Euro-communism accepted the principle of multi-party democracy and the possibility of cooperating with other non-Communist parties in government. In Italy, there was constant talk of a ‘compromesso storico’, a historic compromise between Communists and Christian Democrats to bring together the two dominant political strands in post-Fascist Italy. It is likely that the terrorist attacks of the 1970s were, as many Italian leftists suspected at the time, part of a deliberate ‘strategy of tension’, designed to frighten voters away from the idea of allowing the Communists to enter a national government. And when Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed in 1978, it was widely believed that he was on the brink of signing a power-sharing deal with the Communists.
In the highly charged elections of 1976, marked by an extraordinary intervention from Pope Paul, who instructed Italian Catholics not to vote for the Communists, they narrowly failed to overtake the long-dominant Christian Democrats, winning 34.4 per cent of the vote, less than four percentage points behind the Christian Democrats. After months of haggling, the Christian Democrat veteran Giulio Andreotti formed a minority administration that was dependent on Communist abstentions in parliamentary votes. It lasted less than three years, and was the closest the Communists ever got to national power.
I found the byzantine world of Italian political intrigue endlessly fascinating. And I struggled mightily to engage foreign readers in what too often seemed like an alphabet soup of endless political party acronyms. After a young Communist activist was shot dead at a neo-Fascist rally in the town of Sezze Romano, south of Rome, I reported on his very Catholic funeral.
As the sun’s last rays bathed the Cathedral square in light, the symbols of Communism and Catholicism overlapped and seemed almost to merge.
The heavy walnut coffin was carried solemnly from the Cathedral and hundreds of red flags dipped in respect. Fists were raised in a Communist salute that seemed to be directed at the small crucifix carried by a priest in front of the coffin.
Perhaps I had been reading too much Hemingway.
After five years in the business, I was beginning to learn the hard way what makes headlines and what does not. Any story containing the words ‘spaghetti’ or ‘Mafia’ could be guaranteed to do well because editors rarely like to confuse their readers by offering them material from outside their comfort zone. And even an über-serious agency like Reuters could always find space for another ‘funny foreigners’ story.
Rome, 20 Feb 1975, Reuter – An enterprising Roman countess has launched a baby-sitting agency with a difference: the baby-sitters are grannies.
I think it was the word ‘countess’ that made it such a lovely little story.
The kidnap of the American teenage grandson of one of the world’s richest oil billionaires, allegedly by the Mafia, certainly made the headlines and, for five months in 1973, the saga of the abduction of J. Paul Getty III was a major international news story, especially in the US.
When his severed ear turned up in the post, together with a note threatening that unless a ransom was paid, he would continue to turn up ‘in bits’, the headlines got even bigger. Getty’s billionaire grandfather was a notorious miser – he had installed a coin-operated telephone in his Surrey mansion for the use of his guests – and was not at all keen to pay the $3 million that the kidnappers were demanding, on the not unreasonable grounds that if he paid up, his fourteen other grandchildren would all instantly become kidnap targets as well.
The Getty kidnap saga – he was eventually released after the ransom was paid – also taught me that luck can play a large part in a journalist’s life. I had been due to fly to Turin to attend a media preview of the Turin shroud, a piece of cloth in which Christ’s body was said to have been wrapped after he was crucified. The shroud was normally kept under lock and key in Turin’s cathedral, but it was due to be shown on Italian television to allow believers a rare glimpse of one of the Church’s most venerated relics.‡ The Vatican had advised everyone to watch the programme but, unfortunately, while waiting to board the plane to Turin, I had dozed off in the departure lounge and missed the boarding announcement. By the time I awoke, I had missed the flight.
All I could do was return to the office and prepare to grovel, but I was still desperately trying to think of ways to explain why Reuters would not be able to report on this major ecclesiastical event when I learned that the Getty ear had turned up. One severed human ear easily outranked a faded piece of ancient cloth of doubtful provenance, so my airport transgression was instantly forgotten.
All reporters dream of getting a scoop, a story of such global importance that their byline will scream from every front page and they will become a household name. Life, of course, is not like that, especially for an agency reporter whose output is likely to be 99.9 per cent mundane. Just occasionally, though, if you are in the right place at the right time, if the wind is in the right direction and the gods are smiling on you, you might get a scoop. I can claim two mini-scoops during my career, both of them dating from my time in Rome.
Scoop Number One: September 1974, when Italy was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. An emergency summit had been arranged on the banks of Lake Como between the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, and the Italian Prime Minister, Mariano Rumor. After the assembled reporters had spent several hours hanging around, a deal was finally announced: the Germans had agreed to lend Italy $2 billion to stave off disaster. I rushed to the nearest phones in the lobby of the hotel where the summit meeting had been held. So did the correspondent for the German news agency, DPA. But I was much younger than he was, and I got there first. I dictated the news flash – and, the following day, I received a message of congratulations from London informing me that German radio had interrupted its programmes to broadcast my dispatch and attributed it to Reuters.
In the news agency world, it does not ever get better than that.
Scoop Number Two: November 1975, a quiet Sunday morning. The Italian news agency ANSA opened up its service only after lunch on Sundays, even though its journalists were already at work in the morning. The tape machines in the Reuters office were silent. But our bureau was in the ANSA building, and we had built up a good working relationship with some of its journalists. Mid-morning, an ANSA journalist put his head round the door: ‘I thought you’d like to know that [the film director] Pier Paolo Pasolini has been found murdered on the beach at Ostia.’
I made a quick phone call to the Ostia police, who confirmed it. It was another Lustig scoop, and it took Reuters’ rivals twenty minutes – twenty minutes! – to catch up. More than forty years later, I still glow with pride.
The murder made a major international impact, and not only because of the fame-cum-notoriety of the victim. He was a director who specialised in portrayals of the underbelly of Italian society, and his killing, apparently by a teenage male prostitute, was inevitably seen as somehow mirroring his art. As I wrote later that day, Pasolini was ‘an apparent victim of the twilight world his first films depicted and from which his first stars came’.
There was an unfortunate aftermath to the Pasolini story, which involved me being summoned to appear in front of an investigating magistrate to explain exactly how much I knew and when I knew it. Pasolini was a highly controversial figure of outspoken left-wing views, and his death immediately gave rise to suggestions that he had been bumped off on the orders of the state. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci reported that a ‘secret witness’ had told her that two young men had been spotted in the area where Pasolini’s body was found, in addition to the male prostitute who had been charged with his murder.
When Fallaci was summoned to name this ‘secret witness’, she gave the name of a journalist friend of mine called Kay Withers. When Kay was summoned in turn and asked where her information had come from, she named me. In fact, as I told the magistrate, she was mistaken, but he took some persuading and, a few months later, the whole silly tale was recounted in the New Statesman as a perfect example of the Italians�
� love of conspiracies. I had to write a long letter of explanation to my bosses in London, who did not generally take kindly to seeing the hallowed Reuters name in such disreputable company.
The rumours surrounding Pasolini’s death persisted, especially in light of the convicted murderer’s retraction, thirty years after the event, of the confession that he had given to police after being picked up driving Pasolini’s car. To this day, many believe that the full story has not been told. Just another Italian mystery…
There was no mystery, however, about the story that won me a fatter sheaf of newspaper cuttings than any other that I wrote during my four years in Rome. The International Herald Tribune even put it on the front page:
Rome, 13 Aug 1975, Reuter – An entire generation of Italian motorists is mourning the loss of its first love – the tiny Fiat 500, first of the world’s minicars and symbol of Italian family motoring.
The recent announcement that Fiat has stopped producing the 500 after 18 years marked the end of a key era in this automobile-mad nation’s history…
For many thousands of Italian motorists, the noisy, uncomfortable ‘cinquecento’ was their first car. Lovingly cared for, repaired in the backyard, often repainted and rebuilt, it enabled Italians to graduate from the Vespa or Lambretta scooters, which dominated Italy in the 1950s, to four-wheeled motoring.
It took Fiat only thirty-two years to realise their mistake, and, in 2007, they introduced a new, updated version of the 500 that seems to have become just as popular as the old one was. (My own car in Rome was a red Fiat 124 sport coupé, which I bought second-hand from a fellow correspondent. Much cooler than the 500.)
I suspect, looking back, that, despite all the frustrations, Rome is still the best city on earth in which to be a foreign correspondent. Not only is it crammed full of artistic, cultural and gastronomic delights, it is also very conveniently situated for quick flits to news hot spots in the Middle East, which is why for many years it boasted an international press corps far more numerous than Italy’s own news importance would have warranted.
I am not sure what the appropriate collective noun for foreign correspondents is but, during my time in Rome, they included a wonderfully eclectic bunch, many of them larger-than-life characters who could have walked straight off a cinema screen. The leader of the English-speaking hack pack was Peter Nichols of The Times. He had arrived in Rome in 1957 and stayed there for more than thirty years until his death, aged only sixty, in 1989. He had twinkling eyes and a ready smile, but was only truly at home in the shadowy corridors of Italian politics and the Vatican. He was close to one of the most sinister of all Italy’s post-war politicians, Giulio Andreotti, who was often suspected, but never convicted, of being one of the Mafia’s most influential friends in government. Peter was always the first person I turned to when I needed someone to explain the latest convulsions on the political scene.
He was married to a stunningly attractive Italian film star, Paola Rosi, of whose charms he was so proud that there was a giant nude photograph of her hanging on the wall of the living room in their Rome flat. It always made visiting them somewhat tricky, as no visitor would wish to be caught looking more at the photo than at the hostess herself.
The Daily Express man was Robin Stafford, known once I arrived on his patch as ‘Big Robin’ to differentiate him from me, aka ‘Little Robin’. He was a correspondent in the great tradition of Express correspondents, from the days when the paper was still justifiably proud of its global reach, and he was as much at home reporting on the weddings of celebrities as on the front line during the Six Day War of 1967. There were few places that he had not reported from; he once told me that when he was based in New York, he had to change his listing in the telephone directory because ‘Robin’ was a popular name for female sex workers in that city, and he was fed up with all the phone calls seeking to engage his services rather than offer him stories.
The ANSA building in which Reuters had its offices was at 94 Via della Dataria, just below the Quirinale palace and only a few steps up from the Trevi fountain. Just along the corridor from the Reuters office was the Chicago Tribune, whose correspondent Phil Caputo had been one of the first US marines to land in Vietnam in 1965. He later wrote a much-praised memoir of his experiences there, A Rumor of War, as well as several well-received works of fiction. When things were quiet, he and I, joined by Sari Gilbert, who wrote for a variety of US publications, would amuse ourselves by improvising quasi-Shakespearian verses on whatever topical subject took our fancy.
Another Rome-based Vietnam veteran was the Pulitzer Prizewinning William (Bill) Tuohy of the Los Angeles Times, a big man with a shock of white hair and an endless fund of stories. He spent nearly thirty years with the LA Times, heading their bureaus in Saigon, Beirut, Rome, London and Bonn. He ended his career back in London, where he would sometimes phone me to seek advice about the intricacies of the British political scene. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-three.
Just outside the Reuters office was Visnews, now Reuters TV, which processed and edited news film from Africa and the Middle East before feeding it into the Eurovision network, which, pre-internet, was the only way international broadcasters could get access to TV pictures from far-flung parts. The Visnews man at the time was Ivor Gaber, who, in his postgraduate days, had taken over my flat in Hove when I left university and who later became one of my closest friends. He and his wife Jane lived near us in London later on, and their three daughters were roughly the same age as our children. After working for several years at ITN and the BBC, Ivor became a leading media academic and Britain’s first professor of broadcast journalism.
The Daily Mirror was represented by Madelon Dimont, the daughter of the journalist and novelist Penelope Mortimer, and stepdaughter of the barrister and playwright John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. She had been living in Rome since 1960, and in 1973 she married Lee Howard, a twenty-stone mountain of a man and a former editor of the Mirror. Madelon hired me on the quiet as her tip-off man and paid me a generous monthly retainer just to be sure that she and the readers of the Mirror never missed a story.
I loved spending time with all these people; after all, if you are interested in journalism, the stories that journalists tell cannot fail to be enthralling. And whatever other failings they might have, journalists are almost invariably great storytellers.
We Reuters drones worked a lot harder than many of our colleagues, but there was still time for long lunches and weekends away on beaches or in the mountains. After one particularly long lunch – probably melanzane alla parmigiana, followed by pasta and a salad at our local trattoria, the Galleria Sciarra – I returned to the office well refreshed and in a dangerously irresponsible mood. For some reason, we started discussing the recent visit to the Vatican by the then Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, the first such visit since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.
So I sat at my typewriter and wrote a spoof dispatch:
Pope Paul VI today announced his forthcoming marriage to the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir. More…
I tore the paper from the typewriter and handed it to a colleague. ‘What do you think?’
‘Great story,’ he said. Then he swivelled round in his chair and pushed the sheet of paper down the chute that led to the telex room on the floor below from where telex operators transmitted our stories to London. They never read what they typed; they just sent whatever came down that chute.
I was down the stairs in a flash. If I had not stopped the dispatch being transmitted to London, my career would undoubtedly have come to an early and ignominious end. But I got to it in time, and learned my lesson: never mess around with ‘joke’ stories in a newsroom. (An equivalent rule applies in radio studios: never say things you might regret in front of a microphone, even if you think no one is listening. I wish I had not had to learn that lesson the hard way as well.)
In early 1977, I found myself on a flight to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, having
been granted an almost unheard-of journalist’s visa by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He was not, as a rule, keen on foreign correspondents, but on this occasion he was only too happy to be in the international spotlight because he had acted as mediator to help negotiate the release of a French archaeologist, Françoise Claustre, who had been kidnapped nearly three years previously by rebel fighters across the border in Chad.
Once freed, she was put on display at a news conference in Tripoli, to which I dutifully turned up, along with a hundred or so other representatives of the foreign press. Gaddafi bathed in his moment of glory, but his security police were keen to see the back of us at the earliest opportunity. Every time I left the hotel, I was followed – conspicuously – by a gentleman in dark glasses and leather jacket. So when Reuters suggested that I should stay on in Tripoli for the full seven days permitted by my visa – ‘see what else you can pick up while you’re there’ – I did something that I probably should not admit to even today. I headed for the airport, jumped on a plane back to Rome and, when they asked why I had not stayed as instructed, I told them that the message had never reached me. I am sure that William Boot of Scoop would have approved.
I loved living and working in Rome, but after three years I was beginning to feel more and more frustrated. I was also worried that I was putting down roots; I was not yet thirty years old, and I was not quite ready to sink into the easy, indolent life of the British expatriate. I decided it was time to move on, and it was The Observer that offered me a way out.
At the suggestion of David Willey, who in the 1970s was not only the BBC’s man in Rome but also The Observer’s, I had filled in for him during the summer when he went away for a few weeks’ break. The mysterious Francis Roberts, who had written occasionally for the New Statesman from Madrid, now started popping up in The Observer from Rome. (An equally mysterious Oliver Moore made occasional appearances in The Times as well.)
Is Anything Happening? Page 17