The Bronfmans: The Rise And Fall of the House of Seagram - Hardcover

Nicholas Faith is a distinguished veteran journalist, a former senior editor at The Economist and the London Sunday Times. He also founded and was chairman of the International Spirits Challenge, now the most prestigious event of its kind in the world. He has written twenty-three books, including The Winemakers of Bordeaux and Safety in Numbers: The Mysterious World of Swiss Banking.

The story of the Bronfman family is a fascinating and improbable saga. It is dominated by Mr. Sam, the single greatest figure in the history of the liquor business, the man who made drinking whiskey respectable in the United States and who in the 1950s and 1960s built Seagram into the first worldwide empire in wine and spirits.
After Sam s death in 1971, his oldest son, Edgar, maintained the business, though he was distracted by his matrimonial problems. Nevertheless, in the 1980s he masterminded a major coup when he translated a small investment in oil made by his father into a 25 percent stake in the mighty DuPont company.
But in the 1990s, Edgar allowed his second son, Edgar Jr., to indulge his ambition to become a media tycoon. The stake in DuPont was sold, and the money reinvested in Universal, the film and theme-park empire. Edgar Jr. then paid more than $10 billion to buy Polygram Records and thus fulfill his fancy to be king of the world s music business. But at the same time, he remained in charge of the liquor business, which started to stagnate indeed, to fall apart. Then came the final disaster when the increasingly divided family sold out to Jean-Marie Messier, overreaching empire builder of Vivendi, the French conglomerate.
But the story of this amazing family over the past century is about more than booze and business. The Bronfmans is a spectacular account that details the larger-than-life personalities and bitter rivalries that have made the family so famous and, sometimes, so infamous.

MR. SAM, NO ORDINARY MONSTER

WHEN I TOLD FRIENDS THAT I HAD BEEN COMMISSIONED TO WRITE ABOUT the Bronfman family, many of them muttered about "cement galoshes" and one serious citizen--a leading investment banker--warned me that the Bronfman family would infallibly take out a contract on me. Although this has turned into something of a joke between us, I found that until recently the threat could have been very real. One of his many mistresses had rebuked Edgar, the founder's elder son, when he talked of "knee-capping" someone. He retorted simply, "No, I meant it." And in the 1980s Edgar's son Edgar Jr. told an obstructive television producer that "in my grandfather's time we'd have killed you." Naturally these comments did nothing to dispel the continuing atmosphere of threat and mystery that still surrounds the family and obviously further whetted my appetite for writing a book about this extraordinary dynasty. Such stories still fascinate people several years after the Bronfmans have sold Seagram, the family firm, to Jean-Marie Messier, the French mogul widely viewed as "megalomaniacal" in his overweening empire building and self-aggrandizement, and the name has disappeared from the business scene. Clearly the Bronfman name, and the story behind it, has not lost its capacity to intrigue, and even frighten, the most sophisticated of onlookers.

The attraction is partly based on the family's wealth. This is still considerable. Even after the disaster of the sale to Messier the combined wealth of Mr. Sam's two sons, Edgar and Charles, amounts to over $5 billion, and there are probably several billions more in the hands of the rest of thisenormous tribe. But even more important is the reputation of the founder, Sam Bronfman, as "the last bootlegger," the one who went legit so successfully. For the story involves a double fascination, that of the billionaire businessman, combined with the mystery inevitably attached to any survivor of that enormous business, the supply of liquor to the American people during Prohibition. The description "bootlegger" haunted him--and his children and grandchildren--for seventy years after Repeal. One evening his youngest child, Charles, asked him in all innocence, "Daddy, what's a bootlegger?" Mr. Sam dropped the carving knife and said angrily, "Don't you ever say that word again." As late as 2000, sixty-seven years after Repeal, Messier could refer to the family's "bootlegger methods." Yet Mr. Sam, as he was usually called, believed that the mere fact that liquor was illegal in the United States was irrelevant because he felt, with some reason, that he was involved in a legal business, distilling liquor in Canada and exporting it to the US. So he was naturally upset that his trade turned him into a bootlegger and spent his life in an obsessive, and largely unsuccessful, attempt to gain respectability and the respect he felt, rightly, was his due.

This is not surprising, for in reality he was an authentic business genius, undoubtedly the greatest in the long history of hard liquor, indeed the man who really invented the whole industry in the US by exploiting the post-Repeal thirst for decent whiskey and made drinking hard liquor respectable for the first time in American history. He was a major creative force who understood that the key to lasting success was reliable quality, which for him implied blending well-aged spirits. That perception, reinforced by an obsessive perfectionism, proved to be in line with the willingness of ordinary Americans to respond to spirits which were not mere rot-gut.

While this book is about the rise and fall of a dynastic business, the family was so numerous, so widespread, the story of its members so complex, that I have simply not been able to write about the vast majority of the family--Sam's three brothers and four sisters produced innumerable progeny and, over a century, have multiplied into a considerable tribe. So I have had to confine myself to Mr. Sam, his offspring, and, of the third generation, only Sam and Edgar Jr., the sons of his elder son, Edgar.

But even within this apparently limited remit, the story is far more important and more widely relevant than that of a single family who escaped from the frozen poverty of the Canadian prairies to generate immensewealth within a few decades of their arrival from czarist Russia, or of a liquor company, however important, and a single individual, however gifted and fascinating. For the Bronfman saga also involves other, very different worlds, notably those of Hollywood and of the higher reaches of the French business aristocracy.

It also, and perhaps most importantly, shines a powerful spotlight on the fundamental changes in the mindset of the world Jewish community in the course of the twentieth century. Even in the face of the Holocaust, the normally dictatorial Sam, for thirty years the uncrowned leader of the Jewish community in Canada, could never summon up the courage to mount an open challenge to gentile politicians, for he perceived them as fundamentally unchallengeable--an attitude typical of Jewish leaders throughout the world. By the sharpest of contrasts, his elder son Edgar, as the long-serving president of the previously almost completely powerless World Jewish Congress, was able to mount repeated challenges to the most powerful enemies of world Jewry--like Swiss bankers and Kurt Waldheim, previously the secretary-general of the United Nations. He was even bold enough to criticize the leaders of Israel, a group accustomed to treat their brethren scattered throughout the world as what Lenin described as "useful idiots," cash cows without any right to a voice, especially so far as Israel was concerned.

 

 

The Bronfman saga starts in the 1890s in the bleak plains of Saskatchewan and ends just over a century later with a disastrous agreement reached in the gilded salons of a French conglomerate. In less than a century Seagram, their family company, first rose to become a dominant force in the world market for spirits, was becalmed for a generation, and then thrown to the wolves in the person of Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi. The founder had repeatedly warned his children of the oft-repeated motto "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Whether the fear was genuine, or whether it was simply that he knew that he wouldn't be there to control the activities of the third generation, is open to question.

After a poverty-stricken few years the family established itself as hoteliers, and then, after 1920, started to supply liquor across the forty-ninth parallel into a newly dry United States. Subsequently, as distillers as well as merchants, they continued to supply their thirsty neighbors until 1933, but they became truly, seriously, rich only in the 1930s and 1940s thanks to Mr.Sam's whiskies, most obviously 7 Crown. Mr. Sam then went on to pioneer, albeit more by chance than deliberate strategy, the totally original concept of a worldwide business producing and selling a wide range of wines and spirits from a dozen different countries. As a result, before Mr. Sam died in 1971 Seagram had become by far the biggest group in the world liquor business and remained a major, albeit declining, force over the following thirty years before its swift demise at the hands of Messier in 2000.

The continuing fascination of the--largely mythical--Mr. Sam begs an important question: why the myth was not attached to other former bootleggers like Harry Hatch of Hiram Walker, famous for brands like Canadian Club and Mr. Sam's great rival in the 1920s, or the appalling Lew Rosenstiel of Schenley Distillers, his archenemy in the United States after Prohibition. But perhaps the most telling contrast is with Joseph Kennedy, in every way a far more...