An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (31 page)

Beaverbrook’s
Express
newspapers were seedbeds of ancient rancour. They pursued vendettas, smeared people and magnified spiteful gossip. A friend of the old man recounted in 1962 that when he mentioned that he would like to contribute an article, Beaverbrook purred softly, ‘Whom do you wish to attack?’ Beaverbrook typically used his power to persecute a reclusive baronet, Sir John Ellerman, from envy that he had inherited £20 million at the age of twenty-two. For a quarter of a century his newspapers inserted disobliging paragraphs about the Duke of Hamilton, partly because he was a duke, but chiefly because Hamilton as a young parliamentary candidate had rejected an offer of Beaverbrook’s support during a by-election. Other rebuffs were revenged. In 1949, hearing of Isaiah Berlin’s scintillating diplomatic reports on American politics and society, Beaverbrook summoned the Oxford don and asked him to write for
Express
newspapers. He was incredulous when the young man did not immediately submit to his overtures. He could arrange luxurious living, he told Berlin: ‘there could be – and it was an offer, he declared, that was not made to many – there could be a discreet flat where Berlin could entertain – a lady; indeed ladies, if need be, could even materialise’. Berlin resisted these blandishments, and shortly afterwards a BBC radio talk by him was decried in a leading article in the
Evening Standard
which Beaverbrook had perhaps dictated to one of his minions. Slurs and innuendos abounded in Beaverbrook’s newspapers. Macmillan noted in his diary in 1957 that they had sunk to the level of
Confidential
(an American scandal sheet), by entrapment of the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. While holidaying in Spain, Lloyd was tracked by a
Daily Express
cameraman, who snapped him walking with a friend and the friend’s wife. The husband, however, was excised from a doctored photograph of Lloyd with the woman published under the caption ‘Who is the
Señorita
?’ ‘Beaverbrook,’ thought Macmillan, ‘could stoop no lower.’
¹⁸

J. B. Priestley had Beaverbrook in mind when he wrote in 1962 that he did not resent the power of newspapers to criticise everything and everybody. What he disliked was ‘their conviction that they are among the sacred objects and persons above all criticism, and that any public man bold enough to challenge this conviction may become the subject of a vendetta, disguised as honest news-gathering, that may last for years’.
¹⁹
Few newsmen felt more sacrosanct from criticism than the Mirror Group’s Cecil Harmsworth King.

King was born in 1901. His mother, whom he hated, was a sister of Northcliffe and Rothermere. She held that monotony was improving for children. King’s eldest brother died at the battle of Ypres; his cousins Vere and Vyvyan Harmsworth – the Rothermere heirs – were killed in the First World War too; another cousin, Alfred Harmsworth, was castrated by wounds sustained at the Somme. Worse still was the calamity of King’s school holidays in the last year of the war. He and his surviving brother were pupils at Winchester College. After visiting their parents in Dublin in 1918, their mother sent them back to Winchester on separate Irish Sea steamers. At the last moment, King asked to travel on the earlier ship: his brother, who took his place on the
Leinster
, drowned when it was torpedoed by a German submarine. King’s cold, twisted sorrow, like his conviction that he was predestined for supreme power, was intensified by this tragedy. He wrote in his memoirs that he had hated himself until old age, and always hankered for suicide. For most of his adulthood he suffered from psoriasis – raw bleeding skin and scales – which deepened his woebegone moods. His self-loathing, though, had a self-congratulatory tinge.

The
Daily Mail
managing director who was ordered to give King his first job threatened but failed to break him. King became a director of his uncle Rothermere’s
Daily Mirror
in 1929. He led the new regime that was installed there in the 1930s. Its keynotes became more assertive after the abdication crisis of 1936, during which the
Daily Mirror
was less deferential than other newspapers. Thereafter it was always class-conscious, with jibes at aristocratic adultery. King selected Hugh Cudlipp, an abrasive young Welshman, as the
Daily Mirror
’s features editor in 1935. When King was appointed as editorial director of the
Sunday Pictorial
in 1937, Cudlipp, aged just twenty-four, was his choice as editor.

Cudlipp had been born in Cardiff in 1913, son of a commercial traveller in eggs and bacon, and grandson of a docks policeman. He was relieved to finish with schooling at the age of fourteen. His journalistic apprenticeship was served on a weekly newspaper serving a dormitory seaside suburb of Cardiff. At the age of fifteen he left Wales to work for Lord Kemsley’s
Manchester Evening Chronicle
. He thrived as a district reporter covering Blackpool: watching the English working classes holidaying was, he believed, an invaluable training for populist journalism. In 1932 he transferred to one of Kemsley’s Fleet Street titles, the
Sunday Chronicle
, where he was appointed features editor at the age of twenty. Three years later he joined the
Daily Mirror
.

Cudlipp enlisted in 1940, and fought on active service before launching the British forces’ newspaper,
Union Jack
. His military experiences honed his understanding of his readers’ aspirations as much as his training in Blackpool. They raised him in the world’s view, too: this bagman’s son was demobilised in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1951, King made him editorial director of both the
Daily Mirror
and
Sunday Pictorial
. For the next seventeen years the two men collaborated in a formidable partnership. By the early 1960s the Mirror Group owned the
Sunday Pictorial
,
The People
(together commanding over forty per cent of Sunday sales), the
Daily Herald
and
Daily Mirror
, together with the six leading women’s magazines published in Britain, and held one-quarter of the shares in Associated Television.

Cudlipp never read a book if he could avoid it. He found it unbearable to sit still in a theatre for more than one act. It was as if plays were newspaper columns: it should be enough to read the first paragraph to get the story. His books
Publish and Be Damned!
(1953) and
At Your Peril
(1962) were ghosted for him. In them, Cudlipp resembled a celebrity cook praising his own recipes. His journalism was ‘rumbustious’,
At Your Peril
boasted. ‘Defying the conventions. Hastening the inevitable in social change. Cocking a snook at the hoary traditions and pomposities of our times. Fighting the taboos.’ Cudlipp’s working credo ran: ‘Say it first, get away with it first, and others will follow. At all events, say it first.’ For a newspaper to boom in popularity, ‘it must be alarmingly provocative in every issue and abundantly confident of its own importance’.
²⁰

A survey of English journalism extolled the Cudlipp-King regime in 1957: ‘the
Daily Mirror
has kicked, jeered, argued, fought, joked and shouted its way up. It has insulted powerful men. Its editors have been brought to court. It has been threatened with suppression. It has been called subversive, irresponsible, pornographic. Always it has kept on the side of the “ordinary” people.’ More than any other newspaper the
Daily Mirror
had identified itself with ‘the century of the common man’. With its ‘spluttering outrage’, and clamorous, denunciatory headlines, it was primarily ‘a paper of opposition’. What readers noticed most, though, were ‘the strip cartoons, the teasing cuties, the babies, the sob-stuff, the bottoms and busts’.
²¹

Harold Macmillan lunched with King and Cudlipp in 1955. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more unpleasant type than Mr King. Mr Cudlipp (I wd say) though quite reckless, was not without a certain bias towards the interests of his country, always supposing that his personal interests were not involved.’ Meeting them again for luncheon a year later he judged them ‘as good a pair of ruffians as you cd find anywhere’. In 1957 the Macmillans gave a Downing Street luncheon for Cudlipp: ‘He is able, & not unreasonable – altho’ naturally, like all such journalists, without any scruples about truth, morality, good faith & the like.’
²²

King stood six feet four inches tall. His rumpled clothes showed his indifference to convention. Humankind, he believed, would live in brutal chaos unless discipline was imposed on the morass of fools by a strong leader. He dealt with letters by returning them with brusque responses written in biro in his even, sprawling script. Sometimes he sealed envelopes with a strip of sellotape. He loathed late nights, and stalked out of public dinners before ten regardless of the eminence of the speakers or his neighbours at table. For thirty years, despite his newspapers’ denunciations of the Tories’ grouse-moor image, he owned a shooting estate in Aberdeenshire, where the bags were mainly grouse.

Every year King made stately business tours of the Commonwealth: his newspapers in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone were as valued by him as those in London. He selected office lackeys to accompany him, put them under his surveillance and delivered trenchant assessments: ‘That goose will never be a swan’; ‘Not ruthless enough’; ‘No fire in his belly’. The lackeys returned with tales of their own: how he ‘fought his way through a mob of four hundred excited gibbering Indians to buy a ticket for a native cinema in Bombay’, as they told Cudlipp; ‘the loud guffaw that astonished a group of nude African villagers when King discovered that the total equipment of their mud hat consisted of a sleeping mat, an eating bowl – and a selection of Hollywood pin-ups stuck on the wall’. In advance of his aircraft landing, his favourite meals were ordered: groundnut stew and palm oil chop. A fog of imperial condescension enveloped King’s tours. ‘He has pow-wows with the African editors and the commercial staffs, listening with patience to their problems and aspirations: with affection they call him “the father of the family”,’ Cudlipp described. ‘When the pow-wows are over, and he has listened to the politicians in their fine new buildings in the city, King wanders off on safari in the villages in his ill-fitting linen suit and floppy straw hat, talking with the chiefs in their mud huts or palaces, and giving lumps of sugar to the hordes of delighted, gurgling children who follow him around with smiles as long and broad as sliced melon.’
²³

Carnal possession was King’s only means of mitigating his emotional isolation. ‘Sex to me is suffering,’ he copied into his commonplace book. ‘This is what it means, has meant since my first pubertal longings, the fire in my head and loins, sometimes such that any woman, my mother or any other, would have helped; and what it has meant through two marriages and now into my sixties. I mean suffering identical with the pangs of Tantalus, a mental and physical hunger, a desperate longing for that which I can see, which is all around, but which I cannot touch at will – and touch, physical contact, is essential for any easement of my condition – but … which, even when perhaps briefly I can satiate or at least blunt its ferocity, returns next moment more urgent than ever.’ King was dismissive of moral panics about changes in sexual conduct, and credited his newspapers’ frankness for inducing these changes: ‘a great deal of the tut-tutting is due to the fact that working-class morals have invaded the middle classes’. Whereas men paid for illicit affairs in money, venereal infection, wifely reproaches or scandal, he admonished women that their ‘promiscuity had to be paid for’ in other ways. It was not a question of hell-fire, ‘but a woman tends to leave a bit of herself behind with each lover and at the end is so dispersed that she can never reassemble herself and become a complete woman. Perhaps this was the origin of the phrase “a ruined woman”.’
²⁴

Presumably King prided himself on leaving each of the many women with whom he had affairs reduced by their final parting. He warned his first wife before their marriage that he had no intention of fidelity, but she was too naive to understand what he meant. ‘Love-making,’ he told her, ‘is the only form of athletics that interests me in the least. It is the only handcraft too! In one form or another it is the only pleasure in life worth talking about.’ His target was to have a dozen women a year. He propositioned his wife’s twin sister, and her friends, as well as taking mistresses from his office. In the 1950s, when he invited his young daughter-in-law to holiday with him without her husband, she concluded that he had designs. He subjected his wife to invasive interrogation about her thoughts, beliefs and emotions, and criticised her replies relentlessly; but when he explained his hopes and vulnerability with unremitting emphasis, he required her responses to be wholly uncritical. King’s wife lurched into depression with occasional bouts of paranoid aggression. Following electric shock treatment, she spiralled by the mid-1950s into horrifying delusions, furies and self-loathing.
²⁵

In 1955, King began an affair with Ruth Railton, a choral conductor who a few years earlier had founded the National Youth Orchestra, which the
Daily Mirror
sponsored. Telling his adult daughter that he was going to live with another woman, he said that he could not yet give her name: ‘Let us call her Marilyn Monroe’. Railton, explains King’s biographer, ‘pictured herself occupying a bower of metaphorical fluffy clouds and pink roses from which she exuded love, kindness, sensitivity, spirituality and truth’, but in truth was ‘jealous, merciless, fiercely manipulative and an inveterate liar’. She claimed to have fought with the Dutch wartime resistance and therefore to be the object of postwar Nazi death threats; to have trained in sexual technique in a Paris brothel; to have been an Olympic rider, Dior model, ballerina and psychic consulted by police in murder cases. She convinced King that she possessed paranormal powers, and claimed that she could make herself invisible. He finally married her in October 1962, three days after his divorce was finalised. Several of his colleagues at Mirror Group applied the word ‘evil’ to her. One called her ‘a maniac’.
²⁶