Abstract
Robin Esser loves gossip. I love gossip. Let's face it, all humankind, since we evolved from the apes, loves gossip. Unlike apes, humans don't have to spend hours picking lice from each other's hair to establish mutual bonds: blessed as we are with language, we use gossip for good or evil instead.
In the past 60 years, anthropologists have come to believe that gossip, a once despised academic category, is an essential human need, whether it's in societies such as stone-age tribes in the Amazon, Papua New Guinea or indeed Fleet Street.
An Oxford graduate and former National Service soldier, Esser, after 60 years in the business as a journalist, editor of the Sunday Express and senior executive on several papers, is one of the most distinguished elders of the old Fleet Street tribe. And boy, is he a good gossip. Some of the best stories in this slim volume are from his days as editor of the Daily Express gossip column “William Hickey” (proprietor Lord Beaverbrook).
One day, Esser answered the phone to a rather plummy voice that barked: “Marlborough here! That awful chap Bedford has been round Blenheim writing ‘Woburn is better’ on our brochures, and giving them to our visitors. That's the sort of thing you like to print in your newspaper, isn't it?” He then put the phone down.
Wary of hoaxers, Esser rang Blenheim Palace, home of the Duke of Marlborough. The butler haughtily informed him that the duke never spoke to the press and in any case he was in the bath and couldn't be disturbed.
Esser, using the rat-like cunning essential for a good journalist, informed the butler, in a charming but faintly minatory tone, that His Grace would be very cross with him if His Grace was not asked to confirm the phone call. The chastened butler later called back to confirm that the duke readily agreed that he had, indeed, made the call.
But there was a potential obstacle: Beaverbrook. “The Old Man”, as we Express employees called him, adored gossip but because he knew everybody who was gossiped about, you had to be rather careful not to jeopardise your career.
On the morning that this farcical ducal feud was revealed in Esser's column, the Old Man rang him to congratulate him on the story. But he growled threateningly: “I hope it's true!”
“I believe so, Lord Beaverbrook.”
“Good, I'm lunching with him today.”
Not all gossip columnists or editors are loathed by their targets. On the contrary, some, like the oil billionaire Paul Getty, enjoy plotting with them. Getty, then said to be the richest private citizen in the world, relished his reputation for miserliness towards everyone, including relatives and guests.
When I once interviewed him in Sutton Place, his Surrey mansion, I asked him whether it was true that houseguests and even his own relatives had to use the coin-operated phone box in the hall. His spiteful old lizard eyes opened slightly, and with a dry little cough he replied: “Of course it is! Why should I pay for their private calls? Heh heh!”
Naturally he was a honeypot for numerous glamorous women on the make, one of whom, Marie, had actually managed to move in with him and was obviously angling for marriage. Getty arranged with Esser that he would quote Getty as saying that he would never remarry: “I'm married to an oil rag” – ie his oil business came before women.
Not long after the story appeared, Getty and Marie were dining with Beaverbrook. She began to denounce Esser, saying what he'd written was simply not true. Beaverbrook turned to Getty, who replied that, on the contrary, what Esser had written was the only article about him that was 100 per cent true. Marie got the message, packed her bags and moved out of Sutton Place for good. Getty was duly grateful, telling his co-conspirator that the Esser family was free to use the mansion's swimming pool and facilities at will, and the two men remained friends for life.
Margaret Thatcher adored Esser and it was rumoured that she'd even offered him a knighthood, which he turned down. He's never confirmed or denied the story except to state that he does not believe a working editor should accept an honour from a politician lest readers suspect they are in the politician's pocket.
For a journalism student this is a valuable primer on the massive changes in the industry from hot metal to digital technology. Journalists too have changed: in the so-called glory days of the printed press, journalists drank like fish all day every day (ah yes, I remember it well). Why this heroic devotion to gallons of booze of every variety didn't kill us all off prematurely remains a mystery.
Esser describes once having lunch with an Express editor, during which they consumed champagne, a goblet of dry sherry, a bottle of chablis, two bottles of claret, a couple of cognacs and finally several glasses of port. The editor then went back to work and Esser went to sleep; that particular editor happens to have died young. Esser – whom I never saw drunk during all the decades I've known and worked with him – is still in play and working as a top executive at the Daily Mail under his old protégé, Paul Dacre.
While he still rejoices in the “great fun” of journalism, he is passionately serious about how essential it is to democracy and how much it is now in danger of being strangulated by the chains of legislative bureaucracy and self-righteous, and often self-interested, lobbies such as Hacked Off.
Journalism's role at its best is, he believes, to be “a thorn in the sides of cheats, wrong doers, those who abuse the young and the old, and the hypocrisy of those in power”