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  HIS THREE BRUSHES with bankcruptcy were real. Not only did he survive to tell the tale, but each time he also persuaded the same lenders to re-open their coffers even wider so he could spend himself dry one more time. That attitude bordered on irresponsibility. But Rogers was a Texas-style entrepreneur, probably the most daring in Canadian business history. During his half-century career, that often meant launching himself on a symbolic corporate bungee jump. Only when he was floating to eternity, did he bother to look back over his shoulder to see if the rope was attached to something solid, which occasionally it was. By his own calculation, he borrowed an astonishing total of $30 billion in bank loans during his career (without a single default) and floated equity financing worth $4.5 billion.

  Rogers had a disturbing habit of being sincere against his better judgment. Asked about his latest electronic vision, he would go into ecstatic detail about how he intended to electronically rewire Toronto, Ontario, Canada—or the universe. His bankers and shareholders read his remarks with a sinking feeling reminiscent of the wonderful put-down that Paul Samuelson, the MIT economist, once directed at his more popular rival, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith. “An unguarded comment by Galbraith,” quipped Samuelson, “can send the Dow off by $2; his guarded utterances send it down $5.”

  In permanent overdrive, Rogers’s idea of reality was whatever he claimed it to be. And he had a point. He had been right before. In 1960, while still a law student at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall, he bought CHFI, the tiny, 940-watt radio station that pioneered the new frequency modulation sound at a time when only 5 percent of Toronto homes had FM receivers.

  The deal set a pattern. For the next four decades, he would spot a new technology with public appeal and charge into it headlong, so that he could exploit the benefits of that first rush of interest. Most of the time it worked fine, except that the arrival of new technologies accelerated in frequency and he would still be trying to pay off the loans he required for jumping into one when another required even greater investments. By 1967 he was in the cable television business and eventually put together the world’s largest cable network, with 2.3 million subscribers, including systems in the U.S. and the U.K. It was much the same story with cellular phones in the 1980s, fibre-optic technology in the 1990s and most spectacularly with iPhones, more recently. Rogers saw himself as chief sponsor and operator of the nation’s electronic highway, travelling along its fibre-optics system into the future. “Only in this way can we compete against satellite transmissions and maintain a strong Canadian presence,” he insisted.

  That he was driven was obvious. That his ambitions might have some limits was less clear. We talked about his future many times, and the anatomy of our discourse was invariably dominated by the obsession with his father. “He died early, when I was five, and I always wanted to be in his tradition, to be as good as he was,” Ted recounted. “The problem is you never feel as if you’ve really done it, because once you feel you have, you advance to another target. “

  To be ahead of your time in Canada is a bit like having leprosy: nobody wants to touch you until you’re either dead or cured—so you take the plunge. Rogers took a similar devil-may-care approach to his own health. He treated his frequent illnesses not as warning signs to slow down but as annoying distractions. When he underwent serious cataract surgery in the early 1980s, Phil Lind, his best friend and chief adviser, recalled seeing company executives gathered around Rogers’ bed, discussing a future cable project while their boss still had his eyes bandaged. His 1992 quadruple bypass surgery drove the medical staff at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to distraction because he was dictating letters before the anaesthetic had properly worn off.

  “Ted has had everything wrong with him there is, but he just keeps beating it back—he’s unsinkable,” said David Peterson, the former Ontario premier who sat on his board. “Everybody has been worried about his health for the last twenty years. He can never relax. He’s the only guy I know who does three things at one time. He can talk to you while he’s writing something, and he’ll be reading something else at the same time. Honest to God, he remembered everything in all three contexts.”

  IT WAS IN AN ANTEBELLUM MANSION on the lush island of New Providence in the azure seas of the Bahamas that I joined Ted and Loretta Rogers in the spring of 1994 to observe, first hand, his attempts to swallow ever tastier bites of Canada’s communications sector. A five-minute golf cart ride from the legendary Lyford Cay Club, established by E.P. Taylor, one of Conrad Black’s predecessors at Argus (later renamed Hollinger Inc.), it provided a safe, tax-free roost for Canadian billionaires on the wing. The Rogers compound resembled nothing so much as a stage set for a colonial governor’s resplendent tropical chancellery. It was complete with elegantly rotating overhead fans, Adam tables, a sunroom done up in white wicker and pink chintz and the compulsory Sheraton dining table with ecru lace mats. The placid tableau exuded the aura of power calmly possessed and habitually exercised.

  But there was nothing tranquil about Rogers himself. When I dropped in that Sunday afternoon, he was in his customary state of doing a barely suppressed St. Vitus’s dance. At that point he was the harassed choreographer of corporate assets worth more than $4 billion and in the midst of his takeover of Maclean Hunter Publishing Ltd., a matter of some concern to me, since I had been a director of Maclean Hunter and editor-in-chief of its flagship magazine, Maclean’s, and remained a substantial shareholder.

  Just before hopping on his private Challenger jet, Ted assured me that there was something special about this latest takeover. “I’m a strong family man,” he told me, explaining there were certain Maclean Hunter strings tugging at his mercenary heart. “Don Hunter [son of M-H’s co-founder] was best man for John Graham [former chairman of Rogers and Ted’s stepfather] when he married my mother,’’ he recalled. “We used to trade ten-year budgets across our adjoining back fences. I talked him into buying CKEY I sold his house to another friend when he bought a new one down the road. We were good pals. We would visit the Hunters’ cottage a number of times every summer.’’

  None of this stopped Ted from acquiring the company (for more than $3 billion) that had weaned me and so many others in the ways of magazine journalism. Despite his professed admiration of M-H’s incumbent management, he expressed a patronizing view of professional managers taking on ownership functions, and the M-H executives soon departed.

  On the subject of shares in his own company, Rogers gleefully pointed out why no freelance capitalist could ever acquire his empire. The fact was that he and his wife, an heiress to the Woolworth fortune and vivacious daughter of Lord Martonmere, the former governor of Bermuda, owned more than 90 percent of the Rogers holding company. (When Ted and Loretta decided to marry, he was so hard up for cash that he bought her engagement and wedding rings at the local Birks, not for cash but in return for running free advertising on his FM station.) Loretta provided a wonderful balance in the relationship. She was a talented amateur painter, and when Ted told her one day, after a visit to her studio, “You’re such a good painter. I wish I were an artist too.” She shot right back, “But you are Ted. You’re one of the great bullshit artists.”

  What Ted accomplished was to move his stock from 70 cents to $20 since his company had gone public in 1979—despite the fact that at that point it had yet to post a profit (with the exception of one year) or pay dividends. “All the company has to do to make money is stop expanding,’’ he told me, pointing out that his stock would be a winner when he died because surpluses would then not be constantly reinvested. (On the day of Ted’s death, his family fortune was estimated to be worth $7 billion, and his stock did indeed inch up slightly.)

  I was impressed, that long-ago day, with Rogers’ concern about Maclean Hunter’s Canadian roots and his vow not to dilute the operation’s significant cultural mandate. He kept the faith. At that point I had several times described the Rogers/ Maclean Hunter standoff as an epic showdown between a Riverboat Gambl
er and a Village Parson. ‘‘I guess that’s true,’’ Rogers quipped just before he showed me the door. “But I don’t know why they keep referring to me as a Village Parson.’’

  THE DEFINING ANECDOTE about Ted Rogers dated back to the time when he was a Big Tory on campus at the University of Toronto—instead of merely looking like one, which he still did at seventy-five. Hyperactive in Conservative politics, he needed to see then-Progressive Conservative party leader John Diefenbaker on a policy issue but couldn’t get an appointment. Finally, granted precisely five minutes in Dief’s parliamentary office, he was squeezed in between the prime minister’s more urgent chores. But when Rogers got in to see him, the Chief spent half the allocated time telling a political joke, then excused himself to use an adjoining bathroom. Realizing that his time was just about up, young Ted barged into the toilet and made his case standing next to a startled but temporarily immobilized prime minister.

  Ted lived up to his income. When Rogers decided that he wanted a tennis court adjoining his stone mansion on posh Frybrook Road in Toronto’s exclusive Forest Hill district, he purchased the house next door (belonging to Neil McKinnon, then chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) and tore it down to make room for the courts. The story going around Forest Hill at the time was that his nervous neighbours were earnestly imploring him, “For God’s sake, don’t take up golf!”

  Every chronicle about Ted concentrated on his father, Edward S. Rogers Sr., the inventor of batteryless radios, and with good reason. One day during a lunch we had at the King Edward Hotel’s Victoria Room, I got him talking about some other ancestors, who sounded at least as fascinating. Within a month he handed me a handwritten document that, among others, identified the original clan member, John Rogers the Elder, who had arrived in England with the Norman Conquest in 1066. One of his offspring was another John Rogers, a canon of Old St. Paul’s in London, who was burned at the stake in 1555, becoming England’s first Protestant martyr. Eighty years later, Thomas Rogers, in a bid for religious freedom, left London for the New World and settled in Connecticut, where he became the richest man in his community. It wasn’t until 1801 that Timothy Rogers, a Quaker seeking to freely practise his religion, came to Canada and settled in what is now Newmarket, north of Toronto. During his grandchildren’s generation, the family divided into two distinct branches. Elias Rogers fathered a clan that became prominent primarily through St. Mary’s Cement, while Samuel Rogers’ family, two generations later, produced the original Edward Rogers, whose ghostly presence would dominate his son’s life.

  Ted’s father, born in 1900, was the first amateur operator in Canada to successfully transmit a radio signal across the Atlantic and later invented the radio tube that made it possible to build AC receiving sets, doing away with bulky and expensive batteries. He founded Rogers Majestic Corporation in the mid-1920s to manufacture the sets and eventually upgraded his ham operation into a commercial station with the call letters CFRB (Canada’s First Rogers Batteryless), which grew to command the country’s largest radio audience. As early as 1931, the elder Rogers was granted the first licence to broadcast experimental television, but he died eight years later from overwork (and a bleeding ulcer) at age thirty-eight, when Ted was only five. (The little boy retained only three mementoes from his father: a ring bearing the call letters CFRB, which he wore daily; his dad’s original tube-operated radio set; and a Valentine’s card.) Young Ted was subsequently chauffeured daily to Upper Canada College, and when he was old enough, his sports car was brought around so he could drive himself home. Paradoxically—since he was a spoiled boy with a scrawny build and sickly disposition—it was at UCC that Ted learned his street smarts. “I used to box at Upper Canada,” he recalled, “and I got knocked out the first year. It took me five years to win my weight. I’ve always been a fighter.”

  AS HE MATURED, Rogers’ strength turned out to be his powers of persuasion, which in a very different context, were described by the American novelist Norman Mailer as part of an essay about Martin Luther King, who shared that talent. “He had a sweet attentive gravity which endeared him to most, for he listened carefully and was responsive when he spoke. He had the presence of a man who would deal with complexity by absorbing its mood and thus resolve its contradictions.” While that was an apt description of Ted’s wooing of bankers and competitors, it did not apply to most dealings with his staff. Phil Lind, Rogers Communications vice-chairman, admitted that he was a demanding, often difficult, boss: “Ted worked all the time so, yeah, you could expect calls from him at odd hours. When John Tory switched from being an executive of Maclean Hunter and joined his friend Ted Rogers in a similar role, he was surprised to find in the office allocated to him a dartboard with a picture of Ted’s face on it—presumably to work off the expected frustrations with his boss. The problem with Ted was his temper. It could flare up at the drop of an extra covenant demanded during loan negotiations or for no good reason at all. His victims did not exclude his favourite banker, the TD’s Robin Korthals. During one particularly desperate loan negotiation, when the latter demanded a particularly onerous covenant from the overextended company, Rogers angrily hurled his keys across the table and shouted, “Here, you run the bloody company then!” And stormed out. Korthals later revealed that in his agitated state, Rogers had thrown him the keys to his convertible Chrysler Le Baron, instead of his business office.

  ALTHOUGH THEY WERE his cash cow, the cable networks required injections of $1 billion a year for constant upgrading. Even their generous cash flow ($2 million a day) couldn’t keep pace with Ted’s ambitions for his cable network. Then, in early 1995, the integrity of the cable operation itself was threatened.

  Running a large company, especially a utility like a major cable network, can be reduced to a series of occasions. And Ted’s worst occasion—the nightmare that invaded his life—was the day he decided to force subscribers to buy a negative option plan. Here was this patriotic, if self-absorbed, good corporate citizen, living like a high-wire acrobat, never using—or even dreaming of using—a net. He prided himself on sublimating his ego for the public good, providing the electronic highway for much of the country, when BANG!—he became Public Enemy Numbah One.

  In the past, Rogers had kept increasing the number of channels he offered and raising his monthly rates accordingly. Few subscribers objected because the only way to get a clear TV picture was to buy his service, which enjoyed a monopoly everywhere he operated. But when he decided to institute his compulsory negative option, automatically billing subscribers an additional $2.65 each month for five new Canadian specialty channels while threatening to remove some popular stations if the extra fee wasn’t paid, subscribers revolted and forced him to back down.

  This time Rogers had gone too far. His company’s move triggered the country’s first cable TV rebellion. Many subscribers cancelled his service and took him to small claims court. His offices were picketed; politicians were cheered for proposing legal challenges that would turn his marketing gimmick into a crime; newspaper editorialists lashed out at “government-sponsored, elitist arrogance.” The country went berserk. Vancouver novelist and playwright John Gray was moved to comment that Canadians, normally docile even when “faced with declining medical services, separatists in Quebec, high unemployment, a seventy-cent dollar and the loss of the cod fishery, stood up, dug in their heels and drew a line in the sand over their right to receive CNN and The Sports Network on their basic cable.” “What I found interesting about the protest,” he went on, “was that these expressions of collective rage are usually reserved for governments. In a way, the tone of the protests revealed that to many people, the cable television monopolies have become a kind of government. The demonstrations were an admission on the part of consumers that somebody up there could meddle with their feed. If they didn’t like what was offered, all they could do was squawk. “

  “The fury of the cable protest,” wrote Maclean’s editor Robert Lewis (who later became a Roge
rs executive), “serves as a warning for establishments everywhere, whether corporate or political. The people of Canada have been in a grumpy mood, starting with the rejection of the Charlottetown Accord in the 1992. The same volatility was evident in the rout of the Conservative Government in 1993 and the reaction to the cable companies. It is an era when people do not trust their leaders or, generally, the country’s elite.”

  “I was stunned,” Rogers confessed when it was all over. “Now I know how those turbot must have felt swimming toward the Spanish fish boats. From now on, our customers will determine what level of service each one of them will get.” It was a small skirmish in a long war, but there was little doubt who had won, and it wasn’t Ted.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING of the mountaineer in Rogers’ countenance, something about his eyes that had the permanent poached look of living on the edge of an abyss, and looking down too often. He was in so many ways a false extrovert—as transparent as the dye jobs of his hair, which turned an embarrassing apricot as he grew older. More characteristically, he was remote and private, an unquiet spirit who never made peace with himself. He was terminally baffled by his inability to find some form of exemption from the laws of cause and effect that taunted him, taking the edge off his triumphs.

  If I could choose a final epitaph for that irreplaceable man, it would run something like this: When George Leigh Mallory, the first man to climb Mount Everest, was asked why he wanted to conquer the great mountain in 1924, he shrugged and famously replied, “Because it is there.” Nearly seventy years later, on September 29, 1988, when Stacey Allison became the first American woman to scale the great peak and was asked the same question, she smiled and shot back, “Because I’m here.”