His collections include the only wood carving Michelangelo ever did, stunning boxwood and ivory carvings and some fabulous miniatures by Octavio Genelia. Death is a recurring theme of his collection, which includes any number of realistically rendered skulls—the carving of a sleeping child using a skull as a pillow, the tableau of a starving wolf being strangled by a skeleton and a pear-wood skull hinged to reveal a miniature Adam and Eve on one side and the crucifixion on the other. The most unusual—and most treasured—objects in his collection are the ship models carved by French prisoners in British jails during the Napoleonic era. They did the carvings to keep from going insane but had few tools or materials, so most of the hulls are fashioned out of the bones of their dead, the rigging braided out of their hair.
As with most of his enterprises, Ken Thomson’s art collection is not exactly what it seems. Nearly all of it belongs to Thomson Works of Art Limited, a company owned by his three children so the increase in value of the collection will be exempted from taxes on his death. The Krieghoff paintings offer their owner an extra incentive: every Christmas, Ken lends one or two canvases to Hallmark, which sends him free Christmas cards bearing the imprint of his painting in return. “They give me a thousand cards free and another four hundred wholesale,” he boasts. Naturally, the cards are mailed with unsealed flaps to qualify for the lowest postal rates.
—1997
David Thomson: Fortune’s Child
SHORTLY AFTER I first met David Thomson, he invited me to his Rosedale mansion in Toronto. It was really an art gallery, with kitchen, bathroom and bedroom attached. Of all the many art objects he showed me that day, the most memorable was a magnificent depiction in gnarled, petrified wood of the crucifixion, with a near-life-size Jesus mounted on its original cross. The carving had been the worship point of an unidentified church in southern Germany during the last quarter of the twelfth century.
“The agony of Christ is pronounced with the hips slightly tilted,” he explained. “The profile of Jesus’ head is quite spectacular. In this piece one confronts the beginnings of Gothic carving and the tremendous expressionism of the northern world …”
He went on and on, praising the creative genius of the holy sculpture in his living room, speaking in a guttural monotone, his throat muscles stretched by the force of his concentration. Overcome by the emotional intensity of the moment, I reacted with one of the great gaffes of uninformed art commentary.
“Look at those nails,” I offered helpfully, “how honest and meretricious they are …”
“Yeah, well actually, I put them there myself,” he shot back, looking at me as if I had just thrown up on his hand-woven Persian rug. “They’re what the cross is hanging on.”
Bad start.
I remembered that small incident of a decade ago as David Thomson moved into the top job of Thomson Corporation, a multinational electronic information provider, with annual revenues of more than $10 billion. Its stock, 73 percent of it owned by the Thomson family, is worth $48 billion, making David the richest Canadian and head of the country’s largest privately controlled enterprise.
Burdened with an original mind, his brew of ideas constantly in ferment, the forty-four-year-old heir is starting out on the journey for which he has been training all of his precocious adult life. He will guide the world’s most successful digital media empire, which operates in one hundred countries and is radically changing how business is done and how executives think.
It will be a fascinating spectacle. David Thomson may well be the prototype twenty-first-century global executive, a corporate space cadet who follows an existential path to highly profitable self-enlightenment. His thought process is a one-off. No head of a major Canadian firm behaves or acts like him.
A cerebral energy bunny on the loose in corporate North America, he relies on a strictly instinctive approach to business decisions, which these days are based on the data that overheated computers spit out. “In the end,” he confided, “judgment and instinct are still the elements of great success. One can have all of the numbers prepared, all the logistics, all the statistics run, but until one faces a human being or a corporate entity, one really has no sense of its service, let alone its potential. How can one quantify success or failure? Is it a failure if it revives a purpose, if it makes one move in another direction that is successful, that in fact is absolutely necessary as a learning curve? I really believe in that. I’ve experienced it.”
There is a touch of extrasensory perception about the man and his postmodern gibberish, which reminds me of nothing so much as the evocative jazz solos of Miles Davis, improvising his way to melodic truth. It’s the loosey-goosey character of jazz that allows it to regenerate itself. David Thomson understands that hip approach. He lives it. “I am absolutely compelled to follow my feelings,” he told me, “or I forfeit the right to live.”
Even before he took over, the youthful chairman had made a tough decision. Despite heavy pressure from within that his company’s headquarters ought to be moved south of the border, where most of its business originated, The Thomson Corporation will remain in Canada. (Only one of its subsidiaries still has a Canadian address. The company is actually run on a day-today basis out of the Metro Center in Stamford, Connecticut.) “Absolutely, our head office is staying in Canada,” Thomson insisted. “It feels good. It feels right. There is nothing more to say, really.” At the same time, he refused to speculate on whether or not he will eventually take up his grandfather’s hereditary title and join the British House of Lords.
He has climbed to the highest position within the Thomson Organization with no profile; has yet to grant his first newspaper, television or any other interview (except for the two occasions he talked to me) ; and is so circumspect that his 1988 marriage to Mary Lou La Prairie, a department store fashion buyer, was missed by Toronto’s social columnists and went undetected even by the nosy Rosedale mavens whose mansions surrounded his home. They had two daughters, Thyra Nicole and Tessa Lyss. He has since been divorced and later married Laurie Ludwick, a bright and lively public relations consultant with whom he has a son. He spends much of his spare time joyfully raising his daughters by his first marriage.
Tall and wispy, with curly, sandy hair and penetrating blue eyes, David is light on both feet, betraying the easy grace born of his training in the martial arts. Intensity characterizes his thoughts and actions. Ask him the meaning of life or the time of day and the brows furrow into deep scars (the forehead is too youthful to show supporting wrinkles), the eyes grow reflective and the brain cells almost audibly start churning. There is no small talk. Ever.
EDUCATED AT THE HALL SCHOOL in England and Toronto’s Upper Canada College, the youthful David painstakingly stayed away from the sports and military training in which both schools then specialized. “I never understood the emphasis on playing games as the only forum for exhibiting manliness,” he recalled. “The Upper Canada College Battalion was an unnecessary and wasteful commitment, illustrating the shallow nature of so many contemporaries in early life. As a chore it was counter to the deep emotional issues which I sought to begin my journey.” Not your average prom-date jock.
He read history at Cambridge, concentrating on studies of the civil service in India from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. To lighten the academic load, Thomson played left wing on the 1976 Cambridge hockey team that beat Oxford for only the fourth time since 1930. “I like to think I was on the team because of my abilities,” he laughed, “but I owned a Volvo station wagon which afforded me a constant place.”
David’s most significant formative influence was the time he spent with his grandfather, Lord Roy Thomson of Fleet, at his country manor house in Alderbourne Arches, Buckinghamshire. “He was very lonely and we conversed for hours about business and people,” he reminisced. “His curious mind was always questioning why things were done in a particular way, seeking to understand the forces that affect people’s judgments. He was an optimist with an unca
nny ability to seize opportunities that others couldn’t see. This approach was in complete parallel to my own nature.” There was another parallel: Roy Thomson unleashed the random thoughts that he credited with helping him resolve the most complex of corporate problems by guessing the murderer in the dozen Agatha Christie and other whodunits he devoured every week. Those stories were for him what resolving the mysteries of the art world would become to his grandson: less an escape than a way to sharpen and exercise the mind for managing the exponential growth of the family fortune. (Every morning of every day David still puts on the copper bracelet his grandfather wore to ward off arthritis as a reminder of the old man’s spirit.)
The trust set up by Roy Thomson, who died in 1976 after accumulating corporate assets worth at least $750 million, formally appointed David to succeed Young Ken as head of the Thomson Organization. “David, my grandson, will have to take his part in the running of the organization, and David’s son, too,” the dying Thomson wrote, spelling out the rules. “For the business is now all tied up in trusts for those future Thomsons, so that death duties will not tear it apart. The Thomson boys who come after Ken are not going to be able, even if they want to, to shrug off these responsibilities. The conditions of the trust ensure that control of the business will remain in Thomson hands for eighty years.”
It was during the many “séances” with his grandfather that David first became seriously interested in art. It quickly became his obsession but has never been based on financial gain or social acceptance. Aware that any cultural hobby pursued by a rich kid was bound to be dismissed as dilettantish, he put in a long and arduous apprenticeship under Hermann Baer, an articulate expert in medieval art who ran a small shop on London’s Davies Street, which rented antique props to the film industry. His other significant mentor was his father, whose collection, David claims, “should be celebrated in its completeness; even the frame mouldings are harmonious.” The relationship between the two men is close but not cloying, with the senior Thomson occasionally wondering if his son is tuned in to worldly realities. “David gets feelings that I never get from pictures,” Ken admitted. “He never misses the technical aspect of art. He talks about the soul, the true message of a painting and can read what the artist had in mind when he did it. He gets signals that even I don’t understand.”
David’s fealty is genuine and profound. “Given my passionate experience in so many realms, I have never felt more admiration for an individual. Father’s contributions to the family and business have been absolute inspirations. Like sculpture it is the space that surrounds them, rather than the space they occupy that truly matters. My father’s relationship with me has also been combustible, as you might expect.
“The art world has taught me harsh lessons about human nature,” David confessed. “Money does not open every door. A real collector will rarely sell a work unless he can replace it with something even greater that has more personal meaning.” Thomson’s most valuable acquisition was J.M.W. Turner’s magnificent Seascape, Folkestone, which Lord Clark, the former director of the National Gallery described as “the best picture in the world.” David bought it at auction in 1984 for $14.6 million, outbidding the National Gallery of Scotland; five years later it was valued at $50 million, and he has sold it for more since. His most lasting dedication is to John Constable, the miller’s son who, along with Turner, dominated English landscape painting in the nineteen century. David’s first purchase, at nineteen, was a page out of the artist’s 1835 Arundel sketchbook, and his collection of his major works, which now includes eighty-six of his drawings, ranks as the world’s finest private representation of Constable’s art. “His sensibility has had a strong influence on my personal philosophy, which I carry forward in all walks of life, including business,” Thomson enthused. “So few people allow themselves to openly see and question scenes and events as he did. All too often subjects are viewed from a narrow perspective, with strong conclusions drawn in advance. Being possessed by imagination, curiosity and such dreamlike qualities doesn’t mean one is incapable of pragmatism and tough decision making. Whenever you lose that sense of idealism, you lose your reason for being.”
That sense of idealism has taken Thomson into the soggy pastures of existentialism, at least in the sense that he feels diminished unless he meets the challenges he sets for himself. Intensely attracted by war and danger, he has put together a London-based collection numbering three-quarters of a million letters documenting first-hand experiences of combat throughout history. He often imagines himself in battle. “I become excited at the thought of measuring myself in varied situations, alongside Wellington in India or being in a fighter, attacking a formation of bombers and being vastly outnumbered. It’s an interesting way to test yourself because you set your own limits.” Among his favourite documents is one of the last letters written by Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, found beside his frozen body in 1912, which Thomson regularly rereads as an example of an undaunted spirit facing death. “The existential idea of life’s journey is very important,” he contends. “It’s all too easy to become cynical and to forget that we are all children at heart, that when you leave those youthful dreams behind, you leave a great part of your being forever, you abandon your sense of wonder and astonishment, the idea that you can be spiritually moved by something or someone.”
His artistic impulses have expanded to collecting “the northern school,” featuring sixteenth-century Flemish canvases, nineteenth-century Scandinavian art and twentieth-century Canadian paintings, as well as photography. More important, he is gradually moving away from his penchant of maintaining his collections strictly for private pleasure. He is constantly lending canvasses to public exhibitions, and his own collections will almost certainly end up, as will his father’s, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Thomson makes little effort to separate his passion for art from his devotion to business. In his mind they are twin strands, usefully entwined: “I take art so seriously because it’s one of the few pursuits in which I can totally unravel my soul. For me, the act of creation comes through in a better appreciation of business.” There is, according to the youthful inheritor, almost no aspect of art that can’t be related to some part of the Thomson Organization’s operational code. “If you look at Limoges and Mosan, two of the great French workshops producing art in the twelfth century, you might think, ‘What the hell does that have to do with business?’” he points out. “Limoges in central France made fantastic reliquaries and chalices for churches and cathedrals with very few variables. But the Mosan craftsmen were different. They worked the market between Liège and Cologne. Their representatives sat down directly with the local bishop and asked what he wanted to see in the holy shrine. They were, in effect, forming the first customer focus groups and producing castings that were far superior to the Limoges enamels. You can’t do anything well in publishing, electronic or print, without a highly developed sense of audience.”
THE YOUNG THOMSON’S learning curve in business realities received its most valuable spurt during the 1980s. He spent most of that decade with the Hudson’s Bay Company, then owned by his family, working as a full-time retailer, right down to selling socks at its Yorkdale department store. His most moving experience was his time at a fur-trading post at Prince Albert in northern Saskatchewan. “The juxtaposition was dramatic,” he recalled. “On July 4, 1980, I bid successfully for a Munch woodblock; the following week I was in Prince Albert, being taken to the post’s backyard, where ten bear claws were positioned on the cement floor, with fresh bloodstains and tissue intact. One fellow proceeded to demonstrate the various new traps and took me through the back room, where numerous shiny models were hanging. He hinged several in open positions and tossed a branch into the claw. I shall never forget the powerful crescendo of the folding pincers. For one of the first times, I enjoyed a completely unfettered response to life, isolated from big cities and the diversions of money. We drove along dirt roads, watched sunsets, merch
andised the store, went fishing and talked of our childhoods. The experience was unforgettable, and I developed a deep respect and empathy towards those real people.”
At the time, some of his co-workers accused him of grilling underlings about their superiors’ performance, then attacking those in charge on the basis of what he’d heard. They claimed that he could operate at only two speeds, full throttle or total indifference, and recalled HBC management meetings where he would grow bored, slump at his desk and finally start reading a book. “David used to phone from Liechtenstein on a Sunday night and say, ‘Hey boss, can I get Monday off?’” complained Marvin Tiller, then in charge of the HBC’s Northern Stores, where the young Thomson put in some time. During his shift with the HBC, Thomson kept a private journal, recording his thoughts—among them: On display: “Spotlight the ring on a model’s finger in a downtown window … use all senses, including the aroma of good cooking.” On expansion: “To build a new shopping centre or store is an analytical decision with no feelings. Yet selling decisions are all feelings.” On Zellers: “Slop it up. Far too clean.” (He later had a brief but spectacular success running the Zellers chain, where he raised operating profit by 45 percent.)
Most Thomson employees who came in contact with David during his time with the HBC respected him but eventually overdosed on his intensity and rococo lingo. He told one dissatisfied staff member that perhaps he should consider leaving the firm because there were certain disadvantages and anxieties involved in working for someone like him. “But at the end of the day,” he added, “you may say: ‘You know, it’s interesting working for David. Even if he’s mad.’ If that means I’m not normal, I’m perfectly happy with that. That’s the type of dialogue I really enjoy because it not only gives me strength, but allows so many wonderful business initiatives to occur.”
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