or had failed to fund the necessary investment in new plants and buildings. Included in his wish-list for purchase were Toronto’s Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Journal, and the Montreal Star. Repeatedly, the vendors rejected his offers and preferred to deal with Roy Thomson.16 Frustrated and needing money, Black lurched in the opposite direction and agreed to sell Sterling Newspapers for $14 million. But after scrutinising the figures, the prospective purchaser withdrew, pronouncing his dissatisfaction with the accounts.17 Black’s consolation was a conference organised by the Economist Intelligence Unit in Toronto. ‘Massey-Ferguson’s former chairman has agreed to sponsor the conference,’ Andrew Knight, the Economist’s editor, told Peter Jay, the recently-retired British ambassador to Washington. ‘Can you arrange for Henry Kissinger to make a keynote speech?’ Jay succeeded, and was talking to Kissinger in the conference hall’s ante-room before his appearance. Black seized his chance. As Jay began to escort Kissinger onto the platform, he was powerfully pushed from behind. Reeling to the side, he noticed Conrad Black striding up to Kissinger. ‘This way,’ smiled Black, engineering his introduction to a relationship which would bless his career. Before he returned to Washington, Kissinger had been seduced by Black’s profound knowledge and charm. Making use of this new relationship depended upon Black increasing his wealth.
With the option of buying more newspapers closed to him, Black identified mining as a certain profit-maker, and resolved to expand Argus’s investments in that field. Argus owned Labrador, an iron-ore extractor. For tax reasons, Labrador could benefit by involvement in oil exploration. After careful research, Black targeted Norcen Energy Resources, an undervalued oil and gas explorer. In December 1979 he had bought 10 per cent of the company’s shares from an investment group. The following day he telephoned Ed Bovey, the company’s chairman, to discuss his investment. Black would insist that, with Bovey’s agreement, he raised his stake to 40 per cent by February 1980.18 The investment was financed by bank loans, but essentially, in a complicated, tax-efficient procedure, Black used Norcen’s own money to finance his purchase. Next, using Norcen as his vehicle, he searched for another mining company in the United States. His motives were partly financial, but they were also social. Ever since he had visited London in 1953 and Palm Beach in the 1960s, and had left Montreal in disgust with Quebec’s separatist politics, Black had been dissatisfied with Canada. The country, in his opinion, was a narrow-minded backwater, and its politics were boring. America, by contrast, was exciting. For a social adventurer, Palm Beach was a natural stage on which to launch his presence in America.
In 1980 Conrad Black took his first step towards joining America’s rich set. He bought an unimposing colonial house at 150 Canterbury Lane, on the north end of Palm Beach island. The comfortable 8,700-square-foot house did not enjoy a sea view, but it was located near the resort’s nobility. Shirley Black employed an interior designer to decorate the house in Colefax & Fowler style, and although there were grumbles among local tradesmen about Black’s ‘ungentlemanly’ quibbles over their bills – like any shrewd businessman, he carefully examined the accounts – the social rewards were gratifying. Assiduously, Black cultivated Jayne Wrightsman, a former manicurist who had married an oil billionaire. After her husband’s death Wrightsman had used her inheritance to become Palm Beach’s patrician hostess. Invited for cocktails and dinner parties, Black worked hard to establish himself as a guest guaranteed to amuse others by reciting from his encyclopaedic memory of history and politics. ‘Come for dinner in Palm Beach,’ Wrightsman said to the London merchant banker Rupert Hambro. ‘I’ve met this hugely intelligent man who is so wonderful. He’s called Conrad Black.’ Hambro knew Black from summer weekends staying at the businessman Bob Dale-Harris’s farm north-east of Toronto. Meeting him again in Florida, he noticed how Black had changed. Touched by the glamour of big money, Black was flattered that Wrightsman, a kind, generous person, was attracted to him, and that by turn he had become a subject of conversation.
The proof of Black’s social acceptance was his proposal for membership of the Everglades Club, the meeting place of Palm Beach’s elite. The obstacles were Maude McDougald and Doris Phillips, the two Argus widows. Both still resented their humiliation, and campaigned to blackball their tormentor. Their tactics were in vain. Imperceptibly, Black organised his nomination and election without any formal notification. ‘Clubs are not democratic,’ the widows were told.
Shirley Black was uninterested in the Everglades Club and her husband’s social ambitions. Politics and business provoked indifference in the modest woman who appeared to some in Palm Beach as shy and ‘childlike’, relying on her husband to book babysitters and make other domestic arrangements. While he excelled at the formal dinners, lecturing on the refinements of French furniture or the career of an obscure general, she sat awkwardly, unappreciative even of his sense of humour, which occasionally, with the help of a few glasses of wine, reduced him to tears while he hilariously mimicked characters and accents. Regardless of Shirley’s disenchantment, with Wrightsman’s patronage Black was introduced into the society he yearned to emulate.
Cultivating the right image, Black knew, was essential to acceptance. Walking into a room, he took care that his large, physical presence captured the space around himself. Gracious but also aloof, his self-assured manner left onlookers in no doubt of his attitude: ‘I’m Conrad Black, take it or leave it.’ His quiet voice and gentle movements suggested that he was neither bombastic nor nasty. With studied stateliness suggesting coiled energy, he intimidated some, but never succumbed to an intemperate outburst. Speaking quietly, his big, intelligent, slightly oriental grey eyes fixed in an immobile face, he aroused curiosity whether his fluent, verbose language was expressing anger or pleasure, never using a short word if a longer one was appropriate. His new friends were impressed by his seamless prose and his prodigious memory.
Black’s next step was to accumulate the level of wealth so abundantly evident on the island. During his first holiday in Palm Beach he attended a rousing election speech by the Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, whom he supported against President Jimmy Carter, a politician he loathed. Black’s enduring memory, besides Reagan’s appearance, was of the limousines parked outside the Breakers Hotel. As far as the eye could see were the biggest Mercedes and the most expensive Rolls-Royces, some lengthened, Black noted, ‘in proof of their owners’ ingenuity at devising methods of spending an additional $100,000 on a $200,000 automobile’.19 He himself had begun indulging his appetite to join the high-spending class. As well as his small yacht he had already accumulated several cars, including a Cadillac, a Mercedes and McDougald’s Rolls-Royce in London. On some of the bonnets he mounted a gold-plated eagle killing a snake. The symbol matched his goal.
Houses reflect their owners’ characters, and Black’s plans for the demolition and reconstruction of his parents’ home in Toronto confirmed his taste for grandeur. The Bridle Path had become the city’s ‘Millionaires’ Row’. Black’s architect produced plans to match his client’s aspirations. The mansion’s new entrance hall would be two storeys high, and a distinctive, high-domed rotunda modelled on the roof of St Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican was to be erected over a library that would house at least 20,000 books. The story was spread that Black intended to repose on an eighteenth-century cardinal’s chair while reading about Napoleon in the midst of a palace that could host Toronto’s biggest parties. Others suggested that the chair was the one Napoleon sat on when signing treaties. Black’s illustriousness was confirmed when he persuaded Archbishop Carter of Toronto and Bishop Aloysius Ambrozic, both future cardinals, to formally bless the new library. Black was not a Catholic, and since he was not noticeably religious, outsiders believed that the prelates were invited as props in his developing plan to present himself as a serious player. Those cynics did not appreciate his dependence on conversations with God to justify the realisation of his entitlement. The priests’ presence validated his relationship with his Creator.
Black’s growing self-confidence of his ranking among the elect was enhanced in
