It is Saturday, a week ago, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa is buzzing with all the glamour of a high-school prom. The ground floor has been festooned with great gobs of bubblegum-pink fabric. This is when arts and politics meet -- the annual NAC fundraising gala.
Guests float in, greeted by snapping cameras. Look, here comes Belinda Stronach, Human Resources Minister, in a short, clingy dress with Pucci-like swirls, accompanied by her stylist, a young spiky-haired man who is . . . yes, he's chewing a wad of bubblegum right there on the red carpet.
Another rich divorcée glides in, dressed in a long black gown and a white textured shrug, little makeup and pearl-drop earrings, she is unaccompanied except for her modernist regal bearing. Her name is Louise Blouin MacBain, a 46-year-old Canadian who has been seducing the arts world with her estimated $500-million fortune. She has a spread in Southampton, Long Island, a Richard Meier-designed duplex penthouse worth $20-million in New York, and a large house in London's Holland Park. Romantically linked with Prince Andrew, she has denied it, saying only that she keeps such company because she has become a key figure in the arts.
That is an understatement. She is a self-made arts angel who has risen up from nowhere.
In three years, she has gone from being Queen of the Classified -- she and her ex-husband, John MacBain, made their fortune in the unglamorous world of classified ads -- to Queen of the Rarefied.
She divorced her husband in 2000, after three children -- now aged 15, 16 and 18 -- and 15 years of marriage. Three years later, through her Bermuda-based company, LTB Holdings, she stunned the art world by buying up its most influential arts magazine, Art + Auction. An acquisition spree followed. Her company now has a portfolio of over 165 arts publications, as well as leading resource databases.
Armed with this content, she is about to launch artsinfo.com, an on-line interactive arts-news service about international art and cultural issues, which will allow her to be the Bloomberg of the art world, she says.
To top it off, in May, she established the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, a not-for-profit philanthropic agency with plans to refurbish a warehouse in London's Notting Hill (for a cool $20-million) into an international arts centre. She describes it as an "Art Davos," in reference to the World Economic Forum, a place where politicians and artists can discuss the role of creativity, which she calls the "nervous system of society."
Few in the Ottawa crowd are aware of who she is -- she is here because she was the keynote speaker at the NAC annual roundtable earlier in the day, about the link between music and medicine.
Born in Montreal to a modest French-Canadian Catholic family, the last of six children, she left home at 15 to fend for herself. Her father, an insurance broker, had died after a long bout with cancer, and she didn't want to burden her mother. ("I saw my mother all the time," she tells me. "But I never asked my mother for money.") Supporting herself by working various jobs while studying, and living at times with an older sister, she attended a CEGEP, McGill University for a year and then Concordia for another, but never graduated. She was busy working as an analyst and stockbroker in Montreal and later, in Toronto.
Blouin's first marriage was to David Stewart, a scion of the RJR-MacDonald tobacco fortune, but the union floundered after only a few months. "It was annulled," she says. Her second marriage was to John MacBain, a Canadian Rhodes scholar. In 1987, they bought three classified-advertising magazines in Montreal for an investment of roughly $4-million, and over the course of the next decade, built it into an empire, Trader Classified Media, with 400 publications, Internet sites and a market value of $922-million.
"I isolate myself for two weeks in the year just to think," she explains minutes into the interview.
"I need to think," she continues in her delicate mix of French and British inflections, "to put concepts together." Immaculately groomed, she speaks with precision, as though each word is a dab of paint on a pointilist masterpiece.
There has been speculation in the British press that her messianic drive to build an arts empire began as revenge against a former lover, Simon de Pury, a Swiss aristocrat who co-founded the auction house of Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg. She met him just as she was divorcing and fell madly in love. He installed her as CEO and she helped reduce the company's debt. But then, two years later, he dumped her -- from his company and from his life.
"It began when I was born," she says lightly when asked about the genesis of her ambition to celebrate creativity. "It's the consolidation of my knowledge, my passion, my experience, my being," she adds sweetly. She has a mild form of dyslexia, she explains, and always felt different; bored with school. (While at Traders Classified, she did a part-time Harvard business course.) It was only in her 30s that she began to understand that the dyslexic brain is different, more creative. "Scientists know that dyslexic people see things as a whole. We have a decision-making process that's totally simplified, so we see all the elements and we see a simple conclusion, and there's a creativity that's very developed," she says, adding that Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell were all dyslexic.
At first, this tendency of hers to instruct, combined with the breathtaking scope of her foundation's mission -- "I asked myself: How can we convince governments to actually be aware of how creativity is important?' -- makes her seem over-the-top, a hyperbole of blond social ambition. After all, granting awards to world leaders is a great way to schmooze with them. Her inaugural awards program honoured eight world leaders, including former U.S. president Bill Clinton, for whom she hosted a gala in New York. Her foundation's board of advisers includes royalty, artists, actors and influential museum directors.
Plus, she easily falls into a description of her goals that sounds like something a pom-pom-shaking cheerleader would dream up. Speaking of the conflict in the world, she says "I think there's a need today because our neighbours are in our garden, and we need to know about the flowers. We need to understand the differences between countries a little bit more, their civilizations, and why not do it through culture?"
But she is also very professional. "I have created so many magazines in my lifetime," she will say. But when it's pointed out that high-end art publications, never sure money-makers, are trickier to get right than magazines with automobile and property ads, her reply is that she has not tampered with the editorial staff of the magazines she has bought and that there are cost efficiencies in having many in the fold.
Asked if she was drawn to the more glamorous world of art after her success in the more mundane one of advertising, she calmly replies, " No, I was in charge of all operations around the world and so many thousands of people, so you can't get bored there."
We speak for over two hours, during which she warms up significantly to talk about her life, her travels, her divorce -- "John is great. He's fantastic.
"We were just very different. I wanted to be involved with the intangibles, to go in a different direction." Her vision is "very complicated, with many angles," she says, itemizing some of the educational research programs to encourage "rational and intuitive or creative thinking" that she has sponsored at Cambridge University. With some vulnerability, she attributes her driving force to her beloved father, who fought his cancer with discipline and determination, and her desire to have meaning in her life.
"I'm at an age where I don't want to prove myself. I'm there to help. A lot of people ask: 'Why don't you go on a boat and do nothing?' It's not me," she says, seated upright on a sofa, legs crossed elegantly. "I want to make a difference."
That night at the gala dinner, she was seated beside the Prime Minister, her head bowed politely in conversation with him. She had her own security detail on the premises -- a dark-suited man who speaks into his sleeve and calls himself her "personal security officer." One of his previous jobs was watching over Princes William and Harry.
And why shouldn't she be protected? The Queen of the Rarefied is carrying a big global dream.