Journalist, author, pundit, personality - for more than 30 years Pierre Berton dominated print and broadcast media in Canada. He wrote 50 books, an average of one a year since he published The Royal Family in 1954, a expanded compilation of his own newspaper and magazine articles. Many of his books were forgettable, but the best ones - his histories of the North, the building of the railroad, the war of 1812 - earned him Governor-General's awards, honorary degrees, the respect of professional historians, and the gratitude of ordinary Canadians for giving them a memorable sense of their past.
"He may be the best popular historian in English Canada ever," says Ramsay Cook a retired Professor of Canadian History at York University and the general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. "He had a journalist's eye, but he was also a natural storyteller with a terrific talent for dramatic narrative. He knew how to choose a story and he knew how to tell it, but what made him a good historian was that he knew that history was more than anecdotes, personalities and a big screen."
A tough guy who never backed down from a fight - I remember seeing him punch a man at a party for insulting the late Jack McClelland's long-time secretary - Mr. Berton made newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television into customized vehicles for his shoot from the hip opinions and his straight ahead prose. Whether he courted controversy or it dogged him, Mr. Berton had opinions on everything from organized religion, teenage sex, abortion, capital punishment, civil rights and the best way to roast a turkey. A Canadian, he once said, is somebody who makes love in a canoe.
He cheerfully admitted to arrogance, saying that it was time Canadians learned to be arrogant. "This statement was considered to be so remarkable," he wrote in My Times, his 1995 memoir "it was picked up by Canadian Press.... An Arrogant Canadian! It was like discovering a new species of marmot."
In his last years Mr. Berton suffered from congestive heart failure and diabetes. Although slowed by his ailments, he continued to write and to make television appearances. In October, 2004, he demonstrated his technique for rolling a marijuana joint on Rick Mercer's Monday Report.
At 84, he published Prisoners of the North a quintet of profiles of Arctic adventurers including Klondike Joe Boyle, Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Robert Service. In reviewing the book for the Globe, Whitehorse physician and author Peter Steele wrote: "...Berton gives us a vivid picture of how the land can get under people's skin and become a potent driving force in their lives. Although plowing familiar soil - each of these people has been the subject of at least one biography - Berton manages to produce an exciting series of personal vignettes."
Insisting that Prisoners would be his last book, Mr. Berton began writing a monthly column for the Globe and Mail. "He's bored. He needs something to do," explained Elsa Franklin, his long time television producer and agent.
A lover of cats and women, he both inspired and demonstrated loyalty. Besides Ms. Franklin, his wife Janet Berton (whom he married in 1946) was his first and best proofreader, Janice Tyrwhitt edited all his books from Drifting Home (1973) on and Janet Craig was his perennial copyeditor. Barbara Sears researched Hollywood's Canada for him in 1975, a working relationship that lasted through nearly 20 books. "He was the quickest study - by a country mile - of anybody I worked for," she commented.
He was also a generous and mostly anonymous benefactor to writers and artists in need, such as the Writer's Trust of which he was a founding member, the Writer's Union and the Berton House Writers" Retreat. Mr. Berton gave $50,000 to the Yukon Arts Council in 1989 to buy his childhood home in Dawson City and turn it into a haven for professional writers. More than 20 writers including Russell Smith and Andrew Pyper have spent time in the house. "Whenever there is a disaster, and we all have them, the Bertons are always the first ones on your doorstep," remembered journalist and friend June Callwood.
Pierre Francis deMerigny Berton, was born in Whitehorse on July 12, 1920, the son of a civil engineer and a part-time reporter. When he was less than a year old, the family moved to Dawson, also in the Yukon.
Although his father, Francis, was trained as an engineer, he turned down a job offer from Queen's University because, as Mr. Berton wrote in My Times, "it wasn't security he sought, or even a job; it was adventure." (123). His father made a living as a cabinetmaker, school principal, Mountie, mining recorder and even an amateur dentist after picking up the necessary equipment from a departing professional.
His mother, Laura was the daughter of socialist newsman Phillips Thompson, one of the first Canadian socialists in the tradition of Edward Bellamy. A journalist, who wrote mostly about social problems, he was a "genuine radical" according to Prof. Cook. "There was quite a lot of that [crusading journalist]in Pierre, and he came by it honestly through his mother," Prof. Cook said.
Mr. Berton graduated from high school in 1937 and headed south to Victoria to university. The first move in becoming "Pierre Berton, famous Canadian," he once told me in an interview, was transferring from Victoria College across the Strait of Georgia to the University of British Columbia in the late 1930s. "Quite clearly, although I didn't know it at the time, I was going into journalism. I switched my courses and did everything I had to do to get to UBC so that I could get to the Ubyssey." In the summers he worked at gold-mining camps in the Yukon.
"The tradition at the Ubyssey," says journalist Allan Fotheringham, "was you never went to class, you worked on the paper, you got drunk and you chased girls." In his fourth year, Mr. Berton was worried that he wouldn't be able to graduate. Fortunately, he "had one of those absent-minded professors who lost the final results for the entire class so everybody including Mr. Berton got 51 per cent. He dined out on that story," said Mr. Fotheringham.
While at UBC, Mr. Berton also became a campus correspondent for The News-Herald. In 1940 he was taken on full-time for the summer and got a permanent job there after he graduated with a BA in 1941.
Editors were in short supply because many younger journalists had enlisted to fight in the Second World War. At the age of 21, Mr. Berton became the youngest city editor in Canada. He was not on the job for long. The Royal Canadian Army beckoned and Mr. Berton served, first as a private in the Canadian Information Corps. He rose through the ranks, ending up as a captain and an instructor at the Royal Military College in Kingston.
After the war he returned to Vancouver, where in, 1946, he married Janet Walker, an aspiring journalist whom he had met at UBC, and found a job as a feature writer for the Vancouver Sun. It was here that he got the next important boost up his career ladder when Maclean's journalist Scott Young flew out from Toronto to offer him a job as an associate editor at the monthly magazine.
The oft-repeated story is now part of the Berton mythology. Arthur Irwin, then the editor, told Mr. Young to offer him a salary between $4,000 and $4,500. "I'll take $4,500," said Mr. Berton and the deal was done.
At the time, he thought Toronto was merely a way station to New York. "My idea was always to go to the States and work for Life magazine or The Saturday Evening Post," he told me. "I've no regrets," he says. "I've done much better here that I would have done in the States. I became a big frog in a little puddle."
As "regular freelancers" for the magazine, June Callwood and her husband Trent Frayne were invited to staff dinner parties on Friday nights. It was at one of these parties that they met in 1947. "He was huge and shy and brash and we didn't know what to make of him," said Ms. Callwood. She remembers that he recited Robert Service's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," like "a kid trying to make a good impression."
Performing the Service poem became one of Mr. Berton's standard party tricks. Mr. Fotheringham, a fellow panelist on the long running television show, Front Page Challenge, remembers travelling across the country with Mr. Berton to tape the show in different cities. Invariably, there would be a party in somebody's home and Mr. Berton "with some giggle water in him" would start declaiming Service. When he came to the lines about "the lady known as Lou" shooting McGrew, Mr. Berton, "all 6 foot five of him, would dive to the floor" in front of the astonished burghers of Red Deer or CornerBook.
At a fundraising dinner for the Berton House Writers' Retreat in September, 2004, Mr. Berton rose from his wheelchair, "recited the whole thing off the top of his head," according to Mr. Fotheringham, "and did everything except throw himself on the floor in front of the crowd."
At Maclean's, Mr. Berton was a writing dynamo. He banged out stories on the Arctic, Canadians serving in Korea, discrimination against Japanese and Jewish Canadians in the 1940s. the need to end capital punishment. Editor Ralph Allen "used to say that Pierre had 10 ideas every day for articles and two of them were brilliant," said Ms. Callwood. It was the fervent example of Allen and writer Bruce Hutchison that turned Mr. Berton into a nationalist.
By the mid-1950s, the Bertons had several offspring (eventually they would have eight children, two of them adopted and seven of them given first names starting with the letter P). After a tip from broadcaster Lister Sinclair, a friend since Ubyssey days, the Bertons bought nine acres of land in Kleinburg, Ont., northwest of Toronto. The ground was level so he built a hill for his kids to slide down in the winter, prompting journalist Robert Collins to crack: "Pierre, God and the citizen's of Saskatoon are the only ones I know of who have created their own hills."
The family moved into house before it was finished because the developer ran out of money, according to Ms. Callwood. "There were no doors. I voted that the first one should be on the bathroom, but I think Janet got a screen door instead." The walls had been framed, but not plastered so the Bertons stretched burlap between the two by fours and then painted it.
The pressure to finish the house and to provide for a growing family soon saw Mr. Berton moonlighting on radio programs such as Court of Opinion and pounding away at book manuscripts. "He got up very early in the morning and typed until it was time to go to Maclean's, working all day and then doing what he could at night," she said. He followed a regimen of 12 hour workdays for most of the rest of his life.
By 1958, he had written three books, two of which, The Mysterious North and Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, had earned him Governor-General's Awards.
Prof. Cook still thinks Klondike, a heroic book about the common people who went to the Yukon Gold Rush is Mr. Berton's best book. "He had a feel for it. That is where he came from and where his mother taught him how to write. It is a wonderful book on almost every level. You can dig around and find a lot of things he probably didn't pay attention to and he probably tells some stories that are a little larger than life, but still it is a book that anybody who is going to visit the Yukon would have to read and would come to with a feeling for the place. " In 1958, Mr. Berton left Maclean's to work for The Toronto Star as a daily columnist. He wrote 1,200 words a day, five days a week, and on the sixth day he ran a column of letters. That column, by turns investigative, crusading. ruminative and domestic, made him a household name. "He reinvented the genre," says Ms. Callwood. "There was in Pierre's journalism an urge to be a social critic and to stir up debate and emotions. At the Star he was a troublemaker in the Joseph Atkinson tradition," says Prof. Cook.
"I was my own boss, they left me alone. I was well known and it opened doors for me," was how Mr. Berton's described the job.
For writer and journalist Rick Salutin, a high school student in the late 1950s, the column was "a completely different voice" that made an immediate and lasting impact on him as a journalistic model. When Mr. Salutin and two of his high school pals organized a city-wide drive for world refugee year in 1959, they asked Mr. Berton to write about their campaign.
As Mr. Salutin remembers it, his little brother Lorne, who had just signed on as a "Pierre Berton operative," was leaving as he and his friends tromped in to Mr. Berton's office to make their pitch. Years later, Mr. Salutin reminded Mr. Berton about the column he had written about "a visit from three typical teenagers." "He just lit up" and began "asking what happened to the other guys," says Mr. Salutin. "He was energetic and enthusiastic and out ahead of the curve in terms of the mainstream media."
Becoming a panelist in 1957 on Front Page Challenge, the CBC program that made him world-famous from coast to coast (to borrow Mordecai Richler's famous phrase about the Incomparable Atuk) came about by chance. The producers signed up journalist Gordon Sinclair, actress Toby Robbins and columnist Alex Barris. "They tested everyone in town for that show - except me - and I got on as a guest," Mr. Berton said.
He was clearly telegenic, having earned his broadcast spurs as the host of the Ross Mclean produced interview program, Close Up. Besides, he knew a lot of history because he had started a series, called Maclean's Flashbacks, so he got all the answers right. "In those days, that was what counted - it was the day of the quiz show - and so they kept me on for 38 years" until the show was finally cancelled to outraged public protests in 1995.
After four years at the Star (and two books based on his newspaper columns) he went back to Maclean's as a columnist, a gig that was short-lived because of a notorious column he wrote in 1963 under the title: "Let's Stop Hoaxing the Kids About Sex. The column was really about hypocrisy, and Berton learned a lesson in that very subject from his employers. As the father of four daughters, he hoped his girls would be sensible, but if they wanted to have sex he hoped they would do it in a comfortable bed rather than the back seat of a car.
Although it seems hard to believe considering today's permissive attitudes towards sex, the public was outraged when he wrote: "Having goaded the infants (through advertising) into a state of emotional and romantic frenzy for which intercourse, rather than cold baths, must be the obvious release, we are going to have to accept teenage sex as matter-of-factly as we now accept the other facets of togetherness."
All hell broke loose after the magazine hit the stands. "Church groups were formed to attack Maclean's, to cancel subscriptions and to withdraw advertising, and I was fired," he said later. "I didn't quit, I was fired. They published the goddamn thing, and now they were pushing me out."
Leaving Maclean's gave him more time to concentrate on books and his burgeoning careers in radio and television. Besides doing regular radio debates with his friend Charles Templeton and appearing as a weekly panelist on Front Page Challenge, he hosted The Pierre Berton Show on CTV from 1963 until l973. His panoply of controversial guests included prostitutes, dope addicts, professional divorce co-respondents, con men and, once, a Playboy bunny. Helen Gurley Brown, who scandalized the United States by writing about Sex and the Single Girl should have been on the list but the skittish executives at CTV killed the program in advance of airing.
But mainly he wrote books. For the next three decades he produced a book every autumn as regularly as the leaves fell from the trees. Klondike remained his favourite. "It is a lively book, it says something about human nature, and I put my heart into it," he explained. The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and Religious Establishment in the New Age (1965) remains his most controversial book.
He hooked up with legendary publisher Jack McClelland in the mid-1950s because McClelland & Stewart were the Canadian distributors for Alfred A. Knopf, for whom Mr. Berton had written his first book on the Royal family. It was only after Klondike that M&S became his originating publisher.
For a while Mr. Berton was editor-in-chief of M&S. Mr. McClelland wanted to start an illustrated-books division and persuaded Mr. Berton to head it up by promising him it would take only one day a week. When this proved illusory, Mr. Berton, who had been hankering to do a book on the Canadian Pacific Railway, told his publisher that either he could stay on as editor-in-chief of M&S or he could quit and write another book, a book that would almost certainly be a bestseller.
He wrote The National Dream (1970) in three weeks, although he took a year to revise it. The Last Spike (1971) took longer to draft - a month - and the same amount of time to polish. Historian Michael Bliss got to know Mr. Berton and his work when he agreed to be the academic reader for the CPR books. "I came to that job with much skepticism, thinking he was probably a phony who relied on researchers, and then was quite surprised that the manuscripts were so good and that in conversation he clearly knew his material extremely well," said Prof. Bliss. " I thought that most (not all) of his later histories were also very good - especially his books on the War of 1812, the Dionnes, and Arctic Grail. He obviously had high intelligence, good writing skills, and a flair for story-telling, and what more does one want in a popular historian?"
The Last Spike won Mr. Berton his third Governor-General' Award. Both books sold about 130,000 copies each, thanks partly to a raucous publicity trip author and publisher made across the country getting everybody, including ourselves drunk along the way," as Mr. Berton remembered it. The railways books led to another triumph when the CBC produced The National Dream in 1974, a series of eight dramatized documentaries about the opening of the Canadian West and the building of the railroad based on his bestselling books. The series, introduced by Mr. Berton, netted 3.6 million viewers, a very large audience in English Canada, considering the average audience at the time was 3.1 million.
Flamboyant, daring, and fiercely patriotic, Mr. McClelland was the perfect marketer for Mr. Berton's colourful narratives about the building of the railroad, the opening of the West, the Great Depression, the War of 1812 and the Dionne Quintuplets. Together they rode the rollercoaster of cultural nationalism with Mr. Berton providing the content and Mr. McClelland supplying the razzmatazz. "He had a sense of books that was so different from the sense we had before," Mr. Berton said after Mr. McClelland died in June 2004. "Jack gave us something different, a feeling of confidence, a sense that Canadian books were the best and that Canadian books were something special."
Mr. Berton was a formidable presence, remembers Allan MacDougall, head of Raincoast Books in Vancouver. He was a "a wet-behind-the-ears salesman" at M&S when he met Mr. Berton back in 1972. "He was brusque and right to the point and it was quite obvious that he would not suffer fools, but after a very few meetings I realized that he was a complete professional and when the work was done he was always kind, interested and interesting. He had a great sense of humour and an ironic wit."
The relationship with M&S continued through 40 books and the sale of the financially beleaguered firm to real estate developer Avie Bennett in 1985 and only ended a decade later when Mr. Berton took his memoir My Times to rival publishers Doubleday. The dispute, as Mr. Bennett admitted publicly at the time, was about money. Mr. Bennett, who had taken a hard look at the balance sheet for Starting Out, the first volume of Mr. Berton's memoirs, was unwilling to offer a big enough advance to keep his author from straying. Mr. Berton's mega selling days were over.
So too were the days for the kind of history that he had made his own. When his 47th title, Onward to War, a history of Canadian's dutiful response to declarations of war in South Africa, Europe and Korea, was published in 2001, historian Modris Eksteins wrote in a review for the Globe: "Canada's historian," as his publishers are describing him in recent advertising, takes us with his usual narrative verve across sundry battlefields, of South Africa, northern Europe and Korea, but also Ottawa and other venues of our domestic political strife. Berton uses newspaper reports, memoirs, diaries and personal reminiscences with panache, leading us over vast historical terrain through the eyes of protagonists who were there.." But Eksteins, himself the author of two highly acclaimed books, wondered, "...is this kind of judgmental narrative what history should be in the 21st century? If the world changed in the last century as dramatically as Berton insists, can - or should - history be written in much the same way Carlyle and Macaulay presented it over a century ago? ...That vision of the past as an interconnected whole has shattered over the century about which Berton writes, as if hit by a mammoth artillery shell, but there's no sign of this in his account."
Mr. Berton will not be remembered for any great archival discoveries or new theories or interpretations of the past. His skill was in creating a large popular following for his recreation of the characters and events of the past. For the most part, says Prof. Cook, he wrote about conventional topics but he gave a life to them that was often lacking in academic studies.
"You could say that Pierre Berton was the Barbara Tuchman or Antonia Fraser of Canadian history," said Prof. Bliss. "I don't believe anyone before him wrote Canadian history for a popular market nearly so well, nor has anyone since. One didn't have to share Berton's passionate nationalism to like his books. The nationalism may have been somewhat conditioned by an optimism that has faded with free trade and other things, but I don't think it descended into chauvinism too often, and on balance was good. " Although his histories will stand as his enduring legacy, Mr. Berton also wrote illustrated books, memoirs, and The Secret World of Og, a children's novel of which he was particularly fond. He told an interviewer in 1988 that, "I get 30 letters a week from children who liked it. I got one that said, 'I'm six years old and this is the best book I ever read in my whole life.' " Even he admitted that his one foray into fiction, a 1985 sex fantasy called Masquerade that he wrote under the pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk, was a flop. He unmasked himself in the presence of reporters seven weeks after it was published, presumably to boost sales.
Sandra Martin