Biography:Conrad Black did not co-operate with this biography, but then an accused man seldom co-operates with his prosecutor. This is the case against - a finger-pointing, court-room exposé of a self-obsessed, celebrity-seeking press baron, who looted his company so that he and his monstrous wife could live a billionaire lifestyle.
The sub-title of this book could have been "Schadenfreude". Those spurned and insulted by Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel on their way up have taken their revenge by providing Tom Bower with endless stories about how awful they were. Erstwhile companions now cut them dead. Bower relates a telling incident.
The publisher telephoned a billionaire in New York and asked if he would contribute a million towards his defence on fraud charges. "You're my best friend," he said. "Surely you can lend me $1 million?" "Well, Conrad," said the billionaire, "What's my private telephone number?" "I don't know, why?" "Well, if you were my best friend, you would have it."
Conrad Black's rise began in 1978 when he gained control of Argus, a big Canadian holding company, using "animal cunning" against a couple of rich widows. He created Hollinger Inc., and bought up scores of newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, and made them vehicles for strident pro-Israeli conservatism. In 1991 he and Kerry Packer won a bitter fight with Tony O'Reilly over control of the Australian Fairfax Group, during which O'Reilly accused Black of being an "interventionist, right-wing pro-Thatcherite owner" and Black raged against "O'Reilly and his pimps". In Britain he meddled in Conservative party politics and gained a peerage, jettisoning his Canadian citizenship to become Baron Black of Crossharbour.
In London, the Blacks threw glittering parties at their Kensington home.
Barbara Amiel, the Sherpa Tensing of social climbing, bullied her husband into buying a Gulfstream. She screamed at her maids, demanded that the butlers stay out of sight, and collected hundreds of expensive but rarely-worn dresses and shoes. She merits her own biography. In fact as a sex-driven British journalist in 1980, before Conrad came along, she wrote a autobiography called Confessions. It was so explicit that Black wanted to destroy every copy.
Black was besotted with Amiel, a beauty whose generous breasts clearly fascinate the author. She herself kept a tight grip on his Lordship, once telling attractive writer Nicola Formby at a party, "Beat it, you've been with my husband long enough". Known to her catty foes as "Attila the Honey", she clung to her pretensions even when her phoney world was crumbling around her. When the Hollinger company secretary said, "Mrs Black, pull yourself together," during a directors' conference call in 2003, she shouted, "It's Lady Black, you bastard!". Black lost everything after an inquiry by former SEC head Richard Breeden uncovered his "corporate kleptocracy". It also showed that the commercial judgements of his luminous neo-con directors, Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, were as worthless as their political judgments. Kissinger failed in his duty as a director of Hollinger to inquire what was going on, and Richard Perle, well rewarded by his association with Black, enabled him to loot the publishing company by signing resolutions he didn't bother to read.
Lord and Lady Black deserve to be hissed off the stage. But like music-hall villains, they are portrayed by Bower as one-dimensional figures. They can't have been that bad: Black had a certain self-important charm. He wrote a bestseller, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, in 2003, and he would sometimes take his domestic staff to dinner. Amiel has the sassy gall to tell Prince Charles at a crowded party, "Will you excuse me? I must work the hall," and then walk off, "her bosom spilling out"of her flaming red dress. And she is standing by her man in bad times as well as good.
The author takes some liberties in reconstructing the motives, emotions and conversations of the power couple, but the duplicitous Lord Black, who faces a possible prison sentence on fraud and racketeering charges in the US next year, is in no position to complain about that.
This book is a cautionary tale for those who believe that wealth sets them apart. The Blacks lost touch with reality as they jetted from London to New York and Palm Beach. Barbara Amiel became a figure of fun to her guests because of her presumption that the rich are expected to behave in a lordly manner. F Scott Fitzgerald could have been writing about this awful twosome when he had a character in a short story say: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . . . they think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are". They aren't. Sometimes they're worse. And when they fall from their grand heights, their biographers can be merciless.
Conor O'Clery is writing a biography of the philanthropist, Charles (Chuck) Feeney