Mail Men Page 13
Indeed, Max Aitken had long shown he was a far cannier political operator than both Bunny and Sunny Harmsworth had ever been. He was elected as a Unionist MP in 1910, not long after arriving in the UK, and became Minister for Information (from the House of Lords after being ennobled) and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – with a seat in Cabinet – in 1918. And a dozen years later, Beaverbrook and Bunny Harmsworth infuriated three-time Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin over a crusade for free trade between the countries of the British Empire. Baldwin was livid over an article in the Daily Mail in which the paper implied that Baldwin – Leader of the Opposition at the time – was unfit for government because he had squandered his family fortune. Baldwin had thought of suing for libel but instead attacked Rothermere and Beaverbrook at a public meeting with a killer phrase from his cousin, the poet and writer Rudyard Kipling: ‘What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ Beaverbrook’s political instincts were so much sharper than those of the Harmsworths, and he never fell for Hitler like Bunny Harmsworth. The Express stayed broadly neutral. Aitken also held several posts in Churchill’s Government during the Second World War.
In 1922 the Express sold only a third as many copies as the Mail, but it overtook Sunny’s darling within a decade and by 1939 it was selling 2.5 million copies a day – a million more than the rattly old Daily Mail.11
Bunny’s grandson Vere, who was born in 1925, just as the Express was starting to catch the Daily Mail, said: ‘Beaverbrook was a natural journalist and he understood the whole situation instinctively. He hired away from the Daily Mail all the top journalists, all trained by Northcliffe and of course the managers on the Daily Mail were under my grandfather’s instructions, cutting this and cutting that and . . . pushing down the journalists. And Beaverbrook said essentially, “What do you want to work there for? Come and work for me and I will give you more money.”’12
After the war, there was yet another factor driving the best Mailmen into Beaverbrook’s arms: Vere’s stepmother, the new Lady Rothermere – a lady many staff began simply to call ‘the Monster’.
Esmond’s second wife Ann was prone to making the kind of telephone call that every editor dreads the most: the one from the proprietor’s wife offering advice or suggesting stories and campaigns for his paper or friends he should hire. Some thought control of the Daily Mail was actually in Lady Rothermere’s hands, not her husband’s. Rothermere’s managing director after the war, William McWhirter, told a colleague: ‘Esmond will come to the office in the morning and announce something with a tone of finality, and you know perfectly well where it has come from. Then you set to work to argue against it, all the more forcibly because you know that his pride is involved and that he will have to go home and explain to Ann why it can’t be done.’13
Esmond had always been, like Uncle St John, very popular with the ladies. His first marriage to Vere’s mother, Peggy – who had, in fact, first been promised to dead brother Vyvyan – ended badly on the grounds of Esmond’s serial adultery: at least two dozen co-respondents were named in their long-drawn-out divorce proceedings. And though Ann Charteris, who became his second wife, was not a conventionally beautiful woman (her enemies said she was ‘hatchet-faced’), she had a strong and deeply sexual hold over her men, and during her years with Esmond he wasn’t the only man she took to bed. Ann, who was married when she began her affair with Esmond after he offered to rub oil on her back during a holiday in Austria in the late 1930s, also began sleeping with Ian Fleming in 1939. She married Esmond after her soldier husband was killed towards the end of the war but she continued her sexual liaisons with Fleming (even having dinner with him the night before her wedding to Esmond).
Fleming was more to Ann’s taste than Esmond; he was the feckless Eton-educated scion of a wealthy merchant banking dynasty until war came and he joined the intelligence service and found his calling. And the future ‘James Bond’ thriller writer had a thing for kinky sex and pornography, of which he had a fine collection. As one girlfriend described it, they were ‘variations on a theme about flagellation . . . books about women dressed up as a schoolmistress in lace collars, standing over manacled men with a whip.’ ‘I say,’ he asked one girlfriend as she flicked through. ‘Are you getting a kick out of that?’
Ann was only too happy to join him in bed for sessions they called their ‘bruisings’, in which they’d whip each other with ‘raw-cowhide’. ‘You have made bruises on my arms and shoulders,’ he wrote to her. ‘All this damage will have to be paid for some time.’ He liked to give her twenty lashes, ‘ten on each buttock’. She also wrote a ‘poem’ to Fleming on one of his inevitable, for the British upper classes of the era, trips down to the French Riviera. ‘This dear familiar face is not accustomed to neglect, and still has the capacity to make other men erect. So if by chance you meet a pretty Biarritz slut, just pause for thought and hesitate before you stuff her up, etc.’
Fleming was also Esmond’s friend. He would wander down from Boodle’s gentlemen’s club in St James’s to Warwick House, where the Rothermeres lived in London, for dinner or to play bridge. If Esmond was away or at the office Fleming would invariably find his way upstairs and into Ann’s bedroom. After one of their sessions in 1948, she wrote to Fleming: ‘I hope you are safe at home and missing your black bitch [Ann] and I long for you even if you whip me because I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards.’14
Esmond, on the other hand, truly irritated his wife. Ann was an aristocratic snob of the Charteris clan – her father was the second son of a minor earl – and it greatly upset her sense of the order of things to learn that Esmond liked to spend time with the middle classes. Esmond enjoyed ‘tennis tournaments and dances in Eastbourne’, she wrote to her brother Hugo – whom she manoeuvred into a job on the Continental Daily Mail, ‘and I think he genuinely prefers that CLASS [her capitals] of society to our CLASS of society’.
Lady Rothermere also blamed the mess the Mail had become on Esmond. ‘The Daily Mail can never be anything but a muddle,’ she wrote to Hugo, ‘for even in the unlikely event of Esmond finding perfect lieutenants, the perfect lieutenants will be in the impossible position of quicksand power and no final responsibility; how can you completely trust or indeed help any person who will within cautious limits inevitably listen to the advice of the last acquaintance he meets?’15
‘The Monster’ also didn’t care for the Mail ’s smartly dressed, fair-haired and athletically handsome Stanley Horniblow, who had been editor since 1944. Maybe, as a true aristocrat, she didn’t like his accent; Aussie Stan had, somehow, developed the plummy English voice of the upper classes, maybe from the newsreels. So Horniblow was pushed out in 1947 and replaced by one of ‘Annie’s boys’. Frank Owen was a former Evening Standard editor and ex-MP who had been as fierce an anti-Nazi while working for the Daily Express as Bunny had been a fan.
Tom Pocock, a Charteris family friend, became a Mailman at Lady Rothermere’s insistence shortly after Owen’s appointment and found the Mail editor ‘a bit wild’. Owen was six foot four tall, with broad shoulders and ‘very macho and tough with dark hair sprouting straight out of his forehead’. On his first day in the job, Owen asked this new hire foisted on him from above for ideas. Pocock had suggested a feature on folk who had terrible jobs yet enjoyed them. Dustmen, for instance, were ‘always smiling and singing’.
‘So you think you would enjoy their jobs?’ said Owen. ‘Why?’
‘Well, perhaps when they’re opening dustbins, they’re always hoping they’ll find a diamond necklace.’
‘That’s right, Tom. Life is a dustbin. You go out and find me the jewels.’
That first lunchtime in his new job he bumped into Owen on the stairs. ‘Come and have lunch with me,’ said the editor. So they went to El Vino, the famous Fleet Street wine bar, and on to a posh restaurant ‘with some friends he had picked up and we didn’t get back to the
office at all’.
We ended up with some glamorous women in low-cut dresses in the Milroy nightclub. There were two wonderful dance bands. We were sitting there in the dark, bottles all over the tables. His link with the office was a white telephone among the bottles and every now and then a dispatch rider would come clumping into the night-club with page proofs for the Daily Mail, and the wine waiter would come over and shine his torch on it. Frank would read the proofs, ring up his night editor and tell him what to do. This went on until four in the morning. I thought ‘Gosh, I never knew Fleet Street was like this.’16
Owen’s former-showgirl wife turned heads when she visited the office, as did his mistress, who would pop into the building during office hours. The editor would then disappear for hours, only to reappear flushed with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. When asked where he’d been, he’d reply: ‘Sunning myself on the roof.’ Then Owen fell out with Lady Rothermere; as Time magazine reported in June 1950, ‘it has long been common knowledge in Fleet Street that the real boss wears a petticoat’.
For several years, pretty, vivacious Lady Ann Rothermere, 36, has tried to run the Mail from Warwick House. Without consulting Editor Owen, she often summoned staffers to her home to assign stories or suggest new features . . . Owen fought back, but fought a losing battle. In recent months, eight top editorial executives and writers and two directors have been fired or quit. Last week, as fed up with Warwick House as Warwick House was with him, Frank Owen quit.17
Finally the Daily Mail staff were saved from ‘the Monster’ when Esmond discovered Ann was pregnant with Fleming’s child and they divorced. Ann, who joked that it was ‘the death of the golden goose’, married Fleming, and the day after their wedding Fleming sat his bruised backside down to work on Casino Royale at his house in Jamaica. His first novel featured a spy called ‘James Bond’ – a name the keen bird-spotter had borrowed from the author of an exhaustive study of Caribbean birds.
Despite the drift, the Daily Mail did still have some of the finest talent in Fleet Street in the post-war period and one of them in particular, Vincent Mulchrone, may well have been the most gifted newspaper writer the trade has ever seen. The ‘King of the Intro’ would craft the first paragraph of a newspaper story into a thing of real beauty. ‘The news story must be the only human activity,’ explained Mulchrone, ‘which demands that the orgasm comes at the beginning.’
Mulchrone was one of the very few so-called ‘Fleet Street Legends’ who was actually worthy of the term; he would sit crumpling up sheets of paper and write out his intro longhand in pencil, said colleague Peter Lewis, until ‘the words gave off an exciting fizz – like the sound of the foam when the first wave runs up the dry sand’.18 He could sum up an entire story without need for anything much more than one paragraph, often under pressure in a stiflingly hot cable office in some dangerous trouble spot, yet could still find the deceptively simple detail that somehow illustrated the whole. It was always a human detail. People ultimately care about people not things – a fact often lost on many ‘heavy’ journalists, lesser writers, who really do believe they are more important than the story.
As Winston Churchill lay in state in January 1965, for instance, Mulchrone summed up the nation’s grief in less than forty words: ‘Two rivers run through London tonight and one of them is made of people. Dark and quiet as the night-time Thames itself, it flows through Westminster Hall, eddying about the feet of the rock called Churchill.’ And when one of the architects of the Holocaust went on trial, he painted in the banality of evil in just a couple of sentences: ‘As the bells of Jerusalem rang nine today the Jews offered their prisoner to the sight of the world – a desperately lonely, balding monster who has a new suit and a cold in the head. The local tailor who made the suit specially for Adolf Eichmann did not, perhaps, put his best skill into it.’ Just like those of Ernest Hemingway – incidentally, also a former newsman – there is a lot of human information eddying beneath those simple words. Mulchrone’s words simply demanded the reader kept on reading, even if they did not know what the story was about. For example: ‘When the poor but honest die, all that remains personal to them can be – and with weird frequency is – contained in a cardboard shoebox.’ And ‘I was shaving waist deep in the Areguma, a pastry slice for a mirror, when this cannibal swam down the river and grabbed my ankles . . .’ Or ‘Wielding my fearless pen like a tin-opener, I now return to the worrying subject of pineapple chunks’, to ‘It is my firm intention, some time during the second half of my life, to do something about the wonky handle on the sitting room door.’ And ‘I don’t mind being fat. And even less the fact that I’m unfit. But I hate like hell being 40. Which I have been now for one whole day. I’m sitting here, a fat, 40-year-old fool, watching a fold in my flesh on the back of my hand which refuses to go down.’19
On another occasion, in the summer of 1966, rugby league fan Vincent wrote the perfect paragraph to sum up a football match later that day, the World Cup Final: ‘If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have beaten them twice at theirs.’20
Any reporter who has written for both a popular newspaper and a broadsheet knows how much easier it is to work on a broadsheet – broadsheets, of course, have more space. To tell the same story with fewer words is a tough skill few can truly master; it generally took talented sub-editors to actually form a tabloid newspaper (the work they used to do can truly be seen nowadays online as ever more reporters file clumsy and cluttered stories – full of ‘txt msg’ grammar, spelling mistakes and typos – straight to their web pages with very few costly subs making the whole product sing in time and tune).
Arguably Vincent Mulchrone – just like with George Warrington Steevens at the very start of the Mail story – defined exactly what Sunny Harmsworth had originally wanted his paper to be (before Lord Northcliffe’s thirst for power, his ownership of The Times and his German obsession dissipated his energy and diluted his populist touch). The best of daily popular journalism is rarely given the respect it deserves, as Vere Harmsworth, who’d become the third Lord Rothermere, explained of Mulchrone: ‘He felt in some ways, paradoxically, that he was a failure as a writer because he confined his talents to daily journalism, which is read, crumpled up and thrown away. It did not occur to him that what he achieved could only be accumulated over the years through daily written journalism, a more direct and immediate communication from writer to reader than either books, on one hand, or television on the other. He took tremendous pride in his craft but he simply did not know how good he was.’21
Yorkshire-born Mulchrone began most working days before midday with champagne in the back bar of the Harrow pub – a paper aeroplane’s throw from the Mail ’s offices (the bar is now named after him). But he was mostly on the move, and Mrs Mulchrone, recalled their son Patrick, ‘could get in and out of Heathrow like threading a needle’. ‘One time when he was coming in from somewhere exotic and going out to somewhere cold, and there was no time to get home, my mother was rung from some far-flung place and told, “Pack all my cold gear, my heavy gear.” And he unloaded his suitcase on the floor of the arrivals building while she shovelled the lightweight stuff in. We three boys stood in our dressing-gowns watching my mother transfer hot-weather kit from a suitcase into a bag.’22
Though he adored the Daily Mail and resisted plenty of overtures to join the Express, in common with many reporters on right-wing newspapers, Mulchrone was no Tory. ‘He always was tortured by the fact that he was writing for a Tory newspaper,’ said Vere. ‘His heart really was on the left.’23
Mulchrone may not have realized how good a writer he was, but he thought a true reporter ‘the happiest animal on earth’ and the Daily Mail had ‘opened doors that would otherwise be barred to one so obviously devoid of any talent but the rough cunning and low-born persistence required of a reporter’.
No other trade would have paid one to swim at midnight in Alice Springs, or fish Loch Ness for i
ts Monster with a bottle of Malt for bait, or open National Tequila Week (a purely personal fiesta) in Mexico City, or marvel at grey Jerusalem flushing apricot in the dawn. When the barricade went up in Algiers the thought came, too, that it would be neither sweet nor fitting to die for one’s intro . . . You can feel yourself growing the extra skin. This explains, in part at least, why journalists live, and drink, and move together . . . Diabolical phonies abound. I have never known one fool a group of journalists . . . I wouldn’t want to be anything other than a reporter.24
When the sixties really started swinging in the autumn of 1963, John, Paul, George and Ringo welcomed Vincent to take an inside peek at the biggest showbiz story there has ever been. ‘This Beatlemania, I wondered what it was all about,’ he wrote in October 1963. ‘The divisive forces which have been tearing at the nation’s loyalties in the past week might be crystallized in one vital question: “Would you let your daughter marry a Beatle?”’