Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
to project herself. After dallying in the past with left-wing politics, a hippie lifestyle and impoverished men, she had chosen to be reincarnated by marrying class, wealth and looks. ‘You can’t believe how good David is in bed,’ she had said to a girlfriend just days before her wedding, with seeming conviction. ‘I couldn’t do without this man. I had to have him.’
Few believed that Graham, a quiet, unexciting man, matched Amiel’s description. Rather, many assumed, her head had been turned after researching an article for Maclean’s magazine entitled ‘Who’s Who in Canada’s Jet Set’. Gushingly, she had written that the rich, with their private planes and pampered lifestyles, ‘live our fantasies in a world which has no borders, just locations’.4 To join that world, she had decided to ‘marry up’, a phrase she would use in the headline of a subsequent confessional article.5 The ‘trade-off’, she admitted, was crude: ‘her looks for his money – his power as her meal ticket’. Together, Barbara Amiel and David Graham could present themselves around the globe as a ‘power couple’, rich and influential.6
Established ‘power couples’ were scattered across the Sutton Place’s party room. Sitting with Ted Rogers, head of the Rogers Communications empire, was Conrad Black, the owner of an expanding newspaper group. Like many of Canada’s establishment, Rogers praised Black’s intellect, but voiced suspicions about the pompous businessman’s eagerness to make money. Branded as a ‘bad boy’ or a ‘bad joke’, Black had not won admirers since saying in the early 1980s, ‘Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated, unfairly in my opinion … It is a motive that has not failed to move me from time to time.’ Strangely, he seemed impervious to the impression his admission had created. Bad publicity was nothing new to the ambitious Black. Over the previous two decades, while seeking the spotlight as a supporter of right-wing causes, the aspiring media baron had placed himself in many firestorms. His outspokenness was a characteristic which he shared with Barbara Amiel.
Black’s admiration for the bride was curious. Professionally, she represented much that he despised. Rather than writing on the basis of careful, measured research, she was famous for spewing out gut prejudices. Years earlier, her left-wing sentiments had been interpreted by Black as envy of the rich and powerful, but after changing boyfriends, her politics had somersaulted. The former Marxist had changed colours, and now chanted her praise for capitalism. Meeting Amiel for the first time at a dinner party in Toronto in 1979 had converted Black into a fan. How could he resist a woman who professed her admiration for his blockbuster biography of the right-wing former Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis? Like so many men in ‘Stop 33’ that evening, he had become enamoured of her star qualities. There were also similarities between them.
Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel had both been afflicted by depression, insecurity and exposure to suicide. Both their fathers had killed themselves, and both Black and Amiel had had moments of the deepest despair at certain points in their lives. Neither imagined that the wedding reception was a mere interlude before the consummation of their own explosive relationship, but with hindsight their eventual union seems almost inevitable.
Fate determined a strange climax for both of them at the end of the reception. Sharing a limousine, Conrad Black and Allan Fotheringham argued violently, and parted on bad terms. Across town, lying in bed after her wedding celebrations, Barbara Amiel was presented by her new husband with a pre-nuptial agreement that had been drawn up earlier. ‘Sign here,’ said Graham. Amiel did as she was ordered. She was in love.
* Unless the context indicates otherwise, throughout the book monetary values are given in American rather than Canadian dollars.
FLOPPED IN HIS ARMCHAIR, regularly refilling his glass with neat vodka, George Black sermonised to his thirty-one-year-old younger son Conrad throughout the night of 29 June 1976. Despite the appearance of civility presented by the chintz and the solid furniture in the grand house in the Bridle Path, Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhood, the resentful sixty-seven-year-old regularly vented his bitterness on the subject of wealth and power. Frustrated by isolation and depression, the ailing recluse had astutely accumulated substantial capital from his business activities, but his withdrawn personality and habits had deprived him of any influence, with one exception: his son Conrad.
Over the years, his father’s lectures on history, power and finance had inculcated in Conrad similar feelings about supremacy and manipulation. Systematically, George had dragooned the youthful Conrad to utilise his photographic memory by giving boastful theatrical performances at social occasions. With little prompting, the precocious boy had paraded his expertise on Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle and other political giants. Similarly, if the opportunity arose, audiences were amazed by his encyclopaedic recitations of battleships, armies and warfare stretching back to the eighteenth century. Without hesitation, as a party piece the teenager could recite the names of all the ships, armies and generals engaged in the most obscure European battles, or of successive prime ministers and monarchs over two centuries, or, if allowed, repeat keynote speeches of statesmen long dead. ‘Reel off the fifteen leading ships in the Spanish Armada,’ George Black would order, ‘and the names of all the admirals in the First World War.’ His son’s memory was infallible. Late into the night, amid a mist of tobacco smoke, those tutorials and memory games about world history infected the loner’s mind with the importance of defying the vulnerability of human weakness.
Stifled by depression, George Black failed to appreciate the burden he was inflicting upon his son. The father offered his children no physical affection, and his wife Jean, always known as ‘Betty’, was similarly cold and remote. In that loveless atmosphere, Conrad compensated for his emotional insecurity by revelling in the lives of historic heroes. At eight, he had been smitten by the memoirs of General de Gaulle, the underdog who rebelled against unpopularity and overcame adversity to become a national hero. Defiance was a trait Conrad Black was encouraged to admire by his father, an outsider cruelly spurned by lesser men.
Ever since George Black had been unceremoniously dismissed in 1958 from the Argus Corporation, a sprawling Canadian conglomerate, his resentment had festered. During their all-night sessions, Conrad Black was imbued with a mission to exact revenge upon those responsible for humiliating his father. He knew them well, because, despite his reclusiveness, George Black had introduced his son to a remarkably privileged lifestyle.
Few could have imagined the transformation of George Black over the previous thirty-six years. In 1940 the tall, articulate, aggressive twenty-nine-year-old accountant was managing a factory in Montreal producing propellers for Allied war planes. With pride, he recounted how his company was the only Canadian government-owned manufacturer during the war to earn a profit. But there was also frustration. The graduate from Winnipeg, a provincial outpost, damned his work as unglamorous and his colleagues as ‘a hopeless bunch’.1 In July 1944 his future appeared lacklustre, until the banker Edward P. Taylor, also from the Canadian provinces, offered an escape. Unlike George Black, Taylor had identified a recipe for great personal wealth.
Ten years older than Black, Taylor enjoyed the expensive lifestyle of a clever but unpopular speculator who paraded as a prominent racehorse owner at the Jockey Club of Canada. In 1944 he was convinced that the end of the war would unleash huge prosperity. To exploit that opportunity, he established Argus with a group of like-minded Toronto investors, including Eric Phillips and John ‘Bud’ McDougald. Based at 10 Toronto Street, an elegant, two-storey, neo-classical building not far from Bay Street, the city’s financial area, the partners pooled their assets invested in Canadian companies. Among those investments was Canadian Breweries, which George Black was invited to manage on the company’s behalf.
During those all-night sessions, which started in Conrad’s