Confessions of a 1960s gossip columnist
The military historian Max Hastings eventually became the editor of the London Evening Standard, but he began his career on the bottom rung, trawling parties and premieres in search of politicians and celebrities with loose mouths and stories to tell
Almost three decades ago, as a newspaper editor, I asked a young job applicant why he had quit his previous employment, serving Nigel Dempster’s famous or infamous Daily Mail gossip column. He replied that he suffered a Damascene moment of revelation and repentance on returning from lunch to find the bibulous diarist presiding over a sweepstake among colleagues about the size of his own private parts.
That conversation took me back to my own misspent youth in Dempster’s trade. Mercifully, I could not remember any event in our office as grotesque as that which the disillusioned interviewee described. But my emotional Irish colleague Mary Kenny once emptied a mug of tea over my head as I typed, and there were drunken scenes that Roman emperors might have thought a trifle over the top.
Gossip-columning is today a much reduced activity, perhaps because the trivia once confined to diaries now dominates many front pages. For most of the 20th century, however, the party columnists were stars. The tasty titbits that appeared under such bylines as William Hickey, Paul Tanfield, Charles Greville (all pseudonyms), Londoner’s Diary and Nigel Dempster were compiled by teams of six to eight young men and women who existed in a high-octane, low-morality universe of champagne, petty bribery, systemic betrayals of families and friends, and published insults and indiscretions, not infrequently followed by lawsuits and grovelling apologies. What fun it all was!
My own debut was contrived through nepotism. In 1964 I was 18, hideously bored at Oxford. My mother, Anne Scott-james, a Daily Mail columnist, persuaded her friend Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard in London since 1959, to grant me a vacation stint on the paper’s Londoner’s Diary. I found myself plunged into a heady rush of gallery openings, movie premieres, brief interviews with politicians and, when possible, much longer ones with young actresses.
The staff reporters, a few years older than me, had all attended public schools. Most were Etonians, and one who was not pretended to be. Among my colleagues were the sons of the distinguished writers V.S. Pritchett, Alan Moorehead and Eric Linklater. Wintour, my boss and father of Vogue’s supremo Anna, was a considerable snob, who made no bones about his belief that one of the foremost functions of Diary reporters was to exploit our well-connected parents’ friends.
Some, including me, did this with gusto. I recall with shame phoning Lord Goodman, the famous lawyerfixer of Harold Wilson, prime minister at the time, and opening the conversation by reminding him of his affection for my mother, to which he responded crisply, “That may make me willing to listen to what you wish to ask, without providing the slightest assurance that I shall feel obliged to respond to it.” Most stories were provided by tipsters who received between £5 and £50 for their information – elsewhere in Fleet Street, a juicy divorce could be worth £500. Some MPS, including Labour’s Tom Driberg, relied on this to support their louche lifestyles.
After two thrilling vacations working for the Diary, I received a letter from Wintour saying that, since I showed some promise, when I left Oxford – which he assumed would be 18 months thereafter – he could promise me a job at £1,500 a year. I wrote back, demanding what if I come now? Wintour was taken aback, but responded that, yes, his offer might be fast-forwarded. A month later I became a member of the Diary’s staff, to the fury of my parents who pointed out to Wintour that, had he not provided me with employment, “the wretched boy could never have thrown away an Oxford exhibition”.
One of my new colleagues, a dear, witty, complacently rich Etonian, observed with the condescending wisdom of his 28 years, “Max, you will never be a gentleman, because gentlemen are never seen to try.” It was true that I tried absurdly hard. Work became the focus of my being, partly because my social life was pretty thin. I rejoiced in every paragraph that got into the paper, sulked over each one that wound up on “the spike”, which in that era existed physically as well as figuratively on every newspaper desk, to skewer stories rejected for publication.
The “real journalists” at the Standard – news reporters and executives, most of whom came from humbler social and educational backgrounds than ourselves – loathed and despised the mummy’s boys who staffed Londoner’s Diary. When Wintour began to send me on foreign assignments – for instance, in 1966 to write a mid-atlantic diary from the liner Queen Mary – a rumour gained credence that my mother was his lover. When I was also dispatched to write a new year diary from St Moritz, together with an article about riding the Cresta Run, unsurprisingly I ran out of money. The news desk refused to send more until the editor gave personal approval on returning from
“Meeting Diana Rigg prompted me to wild excess with the wine list. Afterwards I discovered I had forgotten every word she said”
his seasonal holiday, four days thereafter. This was a gesture of undisguised malice towards Wintour’s pampered protégé. Phone calls from Switzerland were too expensive for me to dare to contact the great man at home. Instead, I trawled the Sunny Bar at the Kulm Hotel, the headquarters of British Cresta riders, borrowing small sums to sustain me over new year.
Back in London, the auction houses leaked to us an endless succession of stories, both about their clients and each other. Hell had no fury like a Christie’s man with his knife into a Sotheby’s one, or vice versa. I enjoyed the assignments to gatecrash parties, though was handicapped by my extreme height, which made it hard to appear inconspicuous. When ordered to cover a Maria Callas gala at Covent Garden, for which tickets were unobtainable by billionaires, never mind reporters, I resorted to a ruse that I had seen employed by Denholm Elliott and Alan Bates in their recent cads’ movie, Nothing but the Best. Attired in a dinner jacket, I parked my car near the Royal Opera House and extracted a quarter-bottle of champagne. Filling the glass I had brought with me, at the first interval I joined the throng of operagoers in the Crush Room bar, and thereafter quizzed everybody in sight, unchallenged by staff.
Among the coolest of all 1960s restaurants was Mario & Franco’s La Terrazza, a trattoria occupying three floors on a corner of Romilly Street, in Soho. Expenses permitted me to lunch in this paradise, celebrated in the fashionable thrillers of Len Deighton, with a succession of actresses. It seems amazing, from a 21st century perspective, that the likes of Diana Rigg, Sarah Miles and Tippi Hedren put up with my callow company for an hour or two, to secure a mere eight or nine paragraphs in the Diary.
I have an old Terrazza menu beside me now, with its cover charge of two shillings and sixpence – less than 13p. Turbot with white wine sauce, tomato and mushrooms cost 16 shillings, calamari alla Luciana just 14 shillings. I adored the food and wine almost as much as I worshipped my interviewees, sometimes too much so. Meeting Rigg, then at the height of her fame as Emma Peel in The Avengers, prompted me to wild excess with the wine list. On returning to the office I discovered that I had forgotten every word she said. I had to telephone and ask her to repeat it all – which, with exceptional good nature, she did.
Much of our daily round involved a phone call to some grandee, often unsociably early in the morning, to put to him or her some implausible suggestion or allegation, before offering a seductive opportunity to “tell your side of it”. During the first moments of the conversation that followed, the suspense was frightful, waiting to see if the connection was abruptly severed or one’s impudence dismissed with a brief, “No comment.”
Instead, most leading lights held forth as we scribbled to record their rash words. Then the reporter leapt to the Diary editor’s desk to rehearse gleeful tidings of some insult or indiscretion. I was once dispatched to secure an interview with Richard Burton at Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he was filming: we sought a comment on allegations made against him by American producer and chat show host David Susskind. To my amazement, I was granted admission to the canteen where the star was lunching. He fixed me – barely 20 and almost paralysed by nerves – with hooded eyes. His remarks in that inimitable gravel voice began, “Mr Susskind is a liar”, and thereafter became less generous. I returned to the office in triumph, and the story became the next day’s column lead.
Wintour lunched most of the young Diary staff, his favourites and fledglings, once or twice a year at the Forum in Chancery Lane, a smart brasserie, and gave occasional dinners for the whole team at which some literary gift was distributed. In 1966 we all received copies of Harold Nicolson’s Diaries, bearing tart personalised inscriptions. In my own he wrote, “For Max Hastings, whose future will probably be quite as bright as he expects.”
He was always “Mr Wintour” face to face, and remained so to me until at least the late 1970s. If we coveted his praise, we also trembled before his wrath. His alarming silences and terse memos attributing blame for errors left strong men and women sobbing. On one occasion I found myself lacerated in his office, following the revelation that I had been dating his secretary, who was very indiscreet to me about his correspondence. “It is fortunate for you that your professional conduct is adequate,” the editor snapped, fixing me with an icy glare, “because your personal conduct certainly is not.” Nobody who knew Wintour needed long to wonder where his daughter Anna learnt the management style that caused her to be dubbed “Nuclear Wintour”.
I spent a year and a half on Londoner’s Diary before moving on. A decade later, just before departing to a new life writing books, I unwillingly served as Diary editor for six months. I look back without pride on the 100-odd pages for which I was then responsible, conspicuous for exuberant bitchiness. Yet I would not for anything have missed those days. A friend once reported the comment of a BBC executive after being interviewed by me: “Typical Beaverbrook journalist!” The man concerned, the odious Desmond Wilcox, intended to be dismissive, but his words caused my chest to swell with pride.
We learnt to think and write fast; to cram a maximum of information into a minimum of words; to deploy boundless cheek, forever asking oneself how far one could reasonably go, then taking a step further; and, while always displaying courtesy to the possessors of wealth and power, never abandoning a reflexive scepticism about them. The best journalists remain at heart outsiders, even if they get to dine at the smartest tables.
Some of my old 1960s Diary colleagues went on to successful careers in the media, while others fell by the wayside. I remember one of the brightest, a man whom I loved, shaking his head in disbelief about some excess I had committed to secure a story. ‘‘Why do you care so much, Max?” he asked with a bemused disdain that caused him to abandon newspaper work. “Tomorrow it will be wrapping fish and chips.” Rationally, I knew that he was right. But an essential ingredient of success for anyone who aspires to scale media summits is to believe that the story – even those silly paragraphs that I wrote for the Londoner’s Diary half a century ago – is absolutely, completely the most important thing in the world. Which I did.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Times. © The Times Magazine / News Licensing
“We learnt to deploy boundless cheek, forever asking oneself how far one could reasonably go, then taking a step further”