Mail Men Page 24
Whatever the relationship with his father, there were other journalists to guide him along this part of his career and one man, more than any other, seems to have been crucial: Dacre’s boss, Brian Vine. Rotund and ruddy-cheeked ‘Vino’ could be found most evenings holding court in Costello’s in a crisp Savile Row tailored suit and with a monocle pushed into his left eye ‘for opthalmic reasons’ – even though it was obvious to all that the glass was clear. His English voice booming across the bar, Brian Vine looked and sounded every bit like an English m’lord on a drink-sodden vacation in the Big Apple, especially to the locals. However, it was all a deceit, and Vine was probably one of the best operators the newspaper trade has ever seen. Vino had scoop after scoop to his name, and he had even helped to track down Britain’s most wanted man, the runaway Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, in Brazil in 1973.
‘New York Magazine wrote a story profiling Vino’s lifestyle,’ said Mickey Brennan, ‘which included a luxurious apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, a weekend house at the end of Long Island, one very large Cadillac motor car – company owned – and a boat. He also had a couple of very slow racehorses.’30
Vino, however, didn’t take to Paul Dacre and would often refer to him as ‘my fucking tea boy’. As Express foreign desk stalwart and English’s friend and former colleague David Eliades, who happened to be in New York on a visit in the late 1970s, explained: ‘Dacre was just a soldier [a junior hack] in New York when I dropped in on the office one day, and we went to the bar [Costello’s] and we were sitting there and I suddenly noticed that Paul wasn’t in the company. So I went and sat with him for the rest of the evening and talked to him because the others didn’t really get on with him very well; they used to refer to Dacre as “pin head”. Brian was a big, bumptious man, and a great friend of mine and there was a clear animosity between Dacre and Brian Vine. It was rather tragic really because I liked Paul, I thought he was a very nice young man.’31
Phil Finn Jr was another hack who weaved in and out of Dacre’s life during these years; Dacre and his wife Kathy would often have dinner at the Finns’ apartment, where Dacre liked to relax with his socks pointed to the air on a reclining chair Finn had in his living room. And Finn had no doubt that Dacre’s time in New York was preparing mild-mannered Dacre well for what was to come.
‘I think the biggest single influence on Paul Dacre was Brian Vine,’ he told the author. ‘Many of the facets of Dacre’s life and the way he acts now were obviously learned from Brian Vine, he learned a lot of those “wrinkles” from Brian. But Vine was a far, far superior journalist to Dacre and Brian was a bit contemptuous of him really. I think that working in New York, if nothing else, he got a lot of steel. I would credit Brian Vine with instilling that in him, giving him that hard edge. I think Dacre saw that if he was going to do anything in the newspaper world he had to have a lot of Brian Vine in him.’32
To some in New York City, Paul Dacre was often an unwitting and unwilling figure of fun. One story has Dacre all in a fluster after Fred the barman handed him a Jewish yarmulke skullcap one afternoon when he walked into Costello’s with the Jewish office secretary.33 But the worst times for Paul Dacre were when Jean Rook, the Express’s lantern-jawed and perma-tanned star writer, showed up in town with her leopard-print dress squeezing out her chest. Her welfare would fall to Dacre, the office junior. And prudish Dacre – so the Costello’s story goes – once even had to shop for tampons for the First Lady of Fleet Street after the airline lost her luggage.
‘She’d call Costello’s and he’d panic,’ Mickey Brennan told the author, ‘and he was a real fucking panic merchant in those days, I can tell you, of the first order. His voice would quaver – he had this oscillating voice when he was scared – and so when she called the pub, he’d go “Oh, oh my God” and he’d run and push anybody out of the way to grab the telephone. And, of course, we’d take the piss out of him mercilessly. The craic in the pub some nights was quite mighty and Dacre was a target for a lot of that piss-taking, you just could not help it. But he never gave it back, he just wasn’t smart enough on his feet in that way. He had this silly upper-class twit kind of an attitude, like he was above it all. Plus, well, he just wasn’t a humorous bloke . . . but we all found him fucking hilarious.’34
Even outside Costello’s, Paul Dacre would have to endure the occasional ribbing, such as the day he went horse riding in New Jersey with his wife, Mickey Brennan and Neal Travis, a witty gossip writer on Murdoch’s New York Post. The party watched the riding school staff struggle to push clumsy Dacre up on to his horse. ‘The saddle hadn’t been tightened properly and of course it slipped and he went underneath the horse, and the horse took off!’ said Brennan. ‘And we’re all standing there pointing and pissing ourselves laughing; Kathy Dacre too. There were only two creatures who weren’t laughing: Dacre, and his fucking horse.’35
During another period out of doors, Mickey Brennan took a snap of a shirtless Dacre eating lunch by a hotel swimming pool in El Salvador, where they’d both been sent – an unstable country that eventually bubbled up into civil war. It was also regularly rocked by severe weather . . . and earthquakes.
‘We were only in El Salvador a short time and we didn’t exactly have a dangerous time, in fact we rather enjoyed ourselves,’ said Brennan. ‘But we were there during a big earthquake and it frightened the shit out of me, I’d never been in an earthquake before and it was quite a big one. Our rooms were on the fifth floor and, fuck me, Dacre was on the same floor but by the time we got down to the ground floor he was already there, sitting by the pool! He must have got down there in record time. The fucking earthquake was still going on, the swimming pool was still making waves.’36
It was far safer back in the Daily News Building, where Paul Dacre had a reputation as something of a studious journalist. Dacre would work far longer than anyone else perfecting a feature, agonizing over every word. Yet no matter how hard the Express staffers worked in New York, back in Britain the paper was on its long slide to nowhere, and by 1979 the Daily Mail was rising to take control of the middle ground that the Daily Express had dominated since the days of Beaverbrook and Bunny Harmsworth.
David English had by now, for sure, noticed Paul Dacre, and one day in 1979 the top Mailman was in New York and he invited Dacre to lunch. English’s Daily Mail was by now simply a better newspaper than the Daily Express, English told him. The Mail ’s time had come again. So Paul Dacre became a Mailman in the autumn of 1979, the clumsy contract appointing him as the Daily Mail ’s new New York bureau chief.
‘It’s difficult to understand really what personally attracted David English to Dacre initially,’ said Express hack David Eliades, who knew both men well, ‘because David was flamboyant and he liked to roll his sleeves up and get involved but Paul was very much more laid back and shy.’37
Perhaps only Dacre and English knew the truth, but it’s a fact that the Mail ’s New York bureau had been floundering for years, and Simon Winchester had spent an unhappy year failing to squeeze into a Mailman’s tights before handing over to Dacre and joining the Sunday Times, a paper to which he was far more suited.
‘I was obviously a lame duck by then,’ Winchester told the author, ‘but I got on perfectly well with Dacre. I was astonished to find he was appointed the Mail ’s editor a decade later or whatever it was, because he never struck me as anything out of the ordinary. He was a rather mild-mannered, perfectly pleasant guy. Unremarkable. He’s become transformed into something that I just don’t recognize; talk about the rise of the mediocre personality!’38
Paul Dacre’s byline in the Mail ’s own archive reveals that features were still his forte. In October 1979 he wrote a story about executions in America being turned into a soap opera. ‘At times this week, it was difficult, if appalling, to resist the thought that the man who convulsed to death in a Nevada death chamber was not a full paid up member of Equity.’39 And Dacre, who was still only thirty but already somewhat of a puritan, disapprove
d of American couples exploring their sex lives on TV – shows that highlighted ‘a grotesque trend seeping insidiously across American television and mirroring a disturbing social malaise’.40
Dacre also wrote a column for his new paper, similar to the one that had helped turn David English into a star reporter on the Express in the 1960s. Dacre’s version, though, wasn’t considered a great success. ‘I don’t think that worked,’ said David Eliades. ‘David English was a spectacular New York column writer and Dacre just didn’t have the same touch. He was more of a features man.’41
Paul Dacre was not born to be a George Steevens or a Vincent Mulchrone – few, to be fair, are – and Dacre himself began to accept that he was never going to be the greatest writer of his generation. He was, as he told the BBC, approaching a crossroads.
For the first ten years in journalism I did wonder whether my career would be pursuing the writing course but frankly I reached a point – and I was a very good writer – I reached a point where I realized I was never going to be a very great writer. I think if I had stayed as a writer I would have ended up as a frustrated chap contributing less and less as I got older. And I decided at that stage to go down the executive path, and I haven’t regretted it.42
It was just as well, as only fifteen months after he became a Mailman, Dacre was recalled to London to become deputy news editor, one of the lowest rungs on a very tall ladder to the top. Around the same time, the Mail ’s correspondent in Rhodesia, George Gordon, had actually turned down the much bigger job offer to be the news editor; it was an office job and he hadn’t become a journalist to get stuck in an office.
‘Suddenly it was all collapsing in New York,’ Gordon told the author, ‘so I had lunch with David English at the Savoy and English said, “Dacre’s coming back and I’d like you to go out to New York as the bureau chief.” He said things hadn’t quite worked out for Dacre and he simply didn’t want him there any longer.’43
Several expat hacks in New York – including Finn, Eliades and Brennan – had a fairly low regard for Dacre’s actual abilities as a news reporter. He was viewed as a feature writer and interviewer rather than as a great Fleet Street ‘operator’ (whereas English had very much been regarded as a top-notch hack in his day). And, it seems, the supreme Mail being must have agreed.
‘Dacre never had much of a news sense,’ added George Gordon, ‘and all right, it was a sort of promotion – I guess – for the New York bureau chief to be made deputy news editor, But I know English never thought much of Dacre’s news sense either. And that’s a Dacre failing, I think, even now as editor. Dacre had impressed English as a writer and with his good academic background but in English’s estimation he lacked on that “cut and thrust” Fleet Street experience that New York needed. He was a very good interviewer; he was good on the features. But it was at the height of a circulation battle with the Daily Express and the Express had a formidable team in New York.’44
On 10 October 1980 – a month shy of his thirty-second birthday – the Daily Mail published Dacre’s final ‘America’ column; he’d miss ‘Oyster stew at Paddy’s clam bar before a fight at Madison Square Garden’ but would be glad to be free of junkies in the street, born-again Christians and ‘American women’s seeming obsession with orgasms . . .’45
So Paul and Kathy Dacre and their two boys readied themselves for their return to the UK, tying up a few loose ends such as ridding themselves of the family’s vacation home in the Pocono Mountains. New bureau boss George Gordon tried to help out: ‘I took a whole bunch of UK hacks up there to see if anyone wanted to take it over [from the property’s occupants]. However, when we saw the agent she told us there had been a problem: the local sheriff had arrested [Dacre’s] previous tenants . . . they’d turned the basement into a pot [cannabis] production facility.’46
Mailman Dacre returned to Fleet Street in the autumn of 1980. It would take another dozen years of tough climbing to reach the top; he’d work double-time, fourteen hours or more, on most days. Paul Dacre was hooked on hard work and headlines and had been since his student newspaper days.47 But first he had to get up off that first rung, and somehow survive a national tabloid newspaper’s news desk, a dangerous furnace that has vaporized many a promising executive career over the years. Some Mailmen of the day suspect that English was testing the news judgement that was thought to be Dacre’s biggest weakness.
Dacre rolled up his sleeves and joined a handful of junior news editors assigning reporters to stories and sending them back again and again to knock on a door, this being the Daily Mail – as well as reading every last sentence in a tall stack of newspapers and magazines, keeping tabs on the wires and sifting agency copy and tips from freelancers. They would then process these fought-for words after they were filed and feed them into the fire – where they might be either incinerated or come out on ‘the stone’ as a double-page spread, the highest compliment for any tale in the Daily Mail.
The news desk performs all these duties with the constant fear that a bomb might go off in the editor’s office; no matter how good the news desk is, something always tends to go wrong. Life, such an untidy business – even for Mailmen – sometimes simply gets in the way: the idea may have been ridiculous in the first place (it is not unheard of for a Fleet Street editor to order the pursuit of a story that actually came to them in a dream), the tip-off from a member of the public or a freelancer may have been false, the target may not be home or the address may be wrong, another paper may have got to them first or simply bought them up as an ‘exclusive’. Yet the editor isn’t interested in reality. Every evening, the news editor’s success or failure is there to be weighed and measured against the rest of Fleet Street in the shape of all the first editions of every other newspaper sprawled out over his oversized desk. If his paper doesn’t have the best stories – and the best versions of the same stories every other paper has – the best editors will want to know why, right NOW! The news editor is the man – always a man, on the Daily Mail – who has to keep the furnace burning, he is the one who has to answer for all the human frailties of his innumerable staff and freelancers.
It’s a damn tough job, especially under an ultra-demanding editor like David English. Many journalists, including English himself, wisely dodge the news desk altogether and find other routes to the top. Yet Paul Dacre wasn’t even the news editor, he was just the deputy and desperately unhappy at being just a number two48 to rising English protégé Rod Gilchrist.
It turned out Dacre could take the heat, and he survived, thrived and then began to rise; soon enough, English moved Gilchrist across to Showbiz and promoted Dacre to news editor. If it had been a test, Dacre had passed; he was in his early thirties and had found his calling. Dacre had always been destined to be a man in an office.
Then the polite and mild-mannered boy from the suburbs began to morph into an expletive-spouting monster; his favourite word became ‘cunt’, a word that would have been like a bullet to a blue sky in Arnos Grove. Context, though, is important; this was the norm in the Fleet Street of the day.
‘We all took a tremendous amount of shit in those days from executives,’ said the Mail ’s crime reporter Tim Miles. ‘Dacre would call us a “load of cunts” or “a shower of cunts”. It was always “cunt this” and “cunt that”. He did like the word “cunt”.’49
Tim Miles was probably the best reporter on Dacre’s newsgathering team, a true Fleet Street ‘operator’ whose byline stood above some of the biggest stories of the 1980s, from the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion heist to IRA bombings. And he could have bylined himself ‘Air Miles’ for all the travelling he did on the Mail ’s account: he was in Zimbabwe for Robert Mugabe’s election, covered the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and was in Tripoli when bombs fell on ‘the mad dog of the Middle East’, Colonel Gaddafi. A British drug smuggler told Mailman Miles from his Malaysian prison cell how ‘they’d never hang him’ . . . only for the chap to swing from the neck until dead a few days late
r. David English rated him highly and his news editor rated him too.
‘It’s often said of Dacre that he’s a bully, and maybe he is,’ he told the author. ‘I made it very, very clear that I wasn’t gonna take any shit from him. I would accept criticism but I certainly would not be bullied. There were one or two reporters who just couldn’t take it, life became too miserable for them under Dacre, and they left. But I’m sure it was never personal: it was just that he wanted to get the best out of people and the best story. There was bombast, there was bluster, [and] there were very, very tough dressings down – “bollockings” – if you didn’t get things right. Yet beneath all that bombast and the bluster, I have to say, is a good heart. He always cared very much if people had family problems, he gave people time off if they did have a family problem. He was solicitous about those who were having some kind of problem either with wives, children, whatever it was.’50
Miles would sometimes see a lanky figure striding headlong down the road towards Fleet Street marching on towards his future. ‘I would give him a lift and I guess I got closer to him than a lot of people because he was in my car. We’d talk about what had gone on the day before, stories. But he didn’t gossip, he didn’t ask me about what I felt about other people in the newsroom – he wasn’t looking for tittle-tattle. It was all about the story. The story. I wouldn’t say we were close friends – I found him a bit of a loner, he’s a self-contained man who is above the fray most of the time, and I don’t think he makes friends easily. But I wouldn’t personally do the man down. He’s not the bad man – the evil man – that some people want him to be.’51