Whiskey Sour

The story of Mordecai Richler showing up Saidye Bronfman, wife of Seagram’s liquor baron Samuel Bronfman, may be apocryphal, but it is too good and, by now, too enduring, not to repeat. The two met at the 1976 Montreal movie premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, where Mrs. Bronfman, by most accounts a good-hearted, innocuous woman, remarked to Richler that he had come a long way for a kid from St. Urbain Street. Richler’s reply was typical of a man who was, by most accounts, a sourpuss. “And you’ve come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife,” he said. In my experience, writers are not usually that quick-witted, but I don’t doubt Richler could have come up with a comment like that on the spot. He had probably been rehearsing some variation of it for years. Richler was obsessed with the Bronfmans—in particular, with how a rag-tag bunch of Jewish immigrants transformed themselves into one of the wealthiest, most philanthropic and influential family-run businesses of its time, a time now past.

The thing Richler never could manage to forgive about the Bronfmans was their persistent and quite transparent need to conceal their colourful, albeit shady, past behind a curtain of banal respectability. What he objected to most he objected to as a novelist—he could not understand their unwillingness to own up to what a good story they had on their hands. A saga worthy of Isaac Babel, he called it. That may explain why he finally told the story himself. His 1989 novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, is fiction, of course, but as one longtime Bronfman associate put it, “I don’t know why Mordecai bothered to change the names.” Indeed, it is impossible for anyone reading the novel not to notice that it has its origins in Bronfman lore, except, that is, for Richler. In an indignant disclaimer at the end of the novel, he wrote, “I made the Gurskys up out of my own head.” Fair enough, I suppose, but that does not alter the fact that the Bronfmans were already taking up a lot of valuable space in his head, providing no end of incentive and inspiration. In fact, Richler was so protective of his take on the story that two years after his novel was published, he took the time to review—and slam—Michael Marrus’s respectful biography, Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam. He referred to Marrus as “a housebroken academic” and the book as “a politically correct eulogy.” It is too bad, Richler added, that “instead of being defiant, or at least amused, about the gaudy origins of the family’s billions, Sam, in his time, and now his progeny, [have] remained unaccountably ashamed.”

In The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram, Nicholas Faith, a veteran British business journalist, relies heavily on Marrus’s biography in telling the first part of the Bronfman story, the rags-to-unimaginable-riches part. That is not surprising. What is surprising is how much of Solomon Gursky Was Here Faith takes at face value. Faith explains that Richler’s “characters are so striking, and if not accurate, express such underlying truths, that they cry out for quotation, though I have been sparing in this respect.” Well, not that sparing. For a non-fiction writer with 23 books to his credit, Faith does not always let the facts get in the way of a good anecdote. Discussing Sam Bronfman’s fear of being targeted by kidnappers, Faith writes that he “built a security fence round his property and, according to Richler, armed the chauffeurs who took the children to school.” According to Richler? According to Richler’s novel, he means. (It should be noted that the first ten pages of Faith’s book include several mistakes about Richler and his work, including the statement that Richler, who died in 2001, has been dead more than a decade.)

Still, Faith is wise to consider Richler’s contribution to Bronfman history, however mischievous, even mean-spirited it often is. It shows that Faith understands what Richler did about “the underlying truth” of the Bronfman story—that material this good should never be left in the hands of family members or their hired hagiographers. Faith has written extensively on the wine and spirits industry and his knowledge comes in handy here. He also crunches the numbers on finance and analyzes some dubious business practices—all the 1990s foolishness over synergy is exposed—but his book really works best as a family saga, as a portrait of a clan of extraordinarily single-minded people: what Richler would have called, with some ambivalence, “strivers.” Sam Bronfman, better known as Mr. Sam, is an example of a character so good in reality that there would be no point in making him up. Brash, crude and domineering, he was “no ordinary monster,” Faith points out. So while he froze his brothers out of their own family business as soon as he could, he could also be surprisingly loyal to the people he hired, assuming they could survive his famously foul-mouthed bouts of temper. “Nobody can be a friend of mine,” he said, “if I can’t call him a son of a bitch.” He also said, “I don’t get ulcers, I give them”—a line Richler shamelessly put into the mouth of Mr. Bernard, Mr. Sam’s stand-in in Solomon Gursky Was Here.

In his review of Marrus’s biography, Richler cited Mr. Sam’s longevity as “proof positive that the unexamined life can be worth living,” but even Mr. Sam was keenly aware that he was sitting on a goldmine. Faith recounts how the Seagram patriarch reacted after reading a pre-publication and official version of the company history. “This is so much bullshit,” he said. “If I only told the truth I’d sell ten million copies.” He made that remark in 1970, a year before he died, and it might have secretly pleased him to know, as Faith’s book goes on to demonstrate, that the story, nearly 40 years and a couple of generations on, just kept getting better—that is to say, more like a sprawling novel, comic, tragic, occasionally implausible.

All family history is revisionist history. In my family, for example, we go on about how we just missed out on being rich. Instead, in the 1920s, my grandfather sold his flourishing Montreal fruit store when his eldest son, my father, contracted polio. The medical bills were, in their own way, crippling. And so it was my grandfather’s competition, a smaller, less popular store on the same block, owned and run by a man named Steinberg, which grew and expanded into one of the most successful family businesses in the country. In its heyday, Steinberg’s was a $4.5 billion empire with 37,000 employees. There, but for the capriciousness of God, we like to muse at family gatherings, go us.

Our daydreaming stops at the oceanfront house in Maine, the sports cars we might have owned, the different partners we might have attracted—the life we might have led, free from financial concerns. “The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, and the real difference may be how incapable you and I are of understanding them. If the rest of us are haunted by what might have been, the rich are haunted by having their wildest dreams come true and having to know it is not quite enough. Short of more important things to worry about, the Bronfmans fretted over their reputation, specifically their not entirely legitimate past. At times, their pursuit of respectability has been so disproportionate, so desperate that it was inevitable that it would prove elusive—inevitable, too, that the pursuit itself would ultimately end up a sour, self-destructive one.

Still, there was, from the start, much to be proud of. If the Bronfmans were lucky to be making liquor in Canada while prohibition was the law of the land in the United States, they were unlucky to have their accomplishments in the liquor business forever tainted by that historical hiccup. (It was not until the 1930s and ’40s, after the Repeal of Prohibition, that the family became “truly, seriously rich.”) Mr. Sam, as Faith points out, “was an authentic business genius, undoubtedly the greatest in the long history of hard liquor, indeed the man who really invented the whole industry in the U.S. by exploiting the post-Repeal thirst for decent whiskey and made drinking hard liquor respectable for the first time in American history.” But, from the start—and also in the end—none of Mr. Sam’s accomplishments were enough. Faith begins The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram with this telling anecdote:

Charles may have refrained, but others would not. As recently as 2000, Jean-Marie Messier, the French mogul who bought Seagram from Edgar Bronfman Jr., Sam’s grandson, voiced his suspicions of what he called the family’s “bootlegging methods.”

There is a Spanish proverb that says, “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience.” In these days of Oprah and The Donald, this seems like a lot to ask. But just drive around in their limousines for a while and you will see that another way in which the rich are different from the rest of us is that they do not just have to worry about making mistakes; they have to worry about making them on a grand, public scale. Fate weighs heavier on the rich; there is so much more at stake.

“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” was the proverb Mr. Sam was fond of repeating whenever his kids were nearby, especially his sons, Edgar and Charles. (Although shareholders, his daughters Minda and Phyllis were not directly involved in the business.) Mr. Sam was the kind of man who would not have had much trouble imagining that, after him, there was nowhere to go but down. The “rise” in Faith’s subtitle is almost all Mr. Sam, but it is the “fall”—the trail of hubris and bitterness left behind by the Bronfman kids and one grandkid, in particular, Edgar Jr.—that Faith finds irresistible. So will readers. It is the kind of epilogue Richler would have relished—Solomon Gursky: The Next Generation.

Faith does not demonstrate much patience for Mr. Sam’s heirs, who, as he notes, were nicknamed by some insiders “the lucky sperm club.” Faith also points out, more than once, that they suffered from “that rarely diagnosed disease that infects so many offspring of the very rich: a terminal case of immaturity” (as Peter C. Newman said). Mr. Sam’s eldest son, Edgar, showed early symptoms. Unlike his more cautious and unassuming brother, Edgar left Montreal for New York’s bright lights and big challenges. He was also a notorious playboy. His early forays into the movie business were seen, especially by his father, as foolish. “We have got whiskey. We have got real estate. What the hell else do you want?” Mr. Sam said. Mr. Sam also suspected that Edgar was just looking for a way to meet women. Edgar’s reply: “Nobody … needs to spend fifty-six million to get laid.”

Not surprisingly, it was not until after his father died that Edgar became serious about the Bronfman legacy. He also would become, in his own way, as preoccupied with respectability as his father had been. Mr. Sam liked to call himself the “King of the Jews,” but like other first generation self-made Jews, he also knew the score. He could not help but be intimidated by the gentile establishment. “A kike is a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room,” Mr. Sam said. Edgar, on the other hand, was not afraid to push—and be viewed as pushy—in pursuit of Jewish causes. As the president of the World Jewish Congress, he helped expose then United Nations secretary general Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past; more recently, he shamed and threatened Swiss banks into redressing the issue of money owed to the families of Holocaust victims.

Once they were out of their father’s shadow, Edgar and Charles proved themselves to be dedicated philanthropists and capable billionaires. But, as Faith does well to show in The Bronfmans, a family business, at least one on this scale, is no ordinary business. It is more like a Greek tragedy with conference rooms and private jets. Every successful venture contains the seeds of its own collapse. Edgar’s biggest mistake was doing, quite deliberately, what his father went out of his way not to do: to cede too much power to the next generation. In 2000, Edgar Jr. sold Seagram. The plan was to make the Bronfmans major players in the flashier, more admired world of big-time media. The result was “probably the largest loss ever sustained by a single family.” Some us$3 billion, Faith says. The financial downturn was bad enough, but the public humiliation trumped it. As Faith writes: “In early 2003 New York magazine called [Edgar Jr.] ‘possibly the stupidest person in the media business,’ while BusinessWeek named him as one of the worst managers of 2002, no mean accolade in a year full of the noisy crashes of so many former titans of the business world.” What were Edgar Jr.’s motives? Faith uncovers one possibility in the comment of a close family friend, who says of Edgar Jr., he was “ashamed of being Jewish, of being Canadian … and of being in the liquor business.” There it was again, what Mordecai Richler referred to, the “unaccountable shame.”

Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations? Well, hardly. “I’m not going down in history as the one Bronfman who pissed away the family fortune,” Edgar Jr. said and, in the end, he did not. No one is going to have to hold a bake sale for the Bronfmans. Faith estimates Edgar’s and Charles’s current fortune at more than us$5 billion. But money, as has been said, is only interesting to those without it. The intriguing thing about the Bronfman story and the thing that inextricably connects the generations is what they tried so hard but were never quite able to attain—their due respect.