Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman stands under London's cloudy skies in 2005 to promote a new autobiography.Randy Quan/The Globe and Mail
In September, 1940, on the night before he and his parents landed at Halifax’s Pier 21, the 11-year-old Czech war refugee Peta Neumann stayed up late to gaze out at the Atlantic and imagine the land where they were about to make their new home. It had been a harrowing months-long run from the Nazis, he later wrote: The family had secured visas mere days before they would have been deported from Venice to certain death in Czechoslovakia; lain helpless on the beach at Biarritz, France, as a Luftwaffe gunner rained death from above; and survived the U-boat torpedoing of their convoy to Canada. Ahead of them now, young Peta envisioned more adventure in the mysterious “land of eternal snow” he had seen in newsreels.
Alas, he awoke in the morning to a bland vision of scrub brown and pallid green: an evident portent of his new, albeit safe, life.
But Peta – who soon became known as Peter Newman – spotted opportunity in the blank canvas, and he spent the ensuing decades peopling the landscape of his new country with colourful characters engaged in epic tales of triumph and failure.
In two hefty bestsellers, Mr. Newman identified and chronicled The Canadian Establishment, a “tight-fisted cadre of elitists who controlled Canadian business,” as he described the class in a 2013 Maclean’s article, an “informal junta of several thousand circumspect pragmatists, linked more closely to one another than to their country.” He penned delicious, definitive tomes on the Bronfman family, broadcaster Izzy Asper, and newspaper mogul Conrad Black, as well as a three-volume history of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
An indefatigable editor-in-chief who briefly oversaw the Toronto Star and remade Maclean’s for the modern era, he also, over the course of more than two dozen books, pioneered a new genre of narrative business reportage for Canadian readers; made the dull business of politics thrilling; and brought an outsider’s eye and myth-making enthusiasm to the task of chronicling the country’s history. In 1990, he was named a companion of the Order of Canada.
Still, with his own checkered personal life and bent for self-mythology, it hardly seems a coincidence that Mr. Newman, who died early Thursday at age 94 of complications of Parkinson’s disease, devoted much of his life to gimlet-eyed explorations of swashbucklers who ruthlessly overcame titanic obstacles in their professional lives but often stumbled over hubris or the perplexing business of being human.
Mr. Newman, then 82, is shown in 2011 on his comfortably apportioned yacht Grace Note, where he did much of his writing. A naval reservist since 1947, he was a longtime sailor usually seen sporting a Greek fisherman’s cap.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Peter Charles Newman was born Peta Karel Neumann on May 10, 1929, in Vienna, about an hour’s drive from his hometown of Breclav, Czechoslovakia: His mother, Wanda Maria, had already lost a daughter shortly after childbirth, and didn’t want to take a chance on a Czech hospital. His father, Oscar Karel Neumann, was a self-made industrialist with interests in sugar (refineries, beet farms and candy factories), breweries and liquor distillers. Young Peter did not want materially, but his emotional life was stunted by undemonstrative parents, the household staff of seven his only friends.
Jewish in name and lineage if not practice, the Neumanns converted to Catholicism before fleeing Europe amid the war, and eventually settled on a farm outside the village of Freeman, Ont., about an hour southwest of Toronto. (All four of Peter’s grandparents underestimated the imminent danger, and later died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.)
At 14, Peter was sent away to Upper Canada College, where he received a swift education in casual brutality at the hands of both his teachers and his “WASP piranha pool” classmates: members of the ruling class who would soon become his primary subject.
That brutality was a spur to self-improvement: Seeking to avoid humiliation, Newman quickly mastered written English. Still, he admitted in his 2004 doorstop of a memoir, the 733-page Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power, that he never became comfortable speaking his adopted language. “Especially when I read from my works,” he wrote,” I often sound as though I am reciting the operating instructions from some complicated Japanese electronic toy manual.”
Just as well, then, that the works spoke for themselves. The first, Flame of Power, written in Newman’s spare time while serving as assistant editor of Maclean’s, comprised 11 profiles of Canadian business leaders that a Globe and Mail reviewer in 1959 pronounced “lively, amusing, instructive and important … so packed with quotable matter that passages yelling for quotation would cover several pages of this newspaper.” The book’s commercial and critical success spawned what Mr. Newman later called an addiction to fame, as he likened the experience to “a drug, terminally unsettling to mental balance, a price I would willingly pay for the rest of my life. … I would sacrifice almost anything and anyone to the unquenchable fires raging inside me.”
That addiction took its toll. By the time of the book’s publication, Mr. Newman had already ended his first marriage, a cordial if loveless seven-year coupling that had deteriorated into an acrimonious one before spiraling into open scandal when he abandoned his wife, the former Patricia McKee, upon the birth of their daughter, Laureen, and took up with Christina McCall, a Maclean’s colleague six years his junior. In his memoir, Mr. Newman said that missing Laureen’s childhood “became a lifetime’s gnawing, painful regret.” (He enjoyed a better relationship with his and Ms. McCall’s daughter, Jennifer Ashley, though he remained an intermittently attentive father.)
Christina McCall was Mr. Newman's second wife, when they formed a power couple of Canadian journalism.
Mr. Newman talks with Arthur Langley, president of the Empire Club, in 1963.Harry McLorinan / The Globe and Mail
His marriage to Ms. McCall – the second of an eventual four conjugal pairings – was more compatible. The two, who were married 1959 to 1976, formed a journalistic power couple in the nation’s capital, though Mr. Newman, a proud outsider, resisted the cozy embrace of the Parliament Hill press corps. By day, he turned out trenchant columns as Maclean’s Ottawa editor and by night he churned out Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (1963), a real-time account of Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker’s fall that was published only seven months after the Tories lost power to Lester B. Pearson.
The book was a revelation for the nation. As Robert Fulford later noted, Mr. Newman’s “account of Diefenbaker’s uncontrollable paranoia, particularly during the last year of the government, was the best Ottawa gossip Canadians had ever been allowed to read: Unlike every other political journalist of the day, Newman wrote in public the way everyone in Ottawa talked in private.” He added: “His frankness changed Canadian journalism, and helped change the way Canadians saw their government.”
Dief, however, took it badly, cursing Mr. Newman as “the literary scavenger of the trash baskets on Parliament Hill,” who took his orders from the “Liberal hierarchy,”… “an innately evil person who seems intent on tearing other people to pieces.” Mr. Newman insisted he was politically neutral. “I attack everybody,” he said, explaining that patriotism was his real motivation. “I make harsh judgments about our leaders because I feel so strongly about preserving Canada.”
He also judged some of his bosses harshly, including Beland Honderich, the longtime publisher of the Toronto Star. Appointed editor-in-chief in 1969, Mr. Newman wrote in his memoir that Mr. Honderich requested he pen a positive editorial about the mayor of Vaughan, in order to ease the paper’s purchase of land for its printing plant. Mr. Newman refused on principle, and resigned in January, 1971, rather than continue to participate in what he called “Mr. Honderich’s despotic empire.” At least, that’s how he framed the move in Here Be Dragons. It may have been mere coincidence that he went directly to the top job at Maclean’s, telling The Globe at the time that he departed the Star “in complete and amicable agreement with the publisher.”
The cover of Maclean's from May 26, 1980, one of the many issues published during Mr. Newman's decade-long tenure as editor of the magazine.
The magazine was in turmoil when Mr. Newman was made its fifth editor in 19 months, but he calmed the waters and oversaw its transition from a monthly – with a confounding 13-week lead-time for written copy – into a vibrant, vital newsweekly that boasted some of the country’s finest writers.
As a manager, he was unapologetically cavalier. “I wanted rebels with a cause, hang-gliders from the 1960s whose hearts belonged to Woodstock and who barely tolerated me,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was fond of individual writers and editors, but making the boys and girls feel warm and fuzzy was not my priority. I wanted to be their coach, not their father. I was always being attacked for being too dictatorial or too lax, sometimes both on the same day.” That laissez-faire approach may have been as much physical necessity as managerial strategy: He maintained a punishing freelance life, writing six more books during his 11 years in the editor’s chair, which he left in 1982.
Douglas Gibson, the McClelland & Stewart publisher of Here Be Dragons and select other Newman books, suggested the author was forever marked by the childhood experience of escaping war and finding shelter in Canada. In Stories About Storytelling, his memoir of working with some of the country’s most accomplished authors, Mr. Gibson wrote that Mr. Newman “remained [a refugee], living by his wits, making alliances for the moment, then moving on as a new source of power emerged. ‘Peter doesn’t have friends,’ so the joke goes, ‘he has sources.’ But he has the fixed, aware intelligence of the watchful outsider, the perennial refugee, and we are all better for it.”
One of those betrayed friends-turned-sources was Brian Mulroney, who had been an attendant at Mr. Newman’s 1979 marriage to his third wife, Camilla Turner. (That pairing lasted until 1990.) In 2005, Mr. Mulroney sued for “breach of confidence” after the surprise publication of Mr. Newman’s The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, which was based on hours of taped interviews that were supposed to have been used for a joint project by the two men. (The book became a bestseller, the suit settled out of court.)
Mr. Newman interviews Brian Mulroney in 1984. A tape recorder sits on the side table between them.
A practitioner of the New Journalism, which applied to reportage the narrative techniques more commonly associated with fiction, Mr. Newman captured his subjects in strikingly visual – albeit frequently purple – prose. During court proceedings in 2004 that led to Mr. Black’s trial and eventual imprisonment in the U.S., Mr. Newman observed the press baron “seemed to have no eyes at all, just a clenched slit near the top of his face, as though he were squinting through the gun turret of a tank.” Of the mining magnate Stephen Roman, he wrote: “You can almost visualize him as a rich peasant in one of Tolstoy’s later novels, with dimpled stocky body, chubby capable hands and a glittery, glittery eye, in a country tavern in the evening of a market day, drinking beer and wiping chicken grease off his chin.” Charles Bronfman’s “sweet-brown eyes reflect that quality of living at a distance from the centre of things sometimes possessed by blind folk singers, gaitered Anglican bishops and pet reindeer.”
Many of his subjects took exception to his descriptions; some took legal recourse. The publisher of his 1995 bestseller, The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance, was forced to take out newspaper ads apologizing to a number of individuals for errors of fact, and to pay an undisclosed sum to former prime minister Joe Clark and his wife, Maureen McTeer, while acknowledging the book had “wrongly and unfairly portrayed their contribution to public life, their individual characters and their marriage.” Mr. Newman shrugged it off, telling The Globe: “I write to the edge.” He added: “I’m not a popular historian, I’m a polemicist, and yes, a myth-seeker.”
Conrad Black in 2004, a year before he would sue Mr. Newman for libel.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
In November, 2005, Mr. Black hit Mr. Newman with a $2.1-million libel suit related to his reporting on the mogul’s legal tangles with Hollinger International. Befitting both men’s theatrical nature, the statement of claim was served at a gala dinner in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Maclean’s, where the two antagonists were in attendance.
The suit was dismissed after Mr. Newman issued a “statement of regret,” but Mr. Black continued to bear a grudge and, in November, 2007, he took to the op-ed page of his newspaper, the National Post (where Mr. Newman had been a columnist in the paper’s first four years) to attack him as a worn-out “peddler of gossip” and add to the troubling questions about the accuracy of Mr. Newman’s reporting that dogged him throughout his career. Mr. Black wrote that he had commissioned research by a Biarritz newspaper which found “no record of the German air force being active” over the city in 1940 – when that Nazi gunner had supposedly targeted the innocents on the beach, including the Newman family, according to Mr. Newman’s autobiography.
Nevertheless, Mr. Newman seemed likely to overcome any such challenges to his reputation. (Besides, he noted in his memoir, “I don’t believe that truth is the sum of all the ascertainable facts. … I wanted to make the facts dance.”) By then he was spending most of his days on the West Coast, away from the power centres of Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal, where, a longtime sailor who sported a Greek fisherman’s cap – he was a Royal Canadian reservist since 1947 – he kept a homey yacht with his fourth wife, Alvy Bjorklund, whom he married in 1996. (Mr. Newman adopted her daughters from a previous marriage, Dana Doll and Brandi Esler.) He continued to write books, among them When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada (2011) which prematurely predicted the end of the Liberal Party. Later, the couple moved to Belleville, Ont., where he wrote about the United Empire Loyalists, many of whom had settled in the surrounding area, including nearby Prince Edward County.
Mr. Newman withdrew from public life in his final years, but his observations about his adopted country remained embedded in its bones.
In a 1991 article, the Globe arts writer Val Ross recalled that she and former colleagues who had worked for Mr. Newman while he was Maclean’s editor had feared him, but they’d recently gotten together and found themselves reminiscing about his time as their boss. “‘He had a vision of the country,’ they said. ‘He had an ear, he had an eye.’”
Mr. Newman and his wife, Alvy, in 2009.Charla Jones/The Globe and Mail