Years and years ago, when Les Hinton, author of An Untidy Life was on the second (maybe, third) rung of the ladder he eventually climbed to the very top of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, we joked about writing our memoirs. Back then, Les, as president of Murdoch Magazines, had just returned from Paris where he’d met with multi-millionaire Daniel Filipacchi, of Hachette Filipacchi, Murdoch’s French publishing partner.
Les returned with some interesting stories, one of which involved a trip to Filipacchi’s powder room where a small Picasso hung “low on the wall.” It had amused –and worried– Les that the valuable piece of art hung “easily within splashing distance.”
“If I ever write a memoir,” he’d added, “the title will have to be Pissing With Picasso.”
As it turns out, that is not the title of his just-published memoir, but is the title of one chapter in the book. Of course, at the time, almost 40 years ago, Les couldn’t have known that “pissing with Picasso” would be only one of many highlights in his future career.
Book Launch Party
He had only recently left Star Magazine (described in the memoir as a “manic weekly sold in supermarket checkout lanes offering celebrity gossip of inconsistent accuracy”) which is where our paths had crossed. Les was editor-in-chief and my boss at the Star when I was news editor of the publication. Les was a good, fair boss, and back then when Murdoch owned only a few newspapers and magazines in the U.S., it was an exciting, fun time to work on a Murdoch publication. Which is probably why so many of us from that tight knit group showed up for the memoir’s launch party at Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side of Manhattan earlier this week.
Not To Be Missed
I definitely wasn’t going to miss it even though it meant flying from Palm Beach to NYC and back again — all in the space of 24 hours (9 of them spent in travel door to door!) Wine and beer flowed freely in the oak-beamed, brick-walled private party room, but that was less the attraction than catching up with former colleagues and associates, most of whom, like me, had started working for Rupert Murdoch when the media mogul was just beginning to make inroads into the U.S in the 1980s.
Humble Beginnings
Les’s story is a remarkable one. His rise in the company over a period of 52 years parallels Murdoch’s ascent to global media domination. But, in a way, his story is the more astounding one because he, unlike Murdoch, did not inherit a newspaper. Born in Bootle, near Liverpool (hence the title, The Bootle Boy, of the U.K. edition) he was 15 years old with no “useful” education when he decided he wanted a life in newspapers.
An Untidy Life chronicles his journey from the humblest of beginnings as a copy boy in Australia (where his parents settled) to London’s Fleet Street (via a month-long sea voyage), to New York, then to Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood, back to London as head of News International, before eventually returning to New York as chief executive at the venerated Wall Street Journal.
A Fine Place To Be
For those of us who, like Les, became journalists, reporters, and correspondents, his story allows us to share his nostalgia for newsrooms of the past. This is how he describes stepping into his first newsroom in Adelaide: “I walked into the glamorous blue haze and down the ranks of cigarette-burned desks, heard the hammer and ring of massed typewriters, smelt the musty blend of newsprint and ink, and discovered how a newspaper building trembles to the rhythm of its great basement presses. It seemed like a fine place to be.”
He reminds us of boozy nights in Fleet Street pubs, in Costello’s “a home-away-from-home” on 44th Street, in New York City — and recalls the cardinal rule in those days before cell phones: “Never go anywhere without making sure the office can reach you, not to a pub or a restaurant or cinema. And when you are on the road check in every hour in case something significant is taking place nearby.”
For those simply curious about his life as the right-hand man of one of the most powerful media moguls of the twentieth century, he weaves a story of glamour and excitement, and rich rewards.
O.J. Was A Neighbor
From around the 1980s, Les (now 74 and retired) was always to be found wherever Murdoch was making new acquisitions. “Newspapers that didn’t like Murdoch described me in unappealing ways,” writes Les. “I was his hitman, consigliore, henchman, capo or, divinely, his ‘representative on earth.’
In 1992, after Murdoch’s acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox, Murdoch asked Les to take charge of Fox’s TV Station Group in Hollywood. Les moved himself and his family into a “grand but ramshackle” house in Brentwood –where it turned out his neighbor was O.J. Simpson.
Les writes: “His housekeeper started coming to our house to sit in the kitchen and cry and talk about the arguments O.J. and Nicole were having. ‘They’re going to kill each other,’ she said, but we knew it was only a figure of speech.” However, the Hintons were still living in the house when “the world’s most famous car chase (with O.J. in the Bronco) ended right next door.”
Hobnobbing With Royalty
Credit: Max Nash AFP/Getty
In London as chief executive officer of News International, Les hobnobbed with royalty. Princess Di called him, and describing herself as a “damsel in distress” begged Les to do something about the photographers who were hounding her. (He could not because, as he told her, he had no control over the paparazzi.
He ate at Buckingham Palace (“never was duller food served in a grander setting.”), He got to know Murdoch better. He describes an occasion when he was called upon to host an impromptu dinner party for Murdoch, Tony Blair, then the U.K. Prime Minister, and their wives at his Hampstead Heath home. The dinner was so impromptu in fact that Mary, Les’ first wife, had time only to run to Marks and Spencer to pick up some prepared dinners which she then heated up for the guests in a microwave.
“Balls Bigger Than Brains”
Snippets and insights about Murdoch abound in this memoir. Les recalls making the mistake of telling Murdoch one day that all was quiet. The media mogul retorted, “there’s no such thing as a quiet day. Some are more challenging than others, that’s all.”
Immediately following his wedding to second wife Wendi, Murdoch told Les, “you will not be hearing from me for a month. [But] fewer than 48 hours after his pledge Rupert called from his honeymoon villa in the hills of Tuscany. Two days after that I was on board his Gulfstream jet heading to Italy to talk business. ”
Waiting for money to be wired in from banks to finalize the purchase of TV Guide for $3 billion, Les observed Murdoch “picking at his cuticles till they bled.”
He describes Murdoch as a “generous sacker,” adding “more than once, I proposed a settlement for a departing executive, and he instructed me to improve upon it.”
He reveals that Murdoch viewed American journalists as “self-absorbed and elitist” — which is why he liked the Fox TV show A Current Affair (“sent from the underbelly of journalism to swing a wrecking ball through their high ethics and fine taste.”)
But, apparently he didn’t always hold his British editors in high regard either, telling Les to keep an eye on Piers Morgan, describing the then editor of the News of the World as having “balls bigger than his brains.
An Untidy Life (Scribe US) is full of such anecdotal, gossipy scenes interwoven with a thoughtful examination of the changing face of the news business in the digital age. It’s an unpretentious must-read evoking golden memories for those who crossed paths with the author, and offering inspiration to those who can only wish they had.
What wonderful stories. Sounds like a remarkable individual.
Agreed, Greg. He is also the embodiment of the phrase “readers are leaders.” Where he says he had no “useful” education, he writes how as a teenager he read everything he could get his hands on. It’s quite an impressive list!