Wednesday 8 April
1998
Nick Auf der Maur
dies
JAMES MENNIE
The Gazette
 ADRIAN LUNNY /
Nick Auf der Maur, with daughter Melissa, ran
in a 1976 provincial election for Democratic
Alliance.
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"About 30 years ago, when I
was having a merrily irresponsible time working as a
waiter in a downtown restaurant, my mother became
worried about what I was going to be when - and if
ever - I grew up.
'A writer, Ma,' I would tell her,
'I'm going to be a writer.'"
- Nick Auf der Maur column,
Dec. 15, 1993
He lived well.
Nick Auf der Maur, journalist,
politician, raconteur and the man who for 30 years
was the quintessence of Montreal died last night
after a 16-month battle with cancer.
He would have been 56 years old
this Friday.
He passed away at his home in
downtown Montreal yesterday evening. His daughter,
Melissa, and friends were with him.
"We'll miss him, he's one of
the great characters in the city and one of the best
storytellers I knew, as raconteur, sitting at a bar,
or at a typewriter," said Gazette editor in
chief Alan Allnut.
"And he was a very
compassionate guy."
Nick loved his daughter Melissa,
politics, Montreal, Donald Duck, bars, being
outrageous, and the municipal district of Peter
McGill.
He also loved a good story,
especially if he got to tell it.
Nick's hats - two Borsalinos, a
Colombian fedora, a summer panama, and a gray
"Dick Tracy" - became something of a
trademark, as did a grenadier moustache and his
ability to run city business and write a newspaper
column out of a briefcase propped up on a bar.
He became this city's unofficial
ambassador to the world, the man out-of-town
reporters would call, meet up with in a downtown bar
and interview to get a crash course on how to
navigate this city's maze of politics and clashing
cultures. A visitor's then being shown where to get a
drink after 3 a.m. was just Nick's idea of proper
diplomacy.
But in the end, the hats, the
barside politics and anecdotes produced at the drop
of a cocktail coaster were just props were for the
live version of his performance, a one-man show for
tourists willing to put up with a haze of cigarette
smoke and a three-drink minimum to find out what Jean
Drapeau was really like.
The Nick Auf der Maur most people
knew, was, despite all of the colour that dashed
through his life, a creature of black and white, a
newspaper feature we never met except through a sheet
of newsprint over breakfast. It didn't matter if we
were drinking coffee, we were drinking it with Nick.
It was happy hour.
He drank and smoked too much and
sometimes - usually a few minutes before last call -
could be as opinionated and irritating as any other
saloon regular.
But he was also a born storyteller
lucky enough to have lived a life that was itself
something of a roman fleuve, seen this city at its
finest and at its worst and write it all down for the
rest of us.
He started doing it as a reporter
with this newspaper 30 years ago and then as a
columnist with the Montreal Star, the short-lived
Montreal Daily News and, finally, back with The
Gazette.
His charm - and when he wanted to,
he could have talked the devil out of his pitchfork -
was such that others would tell their stories to him,
and somehow he could share those stories in way that
didn't make them seem second-hand. That charm also
served Nick well in a less-professional context, and
while he may have been a regular fixture at Woody's
or Grumpy's pubs on Bishop St., he also seemed
inevitably accompanied by a different and usually
strikingly beautiful female on each visit.
Many people outside of the
newspaper business - and not a few within it -
disapproved of Nick's apparently lackadaisical
approach to his work as a columnist and a city
councillor.
But somehow he managed to do both -
and do them well - for nearly a third of a century.
Perhaps his professional longevity
can be best explained by an observation made by a
friend during one of Nick's election campaigns for
city council: "Half the people in his district
share Nick's lifestyle. The other half wish they
did."
He was born on April 10, 1942, the
youngest of the four children of J. Severn and
Theresa Auf der Maur, immigrants from Switzerland who
had come to Canada to explore Severn's conviction a
fortune could be made in mining. They arrived in
Canada a few months before the great stock-market
crash of 1929. Nick would recall later that his
father would confide to him that "Swiss timing
was not my forte."
Nick recalled that he was named
after St. Nicholas von Flue, a 14th-century Swiss
patriot canonized in 1947 - a ancestor he described
as "the real St. Nick."
Nick grew up in the neighbourhood
around St. Urbain St., and remembered a childhood
that was spartan, if not poor, one where Santa once
left a note in handwriting remarkably similar to his
brother Frank's promising to deliver presents during
his next visit during the Epiphany.
Thanks to a government grant paid
to him for compulsory service as a military cadet,
Nick was able to cover the $4 monthly tuition to
attend D'Arcy McGee High School, an experience that
would allow him to later boast of exploits on the
football field, recall his first kiss and establish
an enduring friendship with a fellow student named
Michael Sarrazin.
Sarrazin would eventually be
expelled from D'Arcy McGee and go on to a movie
career. Nick would drop a water bomb on one of the
Christian Brothers and eventually get first newspaper
job with The Gazette.
At the age of 18 and after a brief
attempt at an office career with the Sun Life
Insurance Co. (he would claim he was fired after a
month for getting on top of a desk to recite a poem),
Nick travelled to Europe, winding up predictably in
Geneva where he worked as a milkman and, much to his
surprise, discovering he had inadvertently dodged his
mandatory military service in the Swiss army. He way
he told it, he fled to Greece with a female companion
and, nearly two decades later, received a retroactive
discharge from the Swiss military from the Swiss
counsel in Montreal.
Nick's career in newspapers began
with The Gazette in 1964 as copyboy making $35 a
week.
He would be arrested his first week
on the job (the charge, over the passage of time,
forgotten, but the cause of the arrest believed to
have been linked to late night reveling) and bailed
out by a local night club owner.
Nick made good his debt to his
benefactor by managing to write a positive rock
review of an act playing at the club. He was not
discouraged by the fact the knew nothing of rock and
roll or critical writing.
The review would provide Nick with
his first byline. The band in question, Frank Zappa
and the Mothers of Invention, would return to
Montreal from time to time.
Nick eventually became a reporter
and covered Expo '67, where his diplomatic duties for
wave after wave of visiting foreign reporters would
be honed. A year later he was covering the efforts of
a disgruntled provincial Liberal named Rene Levesque
to form a political party called the Mouvement
Souverainete Association.
He also found himself a part of the
wave of radical dissent that was sweeping North
America during the late 1960s.
"The bunch of us had thrown in
our lot with something called the Mouvement de
liberation de taxi, a group dedicated to ridding the
airport of its Murray Hill limousine monopoly. In
those days, we here in Montreal were always looking
for suitable working-class issues, as opposed to the
''student'' issues that seemed to dominate left-wing
American politics.
"It seems that all it took
back then to organize a full-scale riot in Montreal
was a suggestion, and lots of beer."
- Sept. 16, 1987
In 1969, however, Nick left
newspapering for the CBC, an association that would
lead to his meeting Toronto native Les Nirenberg and
their collaborating on television program entitled
"Quelque Show."
At about the same time he would
find himself editing the Quebec edition of a
politically radical magazine called The Last Post, a
publication he would later recall as a publication
for "left-wing muckraking."
It was during this period that Nick
accumulated a series of flamboyant anecdotes,
international in their scope, including a trip of
Moammar Khaddafi's Libya a visit that included a stay
in a hotel apparently full of professional terrorists
and which he described as making him feel as if
"I was in the middle of pyromaniac's
convention."
However Nick's association with the
political left, a relationship he would later admit
he cultivated in an effort to merely to meet women,
wound up providing him with what would be - for a
non-francophone - the anecdotal equivalent of the
Medal of Honor.
"It started on Monday, Oct. 5,
1970, with the kidnapping of British trade
commissioner Richard Cross by members of the Front de
Liberation du Quebec, a terrorist organization that
had been around in one form or another since 1963.
"The authorities rebuffed the
FLQ's demands. So another group (they called
themselves cells) kidnapped Quebec Labor Minister
Pierre Laporte a week later. And then on Oct. 16, the
federal government, acting on what it said were
requests from both the Quebec government and the city
of Montreal, invoked the War Measures Act and
arrested about 495 people, none of whom had anything
to do with the kidnappings but were for the most part
agitators, troublemakers, bigmouths and so on. That,
of course, included me."
- Sept. 20, 1995
Nick's incarceration was not the
stuff of romantic legend. He was held in a cell
across from that occupied by Gerald Godin, who would
go on to become a Parti Quebecois cabinet minister.
And his stay at the Parthenais St. detention centre
would be highlighted by the receipt of a car package
from his mother that included a Montreal Canadiens
hockey sweater and a prayer book.
Nick was released and continued to
rake muck. But on March 17, 1971, an event occurred
in his life that would steady if not straighten its
course.
Melissa, a daughter whose progress
to adulthood readers would follow for more than 15
years, was born to Nick and Linda Gaboriau.
By the time she had turned three,
her father had gone into politics.
"It can become easy for a
politician to develop a slightly detached view, a
thick hide, and see things in a depersonalized way.
It's a knack I haven't quite mastered."
- Sept. 5, 1984
In 1974 Nick founded with Bob
Keaton what they hoped would be a political party to
challenge Mayor Jean Drapeau's iron authority at city
hall.
To everyone's surprise, not the
least Drapeau's, the Montreal Citizens' Movement
elected 13 councillors to city hall, including Nick,
who added to the general sense of euphoria by beating
John Lynch-Staunton, the mayor's right hand man.
But within two years and displaying
an indifference to party affiliation that would
become a hallmark of his political career, Nick left
the MCM and founded a provincial party - the
Democratic Alliance - created in time to challenge
Robert Bourassa's Liberals in the 1976 election.
Running in Westmount against a
hastily recruited Liberal candidate - George
Springate - Nick was defeated.
But if 1976 was unrewarding for
Nick politically (a complaint the defeated Liberal
government could share as Levesque's PQ took the
reins of power) his profile was raised by the
publication that year of "The Billion Dollar
Games" a quickly produced and vitriolic
assessment of cost overruns for Montreal's Olympics.
The book would be credited with the eventual creation
of a provincial inquiry into the Olympian debt
Montrealers would end up spending two decades trying
to pay off.
Within two years, and running under
the banner of the Municipal Action Group (another
party he co-created), Nick was re-elected to city
hall, becoming along with the MCM's Michael Fainstat
the opposition to Drapeau's Civic Party.
In 1980, Nick took a break from
city politics to sit as president for the No
committee in that year's referendum campaign in the
riding of St. Anne.
He would be re-elected to city
council - again as a member of MAG - during the 1982
MCM election victory.
But once again, he would leave city
politics two years later to run in yet another
election - this time federal - as a Conservative
candidate on Brian Mulroney's slate. Pitted against
Liberal incumbent Warren Allmand in the west end
riding of Notre Dame de Grace, Nick would lose by
3,000 votes and earn the dubious distinction of not
being part of that year's Tory landslide.
On Sept. 14, 1986 - two months
before his attempt at another term at city hall as an
independent candidate, Nick was arrested for
obstructing a peace officer after he is found in an
after hours bar on Lincoln St. The arrest seems to
place his re-election chances in doubt, but by the
time the votes are counted, he was been re-elected by
48 votes, a victory attributed to the congregation of
Grey Nuns who voted for him en bloc.
Three months later, the obstruction
charge is dismissed because of a lack of evidence.
As an independent candidate, Nick
opposed the MCM's controversial purchase of a
$300,000 piano and was the only councillor to vote
against changing the name of Dorchester Blvd. to Rene
Levesque Blvd.
In August of 1988, even the most
jaded observer of Nick's acrobatic to political
affiliation were shocked when he announced he had
decided to join the Civic Party - the same Civic
Party whose policies had prompted him 14 years
earlier to enter politics as an opposition candidate.
It was however, a romance that was
not destined to last. By November of 1989, after
months of not so private feuding with the party
establishment, Nick was expelled from the Civic
Party, a move he said was deliberately taken to
pre-empt his announcement he would resign.
Four days later, Nick would join
the Montreal Municipal Party, a jump that would
eventually leave him leader of the official
opposition at city hall.
In 1990, and despite rumors he had
spent more time at his favourite downtown watering
holes than campaigning, Nick defeated former MCM
colleague Arnold Bennett by 300 votes in Peter
McGill.
There was talk at the time of
Nick's apparent invulnerability in the downtown core.
But it was talk that had a nervous edge.
Eventually, Nick and the Montreal
Municipal Party would sour on each other and by 1992
he was sitting once again as a member for the Civic
Party.
It would be his last term as
councillor for the district.
"For some people, birthdays
are dates of dread. Some people fall into morose
depression as they contemplate their 30th birthday,
figuring it's all downhill from there...Well, as you
get older you realize those 30-year-old punks don't
understand anything at all. The 40th is the big one.
And then you hit 40, and it comes to you that really
the 50th is the important one...And I suppose when I
hit 50, I'll realize that it's the 60th, or the 65th
or maybe the 80th that really counts.
" Maybe by that time I'll have
reached such maturity and wisdom to realize birthdays
don't matter at all, that it's not the age of the
body that counts but the state of the spirit."
- Sept. 28, 1987.
On April 10, 1992, Nick turned 50
and was feted at a downtown restaurant by a galaxy of
political and media colleagues. Prime Minister Brian
Mulroney sent a telegram of congratulations,
explaining his attendance at the affair might cost
him what little reputation he had left. Robert
Bourassa, then premier of Quebec, also sent a
telegrammed tribute, rounding out an evening
highlighted by an apparently unprovoked display of
yodeling by Nick's mother.
In October of 1993, infighting
among the members of the Civic Party's executive led
to Nick's resigning from the party to sit as an
independent. In the ensuing 11 months, Nick enjoyed a
brief flirtation with a stillborn political party
called Action Montreal, but by the time Pierre
Bourque's Vision Montreal party prepared to do battle
at the polls in November of 1994, Nick was running as
an independent, running alone.
After he was defeated, after it had
been determined that the Grey Nuns who had helped him
hang on to office eight years earlier had turned
their backs on him, Nick grudgingly acknowledged that
dismissing a group of north end constituents who had
sought annexation to Westmount as "bourgeois
slime" might have had an effect on his political
chances.
He told a reporter the night of his
defeat that he would not be moving to Toronto - but
he was out of politics.
Nick returned to writing a
freelance column for The Gazette and watching amazed
as his daughter achieved fame and fortune as bass
guitar player for Hole, the band fronted by Courtney
Love.
And then, in December of 1996,
after experiencing a pain in his neck he attributed
to a pulled muscle, Nick went to see his doctor and
learned he had throat cancer.
It was Christmas Eve.
"Last year, I wrote about the
cancer forcing me to confront my own mortality. In
these circumstances, you are left no option.
But that doesn't mean sitting
around feeling miserable and sorry for yourself.
"Sure, I go through a lot of
introspection. When I lie down for a nap or for the
night, waiting for sleep to claim me, thoughts race
through my head. I sometimes sense the damp, humid
presence of death.
"But my morale is such that I
am not intimidated. This is partly because I've had
an exceptionally good time in my life, did just about
everything I wanted. I don't in any way feel
cheated."
- Dec. 28, 1997
As with just about everything else
in his life, Nick's illness found its way into his
column. But somehow, despite the grimness of the
subject, of fighting a disease painfully familiar to
many of his readers, Nick somehow managed to bring
his own set of rules to that fight, to face eternity
rather in the same way someone might expect a bar
bill at the end of a very long, very entertaining
evening.
Nick's battle with cancer was the
one story he never got to finish, the column he never
wrote. Instead, it's a story that will completed by
hundreds of friends, some great, some decidedly less
so, who will recall their particular version of a man
who was not so much a part of this city as he was
someone who made this city a part of himself.
For those of us who knew him as a
friends, a colleague or simply the guy to phone when
you wanted to know what Jean Drapeau was really like,
there are a thousand little details that will be
retained long after the official eulogies have been
said, after the it has finally sunk in that this
truly was the last call.
Nick never wrote his memoires, he
was simply too busy gathering material for them. But
the blueprint of his life can be found in a black and
white memorial he spent two decades building.
Because in the end, Nick Auf der
Maur loved a good story.
Especially if he got to tell it.
"I've changed newspapers,
which journalists are allowed to do. I've changed
political parties. The reasons were always different,
but I always felt I was doing the right thing. Maybe
I was wrong, but I believed them to be the right
things to do. Most of all, I believe - and this, of
course, might seem terribly immodest - that I served
both journalism and politics well. In short, I like
to believe I did my duty."
- Nov. 9, 1994
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