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THE ORIGINS OF A WOMAN later renowned as a ‘drama queen’ were remarkably ordinary.

In summer 1940, Barbara Amiel’s parents, middle-class Jews, moved from central London to Chorley Wood near Watford, north of the capital, to escape the Luftwaffe’s remorseless bombardment. On 4 December 1940, the day of her birth, the area around her grandparents’ homes in the East End was blazing. Among the subsequent victims of the incendiary bombs would be Isaac Amiel, her paternal grandfather, the owner of a sweet shop and an air raid warden.

Harold and Vera Amiel greeted their daughter’s birth with joy but understandable fear. The Blitz was the prelude to an anticipated German invasion, and if Britain was defeated, the fate of the country’s Jews was uncertain. Harold Amiel, a twenty-five-year-old solicitor, had joined the Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment, and was due to be posted to the 8th Army in North Africa. In his absence his wife Vera, a strikingly good-looking woman of twenty-four, could rely on her family: her sister Katherine, a doctor, and Harold’s three younger brothers and older sister Irene, had also left London. Several of them, including Harold and Vera, had settled in Chorley Wood.

In common with all their relations, Harold and Vera had been born in London’s squalid East End, but long before the outbreak of the war most of the Amiels and the Barnetts (Vera’s family) had escaped from the Jewish ghetto. The new generation, including a midwife, a doctor, a school teacher, an actuary, lawyers and businessmen, had abandoned regular attendance at synagogue and had consciously assimilated into British society. Although the Amiels stemmed from a well-known family of Sephardic Jews from Spain, and the Barnetts were descended from Vladimir Isserlis, an Ashkenazi scholar in Russia, Barbara and her cousins growing up in Chorley Wood were only vaguely aware that their family’s arrival in Britain had followed the discovery of great-grandfather Isserlis floating in the River Dnieper with a knife in his back. To escape the pogroms his widow had sold valuables to buy tickets on a boat sailing to Britain. Sixty years later, the fate of Europe’s Jews was rarely discussed in Chorley Wood. Rather, some families were preoccupied with persuading Britons to support the socialist or Communist parties in the next elections. Irene Amiel’s husband Bernard Buckman, the owner of department stores, was particularly close to two rich Jewish families, the Sedleys and the Seiferts. Together they championed and financed the British Communist Party. Barry Amiel, Harold’s younger brother, was also a member of the Communist Party. Among that group, Harold and Vera Amiel were known to be markedly uninterested in politics.

Vera was also noted as a neurotic, which caused tension during Harold’s return on leave in late 1942. Since their marriage in June 1939 the articulate and intelligent lawyer, now newly promoted as a major, had become disturbed by his wife’s emotions. That concern appeared to be brushed aside as he regaled his nephews and nieces with stories about the war and handed out epaulettes taken from captured Italian generals. The prizes from the battle-front would remain an indelible memory among the boys after they had bade Harold farewell on his return to Africa. In Harold’s absence his second daughter Ruth was born in 1943. One year later, Lieutenant Colonel Amiel’s war ended. Shot in the shoulder by a sniper while riding in a Jeep in Italy, he was repatriated as an invalid. Dressed in his colonel’s uniform, he spent time playing with his four-year-old daughter Barbara, who had struck up a close friendship with Peter Buckman, her older cousin. ‘Will you marry me?’ Peter asked Barbara. ‘We can’t,’ she replied. ‘We’ve both got dandruff, and that means that our children will be bald. I learned that in biology.’

During the last months of the war, Harold arranged to establish a solicitors’ partnership with his younger brother Barry. At the same time, he fell in love with a woman called Eileen Ford. Some would blame the tensions of the war for the breakdown of Harold and Vera’s marriage in 1945; others said that Vera was an uneducated neurotic and an unsuitable wife for a cultured lawyer. Divorce was common in the immediate post-war period, but Vera was unusually incandescent about Harold’s infidelity, not least because she had partly financed his new law partnership.

Despite the Amiels’ ugly arguments about money, Barbara Amiel was more fortunate than the many children who had lost their fathers in combat. Nevertheless, her early childhood was insecure. ‘I’ve suffered from insomnia all my life,’ she would write. ‘My earliest memory as a child of four was being sedated to sleep.’¹ There was, however, support from Mary Vangrovsky, Harold’s mother. After the divorce in 1946 and Harold’s marriage to Eileen in 1948, she gave her son money to set up a new home, and cared for her two granddaughters. By then Vera and her daughters were living in Hendon, in north-west London.

Barbara Amiel’s early school years were comfortable. Although affected by the general post-war austerity and the rationing of food and clothes, she attended North London Collegiate, one of England’s best state schools for girls, and enjoyed the privileges of a middle-class upbringing. There were ballet lessons, excursions to the theatre and cinema, visits to the new Festival Hall to hear Dame Myra Hess play Grieg, and regular meetings with her father at weekends.² Forbidden by Vera to entertain his two daughters in his new home, Harold would take the girls to visit their cousins – Anita Amiel in Swiss Cottage and the Buckmans in Hampstead – for lunch and tea before returning to Hendon. In the era of the nationalisation of major industries by the Labour government and the Cold War division of Europe, politics was passionately discussed in many homes, especially by Jews, a number of whom ranked among the leadership of the left-wing parties. Stimulated by the arguments, especially while visiting the Buckmans, Barbara Amiel would recall her growing understanding of their ‘interest in creating a more just society … through socialism’.³ At thirteen she was an intelligent, socially aware schoolgirl enjoying a stable life. Her mother was considering transferring her to Roedean, the expensive private boarding school on the south coast, but instead opted for a more dramatic change.

In the early 1950s Vera had begun a relationship with Leonard Somes, a non-Jewish draughtsman. Among the Barnetts and Amiels, Somes was regarded as decent and unassuming, but intellectually unimpressive. In 1953 Vera married him and declared that they would emigrate to Canada to find a new life. Amiel would later write that emigration was her mother’s only option, because the British class system discriminated against working-class men like her new stepfather, but that was fanciful. Many ambitious working-class Britons earned fortunes in the post-war era. Leonard Somes’s difficulties were his lack of talent and purpose, and his social unease. Canada, promised the advertisements, was a guaranteed escape from austerity and offered an idyllic future. Barbara’s fate was decided. By then her father had two more children, the elder of whom, a boy, was mentally handicapped. There was no possibility of Harold Amiel caring for his elder daughters.

The emigrants arrived in Hamilton, near Toronto, at the end of autumn 1953. There was disillusion rather than a honeymoon. The job Leonard Somes was expecting had disappeared, and after their savings were spent he was compelled following a long period of unemployment to work as a labourer at a local steel mill. Home life in Tragina Avenue, recalled Amiel, was a desperate ‘rat race’ to ‘make ends meet’. The family’s plight worsened when her mother went into premature labour. Although she and her son survived after weeks in hospital, Amiel was horrified that her mother’s wedding ring had been ‘wrenched from her finger’ by a robber in the hospital’s parking lot.⁴

At fifteen, Barbara Amiel was angry. In place of a comfortable home in London, an excellent school and endless cultural excursions, she found herself marooned in a grim wasteland surrounded by uneducated, insular provincials. Her mother, she screamed, was responsible for the calamity. Relations between Leonard and Vera deteriorated. They decided to move to St Catharines, a nearby town where there was the promise of a better job and a bigger home, a necessity since Vera had discovered that she was again pregnant. The only obstacle was Barbara, and there were furious arguments. Vera condemned her daughter’s behaviour as unreasonable. For her part, Barbara judged her mother to be neurotic and unstable, and she was equally dissatisfied with her stepfather’s lacklustre achievements. Although she would write twenty-five years later that her stepfather was ‘a handsome, warm man of whom I was enormously proud’, at the time she was infuriated by his responsibility for her plight.⁵ In her mother’s version of events, there was concern about Barbara’s education. She was settled at the local school, and was ambitious to attend university. The best temporary solution, they agreed, was for Barbara to stay with neighbouring friends and to visit her family at weekends. Accordingly, her clothes were packed and carried to her temporary home.⁶ Barbara’s version is more apocalyptic. She describes arriving home from school one day at the age of fourteen to discover all her possessions ‘packed in a cardboard box next to the front door. My mother was very apologetic. “Your stepfather and I can’t cope with you any more, so you have to move out.” They found me a room in a house on a council estate and paid my rent until the end of the school term.’ The publication of Barbara’s account in 1980 would cause great hurt to Vera and Leonard, and to many others in her family who disputed her recollection of events.

Growing up alone without a family became increasingly difficult. In Amiel’s various descriptions, she lodged in a part-time brothel while revising for her high-school exams at St Catharines Collegiate, or was a tenant with an unpleasant Polish family. She kept her concentration by stuffing her ears with wax earplugs, but after the ‘hurt had passed and I had cried a bit, after I got over the fright of sleeping in cellars underneath the furnace pipes, I came to cherish my freedom’. During her adolescence, she would also write, she found herself ‘in the middle of a room, stranded, sitting in my own urine, sitting for hours, too frightened to cry and too frightened to move’.⁷ Her occasional companions in sexual experimentation and drinking alcohol were the children of Polish émigrés and Canadian aboriginals. To accommodate that lifestyle she moved into a boarding house during the week, and stayed with a succession of girlfriends’ families at the weekends. To finance herself, she worked in the evenings and holidays, in a drugstore, a fruit-canning factory and clothes shops. Illness forced her once to return temporarily to her parents’ home, but she soon resumed life in Hamilton. Told she was entitled to a ‘secure home’ by a social worker, she later commented, ‘I had never thought about what I was entitled to. Things were simply taken as they came.’⁸ Her brave struggle was rewarded by her securing the grades to study philosophy and English at the University of Toronto. Amiel had become a toughened, streetwise survivor. Her ‘wild’ days, she would write thirty years later, left a legacy. ‘Something decent died in me, or perhaps was stillborn: I would never be able to create a successful family life.’ Incorrect reports suggested that she never saw her mother again.⁹ Her anger at Vera was compounded by another surprise. In 1959, on the eve of going to university, she and her sister were invited by their family to return to England for their summer holidays.

Unknown to Amiel, in early 1956 her father had become severely troubled. Harold Amiel, the practice’s accountant, had been stealing money from clients and from his solicitors’ partnership. Exposure was imminent. Fearing disgrace and the anger of his younger brother Barry, he went on 19 April to his mother’s flat in Marylebone while she was on a winter cruise, and took an overdose of barbiturates. A verdict of suicide was declared by the coroner one week later. In their grief, the families decided not to tell Harold’s two daughters in Canada, partly because he rarely talked about them, and also because he had not mentioned them in his last will, signed the day before his death. Barbara’s cousins were told that Uncle Harold had died of his wartime wounds. Amiel’s sole memento of her father was a photograph of him dressed in a colonel’s uniform. Many years later she described her father swallowing the tablets while listening to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.¹⁰ In contrast, Barry Amiel recalled that his brother was reading a good book and eating an apple before his death.

Considering her hardships over the previous six years, Barbara Amiel’s arrival at university had been achieved at a price. Emotionally she was unstable. To relieve her stress and tiredness she swallowed a dozen Codeine 222 tablets a day, and took antidepressants to help her sleep. The physical result was an undernourished, sultry young woman with deep black shadows under her eyes. Sprawled across the bed in her room in the students’ hall of residence were panda bears and other soft toys. On a shelf was the solitary photograph of her father in uniform. ‘Welcome to the Jewish Common Room,’ laughed fellow-student Larry Zolf as the thin Barbara entered the Junior Common Room. ‘The most beautiful fellow-travelling Marxist I have ever seen,’ was Zolf’s conclusion after a few conversations revealed her fascination with Stalin, ‘and certainly the most intelligent.’ Curious about her past, Zolf asked the shy girl about her family. ‘Oh, my father was very poor and unemployed,’ replied Amiel, ‘and we were kept afloat by a rich uncle.’ Other family members do not recall those circumstances.

Sitting regularly in the JCR, the centre of her social life, with her new best friend Ellie Tesher, Amiel confessed her need for security. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked when a handsome, dark-haired student walked in. ‘That’s Gary Smith,’ replied Tesher. ‘He lives in Forest Hill’ (an affluent area of Toronto). ‘I think I’ll marry him,’ said Amiel flatly.

Gary Smith, a gentle, quietly-spoken law student, was the son of Harry Smith, the owner of the once-famous Prince George Hotel in Toronto and a member of a well-known family. In 1958 Harry Smith had opened the luxurious Riviera Hotel in Havana, Cuba, in partnership with Meyer Lansky, the Mafia boss, who owned the hotel’s casino. Fidel Castro’s revolution one year later terminated their investment. In an attempt to recoup some of their money, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr and Sophie Tucker were booked to appear at the Prince George Hotel, and the income their performances generated was substantial. The downside was Harry Smith’s chronic and unsuccessful gambling in casinos across the USA. Nevertheless, to Barbara Amiel, the Smiths appeared a wealthy, stable Jewish family who might offer her salvation.

Amiel enjoyed Gary Smith’s adulation. Silently, he admired her skills in political argument – the legacy, she said, of those family debates in north London. As her self-confidence grew, she became the centre of attraction in student debates as a fiery supporter of neo-Marxism and Leon Trotsky. ‘You don’t know the difference between Trotsky and a hole in the ground,’ laughed Zolf. Once their relationship had become established, Smith was untroubled by Amiel’s frequent indifference towards him, even when she treated him like an imbecile. Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly. ‘Sex is good with Barbara,’ Smith confided, albeit that it invariably took place in the back of the car he borrowed from his parents – by no means an uncommon experience among their age group. Her thin waist and large, high breasts were breathtaking. ‘If anything,’ Smith murmured, ‘Barbara needs breast reduction, they’re so huge.’ Many years later, Conrad Black was to make the same type of comment publicly. Smith had never met such a sexually experienced woman who frequently took the initiative. His placid temperament could easily cope with her dramatic, even histrionic moods, but while Amiel was vitriolic in criticising others, she was vulnerable to even friendly mocking of herself. In those helpless moments he provided the support she needed, especially during the weeks when she consulted the college psychiatrist about her hallucinations and her growing addiction to Codeine. A doctor prescribed Elavil, an antidepressant. ‘The drug,’ she wrote, ‘was to be my undoing [and the cause of] my erratic emotional life … I never realised quite how drugged I was for those seven years.’¹¹

Amiel’s erratic life had started long before the summer of 1962, but that year was a landmark. Isaac Barnett, her grandfather, died and bequeathed her £400. She flew to London with Gary Smith to collect the money and see her family. In the new, exciting environment, Amiel’s imagination let rip. Smith was under the mistaken impression that she had found her father’s corpse after he committed suicide, and she suggested that she had been brought up as a Marxist, mixing with the Seiferts and Sedleys, the rich Jewish Communist families who lived in mansions in Hampstead, although neither family could recall her presence in their homes, or her being invited to their frequent parties. She would later recollect that she was met at Heathrow by ‘my Maoist uncle’s chauffeur’, while Gary Smith recalls them taking a bus into the city and walking to a hotel.¹² The Amiels and the Buckmans recall trying their best to care for their niece whose innocence had, it seemed, been irretrievably lost. As a gesture of their consideration, her uncle Bernard Buckman suggested that she join the British delegation to that year’s World Youth Festival in Helsinki, a Soviet-sponsored summer camp for Communist supporters. Amiel bade farewell to Gary Smith and set off, passing through the newly-built Berlin Wall, to compare the theory of Communism discussed at university in Toronto with the reality.

Eighteen years later, Amiel would assert that the Helsinki experience had immediately and fundamentally changed her political opinions, although the student who returned to Canada still spoke as a Marxist. The noticeable difference was her change of personality. The shy trepidation had been replaced by a flaunting of her sexual attractions. With her family’s support, she did not need to work that summer. Instead she stayed with Florence Smith, Gary’s aunt, while he continued to live with his parents.

Despite her growing dependence on the Smiths, Amiel’s visit to Helsinki did bring about one basic change – she began to live a double life, which would continue until she married Conrad Black. She would travel to Montreal, moving in circles where people played with ‘real drugs’, and discovering that she got high on marijuana more quickly if she used a pipe. While apparently faithful to Gary Smith, she also enjoyed other sexual relations.¹³ The Canadian idol of the era was Leonard Cohen, the brilliant, handsome poet and singer. Cohen’s philosophy appealed to countless female admirers who flocked to the star in the hope of seducing him. Amiel suggests that she joined the queue. Cohen, she said, could offer women ‘everything, except of course fidelity … In his own terms he is not unfaithful to anyone because he cares for them all.’ The poet’s attitude towards free love and open relationships, while caring for all his lovers, appealed to Amiel’s gypsy temperament.¹⁴ ‘The secret that Leonard shares with Casanova,’ she would write, ‘is the one that costs him dear: it is real desire.’ Amiel showed the same unfaithfulness, but in her case it was to satisfy different requirements. She always needed a man, but hated relying on other people. Her dilemma was how to balance her dependence and her desire for independence. Unlike Cohen, she would not advertise her roaming, astutely compartmentalising her life.

Just after completing her final university examinations in 1963, Amiel opted for financial stability. ‘I wrote a message under the seal of your degree,’ she told Gary Smith, referring to a romantic gesture she had made while preparing the degree certificates in the university administrator’s office. ‘It’s a love message,’ she confided. Days later, at the end of a sexual session in Gary’s father’s car, she unexpectedly snapped, ‘Let’s get married.’ Gary understood the reasons. Barbara was fed up with sex in the back of a car. She wanted a bed, security and, above all, money. Their first date for the ceremony was abandoned. ‘We’ve got cold feet,’ Gary told his parents. A few weeks later they were married in a rabbi’s study in front of eight witnesses including her mother and Leonard Somes, Gary’s parents and Larry Zolf. At the party afterwards in the Smiths’ family apartment, Zolf pushed through gamblers, bookmakers and scam artists to ask a small man, ‘Are you Meyer Lansky?’ ‘So what if I am?’ he growled.

The newly married couple rented an apartment on Toronto’s Spadina Road, and while Gary Smith began his career as a lawyer, Amiel was employed as a secretary and script assistant in the television section of CBC. Not long afterwards, there was a terrible shock. Harry Smith, having lost all his money gambling, was arrested with his brother and accused of fraud. Soon after, he was convicted and imprisoned. Instead of joining a stable Jewish family, Amiel had associated herself with criminals. It was not long before she realised that her decision to marry Gary Smith had been short-sighted. Domestic life with the modest lawyer was dull compared to the thrills at CBC, especially following her appearance on the cover of Toronto Life magazine. Increasingly, she returned home late and too tired for sex. Just nine months after their marriage she asked her husband, ‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ ‘I would not presume to know what’s going on in your head,’ replied Smith. ‘This isn’t working. I’m off.’

Late that night in summer 1964, George Jonas, a twenty-nine-year-old Hungarian émigré also employed by CBC, was driving along Spadina Road and spotted Amiel crossing the street, ‘weighed down with more baggage than a ten-hand army mule’. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Jonas. ‘You just robbed a dwelling and can’t remember where you parked the getaway car.’ ‘Close,’ she replied. ‘I just split up with my husband.’ ‘Great,’ said Jonas. ‘Let’s go have coffee.’ ‘Can’t,’ said Amiel. ‘Have to unload all this stuff before seven. Call me tomorrow if you like.’¹⁵

Jonas, a right-wing intellectual, was an unusual character in Toronto. Alternately, he dressed in black leather and rode a motorcycle or assumed the mantle of a Central European, carrying a silver-headed cane as a prop to his hand-kissing and heel-clicking. In London or New York his act might have been ridiculed, but Amiel was attracted to the ambience of an East European intellectual’s home filled with books, music and passionate arguments. Since her visit to Helsinki she had moved from the far left towards the political centre, and Jonas’s fervent anti-Communism was appealing. For his part, Jonas said, ‘I found her very attractive and thoroughly unpleasant.’¹⁶ That was not a barrier to a relationship, and nor was Sylvie, Jonas’s wife. Jonas and Amiel began an affair, although Amiel did not regard it as an exclusive attachment. She was now better fed and dressed, making her breasts appear larger. ‘The bigger and more pronounced they are,’ she would later write, ‘the more attractive they are.’ Depending on her mood, she could appear flat-chested, while on other occasions the size of her breasts fuelled speculation about implants. ‘I’ve got one thing you haven’t got,’ she boasted to male journalists vying for the same interview: ‘cleavage.’¹⁷ Shamelessly, she would ask a colleague for advice about something she had written, and while he read her pages, rest a breast on his shoulder. As she self-consciously walked through CBC’s corridors like a queen with an entourage, her remarkable physique excited drooling and gossip. At parties, men were mesmerised by her sexuality. ‘Holding her thin waist was so erotic, so powerful,’ sighed one admirer. Some of her relationships ended with her ‘seeing stars’ after being hit by a boyfriend;¹⁸ one ended in an abortion;¹⁹ but almost invariably her men, including cameraman Ed Long, discovered that after one night, they were forgotten the following morning. Long’s attempt to seek an explanation was spurned by Amiel, who turned her back as he approached. ‘I could cope with three men a week at CBC,’ she would later jokingly tell a boyfriend. ‘Each man was satisfied with two nights, and that left me one night to wash my hair.’

‘She’s gorgeous,’ announced Ross McLean, regarded as CBC’s most brilliant producer. Moses Znaimer, another producer, agreed that Amiel, who was then employed as a secretary by Perry Roseman on The Way It Is, a current affairs programme, should be turned into a star. Glamour photographs were distributed to promote the new celebrity interviewer. Her debut was not a success. The autopsies of Amiel’s on-screen abilities were merciless. ‘She comes across as affected but not stylish,’ said one producer. ‘She’s too guarded, not sharing her personality with the audience. She’s not a natural.’ Another senior producer agreed: ‘Her fine-boned chiselled features make her attractive but you can’t take her seriously.’ ‘Too nervous and lacks gravitas,’ concluded a third, who carped that her prominence had been won by manipulating Ross McLean. Unexpectedly, Amiel’s overt sexuality had undermined her professional ambitions. Producers were reluctant to use a woman whose appearance and manner were distracting. The struggle for success increased her insecurity, although initially she ignored her failure. ‘All in all, I learned to be a reasonably smart-ass interviewer,’ she would recall in self-praise.²⁰ Appearing in a 1966 TV satire as a bikini-clad temptress of Eddie Shack, a wild ice-hockey player, did not enhance her image as a serious journalist.²¹ Her on-screen career was in jeopardy. In her search for blame she would admit that she had been ‘too self-conscious’, and she later conceded that her appearance as ‘a lacquered apparition with bouffant hair, glazed smile and detachment bordering on the unconscious, often reinforced by the mandatory dosage of Elavil’, was not a winner.²² But the real cause of her misfortune, she decided, was a CBC ‘syndrome’ that excluded ‘non-leftists’ from appearing on the channel. Although it was not a full left-wing ‘conspiracy’, she said there was a prejudice against her anti-Communism. She also perceived another bias. ‘I’m unhappy with my nose,’ she told Claire Weisman, an artist who was temporarily answering telephones in the building, ‘and I’m having it fixed.’ Weisman was surprised. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Haven’t you noticed it?’ said Amiel. ‘Noticed what?’ ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Haven’t you noticed the anti-Semitism here?’ ‘No,’ replied Weisman. ‘Absolutely not.’

Amiel had long been unhappy about the shape of her nose. Variously described as ‘Roman’ or ‘soft Jewish’, it curved gently down, whereas she wanted the ‘turned-up’ nose prevalent among the gentile, white Anglo-Saxon community. She confided her dissatisfaction to George Bloomfield, a gregarious CBC producer whom she had ‘spotted’ a year earlier. Soon after introducing herself, she rented a flat in Bloomfield’s block in Toronto’s High Park, and a few weeks later she moved into his apartment. ‘I don’t like my nose,’ she had repeated for a year. ‘It’s a perfect nose,’ replied Bloomfield mechanically, but eventually he agreed to pay for the surgery. The doctor produced a nose described by Bloomfield as ‘pug’ and by Larry Zolf, now also employed at CBC, as a ‘button nose’ and ‘an insult to the Jewish people. Amiel was ashamed of the perfectly good Jewish nose she had. Now she looks like a crazed Shirley Temple.’²³ Amiel’s depression intensified. ‘It’ll improve,’ the surgeon assured her. Frequently plunging into her handbag to take pills, Amiel set off to California as senior CBC producer Eric Koch’s script assistant to film a documentary, Culture Explosion. ‘She’s a bright, moody Jewish girl cursed by her mental fragility,’ concluded Koch, who became disenchanted with Amiel at a family dinner hosted by his brother. ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she announced, clearly bored. ‘Take me home.’ ‘Out of the question,’ Koch replied, outraged by her selfish behaviour towards his family. ‘Sit down.’ Refusing to obey, Amiel asked a member of the film crew to drive her to her hotel. Clearly she was prepared to live only on her terms. She had, Koch heard, walked out of concerts if a more exciting alternative sprang to mind.

Back in Toronto in 1968, George Bloomfield was preparing to move to New York and make feature films. One night he and Amiel were disturbed by the doorbell. Bloomfield stumbled out of bed. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. ‘Telegram,’ said the voice. Bloomfield opened the door, and was pushed aside by Gary Smith. Finding his way into the bedroom, Smith saw Amiel. He then left. Soon after, Amiel’s mother and stepfather visited the flat for an unemotional but civilised reconciliation. The ghosts of her ‘wild years’ were being interred. To break from her past, she decided to abandon CBC and move with Bloomfield to New York. ‘I’m a camp follower,’ she admitted.²⁴ Soon after their arrival she found a nose surgeon used by Hollywood’s stars. Bloomfield agreed to pay for the second operation. This time she declared the result ‘great’.

Life in New York suited Amiel. Bloomfield was fun, and paid for all her needs. ‘Ten seconds after waking up,’ he recalled, ‘we’d both be laughing.’ She began to read voraciously, stretching her intellect. Unlike in Toronto, she was surrounded by the ‘chic world’ of film celebrities, and came eagerly close to anti-Vietnam war and pro-feminist agitators, notably Jane Fonda and Alan Alda, who were working with Bloomfield. Hovering around Fifth Avenue, she watched the rich buy furs and jewellery, envious of how they recognised each other and could ‘trade fashion names and tips’.²⁵ At length, she justified to Bloomfield her considerable expenditure of his money on exclusive brands: ‘You’ve got to have the right belt, purse, shoes and scarf. The dress doesn’t matter.’ Her easy-going manner, friendliness towards everyone, and willingness to engage in any fantasy Bloomfield suggested in their bedroom, suggested a happy woman. Unseen by others, however, there was another side.

The prescription of the antidepressant Elavil, described by Amiel as ‘my undoing’, had neutralised her sense of responsibility. ‘Nothing was my fault,’ she recalled, because ‘everything is socially or chemically determined’.²⁶ Drugs, Bloomfield complained, had become a routine part of his girlfriend’s life. Screaming in her face, he discovered, grabbed her attention. ‘When you take drugs you look just like your mother,’ he shouted at her. Amiel stood silently, pushing both wrists upwards. Like make-up, the image of the independent and tough woman evaporated, replaced by a vulnerable individual requiring direction to cope with her confused emotions.

Bloomfield would be editing his latest film with Alan Alda in London, where the producers were providing a luxury flat near Buckingham Palace for three months. Amiel was excited. Since her own career as a freelance writer had ground to a near halt, the change would be stimulating. Her relationship with Bloomfield was friendly but no longer passionate. She could use the trip to develop her skills as a hostess. In anticipation of dinner parties, she invested heavily in weighing scales, cooking dishes, recipe books and measuring spoons. To the surprise of Lazlo Kovacs, a guest at one of her London dinner parties, she wore a stopwatch around her neck. Anxiously she watched the seconds tick away. ‘Quick, finish your plate,’ she urged, ‘the next course is coming.’ Everyone, including Bloomfield, would recall the fuss rather than the meal.

Life in London offered a good chance for Amiel to renew her relations with the Buckmans, especially Irene, her father’s older sister, and Peter, her cousin. ‘Do you think it’s too scandalous?’ she asked, modelling a revealing bikini in front of Peter Buckman. Did her choice, she was anxious to know, defy the propriety expected of a Jewish princess? Buckman assured her that she looked beautiful. Meeting the Buckmans was fun, especially Uncle Bernard, the businessman and property developer. ‘You’re very proud of him, aren’t you?’ said Bloomfield. Amiel nodded. Her uncle’s large house in Hampstead, the country home he had bought his son, his own houses on the Côte d’Azur and in St Moritz, his big car and a suspected Swiss bank account excited a woman who wanted wealth but also remained committed to some socialist ideals. In one respect, Bernard Buckman was a mini-idol for both George and Barbara. During his many business trips to China he had met Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, the Communist leaders, whom they both venerated. Plaintively, Amiel urged Bernard Buckman to negotiate Mao’s approval of a film which would feature Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star Over China, a eulogy of Mao’s revolutionary war. Bloomfield would be the producer. Buckman agreed, but Snow’s death terminated the plan. Amiel’s disappointment revealed no suggestion of disapproval of her uncle’s profitable combination of business and politics.

Amiel’s return to Toronto in 1972 was auspicious. She started writing for local magazines, a divorce was arranged with Gary Smith, who cited her adultery with Bloomfield, and she began searching for a new life after what Bloomfield would later call ‘five aimless years’. By then her sexual relations with Bloomfield were rare. He was focused on his work, and was unconcerned whether she was sleeping with other men. He had steadfastly ignored her desire for children. In need of a man, Amiel approached George Jonas to resume their relationship. Her politics were shifting sharply to the right, she needed intellectual stimulation and a totally different life. By living with Jonas, she could concentrate far more on her own work.

George Jonas had been living for several years with Beverley Slopen, a literary agent. Amiel’s appearance in their apartment did not immediately alarm Slopen. She knew Amiel as ‘a hypochondriac who George might take for a weekend to the Bahamas but could not afford to take shopping’. She did not anticipate that Amiel would provoke a very public split between her and Jonas, after which Amiel returned to her apartment in Chestnut Park Road. ‘I’ve decided to leave,’ she told Bloomfield calmly. Bloomfield was not surprised. ‘Found someone else?’ he asked. ‘I’m going back to George,’ said Amiel. That news did shock Bloomfield. How, he wondered, after five years living with supporters of the feminist and anti-war movements, could she live with such a right-wing man? He never received an answer. Soon after, Bloomfield was called by Jonas and invited to meet at the Coffee Mill, his favourite Hungarian restaurant. According to Bloomfield, while they spoke Jonas took out a gun and showed it under the table. ‘I can’t live without her,’ said Jonas. ‘Don’t try to take her away.’ Jonas describes Bloomfield’s scenario as ‘ludicrous, the invention of a film producer’. Whatever the truth of the matter, the emotions of twenty-five years previously are evidently undiminished.

In her new life Amiel worked frantically, laboriously writing acclaimed magazine articles on various social issues throughout the night, carefully choosing each word in her efforts to express original opinions in a cautious climate. Simultaneously, she reemerged as a popular television pundit to disparage Marxism, feminism and Canada’s dependency culture. Trading on the image of a sexy intellectual, she showed off bruises at a dinner party and declaimed, ‘Sex is no good without pain.’ Together with Jonas she posed as a star with brains and beauty, charm and attitude. Those unconvinced by her self-education during her years with Bloomfield credited Jonas as her Svengali, dubbing her ‘the finest second-hand mind in Canada’. This further eroded her self-confidence, already undermined by the painful withdrawal symptoms after she had given up Elavil. She became fearful of cancer and other illnesses. Her critics spoke of borderline narcissism – which she interpreted as evidence of her growing importance.

Living with Jonas, a poet, journalist and political philosopher, was ideal for an aspiring writer. In October 1974, having discovered that Jonas was also Jewish, she announced, ‘I’ve made an appointment with the local rabbi.’ They were to marry later that month, in a synagogue, with only six guests. Over the following months Amiel’s self-confidence soared. Although she voiced a fear of being disliked, and hesitantly dismissed her urge for children as premature, she asserted absolute certainty about her political convictions. Having shed her last vestige of sympathy for compassionate government, she placed herself in the vanguard of the cause of restoring red-blooded capitalism to socialistic Canada.

Peter Newman, the mercurial editor of Maclean’s, Canada’s only popular political magazine, was impressed by Amiel’s right-wing, anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic criticism of modern fads. In 1966 she had written an astutely argued article, ‘Let’s Reinstate Debtors’ Prisons’, for the magazine, advocating that debtors who failed to pay their bills should be imprisoned.²⁷ Ten years later Marci McDonald, a star columnist, resigned, and there was a vacancy. ‘Marci was a bitch,’ said Newman admiringly, ‘but we’ve got a bigger bitch to take her place.’ Amiel’s extreme conservatism, he calculated, would attract profitable controversy.

National prominence enhanced Amiel’s visible self-confidence. ‘She was the sort of woman,’ Newman noted, ‘who kept spilling out of her dresses, then blamed the dresses.’²⁸ Her response to those who whispered about implants was savvy. ‘If I used silicone,’ she told Newman, ‘my breasts would be twice as big. I don’t do things by halves.’²⁹ Fame and independence sparked her weariness with Jonas. Marrying a Jew, she discovered, was not such a good idea after all. His emotional needs were too similar to her own, and rather than partying, he preferred staying at home. Jonas was not the first man to discover the truth of her confession, ‘I’m polyandrous.’ One man could not satisfy her. She was constantly propositioned by men and women, married and single. The ferociously heterosexual Amiel wanted to experiment with most kinds of relationships and sexual antics.

Hanging around the Maclean’s office late one evening towards the end of 1976, Amiel noticed Peter Brimelow, the magazine’s handsome twenty-nine-year-old business editor, born in Lancashire, England. Drawing on her consummate experience, she made signals to encourage his approach. The long dark hair and green eyes of the seductress who had just been named ‘Canada’s most beautiful woman’ by a magazine was irresistible to the younger journalist, unaware of the licentious world he was entering.

‘I’ve got to go for an appointment,’ Amiel often told Jonas, with whom she was writing By Persons Unknown, a prospective non-fiction bestseller about a Canadian businessman who hired killers to murder his wife, a fashion model. In great secrecy she visited Brimelow’s flat. If she went away overnight, Jonas believed she was travelling on an assignment. Her infidelity evoked no crisis of conscience. As with her other relationships, Amiel’s self-indulgence was to please her latest admirer. ‘You’re a luxury,’ she told Brimelow in bed. ‘You’re of no use to me other than for sex and passion.’ Bites and scratches were his badges of her eroticism. ‘What makes people good lovers,’ she later reflected, ‘is not their sexual technique but their sexual being. Extremes of ineptitude aside, it is not how a man touches you, but who the man is that determines your sexual response.’³⁰ The rawness was her attraction: ‘No matter how many times the act is performed, one is still in awe of its potential … whether it is done for love or for money, for spite of for kicks, the sexual act remains the key to our entire being.’³¹ Whether fooling around with Brimelow, joking about another affair with a Hungarian bankrobber who ‘stored gelignite under my bed’, or mimicking mutual friends, Amiel blessed her eternal youth. ‘I’ll never get old,’ she said. ‘That’s a battle I’ll never lose.’ The chilling implication was her preference for death rather than looking at a wrinkled face in the mirror. Inevitably, the relationship bore a cost. Brimelow was not the first to discover that losing one’s heart to Amiel meant a loss of self-control, and she enjoyed witnessing helplessness in her men. Lying in bed with Brimelow early on New Year’s Eve in 1976, she knew that later, while she was celebrating with her husband, Brimelow would be partying with a girlfriend. Seized by a mixture of insecurity and fury at her inability to control Brimelow, she dug the nails of both hands deeply into his chest, drawing blood. Brimelow’s girlfriend, Amiel smiled, would get the message.

Hard work, stylish writing, deep thought, exceptional looks and unconventional opinions had transformed Barbara Amiel into the nation’s conservative star. Describing herself with relish as a ‘very merchandisable’ right-wing pundit or ‘the redneck in a Givenchy dress’, she invited notoriety and a reputation for bitchiness as the Jew who criticised Israel, the advocate of personal responsibility and the critic of equal-opportunity politics.³² Without loyalty or deference to the Canadian establishment, the outsider reproached the natives. While pouting about her need for privacy, revelations about her sentiments in Maclean’s became the cornerstone of her journalistic shock. Like many celebrity pundits, she occasionally confused intelligence with wisdom. Her prominence transformed a spat with the Ontario Human Rights Commission after she described Germans during the First and Second World War as ‘Huns’ into a national debate. ‘You’d have saved us a lot of trouble,’ said Newman, ‘if you’d called them “Sauer Krauts”.’ To Newman’s surprise, Amiel burst into tears. ‘She’s a woman without a sense of humour about herself,’ the editor concluded,³³ puzzled by her insistence that ‘harsh words can’t harm me’.³⁴ Her sensitivity did not always extend to thoughtfulness about others. Careless about the magazine’s schedules, she delivered articles with trembling hands at the editorial office after the deadline, clutching her head to relieve the pain of giving birth to a masterpiece, and awaited the applause. ‘A drama queen,’ concluded Peter Newman, ‘and a whining pest over each lost comma and adjective.’ For sympathy, she constantly telephoned Peter Brimelow. Even in the middle of the night she required an audience to hear about her work, her upsets and the praise she had attracted.

The relationship between Amiel and Brimelow was intense, yet to Brimelow’s despair she would not abandon Jonas. In revenge, Brimelow began an affair with Amiel’s assistant Dia, an attractive Anglo-Indian. ‘You’re having her, aren’t you?’ screamed Amiel. ‘How could you?’ Brimelow was unapologetic. Amiel refused to leave Jonas, he retorted, so why could he not also have an affair? Walking a tightrope, Amiel justified her own infidelity while condemning her lover’s.

In early 1979, Brimelow accepted a job in Washington, where his latest girlfriend, called Maggie, lived. In recent weeks he had described Maggie to Amiel as a potential wife. Amiel was given a choice. If their relationship was to survive, she would have to leave Toronto and her husband. Still undecided, she arrived at Brimelow’s flat with her sister Ruth. After Ruth’s departure, Amiel remained to say farewell. In bed, she announced a game of noughts and crosses on Brimelow’s chest. Her scratch marks were deep, the blood oozed. She knew that Maggie would understand.

A transitional moment in Amiel’s life had arrived. She was still married to Jonas, but she visited Brimelow three times in Washington, and at the same time started an affair with Sam Blyth, thirteen years younger than herself, and with similar looks to Brimelow’s. After two months, her decision was final. ‘It’s time to see Sam,’ she told a friend. She abandoned her husband and long-time lover, and moved into Blyth’s dilapidated Toronto home. The dalliance, she reckoned, would extricate herself from her marriage. Handsome, charming and poor, Sam Blyth offered new excitement. ‘A big adventure,’ said Amiel. ‘A lot of fun, like a journey in a big cookie jar.’³⁵ Brimelow took the news calmly, while Jonas was distressed about no longer meeting Amiel’s requirements. ‘She was not a housewife,’ he said, ‘and I am not a house-husband. We agreed what we should do is find a wife, for both of us.’³⁶ Jonas soon recovered. ‘How would you like to go to Paris for breakfast?’ he asked a Korean woman managing a restaurant. They eventually married.

Amid that hiatus Amiel began writing Confessions, her autobiography, a mixture of political polemic and attention-seeking striptease. ‘I am a wandering Jew,’ she wrote. ‘I always have my toothbrush handy. My allegiance is not to any piece of earth or particular set of rock outcroppings. My allegiance is to ideas, and most especially to the extraordinary idea of individual liberty … My suitcase is packed. I do not feel bound to any country or any popular will more than to my own conscience.’³⁷ In an article published simultaneously in the magazine Chatelaine called ‘Nothing Succeeds Like Excess’, she confessed to being a shameless, self-promoting exhibitionist who enjoyed intellectual domination. Her critics unfairly classified such confessions as proof of the ‘borderline personality disorder’ suffered by attention-seeking addicts, or narcissism. Amiel’s sophisticated political arguments, however, protected the book from ridicule when it was published in 1980.

Rescuing Canada from socialism and ‘the spiritual and moral bankruptcy into which it has fallen’ was the heart of Amiel’s cause.³⁸ Like Conrad Black, she condemned the Globe and Mail and the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau for distorting the policies of anti-Marxists and conservatives. The Liberal ‘thought police’, she wrote, were conducting a ‘witch-hunt’ against those championing the individual against the state. She railed against the bureaucrats promoting political correctness, multi-culturalism and the conditions of working women, and their fellow travellers who were championing sexual harassment prosecutions, denigrating prostitutes, inventing child abuse as a political weapon, lamenting men’s abuse of the clitoris and generally suppressing opportunities. Her black cleaner in New York, she complained, had refused to move out of a poor neighbourhood and seek a better education for her children because she expected improvements to be brought to her at public expense.³⁹ The Canadian media and political establishment, she protested, were deliberately concealing the horrors in China and the Soviet Union. Forgetting her former support for the anti-Vietnam war movement, she confessed to having ‘little sympathy or respect for draft-dodgers’, and ‘loathed the sight of pretend-moralists’.⁴⁰ She was, she wrote, thrilled that Jane Fonda had been arrested by US Customs for carrying drugs which turned out to be Codeine given to her by Amiel for a headache. ‘I was filled with a warm glow,’ she wrote. ‘It was my contribution to the war effort.’⁴¹

Confessions also included a florid description of Amiel’s English roots. After interviewing most of her family during her stay in London in 1971, she described herself as born into a family of British Marxists. The exaggeration justified what she admitted were ‘snide remarks’ about Bernard Buckman. In ungrateful language, she condemned her uncle as an unprincipled, rich hypocrite, living in his big, sunlit Hampstead home where ‘the clichés bounced off the cut crystal’ while indulging in ‘wilful blindness’ about China and the Soviet Union’s repression and bloodshed.⁴² One assertion which hurt the Buckmans was that the family was ‘financed by mainland China’.⁴³ ‘She’s abused our hospitality and twisted the family history,’ Bernard Buckman told his wife Irene. ‘Forgive her,’ urged Irene, uneasy about her niece’s mistreatment by the Amiels. But even Irene was puzzled by Barbara’s inaccurate reconstruction of her background in her attempt to prove her new values. In a book extolling the importance of a journalist’s honesty, complained Irene, Barbara’s inventions were surprising.

The contrast between Amiel writing her book in Sam Blyth’s unkempt home, even wearing a coat when the electricity was cut off, and her personal credo was notable. ‘I knew what I wanted,’ she wrote about her time in London in 1971. ‘To be dropped at Selfridges’s or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for quails’ eggs,’ besides taking lessons to be a hostess and sharing a masseur with Lady Weidenfeld.⁴⁴ She had become envious of the Canadian jet set’s use of private planes, ‘clubby travellers wafting across borders with sleek impunity’, living ‘our fantasies’. Her reality check was a conviction that those birds of paradise had no ‘durability’ and that few would survive.⁴⁵

More revealing, considering her future conduct as Lady Black, was her attitude towards materialism. ‘The true spirit of liberalism,’ she wrote, ‘simply judges everyone on his or her own merit … We are all responsible for ourselves. That is not callous. That is liberation.’⁴⁶ Transgressors, she warned, would be punished: ‘Greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws.’⁴⁷ Her most pertinent comment, in the light of Conrad Black’s problems twenty-three years later, was her reproach, in Maclean’s, of John Dean, Richard Nixon’s dishonest legal adviser in the White House during the Watergate scandal. Amiel was scathing about Dean’s ‘moral myopia’ as a party to the President’s cover-up. Instead of accepting personal responsibility for his conduct, she wrote, he ‘still clings to the soothing thought that it was all somebody else’s fault’, blaming ‘the environment [for his crimes] rather than a person’s own morality’.⁴⁸

In January 1981, soon after the book’s publication, Amiel and Blyth visited Mozambique. She wanted to witness the damage wreaked by Western aid on native agriculture while sustaining Marxist regimes. The journey ended in embarrassment. Attempting to enter the country without visas, they were arrested and imprisoned for some days. She would later claim to have eaten her press pass to avoid recognition. ‘That would have been difficult,’ said Peter Newman. ‘It’s plastic.’ Others quipped that the hardest bit to swallow would have been Newman’s signature, or her own. Amiel’s plight, and her melodramatic plea that her life was in danger, provoked anger from the Canadian ambassador, who was irritated by her behaviour, and from rival journalists. But Peter Worthington, the editor of the Toronto Sun, was surprised by the apparent jealousy. ‘She’s sailing through life like the Spanish Armada,’ he said, apparently unaware that the Armada was destroyed by the English navy and a storm. Amiel’s values and humour, he decided, were ideal for his newspaper. On her return she was appointed a columnist on the Sun, and her life became even more hectic.

Living in squalor with Blyth while renting a comfortable apartment in Forest Hill, she wrote regularly about her abortion, her drugs, her family feuds and her love life. Playing the Jewish card, the impoverished Jew became the aggrieved Jew championing prejudice. Her private life became as varied as her writing. ‘I’ve got this penchant for young men,’ she told a girlfriend. Blyth became just one of several young boyfriends, including twenty-four-year-old journalist Daniel Richler, whom she met during a radio debate. Their affair began soon afterwards. Arguing and laughing in restaurants, Amiel was carefree about her reputation. Just a month after starting the relationship with Richler, there was a silence followed by a sigh during a telephone conversation. ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she declared. The relationship was over. Her ‘penchant’ was for other young men, including Eric Margolis, a freelance journalist specialising in the Middle East whom she met at a lunch hosted by one of her many admirers. The host’s misfortune was that Amiel, impressed by Margolis’s charm and expertise about Islam, decided to pursue him. ‘I’m coming over,’ she announced in a telephone call. ‘I’ve got another date,’ replied Margolis. But finally he succumbed, and discovered what he called ‘an Act of God’, Amiel’s breasts. To her irritation, Margolis was too independent, frequently rejecting her suggestions that she visit his flat. ‘Is there someone else there tonight?’ she asked. If Margolis answered ‘Yes,’ she was sufficiently liberal to cope. But if he replied ‘No, I’m working, babe,’ she became incensed, repeatedly calling, seeking to change his mind. ‘You’re like one of the boys,’ laughed Margolis.

At the age of forty-one, Amiel had reached a crossroads. Fearing loneliness, she was seeking marriage in order to have children and embed her social and professional ambitions. Margolis, she decided, was ideal to give her life that structure. He was intelligent, independent and good fun. Frustratingly, he did not show the obedience she liked in her men, and was patently weary that she always wanted to win her point. Amiel could not resist bickering that he should be rich and famous. A fraught ten-day trip to Hong Kong and China ended with her demand, ‘Marry me!’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’d end up in jail.’ ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because I’d wring your neck.’ Amiel did not give up her marital ambitions despite an overture from a new admirer. In 1983 Peter Worthington offered her the editorship of the Toronto Sun’s comment section. She would, Worthington believed, succeed as the newspaper’s ambassador for ideological conservatism, providing a public profile on TV shows to attract the Thatcherites among Canada’s East European migrants. To celebrate her appointment she was taken by Doug Creighton, the Sun’s publisher, to Winston’s. There are two versions of what followed during the lunch.

In the first version, Creighton asked Amiel in a loud voice, ‘Are you fucking Peter?’ The restaurant fell silent to hear the answer. Amiel jumped up and ran to the lavatory. According to the second version, Creighton kept naming Worthington. ‘Why do you keep mentioning Worthington?’ Amiel asked. ‘Well, he was your predecessor, he hired you, and he trained you as editor. I’m just trying to say he’s gone.’ Waiting for a moment of silence, Amiel screeched, ‘You think I’m fucking him, don’t you?’ Creighton was nonplussed, but replied, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’ Worthington’s explanation of the exchange is benign: ‘Doug was mesmerised by her. She dazzled him. He was persuaded that she was a bombshell.’

Worthington issued the invitations to Amiel’s appointment party: ‘The Sun has a new editor. It’s a girl.’ Transfixed by Amiel, Worthington became unhappy that Eric Margolis was asked by Amiel to edit the comment section in her absence. The triangle could lead to the farce of Worthington calling at Amiel’s flat while she was at Margolis’s. There was gossip that on one occasion Amiel was standing outside Margolis’s flat, waiting for another woman to leave, while Worthington stood outside Amiel’s flat, waiting for her to return. Amiel’s eccentric personal life and odd hours spread into the editorial newsroom. Either she arrived dressed in a chocolate-brown velour tracksuit, looking harassed with unkempt hair and sunglasses, or she appeared as carefully groomed as a Vogue model. ‘Either a bag lady or a $1 million outfit,’ commented Worthington. On one occasion she strode purposefully past Christie Blatchford, one of Canada’s notable columnists, wearing an ‘open trenchcoat, under which could be clearly seen a black bustier, garter belt and fishnet stockings’. Amiel’s gyrating moods were experienced by Allan Fotheringham, another columnist and an occasional boyfriend, during a trip to Vancouver. After flying 3,000 miles to a gathering of theologians, Amiel felt inclined to shock. Ten minutes after arriving at the party, Fotheringham was surprised to hear her shrill ‘Fuck!’, followed minutes later by a loud ‘Cocksuckers!’ Soon after, the two were standing alone in the garden. The theologians had fled into the house.

By 1984 Amiel’s limitations as an editor were causing even Worthington unease. While she was appreciated by some women journalists as an intellectual, fun, right-wing babe, Worthington marked her down as ‘a dangerous writer’. She was, he decided, ‘not an original thinker but a clear thinker. She marshals other people’s ideas and then personalises them. She knows how to get under people’s skin and find their Achilles heel.’ That talent was inadequate when the news broke of Britain’s response to Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in April 1982. Amiel needed guidance about ‘our line’. Repeatedly she tried to call Worthington, who was out of reach climbing mountains in China. In desperation, she telephoned George Jonas. ‘I’m against the British,’ said Jonas. So that was the Toronto Sun’s line, and Jonas was given a column as a poet and later as a commentator. Amiel’s attitude did not inspire loyalty. ‘Her people skills are not great,’ sighed Worthington. ‘She’s focusing on people she likes, and she’s not happy working in the background instead of the spotlight.’

Amiel had reached yet another crossroads. Margolis, she decided, was a bon vivant, uninterested in commercial success. The relationship, she concluded, just like her other concurrent affairs, was pointless. In 1982 she had met David Graham, the good-looking, rich stepbrother of Ted Rogers, Canada’s leading communications mogul. Four years older than Amiel, Graham represented upper-class wealth from the Ottawa Valley. Relationships with WASP businessmen, she decided, were less complicated than with men of mixed European backgrounds. ‘A relatively simple person,’ she would write, ‘can be a very attractive quality in a lover.’ By ‘simple’ she did not mean ‘unintelligent’, just not ‘psychologically complex’. Complexity, she decided, ‘is an awful pain in the neck in lovers. It can create mood swings, whining and sometimes meanness [because] good lovers paradoxically want to please no one but themselves.’⁴⁹ Graham was, she decided, uncomplicated, and therefore a good lover. To keep everyone on their toes, she introduced the new to the old. Margolis met Graham, and smiled his lack of concern. Amiel chose Graham, not suspecting that twenty years later Margolis would own a multi-million dollar vitamin company with over three hundred employees. ‘I’m hankering for David,’ she told a friend. Committing herself to Graham reflected her desperation for domesticity and a child.

Graham, renowned for his many relationships with glamorous women, wanted a home-maker in London, but was casually unspecific about his other requirements. A beautiful, intelligent woman was appealing, but marrying a forty-four-year old Jewish libertine who paraded her ‘erratic emotional life’, implying sexual promiscuity, was an untested experience. At least there was good reason to believe that Amiel had abandoned her pose as an opinionated, left-wing hippie. Recently she had praised the virtues of wealth and comfort. ‘I so loathe the permissive, promiscuous society,’ she had written, ‘and so long for fidelity, stability and monogamy, but it is always just out of my reach. There is a thing called discipline. I have tried to inflict it on my work. I’ve tried to inflict it on me. But all that emerges is self-indulgence. Really, I won’t talk about my personal life, because I am ashamed of it.’⁵⁰

One minor forewarning for Graham of the perils of cohabiting with Amiel occurred at the wedding of Roy Faibish, a Canadian television producer and political adviser, at Chelsea Register Office in London. Amiel arrived with Graham, and met the CBC TV producer Patrick Watson with his girlfriend Caroline. ‘She’s so cute,’ said Amiel. ‘You’ve been together for some years. I always marry the men I sleep with.’ This carping comment to someone who was familiar with Amiel’s career at CBC provoked a blistering argument in front of thirty guests. Graham noted his fiancée’s independent spirit. Unlike other women, she had achieved fame on her own account, without depending on a rich husband’s wealth. Marrying her would not expose him to a financial liability – in fact she could be generous – but harnessing her strong character would be a challenge .

On 2 July 1984, while visiting Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, Barbara Amiel and Graham married. Soon after the ceremony, Graham was badly injured in a car crash in France. After his recovery Amiel decided to celebrate the marriage again in Toronto, and to host a party at the Sutton Place Hotel.

No man in ‘33 Stop’, the hotel’s summit banqueting room, could have appeared to be less attractive to Barbara Amiel than Conrad Black. The two had met in 1979, at a dinner party in Toronto hosted by Black’s friend John Bassett, and had since discovered that they shared conservative opinions. The eventual union of two insecure Canadians dreaming of glamour, fame and fortune among the jet set could have been predicted by no one.