POSTING #95

Some Stories about Ottawa's Chateau Laurier Hotel

In an earlier posting I mentioned swimming in the pool at the Chateau Laurier Hotel (now called the Fairmont Chateau Laurier) while I was working on Parliament Hill in the early 1970s.

The hotel had a membership program that allowed male members to use the changing room, showers, a pool, a  large dry sauna, and a Turkish steam bath. A massage therapist was on hand---at additional cost---to soothe away whatever tensions were left after sessions in the sauna and steam room.

The setup wasn't luxurious by today's standards but it was a very pleasant place to get some exercise and forget the 'crise du jour'.

I've listed the facilities that males were entitled to use.

You may ask 'what about females'?

When I first joined the program, women could be members but they had only a changing room, showers and what I was told was a pokey dry sauna, and of course the pool.

Women members started agitating for facilities that were more like those enjoyed by the men.

The management found it difficult to tweak the basement space in the 1912 hotel, with its heavy stone construction, in order to increase the space for the women's program.

The hotel decided on a compromise. The women members could use the men's facilities twice a week (I seem to recall it was Tuesdays and Fridays) for several hours over the lunch-time period.

The male members grumbled a bit but acquiesced---after all fair is fair. We just made a mental note to fit our visits around the 'women's times'.

A colleague in the  Privy Council, where I worked at the time, was a member of the club. He was a highly intelligent fellow, but very shy.

One day, he came back from lunch looking shaken.

"What's wrong?', I asked

"It was terrible!"

"What was terrible?"

"I went to have a swim, and as I was going into the changing room I saw this naked fellow walking ahead of me."

"So?', I said.

"This guy had really big hips and I thought that was strange. And then I realized it was Tuesday, women's day, and the 'guy' was a woman.

"What did you do?"

"I fled."

"Did she see you?'

"I don't think so, but I keep thinking---what if she had turned around, had seen me and started to scream."

There was silence for a time as we looked at each other and tried to imagine the scene that might have occurred, with the naked woman wheeling around, seeing him, letting out an enormous scream, all of this while she was trying to cover her bits.

And then of staff members rushing in to help a damsel in distress.

He was right.

Scary stuff.

It turned out he had been so upset that he hadn't been able to eat lunch. We went down to our canteen and after a sandwich and some herbal tea he was able to go back to work.

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The pool complex was managed by a very efficient, motherly woman in her early 60s whose mother tongue was French. Her English was good but she sometimes had trouble finding the right word in her second language.

One day as I was signing in she leaned over the counter and said in a low voice, "Does Mr. Hees ever bother you in the pool?"

Now, I knew who she was talking about. Everyone knew who 'Gorgeous' George Hees was---the tall, handsome, millionaire son of a famous Toronto family, who had been an Argonaut football player, a war hero, a Member of Parliament and a minister in several departments in the Diefenbaker governments. I had seen him once or twice in the pool but hadn't taken any particular notice of him---lots of celebrities used the pool.

But what was she talking about. The expression, 'bother you' had at least a couple of possible meanings. I have to confess that my first thought was that she was asking whether Mr. Hees was making advances to me (OK, I have a suspicious mind, with a sometimes dirty tinge).

But this didn't square with his public reputation, which was a bit Clintonesque---if you'll forgive the anachronism. Although he had a charming and attractive wife, he liked women and they liked him.

There had been reports of dalliances but I had never heard any rumours about him being interested in men.

Stumped, I replied that, 'no', he hadn't bothered me.

Then her meaning became clearer. She said that some patrons had complained that Mr. Hees had inadvertently hit them as he swam. If he hit me I was to tell her and she would speak to him.

Later, before getting the pool, I watched Mr. Hees plow back and forth in his lane. He was using an aggressive, unorthodox crawl stroke. As you know, with a skilled swimmer, when one arm has pulled through the water, the swimmer lifts the elbow out of the water, brings the arm forward just above the water and slips the arm into the water in front of the head, with hardly a ripple.

Mr. Hees, on the other hand, rotated the arm out of the water, thrust it up in a half-circle high above his body and let it crash down in front of him. His arms were extra long and heavy and  I could see that if an arm went a little astray and  landed in a neighbouring lane it could damage anyone unlucky enough to be there.

After that, I made a point of swimming in a lane well away from Mr. Hees so that he wouldn't 'bother' me.

000

Prime Minister Diefenbaker promoted Mr. Hees to be Minister of Trade and Commerce in 1960 following his successful stint as Minister of Transport.

The new minister decided that the overseas trade commissioners were spending too much time in the embassies on diplomatic activities and  not doing enough to promote the sale of Canadian goods and services. He arranged to have each commissioner sent a tie clip with the initials 'YCDBSOYA', which translated into, "You can't do business sitting on your ass".

I was in Britain at the time---with the Immigration side of our Foreign Service---and I heard my Trade colleagues complain about what they considered a nasty, rude and totally inappropriate ministerial insult.

The tie clips were crude but they made a point. In the rebuilding years after the Second World War, European nations needed whatever Canada had to offer but by the 1960s trade had become much more internationally competitive. Canada had to get out and sell.

Brash old George spelled out that message very clearly.

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As Prime Minister Diefenbaker's leadership and managerial weaknesses became apparent, observers speculated that Mr. Hees might succeed him as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party.

Until, that is, when Mr. Hees had lunch with Gerda Munsinger.    

For younger readers, Ms Munsinger (1929-1998) was an East German prostitute, who married an American soldier, and then, in 1955, somehow immigrated to Canada. She worked in Montreal as a maid, a waitress and a night club hostess, and although it is unproven, it was believed that she was also working as a Soviet spy. She had an affair with a Diefenbaker minister, Pierre Sévigny, and some kind of relationship with Mr. Hees.

In 1961. when the security people found out what was going on, Ms Munsinger was quietly deported from Canada back to Germany. Mr. Sévigny resigned but Mr. Hees, who argued that he had just had lunch with her, was allowed to continue in the cabinet.

The story of her relationships with Conservative ministers remained secret until 1966 when a Minister in Mr. Pearson's cabinet leaked the story, during a heated House of Commons debate.

In the official enquiry that followed, Mr. Hees acknowledged that he had shown poor judgment in having lunch with Ms. Munsinger. The enquiry agreed with him that he had been unwise but did not conclude that his behaviour had put official secrets at risk,

However, Mr. Hees career, which had seemed so promising, stalled.

 When the Conservatives returned to power in the 1980s, the Prime Minister, Joe Clark chose not to include Mr. Hees in his cabinet, an insult that Mr. Hees never forgave.

A Wikipedia article on Hees records that when Joe Clark was defeated in the party's 1983 leadership vote, Mr. Hees was overheard to say, "We got him! We got the s.o.b."

That was brash old George---and I'm sure he didn't use the initials s.o.b.

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See you on November 21st for Posting #96 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.