Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge

As the news seeped out, Ravelston’s other directors were flummoxed. Tasting his first blood, Black enjoyed comparing himself to those heroic military geniuses whose biographies he devoured. ‘Never interfere with an enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself,’ he liked to quote from Napoleon.38 Adopting military stratagems against weak foes like the widows and Ravelston’s other directors satisfied Black’s fondness for self-congratulation.

News of his victory at the widows’ expense prompted calls from Canadian journalists to Florida. Their questions were the widows’ first inkling of their mistake. ‘I have a bird brain about business,’ admitted Maude McDougald, ‘and I don’t know anything about it.’ Doris Phillips was equally disarming. ‘You know more about it than I do,’ she confessed after admitting ignorance about the ‘hundreds of documents’ she had signed since her husband’s death.39 As the interviews increased, the widows began denouncing Black as a trickster, claiming incomprehension. ‘Like absolute idiots and birdbrains,’ said Maude McDougald, ‘we signed and signed and signed without reading at all.’ In Toronto, Black dismissed their pleas of innocence as ‘an utter fraud’.40 He was not prepared to accept any blame. He was always in the right.

Inside 10 Toronto Street, Black confronted the director who had told him, ‘Don’t rush your fences.’ Empowered with the widows’ shares, the young rebel announced that he had not appreciated the snub. That director and all the others were ousted forthwith. In Black’s imagery, his rivals were ‘trussed up like a partridge to their guillotine. I would not fidget and fumble with the blade levers … Off with his head.’41 News of their resignations sparked uproar. Bay Street had never in living memory witnessed such a coup. As the owner of newspapers, Black assumed that he had the expertise to orchestrate sympathy from the media. To win over Patrick Watson, who was producing a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) television documentary about him, he posed in Hal Jackman’s basement in front of a gigantic model army to illustrate his prowess as a strategist, spawning the false illusion that he regularly engaged in war games. ‘I was asked by the widows,’ said the hero, ‘to pull the trigger and decapitate the enemy because the ladies would not hear of moderation.’ As the criticism of his actions increased, newspaper journalists were introduced to another Blackian tactic – his unusual eloquence in conjuring up images which could only be contradicted by accusing him of lying. Black insisted that he had acted ‘neutrally’ in dismissing the old guard, and that it was the ‘rapacious’ widows who had taken the initiative by asking for the transfer of authority to himself. Experts, he claimed, had ‘explained laboriously to them in monosyllables and with examples adapted to the mind of a child of ten, and they understood and approved every letter of every word of the agreement’.42 To those who remained doubters, he exclaimed, ‘Any suggestion that I would hoodwink two bereaved septuagenarian widows is patently ridiculous.’43 Those newspapers which still stubbornly dared to repeat the widows’ assertions received the threat of a writ for defamation. Several newspapers surrendered, but Black was powerless to prevent CBC TV transmitting its documentary, which featured the widows expressly denouncing him. Their appearance created an unfortunate legacy as he approached his next hurdle.

The document signed by the widows gave Black the power to vote on their behalf, but did not give him the right to buy their shares. While he could remove rival directors, he could not ultimately control the company’s governance. To resolve the confused situation Black sought total control and complete ownership. In the summer of 1978 the fate of Canada’s biggest conglomerate was a cliffhanger, dependent upon Black’s strategy.

All the players, including Black, were minority shareholders. Black’s fate depended upon the decision of two of these. Moving between Winston’s, Toronto’s best restaurant, the Toronto Club and 10 Toronto Street, he sought to break the deadlock in a manner which was previously unseen in Bay Street. Black’s ace was his unique grasp of the complexity of the Argus and Ravelston empire. In the daisy chain of companies, few understood the flows of cash and power. Only Black’s photographic memory could make use of the intricate jigsaw of different people with minority interests in all the companies in order to outwit other shareholders. He understood that by seizing control of Ravelston, he would automatically control Argus.

Throughout the exhausting battle, the widows were buffeted by suitors, professional advisers and the other besieged shareholders. In Black’s subsequent description, ‘the fate of some of Canada’s most famous companies now unfolded in an atmosphere of almost unrelenting buffoonery’.44 The reality was intimidation, stormy meetings, and vicious threats of dismissal and lawsuits. Around the clock Black cajoled shareholders, directors and employees to support him, or at best not to sell their shares to his opponents. Black’s survival depended partly on the success of two friends, Fred Eaton and Hal Jackman, in gathering support for himself. On 2 July 1978 the battle reached its climax when the widows agreed to sell their Ravelston shares to Black for C$20 million. Black offered $18 million, and the deal was settled at $18.4 million. Winning total control thereafter was purely mechanical, and cost just $12 million. For a total of $30 million, Black now owned a corporation controlling assets worth $4 billion. He compared the defeated old guard to ‘generals fighting a war by methods of the last one. They could not conceive of any corporate alternative to trench warfare, attrition and promotion by seniority. They were completely over-confident.’45 Black’s final hurdle was to find the money, and the entire $30 million was borrowed from two banks.46 To reduce his debt he sold off parcels of Ravelston shares to trustworthy friends, especially Fred Eaton, Doug Bassett and Hal Jackman.

With victory came the spoils. Number 10 Toronto Street, constructed as a post office in 1853, became the Black brothers’ headquarters. A huge bronze eagle in full flight was hung over the fireplace to reflect Conrad’s ambitions. To fulfil his Hearstian fantasy, other rooms were furnished with historic symbols and mementos, especially of battles and generals. At the age of thirty-four, Black embellished his performance as a Bay Street player by holding court in Winston’s, at the Toronto Club or in his own dining room. Comparisons with Orson Welles in Citizen Kane were not resented by a prototype tycoon eager to pull the levers of power. ‘If my father knew what I’ve done,’ he confided with pleasure, ‘he’d roll in his grave.’

Propelled into the spotlight in that prestigious building, Black enjoyed the controversy he had invited. Some ‘old money’ families recalled his theft of the school’s examination papers. Others, including members of the Toronto Club, suspicious of the speed of his rise to wealth and celebrity, dubbed the new star ‘Conrad the Barbarian’. His coup may not have been dishonest, they carped, but Black was certainly ‘cruel’. Any such judgements, in Black’s mind, were buried by his nomination as ‘Man of the Year’ and ‘Boy Wonder’. The Globe and Mail, Toronto’s leading newspaper, anointed him ‘Businessman of the Year’. Having outfoxed the establishment, Black felt himself assured of victory in every future battle. Compared to other businessmen in Canada’s small pond, he ranked himself as a star. Convinced that he could manipulate journalists, a breed he disdained, he portrayed himself in interviews as a historian lamenting society’s ‘moral torpor’ and the ‘decline of civilisation’.47 With pleasure he pontificated, ‘I suspected I was starting ticking a public and press-relations time bomb.’48 To his glee, his clever asides were published uncritically. He would, he smiled, continue the traditional Argus dinners, inviting the country’s 150 most important men. No one, he guessed, would refuse the invitation of a man with unique style, so superbly erudite among bankers, politicians and intellectuals, able to articulate the advantages of capitalism over the creeping socialisation of their country.

Reflecting on his victory, Black suggested that he drew pertinent lessons from the criticism he had received then for the remainder of his career. ‘The lesson of June is to be wary of setting out in the most cynical way to use people you have underestimated. The pickpocket whose pocket is picked receives, and deserves, little sympathy … In finance, only proprietors can consistently act like proprietors.’49 That statement exposed a confusion in Black’s attitude towards business. He was suggesting that only a ‘proprietor’ – someone who owned 100 per cent of a company – could behave selfishly, regardless of others. ‘My natural sympathies are with the proprietors whose own money is at stake,’ he said, admiring the personal control of companies enjoyed by Galen Weston, Fred Eaton, Ken Thomson, Hal Jackman and the American moguls. With their substantial control of their businesses, they shone in Black’s eyes compared to mere professional managers. Black’s misfortune was that he was not a proprietor. He lacked the money to buy out Argus’s other shareholders. Yet, as a raw capitalist, he was emphatic that proprietors and investors were bound to live by the laws of the jungle. ‘There is not,’ he emphasised at this critical moment in his career, ‘and should not be, any safety net for the rich.’

Amid the excitement, on 14 July 1978 Conrad Black married Shirley Walters. Considering his aspirations, Black did not arrange the society wedding some had expected. His old friends understood the socially insecure groom’s desire to be certain of a loyal, unstrident wife who would provide him with a domestic refuge. After the small ceremony, witnessed by a handful of friends, twenty people gathered at Black’s house for dinner. At 10 p.m., exhausted by the takeover battle, he left his guests and bride and went to bed. On the wedding certificate he listed his profession as ‘historian’. That was a critical claim for what would follow.50

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