The Mayor of Montreal

Three years ago Montreal's ex-Mayor Camillien Houde, who had just retired after running the city with all the uproar, fun and profit of a bingo game, was asked by a local matron what he thought of the new mayor, a prim, plain lawyer named Jean Drapeau. Replied Houde: "He is a little man, madame, a little man." But last week, with a new election three weeks off, Politician Houde had changed his mind. Just as a boom got rolling to return him as mayor of Canada's biggest city (and the second largest French-speaking city in the world), Houde suddenly ("My doctor recommended . . .") backed out. Stronger than the doctor's advice. Montreal guessed, was a poll showing "little" Jean Drapeau, 41, running ahead of Houde 3 to 1.

Camillien Houde's Montreal (pop. 1,595,000) has changed, and no one has done more to change it than slight, studious-looking Mayor Drapeau. A political unknown, he shot to prominence as prosecutor (1950-53) in a probe of Montreal vice in the '40s, when gambling czars ran up a $100-million-a-year business and bawdyhouses never closed. He proved police collusion with such evidence as a row of doors nailed to a wall so that cops could "padlock" vice dens without offending the underworld; 20 cops were later fined or fired. Only four weeks after the probe ended, Prosecutor Drapeau was installed at city hall by the biggest vote ever given a mayoralty candidate.

In office Drapeau lent the city a new tone. By revamping the city's tax-assessment system, resourcefully tackling traffic congestion, establishing an arts council, tireless Jean Drapeau has convinced Montrealers that the mayor can be more than a circus ringmaster. And although glasses still clink in nightclubs until dawn, big-scale vice has been run out of business--with no evident harm to Montreal's lusty tourist trade or Drapeau's popularity. Says he: "Here in Montreal people used to think that prostitution was necessary to keep down the crime of rape. We found out that sex fiends were only using whorehouses to practice up for careers of rape."

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