Joan Straus in the office of Agent General of Ontario House, in New York, in 1990.Jane Hoffer
It took chutzpah for Joan Sutton to start publishing an annual list of the city’s 10 sexiest men in the Sun, an upstart tabloid, in staid 1970s Toronto. It endeared her to many readers but not everyone was pleased. Some thought the list was undignified, while others were angered because they were excluded.
A more conventional editor of a lifestyle section geared to female readers might have stuck to publishing pot-roast recipes, but that was too limiting for an ambitious talent like Ms. Sutton.
While she also covered fashion and beauty trends of the day, a serendipitous conversation at a Sun event inspired her to write a column that was personal, universal and attention-grabbing. During the event she had overheard a man ask a secretary to have dinner with him. When the young woman refused on the grounds he was married he told her she had to learn to live in the moment. Ms. Sutton pondered, in print, what might have happened if the woman had agreed to the invitation. Responses poured in from both sexes.
Her popular column went on to explore loneliness, the fickleness and dangers of fleeting affairs of the heart as well as the heart’s ultimate prize, enduring love. She wrote about what she knew, and she wrote well.
Ms. Sutton, who went by Ms. Sutton Straus later in life, died of cancer on Oct. 6, aged 89.
In a tribute to the Sun’s 50-year anniversary, writer Christina Blizzard called her colleague’s column “Bold and sexy. It got the city buzzing.”
Ad revenue for the paper soared. Ms. Sutton’s assignments led her to talk John Diefenbaker and other prime ministers and their wives, crash a Variety Village stag party, have tea with sculptor Henry Moore at his country estate, hold the hand of an Arab patient at an Israeli hole-in-the-wall hospital, applaud the return of Canadian hostages held at Entebbe airport, fly on Air Force One, sit on a porch with the mother of U.S. president Jimmy Carter and share a stage with retiring sports legend Howard Cosell, who made her promise she wouldn’t cry. She told him she wouldn’t if he didn’t.
Later likening her early years at the Sun to being on a reality TV show, she wrote, “Every day was an experience.”
One particular experience during the Sun years changed her life forever. Through connections, Ms. Sutton finagled a reluctant interview with the female head of a bank. Despite the woman’s initial reticence, she liked Ms. Sutton enough to ask her to be her “plus one” when Oscar Straus, a wealthy New Yorker connected to the Guggenheim family, came to Toronto without his wife. Ms. Sutton wrote: “And therein lies another tale.”
The Sutton/Straus marriage, announced in the New York Times, took place in March, 1982, after Ms. Sutton converted to Judaism. She then took her place in the heady world of Manhattan society where she entertained a Who’s Who of guests with elegance and panache. Through her husband’s connections she added illustrious names to the people she interviewed, including Nancy Reagan, with whom she talked three times.
While she was still writing for the Sun, her column was syndicated in the Houston Post, the Boston Herald and the L.A. Times. In 1990, then Ontario premier David Peterson named her as Agent General for Ontario to the United States, a position created to promote and facilitate business in the province. In 2019 Ms. Sutton Straus was named to the Order of Ontario.
After an event-filled life divided between Toronto and New York, during which she raised money for various organizations, authored five books and sat on a variety of non-profit boards, Ms. Sutton Straus’s later years were spent supporting her husband through illness.
Her fifth book, titled The Alzheimer’s Diary: One Woman’s Experience from Caregiver to Widow, chronicled Mr. Straus’s painful decline. She wrote, “Alzheimer’s may be a disease of the brain but it is paid for in the currency of the heart.”
One-hundred per cent of Ms. Sutton Straus’s royalties from the book benefit the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, Canada. Mr. Straus was 98 when he died at their weekend home in Bellport, N.Y., on Jan. 11, 2013. Two years later Ms. Sutton Straus moved back to her home in Toronto.
During a time when women were largely subjugated in the workplace, Ms. Sutton was a trailblazer. George Anthony, Ms. Sutton’s equally popular counterpart in the entertainment section of the Sun, and a close friend said, “She was a man’s woman but she was also a woman’s woman. She was a great champion of women and a great mentor to young women. Joan’s life was rich in texture; well lived and fully lived.”
She was born Joan Marie Treble in Mimico, Ont., on Nov. 30, 1932, the first child of Frederick and Anna Treble, a factory worker and his wife. Joan and her younger brother grew up in Port Credit, near Toronto. Her favourite comic-strip role model was Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter.
At age 17, she had a column in a small local paper while completing high school. Modelling work helped pay for English courses at the University of Toronto but she didn’t graduate.
At the age of 20, the dark-haired beauty was a runner-up in the Miss Canada contest. She married her high-school sweetheart in 1955 and moved to Ann Arbour where her husband, W.J. (Pete) Sutton, an Olympic runner had a track and field scholarship at the University of Michigan. Ms. Sutton carried on modelling at events like the Detroit Auto Show and began doing fashion commentary for a department store.
Upon returning to Toronto in the late 1950s, she continued to co-ordinate fashion shows, becoming one of the earliest shopping-centre fashion consultants in North America. She established Joan Sutton and Associates in the garment area of Toronto on Spadina Avenue and became a regular guest on CBC television discussing fashion.
She worked with the Ontario government to develop the Ontario Fashion Council, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, various other fashion-related organizations as well as individual designers. A busy schedule limited the time she could spend with her family, which by then included two children. The marriage ended.
“My mother exposed us to interesting ideas and people. She knew what she wanted and was willing to do whatever it took to get there,” her daughter, Deborah, said. “She was complicated, driven and enjoyed the limelight. The rest of us not necessarily so.”
While still working at her office on Spadina, Ms. Sutton received a phone call from the fashion editor at the Toronto Telegram. The editor was leaving her job and asked if Ms. Sutton was interested in writing about fashion. Ms. Sutton was keen but first she had to prove herself to assistant managing editor John Dowling. He sat her down at a desk and asked her to write an article about issues surrounding the supposed standard sizing of women’s clothes. Ms. Sutton completed the task without hesitation and was hired on the spot. She wrote: “My life had come full circle. I was, at last Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter.”
In October, 1971, the Telegram produced its final edition. A month later, Ms. Sutton had a new job. She wrote, “By some miracle, I was asked to join the adventurers who were launching the Sun.” She gladly became what she called a “day oner,” someone who was there from the very beginning. “It was ‘the best’ is what all the ‘day oners’ say about those days: Being in on the start of something; the freedom to risk and try innovative things knowing management had your back; the camaraderie, the joy.”
She quit the Sun in a fury one day after a drunken sports reporter manhandled her during an event and refused to apologize. She worked briefly for the Toronto Star but returned to the Sun at the coaxing of her friend and editor Doug Creighton. Her final resignation was tendered in 1992, 21 years after she started there, a gesture of solidarity after Mr. Creighton was inexplicably fired as CEO.
Ms. Sutton Straus then moved on to caring for her husband.
At her eulogy, Mr. Anthony told a story about meeting her for a lunch in which they discussed her team of caregivers. She had just been told that her daily schedule was covered but if she wanted someone to spend the night with her she would have to pay them. “Well,” she quipped, “that’ll be a first.”
She leaves her son, Walter J. Sutton; daughter Deborah Anne Sutton; brother, Bruce Treble; grandson, Leon Robie; nephews, nieces and many Straus step-grandchildren, and step-great-grandchildren.