The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  But it was too late then for firing people, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting to be fired myself. So when Rupert called to protest about my lunch with Andrew Neil, I knew it was time to do something.

  ‘Rupert, this is fucking ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘You have no idea what’s going on. I’m not going to discuss it on the phone. I’ll fly back and see you in LA.’

  For years, a few of us had a joke about our fantasy ‘Fuck Off Funds’. When we had enough money in the bank and if life was unbearable, we would go to see Rupert:

  Knock-knock (on Rupert’s office door).

  Yes, Les?

  Rupert. Fuck off.

  I phoned Dot and she booked me in for a meeting four days later. That morning, I went for a long run through the flat streets of Santa Monica, past the quake-ruined beach houses, weaving around the sleeping bodies of the homeless in the palm-lined park overlooking the beach. I ran down to the long pier that reminded me of Blackpool and Southend.

  Life here was sunny and easy, even if the business was fierce. The worldview of LA County is warped by its show business reputation. It has a diverse economy — healthcare, technology, fashion, education — but the glamour and bursting ego of Hollywood washes over the whole town, catching pretty well everyone in its thrall.

  It’s a brutal business keeping America enchanted with good films and television, and the competition was not often friendly. Hollywood’s best acting happens at the Academy Awards every year when everyone pretends to love each other.

  One of Hollywood’s biggest producers, who worked in both television and films, once told me wearily over dinner: ‘People think the television business is savage, but movie people are worse — they’re horrible. They lie and cheat, and they do it while smiling in your face.’

  The intensity consumed so much of people’s time and energy they didn’t want to talk much about the world outside, about big issues and other countries, not like people in New York and London.

  Rupert’s morning habit astonished his LA executives. One of them told me: ‘Do you know he gets all the papers — the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal — and he reads them all?’ No wonder they cared so little about a news magazine or 24-hour news.

  Before our meeting that morning, Rupert had sent David Evans to measure my mood. Evans was an Australian and the latest outsider to be at Rupert’s side at Fox. ‘He’s worried that you’re going to quit,’ he said. I smiled and said nothing, but it did feel like the end of the road. Staying at Fox was impossible. I didn’t want to leave News Corp, but couldn’t think of an equivalent job that might be available. I wasn’t sure I wanted one. I had imagined following the script of my ‘Fuck Off Fund’ fantasy, but by now I was only angry with myself.

  After 25 years, I could count on a decent payoff. I was ready to go back to New York and build up from there, outside the company. It had been a wonderful run, but I was never on top of the job at Fox, and I was unhappy.

  We sat at the bottom of his office, opposite each other on cream-coloured sofas. Rupert reserved his sofa chats for visiting VIPs, or difficult moments like this. He is famous, when a tough personal topic needs addressing, for avoiding the point, and freethinking about the world’s problems and unconnected company issues. That’s not what happened this time.

  ‘I’ve been laying awake worrying about this,’ he said, straight away. Whenever he had a problem, Rupert said it kept him awake.

  ‘Well, that’s been a shared experience,’ I replied.

  He lectured me sternly about how to manage big problems and deal with difficult people. ‘Sometimes when you have a problem you have to drive through it, crash through the wall. If other people make life too difficult, if they’re getting in your way, you have to fire them. Why didn’t you just fire someone?’

  I shrugged. I knew by now he was right. I had planned to list my grievances, but knew they would sound lame. I was beyond trying to explain myself. ‘Maybe I should have, but this hasn’t worked out for me. I’m sorry I couldn’t make a go of it,’ I told him.

  Rupert sank into thought. Always when this happened his bottom lip pushed out, his eyes closed slightly, his head slumped forward, and his face crumpled. Anyone interrupting him at moments like this was sure to be ignored.

  ‘Look,’ he said eventually. ‘You must trust me. I want you to stay with the company. Things are changing in New York. I might want you to run HarperCollins. I’m not sure exactly when, but it could be soon.’

  ‘Really?’ was all I could think to say. I had walked defeated in his office moments before and now he was talking about putting me at the top of one of the world’s biggest book publishers.

  ‘Take the family back to New York, and we’ll sort things out,’ he told me.

  I flew alone to New York. Our three youngest were mid-term and we had to sell the Santa Monica house. I was given a small office on the floor beneath Rupert. We went together on a couple of visits to HarperCollins when Rupert was being briefed on the business. It was clear no one at HarperCollins had any idea what Rupert had said to me. While I waited, he filled my time with random tasks.

  Mirabella, the magazine we started in 1989 with Grace Mirabella, was still struggling. I reviewed the business and recommended it should close if we couldn’t sell it. David Pecker, a New York publisher, added Mirabella to his growing group, but five years later he gave up on it, too. At TV Guide, the chief executive was not working out, and I knew exactly how he must have felt when I asked for his resignation. I also organised the launch of a new magazine; Rupert had wanted for a long time to own a right-leaning weekly — he admired British magazine The Spectator — and asked me to plan one. Any new publication needs the right editor and Bill Kristol was keen on the idea. Kristol had been known as Quayle’s Brain when he was chief of staff to George Bush senior’s vice president, Dan Quayle. It was a title intended more to insult Quayle than compliment Kristol, but Kristol was very bright. When we met to decide a name for the new magazine, I thought I had a great idea. ‘Let’s call it the American Standard,’ I said.

  The pundit Fred Barnes, who would become Kristol’s deputy, shook his head. ‘American Standard is a company that’s famous for making toilets.’

  We agreed it was a bad idea to have a name that was urinated on by millions every day, and decided instead on The Weekly Standard.

  Before any change at HarperCollins, something else happened.

  When Rupert called my New York office, Mary was on her way to Los Angeles airport for a weekend of house hunting in New York.

  He sounded urgent: ‘Can you come up now?’

  Rupert was holding some papers when I arrived, and walked to his desk as he told me: ‘Don’t faint, and please don’t refuse me. We’ve got big problems in London. I need you to go back and run the newspapers.’

  I was almost speechless. How could I have got this lucky?

  ‘Rupert, there is no job in the entire company I would enjoy more.’ I told him.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fleet Street RIP

  When the Great Fire of London ravaged Fleet Street in 1666, printers and publishers had already worked there for more than 150 years. In 1976, when I left for New York, it was still the palpitating heart of the newspaper industry; a village locked inside a great metropolis, with its own distinct culture, rhythms, and familiar faces. Each morning, lorries jammed the warren of alleys to deliver huge rolls of the paper that is the raw material of Fleet Street’s daily alchemy; arriving blank and lifeless, and leaving at night reincarnated by the drama and trivia, brilliance and dross, outrage and entertainment of the British national press.

  Twenty years later, when I returned to London, Fleet Street had become an archaeological site, a newspaper ghost town even as it bustled with new purpose.

  Old newspaper temples today are protected, like the pyramids. Their facades are frozen
in time, almost, but not entirely, stripped of their original identities. The Daily Telegraph building, grey stone and mighty pillars, stands in all its glorious art deco ostentation. Its gilded two-faced timepiece hangs above the street, the clock tower of a lost village. The building’s identity, once displayed across its front in glorious Gothic, is gone. The only clues are in the sculpted facade: the two winged messengers above the main entrance fly away with the news, and two sculpted faces represent Past and Future. ‘Past’ is grim and beaten, ‘Future’ open and hopeful.

  The Telegraph’s shining neighbour is Fleet Street’s slinky lady-in-black, the glass and chrome-trimmed Express building. Inside, still intact, is the manically lavish lobby, a glittering folly of gold and silver, its gigantic tableaus of Empire an everlasting testament to Beaverbrook’s idea of patriotism, and possibly his state of mind as well. This lobby must embarrass the new tenants, Goldman Sachs; heavy grey curtains hide it from the street.

  Between these two giants sits the proud, but respectfully small, bay facade of Mersey House, once the London home of the Liverpool Echo, the newspaper that announced my birth.

  Engraved plaques in the pavement commemorate dead pioneers, and newspapers that are lost, or shadows of their former greatness: The Daily Courant, the Standard, the Express, the type designer William Caslon, and Charles Dickens, who wrote as ‘Boz’ in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub. One plaque depicts Space Invaders, an early kill-or-be-killed computer game in which waves of jagged-edged aliens attack the player. It was put in place to commemorate the arrival of the computer technology that ended the era of linotype machines and hot metal. Now, it is an unintentional metaphor for the digital destroyers that would descend on the industry that built Fleet Street.

  Life is no less febrile, and lights still burn into the night, but the new citizens of Fleet Street talk obscurely of ‘discounted cash flow’, of ‘accretion and dilution analyses’, and ‘affirmative covenants’. The talk of ‘upside collars’ and ‘downside collars’ has nothing to do with fashion, and ‘goodwill’ does not mean precisely that. This is now the world of big money, of mergers and acquisitions, and the language coming from these buildings will never again touch the masses. Bankers and lawyers are the citizens of Fleet Street now; it was once a world of words, but now money does the talking.

  For me, a visit to Fleet Street is like wandering through a mirage; it’s not what it seems and never will be again. Physically, much of it is intact. I pass many of the same buildings walking east from the Strand, past the ornamental spires and arches of the Royal Courts of Justice. The surviving pubs and wine bars are as inviting as ever, but the drinkers inside are strangers.

  A fierce dragon in the middle of the street, flying high on a plinth, still guards the City of London border, but nearby, the Wig & Pen Club, once a haunt of lawyers and journalists, is a Thai restaurant. El Vino, the ancient wine bar, thrives, but I hardly went there; it was the officers’ mess of Fleet Street, and down-table youngsters were not welcome.

  As the road bends near Bouverie Street, you get the same unaltering glimpse of St Paul’s Cathedral. On the right is the narrow, red-painted facade of The Tipperary pub. It was the local for The Sun and the News of the World, but their nearby offices are now the headquarters of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a multinational law firm, and the conversation in the ‘Tipp’ is more sedate.

  Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese still draws crowds. A public house has stood on the same site since the 1500s, and the Cheese itself was built soon after the Great Fire. Its ceilings are blackened by pipe and cigarette smoke, and its sloping timber floor makes guests unsteady even before their first drop. Journalists drinking in the Cheese once jostled for room with Ben Jonson, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and P. G. Wodehouse. Now its unruly farewell parties are for bankers and lawyers off to globalising jobs in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and New York.

  In 1976, no journalist worked more than 50 yards from a pub. From seven o’clock in the evening, it was a safe bet who would be in each of them. Each newspaper had its favourite bar and its share of notorious drinkers. Journalism was a thirstier trade back then. Drink and dissolution felt like a prerequisite, and I arrived in 1965 at the age of 21 as a happy apprentice. The old hands were role models and even their bad habits were desirable. Pubs were study halls where veterans conducted barstool seminars, spinning yarns of great scoops and dangerous travels. The tuition fee was a round of drinks.

  These days, now and then, in places like the Cheese and El Vino, white-haired groups can be seen among the brisk new habitués. If they look out of place, it is because they are. They will be the frail old nostalgics of Fleet Street on a pilgrimage of remembrance. They approach the bar more slowly and less often. Sometimes they sit in silence, with recollecting smiles.

  Often, they will have taken an ambling walk from St Bride’s Church, where the father of Fleet Street, Wynkyn de Worde, set up his print shop in the churchyard more than 500 years ago, before St Bride’s was destroyed in the Great Fire and rebuilt by Wren. Fleet Street may have been a godless world, but journalists will always crowd pews beneath the wedding-cake spire of St Bride’s for funerals and memorials. Today, outside St Bride’s, a crude notice of red letters announces: ‘The world-famous Journalists’ Church’. It has become a tourist trap.

  In their day, heavy drinkers were the heroes of Fleet Street. The lost productivity that resulted was seen by companies as an unavoidable cost of business, and an occupational hazard for the journalist. A man too drunk after lunch would be sent home to sleep it off. He might — or might not — be given a mild chiding next day. When The Sun’s news editor Ken Donlan found a reporter snoozing at his desk, he attempted a reprimand. ‘Drunk again, Mike?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you, Ken?’ came the reply. ‘I’ve had a few myself.’

  Heavy drinkers who could still do the job would carry on for years until their health failed. Many of my peers died in their fifties and sixties. Others would crash and burn quickly. These were serious casualties, who would sneak out for a morning Bloody Mary or two, or return at closing time for the overnight shift with a hidden bottle of Scotch. I went on a royal tour with the Queen and Prince Philip, and no one was sober after a six-hour flight from Vancouver to the Bahamas, but one reporter was so incapable his rivals filed his copy to London. Fleet Street had its own support system for its alcoholics.

  In the 1960s, I worked with a brilliant but deeply troubled and alcoholic reporter whose perfect copy the sub-editors rarely altered. A decade later, a shuffling old-looking man stopped me on Fleet Street. I recognised him at once, but his raincoat was torn and tied by thin rope, his long hair and beard unwashed, and sticky tape held together his wire-rimmed glasses. He was looking for money and I gave him some, but Barrie didn’t know who I was. He could not yet have reached his fortieth birthday.

  Heavy drinking was a habit that came from the top. Ruth Dudley Edwards writes about this in Newspapermen, her dual biography of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the odd couple who made the Mirror newspapers great. The papers, she says, were ‘produced on an ocean of alcohol … Visit Cudlipp before 11am and you would be offered a beer (unless it was a day of celebration, when there would be a champagne conference at 10.30).’ After 11, Cudlipp would open a bottle of white wine; lunch was ‘aperitif, wine, brandy’.

  The Mirror was not alone. Rupert would fume when he surprised imbibing executives sitting together in the office of Larry Lamb, The Sun’s editor. Lamb had learned his trade and drinking habits at Cudlipp’s Mirror. For years, Rupert railed against ‘those bloody Fleet Street lunches’, and once the company was safely removed to Wapping, he put in place a strict prohibition. This ban never worked as well as he thought; executives kept secret stores in their offices, which I pretended not to notice.

  This prohibition was at odds with the rest of London. The growing New York tradition of dry lunches had yet to leap the Atlantic. I was still Rupert’s strict enforcer when John Major, t
he prime minister, came to Wapping for lunch in February 1996. The night before, the Provisional IRA had blown up a double-decker bus in the West End. The device had gone off too soon, killing the bomber and injuring eight. We were sure Major would be too busy at Number 10 to come to Wapping, but he did. Walking into our dining room, his first words were, ‘I am in serious need of a large gin and tonic.’

  It was no time to recite company rules. ‘I can imagine you are. Right away,’ I replied.

  The problem was there was no known gin bottle within 500 yards, although, in reality, there were probably a secret dozen. While I kept the prime minister entertained with sparkling water — ‘Have I caused a problem asking for gin?’ — Marianne Krafinski, my assistant, hurried to the local Morrisons supermarket to return breathless with a bottle of Beefeater. From then on, we had plenty of alcohol for visiting VIPs.

  Newspaper people today certainly drink less. They may use less evident intoxicants, but it is not so easy to tell. When The Sun’s editor David Yelland dreamt up a tabloid gimmick involving the purchase of a drug-sniffing dog, there was anxiety among some staff when it visited the editorial floor.

  Despite all the mourning for the lost spirit and community of old Fleet Street, it was a sick place by the time I left for America. Newspapers had stayed there too long, trapped by greed, mismanagement, and torpor. Fleet Street would have become the industry’s tomb, had it not escaped.

  Fleet Street was not just a thoroughfare, but also a neighbourhood. Every newspaper, in the local labyrinth of backstreets and beyond, belonged to Fleet Street. In the 1970s, it was being eaten away by the mad avarice of over-powerful unions. For years, feeble newspaper managers had enabled these unions by yielding to ever more ruinous demands.