I had believed that to be true, had in fact marvelled to Charles at how well he wrote, even as a teenager. This new evidence from Ramsay cast doubt over much of what I had cheerfully accepted, without asking hard questions, and that Pat, as the editor, had faithfully put into book form.
The ultimate irony is that the person spurring on these “improvements” was, apparently, me. It seems that Charles’s diaries speak of Macmillan (that would be me!) having such high hopes for his new books that he felt under pressure to give us/me really fine stuff, even if the new material was just that — new. “The Great Work,” indeed.
I guess the moral is that if you are “running” a spy, he is likely to turn into a double agent.
But one final story shows the best qualities of my friend Charles. When Roy MacLaren was our minister for international trade, the former British prime minister Ted Heath turned up in Ottawa. Now this was a purely private visit, but Heath was, after all, a former PM, so it was decided to put on a lunch for him. About a dozen people were invited, including the long-serving ambassador who was the dean of the Ottawa diplomatic corps, and, to make up the numbers, the long-retired high commissioner to London in Heath’s time, Charles Ritchie.
Now Heath, it should be explained, is not the warmest fish in the sea, and the editor of Punch, Alan Coren, gained undying fame by giving him the unlikely nickname of “Ted ‘Mr. Bojangles’ Heath.” The lunch was proceeding when his stiff, unbending style emerged. The foreign ambassador, for whom English was not a first language, tried to ask Heath a question.
Heath did not understand. “What?”
The ambassador tried again.
This time Heath roared, “What?”
All eyes upon him, the blushing ambassador tried again.
This time Heath simply dismissed him, saying crossly to his neighbours, “Can’t understand a word the man’s saying.”
Everyone felt very bad, but didn’t know what to do. Charles knew what to do. He was retired, he didn’t care, he was free to act.
As the party stood up and pulled their chairs back he raised his voice and called clearly down the table to the host, standing beside Mr. Heath. “Roy! I say. Roy! Didn’t you think that Heath was bloody rude?”
General satisfaction. And if it is true that the definition of a gentleman is “one who is never rude unintentionally” Charles Ritchie proved that day to be a true gentleman.
Shortly after the news of Pierre Trudeau’s death was broadcast, I was sitting in the back of a cab in downtown Toronto. The cab driver and I shared our regrets about the news. The driver was a Greek who came to Canada as an adult in 1967, yet his heavily accented English allowed him to summarize elegantly how he felt: “I grew with him.”
Late in his life, I was fortunate enough to get to know Pierre Trudeau, the author. At McClelland & Stewart we paid a great deal of money to publish his Memoirs, based on the 1993 CBC TV series that began each episode with him, clad in an elegant buckskin jacket, paddling a canoe on a misty lake. It was a brilliant image, and the series drew millions of viewers.
When the manuscript came in, however, bearing the company’s hopes for a successful year, there were obvious problems with it. Such major problems, in fact, that after I had spent a sleepless night our chairman, Avie Bennett, and I decided that it had to be reworked: in rough terms, made chronological rather than thematic. We flew to Montreal, and Avie, who knew Trudeau, introduced me to him for the first time. Given a choice, I would have made our first meeting an easy, congratulatory one, but c’est la vie.
We sat in his prow-shaped office, jutting out high above the St. Lawrence River, with the snow starting to fall down past the deep windows. After the usual courtesies, Trudeau asked us what brought us to visit him. Avie turned the conversation over to me, and I started to explain why the book had to be rewritten.
Did Trudeau listen, shrug, and then say, “Sure, whatever makes sense to you”?
No. He leaned forward, the eyes narrowed in that look we all remember, and he started to make objections.
“But what about this?” “But what if we did this, what would happen to that?” On and on, a tough, unyielding barrage of questions. Had I considered this? How would I handle that? Obviously, I’d thought this through very carefully, so I was able to answer all his questions, while Avie watched like a fascinated tennis-match spectator.
If I’d ever said, “Of course, Mr. Trudeau, if you don’t like it, we don’t need to do this,” I’d have been lost. Because he was grilling me to be sure I knew what I was doing. And in the end he leaned back, changed his tone, and said, “Fine, your plan makes sense. Let’s do it your way.” And thereafter, with Memoirs and the other three Trudeau books we published, we had a terrific working relationship, marked by his professionalism in getting proofs back to me or my colleagues exactly when he’d promised, every time.
There’s a lesson here, I suggest, about Canadian politics. A prime minister runs up against people with all sorts of ideas, some of them excellent, some totally crazy. One way to spot the ones who do know what they’re talking about is to grill them aggressively — and I can tell you, he was very, very good at it.
When the book was launched in Toronto (I’d been among the throngs at the televised launch at the National Library in Ottawa, and then had seen the dangerously surging crowds at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal behaving with un-Canadian enthusiasm), we had to rope off sections to deal with the 1,200 people clustered in the huge hotel convention room on the waterfront. It was a very big deal, and I’d brought my fifteen-year-old daughter, Katie, and my cousin, Graeme Young, in town from Edmonton, and we’d taken a place on the TV camera island ten feet above the crowd.
When Trudeau began to speak, the huge crowd chanted, “Trudeau! Trudeau!” (even “Four more years!”) and it was all very exciting. Then, after the usual “It’s-very-nice-to-be-in-Toronto” stuff, he talked about his book and about working with Avie Bennett (onstage with him) and then others at M&S. And then Trudeau said, “But the man whom I especially want to thank, the one who pulled this together, is my good friend at McClelland & Stewart” — and I smiled modestly — and then he said, “my good friend Fred Gibson.” And then he looked stricken and said, “Ah, Bob Gibson? Don Gibson?” Avie Bennett stepped forward and whispered into his ear. Trudeau said, “Doug Gibson. If he’s here tonight, he’ll never work with me again.”
(This problem with names was not reserved exclusively for me. Barney Danson, who went on to long service in his cabinet, recalls a meeting in his riding where the PM came and delivered a barn-burner that ended with him urging the crowd to vote for, well, someone with the same number of syllables in his name as Mr. Danson.) I had my revenge at dinner that night — and this, of course, was shortly after Mr. Mulroney’s term in office — when Trudeau and I crossed paths while changing tables. When he apologized for getting my name wrong, I was very gracious. “That’s all right, Brian,” I said, “I do it all the time.”
Peter Gzowski witnessed this exchange; he liked it.
Happily, we did work together again, and McClelland & Stewart went on to publish The Essential Trudeau (with Ron Graham), as well as The Canadian Way (with Ivan Head), and Against the Current, on which Trudeau worked with his old comrade Gérard Pelletier.
I remember a lunch at the Beaver Club in Montreal (a cold day, which they appropriately called un jour de fourrure at the coat check), with those two old veterans at a time when provocations in Paris by Quebec’s delegates (plus ça change) were once again causing trouble for Ottawa. Trudeau and Pelletier, once his ambassador to France, were mesmerizing as they described, with weary irritation, every possible move on the diplomatic chessboard.
In producing his memoirs, Trudeau relied heavily on the help of his former aide Tom Axworthy, then of his former biographer, George Radwanski. Yet as a former journalist and editor (at Cité Libre) and an experienced author (Federalism and t
he French Canadians, 1968, and many other publications) he cared about exact phrasing. My most amusing, strictly literary, memory is of an argument about poetry with him. Towards the end of the Memoirs he quotes the Rimbaud poem “Ma Bohème.” The English translation, it seemed to me, could be slightly improved with a metrical twist of my own devising. By speaker phone, with Avie Bennett as referee, Trudeau sprayed spondees and declaimed dactyls as he demonstrated the rhythms of the original French, then the very different rhythms of the two English versions, expressing a strong preference for the original one. I was hopelessly outgunned, in two languages. We did it his way.
In later years, when I was in Montreal and had time to spare, I would call and, if it was convenient, drop in for a visit to his law office on René Lévesque Boulevard. Once, when he was in his mid-seventies, he took me to lunch. Instead of making for the nearest corner crossing, he set off straight across the wide boulevard named after his old rival. I was recovering from recent back surgery, so was appalled at what happened next. When the lights changed and three lanes of cars (Montreal cars!) hurtled towards us, he called out “Run!” with great cheerfulness, and sprinted to the other side through what seemed to be an unbroken stream of whizzing, honking metal.
As a non-Montrealer I remember thinking that, although the company was good, this was a really stupid way to die (immortalized on a Trivial Pursuit card as “the man killed along with . . .”). I also remember being surprised to live to tell the tale. And as we walked, to lunch, my pulse slowly subsiding, I noticed how, with nods, smiles, nudges, and turning heads, his fellow Montrealers reacted with pleasure to his presence among them. Rumours about his unpopularity in his home province were greatly exaggerated, in my experience.
In our conversations, his own pleasure was greatest when the talk turned to “the boys,” and his face would light up as he spoke about his three sons, whose joint portrait graced the office wall behind him. I responded with tales of the great deeds of “the girls” although his Toronto encounter with Katie (“Fred” Gibson’s daughter) had not been a memorable one, his small talk deserting him on that occasion. When his youngest boy, Michel, died in an avalanche in B.C., like all of his friends I was at a loss for helpful words. The funeral, which I did not attend, was a time of such national sorrow that one incident stands out; when the doors closed for the service, one enterprising reporter slipped inside — and was loudly “outed” by enraged colleagues. This was a time for sadness and mourning, not sly reporting.
Today, a signed photograph from Trudeau hangs on my wall. It speaks of “the best of memories.” For me, that certainly is true. Perhaps my taxi driver friend put it best for all of us: “We grew with him.”
Of course, a man like Trudeau doesn’t simply disappear from your life on his death. He had been part of mine right from 1968, when I was around the Doubleday Canada office when we published Martin Sullivan’s extraordinarily successful book about his rise to power, Mandate 68. I think, on reflection that it was our most successful book until we rushed out Harry Sinden’s book, Hockey Showdown, about the 1972 Canada–Russia hockey series. (And if you think you cared about Canada’s comeback, and Paul Henderson’s winning goal, put yourself in the shoes of the gang at Doubleday — including a kid called Margaret Wente in the publicity department — who had invested a huge amount in a book about a hockey series that, it seemed for a while, Canadians were going to want to forget!)
So it was established early in my mind that books about Trudeau, like books about hockey, did very well. I was not involved in Walter Stewart’s 1971 book, Shrug: Trudeau in Power, which, as you may have guessed, took a jaundiced view of the new Messiah. But I did edit other books by the unforgettable Walter, who listed his hobbies in Canadian Who’s Who as “reading, walking, arguing.” Frequently his arguments, as the managing editor of Maclean’s, were with the editor, Peter C. Newman, who took a relaxed attitude towards what for Walter were points of principle, to be defended with high-pitched, eye-flashing eloquence. I had a grandstand seat for this long-running feud, as Walter and I worked together on a number of books, notably But Not in Canada! (1976) a sharp corrective to the smugness that was afflicting Canadians as they looked south of the border, unaware of the things that had also stained our history. Walter invited people who hated the book to direct some of their tomatoes at me, and some did.
I got into the Trudeau-publishing game in 1978, with a biography by George Radwanski. Later in his life, as privacy commissioner, George got into trouble for his spending habits (years later Ottawa-area restaurant owners were still bewailing “The Radwanski Effect” for the drop in business) but he was a talented writer, and the book, which included what would now be called hours of “face time” with Trudeau, was a success. It was clear then, however (and later, when his dining habits hit the news, and few of his colleagues came to his aid), that George was not universally popular in the press gallery where he worked, and where he was regarded the way high school jocks look at the very smart chess club president.
This emerged after George — who perhaps had not minimized the closeness of his relationship with Trudeau — asked a press conference question and was greeted in reply by the wrong name. I know how he felt, but the gallery took immense delight in this exchange, and I heard about it from many sources.
I also heard another story that speaks to what a clubby atmosphere — in the best sense — prevailed in those days. Now that Margaret Trudeau’s bipolar disorder has been openly discussed, I can mention the occasion when the prime minister’s wife made a late-evening appearance at the Press Club bar. Her behaviour was erratic, so those present simply crouched over their drinks and tried to ignore her group. Matters escalated when Trudeau arrived and tried to persuade his wife to come home, which she loudly resisted. All the journalists, most of them married men, crouched even lower in their seats. And after Margaret, in what we might call her Rolling Stone Phase, was finally persuaded to leave, nobody wrote about it. Think about that.
Somebody who stood apart from that clubby group, for a number of reasons, including her sheer, limitless talent, was Christina McCall Newman. A Victoria College graduate, she had gained a foothold at Maclean’s, where she worked with the country’s best writers, including the legendary editor, Ralph Allen, whose biography she wrote after his death. She married Peter C. Newman, and for many years they were the ultimate Ottawa Power Couple. During this time she turned out newspaper and magazine articles of such perception and style that they were instantly, from the first sentence, recognizable as her work. Soon everyone was waiting for her first big book, an in-depth study of the Liberal Party.
I was the most impatient person in the queue. I had signed her up for this book, and had waited anxiously for it over several years. The wait was not without its exciting moments. At one point Christina, an impressive, elegant woman, with a very direct, level gaze, came to my office to tell me that she had decided that Macmillan was not the right publisher for her book after all, and that she wanted to get out of her contract and take the book elsewhere.
I can do a very direct, level gaze, too, and I gave her the benefit of it as I told her, politely but firmly, that we intended to honour the contract, and expected her to do the same. We were alone, our eyes locked for a very long time, before in the end she got up and left. She was not pleased.
Before the manuscript finally came in to us, there was a false alarm, including a phone call to me on the dock at North Hatley, postponing delivery for another year, which played hell with our budget for the fall, and spoiled my swim. But the final manuscript — beginning with a swing (“Lord knows the Liberals should have been ready for the election of 1979 when it was finally called on March 26 that year”) — was everything I had hoped for. Its in-depth portraits of people like Keith Davey, Trudeau himself, James Coutts, Michael Pitfield, John Turner, and Marc Lalonde made them into characters out of a fine novel. I read it with delight, and told Christina that it should be called
Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party. What we lost in Southern cookbook sales we’d make up in sales to Canadians who realized that this was a book for the ages. And so it proved. Grits set a new standard for political writing and we, dammit, published it very well.
The stage was set for Christina’s next great work: a joint project with her new husband, Stephen Clarkson, a respected political science professor at the University of Toronto, and a successful author in his own right. Its overall title was to be Trudeau and Our Times, which perfectly catches Trudeau’s importance to millions of Canadians. Despite the publication of many other Trudeau books, including Richard Gwyn’s The Northern Magus (with its cover shot of Trudeau at the Grey Cup in a floppy hat calculated to offend) at M&S, we knew that there would be a huge audience for this new two-volume book.
Working with Stephen and Christina was predictably tricky. George (“Two legs bad”) Orwell might have said, “One author, tricky. Two authors, very tricky. Husband and wife authors, tricky beyond belief.” I noticed that Christina had picked up some power principles from her former husband, Peter C. Newman, whose whole career is marked by a fascination with power. A trivial example: every meeting I had with Peter, regardless of our plans to alternate locations, always ended up at his office. I was amused to see the same thing happen to my meetings with Christina and Stephen, and visiting their pleasant house in Rosedale was no problem for me, although they each seemed to spur the other on in their dealings with me. I suppose that it was a compliment of sorts that they chose to work with me as publisher on both volumes of Trudeau and Our Times. And they were well served by an editorial team that included the painstaking copy editor, Barbara Czarnecki. As for me, I find from the acknowledgements that I was “unfailingly inventive, enthusiastic, and patient.” We all know what the “patient” means here. As for the “inventive,” I’m pleased that both Barbara and Stephen graciously recall that I took the very first sentence about Trudeau, “He still haunts us after . . . etc.” and changed it to “He haunts us still.”
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