So, there was Harris, a 57-year-old widower, enjoying his prestigious but undemanding assignments for The Observer and the BBC, working in a leisurely fashion on his books, lunching on expenses with well-known people at his club and enjoying bets on the races and on the gaming tables at night, when his life was changed by a single telephone call inviting him out to dinner.
The call was from Douglass Cater, a former White House correspondent who was working for the Aspen Institute in Colorado, a high-minded think tank and convenor of conferences on major global issues. He had arrived alone in London on a Saturday and was looking for someone to have dinner with. He had made several unproductive calls, including one to Harold Evans, the editor of the Sunday Times, before finding that Harris, an old Washington friend, was free to join him at Rules, a restaurant famous for its game, in Covent Garden.
Their meeting saved The Observer. Cater was shocked when he heard that Rupert Murdoch might take over what he regarded as one of the world’s great newspapers. He rang his boss in Aspen, Joe Slater, to seek his advice. Slater said the only man who could decide whether or not to become involved with The Observer was Robert O. Anderson, the chairman of Arco (Atlantic Richfield), the oil giant that was a major funder of the Aspen Institute.
Slater agreed to call Anderson at his ranch in New Mexico. Although none of us had ever heard of him, Anderson turned out to own more land than any other private citizen in the United States. There then followed a flurry of telephone calls – none of them, I have to add, to a mere editor like me. Slater rang Cater, Cater rang Anderson, Harris spoke to Anderson then to Lord Goodman, Goodman rang Astor, and eventually the main bout of the evening came on with Anderson and Goodman talking serious business after midnight London time.
They discussed the outlines of a deal, in which Arco would buy The Observer for a nominal £1, take on its debts and pay a discounted rent to the Observer Trust (meaning the Astors) for use of the building and the printing works. Astor rang me joyfully on the Sunday morning to share the good news, describing the proposed sale as ‘a godsend’. He, Goodman and Roger Harrison would be heading off to Arco-land in Los Angeles the following day to seal the deal. Meanwhile, it was to be kept a secret.
It was indeed a ‘godsend’, not just for The Observer, which would have an infinitely less intimidating new owner than Rupert Murdoch, but for the Astors, who would shed their debts at a stroke and retain a building on a prime site on the edge of the City of London.
Harris has been credited with achieving this happy outcome, though he later resented the idea that he had ‘found a fiver in the gutter’. My own view is that Cater, as a former journalist of some reputation, played a more crucial role in convincing Anderson that The Observer was a distinguished newspaper that Arco should be proud to be associated with. Anderson had probably never heard of the paper before that night. I suppose tribute should also be paid to Murdoch, for it was his dark shadow looming over the paper that persuaded Arco to move so swiftly to save it from the clutches of Beelzebub, the Prince of the Philistines.
When I asked Thornton Bradshaw, Arco’s chief executive, why the company had bought The Observer, he replied: ‘Frankly, we thought we were doing a good deed in a dirty world that was bound to reflect well on Arco in the long run.’ A highly cultivated man who went on to be president of two other major American corporations, NBC and RCA, Bradshaw seemed more like an academic than an oil tycoon. In fact, he had spent a decade teaching at Harvard Business School before putting his business philosophy into practice.
He was described by the New York Times as ‘a slightly rumpled man whose face seemed to be always on the brink of a smile’. He pioneered the concept in company thinking of social responsibility towards the communities they served and once wrote: ‘The new dimension for business is social approval.’ Arco’s high reputation as a socially responsible corporation, a sponsor of the arts and funder of community education projects owed more to him than to Anderson, who was basically a tough old oil prospector and deal-maker.
Anderson was more likely to have been persuaded by the consideration that acquiring a strong presence in Britain by owning one of its leading newspapers would improve Arco’s chances of securing lucrative North Sea oil and gas licences, which were then coming onto the market. That is certainly how he sold the deal to his fellow Arco directors.
The paper’s journalists were delighted when the takeover was announced. Few had even heard of Atlantic Richfield, but the oil company had one persuasive advantage as owners: they were not Rupert Murdoch. It was also reassuring to the staff that Goodman and Astor would remain on the board and that I would continue as editor.
Anderson himself, wearing his habitual cowboy hat, appeared with Goodman, Astor and myself at a press conference, where we all oozed with contentment at the new arrangement. He said to a group of us afterwards: ‘I guess advertising is important to your business.’ Assured that it was indeed very important, he went on: ‘I’d like you to invite the chairmen of all the advertising agencies to meet me for a drink at the Savoy Hotel at 6.30 p.m. on Thursday. If the chairman himself can’t make it, tell them not to bother.’
As I recall, seventeen out of twenty-one agency chairmen turned up to meet him. Anderson was again wearing his cowboy hat and cowboy boots and put both on the table while saying something along these lines: ‘I want you all to know that The Observer is a great paper and will become even greater in our hands. We are a rich company and we will spare no expense to achieve that. Good to meet y’all.’
When we announced on the front page that Atlantic Richfield had bought the paper, I was surprised that I couldn’t hear the rumble of the presses starting up in the basement. I rang the machine room manager to find out why. He said the NATSOPA night machine room chapel had held a meeting and the father of the chapel, Bert Hand, wanted a word with me.
I had always got on well with the printers. Having had a good apprenticeship in Sheffield, where I often worked a shift late into the night in the composing room, I was well versed in their techniques. By the time I reached The Observer, having also run a print room in Africa, I was comfortable talking shop down there and some of the printers became friends.
When he was put on the telephone, Hand said:
Donald, we’ve seen the story on the front page about the paper being taken over. We wanna be sure this is OK for you. We trust you because we know you’ve got the paper’s best interests at heart. We don’t like Yanks and it’s all a bit of a surprise after expecting Murdoch to take over. But if you say it’ll be all right that’s good enough for us.
When I assured him that everything would be fine, but not if they failed to print the paper, he agreed to let the presses roll. I was rather touched by the episode.
That same weekend, Goodman, who had just become Master of University College, Oxford, threw a celebration party there for 150 people, who included five Cabinet ministers and six other newspaper owners. Among the guests was Rupert Murdoch, who mixed easily – with no obvious sign of resentment – with Anderson, Bradshaw, Astor and myself, even though we had effectively joined forces to defeat him.
For his part, Anderson wanted an even bigger party to celebrate Atlantic Richfield’s acquisition of The Observer and arranged for Harris to organise a massive banquet at Lincoln’s Inn, to be attended by the great and the good and addressed by giant political celebrities such as Harold Macmillan and Henry Kissinger.
Harris was in clover: it was the role his whole life had prepared him for. He had an impressive contacts book, partly from his time in Washington, but also among Labour Party and trade union figures and the eminent people he invited as participants or judges in The Observer’s debating competitions. The guest list on the programme still looks stellar, even after four decades.
There were four of these annual feasts, called the Astor–Goodman dinners, until The Observer – for reasons we shall come to – fell out of favour with Arco, which saw no reason to go on celebrating the connection. While the
y lasted, however, these occasions were quite splendid and doubtless did much to burnish The Observer’s reputation, as well as to give Atlantic Richfield an identity in Britain.
• • •
At the first board meeting since the Arco takeover, Anderson brought along some new directors he had appointed, all of whom were seen as welcome additions by the old Observer contingent. They included Bradshaw, Frank Stanton, a former leading light at CBS in the States, and Lord Bullock, whom they knew as a regular at Aspen meetings. Cater and Harris, the paper’s saviours, were rewarded with places on the board.
Harris had already begun to get close to Anderson, escorting him around town and introducing him to his A-list friends. The two men were also seen in glamorous company at fashionable nightspots such as Annabel’s. Anderson accepted Harris’s offer to write his biography, an assignment that guaranteed they would be spending a good deal of time together, both in Britain and in the United States.
What the board lacked, however, was a British-based chairman who would carry conviction in the London newspaper world. While the new ownership was getting the paper a good press and also settling any fears that it might disappear, the arrangement lacked commercial credibility. Roger Harrison and I approached Lord Barnetson, chairman of the United Newspapers group of regional papers and also chairman of Reuters.
He was a short, cigar-smoking Scotsman with a bristly moustache, a waistcoat and a gold fob watch, respected for his canny shrewdness and liked for his jokey style. He had a look of the late Duff Cooper, but I suspect he was less of a ladies’ man. Goodman was not impressed with our choice, muttering dismissively: ‘He’s gone a long way for a man of his ability.’
Anderson and Bradshaw – impressed, I suspect, by the fact that he was a lord – fell in more readily with our choice and went so far as to provide him with a luxurious apartment in Hill Street, Mayfair. Barnetson’s chief recreation was said to be playing the drums to big band swing records in the basement of his house: I doubt if that would have gone down too well in Mayfair.
Soon after his appointment I went with Barnetson to see Anderson in his suite at Claridge’s. As they shook hands, I almost choked as the former said to the latter: ‘Saw the Queen last night, Bob. She was asking about you.’ I made it my business to check this story out, as far as I could. I established that Barnetson had indeed been at a reception the night before which had been attended by the Queen. But they could hardly have exchanged more than a few words if or when His Lordship was introduced to the monarch. I suppose it’s possible that the recent sale of The Observer was mentioned and that Anderson’s name might have come up in that conversation…
Barnetson’s first decisions were to reinforce the commercial and editorial management of the paper. He brought in Brian Nicholson, a greatly respected advertising executive with experience on the Sunday Times and the Express group, making him joint managing director with Harrison. How Harrison felt about that I never knew. He would know of Nicholson’s high reputation in Fleet Street and the value he could bring to the paper, especially in areas such as advertising and marketing, of which he had no direct experience himself. But I suspect that he didn’t take kindly to having to share his power with anyone.
In the event, the two men got on well together, covering different areas of responsibility. I received a long, handwritten letter from Jocelyn Stevens, then head of the Express group, begging us not to take Nicholson away from him, fearing that it might cause fatal damage to the group. In the event, the Express papers were sold the same year.
Unlike Harrison, who was seen as rather buttoned-up, Nicholson was popular with journalists and enjoyed nothing more than exchanging Fleet Street gossip with them. One of my colleagues once said: ‘Brian actually likes journalists and gives them the impression that they are the most interesting and important people on a paper; Roger gives the impression that editorial is just a loss-making department that spends too much money.’
Nicholson then brought in an able young advertising executive, Nicholas Morrell, who went on to become advertisement director and eventually managing director, first of The Observer and later of Lonrho after the company bought the paper from Arco four years later. It was a shrewd and far-reaching piece of recruitment, giving The Observer a more cutting professional edge. Like Nicholson, Morrell enjoyed the company of journalists and liked nothing more than drinking with the sports department on a Friday evening in their favourite haunt, the Cockpit.
On the editorial side, Barnetson brought in Iain Lindsay Smith, deputy editor of the Yorkshire Post, one of his regional papers, and a former editor of the Glasgow Herald. He was given the title of executive editor and an office close to mine. The assumption in the newsroom was that Lindsay Smith was earmarked to take over my job.
Alan Watkins echoes this in his memoirs:
He [Barnetson] intrigued against Trelford by importing another engaging Scotsman, Iain Lindsay Smith, into the paper with the intention of providing a rival, a possible successor. Trelford – the Rocky Marciano of newspaper politics – saw the punch coming and defended himself by giving Lindsay Smith a commodious office, a full set of daily newspapers, which remained neatly displayed on a side table, and nothing to do all day long.
I think Alan was wrong about Barnetson intriguing against me. In fact, he was to give me vital support when my position came under fire. Had Iain really been out to get my job, he made little visible effort to do so. He hardly ever spoke in editorial conferences and I never got wind of any plotting. It is true that I didn’t give him any specific departmental duties, but he never seemed to want any.
I was told that his friend Jack Crossley, whom he brought in as news editor, used to rail against him for failing to unseat me. But Iain was a gentle soul, lacking the stiletto quality needed for stabbing rivals in the back. He played the bagpipes at office parties wearing a kilt. Iain always seemed a bit uncomfortable on The Observer and I suspect he was glad enough to leave a few years later when Brian Nicholson found him a good job as managing director of Lloyds List.
I had always got on well enough with Harris personally and lunched with him from time to time. He recounted some excellent gossip, though I sometimes wondered why he didn’t feel a need to see it published in the paper. He kept his friendships in good repair, as they say, staying in regular touch, mostly at The Observer’s or the BBC’s expense, with a wide variety of well-known people. These days he would be called a networker. He once introduced me at a party to Harold Wilson, then the Prime Minister, soon after I had become editor. He told me afterwards that Wilson had said of me: ‘He’s my sort of chap.’
Harris’s interviews with the rich and famous were not a popular form of journalism at the time, at least with other journalists. This was mainly because he allowed the person interviewed to have the final say on what would appear in print. In fact, this worked out very well as a method, because it allowed the subjects to say many unguarded things in the course of the interview, confessing their innermost thoughts, private family moments and dragging up half-forgotten memories from childhood.
Kenneth took no notes, relying on his prodigious memory, which also encouraged people to speak more freely. A big part of his skill was his silky charm in flattering his subjects that these private confessions reflected well on them and would improve their public image. Even today some of these interviews, which he reproduced in book form, still read well – on senior figures like Presidents Nixon and Reagan, Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten. Sir Gordon Richards admitted, for example, that he would have preferred to be a singer rather than a jockey.
I had no problem with Harris before he helped to bring about the Arco takeover. In fact, I had more time for him and his old-fashioned style of journalism than most of The Observer’s staff. But I had never once seen him attend a single editorial conference in the decade I had worked on the paper. He took no part whatsoever in the creation of policy or the stimulation of ideas that were at the heart of the newspaper’s activities.
It came as a bit of a shock, therefore, when he and Cater set up a joint office at The Observer and started pouring out comments and criticism about the paper, mostly in memos to me but also to individuals on and off the paper. News of these opinions usually reached me by one route or another. It was unsettling for me and confusing for the staff.
I also learned that they had set up a series of meetings, without bothering to inform me, with senior figures in the media world to obtain their views about The Observer and how it could be improved. These involved people like Robert Kee, David Attenborough, Keith Kyle and Andrew Knight, the former editor of The Economist, who had caught Cater’s attention with the financial dexterity he had displayed in saving the RAC Club. Because I or my senior staff knew all these people, rather better in fact than Cater did, we quickly learned what was going on behind our backs.
In the end I rebelled, sending a sharp note to Cater and Harris that said their editorial thoughts should be directed to me or through me as the editor. I warned that I would not tolerate them trying to establish their own channels of communication to the journalists or organising meetings about the editorial content of The Observer without my prior knowledge. Arco’s acquisition of The Observer, I said, would be seen as a test of American ownership of media in the UK and it would not look good if they abused their power by diminishing the role of the editor.
I got no immediate response from Cater and Harris, but I learned from the management that I had stirred up quite a storm. They evidently wanted their own roles to be defined and formalised. Their plea to Anderson was redirected to Barnetson as the paper’s chairman. Astor and Goodman became involved. These discussions were going on way above my head but I knew that my own future as editor was part of these discussions. Being only dimly aware of what was going on was not good for my peace of mind.
Shouting in the Street Page 20
