My hero Donald Zec, friend of the stars with a pen dipped in venom

Of all the purveyors of purple prose working in Fleet Street in the second half of the 20th century, one man stood out. Donald Zec was The Guv’nor.

 

Zec cultivated friendships with stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. They trusted him and thus allowed Daily Mirror readers a glimpse into their gilded and occasionally chaotic or sinister lives.

 

The great showbiz reporter was a legend to me, his stories revelatory and beautifully written, albeit sometimes with a nib dipped in mamba venom.

 

But for all his entrée into Hollywood, Zec, who died in 2021, aged 102, made his way in Fleet Street exactly as the rest of us did.

 

After a spell selling advertising space for the Floor Covering Review, he joined the Evening Standard as a messenger and became, whether he liked it or not, a member of the NATSOPA union.

 

One morning, he recalls in his memoir Put the Knife in Gently, he turned up to find everyone on strike. “Still new to the game, I attempted to enter the building,” he writes.

 

But one striker had other ideas. “Where’re you going?” he inquired.

 

“To work,” said Zec.

 

“Oh no you’re not.”

 

“Who says I’m not?”

 

The F-O-fucking-C, that’s who!”

 

That was Zec’s first insight into the workings of Fleet Street. The second came even as he wrangled with the NATSOPA official.

 

Lord Beaverbrook – an Edward G Robinson lookalike with intimidating eyebrows, according to Zec – arrived at the Shoe Lane offices and seeing the strikers gathered, asked an aide: “What do they want?”

 

“More money,” came the reply.

 

“Give it to ‘em,” said the Press magnate.

 

Journalists, Zec discovered, worked with a passion reinforced by what seemed to be the greatest concentration of pubs in a single street. “I attended more funerals for prematurely deceased colleagues than I care to recall,” he writes.

 

“The alcoholic intake of some of them is still talked about in their favourite hostelries. (The expected life span of journalists was once announced by the actuarial profession to be fifty two and a half, which caused a split-second run on tomato juice).”

 

Zec, grandson of a Jewish refugee from Odesa in Ukraine, was fascinated by the contributors to the Londoner’s Diary, who included such luminaries as Michael Foot, Malcolm Muggeridge, Robert Bruce Lockhart and Harold Nicholson.

 

“They generally wore horn-rimmed spectacles, hairy tweed jackets and corduroys and called each other ‘old boy’ a lot,” writes Zec. “Just to hover in the room where they worked – or plotted – was instructive. I hovered and learned a lot.”

 

He still wasn’t a reporter, though, and so he headed for Fetter Lane and the Daily Mirror. It was 1938 and he landed a three-day trial on the paper “at the end of which – no decision forthcoming – I stayed for 40 years.”

 

His first assignment was a night club fire in Soho. “I clacked out 200 words on an old Underwood typewriter which began as I recall with the turgid introduction, ‘Firemen were called to extinguish a blaze at a night club in Old Compton Street yesterday…’

 

“The news editor read no further and slowly shook his head. ‘This is shit,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Let Dudley Hawkins have a go at it’.

 

“Five minutes of interrogation by this old campaigner produced the following rewrite: ‘Clad only in her scanties, a blonde 22-years-old nightclub hostess climbed along a 30ft parapet in a Soho fire last night to rescue her pet cat Timothy.’

 

“Here, in a single sentence of soaring hyperbole, were all the elements of popular journalism: Sex, heroism, drama and pet worship. On these lively imperatives, popular journalism (and not a few noble proprietors) have prospered mightily over the years.”

 

Zec was one of 11 children in the family. His only brother was Philip Zec, a talented cartoonist who also spent many years with the Mirror and drew the famous peace cartoon published on May 8, 1945.

 

It showed a bandaged Tommy holding out a laurel wreath bearing the words “Victory and peace in Europe”. The caption read: “Here you are, don’t lose it again.”

 

Donald wrote news and politics (and books) but he was best known for his showbiz reporting. One of the stars he most admired was Liz Taylor, who once told him “with infinite sweetness” in the back seat of her Rolls-Royce in Rome: “You know, you’re a shit, Donald, dear.”

 

This, he says, is high in the canon of Liz Taylor compliments. He returned the affection, writing in his memoir: “Twice I was hauled in off a golf course to write her obituary only for the patient to emerge from a coma, flutter her eyelashes and ask for champagne.

 

“She endured 19 operations. She suffered the emotional havoc of widowhood and a bruising continuum of eight marriages not to mention the life-threatening addiction to alcohol and pain-killing drugs.

 

“Yet here she is, as provocative as ever, a phenomenon of bright and defiant womanhood.”

 

And just to prove that he has an ear for a quote, Zec reports the remark by Taylor’s then husband, the producer Mike Todd: “Let me tell ya. Any minute this dame spends out of bed is wasted, totally wasted.”

 

Zec was and remains a hero of mine. I doubt we will ever see his like again.

 

*****

 

Congratulations to Vadim Goss, this year’s winner of the Guild of St Bride’s journalism bursary, who might benefit from reading the story of Donald Zec’s stellar career.

 

He wins £4,000, which will help to make ends meet when he attends a postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London.

 

Goss, 20, from Dartmouth, Devon, is a graduate of Durham University, where he was Editor-in-Chief of his college newspaper.

 

He has lofty ambitions to be a political journalist and “a columnist for a leading broadsheet newspaper”. (Are you listening, Chris Evans?)

 

Goss is principled, too. He reveals he was drawn to journalism after watching Citizenfour, a documentary film by Laura Poitras about Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal.

 

“Ultimately,” he says, “it is my ambition as a journalist to illuminate injustice and correct it.”

 

Fine words and high ideals. But to misquote Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, no ideal survives first contact with the news editor.

 

I can hear Mike Parry, of this parish, now. “I don’t give a fook about injustice, mate. Where’s yer fooking copy? The night editor’s screaming for it.”

 

No harm in setting your sights high, but a spell as a general news reporter might serve to clarify the journalist’s real world imperatives for Goss.

 

And incidentally, with a name like that, surely he’s a shoo-in for the diary page.

 

*****

 

The world is full of lawyers. There are far too many of them and it is time they were culled, rather in the way the deer herds of Richmond Park are periodically thinned out.

 

Normally I would suggest that we start with The Toolmaker’s Son, that handsome stag with the 12-point antlers and the expense account for Montague Burton (tailor of taste, out at the shoulders and in at the waist).

 

But last week a new contender hove into view. Judge Lorna Findlay was hearing a case at an industrial tribunal for constructive unfair dismissal.

 

Abimbola Idowu, a night manager at a YMCA hostel in Ealing, West London, sued the charity, which had accused her of spending £120 by printing out 750 pages of past exam questions for her teenage son. She claimed she had been targeted and treated like a criminal.

 

Idowu had worked at the hostel alone at night since 2015. In 2021 someone raised concerns that the office was “going through a lot of stationery”. Managers investigated and found that Idowu had used 505 sheets on one day and 245 on another.

 

The tribunal heard that 312 were printed in black and white and 447 in full colour – at a total cost of £120.69. Idowu admitted printing past papers for her son on both days but insisted she had not used colour.

 

She said that her home printer was broken and she did not think that using YMCA resources for her son would be such a “big deal”.

 

Judge Findlay ruled that YMCA managers had not investigated adequately and awarded Idowu £23,000.

 

What an upside down world we live in. Idowu admitted using the printer for her own purposes – arguably a criminal act, though clearly not the most heinous.

 

The charity she worked for thought that merited disciplinary action and issued a first written warning. And for this she is handed £23,000?

 

I despair. Come on, Judge Findlay, is this justice? Where’s the common sense?

 

And where’s Lord Denning when you need him?

 *****

“Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.” – Spike Milligan

RICHARD DISMORE

17 September 2024