Pulling no punches

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/11/2020 (2001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Award-winning writer and journalist Barbara Amiel’s powerful new tell-all memoir, like her first 80 years so far, is a brilliant tour de force.

In Friends and Enemies, the always-controversial Amiel demonstrates the colourful writing and analytical skills that led to her becoming the first female editor in the history of the Toronto Sun and the first female editor in the history of major Canadian daily newspapers. An award-winning author, she was also a columnist for Maclean’s magazine, for British newspapers and was vice-president, editorial for Hollinger Newspapers.

A riveting read, the British-born, Canadian-raised Amiel’s life story overflows with explosive anecdotes and often-outrageous opinions.

Amiel’s social circle has been peppered with luminaries ranging from Diana, Princess of Wales, to Margaret Thatcher and Elton John. At the end of her memoir is an intriguing list of “Friends and Enemies” from Canada, Britain and the United States.

Amiel turns 80 on Dec. 4. She and her fourth husband, 76-year-old former media magnate Conrad Black, married in 1992. They were at the top of North American and British society until Black was convicted of corporate crimes in the United States in 2007. Last year, Black received a full pardon; Amiel stood by him through it all.

For Black, writes his fiercely loyal spouse, “the best revenge really was to enjoy life. For me, the only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined.”

She self-deprecatingly writes that her coat of arms would say “all happiness is short-lived.” She and her husband do have the British peerage titles of Lord and Lady Black of Crossharbour.

In the 1980s, Amiel was “flying as a journalist,” she writes. “I was asked to take positions on all predictable topics because Canadian television couldn’t find another female journalist with long hair and a bust to talk in favour of G-d and against affirmative action… In Britain I would have been a dime a dozen.”

Her parents divorced when she was a young child, and her beloved father took his own life when Amiel was just 15. Her mother tried to take her own life numerous times when Amiel was growing up. Amiel is a remarkably resilient survivor.

Initially terrified of marriage, Amiel embarked on her first of four in 1964 — it lasted seven months. Amiel’s turns of phrase are entertaining and unique, as when she admits that “as wedding plans proceeded, I stewed in a toxic horror.”

Ten years later, she married husband No. 2, the award-winning Hungarian-born Canadian radio producer, writer and author, George Jonas. Amiel divorced him, but the two remained very close; Jonas was ill with Parkinson’s for years, and Amiel legally assisted him with his death in 2016.

Of Jonas, Amiel writes movingly that he had “a sardonic intellect that could splinter the atom.”

Amiel writes candidly about her prolonged clinical depression suffered while her third marriage, to late TV magnate David Graham, was ending.

Amiel and Black’s lives came crashing down in 2003, when Black resigned as chief executive of Hollinger Inc. as fraud investigations into his business dealings intensified. Ponders Amiel, “What if I had known that my husband’s name would become a synonym for greed and failure, a cautionary tale for little children and that at 63 years of age, after a lifetime of work and apparent success, I would lose every job I held, be accused of taking money for work not done and be ridiculed in the public eye as a contemporary Marie Antoinette? What then? I would never have foreseen the psychological consequences a total demolition of our reputations would bring.”

In 2007, Black was sentenced to 78 months in U.S. federal prison.

Her description of Black’s incarceration is, like the rest of the book, brutally honest and frequently moving.

“He was a celebrity when he went in and inmates respected him for fighting the system and not making a plea bargain. Conrad cheerfully cleaned out the lavatory stalls and told the guards brought to view the millionaire on his knees scrubbing them that he found the work morally uplifting.”

He was simultaneously writing three weekly columns and a book.

Amiel described life for Black and herself post-prison as “A tapestry of small defeats adding up to despair.” She still sees herself as an outsider.

Amiel says her marriage to Black was the one right choice she made. “Without Conrad, by now I would long ago have bumped myself off or seen my happiness sucked down into the bog of self-indulgent hysteria. I have loved and lived very nicely, thank you, but I’m tired.”

Amiel observes of Black: “Go ahead, sneer, but I know what punishment he has absorbed and how painful getting up has been. But he always got up.”

Amiel ends her story with tongue-in-cheek defiance. “I’m going to try to enjoy the time left to me. And bugger off to the whole damn lot of you. We’re still here. You lost.”

Friends and Enemies is as courageous and unforgettable as its erudite and extraordinary author.

Then-18-year-old Brenlee Carrington interviewed Barbara Amiel in Winnipeg 40 years ago for her daily radio talk show when Amiel was on a media tour for her award-winning first memoir, Confessions.