Everything one needs to know about why Garth Drabinsky perpetuated one of the most audacious frauds in Canadian history can be gleaned from document 88960, submitted during his trial. It’s the ultimate forensic evidence: a draft of a love letter the impresario wrote to his former girlfriend, Karen Poppell, months before his theatrical empire, Livent, collapsed in 1998.
The 10-page missive seized from Drabinsky’s office offers a private glimpse of the qualities that propelled him to risk all. By turns passionate, frustrated, and buoyant, the note reveals an against-all-odds determination and refusal to concede defeat. Befitting a man who intuitively grasped the box-office power of the Phantom of the Opera, the language is romantically charged, with talk of “true spiritual and emotional union.” Then, in a petulant digression, he complains Poppell hadn’t gotten around to reading his 1995 autobiography, Closer to the Sun.
Like all love letters, it’s part sales pitch. Poppell was apparently displeased with the relationship’s progress; Drabinsky itemizes her grievances, which include not being introduced to his parents and the way his pilot filled in customs forms. Yet, with the play-it-forward optimism that propelled his career, he expresses high hopes for “Garth & Karen—forever.” He alludes to new “financing,” presumably the US$20 million Michael Ovitz invested in Livent in February 1998, which put in motion discovery of accounting fraud: “After a wonderful Christmas, we entered the year buoyed up with a new confidence that in February my financing would close, you would move to Toronto . . . [and] by the end of March I would be out of my marriage.”
Drabinsky seemed to be in arrears on some kind of promise schedule, which he blamed on his “sense of optimism and confidence that if I am determined I will not fail . . . I am not a gay deceiver, but I am too much of an optimist. I over-evaluate. I have learned my limits. The task was simply much larger than I appreciated.” He hadn’t been forthright, he explains: “I never wanted to admit weakness to you or dilute your confidence in me.”
The admission, ironically, has equal resonance for Livent investors. It also explains, in a nutshell, the motivation for the company’s spectacular rise—and fall. Friends speak of the manic pride that propels Drabinsky to work 18-hour days. “He never allowed anything to get in the way to stop him, which is the only way he could ever have accomplished what he accomplished,” says the film producer Robert Lantos. “There was no obstacle that couldn’t be climbed or torn down or barrelled through.” A former colleague has seen the darker side of that drive: “He must win. He will not brook interference. He won’t tolerate anyone who fails to get it or see it or agree. If they don’t, they’re not just wrong but ignorant and stupid and dismissed.”
The Crown submitted the letter as proof Drabinksy had financial motive to commit the $500-million fraud. And certainly it conveys financial distress: he writes of being “strangled” by “an impossible level of personal debt” for the previous five years. But Justice Mary Lou Benotto, who last week found Drabinsky, 59, and Livent co-founder Myron Gottlieb, 65, guilty of two counts of fraud and one of forgery, didn’t buy the money-as-motive rationale, noting in her 85-page ruling: “The motive was the continuation of the company.”
And, as the nine-month trial revealed, continuation of the company entailed defying financial rules governing the business. But, if the title of Drabinsky’s autobiography is any indication, with its allusion to Icarus, the figure in Greek mythology who plummeted to earth after daring to fly too close to the sun with wax wings, not even the rules of classic mythology apply to him. “I think the bastard just gave up too soon,” he writes. “He should have gotten himself another set of wings and taken off again!” When he wrote those words in 1995, newly anointed as a member of the Order of Canada, Drabinsky appeared to have done just that, having crashed to earth once with his flame-out at Cineplex, only to ascend once again at Livent.
The tale of Drabinsky’s epic ambition begins long before that, however. He writes of his struggles after he contracted polio in 1951, at age three, and of the series of painful operations during his childhood that left him with a limp. In Closer to the Sun he recalls worrying the camera would capture it when he accepted a 1993 best musical Tony award for Kiss of the Spider Woman.
