Food Fight

If you thought HBO’s Succession was unbelievable, just an outrageous satire, The Phelan Feud will be a revelation. In the television series, with each child vying for their dad’s love and corporate kingdom, it feels implausible that family intrigue and personal madness can so engulf a company and its senior executives. Who’s running the show so that the cash that fuels these high-octane lives keeps flowing? Or maybe you will simply not believe that siblings would be so cruel to each other but regularly sit down together at their father’s dinner table or take luxurious trips en famille. Yet truth is even stranger than fiction, as Stephen Kimber’s The Phelan Feud proves.

The book begins at a pivotal moment in the Phelan saga: the morning of May 12, 1988, when one of Canada’s wealthiest families dramatically confronted the issue of who would eventually control Cara, a food service behemoth with 36,000 employees. Paul Phelan, the seventy-year-old patriarch, had written a new will, and only one of his four children was pleased: his thirty-seven-year-old son, Paul. (The father was referred to as PJ, for Paul James, and the son as PD, for Paul David.) At the time, Cara was known mostly as the caterer for more than sixty airlines — its “flight kitchens cooked up 60 per cent of all inflight meals served in Canada’s skies,” Kimber explains — and as the owner of concessions at many major airports. But two-thirds of the company’s revenue came from its fast-food chains, including Swiss Chalet, Harvey’s, and Steak N’ Burger. In fact, Cara was Canada’s third-largest restaurant company after McDonald’s and Tim Hortons.

PD had three sisters: Gail and Sharon, both in their forties at the time, and Rosemary, thirty-one. Although PJ had long made it clear that his son was “the prince” and would one day be “king of all the Phelans,” his previous will had treated all four equally in terms of what they and their offspring would inherit. The revised paperwork changed all that, essentially giving complete control to the son. “In the months leading up to today’s meeting,” Kimber writes, “PD’s sisters, despite their own differences in age, ambition, and temperament, had forged an unlikely sisterhood, a bulwark against what they saw as the unfair and unrealistic succession plans concocted by their father and mother.”

Kimber pinpoints what sparked the family feud: the sisters’ common cause against “the unseemly and seemingly unwarranted ambitions of their brother.” The May 12 meeting saw the proverbial first shot fired in a corporate battle after many less dramatic skirmishes. The ensuing fight would continue for more than a decade, with much suffering for all concerned, not to mention damage to the business itself.

Kimber, a professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and the author of eleven non-fiction books and two novels, has the reporter’s skill needed to untangle the Byzantine transactions central to the tale. He also pays close attention to the personalities and emotions that help readers comprehend why succession in the family company became such a quagmire. While he can sound a bit folksy at times, prone to the “Hold your horses, we’ll get to that part of the story later” kind of patter, he makes complexity understandable. And though the book was commissioned by the ultimate victors of the fight — Gail and Rosemary, Sharon having died before matters were settled — he’s careful to present all sides of the story, drawn from primary documentation when it’s available, and to avoid judgment when describing situations where irrefutable and unappealing facts could tempt an author to righteous indignation.

Insanity is not limited to family businesses, of course. Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, for instance, is a classic tale of huge egos and unapologetic corporate greed decimating a public company. But family firms offer more opportunities for riveting, sometimes bizarre stories because they mix intense sibling rivalries, acrimonious divorces, and general familial volatility with the complexities of running a business. Intensity goes stratospheric when you mix in big money and brazen entitlement — the experience of privilege, often spanning generations, that extinguishes any attention to consequences. In such circumstances, stories become Grand Guignol in nature, amalgams of pain and comedy. It’s no coincidence that there are similarities between the Phelans’ story and the more recent struggles of other privileged types like the Rogerses, the Stronachs, and the McCains. These families all harboured bitter strife — tinder that exploded when doused with the incendiary of great wealth.

While ostensibly a business story, a set-the-record-straight coda long after the fight ended, The Phelan Feud is a compelling portrait of what we blithely today call a dysfunctional family. The crucial difference that makes it not just another tale of woe is that most of the Phelans were brilliant, creative, glamorous, or otherwise exceptional, albeit besieged by addiction and mental health issues and living in a Toronto milieu where their behaviour was acceptable if not commonplace. The story is doubly poignant if you are acquainted with Phelan family members, as I am, and suddenly realize how awful it must have been to live through it all. It takes courage to dredge up memories like this.

In many ways, The Phelan Feud is like a volume of Proust’s opus In Search of Lost Time, about French high society in the early twentieth century — only with Toronto as the setting and old-money Canadians substituting for French aristocrats. The neighbourhoods of Rosedale and Forest Hill recall the Faubourg St‑Germain; the York and Toronto Clubs bring to mind the elite Jockey Club. There are grand marriages in Proust, as there are in The Phelan Feud, including PJ’s marriage to Helen Gardiner, the daughter of the financier Percy Gardiner and the sister of George Gardiner, the entrepreneur who later ran a rival food business. “Money on both sides” is the succinct phrase for this kind of union — both then and now.

In Search of Lost Time details bad habits and callousness, and so does The Phelan Feud. PJ convinced Gail to abandon her PhD program and get an MBA instead, for example. After that, he brought her into the business and positioned her against PD while not giving her a meaningful role. Then there’s substance abuse. PJ used the term “monkey on his back” to describe his alcoholism. He spent time at the Betty Ford Center but was never cured, but then it didn’t quite matter, as Toronto in his day had a high tolerance for such behaviour, especially among the rich. It was the era of three-martini lunches, drunk driving, and everyone ignoring or tidying up the detritus the morning after.

In addition to drinking like his dad, PD did drugs that grew more and more dangerous. The reason for his unsuitability for running the family business was not so much his lack of experience but his increasingly turbulent personality. When his sisters got together to prevent his sole succession, it wasn’t that they were being “feminazis,” to use his term. Rather they seemed to be the only ones who appreciated that he was too crazy to manage anything. (PD died in 2021 of liver disease, “an all-too-familiar Phelan family curse.”)

If you were writing a screenplay based on this book, a made-for-the-movies moment would be the morning when PD, a hungover teenager having breakfast with his girlfriend on the terrace, threw an exquisite tray set with steak and eggs against a wall. He yelled at the housekeeper of long standing, someone who helped bring him up, that he had asked for ice in his Coke and there wasn’t any. Soon a new tray appeared, this time with ice. Everyone, including the horrified girlfriend, ignored the wreckage of the broken Minton china as PD, his dark mood gone, chatted happily away.

Equally instructive in Proust is how upper-class women, like the Duchesse de Guermantes, were expected to be chic and clever creatures who hosted elegant salons. Helen was attractive and intelligent, and though her parties were not always elegant, they were famous, if not notorious. Going to the spa for an early December “spin dry”— a temporary break from drinking, to get her face and body in shape for the Christmas season — was part of Helen’s routine. She was an indifferent mother, her version of feminism focused on supporting the causes she cared about and serving on corporate boards. She seemed to believe that sons naturally inherited empires and that daughters simply needed to be pretty and marry well.

What makes The Phelan Feud the most Proustian and memorable — particularly for those not much interested in the restaurant business — is the panorama of a life that most of us glimpse only from the outside. Seeing it from the inside explains so much.