The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  In his left hand was a folded piece of sandpaper; he was rubbing it hard against the jacket’s polished surface.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. But he ignored me, studying the coat’s sleeves and collar, choosing carefully the spots to scour away the shine. It was a beautiful moment. Johnny Rotten, the king of punk and grunge, the emperor of scruff, the apostle of not giving a toss, was meticulously falsifying a brand new and expensive leather jacket with a piece of sandpaper.

  ‘Why don’t you go to a second-hand shop and buy a genuine beaten-up coat? And what’s the shame of wearing a new one anyway?’ I said.

  He smiled at me with a look of weary scorn, as if acknowledging an unwelcome creature from an alien planet, and offered me a beer.

  We went downstairs to Arturo’s for pizza and more beer, which I paid for. Then I did something that impresses my children and grandchildren, and all their friends, more than anything I have done in my entire life. I went to CBGB’s with Johnny Rotten.

  CBGB’s — or the Country, Bluegrass, and Blues bar — was a half a mile away in The Bowery. By 1978, it had outgrown its name and had become the world mecca of punk rock. We walked there with care through the slippery aftermath of a blizzard.

  The bar was crowded and deafening. When Johnny Rotten and I arrived, hardly anyone took any notice of him. We pushed our way towards the bar through a sea of punks, and a few preppy onlookers dressed like me, and no one gave him more than an indifferent glance. It must have been a rule among punks to stay cool.

  Rotten got talking to somebody, and I sat at the bar chatting to a group dressed in leather. Mostly, I talked to a convivial man with thick, dark-fringed hair. I don’t remember the conversation except that it was friendly, but Johnny Rotten was amused at the sight of me deep in conversation with this intense-looking man.

  ‘He’s no fucking idea who he’s talking to,’ he said to Joe Stevens.

  He was right — I had never heard of the punk band The Ramones, or Johnny Ramone, their lead guitarist. They were much more successful than the Sex Pistols.

  Stevens told me: ‘They always reserve a special section of the bar for the band and you just walked up to them and started chatting. You sat right next to Johnny Ramone.’

  That night, I ended up back at the apartment above Arturo’s, where I fell asleep on the spare bed. I awoke to camera flashes and Rotten’s cackling. I have the photo — he had put two blow-up sex dolls on either side of me.

  ‘Johnny said it would be a good idea to use them to blackmail you, but I think he was joking,’ Joe Stevens told me later.

  Next morning, I wondered why I had accepted Stevens’ invitation, and why I was invited in the first place. The Sex Pistols were out of the news — if not for long. Stevens explained later: ‘We were both out of money and starving, and I told Johnny you’d be good company.’

  It was lunchtime on 12 October 1978 when I got to the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. It was already a place with a history: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died there; Leonard Cohen sang sensually about his encounter there with Janis Joplin; Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey while he was a guest. A familiar, shambling figure emerged from the main entrance, handcuffed and cursing, and flanked by two detectives. It was Sid Vicious, and upstairs in the bathroom of Room 100, a woman lay dead from a single stab wound.

  I went there on a tip-off, and to my amazement no one else from Fleet Street was present. There were a couple of local camera crews and reporters, but no one else. In the age of universal, instant communication, I could never have been be so lucky, but news travelled more slowly in those days.

  I knew there was a body upstairs and that Sid had been arrested as a murder suspect. But the police weren’t identifying the corpse and none of the media there had any ideas. I went through the usual, now antediluvian, procedure. I walked to a pay phone in the hotel lobby and placed a reverse charge call to The Sun’s library in London. ‘Can you dig out the Sid Vicious clippings and see if he has a girlfriend?’

  After a few minutes I had an answer: ‘The only name we can find is Nancy Spungen.’

  Outside, I waited until the homicide lieutenant in charge was alone. He had already told me he couldn’t tell me who the dead woman was.

  ‘Am I going to be in trouble if I say the dead woman is Nancy Spungen?’ I asked him.

  For a moment he said nothing, then he shook his head. ‘No, sir, you won’t be.’

  I couldn’t believe my luck. It was the splash in the next day’s The Sun: ‘Sid Vicious In Murder Drama — Girlfriend is found stabbed in a hotel room.’

  Not a single other Fleet Street newspaper had the story. I knew that when the first edition dropped in London, they would be scrambling desperately to catch up with me.

  I sat in a bar — The Fleet Street — across from the office and waited. The first person to track me down was Paul Dacre. I have never since had greater pleasure in being cursed at, and Dacre was a vivid and original swearer. When he became the Editor of the Daily Mail, his morning conferences became known as the Vagina Monologues.

  Big news is often bad news for other people. My small victory was a tragedy for others: for the spaced-out young woman probably killed by Sid Vicious, aka John Simon Ritchie, and for her family. Vicious was a crazy, lost lad from Lewisham, south London, and a little more than three months after his arrest, he was dead from a heroin overdose. He never stood trial. The mystifying legend of Sid and Nancy was born; there was something grotesque about the fascination with which people regarded their helpless lives.

  That was my swansong scoop. After it, my life changed suddenly and forever. Within a month, I would be off the road for good.

  By the end of 1978, Rupert was still unhappy with the mix of his executives at his number one American property, the New York Post. He had moved Roger Wood from The Star to be editor-in-chief, and wanted Steve Dunleavy, The Star’s news editor, as city editor. The mercurial Ian Rae, who had been editor of TV Week in Australia, was given The Star’s top job, but Dunleavy couldn’t leave before his replacement as news editor was found.

  ‘Mate,’ Rae said, after taking me to a bar where no one we knew ever drank. ‘It’s time for you to move up in the business.’ He wanted me to become his news editor on The Star.

  I refused, point blank. ‘I’ve only been doing this a couple of years,’ I told him. ‘I love it. There’s plenty of people will do that job better than me.’

  He kept trying over the next few days. Dunleavy, who was desperate to get to the Post, also put on pressure: ‘It’s a great job, mate, and they’ll double your salary.’

  ‘Steve, I’m not interested in sitting on my arse all day worrying about UFO invasions and who’s screwing who on Dallas,’ I said.

  A week after that, it got serious.

  ‘Rupert wants to have lunch,’ said Rae. ‘Larry Lamb is coming to town and we’re taking him to Sparks.’

  I sat at a table for five with Rupert, Lamb, Rae, and Ian’s one-legged deputy editor, John Canning. In all the years I had known Rupert, it was the first time we had dined together. We talked about everything except the reason I was there.

  We were at the restaurant door on our way out when I felt Rupert’s arm around my shoulder. ‘Les,’ he said. ‘I just want to thank you for helping out at The Star. I’m very grateful and I know you’ll do a fine job.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, Rupert. No way am I doing that job. I keep telling them, but no one will listen to me.’

  Well, they’re not exactly the words I used. What I said was: ‘Oh, you’re welcome, Mr Murdoch, you’re very welcome.’ Maybe a panel of psychologists could explain why I folded so quickly, but I guess being weak-kneed isn’t a clinical condition.

  The following Monday at 7.30am I was in my new office, with a view of 20 desks. In an hour, they would be filled with people wai
ting for me to tell them what do. It was what I’d always dreaded.

  For years afterwards, even when I was a chief executive, I would have the same dream. It was late at night and I was sitting behind the reception desk of some faraway hot-weather hotel at the keyboard of a big beige Telex machine. In the dream, I was producing a paper tape of my story to file to London, and felt — I remember clearly — very happy. And every time, I would wake up to my real world of meetings on advertising revenue, or distribution contracts, and, now and then, a real-life newsprint crisis.

  I miss it still: the liberating sense of not knowing what each day would bring, where I would be, or who I might meet; the hopeful way I always carried my passport with me, the rush and disorder of life on the road, the crazy variety of human life. I even miss you, Johnny Rotten.

  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.