Steve Dunleavy: The Writer They Call Mr. Blood and Guts
Hong Kong — August 16th, 1965 — A young reporter for the Hong Kong ‘American’ sits in heavy thought at his desk. He faces the toughest assignment to come along yet in his twenty-nine-year-old life. Early the next morning, William C. White, an American soldier who defected to Red China during the Korean War, will return from China and surrender himself to the American consul in Hong Kong.
The writer is Steve Dunleavy. His assignment: to get an exclusive interview with White. Wide-open newspaper competition is nothing new to Steve, who dropped out of school at age fourteen to start newspaper work in his native Sydney, Australia. Once, when he and his father worked on competing papers in Sydney, young Steve slashed his father’s tires to beat him on a story. His father retaliated by locking Steve in a laundry room at the scene of a crime.
Steve sits, chain-smoking du Mauriers and pondering all the possible angles to get to White before the competition. He obviously can’t get into China and intercept White before he gets to the border … but … what about the transfer point? Steve remembers that the American consul has a blue 1963 Buick four-door sedan and is always driven by a crew-cut marine. It’s a long shot, but….
Five o’clock the next morning. White comes across the China border at the Lo Wu Bridge. He’s a little bit early, but waiting for him is a very official-looking man accompanied by a ramrod-stiff crew-cut marine who speaks fluent Mandarin and can thus interpret for the exchange.
The official-looking man shakes White’s hand and directs him into a waiting blue 1963 Buick four-door sedan with tiny American flags on the front fenders. They drive away.
Steve’s hands are shaking a little as he realizes he’s gotten away with it. He begins “debriefing” White in the Buick. Locating an identical Buick had not been too difficult, but finding a crew-cut guy who could speak Chinese had been the hard part.
Steve drops White off at a fleabag hotel in Hong Kong. White thanks him and asks, “What time should I be at the consulate?”
“Any time you want, mate!” Steve shouts as he speeds off to file his exclusive. “I’m not the consul!”
Steve feels the kind of high you get only when you know you’ve scooped the world. There’ll be no stopping this boy.
And there was no stopping him. Steve roamed the world, eventually landing in New York City, where he rose to prominence as the number one éminence grise for Australian press magnate Rupert Murdoch (who at last count owned eighty-nine newspapers and other news interests in America, England and Australia). His most spectacular assignment from Murdoch was the flaming Elvis: What Happened?, the book he wrote from interviews with three of Elvis’ former bodyguards. Elvis: What Happened?, which explicitly listed Elvis’ drug habits, was published the day Elvis died. Elvis had read it a week before. Steve still gets death threats from Elvis’ fans, and once someone sent a hearse to the New York Post, where he now works, with instructions to pick up Steve Dunleavy’s body. (It’s commonly assumed that Steve got rich off that book, but in fact he wrote it for Murdoch’s World News Corporation for a flat — and undisclosed — fee, and Murdoch got the royalties.)
In Sydney, Steve had been a barely average student and had left school as soon as his father would permit it. Sydney, then as now, was a real newspaper town, with four competing dailies. Dunleavy’s father and grandfather were newsmen, and Steve romantically felt he’d been born with ink in his blood. At thirteen he went to work as a copy boy for the Sun, where his father worked. But at the Sun there was talk in the news room that Steve would get preferential treatment because of his father’s influence, so Dunleavy jumped to the rival Daily Mirror. He became a reporter at age sixteen, covering the police, city hall and shipping beats.
Like a restive, prowling alley cat, Steve yearned to leave Sydney’s limited horizons. A newsman’s ultimate ambition in Sydney was to get to London and work on Fleet Street. Dunleavy was realistic, though, and knew that few of those heading for Fleet Street actually cracked the job market there.
So he decided to try working his way to London via a less obvious method — the English language newspapers in Asia. Like a cat, he landed on his feet wherever he dropped. First Manila, then to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. On to Tokyo, where he was the boxing writer for the Asahi Morning News. He cofounded the Spanish Daily News (now the Daily Iberian) in Madrid and moved on to London and stints at UPI and as a correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. He “fooled around” in the Bahamas for a while, then decided to try for New York. He landed December 28th, 1966, with seven dollars in his pocket and lived in coffee shops for a week until he ran into some Australian friends and got work with UPI, and then as correspondent for the Sydney Daily Mirror, which Murdoch had acquired. After Murdoch took over London’s News of the World (circulation 5 million plus) in late 1968, Steve shifted to Murdoch’s News Limited bureau in New York. Steve worshiped Murdoch as a “newsman’s newsman” and when Murdoch started the National Star in 1974 (by this time Murdoch had moved to New York), he jumped at the chance to be its news editor. Steve began to make a name for himself there, writing from-the-hip conservative columns, but it wasn’t until 1977, after Murdoch took over the New York Post and Dunleavy embarked on his sensationalist coverage of the Son of Sam case, that the byline “By Steve Dunleavy” began to become an epithet spilling from the lips of offended members of New York’s journalism colony. Dunleavy flies in the face of the current journalistic trend — the cautious respectability that’s so desired by the giant newspaper chains — and is a real throwback to the yellow journalism invented in America in the 1890s. The fact that he makes himself a star in the process is irrelevant. Steve hurls himself at a story with the ferocity of an unleashed Doberman and damn the consequences. That’s rare enough anywhere. The guy is a one-man subculture.