Katie Daubs on the real case behind her new book. The Missing Millionaire
The Missing Millionaire sheds new light on century-old mystery
Initially with this book, I worried that there would not be enough to work with. The most exciting part of it for me was finding how many layers there actually are to this story.
The Missing Millionaire: The True Story of Ambrose Small and the City Obsessed With Finding Him
Katie Daubs Mcclelland & Stewart
One hundred years ago this month, Ontario theatre magnate Ambrose Small closed a $1.7-million deal for the sale of his lucrative network of playhouses. He deposited a cheque in his bank account — and hours later was never seen again.
A few days after his Dec. 2 disappearance, there was a late-night telephone call to Toronto’s Grand Opera House, flagship theatre in the impresario’s empire, and the place he was last seen alive. The caretaker answered.
“Is that the Grand Opera House,” a male voice asked. “Would you like to know where Mr. Small is?”
“Why, certainly,” the caretaker replied.
“Well, keep your mouth shut,” the caller advised. “Or you will be in the same place as him.”
So what place would that be? Toronto Star journalist Katie Daubs set out to find the answer to this century-old mystery and was led down more than one rabbit hole along the way. “It’s a story so filled with myth and legend,” she says now, clearly relishing the challenge of trying to sort truth from fiction. Which is why, in her engaging new book, The Missing Millionaire, she devotes Chapter 26 to a good-natured rundown of the many explanations for Small’s disappearance.
Among her examples: “Ambrose Small was buried in the cellar of his mansion … Ambrose Small was kidnapped by a New York gang who wanted a big payday … Ambrose Small was burned in the furnace of the Grand Opera House in Toronto … Ambrose Small was gambling in Mexico in 1920 … Ambrose Small received chiropractic treatment in Winnipeg before he escaped to Austria … Ambrose Small haunts the Grand Theatre in London where he likes to steal the scissors in the wardrobe department.”
“I think the public appetite for this story surprised me the most,” Daubs says. She’s on the phone, on her way back from London, Ont., where she attended an Ambrose event at the Grand Theatre, which plans to première a new musical about Small’s spectral legacy next Halloween.
“I couldn’t believe that this was a story that went on and on and on even after the deaths of many of the main players.”
Those players constitute a memorable gallery of characters beginning with Small’s widow, Theresa, a devout Roman Catholic saddled during her turbulent marriage with a philandering husband. The ultimate beneficiary of his fortune, she dispenses much if it through charitable good works. Is she also a murderer? It takes weeks before she even admits that Ambrose is missing — his disappearance doesn’t hit the headlines until January — and after her death a purported “confession” emerges.
Daubs has a lot to say about Theresa in her exhaustively researched history, but she also urges readers to keep an open mind. Her own interest was whetted several years ago when she was working on an assignment about Toronto’s underground PATH network. She was fascinated to discover that Scotia Plaza occupies the bowels of the old Grand Opera House. Her realization that she was at the scene of one of Canada’s greatest mysteries led to this book.
It’s not the first book about Ambrose Small — indeed he even makes an appearance in Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion. But for the present volume, Daubs draws on newly unearthed archival material and on interviews with descendants of key players in a drama that continued for decades.
Among those players: Small’s longtime secretary Jack Doughty, who vanishes from the scene and then mysteriously turns up in Oregon; two litigious sisters; two policeman with conflicting views as to what actually happened Dec. 2, 1919; and finally the larger-thanlife character of Patrick Sullivan, a rogue cop from Alberta. Sullivan publishes a rabble-rousing anti-catholic tabloid, compares the Ontario government to maggots, heaps scorn on the competence of the Toronto police department and is a ferocious defender of the sisters’ claim to their missing brother’s wealth.
Sullivan is the kind of forceful personality who seems to be clamouring for his very own book, and Daubs had a field day writing about him.
“He loved being the hero of his own story ... he wanted to be the centre of it all. Yet his motivations always fascinated me — the way he kept on going even after being thrown into jail. I’ve never met a character like him.”
In probing the Small mystery, Daubs also found herself dealing with the culture of the times — political institutions, the workings of the business community, religious divisions, an ingrained class-consciousness.
“I found the theatre scene a really good place for understanding what was going on in Toronto,” Daubs says.
The 19th-century image of “Toronto the good” was under siege. And it was reflected, for example, in Small’s office correspondence dealing with complaints about chorus girls. “The moral side of the city just jumped out at you.”
Daubs found she couldn’t ignore tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants.
“I could allude to that because of the subtext of Theresa Small being such an ardent Catholic and the blowback that happened when she inherited all this money. People worried that she was going to give it all to Catholic charities.”
At the same time, Daubs suspects that Theresa’s virtuous actions may have earned her something of a free pass from Austin Mitchell, the “probably overwhelmed” detective who led the police investigation.
“Within the Toronto police force there was a real reluctance to question her. Because of the charitable role she played in Toronto society and because she lived in (the wealthy neighbourhood of ) Rosedale, they were very deferential toward her.”
Edward Hammond, the Ontario Provincial Police inspector brought in to re-examine the case, was far less deferential. His report, which is extensively examined in this new book, should have created waves. Instead it was quietly buried. The Toronto police closed ranks and continued to support the investigations of its own boy, Mitchell, whose notebooks and files had conveniently gone missing.
“Initially with this book, I worried that there would not be enough to work with,” Daubs says. “So the most exciting part of it for me was finding how many layers there actually are to this story.”
So the final chapter of her book carries a caution: “The story never ends ...”
I think the public appetite for this story surprised me the most. I couldn’t believe that this was a story that went on and on and on even after the deaths of many of the main players.
KATIE DAUBS