Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ on the markets, and after dinner would watch television while drinking himself into a stupor before his long night-time conversation with Conrad. Just before daybreak he would climb the stairs to his bedroom. His wife Betty, a sports enthusiast from the Riley family, whose wealth came from insurance and finance, had little in common with her husband. In recent years, barely tolerating a man who rarely emerged from his house or met visitors, she had condemned her husband as a self-righteous snob and disappeared into her own rooms. Their unpleasant co-existence was interrupted in September 1975, when Jean Black was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

      Eight months later, Conrad, Monte, his elder brother by four years, and their father, accompanied by a nurse, flew with the dying woman in a private plane loaned by Argus to Bermuda, which Jean had always dreamt of visiting. Shortly after their return, on 19 June 1976, she died. George Black declared himself too ill to stand by her grave. After the funeral the mourners returned to the family house, to be told that George was too sick to appear at the wake. Only his closest friends remained when he finally emerged, depressed and showing little will to live. ‘Are you planning a trip during the summer?’ asked one, Douglas Bassett. ‘Yes,’ replied Black. ‘To the dentist in late July.’

      Ten days later, after another night-time discussion with Conrad, George Black slowly climbed the stairs. As he reached the top, his son heard cracking wood, and saw his father fall over the banister onto the ground floor.³ Carried by Conrad into the library, George Black said that he no longer had the will to live. ‘Life is hell,’ he told his son as they awaited the doctor. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ The doctor’s diagnosis was bleak. His father, Conrad was told, was unlikely to survive. Despite the prognosis, Conrad returned to his own home and watched a Charlie Chan film. His viewing was interrupted by a telephone call. George Black, the doctor announced, was dead. Many, occasionally including his son, believed that he had committed suicide. At thirty-two, Conrad Black was an orphan with a purpose.

      Toronto’s financial leaders gathered for George Black’s funeral. The pall bearers, who included all Ravelston’s directors, were led by Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor. Conrad watched McDougald with particular interest. While he admired ‘the ultimate Canadian tycoon’,⁴ he recognised that he represented Canada’s ‘corporate rot’, and that his fortune had been earned in a uniquely dishonest manner called ‘tollgating’.⁵ Conrad’s later pious denunciation of the legend’s ‘venality and self-delusion’ at his father’s graveside did not undermine his endorsement of McDougald’s crushing piety: ‘Some are chosen, some are not.’ In the jungle, Conrad Black was committed to stand among the chosen.

      Bud McDougald, like Ravelston’s other major shareholders, Black noted, had no children. Their wives were uninterested in business. Those circumstances would be his opportunity. Ingratiating himself with the older directors was not a chore, but rather an investment. Among Conrad Black’s skills was flattering old, lonely, rich people.

      After their father’s funeral, Conrad and Monte Black called on Bud McDougald, who controlled the fate of the two young men’s assets. To Conrad’s relief they were ‘welcomed most graciously’. Whereas Conrad had condemned McDougald as a ‘snob, bigot … and an unlearned reactionary’ who had succumbed to ‘jet-addicted decadence’, on that particular day he encountered ‘an elegant and considerable figure’.⁶ After a brief discussion the brothers emerged with a satisfactory deal. Conrad was given a directorship of Argus and Ravelston, while Monte was given directorships of other companies. As if to confirm his younger brother’s intellectual superiority, Monte agreed that Conrad should inherit their parents’ grand house amid seven acres in Bridle Path’s Park Lane Circle. The house matched Conrad’s ambitions. Unlike Monte, an unthreatening bon vivant with a fondness for big cigars, fast cars and good food, Conrad’s dream was to join the establishment and to control an empire matching those of Canada’s principal families, including the Eatons, the owners of the country’s dominant department store chain; the Westons, who owned a food and retail business; the Bronfmans, whose fortune was built on alcohol during the Prohibition; the Thomsons, the media family whose assets included the Times newspapers in Britain; and the investors Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation and Hal Jackman, the inheritor of a large investment fund.⁷ Stuck on the periphery, Conrad Black hoped to use his inheritance to become a power on Bay Street and a member of Toronto’s financial mafia. His life over the previous thirty-two years had been a preparation for that struggle.

      Privilege and prejudice had been Conrad Black’s roots since his birth in Montreal on 25 August 1944. By the age of five, when the family moved to Toronto, he was cosseted by cooks, butlers, nannies and chauffeurs. In the winter holidays he escaped Toronto’s freeze in the Bahamas. At Nassau’s Porcupine Club he gazed with his father at the Mellons, du Ponts and other American magnates. Although George Black did not rank among the super-rich, he was a successful businessman with an astute intellect. Well-read, and always irritated by those who misused the English language, he noted his son’s exceptional gifts and became preoccupied with creating an extraordinary individual out of him.

      Obsessively he ordered Conrad to recall facts, both relevant and irrelevant. After intensive games of chess, his son was encouraged to read encyclopaedias and, like himself, recall what he read. Conrad’s bedrooms were filled with books about the military, wars and politics. He learned not only the names of the world’s ships, both commercial and naval, but their weight, armour thickness and guns. In the midst of the Korean War Conrad Black sat transfixed listening to David Brinkley’s news broadcasts, and watched the television reports of the McCarthy hearings in Washington targeted at unearthing Communist sympathisers. Influenced by his father in favour of capitalism, he grew up with a hatred of those on the left, whom he later damned as ‘phoney, envious and mediocre bleeding hearts whining and snivelling about meritocratic Darwinism’. Nowhere in Black’s education or experience was there any sympathy for the anonymous, simple, honest masses born underprivileged and without special talents. On the contrary, there was boastfulness when in 1952 his father arranged his purchase of a single General Motors share costing $59. The eight-year-old Black had dollar bills spilling from his pockets. When one fell into the mud, he carefully washed it. His journey across the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth the following year to watch the coronation in London enhanced the image of a spoilt child taking luxury for granted.

      From the age of eleven the unsporting, overweight Black was driven every day to Toronto’s Upper Canada College, one of the country’s elite private schools, in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. Awkward and isolated, he was not a natural enthusiast for a society focused on conformity and obedience. During his school day he could be certain that his family’s servants were cleaning his room, washing his clothes and preparing his dinner. Occasionally the chauffeur returned to serve lunch in the limousine. Voices, books and images conjured up for the young Black a romantic fantasy of enjoying the same unlimited power as history’s titans, assured that whatever he willed would be carried out. Entitlement bred defiance and insolence, fashioning a personality which enjoyed a fight and savoured inflicting defeat. Black’s childhood, remarked John Fraser, a school friend, was like prison for a pre-teenager convinced that he was smarter than the system.⁸

      The scoffs directed at the tubby outsider, Conrad believed, were driven by ‘spite and envy’, one of the oft-repeated phrases that encapsulated his life’s credo. His encyclopaedic knowledge, he assumed, was resented, reinforcing his sense of superiority and hatred of regimentation. He construed his teachers as remote from reality, and their authority as a misuse of power. History, he believed, showed how those exercising authority were flawed. Success was won by those who were unwilling to obey laws. Those who failed to admire him were dismissed as despicable. Teachers whom he judged to be inferior excited his contempt. Defiance, in Black’s interpretation, СКАЧАТЬ