Throughout 1960, Peter remained as “Preview” editor and continued to keep in touch with his stringers across the country, urging them to come up with breaking and slightly unusual stories. Peter often called Murray Burt in Moose Jaw. “Got anything today, Murray?” Peter would ask. Peter was especially pleased if the news came from an unusual-sounding place like Elbow or Bienfait, pronounced Beanfate. In the “Preview” of Saturday, April 9, 1960, Burt predicted that if the CCF government of Tommy Douglas were to win the upcoming Saskatchewan election, it would embrace the British model of health insurance. In the same issue, “Preview” published a short piece, no doubt by Harold Horwood, on the growing reputation and price of Cape Dorset carvings and prints. On May 21, 1960, “Preview” included a paragraph on the dangerous rise in smoking, its link with cancer, and the worrisome fact that 80 percent of adults started smoking in their teens. (Did the “Preview” editor write this piece?)
One spring weekend in 1960, Peter and Jennie flew to New York. In an article that appeared in the July 2 issue, Peter began by claiming that Jennie and he had known the city for years by way of photographs and movies.9 They posed for photographer Frank Wolfe, a New Yorker hired by Maclean’s to record the visit. Several of Wolfe’s photographs were published with the article, including one of Peter and Jennie looking down into Central Park from the balcony of their hotel. Another photograph shows them inside the Guggenheim Museum. Peter had his photograph taken while lighting a cigarette in Times Square, which he thought “garish and sleazy.”
On the Thursday evening, Jennie and he arrived early at the Broadway production of A Thurber Carnival. In the lobby, they tried to guess the professions of fellow patrons. One distinguished grey-haired man they took to be an unsuccessful author. Next day they window-shopped at Tiffany’s, after which they had lunch with Fred Kerner. In the afternoon, they headed over to the Algonquin Hotel to see the Round Table made famous by, among others, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. They had already had a Dubonnet for lunch. At the Algonquin they ordered gin and tonic. Later, at a seafood restaurant on Third Avenue, they drank a “dreadful” rosé from Ohio. That evening they declared The Threepenny Opera so dull that they left early, hand in hand, to stroll through Greenwich Village. At the White Horse Tavern, once a favourite drinking spot of Dylan Thomas, they drank a stein each of beer and porter, followed by draft beer in another bar. At a bookstore that was open until 4:00 a.m. they bought two volumes of Irving Layton’s poetry, and a book of East Indian recipes.
On Saturday they rode to the top of the Empire State Building, and that evening, they took in The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft and a young Patty Duke, playing Helen Keller. Peter declared the play “an evening of wonder.” On Sunday morning, they spent an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue on the east side of Central Park, where they viewed Rembrandts and El Grecos, as well as Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, whose “rippling back” Peter admired at such length that Jennie had to nudge him on. They walked the short distance north to the Guggenheim. Peter declared that only two paintings, a Paul Klee and an Amedeo Modigliani, were worth their time.10 He dismissed the Guggenheim’s collection of Abstract Expressionists as nothing but “great gobs of brown on black and little burned things or bold, bare patterns of primary colors that bored us at a glance.”11 Afterward, they headed for Idlewild Airport. Their taxi driver happened to be the father of Jerry Orbach, one of the stars of The Threepenny Opera. Orbach senior labelled Canadians “cheapskate” tippers. Although Peter seems to have enjoyed New York in 1960, eight years later he declared the city rather dull.12
Back at his desk at Maclean’s, Peter continued to work on “Preview.” On July 16, he chose to include another article about attempts to ban smoking in public places in Vancouver. Meantime, according to the same “Preview,” Canadian Robert Goulet was scheduled to join Richard Burton and Julie Andrews in Camelot in October at Toronto’s new O’Keefe Centre. One section in “Preview” was called “The Mailbag,” which on August 27, 1960, printed a poetic letter whose first two lines, inspired by Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees,” read “I think that I shall never see / A sadder sight than my MP.” It was written by a twenty-one-year-old from Baie-Comeau, Quebec, who signed his name M. Brian Mulroney. He was responding to an article by Peter C. Newman, in which Newman had argued that $10,000 was too low an annual salary for MPs.
During the last four months of 1960, three feature articles by Peter appeared in Maclean’s. In October, “The Prisoner of Bordeaux,” based in part on the book Scandale à Bordeaux by Jacques Hébert, focused on Robert Sauvé, a twenty-year-old who had spent three and a half years without trial or treatment in the mental wing of Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison, a wing that was infested with cockroaches and rats, and homosexuals who, according to Peter, brazenly committed “unspeakable acts.” In the second part of the article, Peter did a short profile of Hébert. After working at Le Devoir from 1951 to 1953, Hébert had founded and edited the weekly tabloid Vrai, in which he defended underdogs. Hébert concluded that Sauvé’s greatest crime was daydreaming. He assembled a committee of nine lawyers, including Frank Scott and Pierre Trudeau,13 who managed to free Sauvé.14
Peter’s article, “The Raffish Tradition of the College Football Weekend,” appeared in the last issue of Maclean’s of 1960. Its subject was the championship game of the university football season.15 In 1960, McGill played against the University of Toronto. Much of the article was written in half-sentences such as “One girl knitting and chewing gum.” And “Band comes through leading conga line. Very Scott Fitzgerald … Band leaves. Car grows quiet.” Perhaps Peter was attempting to imitate the speaking style of university students. He travelled to Montreal so that he could return to Toronto on a special train with the McGill players and fans. Along for the ride was the McGill soccer team, one of whose members, Peter noted, looked like Robertson Davies, who had just been appointed lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College. As students sang “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Peter spotted a politician necking with two students.
Next day, at the pre-game parade, Peter stationed himself behind Claude Bissell, president of the University of Toronto and recently appointed chair of the Canada Council. Immediately in front of Bissell, four soldiers in nineteenth-century uniforms fired an antique cannon. “I hate bangs,” Bissell muttered as he moved backward toward Peter, who later slipped over to the Park Plaza for a beer. At the tea dance following the game, photographer Tom Davenport snapped Peter dancing with a baton twirler whom Peter described as “a pretty blonde in blue and white with bare legs and high white boots with tassels.” When the music grew agitated, Peter went home “for dinner.” At 1:30 a.m.! “Decide I should have brought my wife,” Peter later commented. Obviously, Jennie wasn’t amused.
Meantime, the “Preview” of October 22 dealt with topics of great interest to the editor. Would Toronto vote in favour of Sunday movies on Monday, December 5, when the question would be included in the municipal election? The same “Preview” predicted that wealthy golfers would soon be building private clubs, now that golf courses were being inundated by ordinary people. And Native reserves, according to the “Preview” of October 22, would soon be losing their “slummy look” thanks to a government-sponsored housing scheme of mortgages and two-bedroom bungalows easily assembled for $3,000.
With Peter C. Newman, Peter contributed to a four-section report on rising young Canadians. “The Stiffening Spine of a Soft Generation” appeared on March 25, 1961. Among the fourteen successful young people were M. Brian Mulroney and Adrienne Poy, whose short story “Ring Around October” was included. Their generation, Peter noted, suffered from malaise and boredom brought on by too much comfort.
The second