Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
fame – cemented their relationship.
Black was seeking the celebrity of an influential politician. Exaggerating the importance of his twenty tiny newspapers, and concealing his dependence upon his inheritance, Black’s cultivated manner – relaxed, self-indulgent and opinionated – suggested a man of influence and independent wealth. His articulate advocacy of raw capitalism in an increasingly socialistic society attracted television producers eager to stage debates. Frequently he appeared on TV to support Claude Wagner, a politician renowned for accepting bribes and acknowledged by Black as suffering from petulance, superficiality and indecisiveness. The eccentricity of his opinions, and the charade of his eminence, obscured Black’s insecurity. In 1977, to satisfy his need for companionship, he asked Shirley Walters, a secretary in his office, to marry him.
The daughter of an accountant, Walters possessed an incomplete education, little ambition and no interest in politics or history. A decent, solid woman, following the breakdown of her marriage she was vulnerable to her employer, who had limited sexual experience. Although Black would claim to have been the surprised target of predatory women when he was young, eyewitnesses suggest few carefree relationships before he met Walters.29 His proposal of marriage was hastened by the discovery of Walters’s pregnancy. There was, however, a complication: Walters’s divorce could not be completed before the child’s birth. Black was fearful of the criticism of Toronto’s social leaders, especially Bud McDougald, if the existence of his illegitimate child was discovered.30 After he had overcome Walters’s prevarication, they resolved to keep the pregnancy a secret and to withhold Black’s name from the birth certificate.
Jonathan Black’s birth in November 1977 was followed by the news on 15 March 1978 of Bud McDougald’s death in Florida. The chatter around Bay Street was deafening. Few of those gazing at McDougald’s face in his open coffin were filled with sadness. Only McDougald’s widow wept; others were preoccupied by the succession. Skilfully, Conrad Black moved closer to the grieving woman, reminding her of his affection for her husband, whom he later described as ‘a very elegant kind of con man’, a judgement possibly of admiration rather than condemnation.31 McDougald, championed as Canada’s supreme business leader, epitomised so many of Black’s ambitions. ‘Bud was very skilful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn’t within anyone’s grasp,’ Black noted.
For more than twenty-five years, George Black’s son had been nurtured for the moment of vengeance. ‘I appear,’ Conrad Black said in self-congratulation, ‘to have been the only person who took note of the fact that Mr McDougald had died on the Ides of March. He always had a Caesarean bearing, and his succession was not much better organised.’32 The lesson of his father’s dismissal was to foresee deception and to marshal sufficient force to out-manoeuvre any rivals.
The empire’s immediate fate was to be decided at Argus’s first board meeting after McDougald’s death. As usual, Conrad Black arrived late, and was surprised to find that the three elderly directors had taken advantage of his unpunctuality, voting to deny the Black brothers executive directorships. ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ Black was told. Youth would need to wait its turn. ‘It was an utterly disgraceful performance,’ Black publicly proclaimed. Yet quietly he welcomed the rebuff.33 By demonstrating his true status, the other directors had compelled him to focus on the only worthwhile outcome – seizing the whole empire for himself; and, he puffed, they underestimated his abilities.
Argus, although valued at C$4 billion, was financially troubled. The controlling stakes in the various companies had produced good dividends for the shareholders, but bad management had wrecked the businesses. Dominion Stores Ltd was an old-fashioned chain of supermarkets; Hollinger Mines was managed by a lazy director who undertook no activities other than collecting $40 million a year in dividends from iron-ore mining; while Massey-Ferguson, with 45,000 employees, would lose C$257 million in 1978.34 Argus’s directors were certainly incapable of reviving the group. Black’s quandary was how to organise the old guard’s removal.
The ownership of Ravelston and Argus was diffuse. To obtain a majority vote depended upon a matrix of complicated relationships and trusts. In that quagmire there were potential allies, enemies and neutrals. To win control, Black would require dexterity and genius, seducing some and flattening others. Events, Black reminisced, needed to be treated ‘with a certain rhythm, maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’.35 Since his relations with most of the directors were bad, there was nothing to lose from a gamble.
From his study of history, Black had learned how simple gestures could lead to critical alliances, especially a show of concern for the beleaguered. In preparation for the struggle Black had targeted Dixon Chant, a chartered accountant employed by the late Eric Phillips, one of the key shareholders. Chant had suffered a heart attack, and Black visited him in hospital. Sympathising with the distressed came naturally to the unhurried, verbose aspirant. Chant would prove to be Black’s critical ally as the dust dispersed after McDougald’s funeral.
Black’s objective was two widows – Maude ‘Jim’ McDougald and her sister Doris, the widow of Eric Phillips. Together with the Blacks’, their shareholdings in Ravelston would amount to a controlling interest in Argus. Living together in Palm Beach, neither woman was blessed with intelligence or an understanding of business. McDougald, believing in his own infallibility, had never bothered to appoint a reliable, trustworthy lawyer or to explain to his wife how to cope after his death. Isolated in Florida’s sunshine, neither woman guessed that Black felt no pity for their weaknesses when he arrived to offer his assistance. Nor could they imagine the seducer’s thrill he must have felt.
Conrad Black was dressed conservatively, his animal cunning concealed behind a warm embrace of gentle assuredness. Some would carp at his cultivated condescension, but that would be a mistaken view. Rather, Black had perfected an approach towards the distressed that would serve him well over the coming years. Now he won the widows’ trust by obsequiously trimming his manner to put them at ease. He too appeared to be ‘grieving’. The tone of his voice and his gestures persuaded his prey that the three of them shared a common cause. The other major shareholders, explained Black, were crudely manoeuvring against the widows’ interests. ‘You’re being marginalised,’ he warned them. ‘We must do something about this.’ After uttering reassurances about his desire to protect their interests, he urged them to pool their shareholding with his. The two women believed his colourful reports about their husbands’ former colleagues, and were gradually persuaded to trust their gracious, wise visitor. Black’s next step determined the remainder of his life.
He asked the widows to sign a contract which empowered his use of their Ravelston shares in any vote against the other factions. Combined, their 70 per cent stake could compel the remaining shareholders to sell out to himself. That extraordinary power had originally been crafted by the widows’ late husbands to control the empire in their own interests. Puzzled and ignorant, the widows hesitated on the brink, uncertain about the financial advantage of Black’s proposition. He suggested they consult Doris Phillips’s adviser Dixon Chant, who Black knew had become irritated by the behaviour of Argus’s executives. Unlike Black, who had visited Chant in hospital, the other executives were disdainful of him. Just as Black had planned, Chant encouraged the widows to trust him.36 In the conversation which followed, Black performed the role encapsulated by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment: ‘An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eating – and then eats you up.’ Black listened and spoke, and eventually the women signed the agreements without extracting any payment in return. He had achieved power for nothing except the cost of a flight to Florida and the emission of a lot of hot air. Events now assumed a momentum which his adversaries would struggle to halt. ‘My brother and I,’ chortled Black, ‘were in a position to