CHAPTER 10

Hired. Fired. Hired

The Sun had its offices in Covent Garden long before it became fashionably famous for its restaurants and boutique stores. For 300 years it had been London’s wholesale garden market. Covent Garden smelt country fresh early in the day, but later, on a hot afternoon, it was pungent with rotting fruit and vegetables littering its lanes.

Covent Garden overlapped with London’s theatre district. The Royal Opera House was at its heart, and Drury Lane along its edge. It was a nocturnal world, an all-night intersection of bohemian theatre people, flat-capped garden porters, and lingering newspaper workers. This odd mix crowded into the all-night cafes, and pubs opened at 5am when most of the garden workers finished their shifts.

When I arrived one mid-morning in July 1966 for my meeting with Barrie Harding, the working day was winding down. The fruit and vegetable stalls were mostly empty. Lorries had driven off with their purchases to distribute them among shops and supermarkets, and the flower ladies were making their late daily visits in search of bargains to take back to their street stands.

Barrie Harding was blond and softly plump, and he laughed in explosive and disconcerting bursts. I told him about my work at The News in Adelaide.

‘Ha,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t know much about Australian newspapers.’

I told him of my experience at BUP.

‘Ha. Working at an agency is very different to newspapers.’

I could tell my interview was not progressing well, but then he surprised me.

‘We have a vacancy for a holiday relief reporter. It will last for six months or so. I can’t guarantee anything full time, but you will have to leave your BUP job.’

‘That will be absolutely no problem,’ I said calmly. On the street outside, I jumped in the air, and the fruit and veg men looked at me oddly. I had a job on Fleet Street.

The Sun then was an unglamorous poor cousin of the mighty Daily Mirror. It struggled with a sale below 1 million while the Mirror, with sales above 5 million, was the country’s biggest daily. The Sun was an experiment by the Mirror’s owners, the International Publishing Corporation, to produce a modern newspaper for Britain’s growing middle-class. It was born out of the Daily Herald, a paper with its roots in the trade union movement. In the 1930s it became the country’s biggest daily, but its circulation was eaten away by the intense post-war competition. The plan was to make The Sun subtly upscale, and it was given a dry-witted, whimsical style. This approach succeeded in setting The Sun apart from other newspapers; the trouble was it also set it apart from readers.

The Sun was the most intense place I had worked. Everyone was so sure of themselves, so competitive and combative, and so impatient, that I longed for the quiet, sealed loneliness of BUP. Most of the editorial staff worked in the so-called Big Room. At one end, the sub-editors sat bowed and silent, wielding their pens. At our end, it was raucous. Reporters sat in rows of dark metal desks. The old hands were expansive and noisy, and relaxed in an exaggerated way, putting their feet up on the desks, flicking cigarette ash from their shirts. They debated loudly who had come back from lunch the drunkest, and told one another crude stories and jokes. They went quiet only when cursing the bosses who sat across the room.

Few of the heavy black telephones had dials, and there weren’t enough typewriters for everyone, or even desks. We were hot-desking before anyone had thought of the term. This created a pecking order. If Sid Williams, the chief reporter, needed the typewriter I was using, he would snatch it mid-sentence from my desk. ‘Sorry, old boy, I have work to do.’

Reporters congregated in two places during working hours: in the newsroom, or across the street in the Cross Keys. It was debatable where we spent more time. The Keys was a tiny pub, whose narrow front was a thicket of flowers and shrubbery with granite columns beneath two winged and naked cherubs holding huge, crossed keys. This was a version of the papal seal displaying the keys of heaven; certainly arrivals looked happy as they walked through its gates.

Every day, from 1pm until closing time at 3pm — or a bit longer if Ann, the landlady, was in a good mood — we crowded into the Cross Keys. We might have received our assignments before lunch, but unless they required us to leave the neighbourhood, everyone walked over to the Keys. At 3.30pm we would be back at our desks to make a few more phone calls. When the pub reopened at 5.30pm there was time for a quick pint, then back to the office to file by 7pm or so.

There were a lot of drunks among us, and a few geniuses. Sometimes both qualities were present in one person. The film critic Ann Pacey, wild and profane in the pub, would return to the office after lunch to write flawless pieces on the morning screening she had seen. Jon Akass was my hard-living hero, a debauched Ben Franklin, with long, shaggy hair receding at the front. I wanted to be him right down to the drinker’s paunch.

Akass travelled the world, drinking and smoking, and producing colourfully descriptive copy from US presidential elections, African wars, and Iron Curtain countries. Akass was candid when drunk; his career faltered, but recovered, when he called the editor a ‘swivel-headed cunt’. He found writing a torture; on bad days, he would fill a room with cigarette smoke and empty a half-bottle of Scotch. This didn’t make him unique. Harry Arnold was short and slight, and baffled everyone with his capacity for accommodating beer.

Akass and Arnold were at the two ends of the spectrum of newspaper writers. Akass was a ‘creative’, and studied in his shambly untidiness. Arnold was a straight newsman, presenting powerful stories in brisk, unadorned prose. Regular reporters were required to wear suits and ties, and Arnold bought his suits from Savile Row. He was fastidious about his appearance, and it was a bad day for him when he arrived at work with his usual shining shoes — one, however, being black, and the other brown. He dealt well with his embarrassment, announcing: ‘I have another pair at home exactly the same.’

Arnold was peerless at writing hard news and fiction. The fiction was confined to his dazzling expense claims, which possibly explained his Savile Row suits. Expenses were a grey area then. The first stern words I received at The Sun were in a lecture from the newsdesk on the importance of claiming expenses every week: ‘At least ten quid, more if you actually spend anything.’ This was a tax-free tenner on top of my weekly salary of £26 10s, making me rich.

The Sun was struggling, and its offices were shabby, but there was no sign of austerity when it came to the number of staff. Each reporter would get one, maybe two, stories a day. There were teams of industrial reporters, diplomatic reporters, theatre critics, science writers, correspondents dotted round the world, and feature writers happy to get a piece in every month. The full-time motoring editor didn’t get much in the paper, but took us for a spin round the pubs whenever a new Rolls-Royce or Austin Princess came on the market.

A regiment of assistant editors wandered the Big Room with no clear duties. One was Ted Castle, husband of the cabinet minister Barbara Castle, who struck some of us as commissar at a union newspaper still loyal to its roots. Joe Haines, one of our political correspondents, whose grand by-line was ‘J. T. W. Haines’, would go on to work for Harold Wilson in Downing Street.

A large staff meant competition for good stories was intense, and I started at the bottom. My jobs were modest, and when a big story broke I was usually on the sidelines. In October 1966, 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a slagheap, loosened by rain, buried a school in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan. It was a massive tragedy, but my contribution to the next day’s newspaper was a three-paragraph weather piece.

I was often landed with the lonely night shift, manning the newsdesk in case of a big breaking story. I spent much of the time answering crank calls. One man called twice a week to tell me he was Elvis Presley, and sang ‘Love Me Tender’ to prove it. His voice was quite good, but the Newcastle accent raised suspicions.

My stories appeared far from the front page: a too-noisy toy drill taken off the market; Lord Snowdon, the Queen’s brother-in-law, gets a ‘slight electric shock’ using welding equipment on a factory visit; ‘girl’ flight attendants warned: Don’t drink the leftovers.

My first by-line, with my name credited in print, was on a story about a new issue of postage stamps celebrating technology. Images included a hovercraft, a nuclear power station, and an E-Type Jaguar. It was a dull story, but that ‘by Leslie Hinton’ pleased me. It always had to be Leslie: ‘It must be your full name — always beware the diminutive,’ editors told me.

The news agency prose I had used at BUP, which might have worked in a heavy broadsheet, was too cold and clunky for a popular. ‘Give it a bit of zip, mate, this isn’t The Daily Telegraph,’ I was told.

I knew I was not an instant hit in a place crowded with talent, and I remembered Barrie Harding’s warning: no guarantee of a permanent job.

There must have been a shortage of staff the day I was sent to report on an address Prince Philip was making to 500 British exporters. I was sent late, and when I arrived the prince was already speaking.

Fleet Street reporters operated under a code of guarded cooperation. The competition was cutthroat, but there were circumstances in which they helped each other. If a rival reporter arrived late, it was common for his friend from another paper to tell him what he had missed. I was not aware of this custom, nor did I know anyone at the event. My tame story revealed the prince’s desire to eliminate Britain’s trade gap and appeared beneath a bland headline, ‘The Merchant Prince’.

It’s bad enough when a single newspaper scoops the rest of Fleet Street on a story that is your responsibility, but at least you share the pain. It is a lonely terror when you miss a story every other newspaper plays big.

What I’d missed was the prince delivering a fierce attack on his audience. He had protested about late deliveries, poor after-sales service, and constant strikes. ‘I am sick and tired of making excuses for this country,’ he said. ‘We are all in this unpleasant soup together.’

It was huge in all our rivals. The Daily Mirror’s headline was, ‘The Angry Duke Lashes Out’; the Daily Express, ‘I’m Sick And Tired Of Making Excuses For Britain’. The Times reported angry political reaction on its front page, and ran the entire speech inside.

The prince had placed his royal boots squarely on the forbidden parade ground of politics. It was explosive stuff, and my story had contained none of it.

It was an unhappy trip to the office that Friday morning. As soon as I arrived, I was ordered to the office of Tony Boram. I had never met Boram, a senior editor of more power and importance than Barrie Harding.

A bright lamp lit up the surface of Boram’s desk. His spectacles were thick and he peered at me with an apologetic expression. ‘I have to tell you, we will not be able to offer you a full-time job,’ he said. ‘We will keep you on for the time being, but you should begin looking elsewhere.’

I found a desk outside and sat in silence. No one spoke to me. I was sure they knew what had happened. I had capped five months of average work with a serious mistake. Had I done a decent job before my Prince Philip moment, I might have survived, but I had brought disaster on myself by being too tentative. I had felt unsure, out of my depth, and it left me paralysed.

But getting sacked was like shock therapy for me. The moment I knew nothing worse could happen to me at The Sun newspaper, my head cleared. I became brave. Over the next few, carefree weeks, I produced four front-page stories. One was the front-page lead. I started to get better assignments, all while waiting for the promised axe to descend. Seven months later, I was still collecting a salary and claiming each week my minimum £10 expenses. By then, I decided they had forgotten to fire me.

I wrote a story about an ingenious food company boss, Freddie Fox, from St Albans, who sold 200 cases of English spaghetti to an Italian supermarket chain. His back-to-front trade of the national dish stirred indignation in the Italian media. It was a short piece, fun to write, and the newsdesk people laughed out loud when reading it. It appeared as a single column on the front page.

This happened at exactly the right time. It was August, the main holiday month. I was one of the few people in the office and the heavyweight reporters were away. Bill MacLelland, the deputy news editor, had laughed loudest at my spaghetti story. He came over and sat in the chair next to mine with a smile still on his face. His eyes were red and half-closed. MacLelland was always mildly drunk.

‘We need to send someone to the Scilly Isles for a week,’ he told me. ‘You can leave in the morning.’

I had never been on an out-of-towner before. I had never been valued highly enough for a newspaper to actually pay to fly me anywhere, or put me up in a hotel. But now I was heading for the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago reaching into the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest tip of the English mainland. It was a quiet place, and its economy depended on a gentle climate that appealed to tourists, and early spring flowers it sold to chillier parts of the country.

That summer, the Queen and her family were arriving on the Royal Yacht Britannia. It was the first visit by a monarch since the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, Harold Wilson, the determinedly understated prime minister, was spending his summer holidays in a modest local bungalow he owned. On top of this, wreckage had been discovered of a British fleet that had run aground in 1797, killing almost two thousand people. Dozens of treasure hunters were on the scene.

August is always a month for light news. Parliament isn’t sitting, courts are out of session, and big business on holiday, so less serious news fills the vacuum. In Fleet Street, August is known as the Silly Season, and there I was in the Isles of Scilly with my own private harvest of stories. I wrote of treasure hunters staring coldly at each other over the bounty of an ancient wreck; manhole covers painted green to match the grass on a new housing estate the Queen would visit — the joke is the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint — and of the Royal Family’s arrival after sailing through rough waters. I filed stories about Prince Andrew being too seasick to come ashore, and how pale the Queen looked. I wrote about the prime minister draping his bungalow with a giant flag of the Union, and the Queen meeting his dog, Paddy, while royal security officers ordered pleasure boats to stay ashore, and local boatmen planned a loss-of-profit claim against Buckingham Palace.

The newsdesk loved me.

The day I arrived back, I was summoned again to the office of Tony Boram. This time a bright smile came with the poor-sighted peer: ‘That was a good trip. We want to give you a full-time job.’

That was how Prince Philip got me fired, the Queen got me hired, and I discovered the fickle ways of Fleet Street.

—

In a dark downstairs bar off London’s Park Lane, a small group of journalists listened to a young man singing a love song he had written himself. His name was Steven Georgiou, he was 18 years old, and it was the silliest love song I ever heard.

Georgiou stood in the light of a tiny stage swaying to his own melody as he sang, ‘I love my dog as much as I love you/But you may fade, my dog will always come through.’ The singer had recently changed his name to Cat Stevens, and his appearance that night was the beginning of his effort to become a star. I did not hold out much hope for him.

‘Why did you call yourself Cat and decide to sing about a dog?’ I asked.

He looked wounded.

‘I called myself Cat because a girl I know said I looked like one,’ he said.

I thought it was a terrible song and a stupid gimmick, so I drank the free champagne and didn’t write a word.

The debut of Cat Stevens was the first event I covered as The Sun’s new show business reporter.

Frank Fisher had been right, when trying to talk me out of leaving BUP, to warn me that the job of a national newspaper reporter was not all serious work. The Sun might have been staid compared to the redtop tabloid it would soon become, but it nevertheless demanded entertaining news, just as Arthur Christiansen of the Express had said: ‘The reader requires cakes and ale as well as bread and butter.’

As the newest staff reporter, I spent a lot of time providing the cake and ale. Were UFOs visiting the West Country, or was it just Venus ‘cruising’ through the sky thanks to the optical illusion of fast-moving clouds? Was that a puma stalking the Surrey countryside, or an overweight tabby cat? When hippy squatters clashed with Covent Garden locals, my story was about the flower people versus the fruit and veg men.

My personal favourite was the story of the Reverend Hunter A. Tomlinson, an American who had arrived from New York saying he was king of the world. This might have been a false claim, but Tomlinson had once run for the US presidency, pledging to establish a cabinet post of secretary of righteousness; he deserved some attention. After failing to win the presidency, Tomlinson was now travelling the world with an aluminium throne. This throne was apparently a temporary one; later in the month, he was going to set his permanent throne on Mount Zion, shortly after his planned visit to West Germany. ‘I am going to will away the Berlin Wall,’ he told me.

There was also the quiet afternoon I was sent to a protest outside the British Board of Film Censors in Soho Square. John Trevelyan, secretary of the board, was the son of a parson, a man in his sixties with gentle manners and shocking black eyebrows. Trevelyan was wrestling with rapid changes in public taste and new levels of acceptability, and was gaining respect for his efforts. But Trevelyan had limits, and the protesters at his door had reached them.

Fewer than a dozen people were walking in a circle under the gaze of a single glum policeman as Trevelyan stood at his office window looking down on them, and shaking his head.

‘It’s a film showing nothing but close-ups of bottoms, human backsides in the act of walking on a treadmill,’ he told me. ‘The real problem is that every now and then, between the moving legs, there is a clear glimpse of male genitalia. I cannot possibly allow it to be released.’

There was a bunch of daffodils on Trevelyan’s desk. ‘They were sent up to me by the young lady who organised the protest. She’s Japanese.’

The protest leader was short, with long black hair and a serious face. She was offering a daffodil to a smartly dressed passer-by when I introduced myself. The man was studying a large sign covered with photographs of bottoms and the question: ‘What is wrong with these pictures?’ He adjusted his bowler hat and walked on frowning, a daffodil in one hand, and his umbrella in the other.

The protest leader was Yoko Ono. She told me she was 25 years old and a ‘performance artist’. I had never heard of a performance artist, so my story called her an actress. It turned out she was really 34 and had met John Lennon at an art exhibition the year before. Her husband at the time, a New York film producer called Anthony Cox, accompanied her at the protest, and seemed unaware of his wife’s new friendship.

‘The bottom is beautiful. It has great expression,’ Yoko Ono said, in a helium-tone voice. ‘It should not be less exposed than any other part of the body.’

Her art would become famous everywhere in the near future, and my story might have been the first written about it. I kept the clipping of this story, and its headline expresses perfectly the difference between the two Suns. The tabloid that became a runaway hit would have run something like: ‘What A Cheek! Censor Smacks Bare Bum Protesters’. But its sedate predecessor ran the following, two decks over five columns: ‘An Indignant Protest, So Fragrantly Expressed’.

I don’t know why the newsdesk appointed me to the job of full-time show business reporter. I went to the films once or twice a year, watched almost no television, and neither knew nor cared much about music, except for an interest in The Beatles because they were from Liverpool. But I took the job — it was worth £3 more a week — and found myself at the centre of a cultural earthquake, on the edge of the Swinging Sixties, watching ‘counterculture’ turn mainstream.

Show business reporters floated along on an ocean of entertainment provided by a new breed of power broker: the Public Relations Man. Within days, I had a call from Les Perrin, the most famous PR of the day, the pontiff of showbiz flacks, whose biggest clients were the Rolling Stones. ‘Come to lunch. I’ll book a table at the Cafe Royal,’ he said.

The Cafe Royal was a mythical place, the height of old London. It would soon fade away with the changing times, but then the Cafe Royal was still one of Europe’s most glamorous spots. It was a world of silver carving-trolleys, crimson velvet, naked carvings, and mirrored walls that bounced around its rooms the refracting light of huge chandeliers. Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and D. H. Lawrence had once eaten here. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Brigitte Bardot, and Laurence Olivier were now clients. It was a seductive place to take someone whose most frequent dining-out experience was the cafe at Euston Station.

Les Perrin and his rivals jostled for the attention of newspapers. They needed to reach readers because print was still the medium of the masses. Each time a struggling artist such as Cat Stevens came along, we were lured to clubs in Mayfair, with the promise of free alcohol and food. These events — and many others concocted to showcase musicians, actors, films, and plays — went on all day and every day, beginning at 11am. It was the closest I came to living in the 1960s without remembering them. I saw a lot of ‘future superstars’ who never reached the peaks their managers predicted.

Newspapers were important because television and radio were overwhelmingly state-funded and still waking up to the new world. There was no commercial radio, and the BBC had yet to hand a microphone to an actual ‘disc jockey’. That didn’t happen until September 1967. Until then, most pop music came from illegal pirate-radio stations on ships in the North Sea.

Public Relations Men had another job. While they were promoting newcomers, they were also protecting established stars. They gave us champagne, but they also lied and deceived when they wanted to prevent awkward news from leaking. The tricks of PR people became an occupational hazard, but they were new to me then.

To most superstars, we were beneath them. No one was more charmless than Frank Sinatra. He arrived once to rehearse at the Royal Albert Hall, and a reporter friend tried hard for a quote, ‘You’re my hero, I have bought all your records, and seen you live three times. Will you answer a few questions?’ he begged.

Sinatra glanced over his shoulder at his admirer, without adjusting his stride. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

When The Beatles formed their own company and called it Apple Corps, I spent hours standing outside their headquarters at 3 Savile Row being ignored.

I went to Paul McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood in March 1969 because he was expected to marry Linda Eastman, a photographer from New York. McCartney wouldn’t tell me anything. He bounded towards me from his front door and aimed a mighty swing at my stomach. I braced for the pain and imagined the excellent story that would result from being attacked by a Beatle. But he pulled the punch and patted me on the belly. ‘Evening. Got nothing to say.’ He and Eastman married the next day.

John Lennon could be unkind to reporters. Judith Simons of the Daily Express was allegedly one of his favourites, but he could be cruel to people he liked. Judith was a heavy smoker, and when she walked into a press conference he greeted her with: ‘Here comes Judy Simons — she doesn’t menstruate, she just drops ash.’

At the Isle of Wight pop festival, I walked down the street with Bob Dylan and George Harrison, asking them questions and getting no answers. I sat in a bar next to a gloomy Charlie Watts, and he wouldn’t speak to me either, except to say ‘No, thanks’ when I offered to buy him a drink. A group of musicians calling themselves Fat Mattress were happy to talk; they needed publicity, but it didn’t help. They split up soon after.

Performers at the Isle of Wight included Dylan, The Who, Joe Cocker, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Moody Blues, Tom Paxton, and Richie Havens. In the audience were John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Keith Richards, and, I discovered later, a young musician called Elton John no one had yet heard of. Other stars of the day came to watch, including Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Roger Vadim, and Françoise Hardy.

It was a special ‘counterculture’ event because Dylan had been a recluse since a motorbike accident three years before and this was his scheduled resurrection. The mood of homage had faded by the time he arrived on stage three hours late.

No one knew at the time that the Isle of Wight festival would make history. This and Woodstock both happened in the same month, and both turned out to be primitive dress rehearsals for the sophisticated, hyper-produced outdoor festivals that followed.

It was civilised, more or less, and good-natured. I was present for the most unexpected event, a moment that earned more column inches than Dylan’s music, and resulted in the unlikeliest interview I ever conducted.

A young couple, embracing the free spirit of the age, had sex in front of a large audience, including me. They did this in a sea of foam provided by the concert organisers as an added attraction. The foam did not provide much camouflage. I have never since stood up to my waist in foam questioning a naked woman about the rights and wrongs of sex in public. Her answers to my questions were not entirely coherent, but revealed no regret. Her name was Vivian, she was 19 and came from ‘nowhere’.

I witnessed big show business events from a distance in the 1960s only to put together the pieces years later. In the summer of 1967, I stood on the doorstep of a Georgian house in Belgravia as the body of The Beatles manager Brian Epstein was taken away in a coffin. Epstein was 32. He died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the peak of his most famous clients’ fame. It was a tragic story. Years later I told the singer Cilla Black that I had been standing outside Epstein’s home that day. I knew John Lennon had persuaded Epstein to become Cilla’s agent.

‘I was on the other side of that front door the very moment his coffin was taken away,’ she said.

The grief, she told me, had been terrible.

‘It was so awful. Everyone was crying and crying and crying.’

A few days after Epstein’s death, The Beatles held a secret meeting in Ringo Starr’s basement flat in Marylebone. Peter Brown, who worked closely with The Beatles and Epstein at the height of Beatlemania, told me about it over a drink — but not until 2010. Paul McCartney had insisted the group get down to business quickly to plan the future without their manager. It was a difficult meeting; Peter was standing by a window, stunned by the loss of one of his closest friends, when two arms embraced him from behind and a head rested on his back. ‘You all right, mate?’ asked John Lennon.

I found out about that meeting the same year I sat with Mick Jagger at a dinner party in Manhattan, and he gave me a wonderful quote that was decades too late. We talked about the media and how they treated celebrities. He was remarkably uncomplaining, considering the stories written about him. I told Jagger I’d been amazed at how unconcerned he looked in 1967 when he was sentenced to three months in prison for possessing four unprescribed amphetamine pills. It was a crazy sentence, and Jagger was quickly released, but his treatment became a landmark confrontation between the new age and traditionalists.

At the time, Jagger had found an unexpected ally in The Times, whose editor William Rees-Mogg wrote a fierce editorial in his defence: ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’

Jagger was not so relaxed as he looked, he told me over dinner. ‘It was terrible,’ he said. ‘But that editorial changed everything for me. It saved my career.’

By 1968, it was clear that The Sun in its existing form was doomed. Even if I wanted to spend my life trailing fruitlessly after superstars and ruining my liver, The Sun was reaching the end of its days.

Not long after deciding the time had come for another change, I was sitting in the newsroom and the foreign editor, John Graham, a big-voiced Ulsterman, looked up from a piece of agency copy and addressed the room.

‘Anyone here ever heard of Rupert Murdoch?’