, were conducting a ‘witch-hunt’ against those championing the individual against the state. She railed against the bureaucrats promoting political correctness, multi-culturalism and the conditions of working women, and their fellow travellers who were championing sexual harassment prosecutions, denigrating prostitutes, inventing child abuse as a political weapon, lamenting men’s abuse of the clitoris and generally suppressing opportunities. Her black cleaner in New York, she complained, had refused to move out of a poor neighbourhood and seek a better education for her children because she expected improvements to be brought to her at public expense.39 The Canadian media and political establishment, she protested, were deliberately concealing the horrors in China and the Soviet Union. Forgetting her former support for the anti-Vietnam war movement, she confessed to having ‘little sympathy or respect for draft-dodgers’, and ‘loathed the sight of pretend-moralists’.40 She was, she wrote, thrilled that Jane Fonda had been arrested by US Customs for carrying drugs which turned out to be Codeine given to her by Amiel for a headache. ‘I was filled with a warm glow,’ she wrote. ‘It was my contribution to the war effort.’41
Confessions also included a florid description of Amiel’s English roots. After interviewing most of her family during her stay in London in 1971, she described herself as born into a family of British Marxists. The exaggeration justified what she admitted were ‘snide remarks’ about Bernard Buckman. In ungrateful language, she condemned her uncle as an unprincipled, rich hypocrite, living in his big, sunlit Hampstead home where ‘the clichés bounced off the cut crystal’ while indulging in ‘wilful blindness’ about China and the Soviet Union’s repression and bloodshed.42 One assertion which hurt the Buckmans was that the family was ‘financed by mainland China’.43 ‘She’s abused our hospitality and twisted the family history,’ Bernard Buckman told his wife Irene. ‘Forgive her,’ urged Irene, uneasy about her niece’s mistreatment by the Amiels. But even Irene was puzzled by Barbara’s inaccurate reconstruction of her background in her attempt to prove her new values. In a book extolling the importance of a journalist’s honesty, complained Irene, Barbara’s inventions were surprising.
The contrast between Amiel writing her book in Sam Blyth’s unkempt home, even wearing a coat when the electricity was cut off, and her personal credo was notable. ‘I knew what I wanted,’ she wrote about her time in London in 1971. ‘To be dropped at Selfridges’s or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for quails’ eggs,’ besides taking lessons to be a hostess and sharing a masseur with Lady Weidenfeld.44 She had become envious of the Canadian jet set’s use of private planes, ‘clubby travellers wafting across borders with sleek impunity’, living ‘our fantasies’. Her reality check was a conviction that those birds of paradise had no ‘durability’ and that few would survive.45
More revealing, considering her future conduct as Lady Black, was her attitude towards materialism. ‘The true spirit of liberalism,’ she wrote, ‘simply judges everyone on his or her own merit … We are all responsible for ourselves. That is not callous. That is liberation.’46 Transgressors, she warned, would be punished: ‘Greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws.’47 Her most pertinent comment, in the light of Conrad Black’s problems twenty-three years later, was her reproach, in Maclean’s, of John Dean, Richard Nixon’s dishonest legal adviser in the White House during the Watergate scandal. Amiel was scathing about Dean’s ‘moral myopia’ as a party to the President’s cover-up. Instead of accepting personal responsibility for his conduct, she wrote, he ‘still clings to the soothing thought that it was