The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Central Park, Manhattan’s green lung of more than 800 acres, was a no-go zone of muggings and rape; so dangerous at night almost no one went there. Women wore fake jewellery on the streets and carried Mace sprays in their handbags.

  Times Square now is a blinding, round-the-clock electric light show of clean cafes and bright theatres. In the 1970s, it was seedy and dangerous, offering ‘Live Nude Girls — 25 cents’, and films such as The Filthy Five and Wayward Girls. Drug dealers conducted their business without discretion, and it was never wise, going home after a Broadway show, to wander down a lonely side-street.

  Heading home towards Grand Central after work, I passed $10 hookers, patrolling the homebound tide in their towering heels, calling out entreaties — ‘Come on. You can catch the next train.’ It must have been a brisk marketplace; the hookers were always there.

  New York City was full of stories. As for crime, the dread of being mugged was nothing compared with the permanent expectation of an IRA bomb. I witnessed only one criminal act in New York — a youth cutting through a chain to steal a bicycle on Central Park South. It was a heavy chain, cutting it took a while, and people walked past with hardly a glance as the thief laboured to break free his prize.

  As for economic catastrophe, the challenges of New York paled against the crisis in Britain, where inflation had exceeded 20 per cent, unemployment was at its highest since the war, and the government had taken its begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan that would be the biggest in the IMF’s history.

  There was angst in New York, but also a determination to overcome the difficulties. Britain was in the throes of a clinical depression: before leaving, I had the job of speaking to psychiatrists for a feature analysing the country’s mental state. Their diagnosis was a nation on the edge of nervous breakdown. New York, by comparison, was a city of vitality and optimism; a sick patient convinced it would heal.

  It was also America’s bicentennial, 200 years since 1776 when the 13 American colonies declared independence. The country had been through tumultuous times, but by then the Vietnam War was over, Nixon had been forced from office by the Watergate scandal, and America was in the mood for a party.

  Most important of all, this was Rupert Murdoch’s new frontier, his foothold in America, and here I was.

  The outpost of Rupert’s American adventure was at 730 Third Avenue, an expressionless grey glass tower where we leased two floors. The building’s main occupant was a sober operation providing pensions for members of the academic professions, which made the 19th floor where I worked easily the most overwrought area. Rupert’s executive offices were upstairs. I only went there a couple of times — they were white and quiet and intimidating.

  The 19th floor was where the action was. The News Limited bureau where I worked was a cluster of untidy desks and old typewriters. It looked like The Sun’s newsroom in miniature. A wall of beige filing cabinets separated us from our lively neighbour, The National Star. Rupert had launched The Star two years before. It was a manic weekly tabloid sold in supermarket checkout lanes, offering celebrity gossip of inconsistent accuracy, Kennedy conspiracy theories, tales of space aliens held captive by the government, and pages of psychic predictions foreseeing show business romances and divorces, as well as natural calamities and other disasters.

  These two floors on Third Avenue were Rupert’s New York universe. Three years before, he had bought two newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, but that was an act of restless opportunism rather than the acquisition of a strategic asset.

  There was nothing else: no television stations, no big city daily, no film studio, no magazines, and not a lot of friends. Nor was there the contempt and obloquy he endured in Britain, at least not yet. Local newspapers hardly mentioned him, and when his unfamiliar name appeared it required explanation — he was ‘the Australian-born international publishing baron’. Rupert was an outsider again, starting from scratch. It suited him.

  The launch of The Star in February 1974 received modest coverage across three columns of The New York Times, which said its budget of more than $5 million was ‘said to be the largest promotion budget in newspaper history’. The Star, it added, was ‘for people who find their local dailies too intellectual’. It quoted Rupert: ‘We’re not interested in the publishing judgements of Madison Avenue or professors of journalism.’

  At first, The Star was not the success Rupert had hoped for. Transplanted journalists from The Sun, who created the first editions under the leadership of Larry Lamb, hadn’t taken much advice about American tastes. The Star’s first front page was a design riot that made The Sun look subdued. The main illustration was of Bruce Lee, the martial arts actor who had died the year before. A large comic-strip bubble from Lee’s mouth offered four pages and a wall chart on Kung Fu, ‘the craze sweeping the world’.

  ‘It’s a new kind of newspaper,’ the front page boasted, and that was certainly true. The front page promised no actual news and the un-alluring main head said simply: ‘Welcome To The Star, Folks.’

  It failed to electrify the nation’s supermarket shoppers, and Larry Lamb soon returned to London. Rupert briefly appointed himself editor and publisher, but by the time I arrived in New York, Roger Wood was in charge.

  Wood was a Belgian-born Englishman who never renounced his Fleet Street habits in New York, even though his lunchtime absences would enrage Rupert. He was a senior editor on the broadsheet version of The Sun when I was a holiday relief. He had also been editor-in-chief of the Daily Express, and never challenged the widely held belief that when Beaverbrook sacked him he sent his money-savvy identical twin Victor into the office to negotiate his payoff.

  Eventually, The Star would acclimatise and calm its display, if not its fanciful accounts of celebrity life and visiting UFOs. It copied the formula of London tabloids, where serious and frivolous material lived side by side, and appointed a Washington correspondent. It also ran a political column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who were famous and respected US commentators. The Star’s circulation would peak at 5 million, and reliably deliver millions of dollars in profit.

  Rupert’s American empire would eventually develop into a traditional corporate behemoth, smooth-running and fairly well-behaved, but the pioneers who joined him at 730 Third Avenue were a wild bunch.

  When Rupert acquired Dow Jones in 2007, a company advertising campaign was considered that characterised News Corp as a band of pirates and marauders. This idea was abandoned, but must have been inspired by Rupert’s raiders of the 1970s. They were his American boarding party, an exuberant band of brothers, and a few sisters, who refused to learn the manners of New York media.

  Steve Dunleavy, an Australian, wrote a raucous and angry column in The Star. The paper described him as ‘Mr Blood and Guts’, and his by-line included a photo of him with a bottle of Heineken. His escapades were company folklore. An early-shift office boy was reprimanded for calling an ambulance when he couldn’t rouse Dunleavy as he lay beneath the City desk — he was merely recovering from the night before. A snowplough crushed his foot as he lay in a snowdrift outside Elaine’s restaurant on the Upper East Side, leaving his female companion uninjured. He swam the channel at Chappaquiddick, where Mary Jo Kopechne died, to disprove Ted Kennedy’s claim that riptides thwarted his effort to rescue her. Rupert both admired and disapproved of Dunleavy’s life, but people went too far in describing Dunleavy as his ‘alter ego’.

  Neal Travis was Dunleavy’s best friend and drinking buddy, and a former Murdoch star in Sydney. When he moved to Manhattan, he wrote racy novels and became first editor of the now world-famous Page Six column. His standard defence when challenged about the accuracy of an item was: ‘Oh, please, you don’t seem to understand. I’m writing a gossip column.’ Travis was always leaving the company and coming back. Once, spotting Travis at a desk, Rupert told an editor: ‘Not him again. I don’t want him here.’ But Travis h
ad charm, and a moment after returning to his office, Rupert called the editor: ‘I was a bit hasty. We should keep Neal on board.’ Travis had rushed over to Rupert to express his joy at working for him again.

  Australians and Brits enjoyed the fast life of 1970s Manhattan. Piers Akerman, called The Toad for no other reason than he rather looked like one, lived — as the euphemism goes — life to the full. The only adult brawl of my life happened when I insulted him in Costello’s, a journalists’ bar nearby, and he began pounding my chest. He was a short, un-athletic man and, although the blows of Akerman’s tiny fists were slight and he meant no real harm, I helpfully fell to the floor and lay still until Freddie, the barman, threw him out onto 44th Street.

  Ian Rae and I became close friends, even though he had a famously uneven temper and a larrikin streak he struggled to control. When I was news editor at The Star and he was editor-in-chief, Rae was once so annoyed with me that he chased me through our crowded newsroom threatening to kill me. Rae was known as The Pig, no one could say definitively why, and the staff looked only slightly surprised.

  Another friend was Col Allan, a tall, stringy country boy from Dubbo in New South Wales, with unbridled self-confidence, a loud voice, and an intense social life. I enjoyed slight seniority over him, which Allan claimed I abused, landing him in the winter with cold jobs in Canada, while I monopolised Caribbean assignments. He was correct.

  Peter Brennan, when he was chief of The Star’s Los Angeles bureau, would go missing for hours each day — he was writing a novel and never answered his phone before finishing that day’s writing.

  Phil Bunton, an outsized British sub-editor, owned two cats named Rupert and Dot — after Dot Wyndoe, Rupert’s assistant. Bunton claimed his therapy after a difficult day was to go home and kick the cat called Rupert.

  John Canning was a one-legged New Zealander who had contemplated the priesthood as a young man, but instead found his calling at the Sydney Daily Mirror. In high spirits, Canning was known to remove his leg and drink beer from it.

  Others already established as members of Rupert’s inner circle were relatively conventional. George Viles was an aggressive Australian executive. Working in London, he was called the ‘Industrial Gorilla’ after storming into a strike meeting at The Sun and threatening to fire the entire staff. Viles was first in the office, but by 5pm each day he was reliably leaning on a bar in the company of Paul Rigby and Curly Brydon. Rigby was an ebullient cartoonist already celebrated in Australia and Britain. He founded the ‘Limp Falling Association’, whose members would identify themselves by slumping suddenly to the floor, most often in bars. He once demonstrated this fall on national television in Britain. Brydon had been an Australian fighter ace during the war before helping run Rupert’s businesses, peppered his conversation with aviation metaphors, and gave our roving boss the nickname that stuck for years — the Flying Doctor.

  They weren’t all oddballs, and there weren’t many wasters. Among the couple of hundred inhabitants of 730 Third Avenue were serious and sober journalists, such as Ray Kerrison, a devout man and lovely writer; John Raedler, the solemn correspondent of The Australian; and Peter Michelmore, who was Australian but wholly Americanised after years living in New Jersey. Joe Robinowitz was a serious-minded young Texan who didn’t realise he was being insulted when Kelvin MacKenzie, an Englishman then at the New York Post, addressed him repeatedly as ‘you Texas toe rag’.

  An early wave of American managers had already joined the company, led by Marty Singerman, a circulation executive from TV Guide who would rise to become chief of all US publishing. Marty became my mentor, and then one of my closest friends.

  Many of these eccentric and determined misfits went on to great success. Col Allan was an editor-in-chief in Sydney and held the same job for 15 years at the New York Post; Akerman returned to Australia and gained fame as a dyspeptic conservative columnist; Dunleavy relished his notoriety as a New York Post columnist, was profiled by Rolling Stone, and, after gaining national renown on the A Current Affair television programme, helped Robert Downey Jr prepare for his role as an outlandish reporter in Natural Born Killers. Ian Rae became a leading Fox News producer; and Peter Brennan launched shows for Fox TV before breaking out on his own and creating hits such as Judge Judy, which won awards and made millions.

  These Murdoch pioneers constituted the unstable chemistry of Rupert’s early years in America. They were fiery, defiant, adventuring, boozy, and invincible in their own minds, imagining they were storming the beaches of American journalism, certain to overwhelm the opposition. They delighted in the pious disapproval of their American counterparts and retaliated with loud disdain of their new country’s newspapers. It was a true clash of cultures, in which neither side could claim all the right. To the invaders, American newspapers were dull and its journalists smug and self-admiring. In return, Americans were aghast at Rupert’s raiders, who they saw as raucous, reckless, and uncouth. There was evidence supporting both arguments.

  But we newcomers were devoted to The Boss, and in the years to come most of us did pretty well whatever he asked of us. We moved from business to business, taking over newspapers, buying magazines, moving into television — and all the while professing not to give a damn what the rest of the media world thought. We didn’t change American newspapers much, of course. Four decades later the pride of Rupert’s American print properties was The Wall Street Journal. The Star had been cast off long ago, and only the New York Post, by then a tiny asset in a vast enterprise, remained. It was still in high spirits in spite of continuing losses and diminishing sales.

  In the summer of 1976, America was still Rupert’s empire of dreams. It was seven months after my arrival that he made his first serious moves.

  First came the acquisition of the New York Post, a dull and struggling evening newspaper founded 175 years before by Alexander Hamilton. The seller was the heiress Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s 73-year-old editor and publisher, who had bought the newspaper in 1939.

  This was the time US media coverage of Rupert began to harden. Suddenly he became a ‘brash millionaire’ and newspapers gave details, not just of the supermarket Star, but also his newspapers in Britain and Australia and their appetite for scandal, sex, crime, and sport.

  In this more hostile climate, Rupert began his effort to buy New York magazine and The Village Voice, two very different weeklies owned by the same company. New York was a slick magazine whose exaggeration of the glamour and sophistication of Manhattan appealed to a large readership. The Village Voice was a merciless arch-irritant of New York City power, choosing its victims from among a ready supply of dodgy politicians, company bosses, police chiefs, and judges.

  The company was run by Clay S. Felker, a 51-year-old journalist from Missouri. He had created New York, and had become the darling of the city’s best writers, including practitioners of ‘New Journalism’ — writers who applied ‘literary’ techniques to their reporting. According to critics, this technique meant that articles were not always completely truthful.

  Felker had asked Rupert to become an investor in his magazines in the hope he would help him handle his troublesome board. He owned 10 per cent of the company stock, and needed allies. His talents as an editor were not, in his board’s opinion, matched by a gift for fiscal responsibility.

  If Felker had done some homework, he would have known Rupert was never interested in owning a minority share of anything. When Rupert, without informing him, bought other shareholders’ stock until he owned 50 per cent of the company, Felker felt betrayed.

  Rupert’s arrival at New York caused uproar. Bereft at the loss of Felker, and appalled at their new owner’s reputation, well-known writers swore never to work for a Murdoch publication. Editors walked out in an effort to prevent publication of his first edition — one fled the building with a bundle of copy. Rupert, with volunteers from News Corp, produced the edition without them.

 
This drama coincided with the launch of another film version of the King Kong story, and Time magazine adapted the film’s poster to mark a real-life Manhattan invasion. On the cover, with hairy feet planted on each tower of the World Trade Centre, was a giant ape with Rupert’s head. One gorilla fist waved a copy of the New York Post, the other clutched Clay Felker. The head said: ‘Extra!!! Aussie Press Lord Terrifies Gotham’.

  Rupert’s reinvention of the New York Post into a noisy, emotional tabloid caused fainting spells among serious-minded custodians of American journalism. To Londoners or Sydneysiders, the Post was a typical tabloid — entertaining and sometimes over the top — but most American editors were horrified. To them, Rupert and his raiders were plague carriers.

  What they regarded as an assault on cherished standards, Rupert saw as a business opportunity. He thought American newspapers were dull and distant, and that they cared more about Pulitzer Prizes than their readers.

  He was right — few American reporters understood popular journalism — but he was also dismissive of pretty well all American newspaper people, and that was harsh. As a Brit, however, his prejudice served me well.

  American editors never lasted until Ed Kosner came. When he was fired as editor of Newsweek, Rupert appointed Kosner to New York magazine, and he was still there when we sold the magazine 11 years later.

  It was just as well Rupert did not need admirers. The Columbia Journalism Review described the Post as ‘a force for evil’; Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times, called Rupert, ‘a bad element, practising mean, ugly, violent journalism’. Rosenthal predicted: ‘He’ll be out of town in a couple of years’. The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko quit when Rupert bought his newspaper, saying ‘no self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper’.