They knew each other more than fifteen years ago, and since then they have been fellow travellers in the same social firmament. When Conrad gave a party for Andy Warhol at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1981, Barbara was there in the crowd. After Barbara married her third husband, David Graham, Conrad and his wife, Joanna, were among the guests lavishly fêted at the Sutton Place Hotel in 1985. At dinners and receptions and such, they have crossed paths many times. “My role model,” Barbara once said rapturously of Conrad. And he in return admired her journalism so much that his flagship newspaper, The Daily Telegraph of London, tried to lure her to the paper.

When Conrad Black married Barbara Amiel last July, in a civil ceremony in London, it seemed the natural collision of two compatible worlds. They were made for each other. Or so almost everyone says. The corporate predator with the golden touch for media properties bagged by one of Canadian—and now British—journalism’s most exotic, desirable women. They became Canada’s most glamorous couple: our own Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. In fact, they are exactly like Ted and Jane in that Conrad and Barbara are almost caricatures of celebrity—he, in the vernacular of the tabloids, a millionaire right-wing newspaper tycoon; she, in the shorthand of the satirical Private Eye, a reactionary glamour puss columnist.

Their romance brings together uncommon cerebration, cultivation and ideological force, not to mention the pulp-novel tingle of great beauty and big money. Conrad and Barbara—their very familiarity invites the use of the first name even among those who have never set eyes on them—are public figures, each a self-made persona. While still in relative youth, each was the subject of literary scrutiny: for Conrad a biography (The Establishment Man, by Peter C. Newman) at age 38; for Barbara an autobiography (Confessions) at age 39. In those works, and innumerable articles since, the precociousness and privilege of Conrad’s early life and the adventure and struggle of Barbara’s have formed a useful background against which their present renown can be savoured.

Their wedding picture was a mark of the prominence the two have achieved: it made the front page of The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail. There they were: an island of shockingly obvious happiness in a sea of the usual bad news. They posed outside the Chelsea registry office in London after exchanging their vows; he proudly smiled down on his new wife, while she balanced a bouquet of flowers in her hands and beamed adoringly up at him. It was every wedding picture ever taken.

The wedding itself was nicely understated, befitting perhaps their ages (he 47, she 51) and their previous marriages (he one, she three). In attendance as witnesses at the registry office in one of London’s smarter boroughs (where Barbara was living) were her best friend, Miriam Gross, literary editor for The Sunday Telegraph and herself a chic and much-admired journalist, and Max Hastings, the tall, aristocratic-looking editor-in-chief of the Telegraph. Barbara tells the story of the wedding better than anyone. And did, of course, in her weekly column in The Toronto Sun and The Sunday Times in London, in which she disclosed her vow of true love to her husband in the “name of my fathers, their fathers and the faith and beliefs that have sustained us through time.”