The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  The green light was never switched on. The network people complained about Neil’s accent and Regan’s on-air stiffness, and the plan was abandoned. I still think the real problem was that the people who dominated Fox didn’t understand news. Maybe they were right, maybe Fox’s future fortunes were in buzzy young shows and not serious news; certainly the network flourished, but 20 years later, after a couple more attempts, Fox remained the only big network with no prime-time network news show.

  Regan shrugged it off. She went back to publishing bestsellers for HarperCollins until she commissioned a book in which O. J. Simpson was to give a theoretical account of how he ‘might’ have murdered his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Soon after, she was fired after an allegation of anti-Semitism. She sued and received an undisclosed payment — some reports said $10 million. Within a few years, she was publishing again as Regan Arts.

  Andrew Neil, however, was enraged and I couldn’t blame him. Rupert asked him to work on his new idea — a nightly late news show — but Neil refused. ‘I’ve had enough. I need to get back to London while I still have currency there,’ he said.

  Neil was accustomed to the uninterrupted authority and sure hand of the Rupert he knew from print. He went back to London and wrote a lively memoir that he called, in tribute to his failed adventure, Full Disclosure.

  ‘I grew to resent that one man could have so much effect on me,’ he wrote. His supreme revenge was to reinvent himself as the go-to ‘authority’ on Rupert — and, ultimately, as the best political interviewer on British television.

  CHAPTER 19

  Lost in Hollywood

  Brentwood Park, north of Sunset Boulevard in the Westside of Los Angeles, was an untroubled world. The only people walking the streets were short and tough Latinos carrying gardening gear into the grounds of other people’s homes. Not much broke the silence but the palm-filtered wind and the hum of expensive cars and quiet motors that opened the gates to mansions. The walls and shrubbery hiding these houses were so high and impenetrable that even the desire for privacy became part of the ostentation.

  Our next-door neighbour was O. J. Simpson. We met in our back garden the day he said I was the worst tennis player he had ever seen.

  The house we had rented in North Bristol Avenue was huge. The guesthouse at the bottom of the garden was the size of our clapboard colonial in Westchester County. Joan Crawford had lived across the street with Douglas Fairbanks Junior; Marilyn Monroe was found dead a short drive away; up the road was the house where Steve McQueen would get drunk and throw beer cans into the yard of his neighbour James Garner; one of our favourite places to eat was the Brentwood Country Mart, where Steven Spielberg had Saturday brunch with his kids.

  That was how people talked. They littered their conversation with the names of famous people they lived near or saw in their local stores. It was hard to avoid the habit when Mel Gibson was at the next table at dinner and you were surprised he wasn’t taller, or Meryl Streep walked into the local diner with a baby on her hip, just after you had been in the barber’s chair next to Harry Morgan, the gruff old colonel from M*A*S*H. Or when Mary came home from the gym downhearted after half an hour on a treadmill next to Cindy Crawford. Or that my young son Will’s new school was a few hundred yards from the Viper Room in West Hollywood, where River Phoenix dropped dead on the sidewalk from a drug overdose.

  In any other town, estate agents talked to house hunters about local schools and when the roof had been replaced, about new electrics, and refitted bathrooms. But in LA salespeople dropped names to add value. ‘This is Tony Bennett’s house … Deborah Kerr stayed in that guesthouse … Chevy Chase’s bathroom sinks are this high because he is six-foot five … William Wyler, the director of Ben-Hur, lived here. Check out the old film clippings on his projection room floor.’ Even our real estate agent was connected; her husband was Patrick McGoohan, who starred in the cult TV series The Prisoner.

  The house we chose was grand, but also a little ramshackle, which is why we could afford it. The owners were rich and either proud of it or possessed of an ironic sense of fun; outside the double garage where they had kept their Rolls-Royce, a gigantic dollar sign was etched into the driveway. As well as the oversized guesthouse, it had a wine cellar, a poolroom, a cocktail bar, a maid’s apartment, a swimming pool, and a floodlit tennis court.

  O. J. Simpson was not our only strange neighbour; the saddest sight at Halloween was of a young boy handing out candy from a table just outside the tall locked gates of the mansion where he lived — alone except for the family security guard.

  O. J. Simpson’s house was at the back of ours, an even fancier place on North Rockingham Avenue. I didn’t need to understand American football to know Simpson was one of the country’s most loved celebrities. He was a Hall of Fame football great, with a successful second career as an actor in comedy films. For years, I had seen his broad, easy smile in car-rental commercials for Hertz.

  The owners of our house were such good friends with Simpson they put in a gate to connect their gardens. When one family had a party, guests would spill next door to use both tennis courts and basketball hoops. I found out about this gate while playing tennis with my son Thomas one Saturday morning. Tom and I were not a pretty sight; my hand-eye coordination was terrible, and he was no natural at ball games. Several balls had sailed aimlessly over the 15-foot fence into O. J.’s property, and I had just missed a second serve, when the sound of slow, heavy hand clapping came from beneath the big willow drooping over the path to the guest house door.

  ‘I never in my life saw such an awful game of tennis. You are the worst.’ We walked towards the big figure in a white t-shirt and grey shorts that was visible through the limp branches and shook hands. ‘I’m O. J., your next-door neighbour,’ he said.

  His face was so open, warm, and familiar I had to fight the urge to treat him like an old friend.

  We chatted about tennis, the neighbourhood, and football at the college where Thomas was a student. O. J. said his football career had wrecked his knees, and Tom was pleased to be comparing football injuries with the great O. J. Simpson. He said we should use his pool and tennis court whenever we wanted, and to help ourselves to the food and beer in his poolside refrigerator.

  We were 40 minutes under the willow tree with O. J. Simpson, and for 20 of those minutes he was the charming, funny character people loved. But then the cheerfulness drained from his face, his smile disappeared, and his eyes went empty. We sat like reluctant psychiatrists, listening as this familiar stranger poured out his heart.

  He was, suddenly, nothing like the man millions thought they knew. He was desperately anxious that we understood his pain, repeating himself constantly. He looked away from us, with an unfixed gaze, until we began to think he had forgotten we were there. He had loved his wife, he said, but she had left him. They were divorced and he missed his children. Now they were going to try to be a couple again. Nicole was going to move back in, but keep her apartment.

  He didn’t sound sinister; he sounded lost and haunted in the way people can when their lives go wrong. After a while we weren’t listening, just waiting for a moment to escape. When we finally left him there, still standing under our tree, Thomas summed up our conversation. ‘That was fucking weird,’ he said.

  We lived for months on the fringes of the O. J. drama, thinking only that a famous man with a messed-up life lived next door. He was friendly enough. Mary wanted to buy a bicycle for my birthday and O. J. told her the best place to shop. She liked him. ‘He’s not that bright, but he’s beautiful and nice,’ she said. His kids came round to play with ours, running around the garden and jumping in the pool. Jane, my daughter, went to the same pre-school as their youngest. We went next door to a pool party. Thomas watched O. J. play tennis with Bruce Jenner long before he became Caitlyn.

  Then his housekeeper started coming to our house to sit in the kitchen and cry and talk about th
e arguments O. J. and Nicole were having. ‘They’re going to kill each other,’ she said, but we knew it was only a figure of speech.

  One day, O. J. sat on our front deck talking about how he was struggling to make a success of being back with Nicole. One problem, he said, was his housekeeper — Nicole hated her. ‘They can’t be in the house together. They’re always fighting,’ he said, ‘Can you give her a job?’ When we said we couldn’t, O. J. went door to door in the neighbourhood, looking for someone to employ his troublesome housekeeper.

  On Sunday 12 June 1994, we took Jane for a dance performance at the local school. She wore a pink tutu, and, in an early act of single-mindedness, decided firmly against going on stage to perform. We waited hopefully in the auditorium for her to appear, a few rows ahead of the Simpson family, whose eight-year-old daughter Sydney was also dancing. O. J. was there, but he sat apart from Nicole. It was the last time they were seen together in public.

  I heard the news next morning in the KTTV Fox newsroom, which was beneath my office in Hollywood. It’s nothing to be proud of, but double murders involving famous people are inclined to pep up a newsroom. Big news and blanket coverage is easier to organise than piecing together a string of smaller stories and trying to make them seem exciting. Everyone from advertising sales people to news anchors loves it when lots of people are watching.

  Shortly after midnight, Sukru Boztepe, a neighbour drawn to the scene by the wails of a dog, found the bodies of Nicole Simpson, aged 35, and her friend Ronald Goldman, a 25-year-old waiter. They had been stabbed outside Nicole’s apartment, two miles from Simpson’s house. Sydney and her six-year-old brother Justin were asleep inside.

  While the news was breaking, a convoy of television vans laid their deep track marks in the perfect green verges of Brentwood Park, and sprouted satellite dishes, ready to tell the story to the world. Over-groomed television reporters struggled for the best angles for live shots, and photographers, cameras clattering at their necks, competed for the most promising spots to position their aluminium ladders around the high hedges of O. J.’s estate.

  For weeks to follow, the rough and ugly outside world arrived to violate the precious serenity of Brentwood Park. The theme parks of California — Knott’s Berry Farm, Disney Adventure Park, Universal Studios — had a competitor. It was 360 North Rockingham Avenue, and this show was free of charge.

  The rowdy, untidy, picnicking, camper vanning, beer drinking, rap blaring, plump, and happy proletariat — the ‘rubberneckers’ and ‘looky-loos’ — trampled flower beds and littered streets with McDonald’s wrappers. The convention was to call these people ghouls, and I admit they were hard to take, but there was something wonderful about seeing the citizens of Brentwood Park, in all their prim conceit, with the real world camped on their doorsteps.

  Many of our neighbours had not liked the Simpsons. They didn’t like Nicole’s ‘common’ ways — her tight dresses, how she bathed topless by the pool while other mothers were setting up for a school party in their garden. After the trial, they lobbied the local school principal to ban the Simpson children for fear O. J. might appear.

  The spectacular climax of the O. J. drama came five days after the murders. The White Bronco Chase was an early reality TV event that brought America — and much of the world — to a standstill. When Simpson vanished after learning he would be charged, police who were tracking his cell phone found him on a freeway near his ex-wife’s new grave. A flashing fleet of black-and-white Los Angeles police cars soon caught up with him and began a slow pursuit.

  There were so many cars it looked like a comedy chase in a buddy cop film. A thudding fleet of television news helicopters beamed pictures to a watching world, and Domino’s Pizza reported a record night for home deliveries.

  It was an out-of-body experience for the Hinton family, looking down on our own world with millions of others as O. J.’s Bronco made its weirdly safety-conscious left turn at our corner driveway, creeping along Ashford Street past our back gate and into O. J.’s drive. The world’s most famous car chase ended right next door.

  On the day of the chase, we had begun moving out of North Bristol to a more modest house we had bought in Santa Monica. It was the best-timed relocation ever.

  Our last O. J. moment came with a poignant visit to our dry cleaner, with O. J. in jail and the country arguing about his guilt. The dry cleaner was a solemn Indian. ‘It’s so sad,’ he said. ‘Their clothes are still hanging there, next to each other, and no one is ever going to pick them up. What should I do?’

  We took two particular memories with us when we left that sprawling Brentwood Park mansion. The other was more terrifying.

  Six months before the murders, on 14 January 1994, at 4.30am, the house shook so hard it felt like I was on a speeding train that had jumped the tracks. Our home shook and tilted violently; it felt as if everything was about to crash down.

  Later, we were told the LA earthquake lasted 10 to 20 seconds, depending on where you were, but it felt like forever. None of us was hurt; the heavy framed picture above Jane’s sleeping head miraculously stayed in place, and, when getting dressed in the dark, I cut my feet on mirror glass. But the quake cracked walls, shattered mirrors, brought down a chimney, and scared me more than anything since Belfast and Cyprus.

  I felt that old reflex to get to the office, just as I had when Hurricane Gloria swept through Boston and I left the family home alone. In Brentwood, a power blackout had killed the motor that opened our garden gates, trapping my car inside. I found a set of pliers under the kitchen sink and loosened the rusted nuts and bolts that held them shut. I drove to work slowly, peering ahead for fissures in the road. Families dressed in nightwear stood in small groups in their front gardens, afraid of their own homes. Fires flickered through cracks in sidewalks, and the air was filled with wailing alarms and sirens.

  The Northridge earthquake was a huge natural disaster, killing 57 people and injuring more than 8000. Apartment buildings collapsed, roads and freeways crumbled, buildings were destroyed or later condemned. Many gas mains caught fire, and dozens of Santa Monica’s famous little beach houses jumped off their foundations.

  I had never before seen a city, previously so rich, safe, and at peace, go into clinical shock. There were dozens of aftershocks in the following weeks and the larger ones didn’t just scare people, but sent some into real, ashen panic. People who could afford to, left town. An executive I worked with spent hours talking his wife out of moving back to the Midwest with their children.

  Kids could be cooler; during one heavy aftershock when Jane, three, and James, six, our fourth son, were watching cartoons, they went without a word — and without taking their eyes off the screen — to sit under the pool table until it passed. ‘They told us to do that at school,’ said James.

  This post-traumatic shock surprised me. The people of LA didn’t talk about earthquakes much, considering they lived on a fault zone and there were well-developed theories that something apocalyptic would one day happen. Occasional tremors bothered them less than me; everyone knew the ground moved all the time, and that most motion was so slight it wasn’t even felt.

  But Northridge was too serious and threatening even for a newsroom to take any secret pleasure in it. It was unusual and lethal, and the moment when reality finally crashed through abstract theory. The city settled down in time, but its citizens knew they had been through a dress rehearsal for what everyone called The Big One.

  While this was going on, and the earth was literally moving under my feet, I was feeling uneasy about how things were going at the office.

  ‘Les, the boss wants to talk. Put on your crash helmet, love.’

  I was visiting New York, and Rupert was in LA, when Dot Wyndoe called me.

  Dot started working for Rupert about the same time as I did. She managed his life for more than 50 years and no one worked so closely with him for so long. He had secreta
ries and assistants in Sydney, London, New York, and LA, but Dot went with him everywhere.

  The mystery of Dot was that she never seemed agitated, no matter what was happening. I don’t know how she felt, but even when things were really, really hectic, all she ever did was roll her eyes and sigh. And her hair was never out of place, ever.

  More than anyone, Dot knew how tough things could get. She had tracked me down and was giving me a warning.

  I don’t think she knew that I kept a helmet in my office for years to lighten bad moments. It was a toy G. I. helmet to which I attached a large plastic razor blade. I put the helmet on when I knew Rupert was calling in a bad mood. The razor was to slash my wrists when he went over the top.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in New York having long lunches with bloody Andrew Neil when you should have been here on the lot for that meeting?’ he said. Sometimes Rupert pretended to be angry, but this was real, loud, high-pitched fury.

  Neil was in New York working on his network news magazine pilot. Technically, I was overseeing the project — managing Neil was about as easy as caging clouds — and that was why I was in Manhattan.

  I had no idea what important meeting it was that Rupert claimed I had neglected to attend. I was also pretty sure it had not slipped someone’s mind back in LA to let me know about it. Subversives were at work at Fox and they were beginning to get the better of me.

  I had arrived at Fox 18 months previously, leaping over others with years of knowledge and experience. All I knew about the television industry I had learned in a few weeks of desperate all-night reading. I was an unwelcome alien, and some were out to make life difficult for me.

  The hard lesson in this experience is a simple one: don’t let people stick around if you can’t trust them. It’s pretty obvious, really — at Fox I gave the wrong people the benefit of the doubt. But it was a mistake I never repeated, and from then on I advised every rising executive: ‘You are now in charge of people, some of whom think they deserve your job. Give them a period of grief to adjust to the new reality, but if they haven’t come around in a few months tell them it’s time to move on.’