Corporate wife with wardrobes fit for a queen
By Jon Ashworth
A look at the 'intellectual Madonna' who changed from a raving Marxist to rampant right-winger
JUST over a year ago, Barbara Amiel, otherwise Lady Black, made the mistake of allowing a Vogue journalist to inspect the wardrobes of her London home.
One closet was packed with crocodile Hermes Birkin bags. Others contained furs, sweaters, day clothes, night clothes, belts, gloves, and “row after row of pantyhose rolled into perfect neat balls”. This was no ordinary corporate wife.
Amiel, 63 next month, has sat on the Hollinger board since 1996. She was born in Watford, and her parents divorced when she was eight. Her mother remarried when Amiel was 11, and the family emigrated Canada, and lived at Hamilton, near Toronto.
The teenage Amiel briefly left home, taking odd jobs in chemist’s and dress shops. In her 1980 autobiography, Confessions, she writes about her difficult adolescence and her fear of empty rooms and buildings. Left alone indoors, “I could find myself stranded, sitting in my own urine, sitting for hours too frightened to cry, and too frightened to move.”
Her father, whom Amiel idolised, committed suicide in 1956, when Amiel was 15. In 1959, she enrolled at the University of Toronto to study philosophy and English. There she met her first husband, Gary Smith, whose father was an acquaintance of Meyer Lansky, the gangster. The marriage lasted just nine months.
Aged 24, the five-months-pregnant, Amiel had an abortion, something she came to regret bitterly. “I was in too much of a hurry with my life,” she wrote in Confessions. “I couldn’t wait the extra four months and then, if the child was ‘inconvenient’ for me, put it up for adoption. I chose murder instead.”
Amiel had been grappling with an addiction to pills. “It had started in 1959 when I discovered that the muscle fatigue of long hours could be eased by taking drugstore remedies with codeine in them.” The drugs intensified her phobias, and she would see faces peering at her through the window.
After university, Amiel joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a typist, rising to become script assistant, story editor, and, briefly, television presenter. Having kicked codeine, she became addicted to Elavil, an anti-depressant.
At CBC, Amiel embarked on a five-year romance with George Bloomfield, a film director. She moved with him to New York and threw herself into a round of celebrity openings and galas. The mood at the time — left-wing and anti-Vietnam — suited Amiel’s image as a rabid socialist.
Returning to Canada in 1972, she fell in love with George Jonas, a fervently anti-communist refugee from the Hungarian revolution.
He transformed her from raving Marxist to rampant right-winger. He also helped her kick Elavil. They married in 1973.
By the mid-1970s, Amiel was a writer on Maclean’s, a Canadian weekly magazine. Christina Pochmursky, a Canadian television presenter and friend, once said that Amiel “was in the process of creating an identity, a kind of intellectual Madonna. She had to be right up on foreign policy, but she also had to have a very low-cut dress”.
Jonas and Amiel separated in 1979, but remained close. At 39, she moved in with Sam Blyth, a Toronto entrepreneur, who was trying to set up an adventure holiday company.
In 1980, during a trip to southern Africa, Amiel, Blyth and a friend were thrown into jail in Mozambique for lacking the correct visas. They spent ten days crammed in a stinking cellblock with 600 men and one other woman. Amiel contracted malaria and typhoid. The authorities finally let them go.
In 1983, Amiel became the first woman to edit The Toronto Sun newspaper. She resigned after a year to join husband number three, David Graham, a Canadian cable television entrepreneur, who was based in London.
The marriage lasted four years. She became a columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times, becoming known as the “Iron Lady of Wapping” for her attacks on the liberal establishment.
She married Conrad Black in July 1992.
Three years ago, the Blacks attended a Louix XVI-themed ball given by Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. Black came dressed as a cardinal while Amiel went for the busty Marie Antoinette look.
As she looks back on the past week’s events, Amiel may feel a bit like the French queen being led to the guillotine. But at least her wardrobe is in good shape |
