Charles Bronfman chronicles his family’s Seagram empire
The philanthropist is attired in a fine pinstriped suit, his Order of Canada pin in his lapel, a pair of supple handstitched leather loafers upon his feet.
“Oh,” he says, when asked how he sees his younger self, scion of Mr. Sam Bronfman, one of four heirs — two male, two female — to the Seagram booze empire. “I was a total wimp. I had no ego.”
This comes early in the interview — and not as a surprise. Charles Bronfman, now 85, is touring his autobiography, in which he reflects upon his anxieties as a child.
He describes himself in the book as a “basket case.”
“I knew that of the four siblings, I was the weak one, I was the skinny one, I was the sickly one, I was the least bright,” he says.
“My older sister Minda, of whom I was very fond, was a gold-star student. Phyllis was a rebel but very talented. She was a sculptress when she was 13, 14 years old. Edgar was a bully but he was as bright as he wanted to be. “And then there was me.” It doesn’t end there. “I guess my best friend at that time, when I was 11 to 20 at least, was my dog. I used to talk with my dog. I used to have nice conversations with him. He would agree with me, of course. So that was my solace. I really felt encumbered by and dominated by everybody.”
Ultimate self-assessment: “I was not much.”
Charles Bronfman has fussed with his chair. “I don’t want to be higher,” he says, pushing aside a boardroom chair fixed at a lofty level in his publisher’s office. In Bronfman Dynasty, in which author Peter C. Newman defined the Bronfman clan as the Rothschilds of the New World, Mr. Sam would receive office visitors in what Newman described as a higher-than-usual green chair, “a device for making himself look taller than he really was.”
Charles Bronfman is slight, spry and a billionaire. So he’s not looking for tears here. “I thought it was interesting to put it into a book because it’s a real story of a real person who has got, you know, ‘Look at him! He’s got the world by the you-know-whats.’” He flutters his fingers in the air. “But eventually you come to grips with life. I’m very, very fortunate ... I am a contented man, unless you brown me off enough to remind me of what I wasn’t.”
Once upon a time, the Bronfman family built a fortune. Sam Bronfman was not the eldest son of Yechiel (Ekiel) and Mindel, Eastern European Jews who immigrated first to Wapella, Sask., but he emerged as the toughest. Ruthless would not be far off the mark as an early hotel business with robust liquor sales led to a single Montreal liquor store which grew to Distillers Co. of Canada with its own brands (Golden Wedding American Pure Rye Whiskey) and exclusive Canadian rights to Scotch and Irish whiskies (Green Stripe, Mitchell’s). By 1928, the company’s Montreal distillery could produce three million gallons of booze per annum. That same year, Distillers’ takeover of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons launched a company with a market valuation of $30 million. The merged company wasn’t the largest in the country — Walker-Gooderham and Worts could claim that title — but it was big.
The prohibition years in the U.S. stretched from 1920 to 1933, years in which Sam Bronfman and his brothers Harry and Allan flourished in no small part by meeting the parched needs of American consumers. “The value of the legally produced Canadian product soared as contraband in the United States,” Newman wrote in Bronfman Dynasty. “It was on this brutish trade that the Bronfman family’s fortune was squarely based.”
Appropriately, Charles Bronfman’s autobiography is titled Distilled, but it’s a pale straw distillation of an overproof tale. Sam Bronfman desperately sought acceptance into what Charles calls WASP society, be it a board spot at McGill University or the Bank of Montreal or the Mount Royal Club. Asked why his father was blackballed, the son says that financier and industrialist John Wilson McConnell “hated him for the old bootlegging stuff. Whether it was fiction or fact, it’s not for me to judge.” But of course it is. Charles Bronfman and his three siblings were raised in a Westmount mansion called Belvedere, attended to by a butler named Jensen and a chauffeur named Bordeau. He recalls Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits, bringing to mind velvet breeches and lace collars. The Bronfmans ate roast beef on Sundays.
School was an unhappy place. The end of a weekend brought on panic attacks. Enrolment at Trinity College School “ruined my education, it was such a screwed up place,” he writes. He offers that he had no head for finance. He dropped out of McGill at the age of 19.
Through it all he lived in the shadow of his older brother, Edgar. The voluble and volatile Mr. Sam “decided that Edgar was the one to run the business,” Charles says. “I was the one who would make the family name good ... I was not expected to do that well.” Edgar departed for New York in 1955, overseeing the bulk of Seagram operations. Charles stayed in Montreal, moving from sales for the Canadian operation broadly to running Adams Co., a Seagram subsidiary with little prestige that sold exclusively into the Canadian market. “It had several brands,” Bronfman writes, “none of which was very good.”
Seagram on the world stage was anchored by its modernist Mies van der Rohe skyscraper on Park Ave., built under the planning direction of Charles’s sister Phyllis and opened in 1958. The building stands for what was, and what is no more. In 1971, five years after fretting to Fortune magazine that he was worried about the third generation, Mr. Sam died. “Empires have come and gone,” he had told the magazine, citing the propensity of family firms to go from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.
There was trouble in the ’70s. “The company was not doing well. He was drinking too much,” Charles says of Edgar. “The company’s debt structure at that time was, uh, unpleasant.” The Seagram Building was sold to a pension fund for $85 million (U.S.) in 1979.
And there was brilliance: from oil and gas in the ’60s to its landmark deal in 1981 with E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. In the latter deal, Seagram had taken a run at Conoco Inc., lost to DuPont, and ended up with 24.3 per cent of the dividend-spinning chemical giant in exchange for its 28 million shares.
In the publisher’s boardroom, Charles Bronfman slumps his shoulders forward, lowers his head, gazes at the floor. This is the posture he assumed, he says, at the critical moments which led to an epic unravelling. In 1995, Seagram sold its DuPont stake, which had contributed close to $300 million in dividends the previous year. Three days later, Seagram announced a $5.7billion deal to purchase 80 per cent of the movies and music company MCA Inc. The third generation was at the helm, Edgar Sr. having personally anointed his son, Edgar Jr., without bothering to inform the board.
Charles Bronfman had no idea that the disposition of the DuPont stake had been two years in the making. “I guess that old relationship between my brother and me got in the way of a lot of things,” he says. He seems to have made no attempt to test possible board allegiances in opposition to the DuPont sale. Sitting in those board meetings, he never said no. He describes his inner state as one of emotional turmoil and wonders why none of the other board members noticed. Would it be harsh, one wonders, to describe him as ineffectual? “Well that’s quite possible, that’s quite possible.”
He says in Distilled, co-written with broadcaster Howard Green, that he did not want to start a family war. But he also allows that selling DuPont “put Seagram on the path to destruction.”
In June 2000, Edgar Bronfman Jr. led Seagram into a share swap with Vivendi SA, a one-time water and waste management firm transformed into an integrated media company. The offer placed a $77.35 valuation on Seagram shares, which, as Bronfman notes, had never punched above $65. Moneywise, it looked like a good deal. Less so in the heart. “We were now on an unstoppable train and Seagram was about to disappear with it,” Bronfman writes. “As with DuPont, it was at this point that I again put my head between my knees.”
Jean-Marie Messier was Vivendi’s leader. The less said about his leadership and misdirected acquisitions, the better. The short story is that Vivendi shares plummeted and while other family members timed their sales shrewdly, Charles did not. “I knew we had been hosed but I figured, well, it’s gotta go up,” he says. “It went down and down and down and then at $30 we were ready to sell.” He still had shares at 9 bucks.
A full portrait of Charles Bronfman includes his admirable devotion to philanthropy and his fantastically crazy determination to bring Major League Baseball to Montreal. His pioneering role in launching the Expos meant he was no longer just Sam Bronfman’s son. After Mr. Sam’s funeral, Charles and Edgar “put our arms around each other and swore to each other and swore to dad that we would be real partners.” Peter Newman saw that as a moment of closing one chapter and opening another. “Mr. Sam’s dynasty would hold,” Newman wrote in the last line of Bronfman Dynasty.
That proved not to be true. Charles Bronfman describes the nature of his relationship with his brother as “the major regret of my life.” Edgar Bronfman Sr. died in December 2013. Sister Minda died in 1985. Charles describes his relationship with Phyllis as “pretty good,” adding, “we’ll never be buddies.”
And Edgar Jr.? “We’re cordial.” When was the last time you spoke with him? “Oh dear,” he says, with a note of exaggeration, “I haven’t run into him.” jenwells@thestar.ca
Charles Bronfman and his three siblings were raised in a Westmount mansion called Belvedere, attended to by a butler named Jensen and a chauffeur named Bordeau