Distilled

A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy

Charles Bronfman, Howard Green

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781443448499
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsbiographien

While much has been written about his father, Sam, a titan of industry, there is no public record of Charles Bronfman's thoughts on his own life, family, career and his significant accomplishments in sport and philanthropy.

Distilled does just that, chronicling key events in the life of the heir to one of Canada's great fortunes. Born in 1931 to the fabulously wealthy Bronfmans, Charles grew up in a 20-room mansion with many staff. Via their control of the distilling giant Seagram, the Bronfman family dominated the liquor business with brands such as Crown Royal, V.O. and Chivas Regal. By the 1980s, Seagram was also the biggest shareholder of DuPont and by the 1990s, the family's wealth was in the billions, culminating in the $35-billion sale of Seagram to France's Vivendi, which turned into a financial and family disaster. In Distilled, Charles reflects on all of it---his relationship with his parents, his brother Edgar, working in the family business, landing Canada's first big league baseball franchise (the Montreal Expos), leading a philanthropic life by promoting Canadian identity through Heritage Minutes and supporting Israel through countless innovative initiatives including the globally respected Birthright Israel---and to how the Bronfman family splintered over the sale of Seagram.

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 room. I used to hang out there with my black-and-white patched dog, Pat, the product of a mixed marriage and the best dog I ever had.

The car in which I learned to drive was the Packard convertible, complete with a rumble seat, a feature that disappeared from cars like tails disappeared from humans. I was taught on the back roads of the Laurentians, and by the age of twelve, I was a good driver. It was not unusual then for kids in rural Quebec to drive before they turned sixteen, given the need to operate farm vehicles.

My first job was delivering the Montreal Star for a couple of years after school, first on foot to the Gleneagles apartments on Côte-des-Neiges, then later on an easy route on bicycle. It was close to the store where we’d hang out. Apparently, according to my mother’s memoirs, none of us children was extravagant. Each of us got an allowance, but we would make up lists about how we spent it. I grew up hearing business issues discussed around the table—not money, but business, and there is a difference. I think I learned more around the table than I ever did at school. Meantime, the classroom became an unhappy experience and place for me. I would get panic attacks on Sunday nights, knowing I had school the next day. That feeling got so ingrained it even carried on into my business life. My siblings, however, were good in school.

Edgar and I went to Selwyn House, a private school in Montreal. There were very few Jews there, only one other in my class. It was a prestigious school for the economic elite. You had to be from the top, top, top, probably what we’d call the one per cent now, or the point-one per cent. The Great Depression was not a topic of conversation. When we were younger, the chauffeur drove us but dropped us off at the corner nearby because it was embarrassing to be driven to school by a chauffeur.

Edgar, I think, established the record at Selwyn House for getting caned the most times on the bum, the bare bum. He was a good student, but he frequently got in trouble. Our mother would try to discipline him—although, in the 1980s, she wrote in one of her two privately published books that if any of us did anything that required discipline, she would take us into a room and sit us down to discuss the issue at hand. When it came to Edgar, I remember it a bit differently. He would test the limits and then my mother would take a belt and chase after him.

“Anywhere it lands, anywhere it lands!” she’d yell. To my memory, she never got him.

Although the kids we knew were pretty much all from well-to-do homes, most did not have anywhere near the wealth of our family. Yet I had no sense of that, not until my teenage years, when I felt that certain kids wanted to befriend me because of my father’s riches. Funnily, I got used to the idea that maybe there was another reason below the surface for someone wanting to be my friend. But it never really bothered me. I never counted, nor did I care who had what. It’s just the way it was, and I learned to be a little cautious.

For me, I was doing my best to manage at Selwyn House. I was relatively comfortable in my situation in Montreal, with friends and sports. That changed drastically when I was sent to Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, when I was ready for Grade 9. However, I skipped a grade and went right into tenth grade, and the problem with that was that I was behind in science, meaning trouble for me. I hated the place, hated the whole atmosphere. There was no kindness and no gentleness, a school fashioned on old British tradition. The teachers were an eccentric lot and it seemed the only way you could prosper there was if one of the nutty professors liked you. We knew them by their nicknames, like “Sharpie” Snelgrove and “Skook” Lewis. Sharpie had a sharp nose and taught chemistry. He liked me, so I did okay. Skook taught physics. He didn’t like me so much, so I didn’t do well. Later, Skook was teaching both chemistry and physics, so I failed both. I went to him to ask for help.

“Bronfman, you must study, study, study some more,” he said. That’s the help I got.

When it came time for us to get ready for our S...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 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