From London the family set sail for Canada, and in 1940 Peter arrived “a trembling eleven-year-old,” in every sense a refugee. “Nothing,” Peter wrote in his autobiography, “compares with being a refugee.” I would argue that Peter has always remained one, living by his wits, making alliances for the moment, then moving on as a new source of power emerged. “Peter Newman doesn’t have friends,” so the joke goes, “he has sources.” But he has the fixed, aware intelligence of the watchful outsider, the perennial refugee, and we are all better for it.
After a spell in Burlington, Ontario, his ambitious father saw him established at Upper Canada College, the breeding ground of the Canadian establishment, where Canada’s shirts are stuffed.
Roy MacSkimming later described Peter’s way of writing about the Canadian business establishment (the one that gave the title to one of his most successful books) as “half cheeky, half fawning.” If you want to understand that interesting mixture of attitudes towards these leaders, you need look no further, I think, than the little Czech boy of thirteen who spoke little English, was shy and awkward, and not especially good at games, thrown into the macho WASP world of Upper Canada College. No wonder, in a burst of candour, he described himself as “a court jester” to the business world he wrote about, which was full of people he could never quite be like — and, at the deepest level, I suspect, did not want to be like.
Instead, after he went to the University of Toronto, he chose to become a journalist, and a student of Power.
Power. The word runs through his professional life as a writer. “Power is for princes” were the very first words in his first book, Flame of Power, which hit the bookstores in 1959. “Power,” of course, makes its appearance in the subtitle of Here Be Dragons and — almost hilariously — in Renegade in Power (1963), Home Country: People, Places, and Power Politics (1973), The Establishment Man: A Portrait of Power (1982, when that still applied to Conrad Black), Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power (1998). And for many years the name of Peter’s business corporation, where his royalties flowed, included the magic word “Power.” He was indeed to become, as my subtitle suggests, not a heat-seeking missile, but a power-seeking one. He would seek out sources of power, find them, and — eventually, when they disappointed him — attack them.
Equally important, the success of his first book hooked him on fame. Endearingly, as a new author he confesses: “I remember carrying my first copy in my briefcase for weeks, taking frequent peeks at it, in case it had somehow disappeared and the whole thing was a dream.” Less endearingly, he recalled becoming “a praise addict.” His lust for fame and acclaim was such that “from now on, I would sacrifice anything and anyone to the unquenchable fires raging inside me.”
Fair warning, again.
And then he left the Toronto world of the Financial Post and Maclean’s to become the latter’s Ottawa correspondent. The world of Ottawa’s press gallery, and the cozy way it covered politics and politicians, was about to change forever.
I came in touch with that old world in 1976, when I edited the autobiography of its Grand Old Man, Bruce Hutchison. He was indeed a remarkable man, the leading journalist of his day, who had somehow turned himself into a weighty international figure. When this lean woodsman from the West visited London or Washington he was received as the Voice of Canada, with access granted everywhere. His books — notably his study of Canada, The Unknown Country — were the age’s most successful bestsellers. In Ottawa he was as powerful as the average cabinet minister.
Yet somehow he managed to maintain the image of a simple fellow who was never happier than when he was back home on Vancouver Island, working with an axe on the woodpile at Shawinigan Lake. That certainly was where the great photographer, Yousuf Karsh, chose to photograph him. To get the setting just right, Karsh started to order around Bruce’s scruffy, roustabout companion, briskly getting him to hose down those leaves, or stand over there, right now. After the session when Bruce introduced the sawdust-stained helper as Chief Justice J.O. Wilson, Karsh “a gentleman of sensitive manners,” could think of nothing to say and drowned his confusion by plunging, fully clothed, into the lake.
Bruce Hutchison was a fine and distinguished writer with millions of words, and millions of impressed readers behind him, when I entered the scene as his editor. And when people wonder aloud about my cocksure confidence in editing established authors like Robertson Davies or Hugh MacLennan, breezily suggesting this change, and cutting that sentence, they tend to ask: “Didn’t anyone object to you making all these proposed changes to their polished writing?” And I answer that Bruce Hutchison was one.
I edited The Far Side of the Street the way I edited everything, and it was only when Hugh Kane came along and gently suggested that Bruce was a pretty old guy by now, and used to having his writing treated with great respect, that I realized that Bruce must be mad as hell at this young whippersnapper. Hugh handled it very well (as I was to try to do over the years as a publisher whenever authors and editors rubbed each other the wrong way). He suggested that I try to go easy on Bruce’s writing — he had, after all, earned the right to be set in his old-fashioned ways, with a career that had started at the Victoria Daily Times in 1918. (1918!) Meanwhile, I suspect, he told Bruce that young Gibson was good, if sometimes a little overzealous, and would do a fine job looking after his book.
Certainly Bruce bore me no ill will. In fact, on a visit to Victoria I received The Ultimate Victorian Accolade: a roast-beef dinner with Bruce Hutchison at the Union Club, the ivy-covered building full of “billiard rooms” and other ancient traditions that sits right beside the Empress Hotel, very close to where I entered Canada as an unprepared immigrant. Bruce was the perfect genial host, the glasses glinting from his lean, tanned face as he drawled out stories of the famous characters he had known from Mackenzie King onwards — and, of course, his biography of King, The Incredible Canadian, had won the Governor General’s Award in 1952.
The Far Side of the Street reveals an Ottawa Press Corps that was very different from what we now expect. One story from Bruce’s book demonstrates the difference. The day that Lester Pearson entered Parliament as the leader of the Liberal Party was a momentous one. He specifically asked for his old pal Bruce to handle a coast-to-coast TV interview that night, although Bruce was not a TV interviewer. But as a working journalist he would today be expected to be objective.
Bruce’s book tells how he cut short a visit to Washington and arrived in the House press gallery when Pearson was making his maiden speech. This was the historically ill-advised speech where Pearson ended by suggesting that, um, it would be nice if the majority Conservatives under Diefenbaker would resign and hand the government over to the Liberals.
In Bruce’s words: “The bombshell dropped but exploded only in the jeers and laughter of the government benches. Even the press gallery laughed. Dexter [Grant Dexter, another newspaper colleague] and I were too crushed to laugh, the Prime Minister too delighted . . .”
The pair of “too crushed to laugh” objective newsmen rushed to Pearson’s office and proceeded to plan the TV interview. Somehow, Pearson pulled himself together to produce a “cozy chat between two untroubled friends.”
There, in Bruce’s own words, you have an account of a very different press gallery than what we expect today. That was the chummy scene that Peter Newman entered in 1957. “Storming Ottawa’s Barricades” was the title Peter gave in his memoir to this chapter in his life. The epigraph is equally descriptive: “‘Journalists are like Germans,’ a politician once complained. ‘They’re either at your feet or at your throat. At the feet to get information, at the throat when writing it up.’ This,” Peter wrote, “became my standard operating procedure.”
In 1963 his Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years “set the gold standard for political bestsellers” in Roy MacSkimming’s words. This new genre for Canada, “an insider’s book, anecdotal and t
horoughly savvy,” was a runaway success and sold 80,000 copies in hardcover. A new type of bestseller, “the Ottawa political book,” had just been established, and Peter had installed himself as the leading political journalist of his time.
But he never belonged with his peers in Bruce Hutchison’s old press gallery. “I had always been an outsider in the gallery, with little respect for the rules. . . . Every departing member of the press gallery is traditionally given a souvenir pewter mug with their name and years of service engraved on it. The fact that I was never ‘mugged’ was proof positive that my peers felt that I had not played by the rules of their game. They were right, and their slight made me proud.”
By the time he left Ottawa in 1969 with his two books — the second, The Distemper of Our Times, came out in 1969 — setting new records in sales, he had established himself as a man in a class by himself. Even Bruce Hutchison was impressed. Reviewing Distemper he wrote of Newman, “He talks in a soft, disarming whisper, with a boyish smile. But once he finds the nearest typewriter his shrill voice, in print, sounds like an electronic bullhorn in a narrow cave. Oddly enough, he never realizes how much he is hurting politicians, who seldom complain, lest they invite a second blast. To him all this is just part of the game and in his strange innocence he wonders why anyone should be distressed.”
And then, perceptively, Hutchison refers to Peter the refugee, and adds, “Actually, he is more distressed than his victims because he judges them unworthy of the nation he loves.”
Peter’s impact on Ottawa was not a solo achievement. He and the former Christina McCall, a young writer he met at Maclean’s, were an extraordinary team. They became such a power couple (an appropriate Newman term) in Ottawa that on one occasion young Pierre Trudeau was to be found rolling amorously with a lady friend on their carpet, at one of their soirees.
Peter’s own amorous life is worth more than a brief mention. He devotes a healthy part of his autobiography to it, noting that thanks to his repressed Upper Canada College days he got off to a very slow start. He claims that the sexual ignorance at the all-boys school was such that “we thought ‘oral sex’ was talking a good game.”
He was to learn the talk so brilliantly that other men watched his success with scores of ladies in bewildered envy, wondering if it was the pipe, or the soulful brown eyes, or the big expressive hands, or the fact that bushy eyebrows are a little-known sexual magnet for certain women.
(I should explain at this point that I cannot comment on Peter’s activities from the position of a sexual saint. Like most men, I have not led a monastic life, and between my first marriage to Sally and what I intend to be my last, to Jane, I have had the pleasure of knowing a number of fine ladies, notably a fair Southern Belle from Mississippi. I am grateful to them all. But compared to Peter I am a mere dabbler, a sexual dilettante.)
He had such a slow start, he claims that in his early days (when he was trying his hand, unsuccessfully, at being a WASP) he married his first wife, Pat, as a virginal bridegroom. On their wedding night he was appalled to find her protected — facially — by a mask of Noxzema.
The marriage did not last. Peter had met Christina at Maclean’s, and when Pat became pregnant, as Peter tells it, they had an understanding that he would stay in the marriage only until the baby was born. What the world saw, however, was a man who chose to announce to his wife that he was leaving her when she was lying in hospital with their first newborn child.
In Peter’s words: “I was not prepared for the social censure that followed.” Some families never spoke to him again. But Peter’s sense was that “I finally felt freed to see what my future would be with Christina, who held out the promise of being my ideal mate.”
For many years they were a remarkably successful couple, socially in Ottawa, and in the pages of the magazines where they both wrote. Peter gracefully acknowledges her helpful role in polishing his prose, and recalls that they had a huge joint project in mind: he would handle the country’s business establishment, while she dealt with the political one. But after they had moved to Toronto, where Peter became editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star in 1969, the joint book idea died. Over time the marriage fell apart. They split up, amiably, Peter says, and he went on to write The Canadian Establishment for Jack McClelland, and she went on to write Grits for me, as this book’s Trudeau chapter describes.
Peter had been lured to the Star by its stance favouring Canadian nationalism, but found that like everyone else he was expected to be a courtier at the court of the all-seeing, all-powerful publisher, Beland Honderich. So it only lasted for two years. One of Peter’s greatest achievements at the Star, however, was to attract the approval of the legendary Duncan Macpherson, the political cartoonist who was a great talent and a physical giant with a genius for making trouble.
One of my greatest achievements, as the editor of Here Be Dragons was — like any good editor — to enrich the book, in this case with a Duncan Macpherson story of my own. A very cruel person had once shown Duncan how to whip a tablecloth off a fully set table, and after a number of disasters at the Mark Hotel (he was in San Francisco with the luckless Allan Edmonds covering the Republican Convention there, and Edmonds grew used to wearily taking out his wallet to calm outraged restaurant staff) he succeeded in doing it. Flushed with this success — and almost certainly a drink or three — Duncan was pleased to see his friend the Russian ambassador sitting at a well-laden table, complete with wines and steaks, at Barberian’s restaurant in Toronto. The ambassador restrained his two bodyguards when they reached for their armpits at the approach of this large wild man, who told them to sit there while he showed them something amazing.
Wheeeep! And crash, rumble, tinkle, splash, and curse. With their steaks and wines in their laps the bodyguards were now clutching at their armpits in earnest, with the ambassador frantically restraining them, explaining that this was just his friend Duncan being Duncan.
I worked with him on a couple of book jackets — and his signed cartoon for the cover of The Power & the Tories hangs in our house — and even provided the running text for one of his annual cartoon collection books. I liked him very much, though other Star employees shrank away in horror when I announced that I was off to Duncan’s office.
Stories clustered around him. One favourite of mine concerns the time he returned to the Maclean’s art director’s office with a dozen white storyboards the size of giant pizza boxes containing his work from a travel assignment. The art director, greatly daring, suggested an improvement here, a revision there. Duncan’s face darkened. Sweeping up all of the giant whiteboards in his arms, he opened the window and threw all the cardboard pieces out. The appalled art director saw the illustrations for next month’s issue floating like giant snowflakes down towards the traffic on University Avenue. Emergency rescue teams scurried downstairs, and there was no more talk of revisions.
When Peter left the Star, he reports, Duncan wrote a supportive letter that began, “The Star is losing the best talent they ever had when you leave.” Peter was on his way to reform Maclean’s, a period in his life that deserves a whole book, not just a part of a chapter.
But for now, let’s follow the romantic trail. After Christina there were a number of ladies, notably Joy Carroll. She was an interesting partner for Peter since she was by profession a romantic novelist (and a Ph.D. thesis could usefully explore the link between her style and Peter’s famous line that Joe Clark looked “like a deer disturbed eating broccoli.”) Much more immediately important was the fact that she was married to a crew-cut writer named Jock Carroll. When she moved in with Peter, he took it badly. For weeks he made a point of returning her clothes and other intimate possessions to her c/o Peter C. Newman, at Maclean’s. The many cartons, prominently and even libellously labelled to Joy and Peter (and the nouns and adjectives attached to their names were very uncomplimentary) crowded the corridors of Maclean’s, where they were read, avidly, by Peter’
s staff. A lesser man might even have been embarrassed.
After the affair with Joy ended, Peter (now rising at 4 a.m. to write his latest book) would take likely ladies out to dinner and then, around dessert, say, “Look, I have to be in bed by 9:30, with you or without you.” He reports that this line was surprisingly effective.
He doesn’t, however, report that his early rising led to a bizarre form of competition with his neighbour, Abe Rotstein, who was also writing a book in the early hours. Their pride in being the first to light a lamp at their desk produced an unhealthy competition that led, it is claimed, to one competitor getting up, lighting the desk light in triumph, then sneaking back to bed.
Wife Number Three was Camilla Turner, another Maclean-Hunter editor and a notable fair-haired beauty, a number of years younger than Peter. They were married in 1975 with three best men standing up for Peter: Senator Keith Davey, Jack McClelland, and a young Montrealer named Brian Mulroney. And there is an example of what I call the power-seeking missile aspect of Peter’s character. He had a nose for it. In 1975 very few national political reporters had paid much attention to the young Montreal lawyer. Peter sensed (I assume it is a sixth sense) the Power possibilities in him.
In the same way, scores of young journalists from John Fraser through Ken Whyte have been charmed to find that in their early years the mighty Peter C. Newman was taking the time to sit down with them and talk about their life, dispensing advice, and remaining available for further contact. This is an agreeable counter to the side of Peter that kept a black book listing people who had ever criticized him or his books in print. But it may simply be based on the demographic fact that young journalists grow up to be middle-aged journalists, some of them powerful middle-aged journalists. Peter was very good at spotting those who were headed for power. (As I write these words, the uncomfortable thought strikes me that my own constant contact with Peter over the years may owe something to Peter’s power instincts in my own case; even more evidence, dammit, that assigning a simple role to Peter is never easy.)
Stories About Storytellers Page 27