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in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and sent Max to find out if he could buy it out. Did he see the unscrupulous side of Max, and was he ready to use it? We do not know. Certainly he must have recognized Max’s talent for convincing people to do things they had not thought of doing before. And, lucky for Aitken, he lived in an age when we actually had enough moxie in Canada to allow private citizens a range of enterprise they have no recourse to now. It would be very difficult to be a Max Aitken now in New Brunswick. At any rate, it was not the case then that the restrictions on our own people precluded great enterprise.
    But even in those days, not one in ten thousand would have been able to accomplish what Max Aitken did. Within three weeks, the bank in question was under Stairs’s direction, and Max took a ten-thousand-dollar bonus from the sale (or, at least, so he tells us). This was to be his first merger.
    Over time, he would become one of the great merger manipulators in the world, wheeling and dealing with the most famous men of his time, using as his playing field both Britain and Canada. And it all started with trying to sell a typewriter.
    NOW HE WAS on his way. At a time when most people earned perhaps eight hundred dollars a year, Max walkedaway, he states, with that ten-thousand-dollar fee. It was good money and, what was better, he had Stairs’s gratitude and trust. As ever, he enjoyed the gratitude, the trust, of older men, and needed their endorsements. Stairs did like him, and did help him to see the world from the top down. He would never have to look from the bottom up again.
    “By hiring Max as his personal secretary, Stairs gave Aitken a personal and first-class introduction into the world of Canadian high finance,” writes Gregory P. Marchildon in his book Profits and Politics , the most extensive and best book on Beaverbrook’s financial genius.
    So Stairs helped fund Max’s next venture: a finance and bond company. Stairs received a percentage of the profits, and Max, at least as he claimed, did all the work. He was now under the Stairs umbrella, the Scotia Group, which had vast holdings in banks, coal mining, farming, and utilities. Max began to look at doing business beyond Halifax, tending toward the West Indies. He had decided he was not ready for what he called “the Montreal or Toronto Sharks.”
    Later, a biographer from Toronto would exclaim at how terrible it was for Max to say this, being as he was such a shrewd, wily, and underhanded shark himself. What was terrible? Was it that he said this, or that he was more of a shark than they? If he had failed, would their laughter at thiscountry bumpkin have compensated him for his loss? What it does show, however, is to what degree he was considered an outsider.
    He began investing in railroad and utility companies in Cuba and Trinidad and Puerto Rico. If a certain utility company he had his eye on wouldn’t allow his investment, Max would start a rumour that he was going to set up a rival company, which usually frightened the owners. His method was no more unscrupulous than a McDonald’s setting up beside a Burger King, or an Irving by an Esso. He was also not above offering bribes, in a country of bribe-takers.
    Though he felt he was doing a man’s work, as Marchildon states, he was looked upon as John Stairs’s private secretary by other family members, even though John Stairs, up until his untimely death, included him in every major negotiation and, over the next few years, he would become very influential in directing the Scotia Group in its endeavours. By his proficiency, he would earn the trust of one Edward Clouston, president of the Bank of Montreal.
    For a time, Max was headquartered in the grand Halifax Hotel—and for much of the rest of his life he would have private lodgings in hotels, where he conducted business and entertained. Hotels also seemed to be right for Aitken. From the days when he used to slip out from under the gazeof