“On the Friday before Labour Day, 1964,” Peter wrote in The Private Voice, after he, Fulford, Moon, Stein, and Bruce had handed in letters of resignation, they ordered “a jeroboam”25 of champagne. In Ralph Allen’s old office, they posed for a camera, drank the contents of the bottle, smashed their glasses, and staggered up University Avenue to the roof bar of the Park Plaza.26
The imbroglio at Maclean’s drew the attention of Edmund Wilson, the eminent American literary critic, thanks to a meeting, chance or otherwise, in the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza with Peter. In O Canada, his book on Canadian culture, published in 1965, Wilson chastised management and noted that “Mr. Gzowski and his associates succeeded in transforming Maclean’s … into an outstanding journalistic achievement.”27
The following October, Peter embellished his own role in the mass resignation. In Canadian Forum, his article “The Time the Schick Hit the Fan and Other Adventures at Maclean’s” claimed that his piece about Punch Imlach the previous March had mentioned briefly that “Sixteen Leafs … recently lined up for a certain razor-blade ad — and got their fifty dollars each without even having to shave with one blade.” He hadn’t named the razor-blade company in question, but it was pretty obvious that it was Schick. Although the company didn’t advertise in Maclean’s, the article had put it off, and it threatened that it might never buy ad space in the magazine.
In the Canadian Forum article, Peter praised Ken Lefolii for never soliciting “the unadulterated support of advertisers.”28 Peter liked to think that his own resignation kept him aloof from corporate interference. Thus he preserved the mythology that he was a “competitive, self-contained actor who was quite immune to the contaminations of commercial, political, or even personal pressure.” (Of course, how seriously dare one take the Canadian Forum piece? A few years later, in February 1970, when he testified before the Davey Commission on the mass media in Canada, Peter informed Senator Keith Davey that the Canadian Forum article had been meant in jest.)29 In reality, Peter himself always followed the unspoken rule that a magazine, or later, his early radio shows, had to respect its corporate sponsors. All magazines, and all CBC Radio shows up to the mid-1970s, needed as much advertising revenue as they could find. Years later, Peter welcomed sponsorship money for his charity golf tournaments.
In December 1965, when he addressed journalism students at Memorial University in St. John’s, Peter slammed both management interference and journalistic hypocrisy. Since publishers were, he claimed, members of the Canadian Establishment, Maclean’s would never criticize Sam Bronfman, for fear of alienating Seagram’s. Any sportswriter, he told them, who wrote the truth about Carl Brewer’s resignation from the Maple Leafs earlier that year — that he “hates the guts of ‘Punch’ Imlach” — would never be allowed back into the hockey club’s dressing room.30 A few days later Peter joined Robert Fulford at the annual conference of Canadian University Press (CUP) at the University of Alberta. No, he told reporters, he wouldn’t speak about his resignation. However, he did lash out at reporters for self-censorship and at the power of the press. Even Peter C. Newman and Blair Fraser, he told reporters, had become too intimate with the Ottawa establishment. The headline over the article, as published in the Toronto Star, announced “Press Said Confused, Trivial,”31 which sounds like Peter’s own words.
Peter’s last feature in Maclean’s in 1964, though written no doubt before the mass resignation, was published on September 19, after Borden Spears was appointed executive director, a position that incorporated Lefolii’s and Gzowski’s old positions of editor and managing editor respectively. Peter’s subject was golf. To write “Arnie Recruits His Canadian Army,” Peter had returned to Montreal in late July to watch Arnold Palmer compete in the Canadian Open. During a pre-game practice, Peter joined “Arnie’s Army,” Palmer’s numerous fans who followed the golfer from hole to hole. There were so many movie cameras, Peter complained, that they sounded “like a flight of swallows on a summer evening.” He was vexed that one of those home movie cameras had captured an image of him. By 1964, Palmer had become such a mythological figure that Peter had difficulty realizing he was watching the flesh-and-blood player. Even when Palmer failed to win the Open that year, he graciously signed autographs. Palmer was Peter’s ideal sportsman — skillful and magnanimous.
Unlike Palmer, Peter never learned to lose magnanimously. His competitiveness was so intense, Harry Bruce recalled shortly after Peter’s death, that it verged on the offensive. Peter simply had to win, Bruce explained, whether at soccer, tennis, shooting baskets, liar’s poker at the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza, handball, snooker, chess, Chinese checkers, Monopoly, poker, bridge, and all other card games. He smelled of ambition, as well as of cigarettes and brandy.32
Peter loved to win bar games played with Dennis Murphy, Susan Musgrave, Diana LeBlanc, and others. “Gzowski (or perhaps his estate) still owes me $320 for several backgammon victories at speakeasies around Toronto,” Murphy once recalled. “He hated to lose and proved it by seldom paying debts.” Peter had a baseball board game at the family home. Because he knew the game inside out, he always trounced Dennis, who grew to loathe the game.33
Each year staff members at Maclean-Hunter enjoyed a golf tournament. Rather than playing against par, players were paired off in match play, a bit like a tennis tournament. The event was staged over several weeks. One year, one of Peter’s opponents was John Millyard, an editor of one of Maclean-Hunter’s trade magazines. During the first nine holes on a course north of Toronto, Millyard had the edge. Peter wasn’t amused, but he was certain to catch up and win.
On the eleventh or twelfth hole Peter hooked his ball into trees to the left of the fairway. The ball was lost, so Peter, following the rules of the game, hit a provisional tee shot. Now Peter was behind on this hole.34 In silence the two men walked up the fairway to hit their next shots. Millyard addressed the ball for his second shot.
“You’re taking too much goddamn time!” Peter shouted.
Millyard made another good shot. Peter hit his provisional ball fairly well down the fairway. The two men were now lying Millyard two, Gzowski four.
Peter disappeared into the woods. Was nature calling? A few minutes later he emerged, waving a ball he claimed to be the lost one. He announced that he was going to take a drop outside the woods for one stroke and play the lost ball instead of the provisional ball. Millyard knew that if the original ball had indeed been found, the rules for match play clearly stated that the ball had to be played from the point where it had come to rest, deep inside the woods.
“Now I’m lying three not four,” Peter announced.
“But you’ve already played the provisional ball for your fourth shot,” Millyard protested. “You can’t revert to the first ball. The game has rules, you know.”
Peter’s face turned crimson. Once again he swore at Millyard, who quickly decided that discretion was indeed the better part of valour. So he let Peter break the rule. Peter lost, anyway. There was no post-game drink.
Always the novelist or short-story writer, a couple of years later, in one of his sports pieces in Saturday Night, Peter fictionalized the match. “Peter” was working for “a large company” at the time. “All employees who played golf,” he wrote, “had the day off in the spring, and the sixteen low medalists in that round then entered on a summer-long series of elimination matches.” Suddenly, Peter’s imagination kicked in. He had made it to the finals. John Millyard became “Good Old Charlie,” a “nice fellow” from the accounting department. After fourteen holes, Peter had him four down. “All I had to do, in other words, was tie one of the remaining holes and I was the winner, the champion.” Peter could taste victory. He imagined himself “humbly accepting the President’s Trophy.” However, on the nineteenth hole, Charlie sank a long putt to win the match.35 In the fictionalized version, Peter’s language is pure. Throughout the remainder of the summer, “Jennie,” another character in the story,