GLAMOROUS: Sandy Fawkes

IT COULD have been a scene from a Hollywood movie. A man in his thirties with rugged features and red wavy hair sits on a bar stool in the corner of the Holiday Inn bar drinking Manhattans.

 He nods to the woman who has just entered. She oozes glamour, wearing a sparkly black tight sweater, black pleated skirt, stockings and high-heel shoes. She ignores him but the serial killer who has recently raped, strangled, shot and beaten to death 17 women, isn’t put off. He asks her to dance. Finally, she relents, and he holds her close as they spin around the room.

 Later that night, she turns to him in bed and giggles: “For all I know you could be the Boston Strangler.” He laughs too.

 That woman was our very own feature writer Sandy Fawkes.

 Sandy was born on June 30, 1929, and found abandoned by the Grand Union Canal. She never knew her real parents but was named Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle, and dumped from one foster home to another. Sometimes she suffered abuse.

 She loved painting and went to the Camberwell School of Art. Not long afterwards she met and married Willy Fawkes, a clarinettist who became a Daily Mail cartoonist, in 1949.

 They had four children, three daughters and a son. He still lives, as do two of the girls, but the third died in infancy. Sandy was so devastated she began drinking in Soho pubs and her marriage did not survive.

 But friends told how she could always shrug disaster off and found success as a fashion editor for the British Vanity Fair, before joining the Daily Mail and then the Daily Express, where she moved into feature journalism.

 Soon she was battling to outdrink, outlast, and outwit the mostly male hacks. Some of us can remember her around the office in the evening, returning from the pub or preparing to go off to drinking clubs. Loud, brassy, always dolled up, she made her presence felt across the newsroom.

 Then in the early hours of 1974, Sandy landed in Atlanta as a freelancer. She had spent the day in Washington on a fruitless quest to interview former Vice President Spiro Agnew. In town, she checked into the local newspaper to see if she could get shown around. But no one was available yet on the Atlanta Constitution.

 And so, she did her next favourite thing. Fate took a hand, and she turned up at the bar of the Holiday Inn and met her serial killer. That man was Lester Daryl Golden, and they had a whirlwind affair that lasted months, as his victim’s bodies kept piling up. He reportedly fell in love with her, but she never thought he was very good at sex, and finally moved on.

KILLER: Lester Daryl Golden, real name Paul John Knowles

 By the time he was arrested after a shootout involving multiple officers from several law enforcement agencies, helicopters, and dogs, Golden had killed two more people. His total then was 20 or perhaps more.

 “To think that I had been in his arms,” wrote Sandy. “How could I have made such a mistake? Then, like hot metal flooding my veins, came the memory of that first morning, the sense of evil in the room that had thrust me headlong to the door to get out quickly as he slept. Good God, I had known.” But Sandy went back, and he became her lover, showing her the city.

 Sandy wrote a book about her affair in 1977. She died in 2005 aged 76. Golden was shot dead trying to escape from another police car taking him to jail.

*****

THERE is little doubt Beaverbrook and Christiansen were a formidable team right into the 1950s. Circulation rocketed. And for a while they were close friends and admirers of each other. But things changed many years later after the editor saw his boss’s cruel side. It reduced him to tears.

 The chinks started appearing when Christiansen, above right, started to realise that the Beaver, above left, would never change. The Editor became reflective. He wrote: Lord Beaverbrook has changed little in appearance and in character, not at all. He had a little pot around the middle when I met him first, and he has the same little pot now. He only wore blue serge suits then and he wears them now, although at home he goes around in brown open-toe sandals.

 “He wore black trilby hats and drab black overcoats then and does so now. He wore buttons on his shirts then, shaving no patience with cufflinks, and he still wears buttons now. He wore white shirts then and still does. He did not care if his collars were frayed then, nor does he now. The knot in his tie was loose and careless and is now. Sartorially nothing has changed.”

 In 1956 the overworked Editor suffered a heart attack, and the Beaver invited him to his villa in the Bahamas to convalesce. During the visit a copy of Francis Williams’ book Dangerous Estate arrived, claiming to be one of the best publications ever written on British journalism. Upstairs in his rooms, Beaverbrook was furious when he read that Christiansen had been given as the reason for the incredible success of the Express, the most powerful newspaper in the world. The Beaver was left in the shade. He ordered Christiansen back to London – in a short note left on his breakfast table that morning!

 When Chrisstiansen got back, he discovered he had been demoted and staff member Donald Edgar had been made working editor. Christiansen, it was reported, burst into tears. The long honeymoon with the Beaver was over.

 Beaver still had the last word, however.

 At their last meeting months later, Beaverbrook showed Christiansen to the lift, and pressed the button to the ground floor.

 “I’m sorry to see you go down like this, Arthur,” he said.

***



Cartoonist Cummings

CARTOONIST Michael Cummings was a smashing guy and looked more like a Civil Servant than a humorist. Grey suits, neatly cut silver hair and nearly always frowning. He always believed that his profession looked more like accountants. “They are really an unrelaxed and rather gloomy group of people, who always seem terrified of saying anything amusing,” he said. Trouble is, they are expected to be funny.”

 I will never forget how the cartoonist kindly invited me to have any two of his original cartoons from an old filing cabinet in the Express newsroom at Blackfriars. Chief Sub Alastair McIntyre (Now our esteemed Daily Drone Editor) had a couple too. So too did Bobby Cocksworth from the Backbench at the time. He hung his in the circular toilet of his old oast house in Westerham Kent, where he had a Crusader weathervane spinning on the roof. (That was Bobby, who never got over Chairman Stevens admiring his pin-striped tailor-made suit when he sat opposite him at a luncheon). Bobby dined out on that for years.

 Cummings got fed up working for The Tribune, edited by Michael Foot. It was the end of the Second World War and he felt he was too right wing for Foot’s socialist newspaper. Too anti-Russian. At the time, the Express was looking for someone to replace Strube, Churchill’s favourite wartime cartoonist.

 He wrote to Beaverbrook to see if he could get a job. The Beaver’s reply was typical: ‘Dear Mr Cummings, I have arranged for you to meet Editor Mr Christiansen … you see, I am just an old gentleman who wants to sit in the sun.’

 Cummings later learned that the Beaver used to pretend he had no say in the running of his papers.

 “I started work on a three-months’ trial,” said Cummings, “but at the end of it Christiansen fired me! That same day, he was overruled by upstairs. Beaverbrook stepped in and I kept my job until retirement. The Boss was hands on after all.”

TERRY MANNERS

22 July 2024