Читать книгу Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge - Tom Bower - Страница 7

FLOPPED IN HIS ARMCHAIR, regularly refilling his glass with neat vodka, George Black sermonised to his thirty-one-year-old younger son Conrad throughout the night of 29 June 1976. Despite the appearance of civility presented by the chintz and the solid furniture in the grand house in the Bridle Path, Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhood, the resentful sixty-seven-year-old regularly vented his bitterness on the subject of wealth and power. Frustrated by isolation and depression, the ailing recluse had astutely accumulated substantial capital from his business activities, but his withdrawn personality and habits had deprived him of any influence, with one exception: his son Conrad.

Over the years, his father’s lectures on history, power and finance had inculcated in Conrad similar feelings about supremacy and manipulation. Systematically, George had dragooned the youthful Conrad to utilise his photographic memory by giving boastful theatrical performances at social occasions. With little prompting, the precocious boy had paraded his expertise on Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle and other political giants. Similarly, if the opportunity arose, audiences were amazed by his encyclopaedic recitations of battleships, armies and warfare stretching back to the eighteenth century. Without hesitation, as a party piece the teenager could recite the names of all the ships, armies and generals engaged in the most obscure European battles, or of successive prime ministers and monarchs over two centuries, or, if allowed, repeat keynote speeches of statesmen long dead. ‘Reel off the fifteen leading ships in the Spanish Armada,’ George Black would order, ‘and the names of all the admirals in the First World War.’ His son’s memory was infallible. Late into the night, amid a mist of tobacco smoke, those tutorials and memory games about world history infected the loner’s mind with the importance of defying the vulnerability of human weakness.

Stifled by depression, George Black failed to appreciate the burden he was inflicting upon his son. The father offered his children no physical affection, and his wife Jean, always known as ‘Betty’, was similarly cold and remote. In that loveless atmosphere, Conrad compensated for his emotional insecurity by revelling in the lives of historic heroes. At eight, he had been smitten by the memoirs of General de Gaulle, the underdog who rebelled against unpopularity and overcame adversity to become a national hero. Defiance was a trait Conrad Black was encouraged to admire by his father, an outsider cruelly spurned by lesser men.

Ever since George Black had been unceremoniously dismissed in 1958 from the Argus Corporation, a sprawling Canadian conglomerate, his resentment had festered. During their all-night sessions, Conrad Black was imbued with a mission to exact revenge upon those responsible for humiliating his father. He knew them well, because, despite his reclusiveness, George Black had introduced his son to a remarkably privileged lifestyle.

Few could have imagined the transformation of George Black over the previous thirty-six years. In 1940 the tall, articulate, aggressive twenty-nine-year-old accountant was managing a factory in Montreal producing propellers for Allied war planes. With pride, he recounted how his company was the only Canadian government-owned manufacturer during the war to earn a profit. But there was also frustration. The graduate from Winnipeg, a provincial outpost, damned his work as unglamorous and his colleagues as ‘a hopeless bunch’.¹ In July 1944 his future appeared lacklustre, until the banker Edward P. Taylor, also from the Canadian provinces, offered an escape. Unlike George Black, Taylor had identified a recipe for great personal wealth.

Ten years older than Black, Taylor enjoyed the expensive lifestyle of a clever but unpopular speculator who paraded as a prominent racehorse owner at the Jockey Club of Canada. In 1944 he was convinced that the end of the war would unleash huge prosperity. To exploit that opportunity, he established Argus with a group of like-minded Toronto investors, including Eric Phillips and John ‘Bud’ McDougald. Based at 10 Toronto Street, an elegant, two-storey, neo-classical building not far from Bay Street, the city’s financial area, the partners pooled their assets invested in Canadian companies. Among those investments was Canadian Breweries, which George Black was invited to manage on the company’s behalf.

During those all-night sessions, which started in Conrad’s childhood, George Black regaled his son with stories of his struggle to transform Canadian Breweries into an international success. Promoted as the company’s president in 1950, he had savagely cut costs, dismissed staff and created success from disaster. The prize was phenomenal growth – sales and profits had tripled – delivering Taylor’s ambition to control the world’s biggest brewery, embracing Canada, the USA and Britain. The downside was the effect on Black’s health. Insomniac and increasingly intoxicated, he would arrive in his office at midday, boasting that because he delegated authority his presence was not required. Management of the empire, he insisted, could be achieved by telephone, without the need for him to visit the factories. The essence of business, George emphasised to his son, was strategy rather than micro-management. In reality, ‘delegation’ had become George Black’s excuse to recover from hangovers and the morning’s vodka.

High among Black’s priorities was the need to confront the trade unions, which he despised. In 1958, by forging an alliance with other brewers, he challenged the unions to remove their restrictive practices, provoking an acrimonious strike. As his profits evaporated, Taylor lost confidence in Black. He wanted to avoid strikes and reverse the decentralisation. ‘You’re out of your skull,’ Black told Taylor. In October 1958 George Black was fired. He damned Taylor, cleared his desk and went home. At forty-seven, he was unemployed, and had received no thanks for his achievements. From the sidelines he watched as Canadian Breweries declined. No longer the world’s biggest brewer, the company was sold in 1968 to a competitor.

Bitter but realistic, George Black noted how greed, arrogance and dishonesty had become the hallmark of Argus’s directors. While some in Bay Street embodied the best of Presbyterian honesty, Taylor and Bud McDougald, the company’s president, were financial cowboys enjoying a reckless lifestyle, avoiding taxes and cheating the minority shareholders. At the hub of that intrigue, McDougald used intimidation and flattery to disguise rampant dishonesty, known in Toronto Street as ‘pushing the envelope’. As George Black understood so well, McDougald was using Argus, a company floated on the Toronto stock exchange, as his private piggybank, spending shareholders’ money to fund a tycoon’s way of life.

Well-dressed and shamelessly ostentatious, McDougald played the mogul to perfection – serving dinner on gold-plated china, hanging chandeliers in his garage, travelling in custom-built cars and private planes, and walking with an undisguised swagger to impress his audience. Teetotal, uneducated but shrewd, the former bond salesman posed as Canada’s pre-eminent social and commercial aristocrat, suavely speaking way above his financial weight, and accustomed to fawning treatment. Unlike other Canadians, McDougald drove around London like royalty in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, mixing with nobles like the Duke of Wellington, the Marquess of Abergavenny and Lord Crathorne, and standing near the Queen when she inspected her racehorses being trained in his stables at Kingsclere in Hampshire.² In Palm Beach, McDougald was the President of the Everglades Club, the social centre for the local super-rich, where Jews were not admitted as members, or even for lunch. In future years this did not diminish Conrad Black’s apparent awe for McDougald’s technique of buying people off with presents and perks.

Argus’s operations were fundamentally dishonest. In their private capacity the company’s directors bought shares in companies involved in the media, catering, retail, chemicals, forestry and agriculture, including Massey-Ferguson, one of the world’s biggest farm equipment manufacturers. They then resold those same shares to Argus, at a profit. The casualties of this insider dealing were Argus’s public shareholders. The directors’ dishonesty, as George Black had impressed upon his son, was compounded by another ruse.

Argus controlled assets worth $4 billion, but that control did not reside with the shareholders. Instead, the company was run by the six principal shareholders of a private company called Ravelston, named after a Scottish estate owned by McDougald’s ancestors. Before his dismissal, George Black had bought 22.4 per cent of Ravelston’s shares; McDougald and Phillips each held 23.6 per cent. Aware of George Black’s astute investment and his acute understanding of the Argus directors’ subterfuge, McDougald had, from an early stage, understood the benefits of flattering Conrad Black.

In 1965, on Conrad’s twenty-first birthday, Bud McDougald gave the precocious young man a painting of Napoleon and, unprecedentedly, membership of the Toronto Club, the meeting place for the city’s elite, entry to which was zealously controlled by McDougald himself. The advantages for Conrad Black were remarkable. Toronto’s commercial life was fixed by the club’s members as they ate, drank and played within the protected building. Finance for their deals was supplied by Canada’s leading financial institution, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), substantially influenced by McDougald, who was a director. To help his protégé’s career McDougald arranged for Black to become, at thirty-two, the youngest director in the bank’s history. That generosity split Conrad’s loyalties. Despite his father’s anger, he practically worshipped McDougald’s mystique and power. While puffing a cigar in the Toronto Club, Black would enjoy repeating McDougald’s homily, ‘If these bankers had any brains, we’d be lending them money and they’d be getting rich, instead of the other way round.’

Although George Black resented McDougald’s success, he retained his stake in Ravelston. At some stage, he calculated, there would be an opportunity for revenge and profit. That ambition was inculcated into Conrad Black. Steeped in the minutiae of Argus’s personality conflicts and financial dubieties, Conrad emerged with a sophisticated understanding of the inherent deception of the way in which the company was run. Argus rarely held more than a 25 per cent stake in a company, yet McDougald and Taylor behaved like the proprietors, as if they were the owners of the whole lot. Similarly, by assertion and performance, they intimidated Argus’s minority shareholders into believing that they were entitled to behave as the proprietors of the whole company. Their successful intimidation of the little people was a seminal inspiration to Conrad Black.

Besides his father and Bud McDougald, there was a third formative influence on Conrad Black: the lessons of history. Even before his teens, Conrad admired from his copious reading the rise from obscurity to immortal fame of giants who irreversibly changed mankind’s fate. Egoistic self-righteousness, he realised, could overcome adversity, and popular acclaim bestowed permanent glory. The mere appearance of Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln among soldiers and supporters had raised hopes and entrenched loyalty to the leader. History’s heroes, Black learned, exploited their opponents’ weaknesses, outwitted their deceptions, manipulated their ambitions and assembled a coalition of allies to secure victory. Nurturing his own fantasies of eventually standing in the limelight and enjoying similar grandeur, he awaited his chance for revenge. Patience, planning and perfidy would be required to destroy his father’s tormentors.

On most days George Black would awake in a melancholic daze at lunchtime, spend the afternoon speculating on the markets, and after dinner would watch television while drinking himself into a stupor before his long night-time conversation with Conrad. Just before daybreak he would climb the stairs to his bedroom. His wife Betty, a sports enthusiast from the Riley family, whose wealth came from insurance and finance, had little in common with her husband. In recent years, barely tolerating a man who rarely emerged from his house or met visitors, she had condemned her husband as a self-righteous snob and disappeared into her own rooms. Their unpleasant co-existence was interrupted in September 1975, when Jean Black was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

Eight months later, Conrad, Monte, his elder brother by four years, and their father, accompanied by a nurse, flew with the dying woman in a private plane loaned by Argus to Bermuda, which Jean had always dreamt of visiting. Shortly after their return, on 19 June 1976, she died. George Black declared himself too ill to stand by her grave. After the funeral the mourners returned to the family house, to be told that George was too sick to appear at the wake. Only his closest friends remained when he finally emerged, depressed and showing little will to live. ‘Are you planning a trip during the summer?’ asked one, Douglas Bassett. ‘Yes,’ replied Black. ‘To the dentist in late July.’

Ten days later, after another night-time discussion with Conrad, George Black slowly climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, his son heard cracking wood, and saw his father fall over the banister onto the ground floor.³ Carried by Conrad into the library, George Black said that he no longer had the will to live. ‘Life is hell,’ he told his son as they awaited the doctor. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ The doctor’s diagnosis was bleak. His father, Conrad was told, was unlikely to survive. Despite the prognosis, Conrad returned to his own home and watched a Charlie Chan film. His viewing was interrupted by a telephone call. George Black, the doctor announced, was dead. Many, occasionally including his son, believed that he had committed suicide. At thirty-two, Conrad Black was an orphan with a purpose.

Toronto’s financial leaders gathered for George Black’s funeral. The pall bearers, who included all Ravelston’s directors, were led by Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor. Conrad watched McDougald with particular interest. While he admired ‘the ultimate Canadian tycoon’,⁴ he recognised that he represented Canada’s ‘corporate rot’, and that his fortune had been earned in a uniquely dishonest manner called ‘tollgating’.⁵ Conrad’s later pious denunciation of the legend’s ‘venality and self-delusion’ at his father’s graveside did not undermine his endorsement of McDougald’s crushing piety: ‘Some are chosen, some are not.’ In the jungle, Conrad Black was committed to stand among the chosen.

Bud McDougald, like Ravelston’s other major shareholders, Black noted, had no children. Their wives were uninterested in business. Those circumstances would be his opportunity. Ingratiating himself with the older directors was not a chore, but rather an investment. Among Conrad Black’s skills was flattering old, lonely, rich people.

After their father’s funeral, Conrad and Monte Black called on Bud McDougald, who controlled the fate of the two young men’s assets. To Conrad’s relief they were ‘welcomed most graciously’. Whereas Conrad had condemned McDougald as a ‘snob, bigot … and an unlearned reactionary’ who had succumbed to ‘jet-addicted decadence’, on that particular day he encountered ‘an elegant and considerable figure’.⁶ After a brief discussion the brothers emerged with a satisfactory deal. Conrad was given a directorship of Argus and Ravelston, while Monte was given directorships of other companies. As if to confirm his younger brother’s intellectual superiority, Monte agreed that Conrad should inherit their parents’ grand house amid seven acres in Bridle Path’s Park Lane Circle. The house matched Conrad’s ambitions. Unlike Monte, an unthreatening bon vivant with a fondness for big cigars, fast cars and good food, Conrad’s dream was to join the establishment and to control an empire matching those of Canada’s principal families, including the Eatons, the owners of the country’s dominant department store chain; the Westons, who owned a food and retail business; the Bronfmans, whose fortune was built on alcohol during the Prohibition; the Thomsons, the media family whose assets included the Times newspapers in Britain; and the investors Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation and Hal Jackman, the inheritor of a large investment fund.⁷ Stuck on the periphery, Conrad Black hoped to use his inheritance to become a power on Bay Street and a member of Toronto’s financial mafia. His life over the previous thirty-two years had been a preparation for that struggle.

Privilege and prejudice had been Conrad Black’s roots since his birth in Montreal on 25 August 1944. By the age of five, when the family moved to Toronto, he was cosseted by cooks, butlers, nannies and chauffeurs. In the winter holidays he escaped Toronto’s freeze in the Bahamas. At Nassau’s Porcupine Club he gazed with his father at the Mellons, du Ponts and other American magnates. Although George Black did not rank among the super-rich, he was a successful businessman with an astute intellect. Well-read, and always irritated by those who misused the English language, he noted his son’s exceptional gifts and became preoccupied with creating an extraordinary individual out of him.

Obsessively he ordered Conrad to recall facts, both relevant and irrelevant. After intensive games of chess, his son was encouraged to read encyclopaedias and, like himself, recall what he read. Conrad’s bedrooms were filled with books about the military, wars and politics. He learned not only the names of the world’s ships, both commercial and naval, but their weight, armour thickness and guns. In the midst of the Korean War Conrad Black sat transfixed listening to David Brinkley’s news broadcasts, and watched the television reports of the McCarthy hearings in Washington targeted at unearthing Communist sympathisers. Influenced by his father in favour of capitalism, he grew up with a hatred of those on the left, whom he later damned as ‘phoney, envious and mediocre bleeding hearts whining and snivelling about meritocratic Darwinism’. Nowhere in Black’s education or experience was there any sympathy for the anonymous, simple, honest masses born underprivileged and without special talents. On the contrary, there was boastfulness when in 1952 his father arranged his purchase of a single General Motors share costing $59. The eight-year-old Black had dollar bills spilling from his pockets. When one fell into the mud, he carefully washed it. His journey across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth the following year to watch the coronation in London enhanced the image of a spoilt child taking luxury for granted.

From the age of eleven the unsporting, overweight Black was driven every day to Toronto’s Upper Canada College, one of the country’s elite private schools, in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. Awkward and isolated, he was not a natural enthusiast for a society focused on conformity and obedience. During his school day he could be certain that his family’s servants were cleaning his room, washing his clothes and preparing his dinner. Occasionally the chauffeur returned to serve lunch in the limousine. Voices, books and images conjured up for the young Black a romantic fantasy of enjoying the same unlimited power as history’s titans, assured that whatever he willed would be carried out. Entitlement bred defiance and insolence, fashioning a personality which enjoyed a fight and savoured inflicting defeat. Black’s childhood, remarked John Fraser, a school friend, was like prison for a pre-teenager convinced that he was smarter than the system.⁸

The scoffs directed at the tubby outsider, Conrad believed, were driven by ‘spite and envy’, one of the oft-repeated phrases that encapsulated his life’s credo. His encyclopaedic knowledge, he assumed, was resented, reinforcing his sense of superiority and hatred of regimentation. He construed his teachers as remote from reality, and their authority as a misuse of power. History, he believed, showed how those exercising authority were flawed. Success was won by those who were unwilling to obey laws. Those who failed to admire him were dismissed as despicable. Teachers whom he judged to be inferior excited his contempt. Defiance, in Black’s interpretation, showed courage. His insolence did not pass unpunished. Regularly he received corporal punishment on his backside or hands with rulers, slippers and even a riding crop. The ‘official terror’, he later recalled, imposed by flagellators, homosexuals and failures transformed him from a ‘sceptic to a rebel, an insurrectionist and an anarchist’.⁹

There was equal hatred of his fellow pupils who succumbed to the teachers’ tyranny. Black promoted himself as the spokesman against the sadism of his inferiors. ‘This school is like a concentration camp,’ he told John Fraser in the midst of a typical fury. ‘E.P. Taylor could buy this silly place fifty times over. He’d subdivide and make some money off it.’ Fraser and others were baffled by Black’s anger. Life at Upper Canada was little different from that at other schools. The school’s summer camp motto: ‘In the boy is seen the man’ – would prove to be remarkably pertinent.

In May 1959 the school was being rebuilt, and the fourteen-year-old Black spotted lax security in the administrative offices. One night, with little consideration of the consequences, he returned to the building and picked the lock of a room containing the records of the cadet corps. In the hope of avoiding military duty and sport, he removed his own records. On a subsequent night he broke into the room of a teacher whom he particularly disliked and altered the records of some pupils, and in another break-in he copied out the academic records of many pupils. His success bred an outrageous plot to steal and sell the school’s final examination papers.

With two other pupils, he broke into the school’s main office, pocketed the examination papers and used his knowledge of other students’ weaknesses to offer them the relevant papers for an appropriate price. Those in greatest need paid the most. With an exaggerated sense of his own skills, the trademark of any buccaneer, he was excited by the risks he was running. He staked everything on an attempt to demonstrate his bravado and his uniqueness. Thirty-four years later, he would proudly admit to having ‘completely undermined the system’ and to have caused ‘utter chaos’.¹⁰ Blinded by contempt to the possibility of any flaws in his genius, his last throw was calculated to extract revenge for his injured innocence. He gambled that either the authorities were too stupid to discover his deeds, or that his expulsion would be a painless pleasure.

The extraordinary examination results that followed provoked questions, and Black’s role was discovered. Expulsion was inevitable. He felt no shame, and resisted accepting any blame. He dismissed the school’s principal as an ‘insufferable poltroon’, and derided his wife, whose parting words were that his ‘life was over’, as a ‘desiccated old sorceress’.¹¹ He consoled himself that he had received ‘much moral authority by my failure’, and even John Fraser felt that he was ‘the hero of the hour’. Later, Black described his crime as ‘a fundamental subversive’ plot intended to undermine and overthrow a regime which he compared to that of Nazi Germany. His contempt for those pupils who had exposed his dishonesty matched his scorn for those who were outraged by it. The boys who had bought the stolen papers had wasted their money, but the honest students were also forced to retake the examinations. Black’s condescension towards the innocents, combined with a genuine grievance against those who burnt his effigy on the lawn outside his home, reflected his cavalier arrogance. ‘As I walked out of the gates,’ he wrote self-servingly thirty-four years later, ‘a number of students who literally twenty-four hours before had been begging for assistance – one of them on his knees – were now shaking their fists and shouting words of moralistic execration after me. I’ve never forgotten how cowardly and ungrateful people can be.’¹² He blamed the teachers, the school and the system, denying any personal responsibility for his wrongdoing. On the Day of Judgement, Black expected those vilifying him to have to answer for their lack of faith in himself. He was entitled to their praise, not their scorn.

There was a distinctive aspect to Black’s crime. His home environment – the vengeful father, the ineffectual mother and his solitary adoration of history’s heroes – had created an individual who worshipped bronze effigies. Steeped in the blood and glory of history’s heroes, Black’s self-glorification justified trampling on the weak. In his philosophy, society’s masters were permitted to break laws. Veering off the beaten track was imbued in his character. With that notion implanted in his mind, he had lost the only impediment to committing a major crime – a conscience. Black the schoolboy imagined himself to be an unacknowledged genius entitled to break the law. ‘I am neither proud nor ashamed of what happened,’ he wrote. ‘It was an awful system whose odiousness was compounded by banality and pretension.’¹³

George Black excused his son as a ‘compulsive insubordinate’ eager to prove his credentials as a capitalist.¹⁴ The school rejected that explanation, believing that the father was blind to his son’s reckless disregard for rules and morality. Spared any proper parental reprimand, Conrad waited for his mother and father to find a new school. Lonely, he remained in his bedroom listening to long-playing gramophone records of Franklin D. Roosevelt winning the wild applause of a crowd in Madison Square Garden for denouncing American capitalism, the rich and politicians’ deviousness, on his way to becoming President. Roosevelt, he would say admiringly, was a misunderstood hero, defiantly ignoring his physical paralysis to shape the world’s future.

Over the next four years Black passed through two more schools – leaving each because of misbehaviour – before being coached in a crammer to scrape a pass in his final school exams in 1962. His mediocrity reflected his laziness. His reliance on his father’s indulgence and finances was reflected in his unwillingness to focus on his study of journalism and then history at Carleton University in Ottawa, an inferior college. Lodging at the expensive Savoy Hotel in Ottawa rather than in student accommodation, he spent his days sleeping or listening to parliamentary debates, and sharing the hotel restaurant in the evening with senators. The consequence was inevitable. During the summer holidays in 1963, while he was visiting historic and literary sites in France with his elder brother Monte, the college warned that he risked expulsion. His schoolboy notions of genius had been shattered. Laziness had bred failure. Instead of returning to study he remained in France as a tour guide, and later travelled to Spain to meet Brian Stewart, a Canadian friend.

Black arrived in Spain depressed, admitting his inability to cope with life’s normal challenges. His initial escape from despair was to read a biography of the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The combination of politics, history and power appealed to a dilettante seeking a purpose. In his fantasy, the ostracised upstart dreamt about basking in public adoration. Whatever he said would be believed because he uttered the last, irrefutable word. Undecided whether he should become a historian or try to earn some money, he resolved at least to overcome his laziness and improve his performance at college.

Back in Ottawa, Black had the good fortune to meet Peter White, the ambitious assistant of a minister in the federal government. Through White, six years older than himself, he was introduced to Canadian politics and politicians. At parties, political meetings and in committees, he became immersed in the country’s political system. In the era of ruptured dreams after President Kennedy’s assassination, White, Black and Brian Stewart drove to Atlantic City to witness the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential election campaign. Standing among 23,000 people stirred by Bobby Kennedy’s speech urging support for the civil rights campaign, Black sensed that he was present at a moment of history, adoring the image of a towering politician, serene among the excited masses. The theatre of leadership transformed Johnson into Black’s latest hero.

The daydreams barely changed after his graduation from Carleton University with a poor degree in 1965, and the completion of his first year of a law degree. Financed by some profits earned on the stock exchange, an inheritance of over $200,000 from his grandparents and regular income from his parents, Black spent part of his summer in Ireland with Galen Weston, the future head of the retailing family, and later drove to Eastern Europe. The news from Ottawa was bad. After failing his law exams, he had been expelled from the university. At twenty-two, he was categorised as a flop. ‘It was time,’ he decided, ‘to outgrow mischief and debauchery.’¹⁵

Peter White offered Black salvation – a half interest in two small weekly papers, the Knowlton Advertiser and a French-language paper, serving townships near Montreal. The investment would cost Black $500. He settled in Knowlton, a small lakeside community, and single-mindedly began editing the small-circulation newspapers. Living in a poorly heated boathouse, he spent the day struggling to find news and advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors in the hope of furthering his quest to understand life, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets. At dawn, George Black looked across the lawns to the willow trees and swimming pool, and decided to go to bed. In Knowlton, his son also went to sleep, establishing a lifelong habit of rarely rising before noon.

The escape from ‘mischief and debauchery’ was consolidated the following year, when Montreal hosted the world fair Expo 67, and General de Gaulle visited Canada. The combination of parties and witnessing de Gaulle’s provocative remark that Quebec should declare its independence from Canada taught Black, he would later claim, that he had been ‘a rather silly and undiscriminating rebel’. He enrolled for a law degree at Laval University in Quebec City, an additional challenge because he was one of few English students among the French, although this was a test he endured in comfort. He rented a superb penthouse overlooking the St Lawrence river in the fashionable Port Royal Building close to the entertainment quarter, and drove a Cadillac. Since Peter White had become an assistant to Daniel Johnson, the Premier of Quebec, Conrad Black could combine studying, social life and involvement at the heart of Canada’s political life.

As a conservative in a leftish-liberal country divided by the French and English languages, Black suffered a double frustration. The Conservatives had repeatedly failed to offer any solution to Canada’s permanent problem of containing the separatist demands of the French in Quebec; and secondly, as he was told by a Liberal politician, ‘We’re the party of government here. The Conservatives are like mumps. You get them once a lifetime.’ Nevertheless, Black engaged self-confidently in politics, supporting the English-speaking Conservatives, and to his delight people took seriously his self-conscious party pieces, cultivated since childhood. Using unusually complex vocabulary, he effortlessly recited endless historical details from memory in performances which, he persuaded himself, convinced audiences of his genius and his political acumen.

In 1969, Peter White once again offered the next step. The Sherbrooke Record, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 8,000 published near Montreal, was offered for sale. John Bassett, the owner, was distressed. His marriage had disintegrated and his investment in a new office building and new printing presses had plunged the business to the verge of bankruptcy.¹⁶ On the eve of completing the purchase, White introduced a twenty-six-year-old business-school graduate, David Radler, into the deal. Radler, described by some as mischievous and with few pretensions, was a rough, ambitious fortune-hunter who had learned trading from his father, a restaurateur, and who had recently been selling native handicrafts from a shop at Expo 67. His ratty, sharp manner and his spartan lifestyle emphasised his preoccupation with money. In background and manner Black and Radler had little in common, but they complemented each other’s ambitions. Black wanted influence and wealth, while Radler enjoyed mastering the mechanics of creating that wealth. Black brought the vision of a strategy, while Radler was keen to sweat their assets. The chores at the Sherbrooke Record could be easily divided. Radler would be responsible for the financial management, including advertising and printing, while Black and White filled the space between the advertisements with editorial reports. They borrowed C$18,000 from a bank, and inherited thirty-two employees and a business which had lost $180,000 over the previous twenty-two months.

‘Rape and kill’ was the journalists’ metaphorical judgement about the impact of Black’s arrival. Archives were dumped, photographs were destroyed, wages were frozen, expenses were slashed and half the employees were fired. The remainder were squeezed into a smaller building. Under Radler’s merciless penny-pinching, employees were fined for wasting paper, pencils and their own time. Radler and Black scrutinised any expenditure over $5, and the staff’s written complaints resulted in two-cent fines for wasting paper. Any other conduct deemed to be unacceptable was punished by a $2 levy. Stories of Black and Radler’s nastiness became legion. Helen Evans, the newspaper’s social diarist, was docked three days’ pay for taking time off to bury her husband.¹⁷ Black was proud of his ‘oppression’, claiming that his employees departed qualified for better jobs.¹⁸ Suppliers discovered that their bills would only be paid after repeated threats. ‘A good newspaper,’ Black would be heard later to say, ‘is one that makes money.’ After just two months, the new owners were delighted by their results. In Radler, Black had discovered his ideal partner. While he enjoyed journalism and pontificating about the world, Radler focused on maximising advertising revenue and restraining the journalists. ‘I just screwed that bunch of journos,’ Radler loved to joke. He inflicted similar parsimony upon himself, taking packets of sugar from restaurants for his personal use. His frugality was mirrored in his pride at discovering a newspaper’s ideal manpower: ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Despite a declining circulation because it ignored local stories and reported politics prejudicially, the Sherbrooke Record, with vastly reduced costs, earned a profit. Instead of losing $10,000 a month, it made $15,000. A further loan for Black and Radler to acquire their next newspaper was agreed by their bank, based on them applying a similar formula.

Ownership of newspapers, combining money, politics and the opportunity to win influence, was a natural sanctuary for Black. Posing as a putative press baron he appeared at political conventions in Canada, and contacts among the staff of LBJ, by then retired from politics, arranged remarkable access for Black during a trip to South Vietnam in 1969. With the help of the American ambassador he interviewed President Nguyen Van Thieu, and to his glee his account in the Sherbrooke Record was republished across the USA. Soon after, he travelled through South America, his journey culminating in a stopover in Cuba to witness a marathon five-hour speech by Fidel Castro to his poverty-stricken admirers. Next stop was a visit to Bud McDougald in Palm Beach.

Ever since the sixteen-mile island became colonised in the late 1800s as a winter refuge by the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Carnegies – America’s oligarchs and robber barons – Palm Beach had been a haven for celebrities and the world’s richest players. Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome. Some would carp that Palm Beach, populated by ‘up and down folk’, was ‘a sunny place for shady people’ enjoying an extravagant social life of dinners, dances and parties – and that was precisely the attraction for Conrad Black. The principal qualification for newcomers to mix with the old dynastic fortunes was money. ‘Some people are offended by extreme opulence,’ Black would later tell Peter C. Newman, his first biographer, ‘but I find it sort of entertaining.’ McDougald was Black’s mentor in his quest to achieve that affluence. McDougald had the nerve to travel unashamedly to London for private visits at Argus’s expense, and generally to pilfer the company’s assets. Among his prizes was the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which he ‘purchased’ from Massey-Ferguson at a dishonestly low price. McDougald’s traits, described later by Black as ‘lassitude, greed and vanity’, encouraged Black’s own ambition to possess $100 million and to have the means to escape Canada’s winters.¹⁹ The handicap in 1970 was his psychological turmoil.

Throughout the 1960s Black had revealed a lack of sympathy with the era. Buttoned up in suits, and rarely seen without a tie, he arrived at raucous Friday-night parties stiff and solemn. Rather than enjoying the sexual and cultural revolution, he castigated youthful rebels as ‘banal’ and ‘superannuated poltroons’, and showed disdain for men wearing frilly shirts and pink bell-bottom trousers.²⁰ Some interpreted his reticence as shyness, an inferiority complex or a sense of inadequacy concealed by his remarkable vocabulary. Others, like the journalist Hubert Bauch, were unsympathetic. ‘Black’s the most arrogant, obnoxious man I ever met,’ said Bauch.

In March 1970, Black awoke to a massive anxiety attack. Sweating profusely, hyperventilating and racked by apprehension about his fate, he was on the verge, some believed, of committing suicide. The accumulation of his loveless childhood, his academic failure and his social insecurity had become an intolerable burden. He sought help in psychoanalysis. Over the next two years he consulted W. Clifford M. Scott and Vivian Rackoff in his efforts to examine what he called ‘my altruism and the dark side’. Subsequently, he also attended the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto for help to cope with his demons. One diagnosis suggested a narcissistic personality disorder – defined as an exaggerated sense of one’s own self-importance and uniqueness. The sufferer, according to experts, has a propensity to take advantage of others in the interest of self-aggrandisement. Others diagnosed Black’s problems as arising from his loveless, dysfunctional home. Intense psychiatry cured Black of his immediate self-destructive urge, but several personality traits remained, including a sense of his entitlement and a lack of conscience. He frivolously described that combination as the ‘Nietzschean philosophy’ that ‘all that does not kill me makes me stronger’. The mention of Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose anti-Christian arguments in favour of the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘superhuman’ made him attractive to the Nazis, revealed the essence of Conrad Black as a self-important hunter for celebrity.

By 1972, Black felt that all his ‘guiding principles were in place’. He believed in God, and in human and economic freedom, and condemned those who prospered from the high taxes paid by others.²¹ Echoing his father, he regarded trade unionists as ‘self-seeking frauds who cared little for the workers and often were gangsters or Communists’. Union leaders he characterised as ‘corrupt Luddites’ and ‘advocates of feather-bedding’. Pertinently, he was silent about honesty, respect for the law and help for the disadvantaged.²² Fixed firmly on the right wing, he was on the losing side of the Conservatives’ defeat in Canada’s 1972 general election by Pierre Trudeau, a popular Liberal who, as Black saw it, campaigned against America and capitalism and in favour of the East European Communist states. In Black’s opinion, Trudeau, ‘more than anyone, turned Canada into a people of whining, politically conformist welfare addicts’.²³ Cut off from Canada’s mainstream politics, Black felt surrounded by Quebec’s aggressive nationalists and anti-Vietnam war deserters from America, whom he scorned as ‘insolent and contemptible’.²⁴ Conventional and right-wing, Black focused his support on the conservative rich. Supporting minority causes appealed to a man who identified his own plight with underdogs. In a reflection of his own unpopularity at school, he sought to discover the goodness in other disliked personalities. That quest presented a contradiction. While venerating Roosevelt, Lincoln and Napoleon, he also pleaded for the understanding of charlatans, especially those symbolising the tradition of Huey Long, the notoriously corrupt but populist Governor of Louisiana in the 1920s and thirties.

Searching for other lost causes, Black alighted on the life and career of Maurice Duplessis, the dominating political leader of Quebec from 1936 to 1959. In popular opinion, the former Attorney General and Premier was condemned as a rude, drunken, corrupt dictator who ruled the province as a quasi-fascist in alliance with the Catholic Church. To resurrect Duplessis’s reputation, and in the process to rescue his own appalling academic record, Black registered at McGill University after finally graduating in law to produce a thesis for an MA degree about the rogue’s life.

Diligently, Black obtained exclusive access to Duplessis’s private papers, and fleshed out the background of the era by interviewing Duplessis’s contemporaries. In pursuit of the truth he travelled to Cameroon to meet one of them, Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, an eloquent French Canadian missionary. For days they sat in the African bush discussing religion, poverty, life and the fight against disease. Entranced by Léger’s intellect, self-denial and altruism, Black could have been influenced by his understanding of morality, the poor and society. Instead, while he found a new hero, whom he would nominate for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize (it was won by Henry Kissinger), he rejected the purity of Léger’s philosophy. The encounter in Africa was nevertheless a turning point. Inspired by Léger, and with the help of Bishop Carter of London, Ontario, he witnessed the power of the pulpit. Rather than being the enemy of authority, Black was transformed into a man of authority himself. The confirmation of his conversion was the conversation he began with God. In this continuing dialogue, Black would consult the Almighty and be reassured that whatever course of life he decided upon – any plan, ruse or conspiracy – would improve mankind. How far, he would ask, could he go without becoming unstuck? ‘If I go so far, will you still love me?’ His Maker’s approval was crucial if Black was to face down those who vilified him. And God always gave His approval. The integrity of Black’s credo was the life of Duplessis, who had also suffered personal abuse. Through that corrupt leader’s life, Black sought the answers to his own purgatory, and he was rewarded. His vilifiers, God assured him, would have to answer for their lack of faith in Himself.

On his return to Quebec from Africa in 1971, Black began his attempt to restore Duplessis’s reputation. ‘Much of what his critics decried as dictatorship and corruption was really a puckish love of farce,’ wrote Black, who credited Duplessis’s authoritarianism with building new roads and power plants. ‘Maurice Duplessis had too great a sense of the farcical to be arrogant,’ he added admiringly about a politician who accumulated an estimated C$100 million from corrupt payments. In an exhaustive seven-hundred-page text, Black suffocated the reader with endless quotations intended to support every argument in Duplessis’s favour. Unable to focus on the essential facts and crystallise both sides of the argument, the reader was exposed to a tidal wave of prejudice.

After reading Black’s thesis, Ramsay Cook, McGill University’s external examiner, criticised the apparent rehabilitation of Duplessis. He brushed aside the smokescreen of Black’s elephantine effort, and identified the flaws in his scholarship and the fallacy of his conclusions. Black’s belief that history was determined by leaders, not by mass movements or a battle of ideologies, was, Cook declared, as unconvincing as his undisguised admiration of dishonest power-brokers. In particular, Cook was unsettled by Black’s excusing of Duplessis’s criminal character, and he was minded to block the award of the MA. In order to secure his degree, Black had no alternative but to make the necessary alterations, although his anger about Cook’s ‘offensive’ opinions and ‘fairy-land view of Quebec’ reflected his intolerance of criticism. In 1976 the thesis would be published as a 684-page book.²⁵ Inevitably, Cook was asked by a newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, to write a review. Unhesitatingly, he expressed his dislike of the book’s unstructured length and verbosity. ‘Anyone,’ he wrote, ‘who can endure this ramshackle volume to the end will likely conclude that though … Duplessis triumphed rather easily over most of his enemies, he has finally come a cropper in the hands of an admiring biographer.’ Black was incensed. ‘A slanted, supercilious little twit’, he called Ramsay, after personally confronting the newspaper’s publisher. Black’s modest manner hid violence towards anyone questioning his work; he damned anyone who questioned his sympathy as a ‘quasi-fascist Jesuit myth-maker’ or an ‘illiterate bootlicker’.²⁶ His self-esteem led him to neglect compromise in his arguments. To prove his superiority he even bought substantial quantities of his book in order to conceal its sluggish sales.

Similar aggression was directed against the Quebec nationalists after the Liberal Robert Bourassa won the 1970 election to become the province’s Premier. Contrary to his election pledges, Bourassa abolished English as an official language, discriminating against English Canadians. There was no future for Black in a state intent on separation from the country. Damning the ‘hypocrisy, narcissism and obfuscation’ of the French Canadians and mocking the placid English-speaking community as ‘gin-swilling grumblers of no consequence’,²⁷ he resolved, after eight years in Montreal, to return to Toronto. The notoriety he had gained after his expulsion from three schools had, he assumed, been forgotten. He arrived in the English-speaking city in July 1974 as a comparative stranger.

Conrad Black’s homecoming was opportune. Argus’s finances were deteriorating, and relations among the company’s ageing directors had become fraught. Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor, while still enriching themselves at Argus’s expense, had become bitter rivals. Much to McDougald’s dissatisfaction, Taylor had been encouraging Paul Desmarais, the controller of the multi-billion-dollar Power Corporation, to make a bid for Argus. Desmarais’s failure, and the antics of Bay Street’s cowboys, were a foretaste of the turmoil once Argus’s old directors began to die. In anticipation of that future battle, Black resumed his relations with old friends including Fred Eaton of the department-store chain dynasty which he identified as ‘Canada’s ultimate establishment family’.²⁸ Their affection was mutual. ‘Jesus Christ,’ gushed Eaton, ‘Conrad’s got a spectacular mind working there.’ Invited to roast-beef lunches with Eaton were Galen Weston, Hal Jackman, and George Black’s old friend Douglas Bassett. Black spoke lengthily over wine and whisky about history and politics, and explained how he intended to extend his influence in politics by purchasing newspapers considered too small by Roy Thomson, the country’s dominant publisher and owner of The Times and Sunday Times in London. Systematically, Black and Radler telephoned owners with offers which, over the next three years, harvested twenty titles, including such local papers as the Alaska Highway News and the Daily News of Prince Rupert, all financed by loans secured against the Sherbrooke Record. Proudly, Black would assert that besides his original $500 investment, all his expansion consolidated in Sterling Newspapers, a new company, was financed by loans and profits. The Sherbrooke Record would be sold in 1977 for C$865,000, forty-eight times its purchase price eight years earlier, which did not account for $1 million profit used to buy other newspapers. During those years, the partners rarely met. ‘I know exactly what he’s going to do without going near what he’s doing,’ said Radler about Black. Their shared ambition for money – and Black’s for fame – cemented their relationship.

Black was seeking the celebrity of an influential politician. Exaggerating the importance of his twenty tiny newspapers, and concealing his dependence upon his inheritance, Black’s cultivated manner – relaxed, self-indulgent and opinionated – suggested a man of influence and independent wealth. His articulate advocacy of raw capitalism in an increasingly socialistic society attracted television producers eager to stage debates. Frequently he appeared on TV to support Claude Wagner, a politician renowned for accepting bribes and acknowledged by Black as suffering from petulance, superficiality and indecisiveness. The eccentricity of his opinions, and the charade of his eminence, obscured Black’s insecurity. In 1977, to satisfy his need for companionship, he asked Shirley Walters, a secretary in his office, to marry him.

The daughter of an accountant, Walters possessed an incomplete education, little ambition and no interest in politics or history. A decent, solid woman, following the breakdown of her marriage she was vulnerable to her employer, who had limited sexual experience. Although Black would claim to have been the surprised target of predatory women when he was young, eyewitnesses suggest few carefree relationships before he met Walters.²⁹ His proposal of marriage was hastened by the discovery of Walters’s pregnancy. There was, however, a complication: Walters’s divorce could not be completed before the child’s birth. Black was fearful of the criticism of Toronto’s social leaders, especially Bud McDougald, if the existence of his illegitimate child was discovered.³⁰ After he had overcome Walters’s prevarication, they resolved to keep the pregnancy a secret and to withhold Black’s name from the birth certificate.

Jonathan Black’s birth in November 1977 was followed by the news on 15 March 1978 of Bud McDougald’s death in Florida. The chatter around Bay Street was deafening. Few of those gazing at McDougald’s face in his open coffin were filled with sadness. Only McDougald’s widow wept; others were preoccupied by the succession. Skilfully, Conrad Black moved closer to the grieving woman, reminding her of his affection for her husband, whom he later described as ‘a very elegant kind of con man’, a judgement possibly of admiration rather than condemnation.³¹ McDougald, championed as Canada’s supreme business leader, epitomised so many of Black’s ambitions. ‘Bud was very skilful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn’t within anyone’s grasp,’ Black noted.

For more than twenty-five years, George Black’s son had been nurtured for the moment of vengeance. ‘I appear,’ Conrad Black said in self-congratulation, ‘to have been the only person who took note of the fact that Mr McDougald had died on the Ides of March. He always had a Caesarean bearing, and his succession was not much better organised.’³² The lesson of his father’s dismissal was to foresee deception and to marshal sufficient force to out-manoeuvre any rivals.

The empire’s immediate fate was to be decided at Argus’s first board meeting after McDougald’s death. As usual, Conrad Black arrived late, and was surprised to find that the three elderly directors had taken advantage of his unpunctuality, voting to deny the Black brothers executive directorships. ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ Black was told. Youth would need to wait its turn. ‘It was an utterly disgraceful performance,’ Black publicly proclaimed. Yet quietly he welcomed the rebuff.³³ By demonstrating his true status, the other directors had compelled him to focus on the only worthwhile outcome – seizing the whole empire for himself; and, he puffed, they underestimated his abilities.

Argus, although valued at C$4 billion, was financially troubled. The controlling stakes in the various companies had produced good dividends for the shareholders, but bad management had wrecked the businesses. Dominion Stores Ltd was an old-fashioned chain of supermarkets; Hollinger Mines was managed by a lazy director who undertook no activities other than collecting $40 million a year in dividends from iron-ore mining; while Massey-Ferguson, with 45,000 employees, would lose C$257 million in 1978.³⁴ Argus’s directors were certainly incapable of reviving the group. Black’s quandary was how to organise the old guard’s removal.

The ownership of Ravelston and Argus was diffuse. To obtain a majority vote depended upon a matrix of complicated relationships and trusts. In that quagmire there were potential allies, enemies and neutrals. To win control, Black would require dexterity and genius, seducing some and flattening others. Events, Black reminisced, needed to be treated ‘with a certain rhythm, maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’.³⁵ Since his relations with most of the directors were bad, there was nothing to lose from a gamble.

From his study of history, Black had learned how simple gestures could lead to critical alliances, especially a show of concern for the beleaguered. In preparation for the struggle Black had targeted Dixon Chant, a chartered accountant employed by the late Eric Phillips, one of the key shareholders. Chant had suffered a heart attack, and Black visited him in hospital. Sympathising with the distressed came naturally to the unhurried, verbose aspirant. Chant would prove to be Black’s critical ally as the dust dispersed after McDougald’s funeral.

Black’s objective was two widows – Maude ‘Jim’ McDougald and her sister Doris, the widow of Eric Phillips. Together with the Blacks’, their shareholdings in Ravelston would amount to a controlling interest in Argus. Living together in Palm Beach, neither woman was blessed with intelligence or an understanding of business. McDougald, believing in his own infallibility, had never bothered to appoint a reliable, trustworthy lawyer or to explain to his wife how to cope after his death. Isolated in Florida’s sunshine, neither woman guessed that Black felt no pity for their weaknesses when he arrived to offer his assistance. Nor could they imagine the seducer’s thrill he must have felt.

Conrad Black was dressed conservatively, his animal cunning concealed behind a warm embrace of gentle assuredness. Some would carp at his cultivated condescension, but that would be a mistaken view. Rather, Black had perfected an approach towards the distressed that would serve him well over the coming years. Now he won the widows’ trust by obsequiously trimming his manner to put them at ease. He too appeared to be ‘grieving’. The tone of his voice and his gestures persuaded his prey that the three of them shared a common cause. The other major shareholders, explained Black, were crudely manoeuvring against the widows’ interests. ‘You’re being marginalised,’ he warned them. ‘We must do something about this.’ After uttering reassurances about his desire to protect their interests, he urged them to pool their shareholding with his. The two women believed his colourful reports about their husbands’ former colleagues, and were gradually persuaded to trust their gracious, wise visitor. Black’s next step determined the remainder of his life.

He asked the widows to sign a contract which empowered his use of their Ravelston shares in any vote against the other factions. Combined, their 70 per cent stake could compel the remaining shareholders to sell out to himself. That extraordinary power had originally been crafted by the widows’ late husbands to control the empire in their own interests. Puzzled and ignorant, the widows hesitated on the brink, uncertain about the financial advantage of Black’s proposition. He suggested they consult Doris Phillips’s adviser Dixon Chant, who Black knew had become irritated by the behaviour of Argus’s executives. Unlike Black, who had visited Chant in hospital, the other executives were disdainful of him. Just as Black had planned, Chant encouraged the widows to trust him.³⁶ In the conversation which followed, Black performed the role encapsulated by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment: ‘An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eating – and then eats you up.’ Black listened and spoke, and eventually the women signed the agreements without extracting any payment in return. He had achieved power for nothing except the cost of a flight to Florida and the emission of a lot of hot air. Events now assumed a momentum which his adversaries would struggle to halt. ‘My brother and I,’ chortled Black, ‘were in a position to blow the … factions away when we wished.’³⁷ He laughed about those arrogant old Bay Street habitués who underestimated young men, and about the ‘grieving disinterested widows’. His coup was a masterstroke.

As the news seeped out, Ravelston’s other directors were flummoxed. Tasting his first blood, Black enjoyed comparing himself to those heroic military geniuses whose biographies he devoured. ‘Never interfere with an enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself,’ he liked to quote from Napoleon.³⁸ Adopting military stratagems against weak foes like the widows and Ravelston’s other directors satisfied Black’s fondness for self-congratulation.

News of his victory at the widows’ expense prompted calls from Canadian journalists to Florida. Their questions were the widows’ first inkling of their mistake. ‘I have a bird brain about business,’ admitted Maude McDougald, ‘and I don’t know anything about it.’ Doris Phillips was equally disarming. ‘You know more about it than I do,’ she confessed after admitting ignorance about the ‘hundreds of documents’ she had signed since her husband’s death.³⁹ As the interviews increased, the widows began denouncing Black as a trickster, claiming incomprehension. ‘Like absolute idiots and birdbrains,’ said Maude McDougald, ‘we signed and signed and signed without reading at all.’ In Toronto, Black dismissed their pleas of innocence as ‘an utter fraud’.⁴⁰ He was not prepared to accept any blame. He was always in the right.

Inside 10 Toronto Street, Black confronted the director who had told him, ‘Don’t rush your fences.’ Empowered with the widows’ shares, the young rebel announced that he had not appreciated the snub. That director and all the others were ousted forthwith. In Black’s imagery, his rivals were ‘trussed up like a partridge to their guillotine. I would not fidget and fumble with the blade levers … Off with his head.’⁴¹ News of their resignations sparked uproar. Bay Street had never in living memory witnessed such a coup. As the owner of newspapers, Black assumed that he had the expertise to orchestrate sympathy from the media. To win over Patrick Watson, who was producing a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) television documentary about him, he posed in Hal Jackman’s basement in front of a gigantic model army to illustrate his prowess as a strategist, spawning the false illusion that he regularly engaged in war games. ‘I was asked by the widows,’ said the hero, ‘to pull the trigger and decapitate the enemy because the ladies would not hear of moderation.’ As the criticism of his actions increased, newspaper journalists were introduced to another Blackian tactic – his unusual eloquence in conjuring up images which could only be contradicted by accusing him of lying. Black insisted that he had acted ‘neutrally’ in dismissing the old guard, and that it was the ‘rapacious’ widows who had taken the initiative by asking for the transfer of authority to himself. Experts, he claimed, had ‘explained laboriously to them in monosyllables and with examples adapted to the mind of a child of ten, and they understood and approved every letter of every word of the agreement’.⁴² To those who remained doubters, he exclaimed, ‘Any suggestion that I would hoodwink two bereaved septuagenarian widows is patently ridiculous.’⁴³ Those newspapers which still stubbornly dared to repeat the widows’ assertions received the threat of a writ for defamation. Several newspapers surrendered, but Black was powerless to prevent CBC TV transmitting its documentary, which featured the widows expressly denouncing him. Their appearance created an unfortunate legacy as he approached his next hurdle.

The document signed by the widows gave Black the power to vote on their behalf, but did not give him the right to buy their shares. While he could remove rival directors, he could not ultimately control the company’s governance. To resolve the confused situation Black sought total control and complete ownership. In the summer of 1978 the fate of Canada’s biggest conglomerate was a cliffhanger, dependent upon Black’s strategy.

All the players, including Black, were minority shareholders. Black’s fate depended upon the decision of two of these. Moving between Winston’s, Toronto’s best restaurant, the Toronto Club and 10 Toronto Street, he sought to break the deadlock in a manner which was previously unseen in Bay Street. Black’s ace was his unique grasp of the complexity of the Argus and Ravelston empire. In the daisy chain of companies, few understood the flows of cash and power. Only Black’s photographic memory could make use of the intricate jigsaw of different people with minority interests in all the companies in order to outwit other shareholders. He understood that by seizing control of Ravelston, he would automatically control Argus.

Throughout the exhausting battle, the widows were buffeted by suitors, professional advisers and the other besieged shareholders. In Black’s subsequent description, ‘the fate of some of Canada’s most famous companies now unfolded in an atmosphere of almost unrelenting buffoonery’.⁴⁴ The reality was intimidation, stormy meetings, and vicious threats of dismissal and lawsuits. Around the clock Black cajoled shareholders, directors and employees to support him, or at best not to sell their shares to his opponents. Black’s survival depended partly on the success of two friends, Fred Eaton and Hal Jackman, in gathering support for himself. On 2 July 1978 the battle reached its climax when the widows agreed to sell their Ravelston shares to Black for C$20 million. Black offered $18 million, and the deal was settled at $18.4 million. Winning total control thereafter was purely mechanical, and cost just $12 million. For a total of $30 million, Black now owned a corporation controlling assets worth $4 billion. He compared the defeated old guard to ‘generals fighting a war by methods of the last one. They could not conceive of any corporate alternative to trench warfare, attrition and promotion by seniority. They were completely over-confident.’⁴⁵ Black’s final hurdle was to find the money, and the entire $30 million was borrowed from two banks.⁴⁶ To reduce his debt he sold off parcels of Ravelston shares to trustworthy friends, especially Fred Eaton, Doug Bassett and Hal Jackman.

With victory came the spoils. Number 10 Toronto Street, constructed as a post office in 1853, became the Black brothers’ headquarters. A huge bronze eagle in full flight was hung over the fireplace to reflect Conrad’s ambitions. To fulfil his Hearstian fantasy, other rooms were furnished with historic symbols and mementos, especially of battles and generals. At the age of thirty-four, Black embellished his performance as a Bay Street player by holding court in Winston’s, at the Toronto Club or in his own dining room. Comparisons with Orson Welles in Citizen Kane were not resented by a prototype tycoon eager to pull the levers of power. ‘If my father knew what I’ve done,’ he confided with pleasure, ‘he’d roll in his grave.’

Propelled into the spotlight in that prestigious building, Black enjoyed the controversy he had invited. Some ‘old money’ families recalled his theft of the school’s examination papers. Others, including members of the Toronto Club, suspicious of the speed of his rise to wealth and celebrity, dubbed the new star ‘Conrad the Barbarian’. His coup may not have been dishonest, they carped, but Black was certainly ‘cruel’. Any such judgements, in Black’s mind, were buried by his nomination as ‘Man of the Year’ and ‘Boy Wonder’. The Globe and Mail, Toronto’s leading newspaper, anointed him ‘Businessman of the Year’. Having outfoxed the establishment, Black felt himself assured of victory in every future battle. Compared to other businessmen in Canada’s small pond, he ranked himself as a star. Convinced that he could manipulate journalists, a breed he disdained, he portrayed himself in interviews as a historian lamenting society’s ‘moral torpor’ and the ‘decline of civilisation’.⁴⁷ With pleasure he pontificated, ‘I suspected I was starting ticking a public and press-relations time bomb.’⁴⁸ To his glee, his clever asides were published uncritically. He would, he smiled, continue the traditional Argus dinners, inviting the country’s 150 most important men. No one, he guessed, would refuse the invitation of a man with unique style, so superbly erudite among bankers, politicians and intellectuals, able to articulate the advantages of capitalism over the creeping socialisation of their country.

Reflecting on his victory, Black suggested that he drew pertinent lessons from the criticism he had received then for the remainder of his career. ‘The lesson of June is to be wary of setting out in the most cynical way to use people you have underestimated. The pickpocket whose pocket is picked receives, and deserves, little sympathy … In finance, only proprietors can consistently act like proprietors.’⁴⁹ That statement exposed a confusion in Black’s attitude towards business. He was suggesting that only a ‘proprietor’ – someone who owned 100 per cent of a company – could behave selfishly, regardless of others. ‘My natural sympathies are with the proprietors whose own money is at stake,’ he said, admiring the personal control of companies enjoyed by Galen Weston, Fred Eaton, Ken Thomson, Hal Jackman and the American moguls. With their substantial control of their businesses, they shone in Black’s eyes compared to mere professional managers. Black’s misfortune was that he was not a proprietor. He lacked the money to buy out Argus’s other shareholders. Yet, as a raw capitalist, he was emphatic that proprietors and investors were bound to live by the laws of the jungle. ‘There is not,’ he emphasised at this critical moment in his career, ‘and should not be, any safety net for the rich.’

Amid the excitement, on 14 July 1978 Conrad Black married Shirley Walters. Considering his aspirations, Black did not arrange the society wedding some had expected. His old friends understood the socially insecure groom’s desire to be certain of a loyal, unstrident wife who would provide him with a domestic refuge. After the small ceremony, witnessed by a handful of friends, twenty people gathered at Black’s house for dinner. At 10 p.m., exhausted by the takeover battle, he left his guests and bride and went to bed. On the wedding certificate he listed his profession as ‘historian’. That was a critical claim for what would follow.⁵⁰