'Friends and Enemies' Review: Making Her Own Black List

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Barbara Amiel is the wife of Conrad Black, the newspaper tycoon who was convicted of fraud and went to prison in 2008. Now, a year and a half after his pardon from President Donald Trump, comes her memoir, a tome nearly 600 pages long. When it comes to those who have crossed her, the word "pardon" is not in her lexicon.

Ms. Amiel leaves no score unsettled in this waspish, often scandalous, gossipy, vengeful, intimate chronicle of her tumultuous life (there's even a "friends and enemies" list at the end). It's also disarmingly frank, funny and very well written.

Lord Black of Crossharbour (his full title when he was made a life peer in 2001) was chairman of Hollinger International, the media company that owned, among other publications, the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times. After their marriage in 1992, the Blacks led a life of extraordinary opulence: Lincoln Center galas, A-list parties, two private jets, mansions in Kensington and Palm Beach, an apartment on Park Avenue and a house in Toronto. Then, in 2003, things started to unravel as investigations began into Lord Black's financial dealings.

Ms. Amiel, who is now 80, was no stranger to adversity. She had a difficult childhood, growing up during the Blitz in Hendon, a suburb of London, and encountering anti-Semitism at an early age. Her parents divorced when she was 8. Three years later, her stepfather moved the family to Hamilton, a steel town in Ontario. Her mother made frequent attempts to kill herself. When Ms. Amiel was 14 she left home, continuing high school while living in rented rooms. Her natural father committed suicide. She started using codeine, a morphine derivative. "After taking the tablets my spirits got a hit of euphoria . . . All I needed then were an occasional couple of pills. All I need now are a couple or at max three or four a day." She swallows them with a cocktail of Carnation evaporated milk and Ribena, the blackcurrant drink given to British children. Where on earth did she come up with that concoction? She doesn't say.

Before she became Lady Black, Ms. Amiel had a hugely successful career in journalism. In 1983 she became the first woman editor of a daily Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Sun. She married three times and moved to London, where, in 1986, she became an outspoken conservative columnist for the Times. After 9 years, she went to the Daily Telegraph. She was beautiful, addicted to "raiment," and had a succession of lovers, including a toy boy "so physically perfect a specimen that you really wanted to put him nude on the mantelpiece." She declares: "The perception of me was that of a cool seductress, rippling and swirling through life. And perhaps when you so describe yourself in spite of yourself, some of the cheaper characteristics do rub off on you."

They do indeed. Modesty is not one of the attributes of this latter-day Becky Sharp. She writes unblushingly of an encounter with a Doberman who licks whipped cream, “probably horrid artificial stuff,” off her naked body in a stranger’s apartment. She relates how in London she meets the well-connected party-giver, 68-year-old book publisher George Weidenfeld. She finds him physically repulsive. However, “being with him, I thought rather calculatingly, gave me access and some status.” So she dutifully gets down to business.

The affair with Weidenfeld brought her third marriage to an end, after which she was clinically depressed for two-and-a-half years. Then she met Conrad Black. He made the decision to marry her, she writes, when they drove in a Bentley back from a Wiltshire weekend and she requested that he arrange her place at a dinner he was planning. She wanted to sit next to publishing mogul Robert Maxwell (now deceased) so she could ask him for a job. When Lord Black proposed a few weeks later, they hadn’t even exchanged a kiss. The marriage took place in Chelsea, followed by a lunch given by Ambassador Walter Annenberg at Claridge’s in honor (seriously) of the Queen Mother.

After the wedding, Ms. Amiel is thrown into “a maelstrom of entertaining and being entertained” by celebrities and billionaires. “Just bring patio jewellery,” Texan philanthropist Lynn Wyatt says as she proffers an invitation to her villa near Monte Carlo. Ms. Amiel writes: “Patio jewellery, it turned out, meant huge, perfectly spherical and polished turquoise beads alternating with full-cut diamonds.” When banker Jacob Rothschild inquires whether the heavy tiara she’s wearing as a necklace is uncomfortable, she replies, “Diamonds, Jacob, are always comfortable.” She tells an interviewer at Vogue that as a girl she was forced to wear hand-me-downs. So now, she confesses, “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.” This comment, inevitably, she lives to regret.

One day, walking along the sand in Palm Beach with Ghislaine Maxwell (currently awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking for the late Jeffrey Epstein ), the two women discuss how many bathrooms they have. Ms. Amiel reports, “Mine came to an astonishing thirty-nine.”

It comes as no surprise to read that she runs into flagrant anti-Semitism in that WASP haven. At a party she hears it proclaimed outright: “ ‘You understand,’ said the tall red-trousered man with harmonizing bright reddish face who was the very first guest I encountered, ‘we simply can’t let the Jews into Palm Beach.’ ”

When Ms. Amiel recounts how quickly her society friends and money melted away after her husband’s indictment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for her. Yet the second half of her book, which is devoted to a nonstop detailed account of the trials, betrayals and legal proceedings, is a slog.

Lord Black spent around three years in jail. After the pardon, Ms. Amiel writes, “for Conrad, the best revenge really was to enjoy life.” But that’s not her style. “For me, the only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined.”

Ms. Hodgson is the author of “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food.”