THE BIOGRAPHER'S VOICE: THE LIFE & TIMES OF PETER C. NEWMAN
CanWest News Service, Feb. 8, 2005
By Alex Strachan

The best biographies reveal something personal and intimate about their subject by overlooking the obvious -- or, in some cases, ignoring it completely -- and venturing instead down the less-trodden path.

Viewers tuning into Mike Sheerin's highly stylized biography The Biographer's Voice: The Life & Times of Peter C. Newman expecting a rote, point-by-point chronology of the life of the famous author and journalist are liable to be baffled at first, then gently captivated by the film's eccentric tone this Thursday on CBC.

Sheerin frames his biography within the context of a radio play: A radio announcer receives instructions off camera, then reads Newman's words into his microphone. The narrator's voice becomes Newman's, in other words, as Newman takes the viewer on a trip back in time to his idyllic childhood in Austria, his terrified adolescence fleeing Nazi occupation of Europe in the early days of the Second World War, his emigration to Canada in 1941 and his formative years at Upper Canada College.

Sheerin accompanied Newman on a trip back to Europe last summer while making this film; together they traced the escape route Newman's family used to flee the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, stood on the beach in Biarritz where Newman narrowly escaped repeated attacks by a Nazi dive-bomber, and returned to the small town in Czechoslovakia where Newman's father was a powerful industry magnate and the de facto town mayor -- ruined overnight when the Nazis invaded.

Sheerin's film is more Odyssey than Iliad, more concerned with one man's reconnection with his past than with the public record of a best-selling author and prominent retired journalist.

The public record is familiar ground to readers of Newman's tomes about corporate raiders and backroom brokers.

Newman worked his way through university (the University of Toronto, followed by McGill) as a gold miner in northern Quebec and an assistant manager at Eaton's Toytown. He joined the Royal Canadian Navy (Reserves) as an ordinary seaman and rose to captain's rank, and began his career in journalism in 1951 as an assistant editor at The Financial Post. In short order, he was appointed Ottawa editor of Maclean's Magazine, became a syndicated columnist and Ottawa editor for the Toronto Star, was named editor-in-chief of the Star from 1969-'71 and, most famously, served as editor-in-chief of Maclean's from 1971-'82, during which time he righted the proverbial sinking ship -- Maclean's was headed straight onto the rocks at the time -- once again proving his flair for seamanship.

Newman is best known, however, for his string of biographies about the Canadian establishment, beginning with The Flame of Power, a profile of Canada's business leaders, and continuing with Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years, The Canadian Establishment, The Acquisitors (at one point, Newman compares the position of a Canadian CEO with that of a Chinese pelican whose throat is banded to prevent him from swallowing the fish he catches for his masters). Others include: The Bronfman Dynasty, True North: Not Strong and Free and Company of Adventurers, best described a highly unauthorized history of the Hudson's Bay Company and ripped by one irate reviewer on Amazon.ca as "500 pages of overblown corporate propaganda." Another Amazon reviewer, writing from Inuvik, says he found the book to be informative and refreshingly free of political correctness, "more insightful about historical events than what we are normally taught in our schools." Good and bad, in other words: Take your pick.

Newman's critics expecting a mea culpa, or even an explanation, for his alleged transgressions in such Canadian literary bestsellers as The Canadian Establishment and Company of Adventurers are bound to be disappointed by Sheerin's film. It shares more in common with Newman's own recent autobiography Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power than it does Newman's detailed observations of corporate culture. Unlike most prominent personalities, Newman took the trouble to actually write his own autobiography, rather than leaving it to a ghostwriter. A film biography is different from written autobiography, however, and Sheerin takes on the role of ghost-filmmaker in Life & Times. By examining the man, rather than his works, Sheerin emerges with a deeply personal, heartfelt portrait.

The most telling revelation arrives early in the film, and it goes a long way toward explaining Newman's drive to succeed. A slight in a restaurant while Newman was still a young man, an anti-Semitic remark tossed his way by someone in a position of power -- coupled with the revelation that no matter how hard he worked, no matter how well known he became in his own right, he would never be accepted by the Canadian establishment he wrote about in such excruciating detail -- forever framed the man he would become.

The Biographer's Voice: The Life & Times of Peter C. Newman is affected and irritating in parts, and self-conscious throughout. It is also energetic, unpredictable, distinctive and, in its own way, deeply revealing. 



BIOPIC ON NEWMAN IS ABSORBING
Canadian Jewish News, Feb. 3, 2005
By Sheldon Kirshner

Midway through The Biographer's Voice: The Life & Times of Peter C. Newman, the rumpled subject of this absorbing CBC television biopic says, "I've had a very busy life."

This is surely an immense understatement, since the distinguished Canadian journalist has been extremely prolific.

As a correspondent and columnist for the Toronto Star and Maclean's magazine in Ottawa, he filed more than two million words on Canadian politics. And as an author, he has written 20 books, including Flame of Power, The Distemper of our Times, The Canadian Establishment and Company of Adventurers.

Newman hardly paused for breath as he climbed from Jewish refugee in Nazi-occupied Europe to Canadian journalistic icon. His odyssey will be broadcast on Thursday, Feb. 10, at 7 p.m.

The documentary, ably directed by Mike Sheerin and coinciding with the publication of Newman's memoir, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power, navigates his personal and professional lives.

Rather than unfolding in time-honoured chronological order, the film jumps around, starting with Newman's days as an outsider at Upper Canada College - a bastion of the Anglo-Saxon elite - and ending with a snapshot of himself and his fourth wife, Alvy - the love of his life - at sea on his sailboat.

What emerges is a nuanced portrait of an aloof, overweeningly ambitious, somewhat insecure man who reinvented himself in his adopted homeland.

A child of privilege, he grew up in a mansion in Breclav, a town in Czechoslovakia where his father, an industrialist, was the biggest employer. On his eighth birthday, Newman's parents gave him a swimming pool. "Anything I wanted, I got," he recalls.

But the idyll was shattered by Germany's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. When Newman's father realized that the Czech army was powerless to protect them from Nazi anti-Semitism, he announced, "It's over for us here. We have to flee."

When Newman returns to Breclav on a sentimental visit, he can no longer identify with the place, but probably can commiserate with the American novelist, Thomas Wolfe, who once remarked, "You can't go home again."

As Sheerin retraces Newman's boyhood, Newman appears at Upper Canada College in Toronto's affluent Forest Hill neighbourhood. Newman arrived at the school on Sept. 4, 1943, some three years after he and his parents fled Europe on the last ship to Leave Nazi-occupied France.

His English was faulty and he felt alone, desperate to gain the acceptance of his fellow students. But, as he acknowledges, he was not "one of them."

He did not fit into "the prevailing jock culture," Hal Jackman, a contemporary and a former lieutenant-governor of Ontario, observes.

Nevertheless, Newman yearned to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He had already embarked on that quest. Before their arrival in Canada, he and his parents were baptized as Catholics.

"We had to stop being Jews to enter Canada," says Newman in a reference to Canada's restrictive immigration policy. In effect, their baptismal certificate was their passport to Canada.

Newman's ill-conceived marriage to an Anglo-Irish girl was part of his assimilationist strategy. But the union - the first of four - collapsed, and the divorce left him virtually insolvent.

Sheerin does not say why Newman chose journalism as a profession. But he was eminently successful, vaulting to the editorship of the Toronto Star and Maclean's, which he adeptly transformed into a thriving weekly.

His second book, Renegade in Power, a best-seller, was a probing account of John Diefenbaker's prime ministership that clearly offended Diefenbaker. One of his cronies, a senator, hit back, branding Newman "a Jew boy."

Newman now considers that incident as "a slap in the face." It left him with the realization that he would "never be a WASP." What is surprising is that Newman, a shrewd and sophisticated man, could be so blinkered and naive.