The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  If the unions agreed terms, Joe Robinowitz, the 31-year-old assistant managing editor of the New York Post, would become editor-in-chief and I would become city editor, running the newsdesk. This put me several rungs below Robinowitz, but since it meant I could flee The Star, I wasn’t going to complain.

  ‘Go in there and see him,’ said Rupert’s assistant Dot Wyndoe, sitting outside his Boston hotel suite. ‘He’s in there by himself waiting to hear what’s going on in the talks. He needs some company.’

  Robinowitz and I joined Rupert in his darkened hotel room and spent the next 10 hours there gossiping, dozing, and plotting what we would do with the Herald if the talks were successful. He used his in-built world clock during the night, working out time zones and which of his executives in other countries would be awake to take a call. Andrew Neil, who was editor of The Sunday Times in London, wrote a book in which he accused Rupert of being a ‘telephone terrorist’. I know what he meant; Rupert almost never sent memos, he just rang you. He could sound angry on the phone, and no doubt often was, but for the first time that night I saw him acting angry during calls, while winking mischievously at us.

  After our overnight marathon, Rupert invited us to dinner. Robinowitz and I kept talking, delivering a torrent of ideas about what to do with the newspaper. I’m not sure either of us knew then how important it was to keep the initiative with Rupert; to make sure it never looked as if you were waiting for his instructions. Robinowitz and I simply wanted to make sure he knew we were full of ideas. It sounds obvious to act this way with any boss, but Rupert intimidated a lot of people. The dinner must have helped me because a couple of days later Rupert said I would no longer be city editor, but Robinowitz’s number two.

  The deal to buy the Herald reached the brink of collapse before Rupert and the unions agreed terms. Hearst had set a deadline, and when it passed they sent every employee home and prepared to shut down. It was five more hours before the last of the 11 unions was satisfied. I was ready to head back to New York, but instead, at lunchtime on 3 December 1982, we drank a champagne toast.

  The media coverage of our Boston takeover was intense. It dominated television news for days and filled columns all over New England. The Boston Herald American had been close to death, and these were the days when communities had an emotional connection with their newspapers. When a newspaper’s existence was threatened, it was as if a familiar friend was about to depart.

  Newspapers are more common fatalities these days — some are dying, some just fading away — but even now there are moments when the best of them can search the soul of a city or a nation.

  In our age of atomised communication, it is hard to imagine any form of media will ever again touch a community the way a newspaper could then.

  —

  It was shocking to move from The Star to a metropolitan daily. Until now, the most prominent American interested in my company was Jeane Dixon. Suddenly I was getting respect without doing anything to deserve it. First, a letter arrived from Who’s Who in America informing me I was to be included in their next volume, and requesting my biographical details. I provided these details, of course, then wrote to tell Mum.

  Then John Kerry came to lunch. He was 40 years old, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, already famously ambitious, but years from becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and Barack Obama’s secretary of state. It was Kerry who first exposed me to the blandishments of politicians. It happened hundreds of times over the years, but Kerry was my first. His visit coincided with a national debate about Reagan’s support of a guerrilla insurgency in Nicaragua, which was seeking to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega.

  When we had finished eating, Kerry leaned back in his seat and put one hand on his oversized chin. ‘Now, Les,’ he said, with that look of phony earnestness that I was to witness in so many politicians. ‘I would be fascinated to know what you think of our policy in Nicaragua.’ I refrained from telling him that my most recent discussion about clandestine US policy had been with a conspiracy theory journalist offering proof that the air force had recovered aliens from a crashed spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico, and preserved their remains in three Frigidaire freezers behind a Texaco gas station not far from where they perished.

  A lot of people wanted to be friends with the Herald. There was a long procession of politicians — senators and aspiring senators, mayors and wannabe mayors — as well as an occasional bishop. The governor, Mike Dukakis, was in the office often as he built his campaign for the White House. Dukakis was a quiet man for a would-be president, and in the 1988 election to succeed Ronald Reagan, George Bush senior crushed him. Bush was aided significantly by Dukakis’ attempt to toughen his image by staging a disastrous photo-op at the controls of an M1 Abrams tank, in which he looked more like Snoopy from Charlie Brown than a commander-in-chief.

  The state’s most famous living politician, Senator Edward Kennedy, was not a fan of the Herald. Kennedy had grown accustomed to generous coverage of his family from the hometown press, but his liberal policies did not align with the conservative views of Rupert’s new paper. The Herald — and the New York Post — taunted Kennedy for years. Patrick Purcell, the Herald’s publisher, once attempted to make peace by coaxing Kennedy and Rupert to his house for a party, but they ignored each other the entire evening.

  But Kennedy was the exception; most Boston politicians wanted to be friends. When we had the grand idea of redrawing the map of Boston by changing the names of a couple of streets outside our building and calling them ‘Herald Square’, the mayor Kevin White obligingly turned up to perform the unveiling. His successor, Ray Flynn, loved the Herald staff so much he sometimes came into the office on his way home from a bar and sang to the women on the office switchboard. When he was Archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law would come for lunch. He seemed a decent man, with the soft, celestial smile clerics so often practise, but he was forced to resign in 2002 for his part in the cover-up of child abuse by his priests.

  It was the other way round with advertisers. They didn’t care what journalists thought. The day after a joint appearance by Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, when our political reporters had rained down on them with tough questions, a big advertiser came to lunch. I never had anything to do with advertisers before Boston.

  ‘Your newspaper is crap,’ he told us. ‘It’s been crap for years, and so far you guys aren’t making it any better.’

  As we began to retaliate, our advertising director silenced Robinowitz and me with a glare. ‘Hang on,’ he told our angry guest in a pacifying tone. ‘You make some interesting points. But we are the new people in town so give us some time.’

  It was the first lesson for me on the tricky frontier between journalism and business. Advertising is the lifeblood of most newspapers; circulation revenue rarely pays the bills. Our much larger rival, The Boston Globe, was hogging the ad market, and the Herald was losing money. We could be as tough as we liked on politicians, but it was wise to be gentle when meeting advertisers. Unless, of course, they tried to tell us how to edit the paper, or pressured us to be kind to their businesses — that was different.

  The Boston Herald American was the first all-American newsroom I set foot in. I was the solitary Brit. Donald H. Forst and his senior editors were waiting to greet Robinowitz and me on our first day. They were straight out of the city room of a black-and-white film: big voices, jaunty smiles, and huge cigars gripped between their teeth. All the men seemed to have cigars. Alan Eisner, the city editor, didn’t look comfortable with his — as though he were smoking it out of duty and solidarity.

  Don Forst was the editor-in-chief. He was a short, wiry, bubbling New Yorker, and he owned the editorial floor of the Boston Herald American. He owned it like all powerful editors, through energy and will, and above all by always being there. The Herald men smoked cigars because Don Forst did. It was obvious they loved him as much
as they feared the two cocky Murdoch interlopers who had just walked through the door.

  Forst would not be staying, but there was no disgrace in that; not many editors survive a change of ownership. He agreed to hang around for the transition, and was heroic as we set about disassembling the newspaper he had created. We never knew what he was thinking; he smiled like a man who knew things we didn’t.

  We shortened the name of the newspaper to the Boston Herald. It had changed from a broadsheet to a tabloid format a year or so before Rupert bought it, but to us it was tabloid in size only. We thought its headlines bland, its design flat, and that its copy was over long and rambling. We were never heartless enough to say that to Forst.

  Still, the paper had more pep than The Boston Globe, the proud broadsheet that dominated the local market. The Globe’s bosses were a New England dynasty. The newspaper had been founded 110 years before by Charles H. Taylor, and ever since, a man with the same surname had held the job of publisher. The Globe looked down with scorn, from its mountaintop of power and profit, on our rough and struggling tabloid.

  The Globe was excellent in many ways, but it was self-important, and its smugness got under our skin. We enjoyed taking shots at its pomposity and mistakes. Our editorials and columns were filled with jibes. When it put the wrong publication date on its front, we described it for weeks as ‘The Newspaper That Doesn’t Know What Day It Is’. We ran throughout the paper images of planet earth wrapped in rope with a caption saying ‘We’ve Got The Globe on a String.’

  It was enjoyable but sophomoric. We didn’t know that The Globe cared much what we said, but it was therapeutic as we fought to chip away at its monopoly. We must have come across as zealous; The Boston Phoenix, Boston’s answer to The Village Voice, called us ‘Murdoch Moonies’.

  We spent millions to increase circulation, introducing a game called Wingo. It was bingo, really, but for trademark reasons we couldn’t use the word. Every household in greater Boston was mailed a bundle of Wingo cards, and every day readers had to buy the newspaper to see if their numbers had come up. When I arrived, circulation was just over 200,000. Three years later, it had reached 380,000. Soon after, publisher Pat Purcell had a celebration party when the Herald made its first annual profit in decades.

  Robinowitz and I were working long hours and often seven-day weeks. We flew in reinforcements. Bill Ridley was an energetic colleague from London, and he became night editor.

  Impatient with the pace of change, especially in our efforts to improve the paper’s design, Ridley and I decided on drastic action. While Robinowitz was away on holiday, we spent hours adapting dozens of page layouts from the London Daily Mail, and distributed them to the copy editors — in America, subs are called copy editors. The Mail was Britain’s best-designed mid-market tabloid, and its pages were complicated compared with the Herald. It wasn’t the fault of Herald copy editors that they didn’t understand tabloid layouts — no one had ever taught them.

  Sir Harold Evans, a British editor as cantankerous in his old age as he was innovative in his youth, once said that changing a newspaper should be like surgery, that the patient must feel no pain. It is a wise doctrine that I ignored at the Herald. The editors executed their Daily Mail layouts and overnight we gave the newspaper a radical facelift.

  Back from his break, Robinowitz was quick to call. ‘Hinton,’ he shouted, ‘what the hell have you done with my newspaper?’ To his credit, Joe didn’t change a thing, but he made me promise not to do it again.

  The learning was not a one-way street. Feminism reached American journalism before it took hold in Britain. I was behind the times when Betsy Buffington Bates, the women’s editor, stood at my office door waving the proof of a two-page feature I had edited.

  ‘You are not allowed to call grown women “girls” in the pages of the Boston Herald,’ she said. ‘It will be an insult to every adult female in the city.’ I changed the story and headline according to Betsy’s instructions and never made the mistake again.

  In Boston, distant from the heart of News Corp, we were sometimes trapped in wider company catastrophes. I was in bed one morning listening to one of our radio commercials. It included the sound of Hitler’s voice and the heavy thump of Nazi boots on the march. We were delighted to be sharing a worldwide company scoop by publishing the Führer’s diaries. The phone rang. ‘It’s all bullshit,’ said the marketing man from London. I could tell he was having trouble breathing. ‘The diaries are a hoax. It’s a total fucking disaster.’

  Rupert would come to town sometimes. I learned a lesson on one of his early visits. ‘How’s it going?’ he said, taking a seat next to me as I chaired the morning news conference.

  ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘But it’s a quiet day.’

  Rupert scowled: ‘There’s no such thing as a quiet day. Some are more challenging than others, that’s all.’

  I never used that excuse again, or allowed anyone to make it to me.

  Mary and I lived with our three boys — Martin, Thomas, and William — in Weston, a small town in suburban woodland, west of the city along the Massachusetts Turnpike. The only traffic jams were on Sunday mornings near the local churches. The day we moved in, neighbours arrived to welcome us with fresh-baked cookies. It was the kind of thing we had only seen on American TV shows like Leave It To Beaver or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The local school was packed for parent-teacher evenings and school concerts; in North Finchley in the 1970s, these school events were quiet and empty. In Weston, no one walked much; when we invited people to our home from the next street, they arrived by car. And we encountered the talk-to-anyone-anytime openness of most Americans and their readiness to chat to any stranger. In Britain, you could sit across from someone on a four-hour train journey and say nothing but ‘goodbye’ at the end of it. Most important, after six years of cultural decompression, Mary had acclimatised, and now even loved the suburbs. We lived in a clapboard house on top of a wooded hill and felt like Americans; we had become US citizens in Faneuil Hall near Boston Harbor, where pre-revolutionary patriots gave speeches demanding independence from Britain. A mischievous Herald photographer, Leo Tierney, took our photograph beneath a huge painting depicting a redcoat defeat.

  I left the family alone in Weston when Hurricane Gloria struck Boston in September 1985. Hurricanes didn’t often reach as far north as Boston, and Massachusetts was in a state of high alert. Mary drove me to the office. The Massachusetts Turnpike was deserted apart from emergency vehicles. She dropped me off and returned to the house. Martin was 15 then, Thomas was 10, and Will was 5, and while they hid in the basement with their mother, listening to the hurricane, I was at my desk at the Herald selecting dramatic photos and stories for the newspaper.

  Back home, trees in our yard were blown down and a section of the roof went flying down the street. It wasn’t too bad, but when I heard their stories of crashing trees and winds that rocked the house, and could see how frightened they’d been, I thought that the job sometimes twisted my priorities. It wasn’t the last time I felt that way.

  As my third anniversary in Boston approached, I knew it was time for me to start another escape campaign. I loved Boston, and we had developed serious talent among our journalists, but the city was on the sidelines of big media. Now that I was snared in the executive world, I wanted to keep moving.

  Marty Singerman was now the boss of all American publishing. He was one of the first Americans to be counted by Rupert as an equal alongside his loyal Australian business team. Singerman knew I was restless yet again, and invited me to New York for dinner.

  What happened at that dinner and soon after was the perfect example of the haphazard culture of News Corp, and how it was possible to benefit, or suffer, from its hit-and-miss randomness.

  Singerman was already my mentor. He was a strong executive, 18 years older than me, and he was taking a special interest in my future. He wanted to sound me out. Ho
w I would react if I were offered the editorship of The Village Voice?

  Of all the positions I had imagined, that one was not on my list. It was the publication Rupert liked least of all in the entire company. The Voice was New Corp’s black sheep — a radical alternative periodical that paid no attention to the views of its proprietor. Marty didn’t spell it out, but I knew what was happening. Rupert wanted an ally to change this mutinous weekly to his liking. But I knew that making me editor was a fatal idea, and that a tamed version of The Village Voice would bore its readers and quickly sink without trace, probably taking me with it.

  I had never turned down a job before, and felt gloomy and ungrateful on the plane back to Boston. I had pressed Marty Singerman for an opportunity and he had offered me one. But a few months later, after Rupert rid himself of The Voice by selling it to a pet-food magnate for $55 million, Singerman called with another offer: would I become editor-in-chief of The Star?

  First The Village Voice, now The Star. There could not have been two publications in all the United States that were more distant. The Village Voice was a fire-eating crusader, hip chronicler of Manhattan’s underground, champion of gay rights, tormentor of the rich and powerful — and The Star was, well, The Star.

  Maybe I should have been flattered; I was certainly confused. What kind of a life plan was this? I took the job, even though more time at The Star was not a heart-lifting prospect.

  My second spell at The Star lasted 18 months. We tried making it more of a magazine, calming the layout and content in the hope advertisers would like it better. We had limited success in coaxing new advertisers, and managed one pioneering technological achievement.