Heroes Read online

  “A few weeks later, I got this letter from Downing Street saying that they were going to recommend me for a knighthood and would I accept? I wrote back and said I’d love to, but I wanted to make it very clear that I will not give up my Canadian citizenship and left it at that. Nothing happened. So I was living in this question mark world because I knew about the Conrad situation and Chrétien was still prime minister of Canada.”

  On June 14, 2003, Ondaatje’s name appeared on the list of new knighthoods. From that moment on, he was officially a knight but still a Canadian. That same evening, the Westons invited the Ondaatjes to Fort Belvedere, the estate they lease near Windsor Castle, where Galen was throwing a gala to celebrate his wife, Hilary’s, sixtieth birthday. It was attended by three hundred inter- national celebrities, including the queen and Prince Philip. “After dinner Valda and I got up, and the queen made her way to where we were standing,” Ondaatje recalled. “Before I could greet Her Majesty, she grabbed both of my hands and asked if I had heard from the prime minister of Canada. I said that I hadn’t. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘let me tell you, he’s certainly been in touch with me and let me tell you my advice to you is to let me handle this my way.”

  “They let it happen for me, and I feel more Canadian than ever,” Sir Christopher concluded. “Canada made me. It’s an incredibly bloody great country.”

  That story hasn’t been told before, but it says as much about Ondaatje’s rising reputation as it does about Black’s downfall. Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) seventy-one years ago, Christopher Ondaatje has become known as “The English Patron,” a play on his more famous younger brother Michael’s award-winning novel, The English Patient. “Most people in the financial business seek power, and sometimes it brings them down,” he told me. “I always wanted money and I was good at finance, but I didn’t want power because it’s an ego trip.”

  AS I LEFT his flat, I noticed a prose fragment in one of the half-dozen books he has written that seemed to sum up the man and his dreams: “The world of tomorrow will change and as if tomorrow were a foreign land, we must set out in search of it. No man is totally confined by his own time, and no man can move into the future without understanding the past. The future—as always—can only be grasped by those who are ready for it.”

  Ondaatje spends most of his time between expeditions giving money away. His Canadian causes include Massey College at the University of Toronto, Pearson College on Vancouver Island, Ontario’s Lakefield College School, Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and Nova Scotia’s Chester Playhouse, among many others. In London he has helped finance a wing named after him at the National Portrait Gallery and a theatre at the Royal Geographical Society, while providing $35 million to establish a foundation for the development of learning and international understanding.

  Since he is a Conservative, his most unusual gift was $4.5 million he gave to the British Labour party in 2000. “Tony Blair is a middle-of-the-road conservative in my opinion,” he maintained. “I thought he was worth backing because he was the right person at the right time. He is leading the Labour party but has kept the unions out. How much more right wing do you want me to be? The last person I liked was Margaret Thatcher.”

  A tall, rangy man with a mercurial personality, Ondaatje is one of those rare birds who follows his own flight plan and knows exactly where he is heading. No wonder the empire city’s chattering classes have adopted Sir Christopher as their model Canuck.

  Seymour Schulich: Champion Philanthropist

  “I’VE BECOME SOMETHING of a psychiatrist to half a dozen rich guys who have come to me for advice,” confides Seymour Schulich, the Montreal-born mining magnate who has donated more than $15 million and is in the process of giving away another $10 million. “The people who consult me have made good money in the investment industry and are having thoughts about doing something with it. I mean, any fool can give his money away, but the trick is to get some leverage for it. That means forming partnerships with governments, other donors and the leaders of the receiving institutions.”

  The easygoing Schulich outlined his donation philosophy at his unpretentious downtown Toronto office. “Everybody wants their life to have some meaning,” he says. “The big mistake people make is trying to fund something by themselves. If it’s significant, you won’t have enough money to do that, no matter who you are. Even John D. Rockefeller couldn’t. What you must do is become a catalyst by providing the large lead gift for a capital campaign which has matching elements. That’s how you get that all-important multiplier effect.”

  Schulich, who grew up poor and Jewish in Montreal, struck it rich in Nevada. A McGill University science graduate, he personally has never discovered an ounce of any mineral but has instead cut himself into the action through royalty arrangements and now shares ownership in some of the region’s richest mines, including royalties from Peter Munk’s Goldstrike property. His company, Franco-Nevada Mining, has been one of the biggest price gainers on the Toronto Stock Exchange in the past decade. Schulich, who keeps a six-shooter in his desk as a gag, has lived in the same suburban Toronto bungalow for twenty-two years with his one and only wife. Yes, he has driven a Cadillac, but it was ten years old when he traded it in for a Ford. “I’ve never learned how to spend money on myself,” he confesses. “It makes me very uncomfortable.”

  Schulich made news in 1995 when he donated $15 million to establish a business school named after him at Toronto’s York University. It has since grown to be the largest and most prestigious graduate business school in the country, led by Dean Dezso Horvath, a high-octane Hungarian with two PhDs who never lets up and has won Schulich’s admiration because they share the same motto: both men would rather ask for forgiveness than for permission.

  “We train five thousand managers every year and graduate one in three of Ontario’s MBAs,” he says. “And yet we have the oldest and most outdated facility of all the major business schools in the country. It’s great to have scholarship, but if your students are studying in tents, it’s not too good, especially during those Canadian winters. So I’m putting up a lead donation of $5 million to put up a new school building. But it’s not a naming gift. I’m hoping to attract someone who will put up a matching amount to have his name on the building.”

  Schulich’s next move is his donation of another $5 million to upgrade the coronary unit at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. It’s an ideal example of his “multiplier” theory at work. The Ontario government has already promised $7 million, and a public campaign is expected to raise another $14 million. “What I saw in Sunnybrook,” says he, “is the same thing I recognized at York. Both institutions have lots of room to expand. Sunnybrook isn’t like the downtown hospitals, all hemmed in. Like York, it also has a great leader, chief cardiologist Dr. Brian Gilbert, who can take the project forward and make it significant beyond its geographical boundaries. We’ll end up with 152,000 square feet of a world-class facility devoted to cardiac care. It’s going to be called the Schulich Heart Centre, the last damn thing I’m putting my name on.”

  Most of the money now flowing into Toronto’s health and educational facilities originated in the Nevada gold fields. Peter Munk, who has sponsored a major heart institute at the Toronto Hospital and the Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, made most of his fortune digging up Nevada’s rich Carlin Trend, as did Joe Rotman, the generous patron of the University of Toronto’s newly revived School of Management. “After Munk built a heart centre, I felt every guy in the gold business should have one,” Schulich deadpans. “There’s a lot of Nevada money running around Toronto.

  “A hundred years from now, it won’t matter how much money you had in the bank, what kind of car you drove or what kind of house you lived in. But the world may be a better place because you helped some people achieve a better education and improved health care.”

  When he is giving money away, an activity that currently occupies much of his energy and most of his thoughts, Schulich
always recalls a marvellous French saying, which, translated, means: “You can’t tow a safe behind your hearse.”

  —1999

  Peter Bronfman: The Bronfman Who Hated Money

  THE MOST SECRETIVE member of the Bronfman family, the Canadian distilling moguls who once earned the title of being “the Rothschilds of the New World,” walked alone. His persona was charged with corrosive sensibilities and retroactive grievances that marked him as an outcast, even in the Baroque gallery of this neurotic clan. There was about him none of the loose amiability of his cousin Edgar, who walked into a room with a gracefully endearing lope, or of his cousin Charles, whose nourishing quest for certitude charmed one and all.

  More than a little miscast as a Bronfman, Peter was so sensitive that after his father’s house burned down in the summer of 1977, he spent the next six months trying to recover from what his doctor diagnosed as a “sympathy low-grade fever”— even though he’d spent some of the unhappiest times of his life growing up in that cold Victorian pile next to patriarch Sam Bronfman’s Belvedere Palace. To be a Bronfman was never easy. ‘‘I grew up in a castle on a hill on Belvedere Avenue in Montreal’s posh Westmount district, and I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. I had no friends and no real relationship with my parents,’’ he would recall over an espresso we shared. ‘‘I had a nurse for five years when I was very young, and when we happened to meet in Ireland much later when I was twenty-eight, we just fell into one another’s arms and hugged and hugged.’’

  Peter’s fatalistic view of himself and life in general was summed up in this fragment of an essay written about the nihilistic turmoil of the mid-sixties by the New York journalist Gay Talese, which was Peter’s favourite literary selection: “One must be seen to exist, for now there is no other proof. There is no longer an identity in craft, only in self-promotion. There are no acts, only scenes. Peace marches are masquerades. News is staged for camera crews. Critics dance with their eyes closed. Nothing is happening. It is a meaningless moment in history.”

  Peter’s personal theology held that the ability to marvel at life was a gift of heaven and that such enchantment was difficult to achieve and even more difficult to share. A loner with a million complexes, his greatest joy was walking by himself through the fluorescent desolation of city streets in late-night rain, investigating the radiant miscellanies along the way. “Peter is rather antisocial,” noted Jacques Courtois, his Montreal lawyer. “He enjoys the company of a few personal friends but shuns large receptions or gatherings; he has a strong dislike of ties and jackets, let alone dressing in black tie.”

  Except for being close to his children, Peter was an urban hermit. Despite numerous invitations, he managed to visit cousin Charles, who lived less than five minutes up the Westmount hillside, no more than twice a year. He saw cousin Phyllis, whose house was twenty minutes away in the other direction, three times during the last fifteen years. “It might be better if I were more outgoing, a little more gregarious,” he admitted. Peter’s solitary ways sometimes got him into trouble. Among the many other assets in the $2 billion business empire over which he and his brother, Edward, presided was sole ownership of the Canadiens hockey team and the Montreal Forum. During a home game against the Bruins on May 7, 1977, Bob Wilson, a Boston radio commentator, was sitting high up in the press gondola with his technician when a person he later described as “a tall lanky fellow, very leisurely dressed, with open shirt and sports slacks” plunked himself down between them. “The guy didn’t say anything, just sat down and calmly watched the game, gesturing to show his approbation or disappointment. I was looking for a way of telling him to get the hell out of there, that he had no business in the press box, but the many commercials kept me constantly ‘on mike.’ He left near the end of the first period before I could say a word, so I asked the usher on duty if he knew who this impudent guy was, acting as if he owned the place.”

  “He does,” the guard informed the embarrassed commentator. When he returned to watch the second period, Peter explained to Wilson that he could relax during games only by sitting next to somebody with an open microphone, so he couldn’t yell even when he felt like it. occasionally, he was so overcome by emotion that he had to leave his seat to watch the game on the colour TV in the directors’ lounge.

  NOW AND THEN Peter’s determination not to display emotions in public turned in on itself. He could be sardonic in his observations of the privacies of others. This streak in his makeup was probably best documented in a description he wrote in his diary about a flight home from Israel in September of 1976:

  Sitting in El Al’s first-class section, the plane about to take off from Tel Aviv to New York on a recent morning, I was beside a middle-aged Israeli woman who informed me that she and her husband were flying free, since he was an El Al employee. No sooner had I recovered from this mild hurt than she followed up with, “My husband is over there, sitting beside Mr. Eban.” Congratulating her on his good fortune, I learned that she was thankful she wasn’t sitting there, since she couldn’t possibly imagine what she might say to the great man, who had been Israel’s foreign minister.

  Just then, an El Al steward came by and informed her that, unfortunately, she and her husband would have to move into economy to make room for two paying first-class customers who had just come aboard. Turning to me, he asked if I wouldn’t mind sitting beside Mr. Eban, as he didn’t want to separate the newly arrived couple. I asked if he would consider having Mr. Eban move back to the now-vacant seat beside me, since he was sitting up front near the clatter of the bar and the traffic that soon would be flowing to and from the washroom. Understandably, the steward was reluctant to ask Mr. Eban to move, so I picked up my briefcase and seated myself beside him.

  Extending my hand, I introduced myself, thinking the name might possibly remind Mr. Eban of the time in 1967 when, shortly after the Six-Day War, he spent a few hours in my parents ‘ home in Montreal prior to addressing a large audience on the Israeli-Arab conflict then being hotly debated at the UN. On that occasion, he had mumbled some phrase in reply to my attempt to exchange a few words, his gaze remaining fixed midway between the top of a small Sisley painting and the ceiling. I remember thinking at the time that I perhaps shouldn’t have intruded on the thoughts of a man at stage centre of world attention. All of this flashed through my mind as I extended my hand, which he shook, mumbling a phrase very similar in tone and content to that which I had heard some nine years before. The smile, too, was pretty much of the same vintage.

  Realizing that Mr. Eban was undoubtedly preoccupied with matters of significance—though not necessarily as critical as during the 1967 situation—I determined to let him go back to leafing through the dozen or so Hebrew and English newspapers on his lap. When breakfast was served and, some hours later, luncheon as well, I commented briefly about the meals being offered and was met inevitably with the same diplomatic smile that seemed to be his trademark. I assumed that this packaged response to queries and approaches from the unwashed masses was for the purpose of discouraging discussion so that he could be alone with his thoughts. His system was certainly effective. I only bothered him one more time to ask for a few sheets of paper from the scratch pad that he kept nearby for intermittent jottings, so that I could write down these words about how we had lunched together.

  Peter Bronfman published none of his writings, but there existed a slim, mimeographed volume simply entitled Poems 1969–1970. The Cocktail Party graphically screamed out his hatred of empty social occasions:

  Hello! The bar’s over there!

  Good-bye! Going so soon?

  Gotta go home and throw up!

  Terrific! Keep well!

  ALTHOUGH PETER WAS an active chairman of the Jewish General Hospital, he frequently found himself battling the group think of Montreal’s Jewish community. When Arthur Pascal, the unofficial dean of Quebec Jewry, accused him of ignoring the collective views of the community, Peter exploded. “Listen, I’ve heard that bullshit
all my life. It means nothing. People who are exposed to it at the age of twenty instead of five, they may take it seriously. But I don’t care and won’t let you get away with pulling that stuff on me!”

  Peter was separated from his first wife, Diane Feldman, in 1973, and three years later married Theodora Reitsma, a vivacious Dutch blonde with faintly sucked-in cheeks who seemed constantly to be sheltering a smile, turned like a sunflower toward the sun. His children were educated in outstanding private schools, but Peter lived in astonishing modesty. Until he moved into a downtown Montreal apartment, his main residence was a $90,000 townhouse on Trafalgar Place, seventy-five feet outside Westmount’s eastern boundaries. He drove an ancient brown Mercury, and his only real luxury was a valuable art collection that included canvases by Chagall, Lawren Harris and Alfred Pellan, as well as a carload of exquisite pieces of Eskimo sculpture. (The carvings so dominated the house that Jack Pierce, the president of Ranger Oil and a good friend of Peter, once commented that the Bronfman living room reminded him of “the duty-free shop at Gander airport.”)

  Peter hated to spend money. Edper’s chief Toronto link was Trevor Eyton, a canny lawyer with Tory Tory DesLauriers & Binnington, who tended to whisper his legal advice and in the summertime kept a telescope in his office permanently trained on Olympic Island in Toronto Harbour so he could watch his daughters taking sailing lessons at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. He vividly remembered relaxing with Peter in a Vancouver hotel room when Peter took his shoes off. Eyton noticed not only that he had a hole in one sock, but also that the socks had previously been darned in several places. During a train trip Peter and I took (by coach) on the CNR’s Rapido from Montreal to Toronto, when I bought a cheese sandwich, Peter suggested we should share it. When his wife, Dora, ordered half a lobster as an appetizer for dinner at Toronto’s Hyatt Regency Hotel (of which he owned 37 percent), Peter became so nervous that he started fidgeting with his wedding ring and finally dropped it with a loud, symbolic clang on the pewter serving plate.