The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

When Rupert invited The New York Times to his Fifth Avenue apartment for an interview, the Times reporter recorded a prescient scene: ‘As he spoke, his three small children scurried about in the apartment. The publisher’s young daughter carried a portable tape recorder and played at being an interviewer of her brothers. The children would then gleefully replay the responses.’

  Elisabeth was eight, Lachlan five, and James three.

  CHAPTER 15

  Johnny Rotten’s leather jacket

  America’s introduction to Rupert Murdoch was a sideshow for me. I was on the road, having the time of my life. I didn’t know I had entered the twilight of my days as a reporter. I had never wanted any other life, never wanted a big office — any office — and didn’t dream of becoming a company boss. I didn’t want the responsibility of thousands of employees and billions in revenue. I didn’t even want to be an editor at any level, let alone in charge of an entire publication. I was quite a good reporter, if no superstar. All I wanted was to tell stories.

  When my friend Mark Day became the youthful editor of The Sunday Mail in Adelaide, I had a dream that I had his job, and was walking through the office, panic stricken. We had no paper to print the newspaper, and in the dream it was my fault.

  The thought of chairing a meeting or speaking to a large group filled me with fear. It wasn’t nerves; it was morbid dread. Some people relished the rough and tumble of company politics, but it was too intense for me.

  I’m not complaining about my move into management — I could have walked at any time. I adjusted to the importance and power — and definitely the income — and enjoyed managing people more than I had expected. But it was an accidental career, and coming off the road in 1978, aged 34, was painful.

  The New York bureau suited me. Peter Michelmore was technically in charge as bureau chief, but he thought The Sun’s editors were difficult customers and was happy for me to keep them off his back. His background was upmarket and he didn’t understand the newspaper. As long as I provided London with a good flow of stories, I could be my own boss. I didn’t have Ken Donlan or anyone else looking over my shoulder. Although I hankered occasionally to work on a ‘serious’ newspaper, I never grew tired of the insane range of topics that came with working for a redtop.

  My first big assignment was the 1976 presidential election contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I swept across the country in trains and planes, and cheated to ensure that the small Michigan city, Kalamazoo, was my first out-of-town dateline. I filed the copy from Flint, 100 miles away, but couldn’t resist the lyrical sound of Kalamazoo. It was an unattractive place, but composers of a certain era liked using the name in their songs.

  Ford was a decent man. I had a couple of innocuous chats with him when he and his wife Betty stopped to talk when I was aboard his whistle-stop train. I don’t know if he saw the three men mooning him as we rattled through a level crossing. The campaign was so hard on Ford that he lost his voice and Betty had to read his concession speech in the White House. When Mrs Ford wandered among us later, saying goodbye, her daughter, Susan, clung sobbing to her back.

  Flying back to New York, I argued with an old guy who insisted I give up my seat for one of his party. The man was unfamiliar, but he had an entourage of five who treated him with excessive respect. I refused, telling him I needed to get back to New York. The man wandered off grumbling. The clerk behind the check-in desk at the airport had watched wide-eyed and silent. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he said. ‘That’s Walter Cronkite.’

  I was a new boy and Cronkite was the face of CBS News. It dominated every other network, and he was the most famous journalist in the country. We sat across the aisle from each other without speaking.

  Organised crime was a running story in New York. Mafia and gangland killings were commonplace. JFK Airport was a favourite dumping spot; bodies would often be found there, hidden in the boots of parked cars. The Mafia’s preferred means of execution was a .22 handgun. When fired into the back of the head, its low velocity meant the bullet bounced around inside a victim’s skull and could be counted on to inflict conclusive injuries.

  Carlo Gambino was the most notorious Mafia boss in the country. I went to his funeral six months after I arrived in New York. The Daily News ran a classic, hard-bitten headline: ‘Carlo Gambino Dies In Bed’. Gambino was said to be the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather. He was the leader of all the Mafia families — the boss of bosses. He died aged 74 of a suspected heart attack in his Long Island home, while lying in bed, watching a Yankees game on television.

  The funeral was at the Church of Our Lady of Grace in Brooklyn. Gambino had been a benefactor, and hundreds of people were there, several with their faces covered. There were so many flowers it looked like a botanical garden had been uprooted. Thirteen black Cadillacs followed his bronze coffin. One uninvited vehicle was parked outside the church. The NYPD Organized Crime Control Bureau was there, taking photographs. When I approached one of them, he asked me fiercely to identify myself; I think my English accent exonerated me. Gambino had led his family for 20 years and had thwarted every effort the government made to deport him back to his birthplace in Sicily.

  His successor, Paul Castellano, did not have a lucky reign. In 1985, he arrived for dinner at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan, and four men dressed in white trench coats shot him dead in the street. John Gotti had ordered the killing, and subsequently became Godfather. Sparks was across the street from the bureau, 300 feet from our building, and our favourite steakhouse. After the Castellano killing, it became even harder to get a reservation.

  The Mafia held a curious fascination for New Yorkers. Law-abiding Italian-Americans enjoyed taking visitors to restaurants known to be Mafia haunts. Restaurant guides contained hints directing people to the most notorious establishments. It was easy to spot the gangsters by the excessive attention they received.

  I often needed to go beyond the United States. Once, I spent three days travelling in a helicopter through the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico with drug enforcement agents. They were spraying poison on the fields of farmers who had discovered that poppies were a better cash crop than beans. The destruction of their crops irritated the farmers; every so often they fired guns at the helicopters threatening their livelihood.

  The idea of being shot at was not so unnerving as the moment the young Mexican rifleman next to me almost blew us up. We were returning to base and our chopper was awash with fuel leaking from a rubber pod that had carried reserves. Our gunman had spent the day uneventfully, staring down at the mountains with an ancient rifle across his lap, ready to return fire. We were ankle deep in fuel and dizzy from its smell when he lit a cigarette. The pilot leapt from his seat and extinguished the cigarette by clutching it in his fist. He returned to the controls of his veering aircraft yelling aggressively in Spanish and the careless young Mexican looked terrified. ‘I told him I was going to throw him out of the helicopter,’ the pilot said.

  I sometimes wonder if that was the closest I came to a violent death, but my children think it was the time they saw me surface from turtle watching in Barbados as a racing speedboat skimmed the top of my head.

  Foreign correspondents regard it as a mark of distinction to be thrown out of a country for upsetting the local regime. It happened to me only months before my reporting life ended, but I did nothing intrepid to deserve it. In Eleuthera, a long, skinny island in the Bahamas, Prince Charles arrived with a ‘mystery girlfriend’. This was important because Charles was still a bachelor and the tabloids judged every woman with whom he made eye contact a possible future queen. They were staying with a friend whose home was isolated behind acres of high brush, impossible to cross without getting lost. The photographer Burt Reavley came up with the piece-of-string technique of navigation. He bought several balls of string, tied the end of one to a tree beside our car, and unwound the rest as we tried to find our way to C
harles’ love nest. When the first ball ran out, Reavley attached a second one. But Reavley, a master with a camera, knew nothing about knots, and when the strings came apart we were suddenly lost in the hot and vast brown undergrowth of Eleuthera, without water or any means of establishing our position.

  When we eventually found our way out, Reavley had another bright idea. ‘We’re going to pretend to go fishing,’ he said.

  We paid a man with a small blue boat to take us out to sea, and soon spotted Charles’ hideaway. We drew closer, casting our unbaited lines into the choppy water while scanning the beach. We were 50 yards off shore when a Bahamian police officer came running along the sand towards us. He was carrying a pair of binoculars and a gun; he only pointed the binoculars at us, but still we decided to retreat. We thought we were being discreet, but it’s possible Reavley’s huge telescopic lens gave us away.

  That evening, as we plotted our next move over a bottle of wine in the hotel bar, we heard police sirens. Three officers appeared and a grave man with braided shoulders accused us of breaching the terms of our visas by employing a local man — the boat owner. He gave us 12 hours to leave the country. We thought it lame grounds for deportation, but we didn’t argue much; it’s not as if we were there on serious business.

  There is a wary fraternity among competing journalists, especially foreign correspondents who spend a lot of time away from their offices and families. It can be lonely — the best foreign correspondents are often loners — but I never enjoyed waking up in a strange place knowing that there was no possibility of meeting even an acquaintance. I preferred company when I travelled.

  A ghetto of Fleet Street correspondents had formed in and around the offices of the Daily News at Second Avenue and 42nd Street. It was a glamorous place to work before the paper fell on hard times and moved to cheaper digs in lower Manhattan. Its lobby was dominated by a gigantic globe and was the model for the Daily Planet where Clark Kent worked.

  Costello’s on 44th Street started as a speakeasy and had a long history of literary drinkers. When people told this history, they dropped the names of Hemingway and John O’Hara and great writers from The New Yorker such as A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. The walls of Costello’s were covered by a James Thurber mural, which he allegedly painted to pay an outstanding bar bill.

  By the time I became a regular, the drinkers were still illustrious, if not quite so celebrated. Big-name writers from Fleet Street dropped in, Jimmy Breslin was often there, and, for reasons I recall only dimly, Colleen McCullough, the author of a gigantic bestseller, The Thorn Birds, asked me to dance one night even though no music was playing.

  Two regulars were friends from Belfast. Chris Buckland, a cigar chewing, wisecracking Daily Mirror man from Burnley, was now the Mirror’s bureau chief in New York. He was hilarious company, compensating for his lack of height with a big personality and elevated shoes. Paul Dacre of the Daily Express was a shy, towering Londoner who conducted himself with the burdened seriousness of a man who might be in his fifties, even though he was only in his mid-twenties. Some called him pompous, but I gave Dacre the benefit of the doubt and decided it was how he coped with his natural reserve.

  When Buckland died in February 2017 and Dacre and I were pallbearers at his funeral, an obituary said we had ‘swept across America like three musketeers, funded by lavish expense accounts, travelling in hired planes and cars, always bent on outscooping one another, but invariably ending the day in the same bar.’ It wasn’t always so convivial, and Dacre and Buckland might have had unlimited expenses, but not me. But the three of us went thousands of miles together and enjoyed unforgettable moments.

  Dacre and I once drank at the bar of the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, with Hunter S. Thompson. We were there covering a murder trial, but Thompson was more memorable, even though much of what he said didn’t make sense. We spent all night at a wild party at Studio 54, Manhattan’s most untamed disco in the 1970s. Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and Mariel Hemingway were there. A black panther was led on to the dance floor, but panicked and bounded off upon hearing the sound of the Bee Gees. We were there to ask Bianca Jagger if she was separating from Mick, and it must have been four o’clock in the morning before we could get her to talk. She insisted they were happy together, but we didn’t believe it.

  Buckland and I went to the tiny jungle colony of Belize in Central America when neighbouring Guatemala threatened to invade, claiming ancient territorial rights. Buckland arrived at the airport with maps and travel guides. ‘I’m going to do some research,’ he said, ‘so I can file when we land.’ After locating Belize on the map, he drafted his story. Next morning it was the front-page lead: ‘By Gum! It’s War’, and the story referred to Belize as the ‘chewing gum colony’. It was a good tabloid twist and made me gloomy, until I discovered Buckland’s guidebooks were out-of-date. Disease had long since killed the trees that provided chicle, the gum ingredient that had been the backbone of the local economy. Buckland didn’t mention it again, but no matter what he wrote, the subs kept putting the chewing gum back into his stories.

  We took a Land Rover to the purportedly dangerous border, but the barbed-wire gate of the Guatemalan garrison was yawning open and a couple of soldiers snoozed in the shade. The captain in charge offered coffee, and invited us to meet his pet monkey, which was tiny with huge eyes and long black fur. We agreed to tell our offices they had sent us to a phony war and it was time to go home.

  The craziest American road trip Buckland, Dacre, and I took together was the infamous Sex Pistols tour of January 1978. A few months later, we toured Canada with the Queen and Prince Philip. It was a neat juxtaposition of events, demonstrating the absolute extremes of British life.

  I was glad we didn’t have to choose which tour to cover. Watching traditional Ukrainian dancers entertaining Her Majesty on the Saskatchewan prairie could not compete with a Sex Pistols riot at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio.

  Sex Pistols concerts were invariably free-fire zones of flying objects — chairs, beer bottles, food, and even animal entrails. Their tour wasn’t about music — what mattered was audience participation. Sid Vicious was delighted when a young woman struck him a mighty blow on the face. He sucked into his mouth the blood gushing from his nose and sprayed the crowd. He became gentlemanly, in a Sex Pistols kind of way, when security guards seized his assailant, instructing them: ‘Get off her. This is great. Any cunt who bangs me across the face is a cunt I like.’

  Buckland was a talented pianist. His favourite music was Chopin and the hymns of his childhood. He was no fan of the Pistols, but coped in his own way. During one performance, he leaned against a pounding six-foot speaker and fell asleep to the shouted lyrics of Anarchy in the UK. Buckland was an epic drinker at the time and we decided he self-medicated to render himself unconscious. Later, he gave up alcohol and stayed off it for the rest of his life, but in the years that followed he became hard of hearing. I blame the Sex Pistols.

  Dacre’s idea of a rave is a black-tie evening at Glyndebourne, so the Sex Pistols were torture for him. The sight of them on stage caused him more stress than petrol bombs on the Bogside. Dacre thought Sid Vicious was ‘the most nauseating human being in the history of the planet’. To Vicious, this was an accolade, even though he was nothing more than a messed-up youth, who, in a more caring world, would have been sectioned and in medical care.

  I had a beer with him one night in Memphis. He had an uncomplicated mind, inasmuch as I don’t think it was ever filled with many thoughts. When he wasn’t on stage, or pulling punky expressions because he knew he was being watched, his pasty face and small dark eyes would lose all expression. He was sweet natured and impressionable in the manner of an eight-year-old.

  ‘How do you get your stories?’ he asked me. ‘Have you ever met people like the Prime Minister or the Queen?’ He wanted to know how old I was, and how many countries I had visited. ‘Wow,’ he would say when I to
ld him. ‘That’s so cool.’ Of course, he might have been in a state of heroin-induced catatonia, but I like to think there were moments of truth when the lost boy he truly was showed through.

  John Lydon — Johnny Rotten — was another matter. He was canny, brighter than Sid, and his punkish anger was not always an act. Lightning struck our plane when we were taking off from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and there was a flash and a terrifying noise. It did no harm, but I decided it provided grounds for a joke. ‘Hey, Johnny,’ I said on the ground in San Antonio. ‘You know what that was? That was a divine critique of your music.’ That famous on-stage fire lit up in his eyes and for a moment, although it wasn’t my plan, I thought I might have my page lead for the following day — ‘Raging Rotten Takes Swing At Sun Man’. But, just as McCartney had a decade before, he disappointed me and let loose only a few rich curses and expressive hand signals.

  It was no surprise when the group fell apart soon after the tour concluded. They looked bored with themselves by the end. The snarling had become automatic, the curses and gestures repetitive, and it was no longer shocking to see Rotten blow his nose on stage without the aid of a handkerchief. At their last performance in San Francisco, Rotten asked his audience: ‘Ever gotten the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

  I thought that was the last I would see of the Sex Pistols, which caused me no regret, until Joe Stevens called me in New York one Friday afternoon. Stevens was a rock music photographer who knew everyone, and, since I knew nobody, he had become my best contact during the Sex Pistols tour.

  ‘Hey, Johnny’s at my place,’ he said. ‘Want to come over for a drink?’

  Stevens’ apartment was in Greenwich Village above Arturo’s pizzeria on the corner of West Houston and Thompson. Rotten was alone, wearing a leather waistcoat over a white t-shirt and thick, buckled leather bracelets on his wrists. I sat across from him beside a table stacked with empty Budweiser cans. He was paying close attention to a new leather jacket spread across his lap and did not look up.