By April 2003—the month that he left Citytv— I’d been working with Moses Znaimer on and off for what, at times, had seemed an eternity. He had hired me to assist him with a book he wanted to write. Or maybe it wasn’t a book. Maybe it was a series of books. Every time we met, he seemed to have a new idea. It had started off as a profile of the Citytv building but quickly evolved into a treatise on the past, present and future of television. So vast a universe, he argued, could not be successfully contained between the covers of a traditional book. His guiding principle was that it had to be something that would interest him. Maybe it was an encyclopedia. Maybe it was a book and a television program. Maybe it was a Web site. Maybe it was a linked network of Web sites. On more than one occasion, he suggested that it might become a textbook of communications theory for university students and television professionals, but that was also—and here came one of his quizzical and dramatic pauses—a murder mystery. I kept forgetting whether he called this improbable combination a facto-fiction or a fictoid-faction. And he always seemed a little put out that I couldn’t keep it straight.

Soon enough I came to realize that he is not the easiest person to work with. But there were more than a few moments when I also realized that I liked him. This was one of them.

He was in his home: an austerely beautiful, secluded Arts and Crafts residence that he shares with his life partner, Marilyn Lightstone, not far from High Park. His departure from City was shrouded in the silence of the negotiations that would facilitate it. Either he wasn’t allowed to speak, or he was too smart to, but the end result was the same: Znaimer was uncharacteristically silent on the subject of his exit from the empire he had built. Silent, but by no means acquiescent. Sitting in his kitchen on that grey afternoon, he was obviously rattled and angry. He was fielding phone calls from his lawyer, from his assistant, from family and from associates. He also seemed to be taking note of those who didn’t call. Not that he was keeping score; it’s just that there are times in life when you learn who your friends are, and sometimes the learning comes as a bit of a surprise.

Someone who had been the centre of his own universe for so long, and who had been energized daily by going into his swank, multi-screened corner office at City, was suddenly at home on a weekday. He was hurt in the deep, painful way people always are when something with which their identity is very closely bound is taken away. He didn’t acknowledge this, of course. His own sense of pride, far more than any legal strictures, would never allow him to admit to injury. As always, he was above his enemies.

Not that it came as a surprise to him. It had played out exactly as he predicted, and he took an almost smug pleasure in the accuracy of his prophecy. It was, so he had solemnly told me on more than one occasion, an inevitable turn in the cycle of revolutions: the only safe bet in history is that the visionary will someday be replaced by the bureaucrat. In this analysis he did not employ understatement. There was Lenin, then there was Brezhnev. There was the Long March, then the Cultural Revolution. There was Che, then there was the Cuban Communist Party. Znaimer saw himself in this same historical process: a clever, agile fox finally hunted down by the baying hounds of the ordinary.

Sitting across from him that day, my notebook open (to what end, I wasn’t sure), I could see that this setback brought his courtly gentleness to the fore. He routinely enjoyed playing against his own reputation: in private, the egotistical bohemian was often soft-spoken and solicitous. He was aware of how effective a posture this was—particularly with the dozens of print journalists who, over the years, had been sent to figure him out or, as he often felt, to attack him unfairly. But there were occasions when this calm, thoughtful presentation seemed more than mere posturing. There was a sadness in his eyes that seemed to sell no image and play no angle. He asked me how I was. He offered me tea.

This was the quality that I liked. Behind the showmanship and the marketing, behind the theorizing and the grand self-assurance, behind the bombast of his unapologetic self-regard, and his irritating tendency to turn any commercial molehill into a philosophical mountain, there was a warm and serious gentleman.