Diana had decided on the Dispatch (rather than the Daily News) after some consideration. It was, apart from being high Tory, widely acknowledged to have the best diary in Fleet Street, and certainly the best diarist. Good-looking, charming and witty, Leo Bennett inveigled himself into the lives of not only his subjects, but also their underlings, and managed to extract their stories with an almost chilling ease. His rivals regarded his success with irritation and resentment, but the reason was simple. People liked him; indeed it was hard not to. Moreover, within the constraints of his calling, and his frequent statement of the old Fleet Street adage that a good journalist would sell his own grandmother for a story, he was a nice man. He was kind, considerate and particularly fond of children; he had famously remonstrated, and ultimately come to blows, with a father in a children’s playground who had been hitting his small son about the head. He was also a brilliant mimic, and could assume any accent on demand; his default mode was fairly classless BBC, spiced up with a slight northern twang, but for professional purposes it was Old Etonian which had certainly not been acquired at Eton. He had spent a couple of years at a minor public school whence he was expelled for climbing up the fire escape of the local girls’ school where he would meet and exchange fairly chaste embraces with one of the prefects.
His father was an extremely rich industrialist from Manchester, now resident in the Surrey Hills, who had been determined his two sons and his daughter should grow up Gentlemen and a Lady; the daughter, Teresa, had obliged by doing very well at her convent school, and then proceeding to a finishing school in Paris, where she learned to speak French, cook, arrange flowers and get in and out of a car keeping her knees neatly together. Marcus, the younger son, had been a model student at his prep school and was about to go to Charterhouse, from where he was most unlikely to be expelled.
Michael Bennett had refused to spend a penny more on Leo’s education and sent him at fifteen to the local secondary modern, where he made a host of friends. One of them, Ronald Tims, became a very successful burglar and introduced him to all sorts of useful skills, most notably lock-picking, and to his sister Janette, who worked at the local Boots store and relieved Leo of his virginity. Leo still bought Ronald dinner twice a year, partly because he liked him and partly because of his wide range of talents and intimate knowledge of many of the large houses in London – and its families.
At sixteen, feeling that school could teach him little more, Leo told his father he wanted to be a journalist; one of Michael Bennett’s friends, met at Masonic dinners, was Mark Drummond, the proprietor of the Dispatch, and he hosted a lunch for the three of them. Drummond, quietly impressed, arranged for Leo to start work immediately in the post room.
Post rooms were famously the launch pads for many a successful career, providing daily contact with the great and good of a company and the chance to impress them; Leo was hard-working, cheerful and efficient and, after a year, Drummond made it known that he should be promoted, either to the showbiz pages or the diary. The diary editor, a shrewd Fleet Street veteran, looked at Leo’s background and track record and claimed him instantly, and there he typed copy, read proofs, ran errands and fed scandalous stories to the diary reporters which often proved to have sufficient substance to warrant publication.
After a year, he was promoted to reporter himself and by the age of thirty was deputy editor; five years later he became diary editor, his handsome face smiling from the sides of buses and posters for the Dispatch as well as above his page every day.
He was hurrying out of morning conference, late for lunch at the Connaught with a Rank starlet, secretly engaged (or so she said) to a young peer of the realm, when he met Stuart his assistant hovering in the corridor.
‘Some woman says she has a really important story for you. She’s waiting for you to ring soon, otherwise she’s going to the Mail . . .’
‘Original. What’s her name?’
‘Diana Southcott. I looked her up, she’s a model. Up there in the top ten, it seems. And very well connected – mostly with the fashion riff-raff, but divorced from the son of a baronet.’
‘Perhaps I should ring her before I go. Janey,’ he said to his secretary, ‘could you get Diana Southcott on the phone for me? Stuart has the number. Straight away . . . oh, and tell the Connaught to have some champagne on ice for Miss Brown – such an original pseudonym – when she arrives.’
‘I will. She just rang, though, to say she’s arriving early, and can’t be there for more than an hour . . .’
‘Oh, fuck. Well, I’ll call Miss Southcott when I get back. Ring her and keep her sweet, would you?’
‘Diana? It’s Freddie. Listen, I’ve been to American Fashion and they’ve bought the New York feature idea, want us to do it. I know, isn’t that thrilling?’
‘Truly thrilling,’ said Diana, her voice genuinely awed. American Fashion was a post-war, brilliantly packaged, glossy, high-fashion magazine, but quirkier than Vogue or Bazaar, with a social section which covered all the smartest parties, first nights and benefits, guaranteeing a sizeable sale to all those featured, as well as their friends and relations, before it even began on its fashion circulation. ‘You’re a genius, Freddie . . .’
‘I know it. Only problem, timing. Do you have your case packed?’
‘Well, my model bag, obviously, because it always is.’
‘Excellent. It’s all you’ll need. Apart from a few clean pairs of knickers.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly –’
‘I’m not. They only want the one feature this time round, and they’re in a hell of a rush for it – we got lucky and coincided with four blank pages to fill, some feature rejected by the editor, so it’ll be a flying visit, literally. Our plane leaves tomorrow afternoon. I’ll meet you at the Cromwell Road Terminal at three, OK? They’re flying us first class but they’re booking us in for three nights – at the Pierre!’
‘The Pierre! Oh, my God, this is so exciting. You know I’ve never been to New York . . .’
‘I do know, my poor little country bumpkin. OK, I’ll leave you to pack while you ponder on my amazing cleverness.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Diana. ‘God, do you think I’ll have to hang over the rail at the Empire State?’
She put down the phone, reached for the message pad and started to make a packing list. The Pierre! One of the top hotels in Manhattan, seated magnificently on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Soaring high above New York, its top floors home to many of the city’s broadcasting giants, home from home to the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and indeed most of Hollywood royalty – it required a lot more from her than the few pairs of knickers Freddie had suggested.
‘Diana? It’s Ned. I’m so sorry to have been such an age getting back to you, I didn’t get your message yesterday. Long list and then trouble with Sister, and now I’ve been summoned by the big white chief. What? Oh, later today. I’d like to tell you about it. And you’ve been on the phone for ever. What do you girls talk about, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I wasn’t talking to a girl. I was trying to talk to a man. A particular man, yes. And talking to lots of others in the process.’
‘Sounds mysterious. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? Then you could tell me about that as well. Unless you’d rather not! Well, I thought we might go to the Savoy. It would have to be late, though, say nine, that all right for you? Good. See you there.’