by Les Hinton
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?’
CHAPTER 11
The Dirty Digger storms Fleet Street
Until 1968, the name Rupert was associated by much of Britain with a talking bear in a Daily Express comic strip. As a child, I hated comics featuring anthropomorphic characters, and Rupert to me became a weird and unlikeable name. Rupert Bear was a mild, eager-to-please fellow, nothing like the real-life version who was about to descend on Britain. But the bear’s friends did appear to foretell some details of the life ahead for his namesake — there was Tigerlily, the mischievous Chinese girl, and the Fox boys, who were always causing trouble.
Rupert Murdoch was a stranger to Fleet Street. When word spread that I knew him, senior editors started paying attention to me. I played up my acquaintance to keep their interest, but he had only addressed me by name once or twice.
When Rupert’s father, Sir Keith, died in 1952, a long and admiring obituary in The Times — headlined ‘Northcliffe of Australia’ — merely mentioned that among those surviving him was a son. Sir Keith had built a large Australian newspaper group, but in the complicated unwinding of his interests, Rupert was left to manage only a remnant of it.
It was not until May 1960 that Britain got a sniff of Rupert’s ambitions. A seven-line brief in The Times — ‘Sydney Newspapers Change Hands’ — reported that ‘Mr K. R. [Rupert] Murdoch … has entered the daily newspaper field in Sydney by buying a controlling interest’ in the city’s Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror. Newspaper accounts of Rupert would become less benign over the years.
Perhaps the first recorded British insult thrown at him was in January 1969 after he outwitted Robert Maxwell, the millionaire Labour MP, in a bitter battle to gain control of the News of the World. ‘Mr Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo,’ Rupert said at the time, with the wide, gap-toothed grin we all knew when he was young, before the cosmetic dentistry.
The News of the World was Rupert’s first foothold in Britain. The Carr family had controlled it since 1891, but the chairman in the 1960s, Sir William Carr, did not have a reputation as an attentive manager. The family owned a third of the shares and lived well off the proceeds of a flourishing newspaper.
For a while, Carr was an admirer of Rupert. He saw him as the white knight to keep Robert Maxwell at bay. Maxwell’s dodgy business practices were attracting attention even then, 22 years before he pillaged the pension fund of the Mirror Group and toppled mysteriously off his yacht into the Atlantic Ocean.
In persuading News of the World shareholders to support Rupert’s bid, Carr talked warmly of his new Australian friend: ‘You’ll not only like him, but he’ll prove to you he has much to offer us.’ When the deal was done, Carr remained chairman of the company, and Rupert became managing director. He immediately swept through the company, driving for change. Within six months, Carr had resigned and Rupert was in the chair. He was 38.
Rupert moved into his London headquarters at the News of the World offices in Bouverie Street. With a printing plant in the heart of London that operated only one day a week, he was now sitting on a valuable, under-used asset. He started looking for another newspaper. A mile away in Covent Garden, a daily was dying.
The experiment to position The Sun as a broadsheet for the up-and-coming ‘middle-class’ had failed. It was selling around 800,000 and sinking fast. Its owners, the International Publishing Corporation, had decided they were fighting a lost cause. The company chairman was the legendary tabloid editor, Hugh Cudlipp, whose books I had read and re-read as a boy. He agreed to sell The Sun to Rupert.
Before the deal was closed, Robert Maxwell emerged again to fight Rupert. He tried wooing journalists from the paper by inviting us for drinks and snacks to hear what a great owner he would be. He didn’t make a good impression — we had no control in the matter anyway — and Rupert prevailed once more.
After the sale was complete in November 1969 — Rupert paid £800,000 — Cudlipp was dismissive: ‘I wish him well in his bold venture. If he succeeds, as well he may, I will be the first to applaud.’ There is no record of Cudlipp’s applause nine years later when The Sun became Britain’s num
ber one newspaper. His beloved Daily Mirror was selling around 5 million at the time of the sale, and Cudlipp had thought it invincible.
Rupert adapted quickly to the role of a Fleet Street mogul, cruising London in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. But he never slipped into some of his competitors’ easy-going ways. Not many proprietors could be spotted stalking the streets, rearranging newsstands to give their newspapers the best display.
Murdoch’s new edition of The Sun copied the Mirror unashamedly, right down to adopting the paper’s old front-page battle cry to the workers — ‘Forward with the People’ — and spoofing the great Mirror columnist Cassandra by running a daily column that was displayed in exactly the same style and called ‘Son of Cassandra’. Its author was Robert Connor, son of the real Cassandra, William Connor.
But no British newspaper had been so graphic, in words or pictures, on the subject of sex. The Times gave the new arrival a frowning review in an editorial on 18 November, the day after the tabloid’s debut: ‘The formula is a simple one … sex, sport and sensation,’ it said.
This is an old way to create a new newspaper. Sex and sensation … were a normal plot for Daniel Defoe, the first begetter of almost every striking invention in British journalism. Sport as an aid to circulation came in with the Victorians.
It will be interesting to see whether the new Sun is a commercial success. It very well could be. Mr Murdoch has not invented sex but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation, such as a tired old Fleet Street has not seen in recent years.
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While Rupert was plotting to buy The Sun in 1969, I was getting to understand British tabloids. I worked five days a week for the broadsheet version of The Sun, but earned extra working Saturday shifts on Sunday newspapers.
My induction into the raw culture of the Fleet Street popular press came on the night of Saturday 9 August 1969, while working a shift on the News of the World. The News of the World was a broadsheet then, but had the style of today’s redtop tabloids.
Charlie Markus was the squat, bullet-headed news editor. He bellowed a lot, and no one argued with him except, occasionally, his deputy, Robert Warren, whose courtly, soft-spoken manner seemed misplaced in the hectic newsroom.
That night, a two-line news agency snap dropped on Markus’ corner desk in the room he shared with his reporters. Sharon Tate, the beautiful 26-year-old wife of the film director Roman Polanski, had been found murdered in her Bel Air home. It was a good story for the newspaper, given added spice by the fact Polanski was famous for dark horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby.
But as more details emerged, a fever gripped the News of the World. Four others had also been killed: two bodies were on the lawn outside; one was in a car; and another in the house. A white nylon rope was tied around Tate’s neck, looped over a ceiling beam, and attached to another victim with a hood over his head. Tate had been eight months pregnant. She was wearing a bra and knickers. Her front door was daubed with blood. An American flag was mysteriously draped over a couch in the living room.
Markus was in such a state of excitement I thought he might levitate. For him, this story had it all. Beauty, riches, stardom, Hollywood, and an abundance of hideous detail. All this, before it became known the killers were members of Charles Manson’s helter-skelter cult.
If an IBM mainframe computer of the day had been asked to assemble the entire history of homicide and conjure up the ultimate late-breaking story for the News of the World, this would have been it. Long-distance calls were made to Los Angeles, appointing every available freelancer to the job. Every known acquaintance of Roman Polanski and his murdered wife — colleagues, neighbours, rivals, old lovers — were sought for comment. Library clippings were scoured for similarities with Polanski’s grisly films. I was instructed to prepare a list of the twentieth century’s foulest mass murders.
As well as urgency that night, there was a mood of muted appreciation. The News of the World wasn’t enjoying what had happened; there was no ghoulish delight. With the exception of Markus’ near delirium, there was mostly a cold and practical understanding of the task. For their readers, it was a shocking story, and irresistible reading; this was the kind of event they expected their Sunday newspaper to cover in every detail. For journalists doing their jobs, serving their customers, this reduced an awful crime to a commodity, to be packaged and delivered as perfectly as possible.
Saturday shifts on other newspapers gave me first-hand lessons in the differing personalities of Fleet Street, but nothing compared with the atmosphere at the News of the World when it was rising to the occasion of a celebrity mass-murder. I did regular work at The Sunday Telegraph. No newspaper was less like the News of the World, but its reporters were not sombre; they would take me to a pub in Ludgate Circus, where we peered over our pints at women dancing topless.
Editors at the Telegraph liked copy to be straight, just as I had written it at British United Press. Stories ran longer, but we were encouraged to keep adjectives to a minimum. We were permitted to write long first paragraphs, with multiple commas, even occasional semicolons — intros that would have guaranteed a blast from Charlie Markus.
Broadsheet sub-editors believed it was their duty only to trim and tidy a reporter’s work while inspecting it for errors. Most of the time, original work appeared on the page with few changes. The subs’ desks of popular newspapers were mincing machines, and teams of editors would routinely re-write a reporter’s copy beyond recognition. It was infuriating how much better it often was when they’d finished.
When Rupert took over The Sun, I did not stay. I wanted to take Mary, my new wife, to Australia to meet my family and friends, and to show her the country. I was offered a job or a payoff, and the redundancy was enough for a down payment on a house. I was 24 and Mary 23, and we decided to quit our jobs and wander. I took the money, put it in the bank, and we sailed away.
I met Mary in September 1966, one Saturday night at the flat of an Australian dentist in Earl’s Court. I didn’t know the dentist and hadn’t been invited to the party. A few of us heard about it in a local pub and turned up at the door armed with Party Fours, which were usually enough to gain entry to a regular Australian Earl’s Court party. These were four-pint cans of beer that were ubiquitous in the 1960s, but inexplicably went out of fashion sometime in the 1980s.
We went to the party after being thrown out of the pub. I had emptied a pint of beer over the head of an annoying friend, which distressed the landlady.
Mary was standing across from me in a room full of jostling people. I think The Kinks were playing on the stereo. She was with a redhead who was also beautiful. But Mary had a perfect face, with a square Celtic jaw, and gentle eyes. She was wearing a knitted hat.
She said later that the first thing I ever said to her was: ‘Your thin and faintly curling lips look most attractive.’ I do not actually remember saying this because it had been a long and tiring evening, but it was a good description. I do remember that, in spite of my untidy condition, Mary tolerated my company and before she left agreed to give me her telephone number. I have never forgotten it — 953-6564.
I called her the next day and we agreed to meet at seven o’clock that evening at the Earl’s Court tube station. Mary arrived very late — she was never a good timekeeper.
We married on 30 March 1968, a rainy Saturday, in a red-brick Catholic church in Elstree, Hertfordshire, not far from the council house where Mary lived with her mother, Sally, a cleaner, and her younger brother, Danny. Her father, Martin, a merchant seaman, had died of cancer eight years earlier at the age of 52.
There was a patriotic campaign sweeping Britain at the time, intended to raise the country’s morale during an economic downturn. People were wearing Union Flag ‘I’m Backing Britain’ badges, and the Daily Express was running the strapline every day on its front page. We found the mood disagreeable — an earlier symptom o
f the jingoism and lurking xenophobia that contributed to the 2016 Brexit vote — so we staged our own mild protest by spending more than we could afford hiring two Mercedes as our wedding cars.
As a non-Catholic, I was required for several weeks before the ceremony to attend religious instruction meetings with the gaunt and ancient parish priest, Father Murray. We sat in our overcoats in front of an inadequate electric fire while he explained the superiority of the Roman Catholic faith over the Anglican version into which I had been baptised. We failed to agree most of the time, and for our last few evenings together we talked about photography, which was his hobby. He tried to sell me a second-hand camera.
Mum travelled by ship from Adelaide for the wedding. As a Liverpool Protestant, she had not reacted well to the news I was marrying a Catholic of Irish descent. It took a while, but Mary won her over and they became close.
Mary and I sailed to Australia in the autumn of 1969. For the one-way trip to Adelaide I got a job as a ‘press liaison officer’ on the P&O-Orient liner SS Oriana. We received free passage and two first-class cabins, in return for which I had to find interesting stories to offer reporters greeting the ship at every port. It was not hard. I found a flood of human-interest stories by running a competition in the ship’s newsletter. Passengers were given free drinks in exchange for stories about their lives and their reasons for going to Australia. When we arrived in Fremantle in Western Australia, one local television channel ran the first 10 minutes of its nightly news with stories from the ship.
Mary liked Australia, but not its attitude to women. The personnel manager who gave her a job behind the information desk of David Jones department store did so only after she promised not to become pregnant. Mary immediately broke this promise, and enjoyed the angry glares of the personnel manager at the growing evidence of her disobedience.