Years ago I read an article by society columnist Zena Cherry in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Whatever she had written, a reader replied, “Eat those words!” to which she responded, “Gulp, gulp, gulp!”
Zena Mary MacMillan was born on 6 October 1915 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to Stanley Butler MacMillan (1888–1959) and Belle Thomas-Brown (18??–1980). Stanley MacMillan was a seventh-generation Canadian. He descended from Colonel Gordon MacMillan, who had come to Canada with the army of James Wolfe in 1759, and later settled in Nova Scotia. Stanley was born in Isaac’s Harbour, Nova Scotia, and was educated at Horton Academy in Wolfville. He attended Acadia University and Dalhousie University before transferring to McGill University, where he graduated bachelor of medicine in 1910. Subsequently, he lived in Edinburgh, where he took his Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, and then interned in Peking. Stanley’s wife, Belle Thomas-Brown, was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and was educated at Harrogate Ladies’ College and the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Paris. After Stanley’s internship in China, the MacMillans moved to Prince Albert, where he entered practice as medical officer of health and surgeon for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, regional Indian reserves, and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was here that Zena was born in 1915. Later they had a son, Horace Goddard MacMillan (1922–1964).
In 1930, the MacMillans moved to Toronto and settled at 372 Russell Hill Road. Zena attended Bishop Strachan School and was part of the class of ’34, though she left school after the 1932 year. During the 1934–35 season, she was a débutante. In 1936, she was hired by the Globe and Mail as a society reporter. She wrote her first column under her own name on 17 March 1938, detailing the St. Patrick’s Ball held by the Irish Regiment of Canada. Cherry left the paper in 1941 after she was engaged.
On Tuesday, 30 June 1942, MacMillan married Westcott Warren Christopher Cherry (1904–1980). Westcott was a graduate of Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto, and Harvard Business School. He retired in 1968 as sales manager for the Continental Group of Canada. Zena and “Westy,” as she called him, did not have children. The Cherrys lived in a home at 200 Heath Street W., which they called Cherrywood, in Forest Hill.
Unwittingly in 1967 Ms. Cherry was part of my more immediate past. While attending undergraduate studies at Glendon Hall on Bayview Avenue my boarding school chum F. Max E. Maréchaux and I sought to overcome the legal drinking age (18) by visiting Stop 33, a posh lounge atop Sutton Place a new downtown Toronto building. We dressed with jacket and tie and behaved admirably while casually ordering our cocktails. So frequent were we that we became acquainted with one of the servers. Years afterwards when Max and I both graduated from law school we thought to re-attend Stop 33 to see if the same waitress were still there. To our astonishment she was. When we surreptitiously sat in a corner and ordered our drinks – now at legal age – the waitress appeared and instantly recognized us. We gleefully proclaimed, “You never knew we were under age!” to which she replied, “You never knew I was a prostitute!”
In retrospect I did however have a hint though it was one I never dared to embrace. I recalled one evening while ascending the elevator that two of the ladies in the lift were uncommonly interested in my well being. Thinking they were house detectives, I avoided them with complementary discernment. Of course little did they know that they were no competition for a stiff drink!
In 1967, Cherry caused a commotion at the paper accidentally. On 21 and 22 September, she published a list of residents at the new Sutton Place, a combined hotel and apartment. Several of the residents were married men who had not told their wives they had taken out apartments in the city, and threatened the Globe with injunctions. In a profile written years later, the author said, “there has been much speculation over the years as to whether Zena knew what she had wrought, but [Richard] Doyle is sure ‘she knew exactly what she was doing.’ “
“The Sutton Place Hotel was a 33-storey hotel and apartment building located at 955 Bay Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Designed by the architectural firm Webb Zerafa Menkès Housden and operating from 1967 to 2012, Sutton Place was one of Toronto’s most luxurious hotels and was known for frequently hosting dignitaries and celebrities. It was operated by the Sutton Place Hotel Company (SP), which also manages hotel properties in Edmonton, Halifax, Revelstoke Mountain Resort and Vancouver (The Sutton Place).“
As the years have mysteriously passed, I find myself (now 75 years of age) satisfactorily perched at my desk on a magical late autumn afternoon overlooking a serenely flowing river, listening to schmaltz music by Mantovani, pondering only tomorrow’s upcoming cancer surgery (which I consider a fitting ornamentation to a life of toxic misbehaviour). I’ve been gulping water to assuage the impending peril of post-operative thirst.
Vianney Carriere wrote that “she was one of the most gracious ladies I have ever met. She was one of those infuriating people who are immune to any form of scolding, from the very gentle all the way to flashes of temper. I never could instruct her in a way that did not prompt her to smile a caution at me not to take life too, too seriously.