Read All About Him

Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton,

by Sandra Hall;

HarperCollins/Fourth Estate, 2008, $35.

They were also, in their eccentric ways, good newspaper proprietors, who loved the craft, understood their market, readers and production machinery, were good employers except to those who crossed them, and were commercially very successful. In these bland times, where executives love management plans more than media, perhaps we could use more of them.

Their interstate contemporaries, especially Keith Murdoch of the Melbourne Herald group, were mostly formal, polite and paternal. Their newspapers reflected this, and while also good products, never had that distinctive “old Australian” blend of dash and ratbaggery of the Sydney tabloids.

Ezra Norton, the subject of this biography, was from 1920 to 1958 chief executive and biggest shareholder of Truth and Sportsman, publishers of the evening Daily Mirror and weeklies Sportsman and Truth. Truth appeared on Sundays in New South Wales and Queens-land, Thursdays (“pay day”) in separate editions in most other states.

The Mirror at its best had the biggest circulation in Australia after Keith Murdoch’s Sun News-Pictorial and monopoly evening Herald in Melbourne. Established in 1941, it competed vigorously—though somewhat disreputably only in later years—with the Sun, from independent Associated Newspapers, which Fairfax took over in 1953.

“Sun or Mirror,” news vendors would call on Sydney streets, while the rival delivery trucks adorned with often lurid posters darted through the city traffic. Both, and most other evening papers on earth, went to the great printing press in the sky around 1990, victims of too much other media and then recession. Their spiritual successors are, for better or worse—a difficult judgment call—the television “current affairs” programs, talkback radio and celebrity-loving magazines.

Truth, voice of the larrikin and portrayer of sauce, scandal and indignation, closed in Sydney in 1958, when Norton judged its day to be ending and turned it into the slightly more respectable but less successful Sunday Mirror, which closed in the mid-1960s.

Truth sparkled more and was cleverer than the less enduring, more basic scandal sheets. I confess to a youthful liking for the Sunday Truth, which dazzled with alliterative headlines—“Classy Country Coves Clip Coaly Cousins” for rugby league—exposures of dirty Chinese restaurants, Jack Lang’s vituperative memoirs of a distant pre-war past, plus a good helping of saucy scandal and even some serious news.

Elsewhere, especially in Melbourne where it lasted longest, Truth was lighter, more just a scandal sheet, but a good one. Its welcome weekly dose of cheek, the unsayable and the unrespectable lasted in Melbourne under other owners until 1995. It ran against the grain of almost everything else, including in sport; its passing is worth half a tear.

Ezra’s great and heartily detested rival—they once came to blows at the races—was Frank Packer, of the morning Daily Telegraph, father of both Channel Nine and Kerry, grandfather of James. Frank, of the large frame and stridently right-wing views, and his family get extensive treatment here too, less so the also rather rum and crusty Henderson, chief executive of the Fairfax group under the more genteel chairmanship of Warwick Fairfax senior. Henderson engineered the takeover in 1953 of Associated Newspapers, with its big magazine stable and the Sun.

Truth was a new and struggling Sydney scandal sheet when Ezra’s weird but wizardly father John bought into it in 1890. John Norton, who takes up most of the first half of the book, was in the “stranger than fiction” class. It is hard to believe anybody could be so eccentric, let alone with a touch of genius and decided commercial nous as well. He was a young English immigrant who in 1884 arrived in the racy, brashly commercial but egalitarian Sydney that had grown up from the convict settlement of decades earlier. Perhaps because he was originally an outsider, he developed an acute eye, ear and nose for the foibles and sensitivities of the society around him. His Truth was brash, attuned to the outrage of the masses against bungling or roguish government, commercial and clerical authority. A compulsive self-publicist, he wrote at length and developed his trademark alliterative style. His “friend of the people” stance made him sufficiently popular to become an outrageous independent member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for several years.

Much of the information about Ezra’s awful childhood comes from the pages of Truth and its competitors in scandal. John and his wife Ada seemed to be everlastingly divorcing or suing each other, with extensive extracts of the case in Truth—and then making up again.

John’s story was told even more colourfully in Cyril Pearl’s Wild Men of Sydney, which appeared in 1958. Ezra, with misgivings, to put it mildly, about his father but loving his aged mother, at first tried to stop it and then induced the New South Wales Labor government, which valued his erratic support as a counter to Packer and Fairfax, to provide for libel of the dead. Though there was no court case, it was a worthy successor to the Power Without Glory affair of a few years earlier.

It is no wonder Ezra grew up, first, a poor little rich boy, in turn monstered and loved by his father, and then a misanthropic man, compulsively private. His very private—and it seems fairly uneventful except for his terrible, sometimes calculated rages and bullying—life has made a biography difficult.

Tabloid Man is great nostalgia for those who can remember at all, or who would like to, but inevitably there is more “times” than “life”. Ezra left no private papers, had few confidants and no public life outside his businesses. Sandra Hall has mined such reminiscences of him as there are and spoken to some of the few survivors who knew or worked with him, but has had to rely heavily on the story of Truth, as told in its pages, which Ezra dominated but, unlike his father, did not write in. Research begun by the late Richard Hall (no relation) has assisted her. More face-to-face instead of telephone interviews with Norton survivors might have helped.

I—going by the copious hearsay of his later days—had the impression that he was somewhat crazier, as well as even more paranoid, irascible and tantrum-prone, than he appears here.

The book also describes some of his colourful associates, most notably Eric Baume, later one of the first of the loud radio commentators. Hall calls Baume an “incorrigible show-off”.

Truth and Mirror politics were pragmatic, tending to the rightish Labor of their dominant readership. Sometimes Norton’s business interests influenced them, though outside his newspapers these were few, apart from the Trocadero ballroom—another blast from the past. Xenophobia, particularly about coloured people, was a father-and-son speciality, though how far this is to be taken seriously as public opinion and how far trademark crankiness, is debatable.

Norton sold out to Rags Henderson’s Fairfax group in 1958. Fairfax used a company at one remove, found difficulty in running a rival operation successfully and two years later sold out to twenty-nine-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the “boy publisher” from Adelaide and Keith’s son. As they say, the rest is (more) history, but Ms Hall is not the only one to see John Norton’s ghost occasionally nudging history to repeat itself.

Robert Murray spent—rather than misspent—a couple of youthful years with Ezra Norton’s tabloid rival, the Sun.