The resulting interview, in which Rothermere said that Hungary’s frontier would once again be the Carpathian Mountains, caused an even bigger sensation in Hungary. Thousands of letters and telegrams flooded into Rothermere’s office – so much so that Lajos had to go to work there to look after the lord’s Hungarian affairs.
Once established in Rothermere’s office, Lajos’s main worry was how to keep up Rothermere’s interest in Hungary, for he had a reputation for taking up causes and dropping them when he became bored, just as he did with women. Then Lajos had an idea. Hungary was a kingdom without a king. Why not make Rothermere King of Hungary?
He tried out the idea rather diffidently on his editor, Legrady, who was enthusiastic and sounded out his political friends in Budapest. They too were enthusiastic, as were the country’s aristocrats, and for the next three years delegation after delegation came to London to plead with Rothermere to become King of Hungary.
Although this bizarre proposal didn’t finally come off – Rothermere withdrew when the British Foreign Office expressed opposition – it maintained his interest in Hungary for the rest of his life. He even bought land there in case England was invaded. When, after the Munich agreement of 1938, Hungary recovered territories from Czechoslovakia, he was invited to Budapest for the celebrations and received a ticker-tape welcome in the streets – like the king he never was. A memorial to Rothermere still stands in Budapest.
As a royal gesture to the Hungarian people, Rothermere had sent his entire collection of Old Masters on long loan to the Budapest Gallery of Fine Arts. They included priceless works by Botticelli, Bellini, Holbein, Rubens and Rembrandt. Then two things happened to complicate this arrangement: the Second World War was declared in 1939, Hungary joining the Axis powers and coming under Nazi control; and Rothermere’s own death in Bermuda in 1940.
Even though Rothermere had many sources of wealth, the absence of the Old Masters made it impossible to finalise his will – a situation which the family and their lawyers had no option but to accept until the end of hostilities in 1945. Then Lajos received a call from Edmund, Rothermere’s son, asking him to report to Coutts Bank in the City of London, who were trustees of the old man’s will.
He was offered a sum of £5,000, a fortune in those days, to go to Hungary and discover what had happened to the paintings and, if they had survived, to see what formalities would be required to get them back to Britain. It was a rather naive request – requiring a James Bond to fulfil such a daunting assignment – since Hungary, a defeated enemy country, was now in the hands of the Red Army.
Lajos was determined to go, however, for family reasons, for he had heard nothing since 1940, when he had last visited Budapest, from his mother and two older brothers and didn’t know if they had survived the war. To get there he required permission from the Four-Power Allied Control Council, which he obtained by becoming an accredited correspondent of The Observer.
He arrived in the shattered city on a bleak October day in 1945. There he found his eldest brother, Aladar, who told him that their mother had died in May and that their other brother, Zoltan, had been shot dead on the Russian front while serving in a labour battalion.
He went to the Gallery of Fine Arts, which was surrounded by Soviet tanks and Red Army patrols. He found the place bare. The head of the gallery was an old friend, who told him that the paintings, along with sculptures and priceless antiques, had been seized by Hungarian Young Nazis in April, a day or two before the Russians reached the outskirts of Budapest.
Their orders were to take them to the Nazi ‘Gold Train’, which already contained Hungary’s gold reserves and the thousand-year-old St Stephen’s Crown and was waiting at a station ready to go west, away from the advancing Red Army. The Hungarian Young Nazis went along as guards, with instructions to meet the American troops advancing on Vienna.
But once they were over the Austrian border some of the guards had left the train, taking treasures with them, including the Rothermere paintings. They found sanctuary with local villagers, with the result that the paintings were now scattered over the mountainous borderland between Hungary and Austria. Finding them would be a formidable, if not impossible, task.
Astonishingly, however, Lajos did trace them, after weeks of risky adventure that I always thought would make a good film. He was helped by getting a letter of authority from another old friend, Zoltán Tildy, who was now Hungary’s Prime Minister, and by dispensing loads of the Coutts cash to agents who went looking in mountain villages. Eventually, with their help, he was able to compile a list of where the paintings were being held.
In Munich, he persuaded the American Third Army commander to provide him with a Jeep, two military policemen and a secret service agent to go in search of them in the homes of peasant villagers. They found paintings in attics, under beds and on open carts, some rolled up and some still in frames, including a Tintoretto and an El Greco.
But they then discovered that most of the Rothermere paintings had been discovered earlier by an American search party and returned to the Fine Art Gallery in Budapest. This would have been the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts and Archive) unit set up by the American army under General Eisenhower and celebrated in the 2014 film The Monuments Men, starring and directed by George Clooney.
This was a serious setback, since getting the paintings out of Austria was a much easier task than getting them out of Budapest, which was under Russian control. Somehow Lajos persuaded the generals who headed the British political and military missions in Budapest, part of the Allied Control Commissions, to send a plane from Vienna into the Russian zone under cover of darkness and take the paintings back.
Meanwhile, he arranged for the paintings to be packed in crates, which he took by van – using a circuitous route to defeat the Red Army roadblocks – to a military airfield and waited for the plane to land. He helped to load them onto the plane, which took them to Vienna and into the hands of the British section of the MFAA. From there, Rothermere’s precious paintings were transported to London.
Lt Col Humphrey Brooke, who later became Secretary of the Royal Academy, wrote to Lajos:
Having seen the pictures which were recovered by your initiative, I would like to congratulate you on the amazing feat of saving these valuable British treasures. When one considers the condition of Hungary today, it is nothing short of a miracle that these works of art should have been brought back intact.
• • •
Lajos was the sort of person you never forget. He adored the company of women and was an accomplished flirt. He talked about sex a great deal, but never pruriently. I never heard him tell a dirty joke, for example, or brag about his early conquests, though these were evidently numerous. He referred to attractive women as ‘yum-yum’ and sex as ‘jiggy-jiggy’. Although uxorious himself, he always assumed that powerful men needed mistresses and his tolerance brought him many confidences.
He told me once that the wife of one of his rich and famous friends had consulted him about her husband’s notorious affairs and asked for his advice. Lajos had said to her: ‘When he comes home to change before going out to dinner, are you always ready?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘he insists that I should always be ready.’ Lajos advised her: ‘Well, I suggest that you should be not quite so ready. Maybe you should still be in the bath or in your lingerie. That might make him a bit less inclined to flirt with other women when you go out.’
There is an intriguing and unresolved mystery about Lajos’s relationship with Violette de Talleyrand, a great society beauty between the wars. Daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Talleyrand, she lived in one of the most palatial mansions in Paris, a pink marble replica of the Trianon at Versailles. Among Lajos’s papers is a cutting from the Continental Daily Mail of 1934, showing her in a glamorous photograph, reporting her engagement to Comte James de Pourtalès.
Superimposed onto the newspaper cutting, however, is the photocopy of another engagement announcement, dated October 1933, from a Hungar
ian newspaper – of the same Violette de Talleyrand to a certain Dr Lederer, London correspondent of Pesti Hírlap.
The engagement to Lajos had evidently been broken off. But why? The mystery does not end there, however. Many years later, long after Lajos’s death in 1985, a man knocked at the door of his son Randolph’s house in Greenwich and announced that he believed they were related. At first, Randolph thought he must be a crank, then looked closer, saw a family resemblance, and invited him in.
The man said he was the grandson of a maid of Violette de Talleyrand and that his grandmother had had a daughter by Lajos before the war. The grandmother was still alive at the time of the grandson’s visit, a very old lady living in the Austrian Alps. She had kept the birth secret because Lajos was Jewish and it was fraught with danger to be thought to be harbouring anyone of Jewish descent in Austria before and during the war.
Many questions remain. Was it really the maid’s own child – or is it possible that she was looking after it to shield Violette de Talleyrand from scandal? Or was the affair with the maid the reason for ending the engagement to Violette? The story in the Continental Daily Mail says Violette had been suffering from ‘ill-health’ that winter. Could she have been having a secret baby at that time? Did Lajos ever know he had fathered a love child? If so, did he tell Jean, whom he married in 1940 and to whom he remained faithful for nearly forty years? The news certainly came as a shock to his children. I couldn’t help noticing that Violette de Talleyrand’s name still appears in the address book Lajos was using at the end of his life.
• • •
Lajos had met Jean, a Cornish doctor’s daughter, in typically exotic circumstances on one of the last trains out of Europe before the Second World War. He recounted the tale of their meeting:
I was London correspondent of a Hungarian newspaper, holidaying in Austria in 1938, when Anthony Eden resigned from the Foreign Office. My editor ordered me back to London. I was a contented bachelor, with no thought of marriage. I believed all British girls to be unfriendly, frigid, and insular. Travelling through Switzerland at midnight, an English girl entered my dimly lit compartment at Basle. In what I thought was strong language, she demanded fresh air. Next morning in the dining car I thought she would like frivolous reading and passed her the Daily Mirror. But what she wanted was my copy of The Times. She is beautiful and fifteen years younger, and two years later we were married. Then she told me that she had swapped her second-class ticket and paid her last five shillings so that she could join me in first-class.
Jean’s calm temperament was the perfect foil for his exuberance. As he had noticed at their first meeting, she had a strong, cultured voice – inherited by their daughter Vanessa – and firm views that brooked no nonsense. One might have expected Jean, with her down-to-earth Englishness, to bridle occasionally at Lajos’s flamboyant and excitable manner. But I never saw anything of the kind. He adored her and she seemed constantly to marvel at the exotic and unpredictable creature she had married.
Their newly married life was soon disrupted, however, not just by the war itself, but by the fact that Lajos was suddenly arrested and interned with a group of other Hungarians at the beginning of December 1941. He was transported to the Isle of Man, where he became prisoner number 95228. The Home Office refused to give any reason for his detention. Jean began an intensive campaign for his release, calling upon the help of the many eminent friends he had collected in Britain.
A key figure in this campaign was Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son, who wrote to the Home Office:
I have known Lederer for many years and have had many political discussions with him dating back to at least five years before the war. He was always a firm advocate of resistance to Hitler and a fervent advocate of a Grand Alliance to frustrate German expansion. He has an extensive knowledge of central European politics and I should have thought that he could have been made use of at this time … from my experience of him I should judge him to have been a consistent and passionate enemy of Hitler’s.
Similar pleas were sent on his behalf to the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, from the Astors, a number of MPs, and from Hungarian exile groups. The official handling these appeals, Captain Osbert Peake, must have been amazed at the number and eminence of Lederer’s advocates.
Lajos was finally released – and, according to the release order, supplied with a ration book – on 14 March 1942. The Home Office then banned him from working as a freelance journalist, but the ban was later revoked after another campaign by eminent friends on his behalf, including a strongly worded letter from Randolph Churchill to Morrison. He spent the rest of the war working for Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers, mainly monitoring broadcasts from Hungary.
Lajos remained devoted to Randolph for the rest of his life, naming one of his sons after him and speaking for Randolph’s son, Winston Jr, in a general election campaign in his Manchester constituency. He would never allow it to be said in his company that Randolph was a drunken old boor. Friendship always mattered more to Lajos than party politics, which is why he also felt able to support another friend, Harold Lever, a Labour candidate in another part of Manchester, in the same general election in which he supported the Tory Churchill.
• • •
Like Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Lajos Lederer had a ‘gift for hope’ and a ‘romantic readiness’ for the promises of life. He was a man who always looked for the best in people and brought out the best in them. Even when he was in his late seventies and early eighties, he retained his unquenchable curiosity about other people. He kept coming to the Observer office to the last day of his life and was always first to seize a copy of the paper from the presses on a Saturday night.
He was still the life and soul of the party, telling his many amazing stories as he squired a series of attractive ladies around London after Jean’s early death. I once left the Observer office close to midnight on a Saturday and dashed through heavy rain to pick up my car. As I did so, I was astonished to see Lajos and an attractive woman, who must have been half his age, emerge laughing from a darkened shop doorway like a young courting couple. He introduced her as a Countess.
Since he must have been close to eighty at the time, I had to assume they were just sheltering from the rain. With a man like Lajos Lederer, however, you could never be sure.
CHAPTER 8
RUPERT
Three of the most powerful figures in The Observer’s hierarchy – Lord Goodman, chairman of the paper’s trustees; David Astor, the former editor and effective proprietor; and Roger Harrison, the managing director – all had a high opinion of Rupert Murdoch’s abilities. Even so, it came as a surprise to everyone, including Rupert himself, that they should choose a man once described as owning a ‘bordello’ of tabloids as the most suitable person to buy the high-minded liberal newspaper over which they presided.
At that time, in 1976, Murdoch owned only two British newspapers, the salacious News of the World and The Sun, which he had revived as the country’s sleaziest tabloid, with topless pin-ups on page three. These were papers, one may reasonably assume, his three admirers had rarely, if ever, read.
When Murdoch had bought the News of the World in 1969, his first venture into British publishing, Goodman’s firm of solicitors had its offices in the same building in Bouverie Street, and they had done a good deal of legal work for the previous owners, the Carr family. As a result, Goodman had got to know the young Murdoch and began to act for him, soon coming to admire his business drive and acumen.
Astor and Harrison were on the board of London Weekend Television, representing The Observer’s minority shareholding, and had seen Murdoch turn the ailing company round with the injection of cash and management expertise. When Harrison suggested that they should approach Murdoch to buy The Observer, other potential avenues having turned out to be cul-de-sacs, Goodman demurred, thinking Murdoch wouldn’t be interested. When, finally, he was persuaded to make an approach, he was surprised at the Aust
ralian’s positive response.
• • •
The other avenues explored by The Observer trustees through the course of 1976 had included the Financial Times, United Newspapers (publishers of the Yorkshire Post and other regional papers) and the Mirror group, none of which had shown any interest in acquiring a loss-maker, no matter how prestigious.
Astor and Goodman held high hopes of a scheme for newspapers like the one that had been used in the docks, in which the government would provide loans to buy out the printers and install new technology. Although the idea found favour with a Royal Commission on the Press that was currently sitting, chaired by Lord McGregor, it foundered on lack of support from many newspapers because it smacked of a government subsidy for the press.
I went with Goodman and Astor to see Edmund Dell, the Trade Minister in the Callaghan government, but he was dismissive of the whole idea. When Astor said it would at least save the paper from being bought by sources in Libya or Saudi Arabia – both of which had been mooted – Dell replied coolly: ‘It seems to me that The Observer is in no position to refuse help from anyone.’ Astor muttered on the way out: ‘I don’t think he would care if the Kremlin bought the paper.’
This was the gloomy context in which The Observer trustees had decided to offer the paper to Murdoch. He came to London from New York to talk the matter over with Goodman and Astor. He made it clear that he would bring in his own editorial team. Astor was dismayed by this, but Goodman felt the trustees had an overriding obligation to the jobs of all the paper’s employees. Besides, any other possible options had apparently been exhausted.
Not being a trustee of the newspaper, I knew nothing about the Murdoch talks until David unexpectedly called me into the Observer office on Monday 4 October, my day off. He urged me to go to New York to meet him before anything was finally settled. I later discovered that Murdoch had strongly opposed meeting me, as a mere editor, but Astor had insisted.
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