Heroes Page 11

  She lost her temper easily, once threw an ashtray at Senator Keith Davey (even though he was one of her most ardent supporters) and resigned from the Pearson cabinet (for two days at a time) on at least a dozen occasions. Her legislative achievements were considerable, but her behaviour in office often shocked the fastidious and discomfited the established. “She was very democratic,” recalled George Loranger, one of her former aides. “She treated the office boy and her deputy minister exactly alike—she constantly gave them hell.”

  The novels she wrote were her final passion, but she just couldn’t get the sex scenes right. “When you’re engaged in a sexual act,” she would explain, “no one’s there getting a bird’s eye view. When I was trying to describe it, I kept giggling.” It was typical that when she was awarded the Order of Canada on her deathbed, as a farewell gesture by a nation that had rewarded her contributions with remarkable stinginess, Judy’s main reaction was to bitch about some of the people she thought were fools who had been similarly decorated.

  She died with the raw courage and primitive dignity that exemplified her life, deciding late on the afternoon of Friday, October 24, 1980, “Okay, no more medication. That’s it.”

  The reason Judy’s death touched so many Canadians is that so few celebrities manage to preserve their real selves inside their public masks. Judy LaMarsh endowed each of her many careers with energy, intellect and commitment. To the end, she never for a minute gave up her essential, gutsy humanity.

  — 1980

  PART 3

  Business

  Peter Munk: The Man for All Seasons

  IAN DELANEY, Fidel Castro’s favourite capitalist, won his corporate spurs working for Peter Munk. He was for a time second in command of Munk’s formidable empire as president and chief executive officer of Horsham Corporation, its central holding and management arm.

  He got to know his boss well. “There aren’t too many people I’ve worked for who I am prepared to admit have altered my view of business,” he acknowledges, “but Peter Munk is certainly one of them. His style, his energy, his inability to ever stay down when he’s been knocked over, the brilliant way he articulates objectives—both internally and externally—and changes them if necessary. He is absolutely undaunted by the size and scope of any project. He thinks on a scale that would stagger most people. His forbearance and his generosity, his judgment, his …”

  Delaney goes on citing Munk’s stellar qualities as if he were reciting some sort of pagan catechism about a long-departed hero or saint.

  “But … ,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah, well, of course, he fired me,” Delaney confesses. “He was the controlling shareholder, and I was the chief executive officer, and I wanted to have things my way. Obviously, we were incompatible. So he fired me.”

  Hasn’t that made Delaney bitter?

  “Frankly,” he says, “I would have fired me a year and a half before he did.”

  A small taste of the Munk magic.

  Simone Signoret, the French film star, once observed that trying to explain the secrets of acting was impossible. “You shouldn’t try to explain the mystery inside you,” she mused. “You either have it or you don’t.”

  Peter Munk has it. It’s the perfect analogy, since Munk is an actor. He has a dozen faces. His expression seldom changes, but his appearance shifts with his moods. One moment he looks as confused as an usher at a shotgun wedding, so uncertain of his cause that he stutters and stumbles. Ten seconds later, he has the magisterial bearing of a pope presuming worship. Same guy; different mood. Those who know him most intimately—all three of them—swear that he is a false extrovert, aggressive and demonstrative when the occasion requires visible strength. But more often, he is remote and private, a man whose countenance betrays the fact that he has travelled some lonely terrains in his time. He has been at the top and he has been at the bottom—and has successfully confronted and absorbed both experiences.

  Out of that catharsis has emerged the hard core of the man’s character. It took most of three decades for Munk to acquire the self-esteem that now fuels his ventures that have included the realized ambition to own more of the world’s gold mines and, at one time, urban real estate than anybody before him, and if possible, after him.

  His motives aren’t as innocent or as complicated as making money. It’s restitution, redemption and revenge that drive him—the three great Rs in Peter Munk’s life. It’s about giving the finger to all those snotty guys who never waved goodbye as he snuck away to his twelve-year exile in the South Pacific after the Clairtone fiasco back in 1967—and didn’t welcome him back with a ticker parade down Bay Street.

  That’s the essence of the Peter Munk story. All else is detail.

  “If personality is a series of unbroken, successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about his best known antagonist, Jay Gatsby, “some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten miles away.” Peter Munk can claim similar credentials. He, too, is possessed by a heightened sensitivity that endows him with the power of second sight so he can see through people and events to unexpected realities.

  Munk is not physically beautiful, but he is daring—and that makes him charismatic. When he gets excited he becomes an emotional hang glider, talking so fast that you can hardly follow his thoughts. Yet when he’s sharing hopes or secrets, he dramatically lowers his voice, as if he were a Cold War spy confiding the address of his East Berlin safe house.

  Spending time with him is exhilarating but exhausting. Munk doesn’t treat visitors merely as listeners. They must turn themselves into co-conspirators in whatever crusade is occupying his attention or their stay is brief. Those callers who come bearing new deals or supportive messages are rewarded with rapt attention. He welcomes old friends with a smile you could auction at Sotheby’s.

  The once widely circulated comic strip Li’l Abner featured a sad character named Joe Btfsplk. Whenever Joe appeared, trouble was sure to follow. His gloomy approach to life poisoned the mood of anyone unfortunate enough to be in his presence. To signify that misanthropic outlook, Al Capp, the strip’s creator, always painted Joe with a black rain cloud hovering over his head. If there were a comic-strip creation with the opposite characteristics, its inspiration would be Peter Munk. He creates an intense, yet festive, atmosphere wherever he goes. The ingredients that allow Munk to light up a room with the grace of his presence are not easy to isolate. Maybe it’s his air of ingenuousness, those beseeching eyes and mock sighs, the way he rolls words and favourite phrases around his tongue as if they were chocolate- dipped maraschinos.

  MUNK’S MESSIANIC SIDE is seldom on public display. But at least twice a year at the annual meetings of his two companies, when he rises to address his shareholders, he lets go. His appearance is preceded by executives from Barrick (his gold-mining company) who flood the room with so many upbeat statistics that by the time Munk stands up to speak, the shareholders seem to be holding themselves back from shaking their butts, waving their hands in the air and shouting, “Hallelujah!” At the 1996 Barrick annual meeting Munk made news by unreservedly praising the record of Chilean general Augusto Pinochet for his economic reforms, glossing over his bloody human rights record (his assassins murdered at least three hundred thousand innocent people) and the millions he stole from his government’s treasury. Munk is unrepentant. After not very convincingly explaining to the crowd how truly humble all this success has made him feel, Munk confesses, as he did at the 1992 annual meeting, “Barrick is my life. It’s something I created, I conceived, I conceptualized, I lived. It’s a miracle not to be repeated. It will go down in the annals of business history.”

  Within twenty months of that oration, Munk had diversified by moving into real estate, acquiring the near-bankrupt property empire of Peter Bronfman’s Trizec Corporation and turning it into a bonanza. “The goddamn real estate business,�
� he complained in pretend anger. “It’s the graveyard of the human ego.”

  Since Munk bought Trizec and turned it into TrizecHahn, he expanded its downtown holdings in North America by acquiring properties worth US$3 billion. The company bought such high-profile structures as Toronto’s CN Tower; Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood (which was turned into a $200 million entertainment centre); Desert Passage on the Las Vegas Strip; the WestEnd City Center in Hungary, next to Budapest’s main train station; and Chicago’s mighty Sears Tower, the world’s second-tallest office building.

  “Euphoria is so common in real estate, because the more you win, the bigger bets you place,” explains Munk, sounding appropriately euphoric. “But I don’t see this as a gamble. Gambling is when you roll the dice and double your assets if you win—and if you don’t win, the banks and shareholders lose. But I don’t confuse gambling with doing business. Gambling is when you roll the dice; business is when you control the dice. When I decided to buy Trizec, there wasn’t a Canadian real estate company that could raise a buck. Half my board, led by Jim Tory, threatened to walk out on me when I suggested doing it, because they thought real estate was dead forever after the Campeau and Reichmann disasters. We injected some serious money and had almost unlimited access to capital in that low-interest-rate environment.

  “Why am I not staying only in gold?” he demands. “We’re still the world’s most profitable gold company, but gold, by definition, is a limited commodity. We’ve built up a $14 billion mining company in a business that has total market capitalization of $110 billion—that’s less than Microsoft. In real estate, at $10 billion, we haven’t scratched the surface. It’s the world’s biggest business. It’s been around since the days of Cleopatra. At $100 billion, you’re a factor.”

  Whatever he does, Munk will move TrizecHahn’s emphasis outside his home continent: “Why would I fight for the North American market, which is overbuilt and overmailed, with nearly zero growth of people’s disposable incomes, especially at a time of rapidly rising Internet and catalogue sales? I’m going to concentrate on Prague, Budapest, London and other great European cities where the populations—and car ownership— are doubling every four years and the kids have spent their lives sucking on a giant hind tit, not able to buy what they see on TV. That’s changing. Now they want to visit Planet Hollywood, buy Nikes and Big Macs, shop at the Gap and Ralph Lauren. Where are they going to go? Those old dusty streets where you can’t even park a car? Most of these historic cities are ossified, remaining just like they were fifty years ago. We’re the only ones who can put it all together, turn shopping into an entertainment and vice versa. I come from an international background, speak other languages and, thank God, haven’t been spoiled yet … Anyway, don’t let me get carried away.” (I won’t.)

  Since he can spout with equal, volcanic enthusiasm on gold and real estate, is he in the gold business or the real estate business? Neither. Peter Munk’s business is business. His personality is the opposite of Donald Trump’s—he is introspective, moody, intellectual, something of a dreamer in the land of hard sell. Yet the two men have one thing in common: both are obsessed by the art of the deal. Munk has been deeply involved in at least four unrelated lines of work: consumer electronics, hotel ownership, gold mining and real estate. While the detailed technical knowledge required in each industry only bored him, he has, with one or two exceptions, negotiated deals that have taken his competitors’ breath away. He operates at the very top levels of the international business world with the skill of a champion swordsman, a Zorro who knows precisely when to feint and when to thrust.

  He has a deserved reputation for lightning megadeals that turn industries on their heads, but he is really surprisingly conservative, only appearing to be bold. Every step of each corporate foray is planned to the last detail. And if he does make a mistake, as he did with Clairtone by allowing governments to control his destiny, he never makes it again. “I look at every business like skiing a very steep new hill,” he says. “The key is to look down, laugh and tell yourself it’s just like any other hill. You use the same techniques. The moment you panic—the moment you think, Oh God, this is broken powder, there are rocks—you aren’t going to make it. I don’t make a deal a minute; I have long-term objectives. I do business deals, not deals per se. Some people are deal junkies—they carry fifteen pieces of paper around, each with a different proposition. I never do that. I know where I want to go because I’m convinced that I’m right.”

  Such certainty is based not on phoney self-confidence that towers over his tallest buildings, but on his record of buying when an industry, such as gold mining or commercial real estate, is bottoming out, then surfing the crest of its comeback. “I’m not one of these guys with a super IQ,” he says. “I don’t sit around working out mathematical formulas. I’m not a workaholic. I never miss four weeks’ skiing in the winter or going to my island on Georgian Bay in the summer. I love women. I love good food. I love great wine. I love good friends. I am so focused, so consumed, so excited about what I do. I love my family. I love my wife.” (Don’t you envy such simple Men of God who have gone uptown?)

  PETER MET HIS WIFE, the former Melanie Bosanquet, while skiing in Gstaad, where she operated a boutique in the Palace Hotel. He had gone in to buy something for his then-wife, Linda, and took Melanie out for a drink. They lived together for a few years and were married in 1973. It’s a happy partnership. “Melanie,” he exults, “is a super girl. Great wife. Fun. Good partner. Likeable. Worldly. Not pretentious. Warm. Thoughtful. She is very important to me.” They have two daughters, Cheyne and Natalie; Peter also had two children—Anthony and Nina—with his former wife, Linda.

  Munk lives well but not as ostentatiously as his friend the late Sir James Goldsmith, who owned six houses, including an estate called Cuixmala on the west coast of Mexico, sixteen kilometres north of Careyes. It consisted of eighteen thousand acres of jungle and wetlands—filled with wild zebras, monkeys and big cats, as well as four hundred crocodiles—plus two thousand acres, enclosed with barbed wire, where the main house was situated. He employed a hundred servants and at least the same number of gardeners. The main house had a golden dome and enough rooms to comfortably accommodate fifty guests, or a hundred in a pinch. That’s the kind of luxury Munk could afford if he wanted to. Munk’s attitude to money is as nonchalant as that of most inordinately wealthy individuals. “I’m worth more than $100 million, but that doesn’t particularly turn me on,” he says. “To me, money is like the points you win in tennis. If I hadn’t earned that first $5 million long ago, I probably wouldn’t feel that way, but I did that when my Southern Pacific Hotel chain went public thirty years ago, and I haven’t changed my lifestyle since.”

  The year he received $32 million in personal compensation from Barrick (because he cashed in some of his stock options), Munk was attacked by an angry shareholder at the company’s annual meeting, who thought it was “wicked and wrong.” Munk paused for thirty seconds before he responded. “Well, I’ll tell you what I think,” he shot back. “I did make $32 million, and I deserved it, and here’s the reason why: I’ve created $12 billion worth of value, and so from that I took a small piece.” Then he had an afterthought. “You know,” he said, “as I think about it, what this country needs is more Peter Munks, not less.” The objecting shareholder sat down, and the room burst into prolonged applause.

  Munk maintains a house (with tennis court and pool) in Toronto’s Forest Hill Village; a farm in the Caledon Hills; an apartment in Paris; and a chalet at Klosters, Switzerland, as well as the island on Georgian Bay. This is his favourite sanctuary. It’s an old, many-times-expanded cottage (originally built for $9,000) that now covers most of his private island, bought for $1,200 in 1958. “That’s been my real link to Canada,” he says. But it’s at Klosters that he comes into his own. One of the world’s premier ski resorts, which draws both social and mountain climbers, Klosters’ nearby Parsenn region has the world’s most dangerous alp
ine ski runs. One of the Parsenn runs is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s longest (at fourteen kilometres) and toughest ski slope. It is his daredevil approach to the most hazardous of these suicide trails that prompts some of his friends to inquire, after a few drinks, why he is trying so hard to kill himself. “I do take risks,” he admits. “It’s one way of fooling myself that I possess eternal youth. We all like to believe that we’re forever in our thirties, whether we chase girls—which I don’t do anymore because I am happily married—or chase mountains. Skiing is the only thing in life I do well, apart from business. I can still powerski with any twenty-five-year-old. I can get through any trees, can handle anything. So can Melanie. I know I could have a major accident, but life is full of risks. That’s the exciting part. After a day on the slopes, I feel elevated, youthful, sexually invigorated, physically rejuvenated, intellectually ready to tackle anything.”

  Klosters is the winter residence of the kings of Sweden and Norway, as well as Prince Charles, who has become a Munk intimate. Munk subsidized a hardcover publication of Charles’s collection of his own watercolours and offered to hire David Wynne-Morgan of Hill and Knowlton, one of England’s most astute public relations experts, to help the bumbling prince regain public confidence, but the prince chose to flounder on his own.

  In 1993, after the episode in which Charles was overheard in a tapped telephone conversation, telling his beloved Camilla that he wanted to be reincarnated as her Tampax, Munk spent four days with the depressed heir to the throne. “I was very sad,” he recalls. “The man was being hounded. If my cleaning lady had her phoned tapped and her conversation recorded and given to the newspapers, the whole world would back her up in claiming that she had a right to privacy and no one, but no one, could invade her fundamental rights. Prince Charles wasn’t even given the chance to defend himself because he’s unable to sue. He tried six different ways but wasn’t allowed by Buckingham Palace. I know the conversation was quite shocking. Okay, but I asked this of a hundred friends of mine and people in Klosters: you name me a normal man who, at one time or another, when he is totally assured of the privacy of a single one-on-one affair, in a moment of passion, did not say things which, taken out of context and put into a newspaper, would be highly embarrassing. Why, then, are we so hypocritical in the late twentieth century, when we’re protecting every goddamn minority group, imagined or otherwise, but Prince Charles, we don’t give him the same kind of courtesy? I did everything to try and build up his ego, and I kept on telling him that he represents an institution in whose name people died or sacrificed their lives and ultimately, because of those sacrifices, defeated Hitler. I mean, you’ve got to stand back and think of those concepts. I tried really hard. He became so emotional, smashed the table with his fists, spilled our wine. Then I couriered him a long letter, and he sent me back a handwritten note six pages long. But nothing worked. He can’t recapture people’s confidence until he regains his self-confidence.”