Heroes Page 28

  Fifteen years ago, when he was looking around for something interesting to fill his non-existent spare time, Dhillon discovered Belize, a tiny former British colony bordered by Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Guatemala to the west. It was an English-speaking democracy with little poverty, and still virgin tourist territory. With only 280,000 people, it boasted all the trimmings fit for ex-pats: offshore banks protected by privacy laws, a diving paradise second only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, dozens of Mayan ruin sites and 540 species of wild birds. “We were in Calgary before it was the centre of the universe, and oil was less than $20/barrel,” he says. “We went to Edmonton before the tar sands were a buzz and to Saskatoon before it became Saskaboom. We were also one of the first professional developers into Belize.”

  Dhillon purchased a 2,300-acre island and marketed beach lots, only a few with price tags of under $1 million. Leonardo DiCaprio is a neighbour, and Madonna is said to own a nearby estate. When Dhillon is not skippering his fifty-five-foot yacht into the surf (occasionally crossing over to Cuba), he is negotiating to purchase an 88,000-acre patch of jungle for more development. His original island is now worth well over $100 million. “Belize will be the next St. Bart’s without the Eurotrash,” Dhillon says. “It has the best fishing, the best diving, the best sailing, white sand beaches and the kind of lifestyle we all dream about.”

  The one constant in Dhillon’s cheerful litany is his unstinted praise for the country of his choice. “I owe my success to Canada. No matter how bright I may be,” he confesses, “if I wasn’t in Canada, I wouldn’t have had one-tenth of the success anywhere else in the world. I owe my start to Alberta because it was not a closed shop like some of the other places. If you create a business model there that has a success pattern, you can branch out to other parts of Canada. The rest of the country can learn something from Alberta, which is that the number one economic engine is lower taxes. Let the people be free. Governments cannot create jobs. Governments cannot create anything.”

  IN THIS TIME of cholera, few CEOs have the nerve to express confidence in the future, even about their own companies. A dramatic exception is Dhillon, who spent $25 million buying what he decided was the best bargain on the stock exchanges: shares in his own company. His offering wasn’t altogether successful because a quarter of his shareholders decided to hold on to their investment, even though he was offering a substantial premium of over the listing price.

  About a year before the Great Recession, Dhillon decided to gear up for the next cycle and was one of the few Canadian CEOs who planned for a downturn, though he could not know how serious it would turn out to be. His apartments, often occupied by former house owners whose properties had been repossessed, provided a healthy cash flow ($47 million in 2008), and his assets ranged in worth down from their peak at $625 million, depending on the state of the stock market.

  “Why did the pendulum swing the other way so fast—was there a flaw in the whole system or is it just truly free enterprise and that’s the way it is?” he asked when I interviewed him in a downtown Calgary hotel during the Great Crash. “There’s another aspect that nobody talks about. Is there too much concentration of capital in too few hands—I’m referring to the institutional money in a G8 country like Canada—and that’s why these cracks appeared in our capital markets so suddenly. This is something that somebody should definitely look into. Is the wealth concentrated among, perhaps, fifty portfolio managers in Canada? Maybe there should be ten thousand.”

  Still, Dhillon remains positive about the American financial system compared to Canada’s: “The way the Americans do things is they take direct action, and they’ll flush their bonds, their distressed real estate, their foreclosures, out of the system so quickly, and if this happened in Canada to that extent—which it hasn’t—we would debate it, prolong it, dance, into a prolonged recession. Flushing out the bad assets will create a new generation of billionaires.” Himself included, one assumes.

  Within the Canadian real estate world, his firm remains a mid-size company with a future. Dhillon admits, “I’ve got to be at about $5 or $10 billion before anybody will recognize me,” but he intends to double his holdings in the next five years and he has another advantage. “I’m now learning kundalini, which is a higher level of yoga,” he confides as we part company. “I’m a very spiritual individual. Meditation combined with yoga means I can live forever. Literally.”

  — 2005

  PART 4

  Okay, They’re Not Canadian, but They’re Still My Heroes

  Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm

  WHEN I FIRST emigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s, I used to put myself to sleep listening to the Eaton’s catalogue radio I got for one of my teen birthdays, and it turned out to be the most significant formative influence of my young life. I couldn’t speak much English then, but I soaked up the historical CBC radio documentaries, turning myself into a hip nationalist in the process.

  Late at night, long after my parents thought I was asleep, lying there with the radio turned right down (its dial light removed so there would be no telltale glow), I tuned into other, more exciting worlds that followed the earnest history lessons. The midnight airwaves were filled with remote pickups from ballrooms across North America where the big bands were swinging high, and it was their music that first opened the way for me into the culture of the new world to which I had so lately and so fortunately ventured. When I finally fell asleep after three or four hours of CBC documentaries and the big bands, I would dream about John A. Macdonald, Woody Herman, Mackenzie King, Tommy Dorsey, Wilfrid Laurier and Charlie Barnet—somehow sure that this would always be my country and my music.

  Then one night in the late summer of 1942, I picked up a Mutual Broadcasting Company remote from the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California, and heard Stan Kenton for the first time. The music came pouring out of my little radio like a hailstorm. The sound engulfed me with its azure beauty, the soloists cutting into the static of the airwaves in dissonant outbursts, like voices shouting into the wind. Right then and there, my obsession with Stan Kenton’s music began.

  I have performed it, studied it and listened to it ever since. I had tapes of it along with me during those out-of-body train rides during the Diefenbaker election campaigns; heard it when I was reporting the Israeli wars, crouched in foxholes along the Suez Canal; and I’ve written every word of all my books with the Kenton band coming in loud and clear over my earphones, splitting my head open and making me deaf, but also charging me with energy and providing the musical cadence to my prose.

  Kenton played piano, but the band was his real instrument, and he used it like a playwright with his own versatile stock company. It was Kenton who first moved American music beyond its “polka dots and moonbeams” phase into more meaningful rapport with the changing, fluorescent North American environ ment. He believed that rock music would eventually evolve into jazz because that was the only direction it could grow.

  When Stanley Newcomb Kenton died in 1979, he was a lion in winter—defiant in his going but well beyond his prime.

  During the late forties and early fifties, Kenton’s orchestra was the biggest jazz attraction in the world. Though he kept his sound evolving and his band travelling, Kenton spent the last decade of his life careering around the continent, still making converts but reduced to playing one-night stands at shopping-centre openings, musty nightclubs and other neon snake pits on the North American road.

  He lived for thirty-eight years on a band bus, suffering the vagabond’s indignities of little sleep and bad food, drinking a million cups of tepid coffee and eating all those stale Danishes— dealing with the greedy souls of scruffy promoters while having to prop up musicians trying to dredge new sounds out of exhausted psyches.

  What made his gruelling schedule bearable were the nightly concerts when the old man would bound up on the bandstand, shout “Let’s go!,” strike an imperious triad on the piano and bring in the
trumpet section with a chop of his right elbow. The sound of that music would melt away the years and energize him into a groove that took no enemies.

  What Kenton demanded from his musicians was that they broaden the harmonic, rhythmic and structural boundaries of the band’s arrangements so that each composition would trigger their ruminations. The best of the improvisors would grope for a melodic line, pursue it, then explore and soar with it, like astronauts dangling in the moonlight.

  The Kenton band, which opened the 1941 season at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California, was a hybrid offshoot from the Jimmie Lunceford rhythm machine. But Kenton’s own jazz charts moved quickly to the harmonic values and polyphonic inventions of Bartok, Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud. London’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet choreographed his avant-garde arrangements for Grace Kelly’s wedding, and several French and Italian art films were built around his music. Much of the thematic pseudo-jazz that now serves as background music for avant-garde films and television series can be traced to Kenton’s influence.

  The best of his scores sounded as if they might have been torn out of a late Dostoevsky novel, the bravura fanfares from his ten men of brass counterpointed by the deep-mouthed empathy of the smoothest saxophone section in the business. His piano solos, all slides and whispers, had a smoky, three-o’clock-in-the-morning quality about them. He could transform Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” into a lyrical comment about contemporary social values; his dirge-like version of “Here’s That Rainy Day” became a tone poem, its chord structure as poignant as the touch of lovers’ champagne glasses.

  Kenton’s many critics claimed his concerts were about as spontaneous as a cathedral mass. The satirist Mort Sahl captured the band’s tendency toward the pretentious with the line “When Stan Kenton spills a cup of coffee, he doesn’t say, ‘Somebody help me clean this up.’ He says, ‘Look, I have created a mess!’”

  It certainly wasn’t music to make love by, and it didn’t always swing. “There are many more emotions that can be portrayed and felt in jazz than just swinging,” Kenton once explained to me. “For some reason, the critics haven’t been able to communicate with my band. But I don’t worry about it. Most of that crap I just let go in one eye and out the other.”

  The fundamental intent of jazz is to entertain and recharge the spirit with sensory awareness. No music depends so much on the individual players and their ability to improvise. Ideally, jazz performers are spontaneous, non-repetitive poets expressing themselves through their instruments. But what Kenton demanded of his musicians was that they carry the spirit of his composers’ ideas into their own musical ruminations. That was the essence of his art, and that is why his music will survive.

  But for those of us who followed his career and admired his music, the Kenton sound will never replace the Kenton presence. His passing marked not just the close of a musical era but a kind of death in the family. “We play life,” Louis Armstrong once said of jazz, and that was exactly the affinity we felt with Stan Kenton’s music—its lustre and eloquence, its rage and its unfulfilled promise.

  — 1973

  Diana: The Luminous Life That Defined an Era

  WATCHING THE FUNERAL of Diana, Princess of Wales, I was reminded of a passage by John Masefield, one of England’s great poet laureates, in which he described the attack fleet of the Royal Navy leaving Moudros, on the Greek island of Lemnos, during the First World War. The mighty flotilla of warships was bound for the dramatic invasion of the Turkish seaport of Gallipoli, a defining moment of the conflict. ‘‘They left the harbour very, very slowly; this tumult of cheering lasted a long time,’’ Masefield wrote. ‘‘No one who heard it will ever forget it … and those who were left behind in Mudros trimmed their lamps, knowing that they had been for a little time brought near to the heart of things.’’

  Princess Diana’s funeral had that kind of momentous mood about it. We watched, knowing that what we were seeing was the end of a storybook saga that went terribly wrong, right down to the crashed Mercedes where it ended. Personal grief was what we felt, not the cloying diffidence that most Canadians display for the royals during their stilted Canadian tours.

  This was the burial of a spirited woman who had survived heavy psychological abuse by her unfaithful husband and met life more than halfway. She had fought for such worthy causes as the destruction of land mines, thus turning the publicity she generated to good use. She was the role model that the lesser members of the House of Windsor might have envied—if they possessed the brains or the guts to pursue it. The most photographed individual since the invention of the camera, the Princess of Wales was mourned not as some cold, distant apparition on official platforms, but as a sprightly presence with looks and charm to burn, who refused to become the sacrificial virgin that the Royal Family insisted on recruiting for the ungainly heir to the throne.

  Apart from his unwillingness to maintain his marriage vows, the goofy Prince Charles’s greatest failing was that he understood almost nothing about maintaining the monarchy’s essential mystique. For one thing, he never stopped talking, whether it was about his sexual adventures when he was in the Royal Navy or his erotic fantasies about inhabiting the nether regions of his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. ‘‘Many a thing we’d like to tell him,’’ the British royal watcher Julie Burchill pointedly wrote about Charles in her Guardian column. ‘‘Many a thing he ought to understand. But how do you get him to shut the fuck up and listen to any voice save that of himself and his groupies? How can a man with such huge ears hear so very little?’’

  A good example of Charles’s maladroitness was his pronouncement that modern architecture had done more damage to London’s skyline than the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. “Really?” asked Burchill. “How many children have London architects burned alive?’’

  Charles earned most of the credit for his often awkward and almost always inappropriate behaviour, but he shouldn’t bear the brunt of the blame for being an emotional cripple. I clearly recall seeing a documentary on the Royal Family that showed a youthful Elizabeth II arriving home after a lengthy tour abroad. There was the six-year-old Prince of Wales so excited to see her that he was literally jumping up and down with glee. Yet the Queen welcomed her joyful little boy by solemnly shaking his hand. It takes several lifetimes to survive such an upbringing.

  Diana had obviously read the situation correctly and decided that divorce was essential to her survival. She understood that her power flowed not from regal titles or her marriage to the future king, but from her personal popularity, and that this was transferable to real life outside the palace. It was this connection with reality—Diana’s decision to opt out of the essentially phoney business of being a royal—that mesmerized so many fans when she was alive, and it was the reason why her funeral attracted such astounding throngs of mourners. She had reached into our psyches and allowed us to vicariously enjoy her boundless humanity, her sense of mischief and her magic presence.

  Diana, Princess of Wales’ posthumous glory will not save the British monarchy. The passing of Diana leaves the Queen presiding over a house of horrors that makes the Addams family seem refreshing by comparison. One imagines Her Majesty rolling out of her canopied bed each morning, afraid to turn on the telly in case the BBC might be detailing the unspeakable act a family member has committed with yet another fugitive from the gene pool. Only the Queen Mother, at ninety-seven, still seems emotionally alive and kicking.

  Canadians’ connection with British royalty has always been more spiritual than constitutional. For generations, the British monarchy was an essential touchstone for Canadians: the ultimate expression of how to behave and a symbol of what to believe in. That invisible bond relied on a delicate balance of reciprocal illusions that has now been shattered.

  With the Princess of Wales dead and buried, we are no longer enthralled by the royals. Canadians have demanded nothing of the British monarchy except to keep the faith. Diana’s funeral ended all tha
t. It’s time for Canada to ditch that inbred family of promiscuous mediocrities, still pretending to reign over us.

  — 1997

  Václav Havel: Politics of the Improbable

  I MET HIM only once, but I’ve never forgotten my private moments with Václav Havel, the secular political saint whose personal courage and effective guidance freed Czechoslovakia of its Communist yoke. Our meeting took place in Ottawa in 1990, when he was on his way to Washington to address a joint session of Congress and didn’t have much time. But he was glad to meet someone who could speak Czech, so he wouldn’t have to rely on his interpreter. (She was a tiny Asian woman he kept tucked under his left shoulder, who was so good at her job that as local well wishers talked to him, she would repeat what they said to Havel in Czech, lip-read his answer and reply almost instantaneously in perfect Oxford English.)

  From our brief exchange, I recall only two fragments. ‘‘I’ve learned never to be surprised by anything,’’ he replied when I asked how it felt for a beleaguered playwright to suddenly find himself a famous president. To my question about the secret of politics, he shot back: ‘‘Write your own speeches and express hard truths in a polite way.’’ Then he paused and added: ‘‘Of course, everyone is replaceable.’’