I found that in our conversations he was always glad to chat about mutual friends like the unforgettable John C. Crosbie, but what was really interesting was to hear him dissect current politics and politicians. His instincts were uncanny (“Here’s what Ignatieff should do . . .”) and his information superb, so that he was usually a step ahead of the newspapers. When, in the midst of his judicial difficulties, Stephen Harper cut him off — in effect forbidding his MPs to contact Mulroney in any way — it seemed clear that Harper was the loser, since Mulroney’s advice, especially on Quebec, was invaluable. It is striking how Harper’s reputation for sensitivity to Quebec has since taken a nosedive.
Physically, Mulroney’s features are well known, thanks to grateful cartoonists across the land, and the big Irish chin is just as prominent as the photos show, as is the shillelagh-dented forehead. By the time I got to know him well he had survived his near-death experience in the spring of 2005. It is not widely known, but he was so ill from pancreatitis, following lung surgery, that the hospital in Montreal at one point summoned the family to say goodbye to him. But he fought back, from an illness so serious that I remember an M&S board meeting where Dr. John Evans (an expert medical man, as well as his many other skills) frowningly explained to us that this man, in whom our hopes were invested, had a very, very serious disease, from which his recovery would be slow.
When he came back, I noticed that he moved slowly, with a sort of dignified decision. That may not have been just as a result of his illness; even when he was younger, he was not known for a loose, athletic gait, and his arms were usually held a little stiffly at his side.
The Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy cherishes a story about those arms. Valpy was an old Africa hand when he covered Mulroney’s trip to Zimbabwe in 1987. There, his host Robert Mugabe revealed a hilarious culture clash. In Africa it is common for two men to walk holding hands as a gesture of friendship. The Canadian Press corps was delighted to see how uneasy Mulroney, as a regular Canadian guy, was with this hand-holding by Mugabe — and this was long before the dictator became such a pariah that no sensible statesman would want to hold his hand. Valpy and the others watched with glee as Brian started to take evasive action, putting his hands behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh. When Mugabe was not deterred, reaching behind his back to fish out his nearest hand, Brian would twist his joined hands even further away, until he was barely able to walk a straight line. It was a fine, comical Quasimodo moment, not mentioned in the Memoirs, for some reason.
I never really got to know Mila, apart from a warm welcome to the house in Montreal (at the top of the, you remember, mountain) when I was invited for a working breakfast with Brian, served by the nice gentleman who later drove me downtown. I remember another equally warm welcome when the household was full of clothes, spread out on the stairs, ready to be packed for Florida, where they spend a lot of time in the winter. But after the book’s launch party at the Royal Ontario Museum, there was a small private dinner, given by Peter Munk in a room high in the museum, where all of the family and a few close friends were invited. I enjoyed meeting the tight-knit family, but took the chance to draw Mila aside, to thank her for her decision, when she read the book’s proofs, not to ask her husband to cut out the revealing pages about his drinking, as other wives might have done.
Mila just smiled, wisely. In the book her husband pays tribute to her wisdom, and his good fortune in having her in his life. When L. Ian MacDonald asked him what he regarded as his most significant achievement in life, his unhesitating reply was “Having a good marriage.” This is a theme to be explored later, when I deal with Karlheinz Schreiber.
As the book’s publication date approached, the excitement associated with any new book’s appearance began to grow. But this was special, since I knew how much Brian had invested in this one opportunity to get his version of events on the record and to establish his place in history. As Brian confessed to L. Ian Macdonald, “I now understand why you writers get the jitters before a book comes out.” As usual, the first copies, hot off the press, were sent by courier from the printer to our production department, then rushed to me, then fired off to the author. The “new book” thrill, every time, even for jaded old publishing types is extraordinary. It’s a little like seeing a newborn baby, and this particular book was the weight of a fine, healthy baby.
Soon Brian came from Montreal to the warehouse near the Toronto airport, where we set up a sort of bucket brigade to help him to sign as many copies as possible, copies that were to go to influential people in the book world or special friends. I have photos of that day, and I remember how hard Brian worked at the signing — hour after hour — and no one should ever forget to use the words “hard work” when they consider Brian’s career. He was great with the employees we’d assembled to get the books under his pen, and they clearly enjoyed meeting him.
But I noticed that even at his relaxed, friendly best, as he joked with the guys bringing in heavy cartons from the warehouse, he never stopped being Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister. He seemed to me to carry with him an air of gravitas, and he always thought before he spoke, in the well-known baritone. He never quite dropped his guard. In private, of course, he could shed that cloak, and could laugh and joke and tell fine, funny stories. He was, as this book’s title suggests, a storyteller.
I should stress that I am not posing as a close friend of Brian and his family. I was not a member of his inner circle, and could never expect to be that. But, as with any book I take on, I was fighting alongside the author to make the book a huge success. So on the day of the launch party at the Royal Ontario Museum I was glad to be able to make a genuinely enthusiastic speech, recommending the book to anyone who cares about our politics, and later to be a supportive presence backstage when Heather Reisman interviewed her friend Brian before a packed crowd at her Bloor Street Indigo store.
Then came publication day, on September 10, and the reviews came in. Some reviewers clearly started from a hostile position, others were offended by the work involved in reading such a long book. But by and large, the reaction was one of pleasant surprise. Most reviewers noted that the book was — and remains, dear reader — a fine book that not only takes us inside a rags to riches life, but through many tumultuous years. In short, the book was hailed as a major book about a major life.
After publication day, I knew that my job was done. Memoirs was in every bookstore, the sales were so good that it was shooting up the bestseller lists, and the reviews were good. Now I was able to pass the torch to my M&S colleague, Josh Glover, who had set up Brian’s forthcoming coast-to-coast publicity tour and who (with a background in the music industry that made him familiar with the foibles of rock stars) was ready to accompany Brian every step of the way.
With my mission accomplished, it was time for me to get away, to take Jane on the holiday that had been sacrificed to getting the book out. So we went off to James Houston’s former cottage in Haida Gwaii for a glorious week, described elsewhere in this book.
I returned from this wonderful time away from newspapers and TV to find that Brian was mad as hell at me. It seemed that I had, in his reported words, “deserted” and “gone fishing” when the political campaign started. He took my desertion so seriously, felt so betrayed, that my worried M&S colleagues feared that he might never speak to me again.
He was giving a reading to a huge crowd at the Royal Botanical Gardens building in Burlington, and I showed up while he was having a private meal backstage. He did not seem pleased to see me.
“I hear you’re mad at me,” I began. “We should talk about it.”
He waved everyone else out of the room, and we got down to it. It turned out that we were in a culture clash, not a real quarrel. His political training was so strong that in his mind the climax of the book’s publication was “the leader’s tour” — and, as he put it, he expected “all hands on deck.” Hence his outrage when he le
arned that goddamn Gibson had “gone fishing,” while the author tour was on.
I came back at him — and we never raised our voices — explaining my role as editor and publisher, where my main duty was to produce a good book and get it in the stores. That accomplished, and with good reviews flowing in and the book zooming up the bestseller list, my job was done. With an M&S man accompanying him every step of the way on the well-planned author tour, there was no point in my sitting around the office, waiting to hear that everything was going fine. At this stage, my help wasn’t needed any more.
We saw eye to eye in the end. And that was our only quarrel in the entire complex business of bringing out the book, and in what happened afterwards.
The book was indeed headed for great, surefire success, with the reviews and the word-of-mouth reaction just what we had wanted, and the sense that Brian’s role in history had been undervalued now taking hold, and then — as I put it to the next M&S sales conference — “We Wuz Schreibered.” Just a few weeks after the book came out, both the Globe and Mail and CBC News broke sensational stories about Karlheinz Schreiber paying large sums of money to Brian Mulroney. Since Mulroney’s successful suit against the Canadian government had left the impression that he barely knew Schreiber, and had left no impression at all that he had accepted large sums of money from him — resulting in the famous $2,100,000 payment from the government to the aggrieved Mulroney — it was a huge story.
Day after day, it dominated the news. Day after day the number of people who looked at Mulroney’s smiling book cover and started to rethink their dislike of the man dwindled. The book sales slowed, then stopped. Our surefire bestseller died, smothered under the pile of sweaty veils that the dancing Schreiber continued to drop. He continued his enticing “Dance of the Seven Hundred Veils ” (“Oh, the secrets I could tell you!”) before any forum that would listen, thus postponing his extradition to Germany on criminal charges. It was obvious then — and even more obvious in retrospect, since the bombshell revelations never came, and Schreiber is in a German jail — that he played the Canadian justice system like a violin.
I watched all this appalled twice over. First, I was horrified by what it was doing to the sales of what I knew was a very good book, one that for the first time took you into the prime minister’s office and sat you behind the desk as problems came flying across it. Fascinating stuff — but all Schreibered.
Second, of course, I was concerned about what it must be doing to Brian. I knew how deeply he cared about his reputation, and how hard he had worked to rehabilitate it, to make Canadians remember his achievements, and not the murky stuff associated with Schreiber. And now this.
I stayed in touch with him by phone. And I can tell you that the man could give classes on how to handle phone conversations. I might call expressing sympathy for something that was going terribly wrong, and before too long he would have sucked me into his — entirely plausible — view of the world, where I hadn’t noticed this pattern at the Globe, or this contradiction in CBC reporting, and so on. He was resolute and impregnable — although his opponents would have used very different adjectives about his self-belief.
On TV I watched his day in the hot seat testifying before the parliamentary committee led by Paul Szabo, who did not seem up to the job. On the phone Mulroney had produced brief, entertaining character sketches about some committee members, but it was a long, hard day for him, under attack for much of his time in the spotlight. At the end, I remember the cameras catching him and Mila stepping into their limo. I felt sorry for them as they faced the long ride back to Montreal after such an exhausting day.
Some days later, I asked him, very sympathetically, how he had spent the rest of that awful day. He reported happily that they had held a huge party for dozens of people at home that night. I was, and remain, amazed by this. But maybe it goes to show that politicians (even if they are not as old as Diefenbaker) draw energy and strength from crowds. I suspect, too, that all of his friends that night slapped him on the back and assured him that he was great, and none of the committee laid a glove on him. And I’m sure that at some level he believed it.
There is a story that the old Tory guru, Dalton Camp (whom I tried, too late, to get to write a book for me), once gave his friend Brian a kindly scolding. He noted that Brian had quit alcohol, cold turkey, then quit smoking four years later (with more withdrawal aches). So why, Camp asked in exasperation, couldn’t he quit his “hyperbole habit” the same way? By this Camp meant the habit of exaggeration that sometimes gripped him when he rose to his feet in the House, or faced a tempting microphone. Jeffrey Simpson once wrote shrewdly about this, noting the change that seemed to come over him on occasion at question period. Rising to defend a Cabinet member against a routine Opposition attack — let’s say, his postmaster general — Brian’s oratory would soar until the postmaster general was likely to become not just a valued Cabinet colleague, but the finest postmaster general since Confederation, and so on. It was as if he was carried away by his own oratory.
I never experienced that oratory, but in his phone calls I did experience his amazing ability to get you to see the world his way. The mechanics of the call are beautifully handled, too, down to the final “Well, my friend, it’s been great talking to you, but I mustn’t keep you any longer . . .” and so on. When I called him unexpectedly at home, at a very difficult, post-Oliphant time, his Rolodex mind produced the jaunty final line, “Say hi to Jane!”
I never asked him directly about the Schreiber affair. My decision that the book should end with him driving away from Harrington Lake and out of office in 1993 — a time when, I suggest, the boy from Baie Comeau was so conscious that he was going to be unemployed that he was vulnerable to the Schreibers of this world who are trained, like truffle hounds, to smell out people who might be open, even temporarily, to accepting unwise money — was not just based on the book’s length. I knew that the whole Schreiber affair was best left for another book, because it would be hard for Brian to put it in a good light, and his treatment of it would dominate the news coverage of the entire book.
I stuck to my decision not to ask him about Schreiber because a “What really happened?” question implied disbelief. So I watched the game play out through the long days of the Oliphant Inquiry, and beyond, with a sinking heart.
When Justice Oliphant summed up the affair in May 2010, the report was not kind to Brian. I wanted to phone him, but could not think of anything encouraging to say. In the end I phoned and began, simply, “I was just wondering how you were doing.”
And that proved to be enough. As always, he carried the conversation, telling me that everything was fine, the family was all well. He even took comfort from a column by his old sparring partner Jeffrey Simpson, which said some very damning things, but also suggested that history remembered Sir John A. for much more than just the Pacific Railway scandal. He was in good spirits (he may even have used that phrase) and noted that Mila had said, “We’ve come through worse than this before.”
When people look at the whole Schreiber affair, the automatic question is Why did he do it? Mulroney has acknowledged that taking money from Schreiber — although not, he has always insisted, in a context linked in any way with Canada’s legitimate Airbus purchase — was a terrible mistake.
But what about the secret meetings, the special New York bank account, and so on? It doesn’t make sense.
In a similar baffling situation Sherlock Holmes came up with a way to find an explanation: “Cherchez la femme.”
Which brings us to Mila.
What follows is pure speculation, but it is based on three well-known facts. One, that Mila loathed Karlheinz Schreiber. Two, that she wanted Brian to have nothing to do with him. And three, that she was, and remains, a strong influence on her husband. Given those facts, an interesting theory emerges, explaining why Brian (concerned about maintaining a good lifestyle for his family, and worried ab
out having no obvious source of income when he left office) met Schreiber in secret meetings, took money from him in cash, stashed it in a secret bank account in New York, and revealed it to auditors and tax authorities only when the story was coming out. All of this, I suggest, takes on a fascinating plausibility when seen through the lens of Mila. Brian Mulroney would not have been the first husband to try to keep secret from his wife his dealings with a business associate she disliked.
Pure speculation, of course, which I owe to an anonymous person close to the situation. I have never raised it with my friend Brian, for whom I wish a long and healthy retirement that conquers the curse of diabetes, and many more readers for his excellent book.
I have visited thirty-four countries in my journeys around the world, have swum underwater with dolphins, stood on ice in the path of an onrushing icebreaker, parachute-jumped, dodged great white sharks and motorcycle gangs of whale factory workers in Australia, faced angry mobs in Newfoundland, founded a religion, run with the bulls in Pamplona, survived numerous storms and other near-disasters at sea while commanding a converted minesweeper in the North Pacific, stuck my head in a killer whale’s mouth and have nearly drowned, or been stomped, run down or crushed many, many times. . . . What a fabulous existence!
That sounds like Bob, all right, with only the infectious little heh-heh-heh chuckle missing at the end. But that’s only a tiny part of this guy’s life. Let’s try to do better, raising awareness of a man who would have been an icon in many other countries, but who was much too Canadian to take himself seriously, even when Time magazine in 2000 named him as one of the century’s Top Ten Eco-Heroes. Others on the world list — like Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau — are probably better known all over Canada than he ever was.
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