Fleet Street journalist's beat was Hollywood
Schmoozed Bogart, Brando for Daily Mirror
Donald Zec, who has died aged 102, schmoozed the biggest stars in show business for the Daily Mirror in its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the last journalistic links to Hollywood's golden age.
He regularly scooped Fleet Street with exclusive but often acerbic interviews with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Kirk Douglas.
On his home turf in 1963, he was one of the first journalists to profile an emerging Liverpool group called The Beatles — “four cheeky-looking kids with stone-age hair styles”; but he later upset John Lennon, who nearly threw him out of his famous “bed-in” with Yoko Ono at the Amsterdam Hilton when Zec accused the couple of looking like “two chromium-plated nuts.”
He professed to have befriended “the most intriguing” star of all, Marilyn Monroe, to the extent of offering her a shoulder to cry on during her marital woes. When she telephoned him in London from California at 3:30 a.m., announcing herself as Marilyn Monroe Miller (she was married to Arthur Miller at the time), Zec admitted to a “rapid readjustment of reflexes. `Of course you haven't disturbed me!' seemed a minor deceit,” he recalled.
Zec's film star roster was undeniably an impressive one. He boggled at Jane Russell's bust at a preview of Underwater! (1955), and again at the “40-inch round trip” of Jayne Mansfield's embonpoint, when the blonde bombshell, “bursting out of a vermilion swimsuit,” gatecrashed the proceedings.
Donald David Zec was born in London on March 12, 1919. His father, Simon Zecanovskya, a Jewish tailor from Ukraine, had settled his family in London before the First World War, shortened the name to Zec, and brought up nine daughters and two sons.
Zec joined the Evening Standard as a messenger boy and in 1938 moved to the Daily Mirror.
During the Second World War he served with the London Irish Rifles, returning to the Mirror as a crime reporter in 1945.
From crime, he graduated to royal correspondent, and cultivated a mole in the Buckingham Palace boiler room. In 1948 the mole supplied Zec with details of the birth of Prince Charles.
Zec's wife of 66 years, Frances, died in 2006. Their son survives him.