Abstract
The frst sentence of the author's introduction stated that in the “two or three decades” prior to the book's publication the “remarkable species” of the press baron had become virtually extinct. It was a wrong call: within a couple of years the gargantuan fgure of Robert Maxwell was to wrap Mirror Group Newspapers in his octopus embrace and inside two further decades the combative Richard Desmond gained control of Express Newspapers and the Barclay twins had emerged from their reclusives’ hideaway to buy the Telegraph Group.
On the same page Brendon paraphrased Lytton Strachey's remark about the Victorian Age in suggesting that the history of the press barons will never be written because there is too much to be known about them. Also, there were simply too many of them, wrote Brendon. There were to be more than he knew, in fact, but in this book he makes an admirable job of excavating the lives of 25 of the more notorious media moguls in Britain and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In making his selection, the author used their importance as a factor for inclusion, but in rejecting C P Scott in favour of Lord Northcliffe and Adolph Ochs for William Randolph Hearst, another yardstick emerges: idiosyncrasy that, with some, bordered on psychosis. “Vicious, unstable, despotic”, they could be as barmy as Caligula on a bad day. Robert Maxwell would have felt at home in this company.
The younger James Gordon Bennett, son of the Scottish ex-Catholic seminarian who founded the New York Herald, shared with his father a ferce independence: “The Bennetts stood in awe of no convention, bowed the knee to no interest, prostrated themselves before no authority”. But while Bennett Snr merely dismissed his critics by declaring, “It is no egotism in me to say I surpass them all in industry, in genius, in talent, in popularity and in success” while writing fulsome testimonials to himself, his spoilt heir developed eccentricity into an art form, once visiting the staff of the Herald's Paris edition dressed in faming red pyjamas for the purpose of fring everyone on the right-hand side of the room.
He enjoyed making his staff squirm and they had to endure being sniffed by his pack of dogs, “for he was inclined to judge the worth of his employees by the regard in which they were held by these animals”. Yet the organisation was “imbued with vigour” by his volatile personality and magnetism, which “added to the excitement of working in the mercurial medium of journalism”. When, after his death, the Herald was sold, the proceeds were willed to be used to found a home for indigent journalists, “many of whom owed their state to Bennett”.
The commentator Walter Lippmann wrote that Bennett's “glittering patrimony” was “the first independent press which the world has known” and certainly all those examined in a fine, well-written work made some sort of significant contribution to print journalism. Not all were proprietors, nor serious fruitcakes – Thomas Barnes and John Delane appear to have been relatively sane, hardworking obsessives while putting the thunder into The Times – but many had a screw so loose it must have been a constant worry that these might jump clear from their threads.
William Thomas Stead, of the Pall Mall Gazette, saw himself as a barbarian from the north, having edited The Northern Echo at the age of 22. He possibly invented “the new journalism” – he coined the phrase – and was famously jailed for abduction after purchasing a 13-year-old girl as part of an investigation into London vice. Just as famously, he went down with the Titanic, but not before developing delusions of grandeur and announcing while in Holloway, not yet a single-sex jail, “A s I was taking my exercise this morning… I asked myself who was the man of most importance now alive. I could only find one answer – the prisoner in this cell.”
The Hungarian-born Joseph Pulitzer was a brilliant journalist whose New York World exposed corruption in government and society and constantly campaigned for enlightenment and progress, even if the paper never quite satisfied the proprietor's ambition that is should determine who should be elected President and, indeed, be more powerful than the President himself.
Pulitzer lost his eyesight and suffered a nervous breakdown, yet “rose from the depths of yellow journalism to set himself up as the conscience of America”. A fery, shirt-sleeved news junkie with no delegation skill, he also assaulted his journalists both verbally – his command of profanity was legendary – and physically. He sounds like a walking nightmare, but his genius shines from Brendon's pages.
Northcliffe, surfing to riches and a peerage on wave upon wave of egocentricity and eventually aspiring to be Napoleon before succumbing to persecution mania and isolating himself in a hut on the roof of a house owned by the Duke of Devonshire, was a formidable competitor in the press barons’ wacky races.
Even more so was Hearst, his memory irrevocably entwined with Orson Welles’ portrayal of a monster in Citizen Kane and awarded by Brendon the title of “the most vilified press baron in history”. Hearst introduced yellow journalism to the world, staffed his circulation departments with hoodlums and established newsrooms that “resembled lunatic asylums”, awash with thuggery and neurosis. On occasion he was demonstrably unhinged, although not necessarily so when promising to furnish a war in Cuba to suit the fortunes of his New York Journal.
E W Scripps, although lesser known today than some of the other headbangers in Brendon's book, was just as serious a contender in the eccentricity Olympics: having spent a night by a broken pillar at the Colosseum in 1878, he decided “to establish a little kingdom such as Rome” which would consist of many newspapers – “an empire of journalism”. He went on to launch 32 titles, some of which foundered, and own shares in 15 others.
While amassing a fortune of some $40million, he considered women an inferior sex, yet supported female suffrage in his newspapers, and informed a friend that his thought process was not that of a rich man but more that of “a left labour galoot”. His publications, according to the author, were the most effective defenders of the underdog in America and H L Mencken described him as “probably the most successful newspaper owner America has ever known”.
A spectacular drunk early in his career, he took to drink again in later life, suffered a stroke and retreated to live on his yacht, where he began every day listening to a recorded performance of “Onward Christian Soldiers” and spent most of his time playing dominoes. Dead from an attack of apoplexy at 71, his last words were “Too many cigars this evening, I guess.” One can't help but like him.
Threads of irrationality and self-aggrandisement continue through compelling chapters on Beaverbrook, Robert McCormick, Cecil King and their fellow-travellers on the corpse-littered road to power and influence. Brendon brings them all vividly to life, even if he tends to demonstrate rather showily his extensive vocabulary – “tatterdemalion”, “suzerainty”, “philippics” – and the 23 pages of bibliography and notes on sources indicate that nothing new is revealed about any among a collection of media madmen.
