Raise a glass to rogue who charmed Tommy’s widow
I’M NOT ONE TO GOSSIP, BUT... by John Mcentee (Biteback £18)
Long years ago, when Private Eye was in its infancy, Willie Rushton invented a Fleet Street journalist called Lunchtime o’Booze. ‘Make no mistake’ his stories began, or ‘Say what you like, and you probably will . . .’ As his name proclaimed, he was an Irishman and given to drinking at midday.
It is reassuring to be able to report that the spirit of o’Booze is kept alive today in the shape of John McEntee, mainstay of the Daily Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column and author of this highly entertaining memoir.
An Irishman like o’Booze, McEntee gives us a lively account of his early days as a member of a closeknit family in County Cavan — one of seven children, all of them devoted to their remarkable mother Judy, described by her son John as ‘beautiful and daft’. When the euro replaced the Irish pound in 2000 her response was: ‘now why couldn’t they have waited until all the old people were dead first?’
Like her husband, Judy McEntee was a devout Catholic and when she won £80,000 on the lottery she paid for £1,000 worth of Masses to be said for each of her seven children, including John.
Was it money well spent? Daft she may have been, but it is unlikely that she would have approved of her journalist son’s behaviour when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979.
Detailed by the Irish Press to cover the Papal Pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Knock in County Mayo, the resourceful McEntee was not deterred when told that only the sick and the disabled would be admitted to the Pope’s openair Mass.
Fortified with several pints of guinness, our hero acquired a wheelchair, a rug and a man to push him, and posing as one of the infirm, gained a place in the front row and a personal blessing from the Holy Father as he huddled in the wheelchair clutching his now bursting bladder.
While not approving, Judy might have commended John for confessing later to ‘guilt and shame’ for his imposture — an unusual admission to come from a hardened Fleet Street hack.
But McEntee is not a man who will sacrifice all his finer qualities for the sake of a good story. While working for The Sun, he had what most colleagues would have called a sensational scoop when, in April 1984, Tommy Cooper collapsed and died on the stage of a West End theatre.
He was one of a gang of journalists sent to interview the widow at her Chiswick home only to be rebuffed on the doorstep by a Filipino maid.
The canny o’Booze then retreated to a
nearby pub then, once again filled with liquor, returned to the Cooper residence carrying an enormous bouquet of flowers.
The sight of the flowers and the rubicund features of the beaming McEntee immediately won the heart of the tearful Mrs Cooper — ‘Call me Dove’ — who invited him in.
For the next two or three hours they sat drinking together on the settee alongside a plate of half-eaten banana sandwiches, which Tommy Cooper had taken on stage before he collapsed.
While Mrs Cooper wept into her gin and tonic, McEntee fielded calls from fellow comics including Eric Morecambe and Ronnie Barker, informing them in Jeeves-like tones that ‘Mrs Cooper is indisposed’.
On his return to Fleet Street the news editor asked how he had got on. ‘She wouldn’t talk to me,’ he lied.
‘I just hadn’t the heart to write it up for the delectation of Sun readers,’ he writes. Only years later, when Mrs Cooper had long since died, did he tell the story in The Oldie magazine.
It was one of his Oldie stories that later gave rise to the legend of the curse of McEntee. He tells how, as a reporter on the Sunday Press in 1974, he was sent with a photographer to interview Ireland’s oldest man, Mr Jeremiah McCarthy (107).
The poor old boy, now bedridden, was persuaded to get up and be photographed outside his house in the freezing cold. As a result he caught a chill and died. McEntee tried to blame his photographer, but in vain.
After that disaster, a string of deaths followed in the wake of a McEntee interview — John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Cooper all fell victim to the curse.
McEntee’s world may be that of an inveterate gossip writer, but his book is a timely reminder that good journalism means getting out and talking to people. And of course having a jar or two to help jolly things along.