Historian Allan Levine, left, with author Peter Newman as he signs a book.Courtesy of The Asper Foundation/Allan Levine
Allan Levine is a historian and the author of 16 books including his most recent, Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Cafe Society Murder.
It was hot and humid, a typical day in Toronto in late June, 1983. I was foolishly wearing a sports jacket, long-sleeve shirt and tie, and sitting on a couch in a fancy renovated house on Admiral Road in trendy Yorkville – curiously, the air-conditioning unit was not on – waiting for the arrival of Peter C. Newman, arguably Canada’s most famous journalist at the time. He was, as Robert Fulford, then the editor of Saturday Night magazine, later put it, “by a wide margin, the most gossiped-about journalist in the country.”
That truism was predicated on his no-nonsense style and demanding, even authoritarian leadership, which many journalists who worked under him while he was editor of Maclean’s did not appreciate. By 1983, he had also been married three times – there would be one more, his fourth wife, Alvy (Bjorklund) Newman – which added to the sniping and whispers about him among Canada’s allegedly beleaguered scribes, who lived in fear of Peter’s red pencil markings on their copy.
As beads of sweat dripped down my face and back, the front door opened and in walked Peter. I had never met him before that moment. He looked as he did in the news and magazine photographs I had seen, only slightly more intimidating. He barely acknowledged my presence and immediately headed up the stairs where the kitchen and bedrooms were located.
At 54, he was still in his prime, a vibrant and prolific author churning out one bestseller after another – a rarity in Canada, then and now. He had been doing this since 1963 with the publication of his second book, Renegade in Power, about the rise and fall of prime minister John Diefenbaker, a book that made him an author celebrity and drove Mr. Diefenbaker up the wall.
In 1983, Peter had recently given up his editor-in-chief position at Maclean’s – the magazine he had re-invented over 11 years from an unpopular monthly to a best-selling weekly – and become a columnist and, more or less, a full-time author. He was able to do this primarily because his agent, the well-connected lawyer Michael Levine (no relation), had negotiated an astounding $500,000 advance with Peter Mayer, then chairman and chief executive of the Penguin Group, for a three-volume popular history of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Mr. Mayer’s bet paid off: Peter earned back the advance in sales. Few, if any, writers in Canada – and certainly none who write Canadian history, popular or academic – could have achieved that impressive feat.
His contemporary rival Pierre Berton had had success chronicling the Canadian Pacific Railway; Peter was going to do the same for the HBC, one of the great trading companies in the world, which controlled the North American fur trade and ventured into department stores and other commercial interests. Its various interactions with Indigenous peoples, however, were long a contentious subject.
For Peter, however, the HBC was at its core an adventure story of explorers, traders and wealthy aristocrats. It was a natural subject for him to pursue after his two sensational-selling volumes of his Canadian Establishment series (plus his 1982 biography of Conrad Black, and Titans, the third Canadian Establishment volume, published in 1998). As he had done with political writing with Renegade in Power, he also did for business writing with his Establishment books.
From my home in Winnipeg, I had read in Maclean’s about Peter’s plan to tackle the HBC story. It intrigued me. At the time, I was completing my PhD in Canadian history at the University of Toronto. The HBC archives were in Winnipeg, where they had been transferred by the company from London in the early 1970s. I assumed Peter was going to need a researcher; I could not imagine him relocating from Toronto to Winnipeg for any length of time and undertaking this time-consuming work on his own.
So I wrote him a letter introducing myself. About a week later, I received a telephone call from Shirlee Anne Smith, the keeper of the HBC archives, who was keen to assist Peter with his project. Despite academic sniping about him – and there was plenty of that – Mrs. Smith, as I always called her, was astute enough to grasp that a multivolume popular history of the company by Peter would attract a lot of media attention and a large audience.
In due course, I met Mrs. Smith in her office – she was a lovely woman, smart and sincere – and we chatted about becoming Peter’s researcher. She told me that while Peter was interested in hiring me, she also warned me that pleasing him would be challenging. I somewhat understood her reservations. Yet the idea of working closely with someone of Peter’s stature and high profile as a writer admittedly appealed to me greatly.
As fate would have it, I had to be in Toronto for other work in June, and that’s how I found myself on Peter’s couch in sweltering heat. He finally descended from the second floor and we spoke briefly about what researching the HBC archives for him would entail. He was friendly, yet all business. We agreed that I would prepare some research on a few topics for him and then we would see what would be.
Back in Winnipeg, I spent a few weeks going through files on the HBC’s Canadian Advisory Committee, established by the company in 1912. It was a small group comprised of Winnipeg business leaders who advised the HBC on its Canadian operations. I amassed what I thought was a decent 50 pages of work, adding in direct quotations where they seemed appropriate. I mailed the pages to Peter – there was no e-mail in those days – and waited.
About 10 days later, I found a letter from him in my mailbox. I then learned why so many journalists who had worked for him came to fear him. His typed letter was blunt and to the point: I had blown it. Years later, I tried to find that letter but it had unfortunately got tossed, though I do recall that according to Peter, I had missed including the colourful anecdotes that made the facts in his articles and books “dance,” as he put it. Devastated, I phoned him and he kindly agreed to give me another chance to prove myself worthy. I returned to the archives more determined, and compiled a 75-to-90-page research memo. I included every personal comment and fact I could find.
Some weeks later, Peter was in Winnipeg. We agreed to meet. I brought the memo with me. His hotel room had a living room and a bedroom. He took the research memo and retired to the bedroom to examine it. I waited nervously for him to pronounce the verdict. Fifteen or 20 long minutes later, he emerged with a hint of a smile. “Excellent,” he said. To paraphrase John Lennon after the Beatles’ famous rooftop performance, I had passed the audition.
Thereafter, Peter and I became good friends, and remained so for four decades. I completed more than 12 months of work for him researching the HBC archives. During that period, my wife Angie and I spent an enjoyable evening out with him and his then-wife, Camilla (Turner), formerly the managing editor of Flare magazine; it was interesting to observe the buzz Peter’s celebrity generated in the restaurant.
That was “Peter C. Newman,” the author and journalist. Mere mortal “Peter Newman,” however, was witty and funny and, as he publicly admitted, thin-skinned when it came to critics of his writing. The late Michael Bliss, a professor of history at the University of Toronto (whom I came to know as a graduate student), especially loathed Peter’s writing, as he himself noted in his memoirs, published in 2011. Dr. Bliss did not respect Peter as a popular historian, though he had a much higher opinion of Pierre Berton, with whom he had consulted on several of his Canadian history books. Peter rightly regarded Dr. Bliss as his “chief tormentor” who “has been consistent in abhorring everything I publish.” Peter believed – and not without reason – that Dr. Bliss would have only been “content if I stop working.” A master of puns, Peter liked to say (often) that “ignorance is Bliss.”
Peter did generate a lot of hostility among academic historians, and never more so than after the 1985 publication of the first volume of the HBC trilogy, Company of Adventurers. In a harsh assessment in the Canadian Historical Review (CHR) that was typical, W.J. Eccles, a curmudgeon who taught at the University of Toronto and was an expert on French Canada, deemed the book “thoroughly bad” – a judgment held then and later by many, though not all, Canadian specialists. Reviews written by American and British historians and journalists were more favourable.
From my perspective as a 27-year-old PhD student, it seemed to me that some academic historians in Canada resented Peter for obtaining a huge advance for the HBC trilogy; for the royal treatment he received at the archives; and for the attention he garnered in the media and his impressive sales. By May, 1986, Company of Adventurers had sold 135,000 copies, and kept on selling. Like Dr. Eccles, they condemned his popular approach and believed that Peter, an outsider, had committed a sin against history – their history.
I witnessed this animosity firsthand. A cadre of historians and others – including an Indigenous women’s group – denounced Company of Adventurers and, in particular, Peter’s depictions of the relationship between white fur traders and Indigenous women. Then and now, it is a topic rife with controversy. Peter had written that the traders described the women as “bits of brown,” a phrase he insisted he (or the other researcher he hired) had found in the primary sources. (At the same time, Peter was invited to be a special professor at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College – now the First Nations University of Canada – in Regina.) Jennifer Brown, a historian who taught at the University of Winnipeg, disputed Peter’s use of sources. In a lengthy review essay that was published in the CHR’s December, 1986, issue, she catalogued the many problems with Peter’s interpretation and, more generally, his skill – or, rather, lack thereof – as a historian. She insisted that the problem was not academic versus popular history, but “that of accomplishing compelling, accurate representations of the past versus issuing shallow and faulty misrepresentations that sell through name recognition, promotion, and naively enthusiastic journalistic reviews.” The CHR permitted Peter to respond to Dr. Brown and so he did with a few well-placed barbs. He defended his approach and popular history, ending with this classic Newman line, if there ever was one: “Perhaps the moral of this exchange is that Canadian history should be made up of bits of Newman as well as bits of Brown.”
Six months before Peter and Jennifer Brown’s contentious exchange in the CHR, on June 7, 1986, the Rupert’s Land Research Centre at the University of Winnipeg (now the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies) held a colloquium at the university. The key event was a panel discussion on Company of Adventurers and Peter as a historian. About 100 people were in attendance – including me. I listened as one speaker after the other castigated Peter and the book. Peter had been invited to attend, but wisely refused. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, I could not stand it any more and rose from my seat in the large theatre to offer a comment. I suggested that whatever Peter’s transgressions, the work of few people in the room could withstand being put under a microscope like this. Peter later heard what I’d done; he was grateful, and never forgot it.
Some years later, the Asper family recruited Peter to write the story of how Izzy Asper’s dream project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, eventually came to be opened in Winnipeg in 2014. Peter agreed to do the book, yet he procrastinated. I first contributed research – owing to Peter’s recommendation, I had written two anniversary books for Mr. Asper about his media company Canwest Global, and also assisted Peter with his 2008 biography, Izzy – and then wrote half of the book. Entitled Miracle at the Forks, it was published in the fall of 2014. In only 31 years, I had transitioned from Peter’s researcher to his co-author!
Like Izzy Asper, both “Peter C. Newman” and “Peter Newman” were complex characters. Peter later conceded that his “overly ambitious workaholic” behaviour was partly to blame for the breakdown of his marriage to his second wife, journalist and writer Christina McCall. He could be moody and demanding, yet was also a lot of fun. While working on the Asper biography, one of the Canwest people I interviewed had told me a great behind-the-scenes story about some questionable and juicy actions. When I related the tale to Peter, his ears perked up. “Let’s put that in,” he told me. I suggested I should check it out further since we would be impugning someone’s reputation. “Don’t ask too many questions,” he said with a glint in his eye. I laughed. Though he never met an anecdote he didn’t like, I convinced him that we should not use it. And we never did.