To meet Buck Dorsey at the London airport, Joan had rented a Daimler. I had suggested a Rolls-Royce. Nothing but the best for Buck Dorsey, I told Joan. Our futures might depend on making Buck Dorsey happy for the next seven days. Everything had to be better than best.
“That’s why we’re taking a Daimler, duckie,” Joan said. “All the nobs ride around in Rolls-Royces, but a Daimler is special. Queen Mary’s car is a Daimler.”
That cinched it. Remembering Buck Dorsey’s love for everything English, I knew he would be impressed by riding in the kind of car preferred by the queen dowager.
The chauffeur picked us up in Fleet Street. The Daimler was a gigantic machine. Distances inside seemed vast. We climbed up onto the backseat, and the chauffeur leaned in and spread a blanket across our laps, and off we headed toward Heathrow, the two of us enthroned like royalty high above the commoner run of traffic.
It was absurd yet wonderful to be renting a car fit for a queen when, just a few months ago, I could hardly afford a Baltimore taxi. Two months in London, however, had already begun to put me at ease with life in the grand style. I hadn’t acquired the grandeur of Tom O’Neill yet, but maybe I was getting there. The Daimler was a touch worthy of O’Neill.
It was astonishing how much could be learned in two months, especially with Gerry Fay and his extraordinary band of Guardian reporters doing the teaching. I could now write a sensible story about political grandstanding in the House of Commons, a cold-war diplomatic problem, or the passions and prejudices that split the Labour party among academic socialists, Marxist romantics, and labor unions. From the press gallery of the House I had got accustomed to the debating styles of the great men of the day: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, and Aneurin Bevan.
Education came from everywhere. At the American embassy I had been hoodwinked into writing a preposterous story based on a “background briefing” by John Foster Dulles, the new secretary of state. Thanks to Dulles’s skill, I suggested, the next ten weeks might produce “a satisfactory formula” not only to create a common European army, but also “to end forever” the age-old hostility between France and Germany. Only a very young reporter who had never heard a self-serving diplomat torture the truth could have believed that in ten weeks Western Europe would be building a common army while France and Germany embraced in brotherhood. I believed it. The Sun displayed my gullibility on the front page. And so Dulles enriched me with a priceless skepticism I would never lose toward everything spoken by great men “on background.”
On Saturday mornings at tables against El Vino’s back wall, Gerry Fay had instructed me in the pleasures of wine, and the evil of drinking Barsac before lunch. Gerry had also taught me how to cover a flood in England: Same way you cover it in America, jump in the first car headed for the mouth of the Thames and express your confusion with overwrought prose, using phrases like “lake of the dead.” Not that he would have approved the overdone prose if he had seen it, which in the case of “lake of the dead” he did not. Gerry preferred precision, facts plainly stated, and if facts could not be learned, he did not mind saying so.
Far from the disciplines of home and editors, a young man could easily get careless about facts. In a feature story about tourism in London, I cruelly criticized the food served at the Cheshire Cheese, a Fleet Street restaurant famous because Dr. Samuel Johnson was supposed to have been a regular customer two hundred years ago. The criticism was based on a guidebook that advised tourists to stop for a beer but leave the food alone. Gerry, scanning the story at my request, asked, “Have you eaten at the Cheshire Cheese then?”
“No,” I admitted, feeling myself go red with shame.
“Hm,” was the only sound he made, but it was a shattering comment which I would recall forever after whenever I was tempted to fob off unchecked, secondhand information as my own.
Never had I had so many exotic experiences in such a short time. I had lunched at the House of Lords with a peer of the realm, weekended in a seventeenth-century Kentish country house with a young couple who worked hard to persuade me there was a ghost among us, seen Margot Fonteyn dance Swan Lake at Covent Garden, and spent an evening with several thousand Communists celebrating the twenty-third birthday of The Daily Worker.
The peer was Lord Winster, who wrote occasional pieces for the Sun. He invited me to lunch with William Manchester, another young, first-time foreign correspondent for the Sun, who was passing through London en route to India. Winster was that distinctively British curiosity, a socialist converted into a baron by the royal honors list.
“Winster is quite a lively old guy,” I wrote Mimi. “He ticked off all sorts of little gossipy items about how this admiral ran and became a hero, and how this Lady at 52 married this Lord at 27 because of what she had in her purse and he had in his trousers. The House of Lords is very impressive. It looks like Yale. Bill Manchester and I were met at the door by a flunkey in bright red coat, tight black knickers, black hose and a Henry VIII chapeau. He led us through interminable halls, exquisitely paneled, set with beautiful stained glass. Up and down heavily carpeted stairs. Past long corridors with high vaulted ceilings lined with great, musty, leather-bound tomes. Past libraries and lounges, smoking chambers and guest rooms. When he found Winster, he said: M’lord, your guests. Winster fed us a martini, then took us to the dining room where more people M’lorded him and brought us roast duck, plum pudding and rich red wine.”
I was equally impressed by the ghost claimed by my Kentish hosts, Patience and Henry Bayne-Powell.
“Henry is quite proud of this ghost,” I wrote Mimi. “He insists that it’s the ghost of Catherine Howard, one of Henry VIII’s executed wives, and that she is very useful at such things as dusting the staircase railings. I was awakened in the small hours Sunday morning by the noise of a door being slammed somewhere in my wing of the house. I had my own wing, you see, all to myself. I listened a while and noticed that the door banging was repeated at regular intervals as if someone were coming along the hall, opening and slamming the doors.
“Well, I must admit that in the pitch blackness and otherwise dead silence this upset me a bit, so I got up and put on the light. Listening a while longer, I heard a very loud slam. My nerve failed completely at that point, and I slipped surreptitiously to my bedroom door and bolted it, feeling terribly ashamed of myself. Nevertheless, I slept easily after that, until the maid woke me next morning with coffee, eggs and toast.”
“The Bayne-Powells are very fortunate in having Catherine Howard’s ghost,” Mimi replied. “She was supposed to have been a great beauty. Only I must say her ghost must be the busiest ghost in all England. There are several castles that are also said to be graced by her spirit.”
The Baltimore friend who had engineered my weekend in the English countryside also deflated my pride in ghostly encounter. “Mimi reported that you spent a weekend with Patience and Henry and a ghost, which was certainly installed for your benefit, because there was no sign of it last fall,” she wrote. “They will go to any lengths to entertain one.”
The Communists had their enlightening moments, too, as they wore down a Sunday evening with interminable appeals for their big audience to come across with cash to keep The Daily Worker going. I had never been caught up in the Communist panic raging back home, but the Daily Worker evening left me reassured about the safety of capitalism. The selections by the Young Communists’ Chorus persuaded me that the Reds were cursed with tin ears, which would prevent them from ever winning the hearts and dancing feet of Western youth. For example, “Go Home, Yankee,” to the tune of “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys Are Marching”:
Go home, Yankee; Yankee, go home!
We don’t want you any more!
For the way of life you sell
Doesn’t suit us very well
And you’ll never make us fight a Yankee war.
My favorite, though, was a singing commercial for The Daily Worker:
From the River Clyde at Greenock
To the Thames at Charing Cross
You must read the Daily Worker
If you want to beat the boss.
Though I judged the Communists too dull, too lacking in subtle cunning to threaten the governing classes, in London for the first time I understood why many hated the West’s ruling systems. I had become wiser about what true hardship was. After so much whining about our poverty in Baltimore, I quickly learned in London what hard times were really like.
My first week in Fleet Street, three Guardian reporters invited me to join them for afternoon tea at the Kardomah across the street. The bill for a pot of tea and two crumpets came to the British equivalent of twelve cents. To tip the waitress, I put down sixpence, a dime-size coin worth seven American pennies. The Guardian men scowled at me. Why was I tipping like a rich American? They ordered me to put the sixpence back in my pocket and leave a threepenny tip. Threepence, they said, was the proper tip to make the waitress smile, and they were right. It was sobering to realize that life here was so pinched that three pennies were real money to a workingwoman.
“I’ve been here only a week and I already regard America as an incredibly luxurious, wealthy land of milk-and-honey,” I wrote Mimi.
“British ‘austerity’ is very much like what America went through in the Depression. In no time at all, I have become highly sensitive to the fact that a cigarette is a valuable thing. You smoke them until there’s nothing left but ash, and if you don’t have time to finish, you butt the cigarette and save it for later. When you’re drinking with a group, one man brings out his pack and it goes around ceremoniously with everyone taking one. Next time, it’s your turn and you’re expected to reciprocate. Even matches become valuable here. If someone has a lighter you consciously avoid pulling out your box of matches and, instead, take a free light from the benzine machine.
“A penny is a valuable coin. For two of them you get a nice long bus ride. For five, you get a real long bus ride. For one and a half you can buy a newspaper. This morning I ate breakfast at the Savoy—tomato juice, scrambled eggs, roll, butter, coffee—for slightly less than forty cents, and I was eating the most expensive breakfast on the menu. You don’t go out and buy a candy bar when you get hungry. For candy you need a ration card.
“About what to bring with you: Bring everything you can! Especially all your heavy clothing, and don’t worry about how drab it looks. Bring all the blankets and bedding we own. Bring Crisco, or its equivalent, as much as you can carry. It’s invaluable here and you’ll hoard it. Bring two cartons of cigarettes and two fifths of liquor—the maximum allowance. Bring everything linen that you might want while you’re here. The local product looks like burlap. Bring as much chocolate as you’re allowed. Bring book matches—can’t find them here. I can’t impress upon you enough that things you throw in the garbage at home would keep a family going in fine style here.”
Buck Dorsey’s plane was due at 9:45 that morning, but the fog was heavy again, and the airline announced a one-hour delay. The one hour became two and then three. The fog had thickened. It had been a historically bad winter for fog. Now there was a bleak announcement: the airport was closed. Nothing landing or taking off. How long before it would reopen? The airline people shrugged. It would reopen when the fog lifted a bit, sir, that’s all we can tell you just now, why not have a nice cup of tea and perhaps things will clear up shortly.
The thought of Buck Dorsey being bounced around somewhere over England waiting for the fog to lift a bit was not a happy one. I had it from confidential sources in Baltimore that Buck Dorsey had a bad case of flying fear. This was his first trip abroad, my informant said, and he was making it only because Swanson insisted.
He had resisted it for two very basic reasons. First, he hated traveling. Second, he loathed and feared flying. His fear was so deep that though his wife, Becky, was also making the European trip, he would not let her travel on the plane with him. They had a young son. Buck Dorsey did not want to leave him motherless as well as fatherless. To be doubly safe, he had sent Becky by sea aboard the Queen Elizabeth. He obviously faced the flight with dread. Shortly before departing Baltimore, he sent me an extraordinary note asking me to look out for his wife if anything should happen to him, and it did not have the ring of a man making a joke.
Now, circling somewhere over England in a monster fog, he probably felt that the end was near. I did not feel wonderful myself. When he did arrive, and I was sure he would arrive, somehow, somewhere, he was bound to be in a murderous state of mind, hating England and everything associated with it. I was associated with England. The glorious Daimler would be wasted on him now. He would probably see it as nothing more than an unjustifiable waste of money.
I cursed the fog. It wasn’t even fog, and I cursed the English for pretending it was. It was a black, filthy, smelly, deadly smog compounded of poisons pumped into the English sky by millions of soft-coal fires. On days that passed for clear the sun at noon was dusty orange. A white shirt was black by evening. I washed face and hands ten times a day, and each time the water was filthy when I finished.
My mood became as black as my shirt as morning turned to afternoon. I had counted on being back in the office by now and should have been. Queen Mary, she who lent such distinction to the Daimler, was dying. Early morning medical bulletins left no doubt. Her death would be a big story. She had been the wife of one king and mother of two and was the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth. The Sun would want a long, well-written obituary. That meant I should be digging through bales of history to get some sense of her life instead of waiting for a fog to lift.
Then, an announcement: Buck Dorsey’s plane was landing, but not at London. Far out on the southeast coast of England, it had found an airfield with enough visibility to land. Passengers would be brought to London by train. When they would arrive and where, nobody knew. We rode back to Fleet Street in the Daimler that was destined never to impress Buck Dorsey, paid off the driver, and started working the telephones to find out when a train bearing a planeload of Americans might arrive in London.
For the first two months in London, Buck Dorsey had left me free to cover what I wished and seemed satisfied with what he was getting. He had even sent one cable so flattering that I suspected he had taken a few martinis before writing it. Still, he was an unknown quantity to me, a haughty, somewhat imperious authority, and I was worried about my ability to please him, as a child might be anxious about pleasing a stern father.
Mimi had dealt with him back in Baltimore and found him anything but fierce. After my first week in England, she wrote, “I must confess that yesterday I was so worried about you that I called Buck Dorsey. Dorsey was very pleasant. I told him I hadn’t heard from you, and all the grim stories yesterday’s Sun carried about England upset me—thousands die in London smog—flu epidemic rages through Europe—also you had only one story in the paper this week.
“He said, ‘Lady, don’t you worry. He’s all right.’ He told me he didn’t expect anything from you for several weeks as you would be busy finding your way around. He guessed the story you sent just fell into your lap and you cabled it in to get your name in the paper. He invited me to call him any time I need reassurance.”
A few weeks later she wrote: “I was frightened out of my wits, to coin a phrase, tonight. Buck Dorsey called and said Quote Mrs. Baker, you called me a few weeks ago and asked if Russ was all right, you hadn’t heard from him, etc. Unquote. At that point my knees were quaking, I was sure Buck was going to say you had been killed by a hard pitched beer bottle or something equally ghastly, but then dear old Buck went on to say Quote I just wanted to tell you that O’Neill, Swanson, Ed Young and I just sent Russ a cablegram telling him what a fine job he is doing. O’Neill and I think he is doing magnificent work. He is really going to make a name for himself over there. I knew Russ would do a great job. I was willing to stake my reputation on it. Unquote. I’ll bet Buck had a few drinks under his belt, but 8 P.M., the time he called, is a little early to get soused.”
Such a cable—“DELIGHTED WITH EVERYTHING YOU DOING”—did, in fact, arrive in Fleet Street, “OF COURSE COMMA IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO ONEILL AND ME,” it concluded. Like Mimi, I attributed its enthusiasm to the cocktail hour in Baltimore. Newspaper people who constantly sent cables often got carried away by the fun of composing in cable-ese. The rockets they fired around the world were not always to be taken seriously. Still, Buck Dorsey had mentioned me in the same sentence with Tom O’Neill. That might be the highest praise I would ever get.
When Stalin, the century’s other great monster tyrant, died in early March, the Sun had no correspondent in Moscow and only one other man anywhere in Europe. I immediately cabled Baltimore that I was applying for a visa for Moscow. This proved harder to do than I anticipated. Phoning the Soviet embassy in London, I got a Russian male voice out of a stage comedy about Soviet bungling.
Visa? Moscow? What did he know about visa? About Moscow? Nothing.
Could I please talk to someone who did know about visas, someone who handled visa applications?
Visa applications? What was applications?
Couldn’t he just refer me to somebody…?
Somebody? Absolutely not! Who did I think I was calling?
The Soviet embassy. I was calling the Soviet embassy. I wanted to speak to someone in the Soviet embassy about applying for a visa to Moscow.
“No one here now. Everybody gone. You call again tomorrow.”
He hung up on me.
It was past the dinner hour. Maybe the place really had shut down for the night. First thing tomorrow morning I would appear at the embassy in person.
This proved unnecessary. Before the night was out I had a cable from Buck Dorsey with firm orders to stay in London and—NOT REPEAT NOT GO MOSCOW. It was signed, as all his cables were, LOVE STOP DORSEY.
“I spoke to Dorsey today,” Mimi wrote. “He said, ‘Do you know what that screwball husband of yours did?’ Dorsey seemed quite delighted and bubbling over when he told me of your cablegram Quote Applying for Russian visa to attend Stalin’s funeral. Objection? Unquote. I am glad Dorsey instead of Swanson received it. You would probably be on your way by now. Dorsey says he doesn’t want you going behind the Iron Curtain.”
I thought it strange that a paper as important as the Sun did not want a reporter in Moscow at that moment. Stalin’s death, with the change in the Soviet government, was a great story. As events showed, the Soviets were not interested in having Western newspaper visitors just then, so the point was academic. My ignorance of everything Russian, from the language to the lunatic conspiracies of Stalin’s rule, would have been crippling handicaps if I had got to Moscow. Still, just having someone on the scene describing what he saw at this historic moment would be valuable, I thought.
Buck Dorsey’s talk with Mimi suggested he was afraid something terrible might happen if I put myself in Russian clutches. This seemed especially odd because, well, weren’t newspapermen supposed to put themselves in harm’s way when the news demanded? Anyhow, where was the danger? Did Baltimore expect Moscow to celebrate Stalin’s death with a massacre of foreigners? In 1953, of course, Moscow was a dark, sinister cloud on America’s horizon and seemed far more forbidding and dangerous than it did a year or two later when Stalin’s terrible reign, like a dreadful nightmare, was receding slowly from American consciousness.
Despite the evidence that I was doing all right in Buck Dorsey’s grade book, I was terrified by the prospect of having to keep him entertained for a week. I was an inexperienced youngster, green on the job, and anything but a man about London, yet to make the trip successful I would have to establish a social relationship with a boss who was twice my age, highly sophisticated, and had finicky tastes. Besides, Buck Dorsey was not your average, run-of-the-mill editor. As I wrote my mother.
“Dorsey is an odd gent. He is being forced to come to Europe against his will for a one-month tour. Swanson thinks it would broaden him since he’s never been out of the country. I had one letter from him saying that his wife is coming by sea on the Queen Elizabeth and asking me to look out for her if anything should happen to him. I had written asking if he wanted me to arrange any appointments here for him and today he cabled back ‘no arrangements for meeting outside people, for god’s sake!’”
The breakdown in our greeting plans seemed disastrous, but I kept busy all afternoon working up Queen Mary’s obituary. Outside the black daylight turned to black night. Finally, news: The train bringing everybody to London was due at Victoria Station at ten o’clock. I was on the platform, ready to smile, apologize for England, and put him in a taxi to Claridge’s, where he was booked.
He emerged out of the fog looking like death, and no wonder after traveling through what must have looked like a twenty-four-hour night. Fatigued though he was, however, he was amused by something he had seen on the train.
“When they eat cheese and crackers here, they put butter on the cracker,” he was saying as we got into a cab. The sight of an Englishman buttering a cracker before laying a slice of cheese on it struck him as comical. “It’s like putting two kinds of jelly on a piece of toast,” he said, and laughed softly to himself at the absurdity of British eating customs.
I got him checked in at Claridge’s and said I had to get back to the office, check on the dying queen, and file my story if she had slipped away while I was at Victoria.
“You have time to have a drink first, don’t you?” he said.
The bar looked closed, and he wanted to get up to his room anyhow, so I went up with him, and he telephoned room service and ordered three bottles of Scotch. At that time ordering three bottles of Scotch from room service at Claridge’s was the kind of grand gesture associated with touring American movie stars and maharajahs who enjoyed flaunting their fortunes before their impoverished former rulers of the earth. I could imagine Tom O’Neill doing it, then cabling Baltimore to “send five thousand immediately,” but I could never have done it. Watching Buck Dorsey do it now, however, would provide a memory to tell my grandchildren.
Remembering our lunch at the Chesapeake, I put the glass down after one drink, used the telephone to establish that Queen Mary had indeed died, and headed back to Fleet Street to file.
“When you finish, come on back, and we’ll talk,” Buck Dorsey said.
“We sat around until almost dawn discussing one thing or another,” I wrote my mother a few days later. “He repeated what he had sent me by wire before, that everyone thought I am doing okay and he had no criticism, suggestions or orders. According to him I am just to go ahead doing the job as I see fit. He said he never knew of anyone having to take up a job under greater handicap than I did when I came into this one, and he was delighted at the way I had handled it so far. With that I poured him another drink and took a good stiff one myself.”
Many years passed before I fully understood what was happening. He was a gambling man, a truly dedicated horseplayer, and, figuratively speaking, he had put a big bet down on me. It was Buck Dorsey, not Swanson, who had picked me for the London job. Swanson must have been startled; he hardly knew who I was. Buck Dorsey was betting that his eye for newspaper talent was good enough to take an inexperienced man off the local staff who would do a bang-up job as a foreign correspondent. Swanson had to approve me, of course, and may have done so out of a sense of friendly competition with Buck Dorsey, hoping to see Buck Dorsey lose his bet.
This explained a great deal once I understood about the gambling instinct. Buck Dorsey’s stake in having me do well in London was almost as big as my own, and he was using every opportunity to build my confidence. Before sunrise that morning in London we reached a state in our relations that was very close to friendship. For the first time, I began calling him “Buck.” Not “Mister Dorsey,” but “Buck,” the same as Tom O’Neill called him.
Top of the world, Mimi! Just like Tom O’Neill! Wow!