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...