and mocking the placid English-speaking community as ‘gin-swilling grumblers of no consequence’,27 he resolved, after eight years in Montreal, to return to Toronto. The notoriety he had gained after his expulsion from three schools had, he assumed, been forgotten. He arrived in the English-speaking city in July 1974 as a comparative stranger.
Conrad Black’s homecoming was opportune. Argus’s finances were deteriorating, and relations among the company’s ageing directors had become fraught. Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor, while still enriching themselves at Argus’s expense, had become bitter rivals. Much to McDougald’s dissatisfaction, Taylor had been encouraging Paul Desmarais, the controller of the multi-billion-dollar Power Corporation, to make a bid for Argus. Desmarais’s failure, and the antics of Bay Street’s cowboys, were a foretaste of the turmoil once Argus’s old directors began to die. In anticipation of that future battle, Black resumed his relations with old friends including Fred Eaton of the department-store chain dynasty which he identified as ‘Canada’s ultimate establishment family’.28 Their affection was mutual. ‘Jesus Christ,’ gushed Eaton, ‘Conrad’s got a spectacular mind working there.’ Invited to roast-beef lunches with Eaton were Galen Weston, Hal Jackman, and George Black’s old friend Douglas Bassett. Black spoke lengthily over wine and whisky about history and politics, and explained how he intended to extend his influence in politics by purchasing newspapers considered too small by Roy Thomson, the country’s dominant publisher and owner of The Times and Sunday Times in London. Systematically, Black and Radler telephoned owners with offers which, over the next three years, harvested twenty titles, including such local papers as the Alaska Highway News and the Daily News of Prince Rupert, all financed by loans secured against the Sherbrooke Record. Proudly, Black would assert that besides his original $500 investment, all his expansion consolidated in Sterling Newspapers, a new company, was financed by loans and profits. The Sherbrooke Record would be sold in 1977 for C$865,000, forty-eight times its purchase price eight years earlier, which did not account for $1 million profit used to buy other newspapers. During those years, the partners rarely met. ‘I know exactly what he’s going to do without going near what he’s doing,’ said Radler about Black. Their shared ambition for money – and Black’s for fame – cemented their relationship.
Black was seeking the celebrity of an influential politician. Exaggerating the importance of his twenty tiny newspapers, and concealing his dependence upon his inheritance, Black’s cultivated manner – relaxed, self-indulgent and opinionated – suggested a man of influence and independent wealth. His articulate advocacy of raw capitalism in an increasingly socialistic society attracted television producers eager to stage debates. Frequently he appeared on TV to support Claude Wagner, a politician renowned for accepting bribes and acknowledged by Black as suffering from petulance, superficiality and indecisiveness. The eccentricity of his opinions, and the charade of his eminence, obscured Black’s insecurity. In 1977, to satisfy his need for companionship, he asked Shirley Walters, a secretary in his office, to marry him.
The daughter of an accountant, Walters possessed an incomplete education, little ambition and no interest in politics or history. A decent, solid woman, following the breakdown of her marriage she was vulnerable to her employer, who had limited sexual experience. Although Black would claim to have been the surprised target of predatory women when he was young, eyewitnesses suggest few carefree relationships before he met Walters.29 His proposal of marriage was hastened by the discovery of Walters’s pregnancy. There was, however, a complication: Walters’s divorce could not be completed before the child’s birth. Black was fearful of the criticism of Toronto’s social leaders, especially Bud McDougald, if the existence of his illegitimate child was discovered.30 After he had overcome Walters’s prevarication, they resolved to keep the pregnancy a secret and to withhold Black’s name from the birth certificate.
Jonathan Black’s birth in November 1977 was followed by the news on 15 March 1978 of Bud McDougald’s death in Florida. The chatter around Bay Street was deafening. Few of those gazing at McDougald’s face in his open coffin were filled with sadness. Only McDougald’s widow wept; others were preoccupied by the succession. Skilfully, Conrad Black moved closer to the grieving woman, reminding her of his affection for her husband, whom he later described as ‘a very elegant kind of con man’, a judgement possibly of admiration rather than condemnation.31 McDougald, championed as Canada’s supreme business leader, epitomised so many of Black’s ambitions. ‘Bud was very skilful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn’t within anyone’s grasp,’ Black noted.
For more than twenty-five years, George Black’s son had been nurtured for the moment of vengeance. ‘I appear,’ Conrad Black said in self-congratulation, ‘to have been the only person who took note of the fact that Mr McDougald had died on the Ides of March. He always had a Caesarean bearing, and his succession was not much better organised.’32 The lesson of his father’s dismissal was to foresee deception and to marshal sufficient force to out-manoeuvre any rivals.
The empire’s immediate fate was to be decided at Argus’s first board meeting after McDougald’s death. As usual, Conrad Black arrived late, and was surprised to find that the three elderly directors had taken advantage of his unpunctuality, voting to deny the Black brothers executive directorships. ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ Black was told. Youth would need to wait its turn. ‘It was an utterly disgraceful performance,’ Black publicly proclaimed. Yet quietly he welcomed the rebuff.33 By demonstrating his true status, the other directors had compelled him to focus on the only worthwhile outcome – seizing the whole empire for himself; and, he puffed, they underestimated his abilities.
Argus, although valued at C$4 billion, was financially troubled. The controlling stakes in the various companies had produced good dividends for the shareholders, but bad management had wrecked the businesses. Dominion Stores Ltd was an old-fashioned chain of supermarkets; Hollinger Mines was managed by a lazy director who undertook no activities other than collecting $40 million a year in dividends from iron-ore mining; while Massey-Ferguson, with 45,000 employees, would lose C$257 million in 1978.34 Argus’s directors were certainly incapable of reviving the group. Black’s quandary was how to organise the old guard’s removal.
The ownership of Ravelston and Argus was diffuse. To obtain a majority vote depended upon a matrix of complicated relationships and trusts. In that quagmire there were potential allies, enemies and neutrals. To win control, Black would require dexterity and genius, seducing some and flattening others. Events, Black reminisced, needed to be treated ‘with a certain rhythm, maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’.35 Since his relations with most of the directors were bad, there was nothing to lose from a gamble.
From his study of history, Black had learned how simple gestures could lead to critical alliances, especially a show of concern for the beleaguered. In preparation for the struggle Black had targeted Dixon Chant, a chartered accountant employed by the late Eric Phillips, one of the key shareholders. Chant had suffered a heart attack, and Black visited him in hospital. Sympathising with the distressed came naturally to the unhurried, verbose aspirant. Chant would prove to be Black’s critical ally as the dust dispersed after McDougald’s funeral.
Black’s objective was two widows – Maude ‘Jim’ McDougald and her sister Doris, the widow of Eric Phillips. Together with the Blacks’, their shareholdings in Ravelston would amount to a controlling interest in Argus. Living together in Palm Beach, neither woman was blessed with intelligence or an understanding of business. McDougald, believing
