Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
any solution to Canada’s permanent problem of containing the separatist demands of the French in Quebec; and secondly, as he was told by a Liberal politician, ‘We’re the party of government here. The Conservatives are like mumps. You get them once a lifetime.’ Nevertheless, Black engaged self-confidently in politics, supporting the English-speaking Conservatives, and to his delight people took seriously his self-conscious party pieces, cultivated since childhood. Using unusually complex vocabulary, he effortlessly recited endless historical details from memory in performances which, he persuaded himself, convinced audiences of his genius and his political acumen.
In 1969, Peter White once again offered the next step. The Sherbrooke Record, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 8,000 published near Montreal, was offered for sale. John Bassett, the owner, was distressed. His marriage had disintegrated and his investment in a new office building and new printing presses had plunged the business to the verge of bankruptcy.16 On the eve of completing the purchase, White introduced a twenty-six-year-old business-school graduate, David Radler, into the deal. Radler, described by some as mischievous and with few pretensions, was a rough, ambitious fortune-hunter who had learned trading from his father, a restaurateur, and who had recently been selling native handicrafts from a shop at Expo 67. His ratty, sharp manner and his spartan lifestyle emphasised his preoccupation with money. In background and manner Black and Radler had little in common, but they complemented each other’s ambitions. Black wanted influence and wealth, while Radler enjoyed mastering the mechanics of creating that wealth. Black brought the vision of a strategy, while Radler was keen to sweat their assets. The chores at the Sherbrooke Record could be easily divided. Radler would be responsible for the financial management, including advertising and printing, while Black and White filled the space between the advertisements with editorial reports. They borrowed C$18,000 from a bank, and inherited thirty-two employees and a business which had lost $180,000 over the previous twenty-two months.
‘Rape and kill’ was the journalists’ metaphorical judgement about the impact of Black’s arrival. Archives were dumped, photographs were destroyed, wages were frozen, expenses were slashed and half the employees were fired. The remainder were squeezed into a smaller building. Under Radler’s merciless penny-pinching, employees were fined for wasting paper, pencils and their own time. Radler and Black scrutinised any expenditure over $5, and the staff’s written complaints resulted in two-cent fines for wasting paper. Any other conduct deemed to be unacceptable was punished by a $2 levy. Stories of Black and Radler’s nastiness became legion. Helen Evans, the newspaper’s social diarist, was docked three days’ pay for taking time off to bury her husband.17 Black was proud of his ‘oppression’, claiming that his employees departed qualified for better jobs.18 Suppliers discovered that their bills would only be paid after repeated threats. ‘A good newspaper,’ Black would be heard later to say, ‘is one that makes money.’ After just two months, the new owners were delighted by their results. In Radler, Black had discovered his ideal partner. While he enjoyed journalism and pontificating about the world, Radler focused on maximising advertising revenue and restraining the journalists. ‘I just screwed that bunch of journos,’ Radler loved to joke. He inflicted similar parsimony upon himself, taking packets of sugar from restaurants for his personal use. His frugality was mirrored in his pride at discovering a newspaper’s ideal manpower: ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Despite a declining circulation because it ignored local stories and reported politics prejudicially, the Sherbrooke Record, with vastly reduced costs, earned a profit. Instead of losing $10,000 a month, it made $15,000. A further loan for Black and Radler to acquire their next newspaper was agreed by their bank, based on them applying a similar formula.
Ownership of newspapers, combining money, politics and the opportunity to win influence, was a natural sanctuary for Black. Posing as a putative press baron he appeared at political conventions in Canada, and contacts among the staff of LBJ, by then retired from politics, arranged remarkable access for Black during a trip to South Vietnam in 1969. With the help of the American ambassador he interviewed President Nguyen Van Thieu, and to his glee his account in the Sherbrooke Record was republished across the USA. Soon after, he travelled through South America, his journey culminating in a stopover in Cuba to witness a marathon five-hour speech by Fidel Castro to his poverty-stricken admirers. Next stop was a visit to Bud McDougald in Palm Beach.
Ever since the sixteen-mile island became colonised in the late 1800s as a winter refuge by the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Carnegies – America’s oligarchs and robber barons – Palm Beach had been a haven for celebrities and the world’s richest players. Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome. Some would carp that Palm Beach, populated by ‘up and down folk’, was ‘a sunny place for shady people’ enjoying an extravagant social life of dinners, dances and parties – and that was precisely the attraction for Conrad Black. The principal qualification for newcomers to mix with the old dynastic fortunes was money. ‘Some people are offended by extreme opulence,’ Black would later tell Peter C. Newman, his first biographer, ‘but I find it sort of entertaining.’ McDougald was Black’s mentor in his quest to achieve that affluence. McDougald had the nerve to travel unashamedly to London for private visits at Argus’s expense, and generally to pilfer the company’s assets. Among his prizes was the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which he ‘purchased’ from Massey-Ferguson at a dishonestly low price. McDougald’s traits, described later by Black as ‘lassitude, greed and vanity’, encouraged Black’s own ambition to possess $100 million and to have the means to escape Canada’s winters.19 The handicap in 1970 was his psychological turmoil.
Throughout the 1960s Black had revealed a lack of sympathy with the era. Buttoned up in suits, and rarely seen without a tie, he arrived at raucous Friday-night parties stiff and solemn. Rather than enjoying the sexual and cultural revolution, he castigated youthful rebels as ‘banal’ and ‘superannuated poltroons’, and showed disdain for men wearing frilly shirts and pink bell-bottom trousers.20 Some interpreted his reticence as shyness, an inferiority complex or a sense of inadequacy concealed by his remarkable vocabulary. Others, like the journalist Hubert Bauch, were unsympathetic. ‘Black’s the most arrogant, obnoxious man I ever met,’ said Bauch.
In March 1970, Black awoke to a massive anxiety attack. Sweating profusely, hyperventilating and racked by apprehension about his fate, he was on the verge, some believed, of committing suicide. The accumulation of his loveless childhood, his academic failure and his social insecurity had become an intolerable burden. He sought help in psychoanalysis. Over the next two years he consulted W. Clifford M. Scott and Vivian Rackoff in his efforts to examine what he called ‘my altruism and the dark side’. Subsequently, he also attended the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto for help to cope with his demons. One diagnosis suggested a narcissistic personality disorder – defined as an exaggerated sense of one’s own self-importance and uniqueness. The sufferer, according to experts, has a propensity to take advantage of others in the interest of self-aggrandisement. Others diagnosed Black’s problems as arising from his loveless, dysfunctional home. Intense psychiatry cured Black of his immediate self-destructive urge, but several personality traits remained, including a sense of his entitlement and a lack of conscience. He frivolously described that combination as the ‘Nietzschean philosophy’ that ‘all that does not kill me makes me stronger’. The mention of Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose anti-Christian arguments in favour of the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘superhuman’ made him attractive to the Nazis, revealed the essence of Conrad Black as a self-important hunter for celebrity.
By 1972, Black felt that all his ‘guiding principles were in place’. He believed in God, and in human and economic freedom, and condemned those who prospered from the high taxes paid by others.21 Echoing his father, he regarded trade unionists as ‘self-seeking frauds who cared little for the workers and often were gangsters or Communists’. Union leaders he characterised as ‘corrupt Luddites’