Abstract
There was a time when the gossip column was the first page every reader turned to. Written with authority and humour by people who knew the key players in any walk of life for people who enjoyed gossip, sometimes mischievous but generally good humoured. These days they are called diarists, although there's not a Pepys among them. They sit in front of their screens like disaffected teenagers, perusing Facebook and Twitter and, with the help of PR experts, trying to assemble stories about film stars, footballers and royals they have never met. Most of these celebrities lead even more boring lives than normal folk, so they need to be slightly exaggerated.
Now a new menace has raised its head. It is the Leveson inquiry that puts the fear of death into any editor who prints anything intrusive or non-PC. This may be because lawyers are envious of scribblers exercising more power than they do.
When the great Richard Berens edited the William Hickey column in the 1960s and 1970s it occupied the whole of page 3 of the Daily Express, then a broadsheet. He had a team of 13 scribes who often wrote the column before he went to lunch. But when he came back from Boodle's many hours later (sometimes the next day), he usually had enough stories to fill the page himself.
On one occasion in 1972, Berens sent me to report on Queen Charlotte's Ball, with instructions to ring him in the office at 11pm and tell him what I had seen. Luckily I met a young undergraduate called Stephen Evans-Freke warming a python on a radiator so that he could release it later with some white mice on the dance floor. Pandemonium broke out. The debutantes screamed and a mouse bit Paul Getty on the finger, drawing blood from the billionaire.
The story was headlined “Snakes alive” at Queen Charlotte's, and Berens somehow filled the page with it. The next night, Kenneth Alsop, the Jeremy Paxman of his day, interviewed Jocelyn Stevens, managing director of the Express, and Tom Driberg, the original William Hickey columnist, on the BBC 2′s 24 Hours. Driberg, a gay Labour MP, thought it an outrageous story of upper-crust hooliganism, cruel to young ladies, snakes, mice and a rich oilman, but Stevens bravely defended my story.
John McEntee also edited William Hickey, but in the more straitened 1990s. These things don't happen any more. He writes about his childhood in County Cavan where he was abused by a teacher who sat him on his knee. “Brother Francis would now be called a paedophile, a term not in use in Cavan in the late ‘50s,’ writes McEntee. “My inclusion in the band and the football team were rewards for allowing Francis to interfere with me.”
He says this did him no harm at all, but it does seem to have left him with an obsession about penises. He pays tribute to Tom Driberg, referring to him as the first and best William Hickey on Beaverbrook's Express. He mentions Driberg's admiration for James Callaghan's “impressively proportioned penis”. He also includes a flattering, second-hand description of me, which my wife says is an exaggeration. Perhaps I should report this to Lord Leveson as an invasion of my privacy.
McEntee had a lively career in Dublin before he came to London. He once interviewed Ireland's oldest man, who caught a chill when taken outside for a photograph. The poor man died shortly afterwards. He also went to see PopeJohn Paul II when he went on pilgrimage to Knock, where the Virgin Mary once appeared. By sitting in a wheelchair among the chronically ill he bagged a place in the front row. Because he had drunk too much Guinness, he nearly had to leap up and relieve himself. This might have been hailed as a miracle.
McEntee tells how his editor, Rosie Boycott, at the Daily Express once lunched with Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrods, trying to persuade him to buy the paper from Lord Hollick. Fayed tried to seal the deal by giving Boycott two mink coats, the property of a late duchess, from his storeroom. The purchase never happened and the Express was bought by the pornographer Richard Desmond, The fur coats were stolen from Boycott's car shortly afterwards.
Perhaps the author's finest achievement was to invent the term “national treasure” to describe some of the great characters of his time. He used to invite his famous friends, such as Lord Longford, Beryl Bainbridge and Joan Collins, to lunches at the Express. Sadly, this ended in tragedy when one of his chums, the comedian Derek Nimmo, consumed a drop too many at one of these events and fell down some stairs that afternoon. He banged his head and died. On the day Tommy Cooper died on stage at Her Majesty's Theatre, McEntee, representing The Sun, door-stepped Mrs Cooper with flowers. She asked him to answer her telephone and he fielded calls from Eric Morecambe, Michael Parkinson, Eric Sykes, Ronnie Barker, Barry Cryer and others who rang with their condolences. Death and comedy are never far apart in McEntee's world but, as he says, the Irish do enjoy a good funeral.
In June 2013, The Oldie carried a cartoon of Henry Cooper on its front cover. McEntee had interviewed the former heavyweight boxer for its “Still With Us” section. “Sadly, however, Henry was in fact no longer with us,” writes McEntee. “He had taken the celestial count just as the magazine was going to press.” The Oldie editor, Richard Ingrams, told the Evening Standard: “It's the curse of McEntee. He once killed the oldest man in Ireland.”
The ever-thirsty McEntee mourns the transformation of his once colourful and quixotic profession. “All the national newspaper newsrooms are now filled with terracotta armies of earnest young men and women rewriting magazine articles and churning out a grim mince of show business and celebrity stories about people they don't know and will never meet.”
Perhaps someone could tell Lord Leveson before he puts them out all of business that old-fashioned gossip scribes are only trying to earn a modest crust and keep everyone entertained.
