Lord Beaverbrook

...He was a brilliant talent scout...

...and had revolutionized the role of newspaper proprietor...

...In 1916 he acquired a controlling interest in the tottering Daily...

...His appealing mixture of the abject and insolent was calculated to appeal to the Presbyterian playboy...

...Beaverbrook later made him gossip columnist for the Sunday Express, and on the eve of World War II sent him to Paris to suss out the French attitude towards war...

...He wrote several histories, and in 1963 he married the half-Greek widow of his Canadian friend Sir James Dunn, a woman who had parlayed an 8-to-1 payoff in a horse race into a sizable fortune, and with her inheritance had a bank balance to rival Beaverbrook's own...

...His relationship with his children was fraught with thestresses between self-made man and the second generation: his son Max inherited his father's tendency toward dissipation without his brilliance or drive, became a fighter ace in WWII, and, tellingly, never used his father's title...

...He treated his wife churlishly, carrying on a twenty-year affair with socialite Jean Norton, whom he also cheated on...

...Though he was soon elected a member of Parliament, his career was dogged by stage fright and scuttled by his peerage...

...Beaver-brook, with typical flair for disingenuous rhetoric, took advantage of public support for the opposite principle by calling his own plan "Empire Free Trade...

...Evelyn Waugh's go-ahead parvenu Rex Mottram is redolent of the "unmistakeable chic—the flavour of 'Max' and `F.E.' and the Prince of Wales, of the big table in the Sporting Club, the second magnum and the fourth cigar...

...Beaverbrook loomed large in the public imagination for four decades...

...Yet he was desolated, by both his wife's death in 1927, at age 39, and Jean Norton's in 1945 at age 47...

...The man was summoned in from his game...

...An assiduous friend to the great, Beaverbrook had his own retainers...

...Along the way he collected the accolades listed above...

...There are few people, not even soi-disant anachronism Evelyn Waugh, whom one can see prospering less in the nitrogen-rich socialist chill of Clement Attlee's postwar Britain...

...The first and less obscure of the two is his success as Minister of Aircraft Production in the days leading up to and during the Battle of Britain...

...it was rather a private Hyde Park Corner...

...This was of pivotal importance when, in a game of political chicken, both Asquith and Lloyd George resigned...

...Amery called his idea "imperial preference" and conceived of it as an "unbroken tariff wall" surrounding Britain and her "possessions...

...Never a particularly deep thinker, Beaverbrook had 'one great idea, which went back to "jingo Tory" Joseph Chamberlain, and was forcefully espoused in Beaverbrook's time by Leo Amery...

...He died in 1964, and the greater portion of his ashes are apparently secreted inside a statue of him in Fredericton, New Brunswick...

...Full of such intimate anecdotes, this is a wonderful biography...

...Express...

...I just wanted you to know that you work for me 24 hours a day," said Beaverbrook, and hung up...

...Chastened for regularly arriving late to work at his uncle's bank, Castlerosse replied "Yes, but think how early I leave...

...The indolent and supercilious Herbert Henry Asquith—who wrote at least one of his famous love letters to his daughter's friend Venetia Stanley while actually in a cabinet meeting—was regarded as being uniquely suited to preside over the supposed country-house calm of the Edwardian era...

...But it was as a power broker that he performed the more obscure of his claims to consequence...

...By 1952 he was selling five million papers a day, more than anyone else in the world...

...Beaverbrook immediately gave the run-of-the-mill paper an energetic tone...

...To the party might be added at any moment starlets, socialists, poor relations, maharinis, backbenchers, and fellow plutocrats to form a bacchanalian juggernaut celebrated in the pages of half-a-dozen novels, including those of Arnold Bennett, Rebecca West, Michael Arlen, H. G. Wells, and Anthony Powell...

...His younger son Peter fell off a yacht and died...

...Its subject led a long, richly-peopled life, and Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie do an admirable job of explaining Beaverbrook's often murky role in events like Edward VII's abdication (the King once called Beaverbrook at the offices of the Daily News in New York to seek advice...

...As a child in New Brunswick he inclined towards anxiety and prankishness, had the obligatory pre-tycoon paper route, and later cherished legal ambitions...

...and his daughter, Janet, said to have inherited his temperament, married a pair of caddish aristocrats, one of whom pawned her jewelry to finance a honeymoon gambling spree for himself...

...Thereafter his fortunes rose, and by 1909 he'd made a pile financing Caribbean utilities and putting together shady, spectacular mergers...

...He was rarely in his office, preferring to travel armed with telephone and "soundscriber" dictating machine, by means of which he kept his newspapers on a tight rein—once delivering 147 directives to the Daily Express offices in a single day...

...by the twenties the Express was "worldly, optimistic, and classless...

...He had a retinue of society women, writers, peers, elder statesmen, and Bright Young Things, with whom he wended his way from nightclub to limousine to country house to Cate d'Azur through the interwar years...

...It is detailed, informed, and vivid...

...He employed the more promising Bright Young Things (Waugh lasted seven weeks as a reporter), ,and ex-foreign service officers like Harold Nicolson (who didn't last long either), and found it "very soiling to live among people so extremely empirical, quotidian, shallow, and mean...

...Lord Castlerosse met Beaverbrook during World War I, and later became his procurer and court jester...

...His control over his newspaper's editorial content was total...

...I haven't got much further than the bar at Fouquet's," was his response, "but no one at the bar at Fouquet's is going to fight for Danzig...

...Beaverbrook made a slow yearly orbit from London to New York to New Brunswick to Nassau to the South of France, where he entertained Churchill, by then a drooling octogenarian...

...Shortly thereafter Aitken, already Sir Max, was created 1st Baron Beaverbrook, against the objections of the King...

...y et despite the revelry, the glitter, and the chatter, the inordinate consumption of exotic vintages, the junketing, the dalliances, his "household bore little enough resemblance to what the outside world thought of as West End society...

...had influenced by cajolery, counsel, or hysterical opposition every administration since Asquith's...

...Beaverbrook had little use for the postwar world, for imperial decline, American pre-eminence, or the Labour government...

...11...

...On another occasion he reached one of his editors at his golf club...

...He left school, however, at 16, and sold insurance door-to-door until he formed an association with a banking family well known in the Maritimes...

...Chief among these was the suave glutton, pathological spendthrift, and femme fatale–bait nonpareil Valentine Castlerosse, son of the relatively impoverished Catholic Earl of Kenmare...

...He died of a heart attack in 1943, having told Beaverbrook, "I don't suppose any man owed so much to another as I do to you...

...His own soapbox was the Express...

...Aitken-orchestrated support fell to Lloyd George, and he became Prime Minister...

...This preoccupation had its rewards...

...Beaverbrook used his, control over the Express and his influence with Bonar Law to cement an alliance with the more bellicose Liberal War Secretary Lloyd George...

...Meanwhile, his long-suffering wife was raising their children...

...He spent freely, introduced serialized novels and crosswords, renovated the layout...

...Beanacrook," "Lord Crooks," an "animated little deformity," "the old brute," a "ruffian," "evil," "a diseased toad bottled in methylated spirits," "a sublime frog," a "golliwog itching with vitality," "one of the most corrupting influences in the country," "amoral," "a genius uncontaminated by moral indignation," "a strange little gnome with an odor of genius about him," or, simply, "a genius," William Maxwell Aitken was born in 1879 in Ontario, the son of a Presbyterian minister...

...When the case is being made for Beaverbrook as something other than a shady titan and intriguer, he is generally credited with two great—indeed, warwinning—achievements...

...During the twenties and thirties he flexed his proprietorial muscle by campaigning for tariffs, going so far as to field "Empire Crusade" candidates for Parliament...

...In 1910 he went to England—one step ahead of public opinion in his native Canada—and became an intimate of fellow Canadian Andrew Bonaf Law, leader of the Tory party...