Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton

By Sandra Hall

Scandal, politics, power -- and a very private man
tHE RISE OF AUStRALIA'S MAStER MUCKRAKER FOR OVER tHIRtY YEARS, HE WAS ONE OF tHE MOSt POWERFUL MEN IN AUStRALIA In 1922 Ezra Norton inherited the newspaper truth from his father, John. Norton Senior was a fiery polemicist and fierce drinker who used the paper to castigate his enemies and indulge his biases. He even fought out his differences with his wife in its pages by publishing their divorce proceedings. truth and later its stablemate the Daily Mirror made Ezra Norton one of the key media figures of his day. His notorious feud with Frank Packer led to a fist fight at Randwick racecourse. And his newspapers adopted and promoted his father's muckraking style to turn the Norton brand of tabloid journalism into an institution. Yet for someone who profited from others' scandals, Ezra Norton was an unusually private man. Sandra Hall's thoroughly researched and lively account of Ezra Norton's life gives a fascinating insight into this influential Australian figure. In doing so, it traces the evolution of tabloid newspapers and the Australia in which the Nortons thrived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730400684

Sandra Hall

Sandra Hall is well known for her film reviews. In 2006 Fourth Estate published Sandra’s novel, Beyond the Break, which was longlisted for the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She has also written a history of Australian television.

Book preview

In memory of James Hall

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE ‘Nortomania’ is Born

CHAPTER TWO ‘John Norton’s ’Appy ’Ome’

CHAPTER THREE Christ, Caesar and Napoleon

CHAPTER FOUR Ezra’s Birthright

CHAPTER FIVE ‘The People’s Paper’

Photographic Insert

CHAPTER SIX The Maverick Versus the Buccaneer

CHAPTER SEVEN The War Years

CHAPTER EIGHT ‘The Sun or the Mirror!’

CHAPTER NINE Tabloid Man

CHAPTER TEN Ezra Leaves the Building

CHAPTER ELEVEN ‘The Only Religion to Die In’—Oscar Wilde

Epilogue

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

I grew up in a tabloid household in Sydney in the 1950s. We read the evening newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which my father bought on the way home from work, while my aunt and uncle, who shared the same Sydney working-class background as my parents, took the Mirror’s duller and less raffish competitor, the Sun.

I never knew the cause of this distinction, except that it probably came down to political differences. The Mirror’s steadfast populism would have suited my father, who despised politicians of all stripes yet grudgingly voted Labor, while the comparatively phlegmatic views of the Sun would not have upset my aunt, who’d been heard to make the occasional semi-complimentary remark about RG Menzies—or Pig-iron Bob, as my father always called him. Twenty years had passed since Menzies had acquired the nickname as a result of his dispute with waterside workers who had refused to load scrap iron for Japan, believing it would be used for the Japanese war machine. And still my father hadn’t forgotten.

But what really mattered was that none of us were regular readers of the Sydney Morning Herald or listeners to the ABC. Partly this came down to practicality. My father started work at seven-thirty in the morning, rode a bicycle to get there and could not have fitted a morning newspaper into his schedule if he had wanted to. But even if he could have, he would have bought the tabloid Daily Telegraph. In his opinion, broadsheets like the Herald were unnecessarily awkward to handle. It was as if they subliminally announced their claim to superiority with the largeness of their pages. If you wanted their high-quality information, you had to work hard for it by first folding these pages into a series of manageable squares then ferreting for readable nuggets of news amid grey type and undersized headlines.

The ABC carried the same connotations. It meant classical music, which my parents did not much enjoy, long, decorous pauses, causing you to fear that the radio had died, and announcers who sounded as if they had been instructed to deliver elocution lessons with each news bulletin.

So I was not an Argonauts child. We did not even listen to Blue Hills. Our radio world was the one we found on the commercial stations—populated by personalities such as the bombastic pundit Eric Baume, the gossipy interviewer and commentator Andrea, the quick-witted comic and quiz master Jack Davey, the Sunday night Caltex Radio Theatre and, on precious sick days home from school, the daytime serials, which ran for three hours from nine in the morning.

Saturdays brought a slight adjustment to this routine, for we did buy the Saturday Herald— a token, I suppose, of the leisurely mood prevailing at the weekend. And on Sundays, we had all the papers—even the Mirror’s scandalous cousin, Truth, which taught me the meaning of the terms ‘co-respondent’ and ‘mental cruelty’.

It was a powerful diet. The atrocities of war, pogrom and concentration camp were made even more terrifying because I first came upon them, spelt out in short sentences, highlighted in bold in the Mirror’s concession to culture, its ‘Historical Page’. After a particularly thorough reading of the paper, it sometimes happened that the barriers between news and features would dissolve in the night and the crimes of Stalin and Henry VIII would appear in my dreams, mixed up with those of other Mirror favourites like the bank robber Darcy Dugan and Mrs Grills, the thallium murderer.

At school, too, there was cultural overlap. I fancied that our Latin teacher was probably a Mirror and Truth reader. One clue lay in her eccentric custom of covering her copy of The Aeneid in a jacket made out of newspaper. The other was in the ‘r’-rolling relish she brought to her readings of Virgil’s bloodthirstiest passages.

When the time came to leave school, I had already decided I wanted to be a journalist. I was in love with words and storytelling, yet had no confidence in my ability to write creatively. I was also ambitious to see the world which, I believed, was what a journalist’s life was all about. To get to this point, I knew I would have to find my way on to a grander publication than the Sydney tabloids, but I was realistic enough to know that the tabloids were where I would have to start. So in December 1958, while my friends prepared for university and teachers’ college, I took a job as a messenger in a newspaper office—the first step on the way to becoming a junior reporter, otherwise known as a cadet. The job came my way because my father knew somebody who knew somebody in personnel and, sadly, it was not on the Mirror, but the Sun.

Nonetheless, it was in the same down-market part of the city. The Mirror and its stablemate Truth occupied a former chocolate factory in Kippax Street near Central railway station, while the Sun, along with the rest of the Fairfax press, was in Jones Street, behind Broadway, housed in an unlovely rectangle of grey cement, which was said to have been built without the aid of an architect. Once inside, you could believe it. There were cramped cubbyholes paradoxically alongside large expanses of empty floor space. And if you ran errands all over the building, as I would soon be doing, you spent your day alternatively shivering and sweating as you moved in and out of the air-conditioning.

I knew very little about the people who owned newspapers, except for Frank Packer of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph , the only proprietor who seemed to live up to the bullying, buccaneering ideal embodied in the words ‘press baron’. We had all been told the story of the boy he’d fired before discovering that he was only in the building to deliver a telegram. We had also heard about him storming into his employees’ offices and turning off the lights during fits of irritation at the size of the company’s electricity bill. In contrast, our company chairman, Warwick Fairfax, remained a remote, patrician figure, briefly glimpsed as he climbed out of his chauffeur-driven motor car en route to the lift that travelled exclusively to the executive floor.

Otherwise, the only sign we received from upstairs came from the weekly walk-through performed by the general manager, Angus McLachlan. Looking like one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s more wintry characters, he would emerge, dressed in a black suit, from a side corridor during the doziest part of Friday afternoon, make a stately progress across the editorial floor and disappear again, having spoken to no one.

We knew even less about those in charge of our competitors, Truth and the Mirror, which, I learnt later, had been bought the year before I started at the Sun by a company called O’Connell Pty Ltd, run by a team of accountants and lawyers. Our ignorance of them was understandable. Much stranger was our lack of knowledge about the man who had sold the papers to them. Ezra Norton was the son of John Norton, the notoriously foul-mouthed politician, polemicist and muckraker who had taken over the newly established Truth in 1890. He quickly turned it into a success with a cocktail of crime, sex, politics and his own ranting brand of crusading journalism—a tradition that Ezra would carry on in a less flamboyant form.

As I now know, John Norton was not alone in pursuing such a course. When he and Truth first fell in love with one another, they became part of a wave which was sweeping through the presses of the Western world. It was a time when the newspaper industry was being given new energy by technical innovation and by the entrepreneurial talents of a succession of tycoons with an urge for power and a taste for the sensational. And while the politics of these press magnates varied dramatically, yet they all proudly boasted that they were out to serve the working man and woman.

Truth and John Norton made the same claim. What distinguished them from their British and American counterparts was their peculiarly Australian attitude to the world and their country’s place in it. Norton was a maverick with a prodigious intelligence and a larrikin spirit. His innate anti-authoritarianism made him highly critical of the British monarchy and the Protestant Church and quick to criticise the shortcomings of Britain’s bureaucracies. He vehemently embraced the xenophobia that was rife in Australia post-Federation, thanks to the country’s geographical position as a relatively isolated white colonial outpost close to the countries of South East Asia, and he had a great talent for invective, which was frequently exacerbated by his alcoholism. He abhorred the straitlaced and the puritanical, and he built Truth’s coverage of the divorce court into one of the paper’s primary attractions. He was also a fan of the stunt but they were stunts in which he himself was the star performer—usually in court. He was frequently required to defend himself against defamation actions taken out against the paper.

Four years after his death in 1916, Ezra took over Truth. Twenty-one years after that, he founded the Daily Mirror. And while he maintained the strident voice and lurid tone of his father’s journalism, he proved to be a very different character. Although he firmly dictated the papers’ policies, he left the writing of their editorials to his editors. Nor did he make speeches. Rather, he cultivated a reputation as a gruff, enigmatic figure who did his utmost to stay out of the public eye.

Nonetheless, he relished the power his papers gave him and was passionate about the things they stood for—whether it was a campaign for better public housing or a crusade pushing for more hygienic methods of milk delivery. For the papers were taken up with the immediate practicalities of life rather than grand political questions. Above all, the Nortons felt, they had to keep in touch with their readers, many of whom could not afford to think beyond the here and now.

The Norton papers may have been unsavoury, but they also took risks in pursuing their owner’s vendettas and obsessions, and for a young reporter, there were definite advantages to be had from working on one of his papers. You were quickly schooled in the libel and defamation laws, and if you were sure of your facts, you could count on management to support you once it came down to the wire. Like his father, Ezra was a muckraker of nagging, if idiosyncratic, persistence.

The Mirror was also a paper where women could move up in the newsroom. Mirror women covered World War II, the courts and state parliament, and learnt to become doorstepping reporters of great tenacity. The Sydney Morning Herald, on the other hand, did not take women on as news reporters. During my time on the Sun, the only woman in the Herald’s newsroom was Kathleen Commins, the paper’s formidable assistant to the chief-of-staff. She had been a tennis and cricket champion at university, and in the 1930s was taken on by the Herald as a sports reporter. This, however, did not qualify her for a desk in the department. Although she answered only to the sports editor, she was made to sit with the rest of the female staff, who wrote for the women’s pages.¹ Only during World War II, when manpower was scarce, did the barriers come down to make her the first woman on the Herald to report from state and federal parliaments. Decades were to pass before there would be another one.

So the Mirror and Sun gave women more opportunities. But the main attraction of tabloid life was the atmosphere, which has long been much celebrated by those who were there, for its larrikinism and its knockabout culture, and while they have romanticised it, they have not exaggerated. That would be impossible.

I had come from an academic high school where the governing philosophy was succinctly summed up in the school motto—Labor Omnia Vincit— which we translated as Work Conquers All. Yet here I was in a place where the scallywag was glorified, and hard work, rather than overcoming all obstacles, was frequently irrelevant. Most Sun reporters experienced settling down diligently to type out fillers for the next day’s paper only to have the chief-of-staff come along, rip their copy paper out of one the typewriters and rush the machine over to the other side of the room because the star of the moment needed it for a scoop.

The word ‘scoop’ said it all. The aim of all tabloid reporters was to swoop down on a story, scoop it up in their beaks and deliver it hot to their editors before the opposition got even a sniff. Then they would go back to drinking with the contacts who had made the scoop possible. So diligence had little to do with it. What mattered was personality and knowing how to exercise it. Even the act of putting news together could turn into an involuntary public performance. Reporters covering a breaking story would be sent out in a car equipped with a two-way radio so that they could dictate their reports to a copytaker while they were travelling. Their voices, crackling with static and the strain of composing stories on the run, could be heard all over the editorial floor.

I was sixteen when I joined the Sun’s band of editorial assistants—known as copy boys and copy girls. I was assigned to the sub-editors’ room, which satisfied all my preconceived romantic notions about newspapers which I had been nurturing by reading the autobiography of Arthur Christiansen, editor of London’s Daily Express . This was a book which reeked subliminally of nicotine, printers’ ink and the sweaty-palmed panic of living to deadlines, and as I took my place in the subs’ room at seven-thirty each morning, I felt as if I’d stepped straight into its pages.

Waves of cigarette smoke billowed in the dusty air, which also carried the whiff of hops from the brewery on the other side of Broadway. Both the elderly cables subs who manned the foreign desk near the window wore green eyeshades of a kind familiar from every newspaper movie I had ever seen, and except for the occasional howl from the layout sub, enraged by having to redraw the front page yet again, conversation was restricted to a baritone grunting.

I sat on a chair in the corner, happily answering to shouts of ‘Boy!’ by leaping up and running across the room to collect another scrap of copy paper and stuff it into a metal canister. This was then thrust into the chute, a rattling contraption rigged with a series of pulleys, and sent hurtling down to the printers on the floor below.

After lunch the pressure was off and it was safe to bring out one of the Joyce Cary or DH Lawrence novels I was reading for the part-time Sydney University arts course that I was never to finish. This display of literary interest earned me no points with the subs, who were quick to banish any thought that a degree would be of use to me in newspapers. I would learn on the job or not at all.

My big promotion came when I was assigned, with another copy girl, to monitor the radio in the police rounds room. This was a rare privilege. The job was usually done by a boy, and police rounds, as well as being the paper’s nerve centre, was the perfect place in which to watch its stars at work. But the first instruction I was given puzzled me. Most of the calls the police received, I was told, related to domestic disputes and we never followed them up because even when the police checked them out they didn’t lead to anything. Why not? Because a woman being beaten by her husband seldom pressed charges. From this I realised that Truth’s divorce court coverage had one redeeming feature: clearly, domestic abuse was going on every night all over the city, yet only in Truth was it ever talked about.

The chief police reporter was Noel Bailey, a rotund, easy-going character whose smoothly rolling gait gave him the appearance of a soccer ball wearing a hat. He was so well connected to his sources that even though he was right at the centre of the Sun’s ferocious daily contest with the Mirror , he always seemed eligible for further amusement. One day he picked up the telephone to a householder who had just seen a lizard swim out of his kitchen tap. After telling the man to keep the lizard exactly where it was, Bailey ordered up a car and a photographer yet didn’t seem put out when the man rang back five minutes later with the sad news that the lizard was no more because the cat had got it.

Police rounds’ other star, Steve Dunleavy, was a less relaxed character. Once you looked past the quiff and the spivvy cherry-red velvet waistcoat, it was possible to see that he was handsome in an old-fashioned, straight-nosed, movie-star style, but at twenty-three he had already attained an air of world-weariness. With some modification of his ocker brashness, you could have cast him in a Roman epic—as, say, a young emperor already suffering orgy fatigue. Instead, he worked the 5.30 am shift and was generally supposed to have come to the office direct from the party of the night before. ‘Keep away from Steve,’ was the warning routinely given to every new girl by the copytakers, who collectively served as the editorial floor’s Delphic oracle.

Lucky copy boys graduated to the status of first-year cadet in around six months. For girls, it usually took eighteen months. The chosen few would sit a brief examination in which they were asked to write an account of an imagined news event. I think I was required to cobble together a dozen or so paragraphs about a near-shipwreck. And shortly afterwards, I was given the happy news: I would now join the other first-year cadets serving as cheap labour for the paper’s service pages. We cut and pasted up copy for the television guide; we sat in the New South Wales Lotteries Office, scribbling down the winning numbers as they were drawn out of the barrel; we went to the fish markets to take down details of the catch or to the stock exchange to list the stock prices. And occasionally, if there was time, we tagged along with the senior reporters as they worked state parliament, the town hall, the courts, the airport and the shipping round.

The shipping round offered particular excitements. At dawn, we gathered with the opposition on Stannards Wharf at Walsh Bay and were ferried out to Sydney Heads to meet whatever passenger liner was arriving. There we had to climb a rope ladder thrown over the ship’s side, the women struggling to maintain both balance and modesty in straight skirts and high heels. The purser would brief us on passengers of interest and if, as we hoped, they weren’t interesting enough, we’d skip the interview and head straight for the complimentary ship’s breakfast.

Covering Central Court was another favourite with its own rituals. On Monday mornings, prostitutes up on weekend soliciting charges would form a long line to go before the judge and receive the customary £5 fine. And on Saturday mornings, we cadets were trusted to monitor proceedings alone because the extensiveness of the weekend sports coverage meant that, short of a courtroom massacre, the paper would not be wanting a story. Not that there were many fit to print. ‘This next case won’t interest you, miss’, was the line adopted by a pink-faced constable, anxious to spare female reporters the details of what had gone on the night before between a drunken agricultural labourer and an unfortunate farmyard animal.

At the airport, too, I was often relieved not to have to write anything. One Saturday, a party from something called ELDO arrived from Western Australia on their way back to London. ELDO? What was ELDO? After painfully teasing out the words European Launcher Development Organisation, another eighteen-year-old cadet and I self-importantly led the group of sober suits to the lounge upstairs so we could conduct our interview in quiet surroundings. They grew even quieter during the long, tongue-tied quarter-hour which followed as we failed to think of any coherent questions to ask.

If anything typified the attitudinal difference between the Sun and the Mirror , it was the Sun’s fondness for ‘the do-up’—a picture story pinned on an incident or issue which, although bereft of news value, could demonstrate that the paper had a heart, a sense of humour, a capacity for indignation, or at least a sense of tradition. Hence, its seasonal updates on the annual flea plague in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, the never-ending job of repainting the Harbour Bridge, and the plight of homeless dogs taken in by the RSPCA.

The legendary ‘do-up’ of my time on the Sun— and I use the word ‘legendary’ because nobody I know can now remember if it actually happened or if our imaginations have invented and embellished it in true ‘do-up’ style—was a fish story. The rumour was that the Parramatta River had become so polluted that fish could no longer live in it and were committing suicide by hurling themselves onto its banks. To record this environmental tragedy, the paper’s star colour writer was sent out with a photographer, but had the forethought to call in at a fish shop on the way in case the suicidal fish failed to perform in time for the next edition. This meant he was able to crouch down near the water, unwrap his parcel of already dead flathead, and toss them onto the bank while the photographer went to work.

A ‘do-up’ gave me my first by-line, when I was sent to a shopping centre at Neutral Bay to interview a man who had volunteered, as part of a charity fundraising stunt, to spend several days sitting at the top of a flagpole. This wasn’t as precarious as it sounded. A platform had been built to accommodate him, and a ladder put in place for the delivery of food and drink. And it was this ladder I climbed, carrying a notebook and pen, and wearing the usual high heels, while the photographer, who had been told to get a shot of my legs, gave that idea up and concentrated on trying to get my distant figure into focus.

But what worried me more than anything was having to ask the pole-sitter about his lavatory arrangements. Why this ludicrously ladylike inhibitedness? It was part of my general reluctance to ask hard questions. Because beneath my fascination with the tabloid life lay the realisation that I was not cut out for it. I worried that one day I would be the person sent to ‘deathknock’ the family of a murder or accident victim. And instead of being envious, I was glad not to be in the shoes of one of my friends, another cadet, who went off blithely every morning to work on the celebrity divorce story of the day.

I did ask about the pole-sitter’s bucket, but not long afterwards, when sent to interview a lottery winner, I couldn’t bring myself to check the rumour that he was related to Graeme Thorne, the Sydney schoolboy who had been kidnapped and murdered a few years before—a crime provoked by his parents’ win in another lottery. When I got back to the office without having put this crucial question, I had to go through the business of ringing the man back and asking him while the news editor sat on my desk urging me on and the rest of the newsroom pretended not to listen.

My next failure took place at the airport, where I was sent one afternoon to interview an Aboriginal woman who was coming home after studying abroad. As usual, there was no time to stop off at the clippings library, and an hour spent with this enormously articulate and relentlessly solemn woman left me struggling with a long, academic, non-Sun story about the infinite benefits of education.

At home later, I shuffled through my pages of notes looking desperately for an angle the Sun would find newsworthy. That night, she went on television and gave a galvanising interview on the injustices of the laws restricting the movement of Aborigines living on missions and government reserves. Even the news room could see a headline which invoked comparison with South Africa’s apartheid laws and the next morning in the office, after a lot of hand-wringing and head-scratching, the sub-editors glued together a summary of her television interview with a few scraps from my leaden string of paragraphs and got something into the paper.

This was far more demoralising than any of my earlier humiliations, for all along I had been secretly feeling that I was better than this tabloid I worked for and that one day I would float up to my rightful level in journalism. Yet when it came to the point of publishing a story really worth telling, the paper had outdone me. It had wanted to run a serious piece, and I had failed to get it because I hadn’t posed the right questions.

I finally made my escape from the tabloid world when the new national daily, the Australian , was launched in Canberra in 1964. Here was a serious paper of aspiration run by an apparently young, idealistic proprietor whose models were the great Fleet Street and New York broadsheets. Rupert Murdoch had long been trying to expand his newspaper interests from his base in Adelaide, but until the retirement of Ezra Norton, there had been no opening. And even then, he had to wait for a year, for John Fairfax and Sons were so wary of him that they had made a deal with Norton, setting up the anonymous-sounding O’Connell Pty Ltd, to take over Truth and the Mirror with Fairfax finance. This was to be a temporary arrangement. The papers were to be sold on as soon as Fairfax found a buyer more to its liking. But after a year, the patience of Rupert Henderson, Fairfax’s formidable managing director, had run out, and he negotiated a sale to Murdoch, thinking Murdoch had not amassed enough capital to become a real threat.² Little did he know. And little did we know—those of us who went to work on the Australian— for Murdoch turned out not to be the broadsheet man we had thought him to be.

Certainly he would persevere with the Australian against difficult odds. He would also go on to acquire two of the world’s most respected broadsheets, the London Times and the Sunday Times . But the tabloids have remained a particular love. His purchase of News of the World in 1969 and the Sun in the same year spearheaded his entry into British newspapers, and in the United States he also began purchasing tabloids, staffed in the main by British and Australian journalists, one of whom was Steve Dunleavy. When he bought the New York Post , Dunleavy worked there too, as did many other Sydney tabloid people, sexing up its headlines, sensationalising its crime reporting and junking the liberal politics of the Post’s former owner, Dorothy Schiff, for the clamorous populism that characterised all the Murdoch tabloids and would later be reflected in his television news networks.

In short, he began adapting and exporting the Australian tabloid style, mingling its garish colours with the tabloid styles of other countries to create media with