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— 5 — “You’re Taking Too Much Goddamn Time,” ¹ 1962–1964

Journalists become ordinary when they decide that the job isn’t hard....

All his life, [Peter] had the courage, and the wisdom, to be scared.

— Robert Fulford in Edna Barker, ed., Remembering Peter Gzowski: A Book of Tributes

So successful was Peter as the Quebec editor that upon his return to Toronto the magazine’s editor, Ken Lefolii, who had replaced Blair Fraser in July 1962, appointed Peter managing editor. At twenty-eight he was the youngest person to reach that important position. According to Harry Bruce, he was often brutal and sarcastic. When the magazine’s journalists sat around a long table trading story ideas, the red-rimmed eyes of the managing editor remained expressionless. As more and more ideas were thrown out for discussion, Peter would silently push his hand through “his lank hair” and look sideways. A “shadow of distaste would cross his pock-marked face.” Nevertheless, like most journalists who ever worked for Peter, Bruce deemed the new managing editor the best he ever knew, for he created a “yeasty office spirit” that brought out the best in writers.²

One of Peter’s tasks was to solicit articles. On December 16, 1962, he wrote a newsy letter to Mordecai Richler. Peter wanted to hire Richler to do a regular television column for Maclean’s, perhaps at $150 per piece, with a guarantee of twenty columns per year. Maclean’s managing editor also thought he would be able to buy several of Richler’s feature articles. Richler talked to Peter about going to Warsaw to do a story, and Peter encouraged him, for in that city lived several members of the Canadian Communist Party, including Fred Rose. The article might also deal with the intellectual and artistic life in Warsaw, Peter suggested, and he urged Richler to “come down pretty hard” on it. Too much of Canada’s writing, Peter added, was the product of three men: Hugh MacLennan, Bruce Hutchison, and Pierre Berton. Canadian letters needed Richler’s hard-hitting style. Meantime, he confessed to Richler that, after only a month back in Toronto, the city was getting him down. He would much prefer the Laurentian Mountains or anywhere else where he could write what he wanted to write and not have to spend his day purchasing pencils and “goosing the secretaries” at Maclean’s.³

Richler was considering a move to Toronto. Finding a suitable home might be a problem, Peter warned, especially in downtown Toronto, though he and Jennie had managed to rent a three-storey house at 16 Washington Avenue, a short street running between Spadina Avenue and Huron Street, one block south of Bloor. All twenty-one houses on the street were owned by a man described by Peter as “one old kook” who was using several of them for storage. Once the “kook” discovered that Peter was a member of an old Toronto family (Peter must have told him!), and that he could afford to pay $175 per month for rent, he cleared out number 16.⁴ Unfortunately for Jennie, the “son of a bitch” (Peter’s phrase) failed to keep his promise to fix up the house, and Jennie had to scrape off old wallpaper. The “unhandiest man in town,” as Peter described himself to Richler, was free to explore the area, which included the rooftop bar at the Park Plaza. He concluded his letter to Richler by announcing that it was time to go home. To help Jennie mind the children? No, to watch a football game. He sounds selfish, but Peter wasn’t untypical of husbands, fathers, and bosses of the period.

Peter’s year in Montreal had left a lasting impression. Although he was back in Toronto, his mind and heart remained in Canada’s only cosmopolitan city at that time. His first feature article after his return was called “How I Nearly Learned to Ski in a Week,” published in December 1962. The article reported on his attempt to learn to ski at Mont Tremblant. The first time that Peter fell, his sunglasses and, even worse, his cigarettes went skittering down the slope. Nevertheless, his powers of observation were keen. Young women wore stretch pants so tight that “if the girl has a dime in her hip pocket, you could tell if it was heads or tails.” The French translation of the article, “Comment j’ai failli apprendre à faire du ski,” appeared in Le Magazine Maclean in January 1963.

On April 6, 1963, Maclean’s published Peter’s “Young Canadiens Speak Their Mind.” To research the article, Peter had returned to Montreal where he observed a panel discussion chaired by Gérard Pelletier. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-thirties, the panellists were all federalists who demanded changes in the Canadian political system. Businssman Robert Demers predicted that French would soon become the language of business in Quebec. On English Canadians, journalist Jean David announced that he would be “bored to death to be an English Canadian.” Madeleine Gobeil, a close friend of Pierre Trudeau, asserted that les Anglais were really not “good conversationalists.”

In “Conversations with Quebec’s Revolutionaries,” an examination of the province’s youthful and angry nationalists and separatists (Maclean’s, September 7, 1963), Peter expressed surprise at the increased intensity of Quebec nationalism. Men such as Jean Lesage, Gérard Pelletier, René Lévesque, Léon Dion, and André Laurendeau, who had unleashed the Quiet Revolution only a few years earlier, were losing control. “It is now an inescapable fact,” Peter wrote, “that we are headed toward separation into two countries.” Accompanying the article was a second and shorter piece, unattributed but probably written by Peter, on the subject of five members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), all charged with setting off bombs. The five — Gabriel Hudon, a designer; Yves Labonté, a salesman; Eugénio Pilote, a proofreader; and students Alain Brouillard and Mario Bachand — argued that violence was the only way to liberate Quebec.⁵ As usual Peter had sensed the temper of the times and had written about it honestly.

Maclean’s devoted an issue, that of November 2, 1963, to the question of Quebec nationalism and independence. Peter’s article, “This Is the True Strength of Separatism,” was based on the first-ever poll on the subject.⁶ The previous summer he had helped to conduct the survey of a thousand people, 13 percent of whom had opted for independence, either through a referendum or by nominating separatist candidates in the next provincial election.⁷ When asked which provincial politician most favoured separatism, most of those polled named René Lévesque, minister of natural resources in the Lesage government.

Peter also contributed short pieces to Maclean’s on topics such as reactions in Quebec against the Quiet Revolution, especially against the anticlericalism promoted by Cité Libre and Mouvement laïque de langue française. His last short piece in the magazine appeared on October 17, 1964. In “Open Letter to French-Canadian Nationalists,” Peter described his frustration at the ongoing political crisis in Canada. He was no longer so sympathetic, he admitted, to the constant stridency in Quebec. After all, he pointed out, French Canada had already won its revolution, and English Canada was now paying attention. On the other hand, French Canada seemed unwilling to listen to English Canada. “Virtually anything you can do in Quebec,” Peter concluded, “short of killing people, can be done with the sympathy of at least a sizeable body of English Canadian opinion.”⁸ The open letter was translated and published in Le Magazine Maclean in November 1964. No one, least of all Peter, could have predicted that six years later those four words, “short of killing people,” would take on new meaning.

As well as Quebec, Peter was interested in its neighbour, Labrador. In the November 2, 1963, issue of Maclean’s, Peter’s article “New Soft Life on the Last Frontier” compared the old and new Labrador. In Wabush, which was only three years old, Peter could enjoy an extra-dry martini on the rocks, snails, pea soup, beef tenderloin with mushrooms, fresh bread, and Mexican corn, all washed down by a bottle of Beaujolais. Wabush’s malls, restaurants, and new houses made it no less comfortable, Peter thought, than the suburbs of any Canadian city. He and photographer Don Newlands stayed at the Sir Wilfred Grenfell Hotel where the hostess was “curvy” and the waitresses “pretty.” The standard of living among construction men and miners was much better than it had been a decade earlier when Peter had worked on the railway from Sept-Îles into Labrador. In 1963, when Peter visited the company cafeteria, he discovered an appealing menu of fried chicken legs, corn on the cob, fresh bread, and ice cream. Nevertheless, the working men still had to put up with monotony and isolation and long days of work. “Life in the camps of the north,” Peter wrote, “has some things in common with the life of Ivan Denisovich,” the Siberian prisoner in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s newly translated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

In the next issue, that of November 16, Peter wrote about the Quebec, North Shore, and Labrador Railway, in “Journey Down the Railway That Couldn’t Be Built.” Once Don Newlands and Peter had concluded their visit to Wabush, they travelled south from Labrador City to Sept-Îles on the railway Peter had helped to build. En route, he talked to the dining-car steward, a North Shore old-timer, who recalled the boom years of Sept-Îles in the 1950s when the construction companies found it next to impossible to keep women working in cafeterias and offices because prostitution paid so well. It was a sentimental journey, and Peter marvelled at the convenience of travelling southward at fifty miles per hour. “What a pleasure to be able to stretch back on a railway carriage seat,” he noted in his best lyrical, romantic style, “and enjoy the scenery of a country whose beauty I had forgotten, first in the monotony and discomfort of camp life and then in the city years between.”

Peter also continued to be keenly interested in the Canadian West, particularly Saskatchewan, where the NDP government of Woodrow Lloyd, successor to Premier Tommy Douglas, was defeated in the spring of 1964. Soon thereafter, Peter was in Regina to examine reasons for the defeat of a party that had pioneered state-supported hospital insurance and Medicare, and that in the 1940s and 1950s had created what was arguably the best-trained bureaucracy in Canada. Peter’s “Report from the Changing Heartland of Canada,” published in Maclean’s on July 25, 1964, remains one of the most insightful articles on the province during the two decades from 1944, when Douglas was first elected premier, to 1964, when Ross Thatcher’s Liberals gained power. Peter met most of the important architects of the CCF revolution, including Tommy McLeod, who, along with Tommy Shoyama,⁹ had helped to make the Douglas government the most innovative of its day. In 1956, in order to investigate agriculture and rural life, sociologist W.B. Baker had set up a royal commission, which, according to Peter, was the model for the federal government’s Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism, established in 1963. Peter admitted that, over time, the superb bureaucracy had grown too large, and voters had begun to feel that the right thing was being done for them “whether they liked it or not.”

When Peter visited Saskatchewan in 1964, he was surprised to discover cocktail bars that hadn’t existed in 1957, and he dined at three restaurants in Saskatoon and Regina that ranked with the best, in his estimation, in Toronto.¹⁰ In a drugstore, he bought two copies of Fanny Hill, a novel that was banned in Ontario. He liked the handsome new Regina headquarters of the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, a building whose curvilinear form was an architectural wonder then, and he marvelled at the Wascana project, which, under the direction of internationally acclaimed landscape architect Minoru Yamasaki, would become, Peter predicted, an international showpiece. On Wascana Park, and so much else, Peter was more than astute. On a flat plain, Yamasaki was creating one of Canada’s most attractive urban parks.

Natives of the Prairies drew Peter’s attention, too. His Maclean’s editorial on July 6, 1963, “Last Chance to Head Off a Showdown with the Canadian Indian,” was a preamble to his feature in the same issue on discrimination and violence against Natives in Saskatchewan. In May 1963, a Saulteaux named Allan Thomas had been murdered in a village north of North Battleford. Most of the murderers were ordinary farmers and businessmen. “This is Canada’s Alabama,” Peter contended, and trouble was brewing. “If Canada can afford to spend $70 million on foreign aid,” he argued, “we can afford to spend a small fraction more to prevent giving to the West and to ourselves another list of Birminghams and Little Rocks.”¹¹ Once again, Peter was on the cutting edge, and it would take more than a few years for journalists and academics to catch up to him.

On May 2, 1964, under the title “Portrait of a Beautiful Segregationist,” Peter wrote the first of a two-part feature on the Native activist Kahn-Tineta Horn, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old model who worked in Montreal and lived on the Caughnawaga Reserve near that city. Horn was one of the first leaders to emerge from the Native community, and Peter was one of the first journalists to write about her. In speeches she scoffed at the so-called superiority of Western civilization. In “How Kahn-Tineta Horn Became an Indian,” the second part of the article, published in the May 16, 1964, issue, Peter sketched a history of the Caughnawaga Mohawks and how the Horn family fitted into that chronicle.¹²

In March 1957, when Peter was heading for Moose Jaw, Cathy Breslin had claimed that he could regale an audience by describing a trip to the dry cleaners. In Maclean’s of April 20, 1963, under the pseudonym Peter N. Allison, the names of his two eldest children, Peter entertained his readers by writing about a catalogue. His “Life in Eaton’s Catalogue, or How I Wrestled My Uncle Ernest in My Medium-Weight Thermal Underwear” dealt with a catalogue that was first published in 1884 and that by the 1960s had grown to 40 million copies per annum, resulting in about fifty thousand orders each weekday. Peter loved the “slick, glossy handsomeness of the cover” and even the “sweet, and somehow secure” smell of a new catalogue. In these catalogues, Peter glimpsed Canadian identity: since their inception, Eaton’s catalogues had always reflected “our way of life,” and the products that they advertised, Peter argued, had helped to build Canada.

He concluded with a flight of fancy. Peter imagined that Jennie and he, along with his Uncle Ernest, were trapped at exactly 8:18 a.m. in Eatonia where they were doomed to play the role of catalogue models, including the two men who were dressed in thermal underwear, their right hands locked together in a test of strength. His fiction was a satire on the catalogue and the department store, both of which created the illusion that customers, if they ordered the items worn by beautiful models, could also achieve perfection and happiness. Even the images on the catalogue’s television screens, Peter pointed out, were too perfect, as if someone had airbrushed the horizontal lines of black-and-white television sets during the 1960s. “It is still 8:18 as I write this and address it to Eaton’s,” he concluded. “What I want them to tell me is: How do I get out of here?” ¹³ Although the imaginative world of Eatonia was told with humour, the ending strongly suggests Peter’s discomfort with the increasingly materialistic world of the 1960s.

In magazine writing, and later during his radio career, Peter could move adeptly from the light-hearted to the serious. A month after his Eatonia article, he turned to the weighty business of crime and murder. On May 18, 1963, his topic was Hal Banks, “Canada’s Waterfront Warlord.” It was a brave article, for Banks, a notorious union leader, was known to employ violent tactics to maintain his iron grip on the Seafarers’ International Union, and wasn’t above knocking off an unsympathetic journalist or two. Under the title “Hal Banks, le héros des marins, un homme à battre?” the article appeared in Le Magazine Maclean in July 1963.

The Maclean’s issue of September 21, 1963, saw Peter return to a lighter topic when his notes on the subject of the third annual Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, were published under the title “Where the Boys and Girls Go.” The fifteen thousand residents of Orillia were overwhelmed by the twenty thousand fans, including motorcyclists wearing black jackets, who had descended on the town made famous by Stephen Leacock. “This year’s festival was a blast, man,” Peter commented.

Two months later Peter was in a restaurant in Toronto when a waiter brought the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He returned home to watch the terrible news with Jennie. When Peter C. returned from kindergarten, he found his father weeping. “I wonder if he remembers that that was the first time he saw his father weep,” Peter later mused in a radio essay on This Country in the Morning on the tenth anniversary of Kennedy’s death. “And I wonder if he can remember how I tried to explain to him why I was doing that.... I guess there are two things that I hope for the son who saw me weep that day,” Peter added. “The first is that he will understand why. And the second is that if something should happen to him, the way it happened to all of us, that he will weep, too, and survive.”¹⁴ Peter rarely revealed his tender, more vulnerable side in public.

In 1964, Peter’s topics ranged from the national anthem to spectator sports. He argued, in an editorial on the search for a Canadian national anthem and a distinctive flag, against political correctness in old Canadian songs such as “The Maple Leaf Forever,” whose lyrics were demeaning to French Canada. “Trying to rewrite one old song,” he wrote, “is scarcely different from trying to rewrite the history from which it sprang.” He thought that “O Canada” would do as a national anthem, provided that only the music was played, which would give sports fans a chance “to give silent thanks that we live in a land where everyone can pay homage to God and country the way he wants to.”¹⁵

Spectator sports, from hockey to horse racing, sprinting, boxing, soccer, and lacrosse, were never far from Peter’s mind. In 1964 he wrote about a dozen short pieces for the sports section of Maclean’s. On February 22, 1964, his topic was racing: Northern Dancer was a promising, young racehorse in the stable of E.P. Taylor; and Bruce Kidd had just been beaten by an Australian at Maple Leaf Gardens.¹⁶ For the April 4, 1964, issue, Peter wrote about watching the world championship boxing match between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay on large-screen television. Peter wasn’t amused. “Like wrestling,” he wrote, “boxing will undoubtedly go on for a while, but I for one no longer care who is supposed to be the champ.” The second part of the article dealt with the Vancouver sprinter, Harry Jerome, who, after several injuries and disappointments, was training for the Tokyo Olympics later in 1964. On July 25, 1964, Peter’s topic was Canadian soccer — its rise in the Toronto of the 1880s, and its decline after the Second World War when Anglo-Saxon fans deserted the game. On August 22, he wrote about lacrosse in “How the Indians Are Leading One More Comeback for Our First National Sport.” He predicted, correctly, that the sport would gradually attract more players and fans.

Peter was almost constantly in touch by cable and letter with Mordecai Richler. In early December 1963, he welcomed Richler’s promise of a piece on highbrow clichés. Peter promised to include it in the “Argument” section of the yellows, and to pay Richler the standard $200 for any short piece. Two weeks later Peter announced to Richler that Jennie was pregnant with their fourth child. Before folding the letter, he stamped it with his special insignia, which he may have used, in the style of Ralph Allen, when condemning inferior work by his staff. The stamp read horse shit.¹⁷

On February 4, 1964, Peter told Richler that his piece on highbrow clichés probably wasn’t, after all, right for Maclean’s, though the final decision would be made by Ken Lefolii.¹⁸ Peter answered a series of questions posed by Richler on the subject of prizes given for first novels, and also those awarded by the Quebec government for literature and political science. He assured Richler that he, Peter, was “not an active homsexual” [sic] but he refused to speculate on Nathan Cohen, Robert Fulford, Ken Lefolii, and Jack McClelland.¹⁹

Peter also kept in touch with W.O. Mitchell, one-time fiction editor of Maclean’s and a continuing freelance contributor. In early March 1964, while visiting Toronto, W.O met Peter at an upscale bar. On March 11, 1964, once back in High River, Mitchell wrote to Peter asking if he could recall what story ideas were discussed. Mitchell was pretty certain that one of the pieces was to be entitled “How to Stop Smoking by Really Trying.” The novelist promised to stay off martinis while writing the pieces.²⁰

Clashes between owners and managers of magazines and newspapers, on the one hand, and editors and journalists on the other, occur from time to time. In late July 1964, claiming editorial interference, editor Ken Lefolii resigned from Maclean’s. The dispute had been simmering for months, and Peter claimed it was one of his articles that had first riled management the previous March.²¹ In “Maple Leaf Money Machine,” published in Maclean’s on March 21, 1964, Peter had quoted coach “Punch” Imlach. Instead of printing fucking, one of the coach’s favourite words, Peter and Ken Lefolii had replaced the first four letters with a long dash. When Gerry Brander, the magazine’s publisher, objected, Peter and Lefolii agreed on “— —,” which fooled no one. In June 1964, when Ronald McEachern was hired as Maclean-Hunter’s vice-president, tensions increased. McEachern and Brander decided not to publish an article by Harry Bruce about how a group of journalists had tried to circumvent a Toronto newspaper strike by printing, on their own, the three newspapers affected by the strike. McEachern pulled the article without consulting either Bruce or Lefolii.

Lefolii told the Globe and Mail that the cancellation was the last straw. No longer, Lefolii argued, was quality the most important criterion. Bruce’s article was the third to be disputed.²² According to Bruce today, his article may have been used by McEachern as an excuse to force the resignation of Lefolii, who had a way of rubbing management the wrong way. Although Lefolii knew that Floyd Chalmers, chairman of Maclean-Hunter Publishing Company Limited, preferred to be addressed as “Mr. Chalmers,” Lefolii always addressed him as just plain “Floyd.”

Nor was tact one of McEachern’s strong points. On July 31, during a meeting with Bruce, Fulford, and Gzowski, as well as David Lewis Stein and Barbara Moon, McEachern called the yellow pages, of which Bruce was the editor, mere “filler.” “I don’t write fillers,” the usually quiet Bruce blurted out, much to the surprise of Peter and the other journalists at the table.²³ At the same meeting Chalmers announced that, in order to attract more subscribers and advertising revenue, the company had no option but to please the reading public as well as the business community. “We are not running a Canada Council,” lectured Chalmers. In other words, Maclean-Hunter couldn’t continue to subsidize the money-losing magazine.

The dispute simmered into August. During the height of the crisis, McEachern, a short, stocky man with hair slicked back, and short, quick steps, tore out of Lefolii’s office. He turned left, then left again, straight into the women’s washroom. Wheeling around, he made a left turn and finally found the door to the stairs.²⁴

“On the Friday before Labour Day, 1964,” Peter wrote in The Private Voice, after he, Fulford, Moon, Stein, and Bruce had handed in letters of resignation, they ordered “a jeroboam”²⁵ of champagne. In Ralph Allen’s old office, they posed for a camera, drank the contents of the bottle, smashed their glasses, and staggered up University Avenue to the roof bar of the Park Plaza.²⁶

The imbroglio at Maclean’s drew the attention of Edmund Wilson, the eminent American literary critic, thanks to a meeting, chance or otherwise, in the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza with Peter. In O Canada, his book on Canadian culture, published in 1965, Wilson chastised management and noted that “Mr. Gzowski and his associates succeeded in transforming Maclean’s … into an outstanding journalistic achievement.”²⁷

The following October, Peter embellished his own role in the mass resignation. In Canadian Forum, his article “The Time the Schick Hit the Fan and Other Adventures at Maclean’s” claimed that his piece about Punch Imlach the previous March had mentioned briefly that “Sixteen Leafs … recently lined up for a certain razor-blade ad — and got their fifty dollars each without even having to shave with one blade.” He hadn’t named the razor-blade company in question, but it was pretty obvious that it was Schick. Although the company didn’t advertise in Maclean’s, the article had put it off, and it threatened that it might never buy ad space in the magazine.

In the Canadian Forum article, Peter praised Ken Lefolii for never soliciting “the unadulterated support of advertisers.”²⁸ Peter liked to think that his own resignation kept him aloof from corporate interference. Thus he preserved the mythology that he was a “competitive, self-contained actor who was quite immune to the contaminations of commercial, political, or even personal pressure.” (Of course, how seriously dare one take the Canadian Forum piece? A few years later, in February 1970, when he testified before the Davey Commission on the mass media in Canada, Peter informed Senator Keith Davey that the Canadian Forum article had been meant in jest.)²⁹ In reality, Peter himself always followed the unspoken rule that a magazine, or later, his early radio shows, had to respect its corporate sponsors. All magazines, and all CBC Radio shows up to the mid-1970s, needed as much advertising revenue as they could find. Years later, Peter welcomed sponsorship money for his charity golf tournaments.

In December 1965, when he addressed journalism students at Memorial University in St. John’s, Peter slammed both management interference and journalistic hypocrisy. Since publishers were, he claimed, members of the Canadian Establishment, Maclean’s would never criticize Sam Bronfman, for fear of alienating Seagram’s. Any sportswriter, he told them, who wrote the truth about Carl Brewer’s resignation from the Maple Leafs earlier that year — that he “hates the guts of ‘Punch’ Imlach” — would never be allowed back into the hockey club’s dressing room.³⁰ A few days later Peter joined Robert Fulford at the annual conference of Canadian University Press (CUP) at the University of Alberta. No, he told reporters, he wouldn’t speak about his resignation. However, he did lash out at reporters for self-censorship and at the power of the press. Even Peter C. Newman and Blair Fraser, he told reporters, had become too intimate with the Ottawa establishment. The headline over the article, as published in the Toronto Star, announced “Press Said Confused, Trivial,”³¹ which sounds like Peter’s own words.

Peter’s last feature in Maclean’s in 1964, though written no doubt before the mass resignation, was published on September 19, after Borden Spears was appointed executive director, a position that incorporated Lefolii’s and Gzowski’s old positions of editor and managing editor respectively. Peter’s subject was golf. To write “Arnie Recruits His Canadian Army,” Peter had returned to Montreal in late July to watch Arnold Palmer compete in the Canadian Open. During a pre-game practice, Peter joined “Arnie’s Army,” Palmer’s numerous fans who followed the golfer from hole to hole. There were so many movie cameras, Peter complained, that they sounded “like a flight of swallows on a summer evening.” He was vexed that one of those home movie cameras had captured an image of him. By 1964, Palmer had become such a mythological figure that Peter had difficulty realizing he was watching the flesh-and-blood player. Even when Palmer failed to win the Open that year, he graciously signed autographs. Palmer was Peter’s ideal sportsman — skillful and magnanimous.

Unlike Palmer, Peter never learned to lose magnanimously. His competitiveness was so intense, Harry Bruce recalled shortly after Peter’s death, that it verged on the offensive. Peter simply had to win, Bruce explained, whether at soccer, tennis, shooting baskets, liar’s poker at the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza, handball, snooker, chess, Chinese checkers, Monopoly, poker, bridge, and all other card games. He smelled of ambition, as well as of cigarettes and brandy.³²

Peter loved to win bar games played with Dennis Murphy, Susan Musgrave, Diana LeBlanc, and others. “Gzowski (or perhaps his estate) still owes me $320 for several backgammon victories at speakeasies around Toronto,” Murphy once recalled. “He hated to lose and proved it by seldom paying debts.” Peter had a baseball board game at the family home. Because he knew the game inside out, he always trounced Dennis, who grew to loathe the game.³³

Each year staff members at Maclean-Hunter enjoyed a golf tournament. Rather than playing against par, players were paired off in match play, a bit like a tennis tournament. The event was staged over several weeks. One year, one of Peter’s opponents was John Millyard, an editor of one of Maclean-Hunter’s trade magazines. During the first nine holes on a course north of Toronto, Millyard had the edge. Peter wasn’t amused, but he was certain to catch up and win.

On the eleventh or twelfth hole Peter hooked his ball into trees to the left of the fairway. The ball was lost, so Peter, following the rules of the game, hit a provisional tee shot. Now Peter was behind on this hole.³⁴ In silence the two men walked up the fairway to hit their next shots. Millyard addressed the ball for his second shot.

“You’re taking too much goddamn time!” Peter shouted.

Millyard made another good shot. Peter hit his provisional ball fairly well down the fairway. The two men were now lying Millyard two, Gzowski four.

Peter disappeared into the woods. Was nature calling? A few minutes later he emerged, waving a ball he claimed to be the lost one. He announced that he was going to take a drop outside the woods for one stroke and play the lost ball instead of the provisional ball. Millyard knew that if the original ball had indeed been found, the rules for match play clearly stated that the ball had to be played from the point where it had come to rest, deep inside the woods.

“Now I’m lying three not four,” Peter announced.

“But you’ve already played the provisional ball for your fourth shot,” Millyard protested. “You can’t revert to the first ball. The game has rules, you know.”

Peter’s face turned crimson. Once again he swore at Millyard, who quickly decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valour. So he let Peter break the rule. Peter lost, anyway. There was no post-game drink.

Always the novelist or short-story writer, a couple of years later, in one of his sports pieces in Saturday Night, Peter fictionalized the match. “Peter” was working for “a large company” at the time. “All employees who played golf,” he wrote, “had the day off in the spring, and the sixteen low medalists in that round then entered on a summer-long series of elimination matches.” Suddenly, Peter’s imagination kicked in. He had made it to the finals. John Millyard became “Good Old Charlie,” a “nice fellow” from the accounting department. After fourteen holes, Peter had him four down. “All I had to do, in other words, was tie one of the remaining holes and I was the winner, the champion.” Peter could taste victory. He imagined himself “humbly accepting the President’s Trophy.” However, on the nineteenth hole, Charlie sank a long putt to win the match.³⁵ In the fictionalized version, Peter’s language is pure. Throughout the remainder of the summer, “Jennie,” another character in the story, often awoke in the middle of the night to find “Peter” pantomiming his swing in front of a bedroom mirror. At other times “Jennie” was awakened by Peter’s tossing and writhing as he mumbled, “Miss it, Charlie, miss it, Charlie.”

“Oh, well,” the real John Millyard reflected years later, “journalists are all — and I include myself — grave robbers and vultures who swallow experiences and regurgitate them in another form for fun and profit.”³⁶

Ironically, a few years later, Peter included “Ten Rules for Playing Golf” in Peter Gzowski’s Book About This Country in the Morning. A good player never talks when others are hitting; nor does he cheat, for “golf is a game of honour.” And by the way, Peter advised, a golfer should always enjoy himself.

On July 8, 1964, Harry Bruce turned thirty, and five days later, so did Peter. To celebrate what they called FOTT, the Festival of Turning Thirty, they began their toasts on the eighth and drank booze “harder than ever for five days in a row.”³⁷ Also in 1964, the brilliant photographer Lutz Dille captured a more sober Peter in an intimate moment with his daughter, Alison, who peers over a banister at her father as he reaches up to touch her (see page 106). Peter’s affection is palpable. It was a tenderness that he rarely, if ever, revealed in the corridors and offices of that impregnable concrete building at 481 University Avenue, the headquarters of the Maclean-Hunter empire.