CHAPTER 16

The psychic and the White House

We were at Lutéce, then Manhattan’s most glamorous restaurant, with Jeane Dixon, America’s most famous psychic and astrologer. Dixon wanted to share a secret with us.

Jeane Dixon must have liked Lutéce for its fancy reputation and cosy opulence; it can’t have been for the food because she ate almost nothing, and drank only sips of Perrier water. That didn’t stop her offering advice to its owner, the celebrated chef André Soltner. When she told him how to improve his pea soup, Soltner patiently took out pen and paper to record her recommendations.

Dixon leaned in to the table, clutching her Perrier in both hands. Phil Bunton, Ian Rae, and I leaned closer. ‘I have a direct line to her bedside,’ she said in a whispery conspirator’s voice. ‘I can call her whenever I wish. She plans her life and her husband’s life around my advice.’

We were underwhelmed by Dixon’s secret. She told us once that she gave psychic advice to the Pope, so we were naturally sceptical to hear her claim that she used her supernatural powers to help Nancy and Ronald Reagan.

We didn’t tell Jeane Dixon she was nuts; she was too important for that. She might have been eccentric, but she was also a valuable asset to us, and besides, we liked her. After she had gone, we had a few more drinks, and laughed at her expense.

Millions of people across America had faith in Jeane Dixon, and a high concentration of them were readers of The Star. We had an exclusive contract with her, and whenever she was in the paper there was a colossal spike in circulation.

Dixon had built her reputation on the assertion that she had foreseen the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In a 1956 profile of her in Parade magazine, the interviewer wrote: ‘As for the 1960 election, Mrs Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office.’ Cynics called it a lucky guess, but Dixon used her remark to become a psychic superstar.

No one, least of all The Star, tracked the accuracy of her other predictions. Now and then, very gently, I would remind her of a prophecy that had not come true. When I mentioned her unfulfilled prediction that two Hollywood stars would divorce, she told me: ‘The prediction was true when I made it, but their relationship improved soon after.’ At the time of writing, her prediction that a descendant of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt would unite the world has yet to happen. She did tell me I would be promoted to a high position at News Corp, but I bet she said things like that to all her bosses.

Twice a year, executives from The Star would take Dixon to lunch at Lutèce. If Rupert joined us, she would ask him to say grace, and he would close his eyes, bow his head, and mutter a few kind words to God about Jeane Dixon and the food we were about to receive.

The astonishing truth about her did not emerge for years. Donald Regan, who served as Reagan’s secretary of the treasury and then chief of staff, revealed in a memoir that the Reagans had first consulted Dixon in the 1960s when he was governor of California. He said the first couple plotted their lives according to their horoscopes and the stars were consulted before: ‘virtually every major move and decision … made during my time as White House Chief of Staff.’ Dixon’s immodesty didn’t allow her to confess that, at some point, the Reagans had decided her powers were fading and broadened their consultations to include other seers. I sat next to Donald Regan at lunch in the White House once and unfortunately he did not choose that moment to reveal his boss’ secret

Working at The Star could be fun, but it was the netherworld of real journalism. It made The Sun look like The Times of London, and the story of Jeane Dixon’s role as psychic consultant to the Reagans was the closest I came to a real scoop.

The Star was profitable when I joined. Millions bought it every week, most of them at the supermarket checkout where it competed with titles offering stories from an alternative universe. Their titles made them sound more respectable than they deserved: the Globe, the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Weekly World News. At their peak, these weeklies sold close to 10 million. They told stories of UFO fleets, and celebrity break-ups and romances that never happened. They wrote about famous people with ‘terminal illnesses’ who were still alive 20 years later; miracle cures for everything from arthritis to constipation; and high-speed diets that would starve to death anyone adhering to them. The most breathtaking was Weekly World News. Until it closed in 2007, it ran the most imaginative front pages anywhere in print: ‘Abraham Lincoln Was A Woman!’, ‘Five US Senators Are Space Aliens’.

In comparison, The Star was mainstream. Medical advances were covered with care — Rupert liked stories about science. Stories about shipwrecks and improbable survival were also popular; every Midwest tornado season, we sent reporters to track down families with lurid tales of how lucky they were to be alive.

But we were not innocent. Tales of love and lust among the famous were not always impeccably sourced. We sometimes gave credibility to stories of alien abduction, or sent reporters to séances to conduct interviews with people beyond the grave. Images of Christ on slices of toast were always popular. The Star once ran a huge two-deck cover headline: ‘Proof Of Life After Death’. The headline increased sales, but I don’t recall any conclusive evidence in the story.

We organised a stunt with Uri Geller, the Israeli showman who purported to bend metal objects without touching them, and said he could communicate telepathically. His powers, he claimed, came from outer space.

I spent hours with Geller, and he was a convincing magician. Phil Bunton and I sat in the corner of a room as far from Geller as possible, and, when we created an image on a piece of paper, he instantly reproduced it. We flew him across the country — from New York to Los Angeles — and told readers to put out cutlery and other objects while Geller transmitted his metal-bending powers. We had hundreds of calls complaining about ruined knives and forks. Some threatened to sue for damages; our lawyers said they didn’t have grounds.

In Rupert’s first American television venture, The Star produced the pilot of a daily show. We worked with producers for months to develop a gossipy programme with all the qualities of the newspaper. The main on-camera talent was an un-telegenic Englishman, Robin Leach, who had a whining, high-pitched voice. In those days, English accents on television were rare. Only David Frost was well known. No one believed the show would work, and we had no success selling it. The competition that beat us was a similar idea entitled Entertainment Tonight. Thirty-five years later, ET was still on the air.

I had the job of telling Leach he was fired. He didn’t take it well. He stood at the door of my office on his way out, and vowed: ‘You will regret this. One day I’m going to be a big TV star.’ Not long after, Leach became just that as presenter of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, a hugely successful show that ran for 10 years, making Leach a household name, and earning him millions. For years, every time we met, Leach would give me a wink. ‘Told you so,’ he would say.

After a while, the world of supermarket tabloids becomes a mind-warping place where your fantasy-reality equilibrium gets lost in the madness. I begged to be freed, but there was nowhere to go. I pestered my mentor, Marty Singerman, who was running the company’s growing stable of magazines. ‘Be patient,’ he would say. ‘Things are going to change. We’re looking all the time at new opportunities.’

My complaints to Marty Singerman were at their height when the company began negotiations to buy the Buffalo Courier-Express, a 137-year-old daily that had fallen on hard times. Buffalo is on the shore of Lake Erie, next door to Canada and not far from Niagara Falls. Almost seven feet of snow is dumped on Buffalo every year, making it one of the nation’s snowiest cities. I was sure many people loved Buffalo, but I knew it would be a disaster for us. Mary had thought Westchester County was a suburban wasteland — how could I expect her to cope with the frozen north of New York State?

‘There could be a great job coming your way soon,’ said Singerman, smiling at me happily. After months of pleading, how could I turn down Buffalo? And would my refusal doom me to more years of soothsayers, flying saucers, and the evildoing of J. R. Ewing?

Mum and Dad were visiting from Adelaide, and we drove them to Niagara Falls. They couldn’t believe the power and the roar, or the rainbows in the misty spray. Mum was convinced the falls were going to suck in our boat and kill us all.

We found out later that, about the time we were touring the Buffalo city centre, with Mary gazing silently out the window, the Courier-Express unions were voting against a Murdoch acquisition. They rejected the cost savings that were a condition of the purchase and said they didn’t like Rupert’s other papers.

‘We voted to die with dignity,’ one reporter said. In an act of suicide, the Courier-Express took its dignity to the grave — along with more than a thousand jobs — on 19 September 1982. Buffalo’s loss was my lucky escape.

It was just weeks before Rupert found another newspaper to buy, this time the Boston Herald American. Boston was a city we knew and liked. The paper’s owners, Hearst Corporation, were planning to close the newspaper unless they found a buyer. News Corp was quick to make a deal with Hearst, but once more the sale required the unions to accept fewer jobs and the introduction of new technology.

If the unions agreed terms, Joe Robinowitz, the 31-year-old assistant managing editor of the New York Post, would become editor-in-chief and I would become city editor, running the newsdesk. This put me several rungs below Robinowitz, but since it meant I could flee The Star, I wasn’t going to complain.

‘Go in there and see him,’ said Rupert’s assistant Dot Wyndoe, sitting outside his Boston hotel suite. ‘He’s in there by himself waiting to hear what’s going on in the talks. He needs some company.’

Robinowitz and I joined Rupert in his darkened hotel room and spent the next 10 hours there gossiping, dozing, and plotting what we would do with the Herald if the talks were successful. He used his in-built world clock during the night, working out time zones and which of his executives in other countries would be awake to take a call. Andrew Neil, who was editor of The Sunday Times in London, wrote a book in which he accused Rupert of being a ‘telephone terrorist’. I know what he meant; Rupert almost never sent memos, he just rang you. He could sound angry on the phone, and no doubt often was, but for the first time that night I saw him acting angry during calls, while winking mischievously at us.

After our overnight marathon, Rupert invited us to dinner. Robinowitz and I kept talking, delivering a torrent of ideas about what to do with the newspaper. I’m not sure either of us knew then how important it was to keep the initiative with Rupert; to make sure it never looked as if you were waiting for his instructions. Robinowitz and I simply wanted to make sure he knew we were full of ideas. It sounds obvious to act this way with any boss, but Rupert intimidated a lot of people. The dinner must have helped me because a couple of days later Rupert said I would no longer be city editor, but Robinowitz’s number two.

The deal to buy the Herald reached the brink of collapse before Rupert and the unions agreed terms. Hearst had set a deadline, and when it passed they sent every employee home and prepared to shut down. It was five more hours before the last of the 11 unions was satisfied. I was ready to head back to New York, but instead, at lunchtime on 3 December 1982, we drank a champagne toast.

The media coverage of our Boston takeover was intense. It dominated television news for days and filled columns all over New England. The Boston Herald American had been close to death, and these were the days when communities had an emotional connection with their newspapers. When a newspaper’s existence was threatened, it was as if a familiar friend was about to depart.

Newspapers are more common fatalities these days — some are dying, some just fading away — but even now there are moments when the best of them can search the soul of a city or a nation.

In our age of atomised communication, it is hard to imagine any form of media will ever again touch a community the way a newspaper could then.

—

It was shocking to move from The Star to a metropolitan daily. Until now, the most prominent American interested in my company was Jeane Dixon. Suddenly I was getting respect without doing anything to deserve it. First, a letter arrived from Who’s Who in America informing me I was to be included in their next volume, and requesting my biographical details. I provided these details, of course, then wrote to tell Mum.

Then John Kerry came to lunch. He was 40 years old, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, already famously ambitious, but years from becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and Barack Obama’s secretary of state. It was Kerry who first exposed me to the blandishments of politicians. It happened hundreds of times over the years, but Kerry was my first. His visit coincided with a national debate about Reagan’s support of a guerrilla insurgency in Nicaragua, which was seeking to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega.

When we had finished eating, Kerry leaned back in his seat and put one hand on his oversized chin. ‘Now, Les,’ he said, with that look of phony earnestness that I was to witness in so many politicians. ‘I would be fascinated to know what you think of our policy in Nicaragua.’ I refrained from telling him that my most recent discussion about clandestine US policy had been with a conspiracy theory journalist offering proof that the air force had recovered aliens from a crashed spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico, and preserved their remains in three Frigidaire freezers behind a Texaco gas station not far from where they perished.

A lot of people wanted to be friends with the Herald. There was a long procession of politicians — senators and aspiring senators, mayors and wannabe mayors — as well as an occasional bishop. The governor, Mike Dukakis, was in the office often as he built his campaign for the White House. Dukakis was a quiet man for a would-be president, and in the 1988 election to succeed Ronald Reagan, George Bush senior crushed him. Bush was aided significantly by Dukakis’ attempt to toughen his image by staging a disastrous photo-op at the controls of an M1 Abrams tank, in which he looked more like Snoopy from Charlie Brown than a commander-in-chief.

The state’s most famous living politician, Senator Edward Kennedy, was not a fan of the Herald. Kennedy had grown accustomed to generous coverage of his family from the hometown press, but his liberal policies did not align with the conservative views of Rupert’s new paper. The Herald — and the New York Post — taunted Kennedy for years. Patrick Purcell, the Herald’s publisher, once attempted to make peace by coaxing Kennedy and Rupert to his house for a party, but they ignored each other the entire evening.

But Kennedy was the exception; most Boston politicians wanted to be friends. When we had the grand idea of redrawing the map of Boston by changing the names of a couple of streets outside our building and calling them ‘Herald Square’, the mayor Kevin White obligingly turned up to perform the unveiling. His successor, Ray Flynn, loved the Herald staff so much he sometimes came into the office on his way home from a bar and sang to the women on the office switchboard. When he was Archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law would come for lunch. He seemed a decent man, with the soft, celestial smile clerics so often practise, but he was forced to resign in 2002 for his part in the cover-up of child abuse by his priests.

It was the other way round with advertisers. They didn’t care what journalists thought. The day after a joint appearance by Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, when our political reporters had rained down on them with tough questions, a big advertiser came to lunch. I never had anything to do with advertisers before Boston.

‘Your newspaper is crap,’ he told us. ‘It’s been crap for years, and so far you guys aren’t making it any better.’

As we began to retaliate, our advertising director silenced Robinowitz and me with a glare. ‘Hang on,’ he told our angry guest in a pacifying tone. ‘You make some interesting points. But we are the new people in town so give us some time.’

It was the first lesson for me on the tricky frontier between journalism and business. Advertising is the lifeblood of most newspapers; circulation revenue rarely pays the bills. Our much larger rival, The Boston Globe, was hogging the ad market, and the Herald was losing money. We could be as tough as we liked on politicians, but it was wise to be gentle when meeting advertisers. Unless, of course, they tried to tell us how to edit the paper, or pressured us to be kind to their businesses — that was different.

The Boston Herald American was the first all-American newsroom I set foot in. I was the solitary Brit. Donald H. Forst and his senior editors were waiting to greet Robinowitz and me on our first day. They were straight out of the city room of a black-and-white film: big voices, jaunty smiles, and huge cigars gripped between their teeth. All the men seemed to have cigars. Alan Eisner, the city editor, didn’t look comfortable with his — as though he were smoking it out of duty and solidarity.

Don Forst was the editor-in-chief. He was a short, wiry, bubbling New Yorker, and he owned the editorial floor of the Boston Herald American. He owned it like all powerful editors, through energy and will, and above all by always being there. The Herald men smoked cigars because Don Forst did. It was obvious they loved him as much as they feared the two cocky Murdoch interlopers who had just walked through the door.

Forst would not be staying, but there was no disgrace in that; not many editors survive a change of ownership. He agreed to hang around for the transition, and was heroic as we set about disassembling the newspaper he had created. We never knew what he was thinking; he smiled like a man who knew things we didn’t.

We shortened the name of the newspaper to the Boston Herald. It had changed from a broadsheet to a tabloid format a year or so before Rupert bought it, but to us it was tabloid in size only. We thought its headlines bland, its design flat, and that its copy was over long and rambling. We were never heartless enough to say that to Forst.

Still, the paper had more pep than The Boston Globe, the proud broadsheet that dominated the local market. The Globe’s bosses were a New England dynasty. The newspaper had been founded 110 years before by Charles H. Taylor, and ever since, a man with the same surname had held the job of publisher. The Globe looked down with scorn, from its mountaintop of power and profit, on our rough and struggling tabloid.

The Globe was excellent in many ways, but it was self-important, and its smugness got under our skin. We enjoyed taking shots at its pomposity and mistakes. Our editorials and columns were filled with jibes. When it put the wrong publication date on its front, we described it for weeks as ‘The Newspaper That Doesn’t Know What Day It Is’. We ran throughout the paper images of planet earth wrapped in rope with a caption saying ‘We’ve Got The Globe on a String.’

It was enjoyable but sophomoric. We didn’t know that The Globe cared much what we said, but it was therapeutic as we fought to chip away at its monopoly. We must have come across as zealous; The Boston Phoenix, Boston’s answer to The Village Voice, called us ‘Murdoch Moonies’.

We spent millions to increase circulation, introducing a game called Wingo. It was bingo, really, but for trademark reasons we couldn’t use the word. Every household in greater Boston was mailed a bundle of Wingo cards, and every day readers had to buy the newspaper to see if their numbers had come up. When I arrived, circulation was just over 200,000. Three years later, it had reached 380,000. Soon after, publisher Pat Purcell had a celebration party when the Herald made its first annual profit in decades.

Robinowitz and I were working long hours and often seven-day weeks. We flew in reinforcements. Bill Ridley was an energetic colleague from London, and he became night editor.

Impatient with the pace of change, especially in our efforts to improve the paper’s design, Ridley and I decided on drastic action. While Robinowitz was away on holiday, we spent hours adapting dozens of page layouts from the London Daily Mail, and distributed them to the copy editors — in America, subs are called copy editors. The Mail was Britain’s best-designed mid-market tabloid, and its pages were complicated compared with the Herald. It wasn’t the fault of Herald copy editors that they didn’t understand tabloid layouts — no one had ever taught them.

Sir Harold Evans, a British editor as cantankerous in his old age as he was innovative in his youth, once said that changing a newspaper should be like surgery, that the patient must feel no pain. It is a wise doctrine that I ignored at the Herald. The editors executed their Daily Mail layouts and overnight we gave the newspaper a radical facelift.

Back from his break, Robinowitz was quick to call. ‘Hinton,’ he shouted, ‘what the hell have you done with my newspaper?’ To his credit, Joe didn’t change a thing, but he made me promise not to do it again.

The learning was not a one-way street. Feminism reached American journalism before it took hold in Britain. I was behind the times when Betsy Buffington Bates, the women’s editor, stood at my office door waving the proof of a two-page feature I had edited.

‘You are not allowed to call grown women “girls” in the pages of the Boston Herald,’ she said. ‘It will be an insult to every adult female in the city.’ I changed the story and headline according to Betsy’s instructions and never made the mistake again.

In Boston, distant from the heart of News Corp, we were sometimes trapped in wider company catastrophes. I was in bed one morning listening to one of our radio commercials. It included the sound of Hitler’s voice and the heavy thump of Nazi boots on the march. We were delighted to be sharing a worldwide company scoop by publishing the Führer’s diaries. The phone rang. ‘It’s all bullshit,’ said the marketing man from London. I could tell he was having trouble breathing. ‘The diaries are a hoax. It’s a total fucking disaster.’

Rupert would come to town sometimes. I learned a lesson on one of his early visits. ‘How’s it going?’ he said, taking a seat next to me as I chaired the morning news conference.

‘OK,’ I told him. ‘But it’s a quiet day.’

Rupert scowled: ‘There’s no such thing as a quiet day. Some are more challenging than others, that’s all.’

I never used that excuse again, or allowed anyone to make it to me.

Mary and I lived with our three boys — Martin, Thomas, and William — in Weston, a small town in suburban woodland, west of the city along the Massachusetts Turnpike. The only traffic jams were on Sunday mornings near the local churches. The day we moved in, neighbours arrived to welcome us with fresh-baked cookies. It was the kind of thing we had only seen on American TV shows like Leave It To Beaver or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The local school was packed for parent-teacher evenings and school concerts; in North Finchley in the 1970s, these school events were quiet and empty. In Weston, no one walked much; when we invited people to our home from the next street, they arrived by car. And we encountered the talk-to-anyone-anytime openness of most Americans and their readiness to chat to any stranger. In Britain, you could sit across from someone on a four-hour train journey and say nothing but ‘goodbye’ at the end of it. Most important, after six years of cultural decompression, Mary had acclimatised, and now even loved the suburbs. We lived in a clapboard house on top of a wooded hill and felt like Americans; we had become US citizens in Faneuil Hall near Boston Harbor, where pre-revolutionary patriots gave speeches demanding independence from Britain. A mischievous Herald photographer, Leo Tierney, took our photograph beneath a huge painting depicting a redcoat defeat.

I left the family alone in Weston when Hurricane Gloria struck Boston in September 1985. Hurricanes didn’t often reach as far north as Boston, and Massachusetts was in a state of high alert. Mary drove me to the office. The Massachusetts Turnpike was deserted apart from emergency vehicles. She dropped me off and returned to the house. Martin was 15 then, Thomas was 10, and Will was 5, and while they hid in the basement with their mother, listening to the hurricane, I was at my desk at the Herald selecting dramatic photos and stories for the newspaper.

Back home, trees in our yard were blown down and a section of the roof went flying down the street. It wasn’t too bad, but when I heard their stories of crashing trees and winds that rocked the house, and could see how frightened they’d been, I thought that the job sometimes twisted my priorities. It wasn’t the last time I felt that way.

As my third anniversary in Boston approached, I knew it was time for me to start another escape campaign. I loved Boston, and we had developed serious talent among our journalists, but the city was on the sidelines of big media. Now that I was snared in the executive world, I wanted to keep moving.

Marty Singerman was now the boss of all American publishing. He was one of the first Americans to be counted by Rupert as an equal alongside his loyal Australian business team. Singerman knew I was restless yet again, and invited me to New York for dinner.

What happened at that dinner and soon after was the perfect example of the haphazard culture of News Corp, and how it was possible to benefit, or suffer, from its hit-and-miss randomness.

Singerman was already my mentor. He was a strong executive, 18 years older than me, and he was taking a special interest in my future. He wanted to sound me out. How I would react if I were offered the editorship of The Village Voice?

Of all the positions I had imagined, that one was not on my list. It was the publication Rupert liked least of all in the entire company. The Voice was New Corp’s black sheep — a radical alternative periodical that paid no attention to the views of its proprietor. Marty didn’t spell it out, but I knew what was happening. Rupert wanted an ally to change this mutinous weekly to his liking. But I knew that making me editor was a fatal idea, and that a tamed version of The Village Voice would bore its readers and quickly sink without trace, probably taking me with it.

I had never turned down a job before, and felt gloomy and ungrateful on the plane back to Boston. I had pressed Marty Singerman for an opportunity and he had offered me one. But a few months later, after Rupert rid himself of The Voice by selling it to a pet-food magnate for $55 million, Singerman called with another offer: would I become editor-in-chief of The Star?

First The Village Voice, now The Star. There could not have been two publications in all the United States that were more distant. The Village Voice was a fire-eating crusader, hip chronicler of Manhattan’s underground, champion of gay rights, tormentor of the rich and powerful — and The Star was, well, The Star.

Maybe I should have been flattered; I was certainly confused. What kind of a life plan was this? I took the job, even though more time at The Star was not a heart-lifting prospect.

My second spell at The Star lasted 18 months. We tried making it more of a magazine, calming the layout and content in the hope advertisers would like it better. We had limited success in coaxing new advertisers, and managed one pioneering technological achievement.

Prince Andrew was to marry Sarah Ferguson in the summer of 1986, and AT&T was promoting a new high-speed technology to transmit colour photos by satellite. Alistair Duncan, the picture editor, persuaded AT&T to demonstrate it free of charge, and they agreed to transmit photos of the Fergie-Andrew wedding from London to New York. We beat our competition with colour photos of the wedding and saw a big lift in sales.

It doesn’t seem much now, in the age of FaceTime with the grandkids, but in 1986 Rupert was impressed: ‘Your magazine looks fabulous this week,’ he told me. ‘I can hardly believe it.’