Working the Dead Beat (23 page)

By then Franca had moved to Ottawa with her third husband, James Morton, a clarinettist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and announced plans to write her memoirs. She returned to the
NBC
to dance Lady Capulet in
Romeo and Juliet
with Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn, a gala performance of John Cranko's version set to music by Sergei Prokofiev. In 1978 the People's Republic of China invited her to teach and give lectures in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, in a tour so successful she was asked back again two years later. Although she continued to live in Ottawa, where she was in demand as a coach and teacher and as co–artistic director of the School of Dance, she returned to the National Ballet to produce a thirty-fifth anniversary gala performance at Toronto's O'Keefe Centre in 1986, and to stage
Judgment of Paris
in 2002.

The “Haber business,” as Franca called it, and public bickering over dancer Kimberley Glasco's forced retirement during James Kudelka's era as artistic director caused a major rift between the two prima donnas of Canadian ballet. Oliphant and Franca ceased speaking and publicly traded insults until Franca was able to enjoy the ultimate revenge: outliving Oliphant, who died in July 2004. “Betty became jealous of my position,” she said in a 2006 documentary. “She wanted to be the big queen bee and I had made her as big a queen bee as I possibly could. I made her director of the National Ballet School and that was as much as I was prepared to do for Betty.”

Her many honours included the Molson Prize and being made a Companion of the Order of Canada. The National Arts Centre organized a gala performance for her eightieth birthday in Ottawa in 2001. The National Ballet School named part of its new facility the Celia Franca Ballet Centre in 2004. Karen Kain, who had succeeded Kudelka as artistic director of the
NBC
, dedicated the 2005–06 season — the company's first as a principal tenant of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts — to her mentor.

In August 2006 Franca made an elegant final appearance in Toronto for a screening of
Celia Franca: Tour de Force
, a documentary made by her former dancer Veronica Tennant. Already bedridden after a series of falls and in chronic pain, she arrived — elegant as ever, sitting in a wheelchair as though it were merely a stage prop — at the Carlu, the contemporary update of the Eaton Auditorium, where she had staged the National Ballet's first performance half a century earlier. That was the swan song of the woman who had trained and exhorted generations of young dancers and created an internationally renowned ballet company out of hope, tenacity, and ambition. Back home in Ottawa, her dancer's body was painfully wearing out. Finally she was admitted to hospital, where, after visits with some of her favourite dancers, she quietly died on February 19, 2007. She was eighty-five.

 

Ken Thomson

Business Magnate and Art Collector

September 1, 1923 – June 12, 2006

A
MAN OF
small economies and grand generosities, media magnate and art collector Kenneth Thomson was Canada's richest man and ninth-wealthiest in the world. When he inherited the Thomson media empire in 1976, many thought that he was merely a pallid version of his father, Roy Thomson, first Lord Thomson of Fleet. In fact, the two men were very different, a fact that the senior Thomson acknowledged to colleagues when he said about his son, “He is so full of goodness he will be successful” in managing the company and looking after the family.

Roy Thomson was a gambler and an opportunist who loved making deals, an extrovert with an ego to match. A barber's son, he started out poor and was in his forties before he achieved financial success. He was almost eighty when he joined the North Sea oil and gas consortium that made him fabulously wealthy in the 1970s.

By contrast, his son was shy, private, extremely modest, and much more focused. Although he was keenly interested in business, Ken Thomson's job, as he saw it, was to serve as steward of the empire on behalf of his family and the shareholders of the Thomson Corporation. “Roy was more the entrepreneur, the tycoon, the guy who saw opportunities and propelled the business beyond anything else. Ken truly was a builder,” according to Geoff Beattie, deputy chairman of Thomson and president of the Woodbridge Company Ltd., the Thomson family's private holding company. “In business, people are either traders or builders. Traders are looking for things and trying to move from opportunity to opportunity, whereas Ken was someone who saw opportunities, but more in the context of wanting to stay the course. He was not an impatient guy, because he had tremendous confidence that if you keep doing good things, more good things will happen.”

What father and son shared, according to the late John Tory, the lawyer who worked for them both for half a century, was shrewdness and an ability to distinguish between owning a company and running one. Neither Thomson was a micro-manager; both encouraged consensus and risk-taking and were loyal and committed to the professional managers in their employ. “They both realized that you couldn't do everything yourself, so you had to have good people and to provide them with really strong support and to trust them.”

After his father's death from a stroke in London in August 1976, Thomson inherited vast holdings and a hereditary title — Baron Thomson of Fleet, of Northbridge in the City of Edinburgh — for which his father had happily renounced his Canadian citizenship a dozen years earlier. Typically, the younger Thomson found a way to remain himself and to accede to his father's wishes. “In London, I'm Lord Thomson. In Toronto, I'm Ken,” he told writer David Macfarlane in a profile in
Saturday Night
magazine in 1980. Although Thomson never sat in the House of Lords, he did allow to having two sets of Christmas cards and two sets of stationery, one for each country. Bizarrely, considering Thomson's significance in Canadian life, he was never inducted into the Order of Canada or the Business Hall of Fame.

Thomson moved the crux of the family's operations back across the Atlantic to North America and transformed the corporation from a print-based media conglomerate to a Web-based provider of information and services. In the process, he increased the company's value exponentially, from about US$500 million in 1976 to roughly $29 billion by 2006, with a personal fortune of about $20 billion.

During his tenure, Thomson sold off most of the company's newspaper holdings, including the
Times
and the
Sunday Times
, prestigious but tempestuous and money-losing British newspapers, and acquired FP Publications, which included the
Globe and Mail
, a local flagship with a national reach that had always eluded his father. Thomson's ownership of the
Globe
was diluted in a corporate merger in 2001 with
CTV
and Bell and their subsidiaries and partners. That changed nine years later, when the Thomson family bought back a majority interest in the
Globe and Mail
in September 2010. Observers could sense the friendly if ghostly presence of Ken Thomson on the day of the announcement as Thomson's widow, Marilyn, his son David, the current chair of the global company, and his closest colleagues, Beattie and Tory, trooped into a crowded meeting room at the newspaper. “It was a dream,” David Thomson said later about the repurchase of the media company that had been intrinsic to three generations of his family.

Thomson the Collector

STORIES OF THOMSON'S
frugality abound, from watching the parking meter run out before feeding it more coins to sorting through the bargain bins for socks and pushing a cart up and down the aisles checking the cost of produce in his local grocery store. Although he seemed unwilling to spend money on himself — his suits were serviceable rather than elegant — he was willing to dig deep to indulge his passion for Canadian and European art.

In the same way that he refined his family's business holdings, he pruned and buffed his collection of paintings by Cornelius Krieghoff, the Group of Seven, and David Milne, among other landscape artists, and his assemblage of European ceramics, ivory miniatures, and other artifacts. In building this art collection he created his personal legacy. “I like business,” he once said, “but I feel the same way about art that my father felt about business.”

What propelled Thomson as a collector was a visceral reaction to something that pleased him aesthetically. He set about learning more about the artists he admired, studying their techniques and acquiring paintings that complemented each other. Collecting for him was more than a hobby; it was a process of discovery and self-education that he loved to share with friends such as John Band.

“I wish I knew the first time I shook his hand,” Thomson said in an interview after Band's death in 2005. “I think it was in the mid-fifties and it must have been about art.” For half a century the two men discussed upcoming auction sales, although their friendship meant they never bid against each other. “He was always around the corner from my house and up here,” Thomson said, tapping his forehead with his finger. “I never got along with anybody better.”

These were also the years when Thomson made his first forays into collecting by scouring shops in Chinatown for carvings and curios. He moved on to genre paintings, buying his first Krieghoff in 1950, only realizing several years and many acquisitions later that he had developed a passion for the artist. Whenever Band was “adamant” about a picture, such as
Steamship Quebec
, painted by Cornelius Krieghoff in 1853, “I jolly well bought it. There wasn't going to be any doubt about that,” Thomson admitted. In 1966, the same year his father bought the
Times
, he “made a decision to go strongly for Krieghoffs. I changed from a casual acquirer to an aggressive collector.”

But it was not until he met Hermann Baer, an antique dealer in London, that Thomson became a serious as well as a passionate collector. A seventeenth-­century ivory and ebony crucifix in the window of Baer's store drew him inside one day in 1959. “He showed me some things, beautiful things,” Thomson told the
Globe
in 2003, “but he told me I was not yet ready for them. He was showing them, he said, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.”

Baer helped Thomson refine his tastes, encouraging him to move boldly in pursuit of ivory and boxwood carvings, Baroque goblets, enamels, miniature portraits, and mementos mori. When Baer died in 1977, Thomson made some of his most significant acquisitions from the dealer's estate. Two of the objects Thomson cradled in his hands back in 1959 — a boxwood Madonna and Child and a carved ivory depiction of Saint George slaying the dragon, are now in the Thomson collection. So is the ivory and ebony crucifix that Baer wanted the Ashmolean to have.

In 2005 Thomson gave his friend Band a small J. E. H. MacDonald painting of his family's island in Georgian Bay as a ninetieth-birthday gift. Knowing the value of the painting, Band refused to accept it, although he delighted in pointing out familiar landmarks. Finally he agreed to “borrow” the painting after attaching a note to the back saying it belonged to Thomson. When Band died shortly afterwards, the painting went back to Thomson, now layered with “priceless” sentimental value. Thomson hung it in his office and arranged for it to become part of his planned gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Others have given away a greater percentage of their fortunes, but the size of Thomson's personal gift to the art gallery — more than three thousand works of art, valued in 2012 at approximately US$500 million, plus C$100 million in cash — is without precedent in Canadian history. He died two years before the acclaimed addition designed by Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry opened in 2008. The loss of such a dedicated and involved partner was devastating to
AGO
director Matthew Teitelbaum, who missed Thomson's “incredible focus” and the “sparkle” of his conversation as the project progressed to completion. Once he had made the commitment to share his treasures, Thomson changed his approach to collecting, according to Teitelbaum. “I don't want to acquire things that I just happen to like. I am going to acquire things that make the collection better,” he remembered Thomson saying.

As in business, when Thomson increased expenditures to enhance well-developed initiatives, he bumped up his donations to the
AGO
. In 2002 he bought Peter Paul Rubens's
Massacre of the Innocents
at a Sotheby's auction in London for close to C$120 million. “I call it an electrifying painting,” he told the
Globe
at the time about the work. “How do you paint a painting like that — with such a gruesome subject — without it being totally off-putting? Its horror is obscured by its aesthetics. I find that extraordinary.” Today the painting is prominently displayed in the
AGO
, attracting visitors to the gallery and giving ordinary people, who could never afford a Rubens, an insight into the painting, the artist, and the collector.

Early Days

KENNETH ROY THOMSON
was born on Isabella Street in Toronto on September 1, 1923, the only son and youngest of Roy and Edna (née Irvine) Thomson's three children. He was descended from Archibald Thomson, a master carpenter, and David Thomson, a mason, two of three Scottish-born brothers who came with their families from Niagara to York, as Toronto was then called, in 1797. David Thomson built Upper Canada's first parliament buildings on Front Street, as well as the stone powder magazine at Fort York — probably his only surviving building.

For a man who ended up fabulously wealthy, Thomson's childhood was far from luxurious. His father was an itinerant salesman who struggled to make enough money to pay the rent and feed his family of five. The Thomsons moved to Ottawa in 1925 and to North Bay three years later, always in search of more lucrative employment.

When young Ken started school in North Bay, his father was away for days at a time, travelling by train to Cobalt, New Liskeard, Timmins, Cochrane, Sudbury, and Sault Ste. Marie to sell radios, auto parts, washing machines, and refrigerators. “He was always busy with various projects, travelling the North, selling, arranging things. He would often come home late at night,” Thomson told
Saturday Night
. “My mother would try to keep his dinner warm. We all knew he was a big worker, but it was difficult sometimes.”

But life wasn't all loneliness and watching his father read the newspaper (“every inch of it”). He was, and remained, very close to his two older sisters. When he talked about his childhood in an interview with the
Globe
in 2003, he described a life of riding bicycles, exploring the woods, and fishing for pickerel in the summers and skating on the frozen lake in winter. He credited those halcyon memories for his later fascination with Cornelius Krieghoff and the Group of Seven.

It was his mother who kindled his appreciation for music and painting. “Art almost bemused my father,” he said. “With music, the most serious thing he liked were Strauss waltzes. He liked people like Irving Berlin. But even then, if you were driving in the car, he was always fishing for news on the dial, even though it was the same news on every station. You could say he was obsessed with it.”

Selling radio parts was tough in an area where reception was so dismal that listening was a frustration rather than a pleasure. Undaunted, Roy Thomson paid one dollar for a broadcasting licence, bought a fifty-watt transmitter on three months' credit, and started
CFCH
, his first radio station, in North Bay in 1931. “I was eight years old and radios were still exciting things,” his son recalled. “All I really knew was that something big was going on in town and that Dad was at the middle of it all.” Soon his father had bought radio station
CKGB
in Timmins and followed up that purchase by moving into print, acquiring the Timmins
Daily Press
in 1934, in the depths of the Depression.

The family moved back to Toronto in 1937, when Ken was fourteen. By then he was aware that his father was “really rolling.” He went to Upper Canada College, the elite private school, as a day boy. An average student and definitely not a jock, he was not part of the in-crowd. “I didn't give it much of a chance,” he said later. “I was a little bit different from the other guys.” When he was sixteen, he worked as a disc jockey at
CFCH
for a summer.

He graduated from
UCC
in 1942 and registered that fall at the University of Toronto, but dropped out in December to join the
RCAF
. He was nineteen when he was shipped overseas. After working as an instrument mechanic he was posted to London, where he rewrote news articles for an Air Force magazine called
Wings Abroad
.