Distilled: A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy

Dedication

To my grandchildren—I love you all so very much.

Epigraph

In the days of my youth, Father William replied

I remember that youth would fly fast

So I thought of the future

Whatever I did

So I never might rue o’er the past

—SAM BRONFMAN’S VARIATION ON ROBERT SOUTHEY’S

THE OLD MAN’S COMFORTS AND HOW HE GAINED THEM

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note from Charles Bronfman

Preface

1   Basket Case Kid

2   Overwhelming Family

3   Young Man in Business

4   Bringing Major League Baseball to Canada

5   DuPont: Selling the Insurance Policy

6   Selling Seagram: Losing the Farm

7   Philanthropy: Finding My Métier

8   Heritage Minutes: I Didn’t Know That!

9   Israel: Hope Over Upset

10 The Magic of Birthright Israel

11 Family: Love, Loss, Regret, and Pride

12 Reflections of a Contented Man

Acknowledgements

A Note on Sources

Bibliography

Appendix

Index

Photo Section

About the Authors

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Note from Charles Bronfman

I’m now eighty-five. Thankfully, I’m fit—both mentally and physically. My life, like most people’s, has been a mixed bag—substantial achievements, serious disappointments; great loves, poor ones; various careers, some exciting, others mundane; critical illnesses, wonderful health. I wrote this memoir not to enhance my ego, but to indicate to others the possibilities that we all have, whether entrepreneur, inheritor, or whatever. It was time to reflect on all these and the other conditions and influences that have shaped, and will continue to shape, my life.

I’ve met and come to know many, many people. Most were bright; very few were wise. And wisdom, it seems to me, need not be reserved for those in their later years. However, it does take years to be honed. As George Bernard Shaw was wont to say, Youth is wasted on the young. He also said, A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

Despite being born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth, I have not suffered that hell on earth. I have endured the horrid pain of suddenly, with no warning at all, losing a beloved wife, Andy, with whom I had spent twenty-five years. And the loss of Seagram was a huge blow for what it meant to my family and me, even more emotionally than financially.

Today, though, I’m one of the happiest of people. As you read this memoir, I hope you have discovered that I was often anything but. Yet I am now married to a wonderful woman. My children, as well as my stepchildren, have brought me great naches, and my grandchildren give me tremendous joy.

People probably know me best for what I call entrepreneurial philanthropy. Certainly that has been the incredibly rewarding hallmark of my long career. These accomplishments, though, were based on business principles I learned from my father and my colleagues, both at Seagram and our family businesses—CEMP, and later Claridge. I really believe that, both for my loved ones and me, the best is yet to come.

Preface

Over the years, I hadn’t had much luck getting an interview with one of the Bronfmans. I recall a request I once made to speak with Charles, son of Mr. Sam, only to receive a tart letter from a lawyer saying no.

By virtue of their enormous wealth, the Bronfman family were equivalent to Canadian royalty—and later international royalty—because of what they controlled in the corporate sphere, their philanthropic heft, and their influence in certain circles, particularly in the Jewish community in Canada and globally. Sam Bronfman, who died in 1971, had turned Seagram into a global powerhouse and set the stage for a dynasty. This was the company that stocked the world’s bars with Crown Royal, Chivas Regal, V.O., and many other well-known names like Martell cognac and Captain Morgan rum. Liquor sold, and sold well. The company gushed cash. Mr. Sam’s sons, Edgar and Charles, took the family-controlled firm a step further, into the realm of chemicals and plastics, when Seagram became the largest shareholder of DuPont, one of the best-known companies worldwide. The Bronfmans were billionaires many times over and, in certain respects, on a pedestal because of their wealth.

My luck changed in the fall of 2012. One of my colleagues at Business News Network knew Charles Bronfman from a past interaction and convinced him to come on my program for an interview. The agreement was that the subject matter would be his philanthropy because he was joining the Giving Pledge, started by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett—agreeing to leave more than half of his wealth to charity. I was pleased to hear we would have such a marquee guest. However, I was uncomfortable with only discussing philanthropy. For sure, Charles was, by any measure, a huge donor to many causes. But there was an elephant in the room. We had not heard other aspects of the Bronfman story—in particular, firsthand insights into the demise of Seagram after Charles’s nephew Edgar Jr. pivoted the company toward entertainment and media, finally selling Seagram to France’s Vivendi during the height of the 2000 technology boom for a huge stake in the French firm. Vivendi quickly withered, taking a chunk of the Bronfman fortune down with it. It was a shattering loss for the family—a humiliation and an embarrassment. To my knowledge, in all our years at the network, we had not had one of the key Bronfmans on the air to discuss what happened. The story had virtually gone away.

I thought it over. Most certainly we would honour our agreement to talk about philanthropy, but I felt that if we were sensitive and fair, we could reserve a segment to devote to other matters. On the appointed day, I went to the greenroom to meet Charles and we seemed to hit it off instantly. There was chemistry, as he would say. The section of the interview on philanthropy went well, so as we entered the final block of the show, I shifted to another topic, the separatist government in Quebec. That was my bridge to turn the interview away from philanthropy. Then I made the big turn. I told Charles we only had a few minutes left—a signal that he would not have to endure me for long—and with the greatest respect, I wondered all these years later what he thought about what happened to Seagram. The floodgates opened. He said he thought the same now as he did back then—it was a terrible tragedy and the family lost its identity. Did he speak with his nephew much? I asked.

Not much, came the raw answer.

When I asked how it would have made his father feel, he began to tear up. He explained that to go against the sale of Seagram would have resulted in a family war. This was Charles Bronfman, finally speaking out. It was riveting.

After the interview aired, we corresponded warmly via email a few times, and the following year he came back, accompanied by his wife, Rita, for another interview. He told me that publicly expressing how he felt during our first interview had made him feel better. When Paul Desmarais Sr. died some time later, we called Charles again and he did a live phone tribute from New York. He was obviously greatly saddened by the death of his friend, a former Seagram director and another corporate titan in Quebec, whom he had visited just days before he passed away. By then, I felt that Charles Bronfman and I had developed a relationship of sorts. He felt comfortable speaking to me.

On Friday, July 29, 2014, I received a brief note from Anthony Wilson-Smith, the president of Historica, the organization that promotes the teaching of Canadian history and now produces Canada’s Heritage Minutes, one of Charles’s many philanthropic endeavours. Tony knew I was no longer at BNN and wanted my phone number because an eminent Canadian wanted to call me. Later that afternoon, my cellphone rang.

Hi, Howard. This is Charles Bronfman, he said. Do you want to write my biography?

I was slightly thrown by this out-of-the-blue offer but managed to say I was flattered. I suggested we meet face to face to chat further, so I arranged to fly to Montreal the following Monday to meet him for lunch.

My spouse, Lynne, drove me to the airport. As I got out of the car, she advised me to get my shoes shined. I took her advice and got them spiffed up when I arrived at the Montreal airport, where I also picked up a Tide stick to wipe a stain off the lapel of my suit. I was arriving early, so Charles’s assistant Angela Forster arranged an impromptu tour of the art collection at the sumptuous offices of Claridge, his family’s private investment company. Everything surrounding Charles is elegant, so having freshly buffed shoes was a good call.

At noon, I met with him and after a minute or two of small talk we got down to what he wanted to discuss. He felt people didn’t understand him, telling me that as a child, he was a basket case, the youngest of four siblings with an overbearing brother and a domineering father. He said he wanted the manuscript published, not just written for his family. When I asked what the boundaries would be, he said there weren’t any.

We soon walked up Peel Street to Ferreira for lunch. As we were guided to our table, we found ourselves walking toward former prime minister Brian Mulroney and L. Ian MacDonald, who were at the next table. Mulroney and Charles greeted each other like old friends, kibitzing about a glittering wedding they’d attended over the weekend, joking about how much it might have cost.

Charles ordered fish and I ordered chicken. When his meal was placed in front of him, it was a whole fish and he expertly lopped off the head and tail for the waiter to take away. As we tucked into our food, he talked about how, growing up, he never really noticed that he was unbelievably rich. If he went to the home of a friend, it didn’t matter to him if the house was small. We also talked about anti-Semitism. He said he didn’t experience it very much growing up in Quebec but did when he attended private school in Ontario. At one point, he asked me how much I’d charge to write the book. I laughed and said I knew he’d ask but that I wasn’t sure of the answer, adding that I hoped he didn’t think I was being coy.

If I thought you were being coy, you wouldn’t be here.

I went back to Toronto and thought about it. I knew by now that he’d tried to write his memoirs before, and for various reasons it hadn’t worked out. The next time we spoke was on the phone and I said that while I knew he wanted it to be a good book, I needed it to be a good book, not just a vanity publication by someone who could afford such a thing. He said he understood, adding that he knew he wasn’t perfect and had plenty of warts, like everyone else. I felt as though we now had an unwritten agreement between us. Our discussions proceeded over the next few weeks and I made another trip to Montreal on September 5, when we spent another six hours alone, talking about various chapters in his life. I could feel a book coming on. Then I was back in Montreal again on September 18 for another afternoon of conversation. It was no holds barred. He seemed willing to talk about anything—almost anything. One instance where he put a harness on me occurred when I asked about girlfriends when he was a young man.

We’re not going there, he said softly. Then he chuckled and told me to mind your own effing business. I laughed and said we weren’t finished the project yet, at which point he laughed harder. Another time he tried to put a leash on me was during a lunch in one of the world’s most elegant restaurants, the Grill Room of the Four Seasons on Park Avenue in New York City, a quasi-club for the rich and famous since its opening in the late 1950s. Until it closed in the summer of 2016, it was, of course, in the Seagram Building, an icon of modernist architecture. I asked Angela, who had joined us for lunch, if we could get a copy of the menu.

What do you want that for? Charles asked, mildly irritated.

Colour, I answered.

Let me tell you something, he said. Edgar, with his family, bought the restaurant without even asking me if I wanted to participate. Clearly hurt, he recounted how he’d phoned his brother and asked why he hadn’t been told about the purchase before the deal was closed.

We forgot, was the answer.

Well, Charles said, that kind of sums up our relationship, doesn’t it? So we’re not taking any effing menus.

Fine, I said, but I got the story, didn’t I?

He let out a very big laugh. Sometimes things come spilling out without a question being asked. The mere mention of a menu was a trigger.

A memoir has to give a sense, a feeling about someone’s life. It’s more than just a chronology. It’s the sum telling of various stories, episodes, and phases that paint a life portrait. When we began this project, Charles was eighty-three years old, meaning he’d already experienced more than thirty thousand days of living. To extract the essential elements of that experience is a bit like building and residing in a house during the good times as well as when storms hit and dramas unfold within its walls.

The bricks to build this book came from Charles through extensive and intense interviews and conversations, the more than two hundred and fifty hours we spent together collaborating on how to tell his story. The result is his voice, from his heart. Our time together does not include close to one hundred hours spent with other people—in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Palm Beach, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem—to help fill in the blanks and recall details and stories that are impossible for one person to remember.

Most of the thousands of interviews I have done in my career have been timed to the second, conducted under bright lights, and viewed by people anonymous to me. These were very different. By way of example, one night in November 2014, after a delicious meal at an Italian restaurant in Palm Beach, Florida, we went back to Charles’s beautiful home and sat in his spacious study. Generally, we did our talking for the project in the mornings and afternoons. But I was leaving early the next day and suggested it might be good to do another hour of work after dinner. The lights were low and there was no one else in the house. He started talking about his first wife, Barbara, his children, and then the love he lost—his second wife, Andy, who’d died after being hit by a car. It was quiet and I barely had to ask any questions; he just talked. Sometimes the essence of interviewing is not saying anything, but just being a receptor. When he was done, my eyes were moist—not because of a big, dramatic revelation or a great clip that we so frequently sought in television, but from the unadorned telling of loves lost, quietly related in the silence of a large, darkened home. Throughout this process, Charles opened himself up as few in my experience have done, and not all of it has been pleasant for him. He has led a remarkable life—filled with uncertainty, triumphs, and failures—and he has chosen to share it.

I’ve been lucky to have a lot of wonderful jobs and assignments during my career. My luck continued when Charles called me. It has been a privilege to work with him. Over the course of working with Charles, I think we have become friends (I hope he feels the same way) and I get what others say about him. The former president and prime minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, told me that Charles led by trust, not by authority. Aliza Olmert, the wife of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, said of Charles, He knew how to be a partner. He gave with what we call warm hands, with a deep understanding of the issues. His son Stephen told me he learned from his father that it’s better to have people work with you than for you. In fact, Charles will tell you that his successes have always been the result of partnerships. Charles Bronfman has a lot of friends in this world. This book explains why.

—Howard Green, March 2016

1

Basket Case Kid

I was the fourth of four, with all that goes with that. Each of us, the children of Sam and Saidye Bronfman, were two years apart in age. Minda was born in 1925, Phyllis in 1927, Edgar in 1929, and me in 1931. My parents wanted me to be born on June 20, the same day Edgar was born and the same day as their wedding anniversary. Phyllis says they went for a ride on a bumpy road to try to induce my arrival, but I was stubborn and didn’t make an appearance until a week later. She chuckles that I was kind of a squabby, long kid . . . like a chicken. Whether it was the poultry look or not, I was most certainly the overprotected youngest of the family, something of a toy for the others. Phyllis says I was an adorable little kid with blond hair, and cross-eyed, which meant I wore glasses with one lens frosted.

A skinny lad with big, protruding ears, I had several major illnesses, contracting double pneumonia at five, pneumonia again at nine, and streptococcus while in early adolescence. There were no antibacterial sulfa drugs when I got double pneumonia, and no penicillin when I subsequently got pneumonia. Both illnesses were very serious and potentially life-threatening. Phyllis remembers our parents calling the situation a crisis. In the second instance, she says that Mother and Dad took the rare step in those days of flying back from wherever they were to be with me and that it was very quiet on the floor of the house where I was. When I got streptococcus, it was most certainly a threat to human life. I remember my mother crying as she stood in front of the window of my hospital room. A sick puppy, I found it too hard to open my eyes and I was too tired to close them. I was then one of the first civilians in the country to receive penicillin, via a huge needle jabbed in my skinny butt every three hours. Since then, the only time I’ve been in hospital has been as a visitor.

The world I was born into was the world of the Great Depression, but given who my father was, that would mean little to me. We were an extremely wealthy family thanks to our father, one of the leading industrialists of the era through Seagram, the spirits business he built and ran, the home of globally known brands such as Crown Royal and Chivas Regal. By the time I was two years old in 1933, the company had forty per cent of the Canadian whisky market. In 1948, when I was seventeen, Fortune estimated Sam Bronfman’s wealth at $100 million, the equivalent of being a billionaire today. We lived in a world apart, described as Jewish royalty by historian Michael Marrus in his biography of my father.

Our home in Montreal at 15 Belvedere Road, known as Oaklands, still sits on a steep hill in upper Westmount, a district that I now jokingly refer to as "the shtetl. With a high stone wall protecting it from the street and nosy passersby, it boasted twenty rooms. My father bought it while my mother, who was then pregnant with Edgar, and my sisters were holidaying on the coast of Maine. Robert Findlay, the architect who designed Westmount City Hall, designed the house. My parents gutted it and redid the interior, adding a sunroom, a breakfast room, bathrooms, and dressing rooms. All the furniture was custom-made, with oak in the dining room and mahogany for the living room. My mother emphasized what she referred to at the time as Oriental furniture, such as a Chinese inlaid table large enough for bridge games. My father once told me it’s the most beautiful house in North America."

Dad? The most beautiful house in North America? I queried.

You heard me.

In addition to the main home, there was a multicar garage opposite the house. My brother and I were playing on the driveway when we heard that the Second World War had started. Our home was big, but it wasn’t the biggest in the neighbourhood.

The Timmins family—as in mining in Timmins, Ontario—had a huge mansion nearby to house nine children. My father’s siblings lived close to us—Uncle Allan and his family practically next door, Uncle Harry a couple of blocks away, as well as Uncle Abe and Aunt Laura. I sat in front of Uncle Harry’s house, dressed in short pants and a school blazer, to watch King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later known as the Queen Mum) drive by when they were on their cross-country tour of Canada in the spring of 1939. In those days, there wasn’t the same security as there is now to protect people like that. You could get close. By the way, that was the visit that inspired my father to dream up Crown Royal. He put five cases (sixty bottles) on the royal train in Quebec and another five cases on the train in Ontario. But he never drank Crown Royal. I asked him once why he only drank V.O.

V.O. is for drinking. Crown Royal is for selling, he said.

In my dad’s study, where he spent most of his time when he was home, he used to play solitaire at his desk. Mother played cards with her sister Freda in the sunroom. My son Stephen and daughter-in-law Claudine now own the property and have renovated it in a warm, yet stunning modern style. It is now heated geothermally and is LEED certified, an environmentally friendly home.

We also owned a second version of Belvedere about forty-five minutes outside of New York City, overlooking the Hudson River in a village called Tarrytown. My mother’s description paints it as paradise.

The estate was magnificent, twenty-two acres planted with superb trees and lovely gardens. There was a small lake on the property and a large, heated swimming pool made of Italian tile. The house was modelled on a Spanish villa, a charming place with twenty-five enormous rooms and fireplaces everywhere with mantels of marble or Dutch tile. The master bedroom was magnificent, its windows offering a sweeping view of the Hudson River. The place was beautifully furnished when we bought it. I didn’t have to touch the dining room or the library. In Ogilvy’s department store in Montreal an antique section had just opened, and I bought a lot of pieces there, mixing them with the furniture in the other rooms. I also bought some marvellous Chinese paintings in New York. The result was very pleasing. There was a two-storey recreation house by the pool, picturesque and rather romantic, and during the summer we spent most of our time there. On weekends, there was a lot of company. We lunched on the terrace, at umbrella-shaded tables. Often, my Sam sat out there and chatted with friends for hours. Another of his favourite places was the pool table in the games room. He still loved to play the game. The house was well set up for entertaining. There was an arcade in the dining room, and we often had cocktails and dinner outside on the lawn. The children and their friends were often around.

My mother had her view of Tarrytown, but our views certainly don’t synch. I look back on it as an enormous, nice jail because in order to visit anyone, you had to go by car. Prior to Tarrytown, though, when I was between the ages of ten and fourteen, we had a large stone country house north of Montreal that we rented from the Purvis family of Canadian Industries Ltd., more commonly known as C-I-L (the father, Arthur, had been killed in a plane crash during the Second World War). That home in Sainte-Marguerite was, according to Phyllis, the one place where we were a family, eating together, and when indoors spending time in the same huge room that had a cathedral ceiling and a great imported stone fireplace . . . I see in my mind’s eye Charles coming to Mother with a kitten upside down in his arms (asking), ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ Charles asked Mother what sodomy meant; and my sister sang a song about Minnie the Mermaid where among the corals she lost her morals and Charles asked what ‘morals’ meant.

Our car was a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur named Bordeau who wore the full regalia. At 15 Belvedere, we had a butler named Jensen who professionally played the part to the hilt. The girls had their nanny on their floor of the house, the second floor. Edgar and I had our nanny on the third floor of the house. Our bedrooms were next to each other. Edgar’s was larger than mine and had a little nook thanks to the turret that went up that side of the house. We had our own small baseball diamond that was flooded in the winter so we could have a skating rink. It all made for comfortable living, to say the least.

My parents revered the style of the English aristocracy, particularly my father, who had a fascination, maybe an obsession, with royalty. The Jewish elite in Montreal wanted to emulate the Anglo-Protestant elite, and we were most certainly the Jewish elite. This royal fetish manifested itself in the names of Seagram’s most successful brands like Crown Royal, 5 Crown, 7 Crown, and Chivas Regal.

Many people believe that those born to very successful, prominent people are instantly imbued with a supernatural self-confidence. That may be true of the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelts, but it was most certainly not true of me. I had none. I felt overwhelmed by my family and its high-achieving ways. I was, looking back, a childhood basket case, full of anxieties, fears, and an inner life that bore no resemblance to my outer, public life. Only in my thirties did this feeling start to reverse itself. And only in my later years have I begun to feel satisfied with who I am as a person, and who I have been.

When I grew up in Montreal, it was still Canada’s number one city. Aside from not being affected by the depressed economy of the time, I also had no idea that I was living in a largely Francophone metropolis and province. There was a well-known book written by Hugh MacLennan called Two Solitudes, and I can tell you that’s what it was like. The French lived east of St. Lawrence (St-Laurent) Boulevard and the English to the west. We lived in Westmount, the enclave where Montreal’s richest English-speaking citizens lived. Our French counterparts lived in Outremont, where the Université de Montréal is located. McGill University is situated downtown in English-speaking Montreal. The only French people I knew were those who worked in our home, and they spoke English to us. I’m amazed that I was in my twenties before I knew French was spoken in the city—that’s how cut off we were.

Such was the formality of our household that we rarely ate with our parents. My father, because of the pressing needs of his business empire, spent the week in New York City, running Seagram. He would take the overnight train on Thursday evening and be home in Montreal for the weekend. At Shabbat dinner on Friday night, we boys were dressed in our Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, while the girls wore flowery dresses. It was awful, but my parents meant well. Sunday lunch, featuring roast beef, was the other time we were likeliest to all be together.

My mother’s guru was Emily Post, the maven of etiquette, and she grew to adopt a so-called European style of service—that is, formal. The food was English cuisine, if you can call English food cuisine. Our cooks were cooks; they were not chefs. Still, there are foods from my childhood that still excite me when I think of them. Funnily enough, the famous Montreal bagel is not on the list, which includes sweetbreads and liver chopped in a little dish, flat crepes with maple syrup, tapioca and rice pudding, and bean tzimmes with marrow bones. My sisters loved the marrow, but I can’t eat it to this day. As a result, I got extra beans in a sweet sauce.

Because we kept a kosher home (for the most part), we didn’t have any sausages or bacon, although Edgar and I once ordered bacon and eggs in Boca Raton while having breakfast with our father. You could feel the roof blow off the place, such was Dad’s volcanic reaction. Truth be told, a lot of families make up their own cultural/religious dietary rules to suit themselves. Shellfish isn’t kosher, but we had it, although only when we were outside of the home. Somehow it seemed to be a lesser evil compared with meat from a pig. After all, the last part of the word shellfish is fish. Our father made the excuse that he grew up on the prairie so he didn’t know about it. There was also something called petcha or ptcha, depending on which shtetl you’re from. In today’s delicate foodie world, jelly made from calves’ feet doesn’t exactly sound appetizing, but it was.

What I didn’t want to eat was baked apple for dessert. One day it was placed before me and I had the temerity to say, No, thank you. For that response, I was sent to my room for the afternoon. It took me fifty years to ever look at a baked apple again. It’s actually not bad, I’ve discovered.

I remember the iceman coming to the house with big blocks of ice, manipulating them with a large set of forceps. There was also an equivalent to the Good Humor Man, who came around with ice cream for sale. In a neighbourhood store, we’d sit down and read comic books so we didn’t have to pay for them. Typical kids. We’d get seven streetcar rides for a quarter and a chocolate bar for a nickel.

My hero was our chauffeur, Bordeau, because he could drink the entire contents of a six-ounce bottle of Coke in one gulp, without having to stop to belch. He wore the boots, the leggings, the cap, the whole uniform. When he’d drive my mother around, people would ask whose car it was and he’d always say it belonged to the governor general. During the war, however, we put the Rolls-Royce up on blocks. Because of rationing, you couldn’t get gasoline for it. It was a glutton on gas. Besides the Rolls, we had other cars. I recall two Packards, an American luxury competitor to Cadillac that went out of production in the late 1950s. We had a sedan and a convertible that was in my mother’s name, but she never drove it. Some of my happiest times were spent upstairs over the garage, where Bordeau had an apartment. You could park three cars in the garage, but above one side of it is an apartment the size of a nice home, with two bedrooms, a kitchen, dining room, and sitting