The Untold Tim Hortons Story

This story was originally published in 2007.

If only he hadn’t crashed the goddamn car, it would have all been different. If he’d just gone to bed, grabbed a few hours of sleep before hitting the road. If he hadn’t had those last few drinks. If he hadn’t had those amphetamines pumping through his system. If he hadn’t been driving like a madman. If he hadn’t played that last season at all. If Punch Imlach hadn’t lured him back to the Buffalo Sabres at age 44, with the promise of a $150,000 salary he could use to underwrite the doughnut business. If Imlach hadn’t thrown in the Pantera as a signing bonus, knowing that for a guy who loved speed, the sports car would be impossible to resist. If he had just called it a career and stayed home with Lori and the girls.

The wife, pretty and smart and frustrated and mercurial and whacked out on uppers and downers, wouldn’t have been left to fend for herself. The daughters, the straight, dutiful ones and the wild ones, wouldn’t have had their world upended, their anchor pulled. All of them would have made their mistakes, enjoyed their triumphs and disasters, grown old gracefully or less so, but they would have done it from a position of wealth, privilege and comfort in which it’s safer to make mistakes, in which you’d be forgiven for more. Even if their parents’ marriage had finally hit the rocks, even if there had been an ugly divorce, there would have been plenty to go around.

Instead, in the early morning hours of February 21, 1974, after playing a game for the Sabres at Maple Leaf Gardens, Tim Horton drove off a stretch of the Queen Elizabeth Way on the Niagara Peninsula at over 250 kilometres an hour trying to avoid a police roadblock, killing himself, shattering a family, ending a business partnership, and setting in motion the process that would erase the memory of who he was, that would eventually turn his human self into a doughnut-and-coffee abstract. One dead hockey player three decades on transformed into the comforting feel of warm java through a brown paper cup, into that familiar, soothing flavour, nothing too strong or too startling. Double double. Roll up the rim. Always fresh. A Timmy’s in hand, in the morning, on the road, at the rink, mother’s milk to millions.

Those left now—the fabulously rich partner, the four Horton daughters fighting their own personal and financial battles, and the ghosts of the dead hockey star and his wife who haunt them all still—are the flesh and blood behind the familiar marquee. What’s comfort food for the rest of us is for them a torment, a tease, a reminder of what was and, worst of all, a suggestion of what might have been.

Although Americans consume hamburgers in the billions, few would argue that McDonald’s is part of what makes them them. But to pick up a Tim’s on a cold winter morning is for many Canadians an act of self-definition. Just as the pub is part of what makes the Irish Irish, so Tim Hortons is part of what makes us us.

The story of how a humble doughnut shop became a touchstone of Canadian identity is well known, especially since Horton’s business partner, Ron Joyce, published his memoir, Always Fresh: The Untold Story of Tim Hortons by the Man Who Created a Canadian Empire. Last fall, the book found its way to the best-seller lists, even though it seemed to lack a beating heart. Not surprisingly, its author is the hero of the tale, the poor Nova Scotia boy who became a Hamilton cop, who dreamed of bigger things; the diligent striver, the hardest worker, the one with the vision, the one who actually baked the doughnuts. In his old hometown, his name is now attached to monuments to his philanthropy: the Ronald V. Joyce Centre for the Performing Arts, formerly Hamilton Place Theatre, and the Ronald V. Joyce Stadium, currently under construction and soon to be the new home of the McMaster Marauders football team (Joyce contributed $10 million to the latter).

His once far-more-famous partner was a striver as well. Tim Horton grew up dirt poor in Cochrane, Ontario, and feared nothing more than having to give up hockey and return to grim working life in the north. He had branched out long before he met Joyce in 1965, first with a car dealership, then with a hamburger and chicken joint, and finally in a failing doughnut-and-coffee business. Brought together by chance when Joyce purchased the store on Ottawa Street in the city’s industrial North End, they stumbled onto the perfect formula, the magic elixir of Canadian life.

Store number four, my local, is in the Westdale neighbourhood of Hamilton, not far from McMaster University. Although it isn’t the birthplace of the Horton-Joyce partnership, it ought to be a shrine, a historic site for anyone retracing the chain’s creation myth. Inside and out it looks just like any of the other 3,000 Tims, including the fact that it houses not a single reminder of the man himself beyond the name on the sign. But what makes it different is that in the bricks and mortar beneath its bland, brown, stucco façade there are likely traces of Tim Horton’s DNA, since he helped build the place with his own hands.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Joyce likes to tell about that time. A group of children from the George R. Allan grade school across the street were walking with a teacher past the construction site on the way to the nearby library, when one of them spotted a handsome, square-jawed man with a sinewy, muscled physique, a hockey card face out of place among the workers.

“Look. There’s Tim Horton,” said the kid.

“That’s right,” said the teacher. “And if you don’t go to school, you’ll end up digging ditches just like him.”

We are sitting in the dining room of Joyce’s grand home on the north shore of Burlington Bay when he recounts the tale once again. It is a beautiful but austere place with marble floors and, somewhere out of sight, an indoor swimming pool. The windows look out across the chilly waters of the bay toward the steaming stacks of Dofasco and Stelco. A straight line drawn from here to there would take you directly to the store on Ottawa Street where it all began. The Christmas tree in the entrance hall is surrounded by perfectly wrapped boxes that one immediately senses must be merely decorative. The walls are covered with art. But there is no real evidence that anyone lives here—and since it is only one of his residences, at the moment that may in fact be the case. The next day, he is heading to the Caribbean, to sail in the magnificent 40-metre sloop he had built in New Zealand. In summer, he spends considerable time in Nova Scotia at his Fox Harb’r Golf Resort, where he has entertained, among others, Bill Clinton. His personal wealth has been estimated at $700 million.

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“I said, ‘Timmy, why don’t you walk away?’ He said, ‘I can’t. She’ll kill herself’”

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Joyce has emerged for our morning interview dressed in suit and tie. The monogrammed cuffs of his custom-made shirt are visible when he reaches to pick up a cup of coffee served in a china mug commemorating Tim Hortons’ 25th anniversary. The brew itself is unmistakably the real thing (Tim and Lori Horton experimented with different beans from different places, brewing pot after pot in their kitchen, before finally settling on the chain’s signature blend). I’m here to flesh out a portrait that in the pages of Joyce’s book is one-dimensional and self-congratulatory. Personal details, especially when it comes to his life outside the boardroom, are doled out in vague, scattered fragments—two wives, with two sets of children, walk out on him during the course of the narrative, but even those life-altering events are dismissed in a scant few lines. There are chapters devoted to the chain’s evolution and marketing philosophy, to its camps for underprivileged children, and to its sale to Wendy’s for approximately $600 million in 1995, which eventually resulted in Joyce losing control. (He had no involvement at all by the time Tim Hortons went public last year.)

But what caught the eyes of most readers—and became the focus of a cover story in Maclean’s—were his revelations about the personal lives of Tim and Lori Horton: tales of Tim’s infidelity and boozing, of Lori’s erratic personality and drug addiction, of their marital ups and downs, all of it culminating in Joyce’s triumphant legal battle with Lori years later. Speaking about the book now, he seems uncomfortable with these subjects, preferring to stick to the story of his business success, although when asked he paints an unflinching, unflattering portrait of the Hortons that is at odds, in many ways, with the memories of their daughters, Jeri, Kelly, Kim and Tracy.

Tim, he says, was a good guy, surprisingly shy, a professional hockey player who didn’t act the star. Even if he wasn’t really interested in learning the doughnut business from top to bottom (he never did learn to bake), even if he didn’t really share Joyce’s vision, he was a good partner, and a good friend. They hung around together, drank at George’s Spaghetti House after practice and after games, and in many ways were kindred spirits.

Tim’s wife, he says, made both of their lives miserable. “Lori was always a very difficult person. She was always very, very difficult to get along with for just about anybody… Tim comparatively was so mild. We’d be in a room and people would ask Tim a question and Lori would answer. After he got loosened up and had a couple of beers, he’d start talking and Lori would get upset and quite put off and just leave. He loved her dearly. But she was difficult… [With Lori you were] always walking on eggs. Always. Any time you were with her, you never knew what was going to happen.

“He used to come into the office, and he’d be white and drawn looking. You knew. Every time I saw him I thought, Oh God, oh no, not again. And it happened a lot. I said, ‘Timmy, why don’t you walk away from that marriage? You’re getting on in years. You’ve got to find some personal happiness.’ He said, ‘I can’t do that.’ Why? ‘Because she’ll kill herself. She’ll commit suicide.’ I said, ‘Tim, she’s too goddamn mean to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide.’ But she used that as a hammer. And he couldn’t handle it. That was sort of the life he led.”

In his book, Joyce revealed that in the last years of his life Tim had a girlfriend on the side, a married woman whom Joyce met one night at an apartment Horton kept close to the company’s corporate headquarters in Oakville. “She was a lovely girl. She wanted to leave her husband—she had a couple of kids.” Seeing how comfortable Horton was in the extra-marital relationship, and understanding how miserable he had been with Lori, Joyce says he was happy for his friend and partner.

On the night Horton died, he and Joyce had one of their few real disagreements—the subject, he says, was Horton’s daughters using company credit cards to pay for phone bills. Joyce was worried about what might happen if the company were audited. “He got a little upset with me,” Joyce says. Meeting at the office in Oakville after the Leafs-Sabres game, they had a few drinks and hashed it out. Then Horton, declining an offer of a bed at Joyce’s house, climbed into the Pantera and headed off for Buffalo. It was around four in the morning. On his way out the door, he said, “I love you, Blub” (his pet name for his rotund partner). By dawn, he was dead.

In accordance with the terms of their partnership agreement, Lori Horton inherited Tim’s half of the company. “For a short time, she took an active role in the business,” says Joyce. “We were together for a couple of years and she was fine. Actually, I thought that during that period of time she was great.” But then, in Joyce’s telling, she lost interest, decided to sell him her share of the business, and eventually accepted an offer representing half the audited value of the company. More, in fact, says Joyce. He wanted to pay her $850,000. She held out for a million and got it. At the time, there were 48 stores and a significant debt load. He had to borrow to pay her off.

Joyce says he considered the money well spent. He had faith in the company’s future. He had big plans. But back then even he couldn’t have predicted how successful it would soon be. And he claims, as he did in the courtroom years later, that despite socializing with the Hortons, despite seeing Lori behave erratically, despite sharing an office space with her off and on for a few months, he never realized what others close to her considered obvious: that she was a barely functioning drug addict and alcoholic. In the book, he adds another telling detail, one that came as a shock to the Horton daughters: occasionally after Tim’s death, he and Lori “dated.” And yet the drug addiction was news to him, he says. As far as he’s concerned, Lori’s long spiral downward began after she sold out. “Here’s a woman who never had to earn money. Never had a job except some modelling. All of a sudden she’s got a million dollars in cash, a car, no debt. Not bad. Whoosh. Away she went and just ruined her life.”

Which she most certainly did, blowing it all on booze and drugs, travel and parties, shopping binges and hangers-on. And later, after finally shaking her addictions, she admitted it all. In 1987, she launched legal action and went to court five years later to argue that she hadn’t known what she was doing when she signed away her half of the company. In the courtroom, humiliated but unbowed, she laid bare her pathetic life. And she lost—decisively, completely, unequivocally.

“We offered her money,” says Joyce. (In the book, he mentions a salary of $100,000 a year, plus a car.) “We offered to support her before the trial. We offered to help her in many ways, and I did help her all the way through in so many things. And we offered to settle—and when I say we offered to settle, it was against my…it sort of ate at my craw that I’m even trying to offer this woman money, and she turned it down, because she wanted half the company. I still get the finger pointed at me—Ron Joyce. But I can hold my head high. I did nothing wrong.”

That’s Joyce’s story. And the trial judge believed him and his witnesses, including one of Horton’s old friends and teammates, Bobby Baun, over Lori and hers, including one of Joyce’s ex-wives. Caught in the middle was Tim’s oldest daughter, Jeri, who had married Joyce’s oldest son, Ron Jr., the first child from his first marriage. She was subpoenaed to testify and, speaking for herself and her three sisters, backed up her mother’s story, only to be called, in so many words, a liar.

Of the four Horton daughters, Jeri is Joyce’s favourite. “When Lori left the business, I really wanted a Horton in the company,” he says. “The most promising one was Jeri.” She worked for the company for a time in operations, helping to train new store owners, which is how she met Ron Jr. at a store opening. (Jeri is the only one of the four who read Joyce’s book, and last December she took him aside to ask about her father’s affair.) Jeri’s sisters, he says, are more problematic, have more financial challenges, have experienced more personal problems, and for the past four years he has tried to help them out, sending them a modest annual stipend. “I have received thank-you letters from them,” he says.

The late morning lineup at the Tim’s in Cobourg, just off the 401, is as long as at store number four in Hamilton, the coffee crowd morphing into the lunch crowd creating a happy din. But the walls here are covered with Horton memorabilia, which is no coincidence since Jeri Horton and her husband run this place, contented franchise owners making a fine buck.

Jeri looks a lot like her father—the dramatic jawline, the clear, piercing eyes. Of the four siblings, she is the most comfortable in the public eye (the day of the Tim Hortons IPO, she was invited to the Toronto Stock Exchange). She is one of those people who pauses a moment to think before she speaks, friendly without being glib, straightforward and candid even when talking about her mother, who so often in life and now after her death has been reduced to a kind of cartoon harpy, the hockey star’s crazy, drug-addled wife who blew a million bucks and made a fool of herself in court.

I ask her to tell me about her mother, an American who skated in the Ice Capades, who modelled, who met a handsome minor league defenceman in Pittsburgh, fell for him and moved with him to a strange town to play the role of the dutiful hockey wife. “She’s been gone six years now,” says Jeri. “She had her problems. She gave up her skating career to move to Canada… It was hard not being yourself. She was never Lori Horton. She was Mrs. Tim Horton.” Bored with the hockey wife’s life—attending home games at the Gardens, watching away games on television with the other Leafs wives—she decided she wanted to become an interior decorator. But classes were on Wednesday night, when the Leafs played at home, and Tim made her quit. And there were emotional issues. “She was diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder a few years before she died,” says Jeri, “so she suffered with that for a long time. And I don’t think that helped with the addictions either… The pills and the addictions—I don’t know if they were because of her anxieties or her panic attacks, which you never heard of then. I don’t know. I know she went through hell.”

Posing with the kids for Maple Leafs publicity shots in the 1960s, Lori looks the very picture of the cute, miniskirted hockey wife. The Hortons lived comfortably though not lavishly when Tim was winning four Stanley Cups in Toronto. Being a professional athlete was still a middle-class profession back then. Their first house was near Warden and York Mills, the next on Birchwood Avenue in Willowdale, the next in the Leslie–York Mills area, where the family was living when Tim died. In a city where hockey was the biggest game in town, the girls grew up well aware of their father’s celebrity. “You never knew if your friends were your friends for you or they wanted to meet your dad,” says Jeri. “That was always in the back of your head. We had some privileges. We got in to see The Beatles and The Monkees [at], and we got to meet them. But Mom and Dad were strict. They didn’t spoil us at all, because they grew up with nothing. Both of them were pretty poor. It was different then, anyway. There wasn’t that much money then.”

Jeri was around 14 when her mother began having real problems. Whether because of her anxieties, or to control her weight, or some combination of the two, Lori was prescribed amphetamines and tranquilizers, like so many women of her generation. But she drank, as well, and so did Tim—and so, for that matter, did everyone in their social circle, especially the hockey crowd. The booze couldn’t have helped either of them, but it was the drugs that made Lori erratic, and she never had any trouble getting them from this doctor or that. “She had good days and bad days,” says Jeri. “Mom wanted a career. She was one of Toronto’s top models. She was a beautiful woman. She kept trying to get out of a cocoon, and she kept getting pushed back. Because that’s the way it was then. Wives just didn’t do that…”

The family followed Tim to New York and Pittsburgh after he was traded first to the Rangers and then the Penguins, although the two middle girls, Kelly and Kim, exceptionally rebellious teenagers, did their best to run away to Toronto at every opportunity, hitchhiking, taking off in the family car. When he signed on with the Sabres, Tim rented a house on Lake Erie, where Lori stayed with him much of the time while the girls lived in the house in Toronto, looked after by friends and nannies. Jeri was the first to leave home, working in a series of jobs in the airline industry. She was with Air Canada when a supervisor at Pearson delivered the news that her father was dead. How did that change her life? “How do you explain the whole bottom dropping out?” she says.

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“He just kind of walked out on me and the girls. It didn’t have to happen”

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As the oldest and most aware of the children, Jeri had an inkling about her father’s infidelities long before Joyce described them in his book. But it was a complete shock the day a customer at her store dropped a copy of Maclean’s in her lap, with her parents’ photos on the cover and the headline “Love, Betrayal, Greed and Apple Fritters,” pointing to a story that highlighted the juiciest elements of Joyce’s memoir.

“When Dad died, we had a phone call the next day and it was a woman talking with Mom saying, Well you have his kids, I want something of his. And Mom, I think, kind of knew but she didn’t. Right until the day that she died, she denied that he ever had an affair. But I could see it in the back of my head. Dad was human. I know [he] broke up before he died, because her husband found out. But I still think that should have been kept private. That should not have been [in].”

After Tim’s death, Lori took to her bed in a depressed, drug-fuelled haze. The two middle girls ran wild, all but abandoning school, drinking hard. Jeri joined Braniff Airways and moved to New York, where she met her first husband. Kim and Kelly followed her there soon after (because Lori was American, all of the girls enjoyed dual citizenship), which left Tracy at home with her mother. “When Dad died, she had four of us to raise and the whole bit,” Jeri says. “I think it would have been a lot different if she had been straight. It was just the way she was at the time. She just fell apart. And you can’t blame her. Dad was her whole life. She didn’t even know how to balance a cheque book, because Dad did it. Because that was the way she was made to be. She was kind of pushed back where she didn’t know what to do.”

Jeri was living in New York when her mother announced, after a brief period working as Joyce’s partner, that she had sold the business. “If she was straight, she would have been a helluva force in that business. She really would have. But she wanted to party. I guess it was her way of getting over it.” And she was away when Lori pissed away the million dollars. “She invested some of it. I think she invested a lot of it. I know she blew a lot of it on trips, travelling. She renovated the house a little bit. And then it was just her drinking and her pills. I think some of it disappeared. Tracy said money was literally falling out of Mom’s purse. And the place was always full of people—Kim, Kelly and Tracy’s friends. So who knows?”

Jeri was back in Canada, divorced from her first husband and married to Ron Joyce Jr. by the time Lori’s case went to court in 1992. It was a terrible time in the household, torn between the two warring parents. “We went through hell,” she says. “His dad would call the house, going, You guys can’t say anything, don’t talk to the papers, don’t do this, don’t do that. Then Mom would call, blah, blah, blah. It was not good. Not good.” Jeri testified only because she was forced to, telling the truth as she knew it, describing the family in which she had grown up. She thought Lori would win. All the girls did. All of Lori’s friends did. They were sure of it.

Jeri and Ron Jr. were sitting in O’Hare Airport, heading west for a skiing holiday, when they read a transcript of the judge’s decision and saw for the first time how the court had believed Joyce’s version of events, believed that he never suspected Lori had a drug problem at the time of the sale while discounting, among other things, Jeri’s own memories. “He still denies it,” says Jeri. “He still denies that he knew anything. He admitted that he was dating her, for crying out loud. Everybody else around her knew. Pills were falling out of her purse, all of the prescription stuff. It’s hard to miss. I really don’t feel that he could not know. That’s a nice way of putting it, I hope.”

Do you want to go get yourself a Timmy’s?” Tracy Simone, the youngest of the Horton daughters, asks the question unselfconsciously and without irony out of the same reflex as millions of other Canadians, seeing the familiar sign. This branch of the coffee-and-doughnut Goliath is on the main floor of the North York General Hospital in a brightly lit, spit-polish-clean food court bustling in equal parts with busy, smiling folks in hospital greens, and grim, huddled groups of friends and family, grabbing a few moments of peace before returning to matters of life and death upstairs.

On the sixth floor, where she is a resident of the hospital’s intensive care unit, Tracy’s older sister Kim is fighting the ravages of alcoholism. A few days ago, it looked as if she might not make it, but today she’s doing better and might even be discharged this afternoon. The baby of the Horton brood, Tracy will be back in here herself in a couple of days for knee surgery, the 15th or 16th operation since she was injured in a 1999 car accident that left her on a disability pension. Married for 25 years, her own wild days behind her, she has played the role of family care­giver. Lori Horton moved in with her for the last year of her life, and now both Kim and Kelly are temporary residents in the modest North York townhouse she shares with her husband, two sons and a large collection of dogs and cats.

Kelly, who lives in Sarasota, Florida, chose not to be interviewed for this story; Kim, also from Sarasota, agreed to talk off the record, although she was more than frank about her challenges as a recovering alcoholic, especially since the death of her third husband, a New York firefighter, in 2000. “I was happy,” she says. “I got married a couple of times and screwed up. I got married a third time and he was the right one. I partied a lot. The first two marriages, I didn’t care. Then Dad died—that was a biggie. That’s when I started really partying. Mom died the same year as my keeper husband. That really screwed me up, and that’s when I started drinking real heavy. The last 18 months I’ve really been drinking heavy. That’s why I’ve been so sick and been in the hospital five times and learned a lesson.”

Having spent most of the last 27 years in the United States, Kim and Kelly find it an unpleasant shock seeing all of the signs with their father’s name on them the moment they cross the border. Jeri, of course, is more than used to it. And Tracy? “It’s annoying,” she says. “It’s nice to see that it went that far, but it doesn’t let us let go. Normal people can lay their parents to rest. We’ve never been able to do that. It bothers me. I have absolutely nothing to do with Tim Hortons, but I get affected by everything that Tim Hortons does.”

Her place in the birth order makes her recollections of childhood—of her father’s death when she was 15, and of the rocky periods before and especially afterwards—a bit different from Jeri’s. She had been the tomboy in the family, the son Tim never had, the one who followed him to practice whenever she could, followed him everywhere, never missed a game. “When Dad died, it was my life gone,” she says. “I don’t really remember a couple of those years. I was in pretty rough shape after Dad died. Kim and Kelly moved away. Mom was a mess.”

Tracy has no childhood memory in which her mother was entirely clean. “All I remember was seeing Mom lying in bed with chocolate. Always chocolate. I really don’t remember her ever being straight. There were days that she could have been OK. But then you’d go in the bathroom and find pills everywhere­—all over the floor, everywhere. There was a little red one. I remember trying it once to see what it would do to me. I was out cold for 15 hours. Out cold. And she was living on this all day—taking four or five a day. Then we tried to steal them and she would attack us for them… She’d take a plane to New York once a month [to], load up and come back. Some doctor there was giving her drugs. I remember being so damn embarrassed carrying her through the airport. Lugging your mother, it’s kind of…”

But Tracy saw something her sisters missed. It was she who gave her mother an ultimatum in 1984: straighten up, get off the pills, or you’ll never see your grandson again. And Lori did it. With the help of a Catholic priest, she endured seizures, the pain of withdrawal, and got herself together for the first time in years. The cruel irony is that only then did she really understand the hash she had made of her life. Only then did she realize that she had sold a stake in the company for a million dollars that, had she held on to it, might be worth a hundred million, or more. Encouraged by friends, she announced she was going to court. Then it was as though she was training for a prize fight, walking miles and miles on a treadmill, getting herself prepared physically and mentally. “She felt she was right. She felt that she was screwed, that Mr. Joyce did not look out for her or us, that Mr. Joyce didn’t give a shit about us or her. ‘I’ve got to make it right for you guys,’ she said. ‘Because I’m the one who screwed this all up.’ She held her head up so high, even on her bad days. She was like Rocky. It hurt watching her. She was in a battle.”

One thing on which all of the daughters agree is that Lori fought the battle on their behalf, that she laid herself bare and looked on as a parade of witnesses testified to her weakness because she felt she owed it to her kids. “To humiliate herself like that—that’s one thing I wish Mr. Joyce would understand,” says Tracy. “The humiliation, and why she did all this. For her to even get up and do that—I had so much respect for her throughout that whole period, because of what she did… You have to testify to what’s true—then nobody believes you anyway. Nobody thought she would lose. None of us thought she would lose. Mom tried. That’s all you can do.”

After the trial, she was almost broke, aside from a small annuity and her late husband’s modest NHL pension ($500 US a month). During the crazy years after she sold the business and ran through most of the million dollars, she had been forced to sell the family home and cottage to stay afloat. Now there was nothing much left. She collaborated on a sentimental book about her husband, In Loving Memory, and tried to appeal the court decision, unsuccessfully. Before she died, she told her daughters that when she was gone Ron Joyce would look after them. She was sure of it. Once the object of his enmity was out of the picture, he’d take care of Tim Horton’s kids. And, to some extent, she was right.

Near the end, she started phoning people, old friends, some of whom she hadn’t seen in years. “I want to make sure there are people to come to my funeral,” she told Tracy. Jeri thinks she tried to get in touch with Joyce. “Just before she died she called him and said, ‘Let’s clear this up.’ But they never got to have that last conversation.”

On December 23, 2001, just after dinner, Lori was in her room at Tracy’s place, talking on the phone. “She was laughing one minute and then it was quiet,” says Tracy. “She died in five minutes. Congestive heart failure and that was it. She was on the telephone and laughing. Then it was quiet.” She was 68. The coffee-and-doughnut company bearing her husband’s name paid for her funeral. It says so in Ron Joyce’s book.

It is raw, unedited footage, shot just before Lori Horton died, for a segment of the CBC television series Life and Times that aired under the title “The Perfect Husband.” She is wearing a white, cable-knit sweater and seems older than 68, a difficult life etched in her face. But she is still beautiful, especially the huge green eyes. The interviewer has an agenda, a story he wants to tell, and he’s going to tell it even if it means pushing, prodding and bullying his subject. He wants to explain how Tim Horton had a drinking problem, how he could be rough and frightening, and how just at the moment when he was on top of the world, with a big paycheque, a company on the rise and the fastest, sexiest car he’d ever owned, he killed himself in a way that seemed inevitable.

Lori seems nervous and anxious to please. She has the apologetic quality of someone who understands all too well that she’s screwed up. And yet she refuses to reduce her life, her husband’s life, her family’s life, to something neat and tidy and dark. Some of her memories of Tim are touchingly ordinary: how he drew a picture of a pig for one of Kelly’s school projects that Lori pointed out didn’t much resemble any pig found in nature, then came home one night with a goofy-looking stuffed animal that seemed close enough to his drawing to make his silly point; how, when the kids were young, he always liked to have one of them in his lap, even when he was eating dinner, a baby poking her hands into his food.

“He was very funny,” she says of the handsome young man she married, “and very shy. He got over that in 30 years, but he was very shy when I met him. We saw each other whenever we could. We got engaged and I was asked to leave the Ice Capades. That suited Tim just fine. We got married that April. And he took me to North Bay for the summer… I got to go places and meet people. I just got to do things that I never would have had the opportunity to do if I hadn’t met Tim. He could have so much charisma. He seemed to attract people wherever we went. We’d have six extra people sitting at our table just because they liked him. And he’d keep them entertained.” Yes he drank, she acknowledges. And yes there were times he turned nasty, especially in later years. But there were other times, when he was drinking, when people just found him funny.

She isn’t asked to talk about herself and won’t discuss Joyce when the conversation drifts in that direction. “I don’t want to talk about Ron,” she says. The subject turns to the night Tim Horton died. “He’d had a lot to drink that night. We didn’t know that at the beginning, but we finally got the coroner’s report. Somebody in Burlington called the police and reported a speeding car. An officer was chasing him but couldn’t catch him… They had set up a roadblock. It was illegal at the time… It took me a few years to forgive him. As far as I’m concerned, he killed himself. He just kind of walked out on me and the girls. I mean, it didn’t have to happen.”

Somebody has suggested, the interviewer says, that Horton was one lucky guy, that in hockey terms his timing was right, that in business he had stumbled onto the perfect formula and perfect partner, that the stars were all aligned. “He died,” Lori says. She’s not playing along now. “Had he not been killed, my whole life would be different. And that certainly wasn’t lucky. He should be here sharing and taking his rightful place as founder of the company. He never dreamed it would reach these heights. He never dreamed it would.”

She looks straight at her interviewer then, and says nothing at all. No tears. Many regrets. Some delusions. Loads of anger. A profound sadness. It’s all there, in the uncomfortable silence.

This story appears in the May 2007 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.