Heroes Read online

  HEROES

  Canadian Champions, Dark Horses and Icons

  PETER C. NEWMAN

  With adoration and profound gratitude for my parents, Oscar and Wanda Neumann, the shining lode stars who guided me on my journey

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: We’d Rather Be Clark Kent

  PART 1: The Arts

  Margaret Atwood: The Corrugated Madonna

  The Tempestuous Vision of Irving Layton

  A Fond Farewell to Robertson Davies

  The “Fillum” Moguls Who Made Me

  Terry Fox on the Run

  Jack McClelland: The Authors’ Publisher

  Hugh MacLennan: Charting Canada’s Psyche

  Remembering Pierre Berton, the Big Foot of CanLit

  June Callwood: A Passion for Compassion

  Jack Poole: The Shy Birth Father of the Vancouver Olympics

  Marshall McLuhan: Calling Planet Earth

  Ralph Allen: The Man from Oxbow

  Homage to Christina McCall

  PART 2: Politics

  Michael Ignatieff: The Count Comes Home

  Pierre Trudeau: Phantom of the Canadian Opera

  Lester Pearson: A Good Man in a Wicked Time

  Walter Gordon: The Troubled Canadian

  Frank Underhill: A Liberal for All Seasons

  Judy LaMarsh: The Gutsy Charmer with Class

  PART 3: Business

  Peter Munk: The Man for All Seasons

  For the Love of Andy (Sarlos): Of Casinos and Markets

  “Young Ken “ Thomson: The World’s Shyest Multi-Billionaire

  David Thomson: Fortune’s Child

  The Immaculate Passions of Nelson Davis

  Paul Desmarais: King of the Establishment

  The Golden Couple: Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman

  Jimmy Pattison: Canada’s Über-Entrepreneur

  Ted Rogers: The Tycoon Who Never Rested

  Arthur Child: Calgary’s Renaissance Man

  Sir Christopher Ondaatje: The Knight Who Explored Africa

  Seymour Schulich: Champion Philanthropist

  Peter Bronfman: The Bronfman Who Hated Money

  The New Wave: Navjeet Dhillon Goes Gold

  PART 4: Okay, They’re Not Canadian, but They’re Still My Heroes

  Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm

  Diana: The Luminous Life That Defined an Era

  Václav Havel: Politics of the Improbable

  Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR PETER C. NEWMAN

  ALSO BY PETER C. NEWMAN:

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  We’d Rather Be Clark Kent

  HEROES REFLECT THE NATIONS that anoint them—and Canada is no exception. Latin American countries tend to pick dictators who spend most of their time on palace balconies, hectoring befuddled mobs. The British have been reduced to worshipping bedevilled rock stars who eat live bats, and to chasing un-hung derivative traders. To Americans, contemporary heroes tend more toward androgynous constructs like Madonna, drug-chewing baseball batters like Mark McGwire or any number of upwardly nubile beauties with kneel-and-duck love lives, temporarily out on rehab passes. Historically, the Yanks have benefited no end from the hero factory run by Walt Disney, who made demigods out of such frontier reprobates as Davy Crockett and Francis Marion, better known as “the Swamp Fox.”

  Most Canadian heroes—the few who have historically attained and managed to retain that state of grace—share one tragic qualification: they died in brave circumstances.

  There are exceptions, of course, like most of my personal choices, cited in the pages that follow. This breaks the mould of unassuming Canadians, who by habit and temperament do not recognize heroes because that might hint of boasting. Most Canadians regard heroes—or at least the celebration of heroism—as an emotional extravagance, reserved for Americans and other RAH! RAH! species. Those heroic few who can claim that category find themselves in an existential state with a shorter shelf life than boysenberry yogourt. We have little talent for excesses of any kind and little patience for anyone who believes that heroism is worth achieving—except by inadvertence. There exists a vague link between heroes and weather, which remains Canada’s most essential reality. Our frigid climate reflects the selectivity of how we pick our heroes: many are cold, but few are frozen.

  We’re the only country on earth whose citizens dream of being Clark Kent instead of Superman.

  One example: Ottawa has struck our own versions of the Victoria Cross, the ultimate badge that recognizes exceptional military valour. But none have been awarded. This despite the fact that our troops have been engaged in a brutal war for most of eight years and our soldiers have been as brave as, or braver than, American GIs, who inevitably return home in uniforms aglow with Technicolor ribbons, signifying a bouquet of medals. “The true heroes,” wrote the late political pundit Murray Kempton, “are those who die for causes they cannot take quite seriously.” What our brave troops lack in evidence, they make up for in conviction.

  CANADA’S MOST COURAGEOUS historical epics—the magnificent journeys of the voyageurs; the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the St. Roch’s pioneering traverse of the Northwest Passage; the taking of Vimy Ridge in the First World War; the manning of the fighting corvettes that won the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War—these and similar events share a common thread. They exemplified the anonymous bravery and collective endurance of their participants, rather than being remembered for the many individual acts of heroism involved.

  Even the few historical heroes we do recognize have not travelled an easy road to glory. They have been mainly lost explorers, slyly hoping they would discover a shortcut to Cathay’s treasured spices around each river bend. And then there were the stubborn Arctic pioneers who went against nature’s barriers of rock-solid ice, attempting to discover a then-impassable Northwest Passage. Butting pack-ice was not considered to be a truly heroic pastime.

  There have been some curious lapses in our choices. The St. Malo navigator Jacques Cartier, for example, is credited with Canada’s “discovery” and thus widely hailed, but the Genoa merchant-adventurer John Cabot made his landfall in Newfoundland and Cape Breton thirty-seven years earlier. Until the relatively recent celebration of the anniversary of his voyage, the only memorials to Cabot were the scenic trail looping around northern Cape Breton Island and the plaque on a drafty baronial tower on Signal Hill in St. John’s, better known as the location of Guglielmo Marconi’s earliest trans-Atlantic signal transmission. If Cabot had only landed in what is now the United States, he would have been more famous than Christopher Columbus. (The Americans celebrate the Spanish navigator as their discoverer, though he didn’t get close enough to sight North America’s coastline and mistook Cuba for Japan.)

  There is additional irony in the Marconi connection. In 1902 the Laurier government awarded $80,000 to the Italian inventor for his wireless radio station, turning its back on Reginald Aubrey Fessenden from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, who had earlier developed a system of voice transmissions as compared to Marconi’s primitive Morse code messages. Fessenden was hired away by the U.S. Weather Bureau, where he broadcast daily reports from his laboratory at Cobb Island on the Potomac to a receiving station at Arlington, Virginia. He was never recognized during his lifetime in his home country.

  Generals James Wolfe, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and Isaac Brock were more appropriate Canadian heroes, since they died in battles without knowing their outcomes, but the memory of our most daring privateer, Antoine Laumet dit de Lamothe Cadillac, is perpetuated only
by General Motors.

  There is Iittle consensus on the nature of Canadian heroes except that they’re usually not politicians. Even Pierre Trudeau, the magnetic Liberal leader who inspired a generation, lost his crown in 1979, to—guess who? That’s right—Joe Clark, the nerd who never set the world on fire except by accident. It was because the High River politician couldn’t master the addition tables that he was defeated in a Commons budget vote nine months later— and the guy with the red rose in his lapel retrieved high office by default. Most of our public figures are equivocating politicians who promise they’ll take care of us from erection to resurrection. Then dump us between election campaigns, spending their time in office appointing friends to high places and playing footsie with whatever American bigwig happens to be occupying the White House.

  WE DO NOT officially mark the anniversary of our founding father’s birth, Sir John A. Macdonald, but celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday instead—long after that routine occasion has been forgotten in her mother country. A rare exception to our antihero worship is the Group of Seven, who glorified Ontario cottage country by turning it into stunning landscapes; they certainly took on heroic dimensions. Though most Canadians assumed that Tom Thomson fronted the big Seven, it was formed two years after he died. (That didn’t stop him from gaining heroic status, since he drowned under mysterious circumstances at the height of his fame.)

  Our antihero attitude extends even to entertainers. If they’re successful, they can’t be real. Anne Murray, one of our first world-class pop singing stars, saluted by People magazine as the Madonna of Sunnybrook Farm, received this back-handed tribute from the music critic Larry LeBlanc: “If you close your eyes and think of a naked Anne Murray, parts of her always come up airbrushed.”

  The most conspicuously heroic Canadian of recent times was, of course, Terry Fox, the young British Columbia athlete, ravaged by cancer, who in 1980 hobbled halfway between our coasts. His heroic stature was confirmed when he was pinned with the Order of Canada just before he died the following year. (What’s-his-name, who followed Fox’s path while suffering from precisely the same affliction, actually completed his trek and raised $13 million for cancer research. But Steve Fonyo, who didn’t look or behave heroically, has since been relegated to obscurity so chilling that he has remained visible only as a result of a series of petty crimes and misdemeanours.)

  Similarly, no one made much fuss about Dr. Norman Bethune until he was sanctified in his heroic status by dying while on military duty; in 1939, as a member of Mao Tse Tung’s Communist forces, he neglected a cut finger after operating on an infected soldier. Becoming a Canadian hero is a tough gig. Heroes can’t be manufactured. They materialize unbidden, like cats appearing on laps.

  Recognizing heroics is twice as problematic in the Age of Internet, a medium that has more bytes than bite, and has so far cast up only one fin-de-siècle antihero: the pathetic Matt Drudge. Within the new Internet culture, anarchy is always the flavour-of-the-month, with no one in charge of anything and every hacker capable of bringing the www.com world crashing into chaos. Heroism is not a function of Internet, unless you count fighting your way past all those RAMs of Viagra ads that pollute the digital universe.

  Even when Canadians are placed in such potentially instant heroic circumstances as sports competitions, they tend to excuse themselves for winning and hope that with any luck, it would never happen again. In few other countries would a rising tennis star like Marjorie Blackwood set her long-term sights on being “among the top forty tennis players”—instead of going for gold. Quebec’s Olympic champion speed skater Gaétan Boucher once explained why he competed in the American, instead of our, way: “Canadians come to me and say, ‘So, you came in tenth, eh? Well, that’s not too bad.’ But it is. Compare that with the Americans. They do everything to win, not to finish tenth.”

  Heroes require contexts. The bounce and bravado that characterize most countries’ national will prompts their citizens to focus on inordinately courageous, charismatic and resolute figures who fit the heroic mould. These larger-than-life totems become touchstones to live by and maintain a society’s vibrancy. By its example, heroism is a tonic that heals and recharges. The urgency of time on the march has been my taskmaster; the hunt for personal heroes, my self-defeating quest. I picked my personal candidates for this book based on admiring their courage, dedication to country and loyalty to their craft or personal crusades. They remained true to themselves and loved Canada, as I do. They were patriots with balls—a rare combination.

  I consider myself politically neutral; I attack everybody, though I maintain some strong preferences among individuals. I have found that the measure of commitment and integrity a man or woman brings to the political wars is far more significant than the banner under which they travel. Above all, heroes must be doers, go-getters who can turn destiny into history. Garibaldi, de Gaulle, Lincoln, Churchill and Mother Teresa come to mind. (Sir John A. Macdonald’s inclusion is suspect, since he founded this country while he was often falling-down drunk and it’s not clear whether he was following some grand vision or AA’s Twelve Steps.)

  Faced by a massive loss of faith (in politics but not in democracy), Canadians have begun to fashion their own belief systems. In a sub-Arctic update of Pirandello, we’ve become thirty-four million characters in search of an author. Who can maintain heroic status in an age when we are assaulted by such phenomena as round-the-clock rap music, psychic hotlines, “Viagra-Light” for codgers who just want to cuddle, and Lady Gaga?

  Our national trait of modesty has long been explained as the levelling influence on a country whose inhabitants have often been forced to cooperate for survival. But with mainly the uninspiring imperative of outlasting a cold climate to spur us on, and a prime minister whose idea of manifest destiny is to perpetuate his hold on power by not allowing cabinet ministers to sneeze without his permission, we have a long way to go before we can claim heroism as our national characteristic.

  Given the debased nature of our public discourse, Canadians continue to huddle under the polar moon, satisfied with their freedoms-from instead of exploiting their freedoms-to. Becoming

  Canadian requires no conversion to a new faith or allegiance to anything more profound than knowing on your citizenship test that Mackenzie King was not a royal.

  Founded on social compact instead of the U.S. ethic of individual allegiance, Canadian nationhood seems threatened less by the Americans taking over every profitable activity except selling hand-carved Inuit chess sets than by our lack of self-confidence. This country remains fallow ground for heroism. Risk takers—and every hero must be one—cannot play to a public that ranks our pledge to preserve peace, order and good government above the Yanks’ pursuit of hedonism and happiness.

  Chances are that we will fumble past the next millennium by pretending that survival is a glorious option—and talk ourselves into the twenty-second century. That’s hardly a heroic formula. But it helps to make it through the night.

  PART 1

  The Arts

  Margaret Atwood: The Corrugated Madonna

  BECOMING A METAPHOR is never easy, and Margaret Atwood, with her wintry eyes and corrugated hair, tries hard to conceal herself in her books, leaking information in careful bits and smaller morsels, salting literary instinct with mundane detail and publishing the results.

  Her novel Life Before Man is populated with heroines and antiheroes driven by the conviction that they ought to become pivotal characters in their own lives. There are women like Lesje Green (half Lithuanian and three-quarters Jewish), who discovers that risking your life is less important than risking your soul. And men such as Nate Schoenhof, who has given up his law practice to carve toy rocking horses but never quite realizes that the forces that drove his ambitions didn’t come out of the same faucet as those that control his emotions. In typical Atwood fashion, her cast of characters meets its come-uppance, torturing one another with ancestry and recriminations, ultimately drowning
in the existential quicksand that is an Atwood specialty.

  It is in the architecture of her prose that Atwood’s novels achieve their power. She can build an entire page around the difference between a pause and silence, call down revelations as disturbing as thunderclaps, yet seldom pauses to deliver a tangential thought or phrase. Her art is rooted in an ability to step back from herself, calibrate her characters’ emotions, acknowledge the absurdity of life—then create comedy out of hurt or vice versa. She understands that love, however tempting, inevitably casts its partners back into the loneliness that first disposed them to one another—until their isolation becomes intolerable and they are driven back together, more needy than before. “Dreams are not bargains,” she reminds us. “They settle nothing.”

  Even when Atwood occasionally slips into girlish chatter or tries too hard to turn her scenes into symbolic crossword puzzles, her literary lapses become her signature, like uneven threads in a handmade wall hanging. Her writing has always been an exploration of the reality in which we live. In the process, she provides us with a sense of place. “I don’t think Canada is ‘better’ than any other place,” she once told me, “any more than I think Canadian literature is ‘better’; I live in one and read the other for a simple reason—they are mine, with all the sense of territory that implies. Refusing to acknowledge where you come from is an act of amputation. By discovering your place you discover yourself.”

  Life Before Man may not be the great Canadian novel, but it is a significant book which proves, yet again, that Peggy Atwood is one of those rare writers with the natural pitch of a street-corner minstrel and the agitating talent of a born truth teller. All Hail, Atwood.

  —1979

  The Tempestuous Vision of Irving Layton

  ACCORDING TO KEITH SPICER, the essayist and bon savant chosen in the mid-1980s to head the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, our destiny ought to be articulated by poets, not the professors, politicians or hectoring new-wave singers who brought this country to the brink of disintegration. So I found it entirely appropriate to seek out the wit and wisdom of the man Northrop Frye described as “the best English-language poet in Canada”—the self-styled literary colossus, Montreal’s Rabelaisian superman of letters, Irving Layton.