In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Having just been to Romania, I proposed a book about vampires to Barnes & Noble. They liked the concept, the price, the number of pages, everything, except that they wanted it in two months. I agreed, on the assumption that I would find someone to write it very quickly. When I couldn’t, I ended up writing most of the book myself with an assist from a co-author film buff who supplied words about vampires in movies. I did Vlad the Impaler and his successors. The book, I am surprised to discover, is still in print.

  We also explored ways of increasing our size and, therefore, our clout in the Canadian book market, imagining that if our annual income doubled or tripled, we could demand better terms from “the chain,” from Amazon, maybe even Costco.

  I had had long, enjoyable meetings with my colleague Scott McIntyre to discuss how such an affiliation or even a merger could work. We had now been friends for more than thirty years, had grown to know what each of us cared about and why we were devoted book people. We had both been members of the small group—known at the time as “the junta”—elected in 1991 by the Association of Canadian Publishers to lobby the government.I Scott’s company, Douglas & McIntyre, was the star of West Coast publishing. We were both known to be innovative at home and respected internationally. We both sold books all over the world.

  Scott and I sometimes had dinner in Frankfurt during the Book Fair, and in Paris after Frankfurt. Scott took many pages of notes and calculated whether we could save money by merging. We thought we could, as Scott was fond of saying, “create a major.” However, Scott’s dream of “a major” included Jack Stoddart of General Publishing, whose sales were about the same as Key Porter’s. Since Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution Services supplied warehousing and shipping for all of us, it seemed to be a marvellous idea to invite Jack to our discussions. If the two of us together could be influential, imagine how influential the three of us together would be! Better still, the combined firms would prove to be an attractive investment for outsiders. Scott and I had a number of very encouraging meetings with potential investors.

  I wrote a long letter to Jack Stoddart on November 7, 2001, proposing a corporate structure that was predicated on merging Key Porter, Douglas & McIntyre, and General Publishing. It was an elaborate plan, partly devised by our CFO, Allan Ibarra. I still think it could have saved all three companies. I hoped that if we merged, Scott would run the company day-to-day and I could maybe write the book that had been gnawing at me for a couple of years. It was about the Holocaust in Hungary and an unusual person who had both the courage and the imagination to come up with a plan to rescue more than seventeen hundred Jews.

  We didn’t know that Jack Stoddart had been teetering on the edge for a couple of years. There had been problems with his bankers, but he had found another bank, an American lender called Finova. He still had a confident strut, a cheery smile, and, I thought at the time, a great relationship with Sheila Copps, the federal Heritage minister, because Jack usually attended her functions. When he suggested that Scott and I go to Ottawa and cajole the government into a short-term investment of $5 million, we believed it was all for a good cause.

  But we were wrong. After sustaining about sixty per cent returns of inventory from Chapters, and after Finova itself went bankrupt, General Publishing, including GDS, sought bankruptcy protection in April 2002.II That the announcement was a shock to me would be an understatement. GDS’s gargantuan warehouse held all of Key Porter’s books and we were among the many unsecured creditors. Overnight, we had no income from our Canadian sales. Our banker noted the news with alarm. Our plight was exacerbated by the decision of a judge that all our receivables belonged to GDS, which had but one secured creditor: its bank. In The Perilous Trade, Roy MacSkimming gives a full account of the disastrous effect on GDS’s client publishers, including us.

  I spent some months reeling from the blow, more months trying to get our books out of the warehouse and pick up the pieces. Most of our authors and many of Jack Stoddart’s were calling in panic to see if their royalties would ever be paid (I know we paid ours). God knows, it’s hard enough to make a living as an author even if your royalty cheques show up on time. What may have saved Key Porter was our early decision not to put all our eggs in one basket. While we had no income and, for a long time no books to sell to bookstores, we had those Barnes & Noble, door-to-door, and bulk sales to other countries. I remember a phone call from a reporter covering the story of our plight (many others, including D&M, were in the same pickle). He asked when we had last been paid by Stoddart and I told him, “Moses was still in short pants when we had our last cheque.”

  Eventually, we bought our books out of GDS’s warehouse and moved them to H. B. Fenn, our new distributor. I had known Harold Fenn for a long time and he had always seemed stable, amiable, and reliable.

  Though he was always willing to have one more discussion about Key Porter’s future, Michael de Pencier was obviously preoccupied with selling Key Publishers to St. Joseph Corporation. His interests and enthusiasms had shifted from magazines to the environment. Throughout the eighties he had been involved with the Young Naturalists Foundation and with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Canadian Geographic, and he was on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. His new venture, Investeco Capital, would be Canada’s first “green” investment company.

  It didn’t take a genius to discern that Michael had moved on. I didn’t blame him. The writing was on the wall.

  * * *

  IN 2003 I asked Harold Fenn whether he would be interested in buying Key Porter. It was a difficult decision for him because publishing required a lot of cash for author advances and manufacturing. The kind of business Harold was in—distribution—worked in reverse: you sold other companies’ books, collected, took your percentage, and sent the rest to the publisher who had produced the books. Unsold copies were usually returned as well, so you didn’t have to finance mountains of inventory. However, Harold’s son, Jordan, had taken a course in publishing and wanted to be a book publisher. So Harold was interested.

  In July 2004, Michael and I sold most of our shares in Key Porter to H. B. Fenn. There was a seemingly endless array of papers to sign in Harold’s lawyers’ steel and glass tower offices. Now and then I pretended an avid interest in the skyline, walked over to the windows, and muttered something about birds. Only Julian, who had come with me that day, knew that I was crying.

  As part of the deal, I had to agree to stay on in some undefined capacity to finish a few projects and to ease Jordan into the role of publisher. One of Harold’s first decisions was to move our offices from The Esplanade to Adelaide Street, into one of those dull buildings that define the street east of Yonge. While I was sad to leave our lived-in premises, I was relieved that I would not be haunted by memories of happier times.

  * * *

  I. The other members of our group were Karl Siegler of Talon Books, Philip Cercone of McGill-Queen’s University Press, Louise Fleming of Ragweed, and Randy Morse of Reidmore Books. Roy MacSkimming was “interim director” coordinating our efforts.

  II. For more detail, see The Perilous Trade.

  Endings

  ONE OF THE last two books I worked on was George Jonas’s riveting memoir, Beethoven’s Mask: Notes on My Life and Times. Set against the grim facts of the twentieth century, it is by turns comic and tragic, bemused and opinionated. It is classic Jonas. George muses on the rise and fall of nations, on human follies and foibles, on Hitler and the pope, on political correctness, pomposity, ignorance, anti-Americanism, nationalism, on the scope and barbarity of the Holocaust, the future of the European Union, and even life and death.

  In the Preface to Beethoven’s Mask, George quotes his opera singer father: “ ‘Europe is a carnival in Venice,’ he offers, ‘with assassins dressed up as lyric poets. Butchers lurk in ducal palaces wearing Beethoven’s mask. The voice is Beethoven’s, but the hand is Beria’s.’ ”I

  The other manuscript was Norman Jewison’s This Terrible Busine
ss Has Been Good to Me. It’s a great title for a memoir and I wish I could have used it for this book. It took me over a decade to convince Norman to tell his story. For more than forty years, Norman had been one of Hollywood’s fabled filmmakers. He had directed many of the great stars of the era, from Steve McQueen (“the camera loved him”) in The Thomas Crown Affair and The Cincinnati Kid, to Cher (“she is in touch with the reality of ordinary people . . . they identify with her”) in Moonstruck. He also worked with Faye Dunaway, Goldie Hawn, Burt Reynolds, Anne Bancroft, Meg Tilly, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and, in the very early days of television, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.

  His landmark film, In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier, was shot in 1966, in a small southern corner of Illinois, to quote Norman, “as Southern as we could get without actually crossing into the Confederacy, where black men were still being lynched.” It was a time when the civil rights movement in the South was held in check by brutal police forces. “Sidney said there was no goddamn way he’d go below the Mason-Dixon Line for the eight weeks we’d needed to shoot the movie.” When the Poitier character, Tibbs, slapped the Rod Steiger character, Endicott, it was the first time that a black man had slapped a white man in an American movie.

  The film won five Academy Awards. Norman would eventually receive the Academy’s lifetime achievement award in 1999. To help nurture Canadian talent, he created the Canadian Film Centre on what used to be E. P. Taylor’s estate in north Toronto, and judging by its graduates’ careers, it has been a great success.

  We worked on the manuscript for several weeks, most of the time in Malibu, where we started early mornings and didn’t finish until after midnight. I was editing the manuscript all the way home on the plane, testing a few ideas on the flight attendants.

  This Terrible Business is not a personal autobiography. Like this book, it’s mostly about Norman’s craft, the people he worked with, the films he directed. “I tried to be truthful and entertaining,” he wrote in the Preface. And his films reflect this simple but powerful credo.

  * * *

  I. Lavrenti Beria was the chief of Joseph Stalin’s secret police.

  From Publisher to Writer

  INEVITABLY, MY NEXT book was going to be about the Holocaust in Hungary. I had been thinking about it for some forty years, circling around it, but I couldn’t find a compelling way into the story. Vili had often talked about those terrible times, the horror and the inexplicable brutality of the murder of more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. Some of them had been his friends and at least one of them had also courted my seventeen-year-old mother when she was home on school holidays. The last time she saw him, he was hanging from a lamppost in a small square on the Buda side of the river.

  My grandfather had hidden a few of his Jewish friends in the basement of our home during the war but thought that was too little. He should have fought a valiant battle in their cause, but under the fascist regime that had brought in the anti-Jewish laws and arranged the deportations, it was too hard to be valiant. Still, according to Martin Gilbert’s book The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, Vili Racz is listed among the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

  I found the subject so overwhelming, so incomprehensible that I simply couldn’t write the book while I was still in publishing. I interviewed some survivors, but remained baffled by how this horror could have happened and by the fact that those wonderful, heroic, funny, interesting people—the Hungarians—had a major role in the murder of almost half a million of their fellow citizens. I went to Auschwitz II Birkenau, stood on the railway platform in the blazing sunshine, and tried to imagine the terror of those arriving after days of standing in tightly packed boxcars, the howls of the children, the desperation of the mothers as they were herded by dogs and whip-wielding guards into the showers—the showers that were gas chambers. Most of the victims at Birkenau were Hungarians.

  The sheer magnitude of the task weighed me down.

  Then, one Saturday afternoon in 2004, Peter Munk called to ask if I had time to come over for a talk. I had known Peter for some years. I had first spoken with him when M&S was planning to publish a book by Garth Hopkins about Clairtone, Peter’s first business venture in Canada. Jack McClelland, disinclined to be sued for libel, had thought I was the best person to find out how Peter felt about the book, as we were both born in Hungary.

  Clairtone, a company that manufactured high-end stereo equipment, had collapsed, leaving a trail of unhappy investors and politicians. Peter and his partner, David Gilmour, had left Canada and spent a few years assembling a package of hotels, real estate, and mining companies. Now, years later, he was chairman of the largest gold producer in the world: Barrick Gold.

  Peter said that Garth Hopkins had the facts of the sorry tale correct. We got to know each other during the next few years of lunches and dinners and the occasional trip to his Georgian Bay island. We shared friendships with both Andy Sarlos and George Jonas.

  Now he and his wife, Melanie, were moving to a new house in Forest Hill, and he had been packing up old photographs and memorabilia that got him thinking about the past. He recalled his elegant grandfather, Gabriel Munk, his almost as elegant father, his beautiful mother, and the rest of his wealthy, privileged Hungarian Jewish family.

  It was the first time I had heard of Rezso Kasztner. He was the man who had saved the Munk family, part of a group of 1,684 people he had rescued from almost certain death. He had managed to do this three and a half months after the German army and Adolf Eichmann’s Special Commands had marched into Hungary. Ironically, Rezso Kasztner was killed in Israel, after the war, by a fellow Jew who believed he had been a collaborator.

  That was my entry into the world of Kasztner’s Train. By the time I finished the manuscript, I had read about two hundred books, hundreds of documents in three languages, and travelled to Hungary, Poland, Israel, the United States, Germany, and Austria to interview survivors. I had endured long sleepless nights living with their stories, and I knew how my book was going to tell the story of Rezso Kasztner and of the Holocaust in Hungary.

  * * *

  WHILE I WAS struggling with ghosts from the past, Michael de Pencier continued to invest in green businesses, such as the Green Living Show and the Environmental Guide (co-founded with Mary Anne Brinckman), Bullfrog Power, fluorescent light bulbs, smart cars, the Green Toronto Awards (which he managed in partnership with the city), and even LongPen, the remote signing device launched in 2006 by Margaret Atwood. LongPen’s plan had been to make it possible for authors to sign their books for fans without having to travel. Conrad Black, for example, could go on a virtual tour, signing his Richard Nixon book while sitting in his house.I

  As chairman of World Wildlife Canada, Michael had become a poster man for the green movement. He volunteered for the International Conservation Fund and the Natural Burial Association of Canada (yes, we are considering this but it is a bit yucky). He and Honor use solar power at their farm near Rosemont, Ontario, and he has been busy planting and nurturing trees—ninety thousand at last count—on their property. I have witnessed, personally, the nurturing: Michael wrapping saplings for the winter and proudly unwrapping them in the spring.

  In early 2005, to take a break from my writing, I went to Florence with Catherine for a short holiday, just the two of us. We walked, checked out the art galleries, laughed, talked, drank Prosecco, and ate. Our room looked out over the Arno, with a grand view of the Ponte Vecchio. Julian phoned from Vancouver on April 8. He was about to argue a libel case in front of the BC Court of Appeal. He was as nervous as a kid before an exam. The last time he was in a Vancouver courtroom, famous BC counsel Peter Butler had said to the judge, “Well, Mr. Porter’s an Eastern lawyer. What does he know?” Julian thought being a Toronto lawyer had counted against him then, and would, perhaps, now.

  When he called the next day, he was somewhere along a river, surrounded by Douglas firs. “My God,” he shouted over the sound of rushing waters, �
��I think I won!”

  While we were away, Harold Fenn fired Allan Ibarra, the best book business finance guy in Canada. Allan, who was rather more philosophical about his dismissal than I was, said he was not surprised that Harold would want his own man in place.II I quit Key Porter Books a week after Julian won his case, and I got on with writing my book.

  Kasztner’s Train was published in 2007 by my friends Scott McIntyre in Canada and George GibsonIII of Bloomsbury in the United States. It won the 2007 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award. I spent much of the fall on a promotion tour, including a talk at New York’s famed 92nd Street Y. It was a great relief to finally share this story with the world. Vili would have been proud of me.

  * * *

  I. In 2014 LongPen was proud to announce that the invention had saved 1,764 lbs of CO2 emissions. It is now part of www.syngrafii.com.

  II. Allan went on to be CFO at the House of Anansi.

  III. George was an occasional member of the Quasimodo dinner group.

  Europe’s Ghosts