Mail Men Page 21

  English, the former Washington correspondent for the Daily Express, had never quite let America go. David and Irene had never really wanted to leave in the first place, and they returned to the States whenever they could to visit friends or to ski in Colorado. ‘He was a great – a total – lover of America,’ said Brian Freemantle. ‘Too much a lover of America actually because he sort of copied from American newspapers.’11

  David English had once been the master of American miscellany when he wrote a column from the US for the Daily Express in the 1960s, and he wanted to try and replicate this for his Daily Mail. So London-based Mailman James Gibbins was sent, for a three-week stint, to Washington, partly to provide the same kind of crisp little items for the paper that illuminated life stateside in the late 1970s. And young Gibbins, who’d won an award in his early days as a reporter in Scotland, came up with some crackers. He arrived in America in the early summer of 1978 and soon found a brilliant tale that Sunny Harmsworth would have adored: a hat story. There were beggars outside the White House and Gibbins wrote that ‘every one who approached me hand out-stretched, was wearing a bowler hat’. The hats had been given by a city draper to a welfare organization, he explained, who later gave them away ‘to bring dignity in head gear to the city’.12 It must have been fascinating to see destitute men who slept in doorways begging for change in black bowlers beloved by English City gents – and these sartorially elegant vagrants would have made a fantastic photo but, unfortunately, there wasn’t a picture.

  Another Gibbins scoop soon followed. The Secret Service was on the lookout for a potential ‘gatecrasher’ at a NATO summit – disgraced former President Richard Nixon.13 It was a great story, and the other British hacks in the US were immediately harangued by their foreign editors back in Fleet Street; how the hell could they miss such a story? Gibbins even got a front-page splash out of the – Nixon-free, he never did appear – NATO summit: ‘Jim Callaghan emerged last night in the unlikely role of the new Iron Man of the NATO alliance.’14 Gibbins was proving to be a better hack in the States even than his famous editor.

  He came up with another cracker about President Jimmy Carter, stating that he was a wreck, had backache and migraines and couldn’t eat or sleep. The First Lady, Rosalynn, ‘she of the beguiling smile’, was according to Gibbins ‘increasingly regarded by Washington insiders, men and women who have studied the shifts and nuances of supreme power for decades, as the de facto President’. Something had to be done. This was an emergency for the Democrats with an election just over the hill – ‘clinical injections had failed’ and ‘three top psychologists, and any number of sociologists and demographers’ advised Carter to take drastic action. There could, of course, be but one solution, the President had no choice – he had to grow a beard.

  ‘Image-makers hired to fathom how Jimmy Carter can grow “giant-sized” with a public that views him as a presidential pygmy,’ wrote Gibbins in June 1978, alongside a sketch of a bearded Carter, ‘have decided that one-inch can do the trick – a tuft of beard. Just enough to convince Americans and the world that there are shades of the wisdom of Abe Lincoln here.’

  Gibbins wrote that Carter at first snarled ‘Are you crazy?’ when told of the idea and ‘other equally bizarre face-savers’, but was ‘trying it on’ with close friends and ‘may well’ even have discussed it over breakfast with British Prime Minister Callaghan.15 Maybe Jimmy and Jim did in fact discuss beards over bacon and eggs, but the other hacks in America had had quite enough of James Gibbins and his ‘scoops’. White House bums in bowlers? The President growing a beard? They denounced him to their bosses as a barefaced liar.

  An American reporter named Jim Srodes wrote it all up for the Washington Post. Srodes himself was a little worried it might all be an elaborate spoof, a genuine attempt at satire, until he phoned the Mail ’s foreign editor, John Moger. ‘We did send Mr Gibbins to Washington briefly,’ said Moger. ‘He is one of our best feature writers and he did a good job for us. The Mail prides itself on its reputation for accuracy and so if you say it’s all fantasy, that is you saying so and not me.’16 Srodes unpicked a dozen Gibbins stories under the headline ‘The Faker of Fleet Street – the tale of a foreign correspondent who went too far in inventing stories’.

  The Washington Post did give Gibbins a right of reply in which he stated: ‘I stand by everything I wrote about America.’

  The Post, acting for a press gang in the worst sense of the word, struck me a vast psychological blow which robbed me, at least so far as its readership goes and possibly far beyond this, of the ‘credit card’ vital to my survival as a professional journalist: my integrity. Indeed, the repercussions of this attack so far indicate that I might well be left penniless for life.17

  A letter from Gibbins was also printed soon after in Press Gazette, the trade magazine for British journalists, shortly before he departed the Daily Mail staff. ‘I wish to announce formally that I am not the Faker of Fleet Street,’ he wrote,18 though he didn’t deny the Post’s story – he did write a ‘rebuttal’, which he’d sent to every newspaper office in London. And those beggars in bowlers had been there, he insisted. The other Washington hacks simply didn’t like him, that was the problem.

  I decided to roll up my sleeves rather than rest my elbows on the bar counter of the Press Club. Journalism by hand-out wasn’t for me. A bad mistake, I now see. I knew I was rocking the boat, of course – it never occurred to me that the other occupants would throw me overboard and leave me to drown.19

  America was the second most important territory for generating content for the pages of the Daily Mail newspaper and David English wanted someone he rated highly, somebody he could trust to run his paper’s US operations to make sure this kind of thing never happened again. But his choice, Simon Winchester, wasn’t born to be a Mailman – his byline simply belonged within the tall, wide-open space of a broadsheet.

  English now had a problem with the Mail ’s reputation in America, though, especially among other journalists, and Winchester – who’d studied geology at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and was a seasoned foreign correspondent with a solid reputation – could bring some intellectual ballast to the Mail ’s listing ship in the USA.

  ‘I was in Delhi and I got this call from David English, who I knew quite well,’ Winchester told the author, ‘and he said, “Simon, I’ve been reading in the papers it’s rather hot over there at the moment.”’

  ‘Yes, David,’ said Winchester. ‘It’s very, very hot indeed.’

  ‘How many air conditioners does the Guardian give you?’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking? I think there’s one.’

  ‘Well, quite. So, it’s miserable working for the Guardian, isn’t it? They don’t pay you enough. We, however, would pay you a heap of money if you came to work for us in New York.’

  ‘Well, David, that’s sweet of you but I’m just not a Daily Mail kind of chap.’

  ‘Well, there’s a seat reserved for you tonight first class on British Airways 145 from Delhi to London. Come and have a chat.’20

  Winchester spent a few days being wined and dined at the Savoy before finally saying ‘why not’. He was duly appointed US bureau chief of the Daily Mail, though he had to work his notice on the Guardian. Coincidentally, he was sent to Bangladesh on a story, where he met Jim Srodes among a press pack of other hacks. He told them he was joining the Mail, to which Srodes replied: ‘You’re an idiot for going to the Mail and I’ll show you why.’ He went off to find his copy of his ‘Faker of Fleet Street’ story and showed it to Winchester.

  Even so, the Guardian’s Simon Winchester – now a successful author – became a Mailman at the end of the 1970s. But it didn’t take him long to realise he’d made a huge mistake. ‘They hated me after about three months,’ he said, ‘because I was clearly some pointy-headed, pompous Oxbridge ex-Guardian man. And they started doing things that they knew would get up my nose.’ The foreign editor, still John Moger, wanted to send him to California to s
ee what a load of British union officials got up to while visiting the golden state on a fact-finding mission, and his Guardian nose smelled a dull but worthy kind of tale: ‘Oh, that’s interesting, John, to do a comparison of English and American workplace practices? That would be fascinating!’

  ‘No,’ Moger replied. ‘That’s not what we want you to do. We want you to follow them surreptitiously to all the nightclubs and strip clubs they go to. And just do a “number” on them.’

  ‘And I said: “John, come on. I’m not holier-than-thou but . . . what if they don’t go to any? And anyway I don’t want to be following people around like that.” He said: “It’s an ‘Editor’s Must’ – you’ve got to do it.”’

  Another ‘Editor’s Must’ that Winchester was asked to write up from the US was a study by ‘a thoroughly disreputable eugenics organisation saying, essentially “Black People Are Stupid – It’s Official!” This was measuring intelligence on a very skewed basis and it was an utterly discredited survey. And of course the Mail – David – wanted to run it big. Something with some academic credentials showing that black people were not as bright as white people.’

  ‘Editor’s Must’ is a phrase that has struck fear in many a Fleet Street hack, meaning a direct order from the Führer which cannot be declined – a stick often used by department heads to get reluctant reporters to do as they’re told. The Mail ’s highly paid US bureau chief struggled with his conscience on both these stories for under five seconds: ‘I refused to write these pieces. And then things got very nasty indeed.’

  Winchester was finally saved from his Daily Mail hell by the Pope. The pontiff was in New York, and where the Pope goes the press pack follow; among them was a friend from the Sunday Times called John Whale, who asked how it was going on the Mail. ‘I’m having a miserable time,’ Winchester replied. ‘I’m being paid heaps of money by the Mail but they’re just asking me to do all these weird stories which basically, and I know I must sound very naive in saying this, but they’re not true! I mean I am being asked to write things that have no truth in them at all.’

  The Sunday Times religious affairs correspondent would prove to be a saint for Simon Winchester. He walked away to a phone booth. ‘And then he opened the door and beckoned me over. And he said: “Take this phone call.”’ On the line was the legendary Sunday Times editor Harry Evans, who said: ‘I understand you’re not happy working for the Mail ?’ He offered the Mailman a job, and Winchester resigned. But English had a shock for him yet: he was going to hold him to the notice period stipulated in his contract – one whole year. ‘That was pretty wretched,’ said Winchester. ‘That year was horrible.’

  As he endured his long goodbye from the paper, Winchester got to see up close just how the supreme Mailman operated when English attended the Republican Party National Convention in Detroit in July 1980, which saw Ronald Reagan anointed as the party’s nominee to run for president. There was a suggestion at the time that ex-president Gerald Ford could run for Vice-President on the Reagan ticket, but George H. W. Bush joined Reagan instead. Ford was, apparently, being prevented from running by his wife Betty, who was a struggling alcoholic and would be unable to handle the stress of her husband’s return to frontline politics.

  ‘So it was at about ten or eleven at night in Detroit,’ said Winchester, ‘that would have been about four in the morning in London. And David said, “I’m going to dictate the following copy for you to take down.” And it said, basically, “In an exclusive interview with a weeping Betty Ford, she said under no circumstances am I going to allow my husband to run as nominee for vice president.”’

  Winchester paused, looked up.

  ‘David,’ he asked, ‘did you see Betty Ford?’

  ‘And he said: “No, no. It’s entirely fiction. But this is going in as an ‘Editor’s Must’.” And it was this personal interview. I mean, it was complete fiction. Of course, I just sent the copy over. But that was David really, I mean, never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. I hated what he did. But as a man he was so amusing. David and I always got on well personally – even years later after I left. But it was a pretty damn dishonest ship he was captain of.’21

  Indeed. And a level of dishonesty was exactly what was required when English’s Daily Mail lost out in a bidding battle with other newspapers to secure the rights to the big books of the day – political, celebrity or royal biographies that could often deliver a full week’s worth of scoops and scandals (but cost a great deal of money as a consequence).

  ‘We did a lot of stealing of books,’ one former Mailman told the author. ‘We might lose out on the rights but that didn’t stop us, we’d just launch an undercover operation to get hold of the manuscript without actually buying the rights. It was like cops and robbers and we got very good at it. One of the best techniques was to find out where the printing took place, which was often abroad, and someone would arrive as a prospective client asking to have a look around the print plant. And you’d get a tour and you’d have your cover worked out – like who you represented and so on – and then on the tour, if you were lucky, you’d ask to see a few samples of stuff they’d printed and hopefully you’d find that elusive biography and you’d just put it in your bag.’22

  Back at the Mail ’s office, the place would be alight with excitement at having a book full of scoops in their hands a full month before the rival paper planned to run their stories. But there was still a problem; they had to find a way to cover up where all these juicy tales had come from – they couldn’t just say they were from the book they’d failed to buy, that would be theft.

  ‘Sometimes the best way was to take the stolen manuscript and commission another book off the back of it, a very quick book that would be written in a week with all the best stories in, which would basically be attributed to “friends” or other anonymous sources, and get a tame publisher to publish it, then buy the serial rights and run the best stories from it in the Mail before it was in the Sunday Times or whatever. And that was very hard for anyone to trace. It was very clever and, of course, it was illegal and immoral but it was a hell of a lot of fun too. It was all very “Fleet Street” of the day though – those playground games. And David English loved all that.’

  An example of just how dishonest David English could be personally, however, did not emerge until 1988, when English wrote a piece in the Daily Mail about his experiences as a young Daily Express hack in the US in the early 1960s. Everybody, so the cliché goes, could remember precisely where they were when they heard the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Not David English. He told his readers a quarter of a century later that he was in Dallas, Texas, the day Kennedy died in November 1963. But he wasn’t, he was 1,600 miles away, having a coffee with the office Telex operator George Valinotti near the Express HQ in New York City.

  Selected by Lord Beaverbrook, a long time crony of the Kennedy clan, to be his man at the new Camelot I had by patronage and connection become part of the inner press circle which the Kennedys courted so assiduously. It was a heady, intoxicating spell they wove around us, corrupting with charm and grace, mesmerising with a dazzling imperial vision of America’s role in the world and disarming us with inside information which always put them in a good light. And all along with humour, style and grace unknown before in political America and exceptional even to the highest standards of Europe. As the youngest member of this elite club I could hardly believe the providence and luck that had put me there . . . We lived and travelled well, we President’s men in the White House Press Corps in brand new special planes. We were cossetted and flattered. We were part of the system. And so that November we went to Texas because the President was going. None of us would have deigned to have set foot there but for him. For we knew from him and his brother Robert that there was more than something rotten in the state of Texas.23

  It was wonderfully evocative stuff, with the Mail ’s editor painting in words a full-colour picture of a wonderfully gifted, heroic even
, young reporter – himself – right at the centre of things. But unfortunately, he had not been personally ‘selected by Beaverbrook’, as Max Aitken senior was an old man riddled with cancer by then and he died only six months after Kennedy. The Express didn’t even send anyone down to Dallas with the President, probably because Ross Mark, the Express’s accredited White House correspondent, was on holiday. It was not as mad a decision as it seems in hindsight, given that the President was there for the start of his re-election campaign and the business end was another full year away.

  Dozens of English’s fellow hacks from the era knew English had made all this up – because they had also been working in the States or receiving copy from the US on the Express’s foreign desk at the time. ‘That was, to my mind, the most astonishing thing to have done,’ chuckled English’s good friend and the reborn Mail ’s first foreign editor Brian Freemantle, who had left Fleet Street a decade before to write novels, ‘because so many people immediately knew it wasn’t true! I mean, Kennedy was shot and so was Oswald but David English wasn’t where he said he was when it all happened. I knew he wasn’t there, many people knew he wasn’t there – when he was hitting the keys he must have known he wasn’t there for fuck’s sake. You know, if you’re gonna just tart a story up a bit – don’t do it with a story that is blatantly, blatantly, blatantly, blatantly not true. I saw his story the day it appeared, and called a friend on the Express, David Eliades, and said, “What the fuck’s this about?”’24

  David Eliades knew more than most; he had worked for most of his career as a senior editor on the Express foreign desk and he knew who was where and when. The day he received the call from Freemantle in November 1988, he was in the Express office reading the same piece with utter astonishment – alongside a retired Express reporter, Robin Stafford, who was the man who had actually written the initial J. F. K. story from Washington while English dashed to the airport to get down to Dallas. English’s story was a great read, a well-spun yarn. It continued: