Harold Evans

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a journalist and publisher. He learned his trade in two good schools, the North of England and New York. The son of a Lancashire railwayman, he was editor of the Northern Echo by the age of thirty one, and eight years after that, editor of The Sunday Times, where his campaigning flair, thalidomide, the Crossman Diaries, the Expose of Harold Wilson's Lavender List made him one of the most successful and important newspaper men in post-war Britain.

Presenter0:57

Rupert Murdoch put a stop to that. Having given him a brief sop as editor of The Times, he sacked him. The abandoned journalist left for America, where ten years ago he became President and Publisher of Random House. These days he can look back on a life of glamour, risk, and good fortune. My greatest strength, he says, is reckless insensitivity to the possibility of failure. He is Harold Evans, better known as Harry Evans, or indeed perhaps happy Harry Evans, I feel, because everything I read about you

Presenter1:27

Is you finding everything so wonderful, enjoying everything you tackle?

Harold Evans1:32

Well, just picking up on your introduction, I'd like to look forward to a life of glamour and excitement instead of look back on it as you can.

Presenter1:38

Now age 71, which is

Harold Evans1:39

Well, let's not say that, but uh

Presenter1:41

But you are a kind of Doctor Pangloss, aren't you?

Harold Evans1:44

Mhm. Well, I'm very optimistic. I don't know where it comes from. I've been very lucky, and so the things that I've tried to do have mostly worked, so this encourages another kind of reckless optimism.

Presenter1:55

And it began, I mean, right from the start, whether it was school or your first job, everything was exhilarating.

Harold Evans2:00

I think it begins with my father, who was very I mean, who had a very tough job really, but he exulted in it, getting up at all hours of the day or night, two o'clock, three o'clock, driving the steam trains, firing the engines, and was con he was always jolly, and my mother was very emotionally secure and stable and loving, and I think those they gave us that kind of atmosphere.

Presenter2:21

And did you therefore want to be an engine driver when you were born?

Harold Evans2:25

No, he would never have let me be an engine driver. My father was a passionate believer in education, having left school at eleven himself and having absorbed uh everything you could from encyclopedias, he was autodidact. I did once stand on the footplate with my father, and he took this roaring monster through northern Manchester, swaying and on the tracks. It was really tremendously exciting.

Presenter2:49

But when did you decide you wanted to be a journalist and how early on was that?

Harold Evans2:51

Oh, one of the big journeys I think must have been very early when I discovered that the English compositions I did at St. Mary's Road Central School were received with somewhat more tolerance than my efforts in physics and chemistry and so on. So that may have been a thought, hello, perhaps I can do this when I can't make the stink bombs in the lab like everybody else.

Presenter3:11

So it wasn't it was writing that attracted you, it wasn't the search for truth.

Harold Evans3:15

No, no. Writing was I think possibly the initial stimulus, but then I saw a lot of Hollywood movers and read a lot of books in which heroic journalists slew dragons. I thought that sounds a pretty good job.

Presenter3:28

But yours has been, Harry, an extraordinary career, you know, from this gritty northern origin that you described to kind of

Harold Evans3:34

Rhyme to create.

Presenter3:35

Glittering New York, you know, sh chauffeur'd around in stretched limos.

Harold Evans3:36

Yeah.

Presenter3:40

Your dad would surely have turned in his grave to think we couldn't.

Harold Evans3:42

Oh, my father would have loved something like that. I mean, Stretch Limit says that is the if that epitomizes luxury, which actually it doesn't, my father would have exulted in anything like that. He uh appreciated the good life and he would have liked um the what the apparent glamour of Hollywood and New York, as you say. It is when I say apparent glamour.

Presenter4:02

I heard the apparent.

Harold Evans4:03

Okay.

Presenter4:03

We'll talk about that later. Tell me about your first record.

Harold Evans4:06

The first record takes me to Durham Cathedral, which I was very proud to run a Sonny Lumia there when I was editing Northern Echo and got it floodlit. And we had Bach St. Matthew Passion later in the cathedral. And so Bach St. Matthew Passion, apart from being very moving music, has special connections for me with the finest cathedral.

Harold Evans4:29

Dramatic and exciting architectural site in the world to me is Durham Cathedral, as seen from the railway station arriving.

Speaker 44:38

And each mine brought a ride.

Speaker 45:08

I shall listen to God.

Presenter5:35

Cornelius Hauptmann singing Mache dic mein Herze Rhein from Bach St Matthew Passion with the English Baroque Soloist conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Your editorship of the Sunday Times, Harry Evans, was undoubtedly a golden period. You you got it when you were thirty-nine, you stayed for fourteen years and you changed the face of journalism.

Presenter5:55

It it was an incredible Meccano set to get your hands on, wasn't it?

Harold Evans5:58

Well, I Rills Royce, I Dennis Hamilton, who really laid the foundations for the Sunday Times in its great period.

Harold Evans6:05

uh stood on the composing room steps with me once and said, look, I'm giving you a Rolls-Royce and he was, because he'd first of all institutionalized the relationships between the ownership and the editorship. The most crucial feature in journalism is what freedom does the editor have and what responsibilities for good management and investment does ownership have.

Harold Evans6:26

And Dennis Hamilton had schooled the wonderful Roy Thompson into the right relationship with him.

Presenter6:31

Three of the milk bottle bottom glasses.

Harold Evans6:33

He of the milk bottom glasses, who hadn't made a cent until he was sixty years of age, and made his fortune afterwards

Presenter6:39

But you tamed him is what you're saying.

Harold Evans6:39

But you take

Harold Evans6:40

Well you put it in the claimed him, yes, but I mean there was certain one thing that was made clear to me when I took over. You're going to be free to write, investigate and say what you like, but you never will be free to attack the royal family.

Presenter6:52

But it's the campaigns we remember you know, the the the setting up of the insight team to crawl all over an issue, whether it was I mentioned some of the introduction thalidomide, but there were phony claret labels, the hanging of Timothy Evans, so many of them. Is it true that you put as many as eighteen or twenty reporters on any story at any one time?

Harold Evans7:10

Well there were certainly expenses for twenty.

Harold Evans7:13

And the chits that were filled in. Uh I think there was seventeen or eighteen when Bruce Page organized the investigation of Philby, which was very dramatic, it was in my first year of editorship and it was suddenly being plunged into a highly sensitive area of national security with a lot of things going on in the background between the Secret Service and

Harold Evans7:33

And others that I'm still not entirely clear about, but it was a brilliant success.

Presenter7:37

You talked about slaying dragons earlier on. That that's exactly what it was. It was you against the establishment. It was the moment at which, suddenly, the press came into its own and decided not to be manipulated any more.

Harold Evans7:48

Well, it's curious the way it happened really, because the serious press had conventionally had scoops as leaked from the Foreign Office or the Treasury or occasionally from business and it hadn't investigated and the popular press had investigated only things like vice rackets. But so when the Sunday Times with this bunch of really eager journalists and let's remember that they were the engine of it when we began investigating and stretched out our hands, we discovered that we were hitting a brick wall. And the brick wall was the legal system in England which had no constitutional provisions for a free press and nothing in the case law. So we were continually in the High Courts arguing that there was a public interest in exposing the plight of the thalidomide mothers, or there was a public interest in knowing what was going on in government or in stopping various frauds and embezzlements as we exposed. And until that period, nobody really realised just how half free, as I call it, the British press was and to me to some extent still is in terms of the legal restraints it faces by comparison with the United States.

Presenter8:57

You credit the the reporters that were working under you at that time, but of course you had started campaigning on the Northern Echo, hadn't you? As I understand it.

Harold Evans9:03

I had it.

Presenter9:05

In the early sixties, which was pre-pill, pre-abortion, everything, you were campaigning for cervical smear tests for women.

Harold Evans9:11

Well, it was one of my proudest moments, to tell the truth. I read a small paragraph in the Sunday Times of London, and this tiny paragraph said that they were testing women in Vancouver for cervical cancer. And I sent we could ill afford it, but I sent a young graduate called Kenneth Hooper to Vancouver to investigate. And his report, when I came back, so horrified me that we could actually be saving these women's lives in England, but we were not doing anything about it. I began a campaign, wrote to every MP, etc., etc., produced pamphlets, and finally got Jeremy Bray, the Labour member for Middlesbrough, to raise a question in the House of Commons. I'll never forget, will the Minister now introduce a programme for the detection of cancer in women? No, sir, was the answer. And it was Enoch Powell, the Minister of Health, was saying no, sir. So we continued the campaign, got more MPs to sign the order of paper. And then Jeremy Bray got up again. Will the Minister introduce No, sir, was the answer. And we continued the campaign. And then Jeremy Bray got up on another occasion. Will the Minister yes, sir? And it was the new Minister of Health, Anthony Barber. And he introduced the programme to women all over the country.

Presenter10:19

Record number two.

Harold Evans10:21

Record number two is memory of my mother and father. It's uh They Didn't Believe Me with Ambrose and his Orchestra. My father uh used to sing uh Al Jolson songs. Don't forget they were married in the twenties.

Speaker 410:34

Uh

Harold Evans10:34

But my father was very musical.

Speaker 410:43

That's a good name for you.

Speaker 410:45

I didn't believe me.

Speaker 410:50

They didn't believe me.

Speaker 410:54

You are a little bit.

Speaker 410:55

Your eyes, your cheeks, your hair Are in a class beyond compare.

Speaker 411:04

You're the love

Presenter11:06

Ambrose and his orchestra with They Didn't Believe Me and Memories, Harry, of your father Fred.

Presenter11:11

whom you buried twenty-four hours before Rupert Murdoch sacked you. Did he, Murdoch, know what was going on in your life?

Harold Evans11:18

Oh yes, yes, yes.

Presenter11:20

Did he say did he make it?

Harold Evans11:21

Well, he wrote me a very nice letter when my father died saying uh

Harold Evans11:25

Um

Harold Evans11:26

I know what it's like to lose a father. Take any time you like and go to the funeral and so on. So I got prepared for the funeral. And when I got prepared for the funeral he asked me to resign. That was the moment he chose. Now of course it would be wrong of me to suggest that it was time to take advantage of an emotional crisis. It may just have been an accident.

Presenter11:39

No, of course it would be wrong.

Presenter11:49

I'll come back to Rupert Murray. Tell me about your mother. She ran a shop. Sweets and ice cream at first.

Harold Evans11:53

Yeah, well my mother started a shop. People used to knock on our door. We were on the edge of fields in Manchester. My father was away driving these trains. People knocked on the door and asked for a cup of water. And you don't have a cigarette, do you? Or whatever it was. People were on the way sometimes to a fair, Daisy Nuke. And my father said, why don't we sell them ice cream? So he carried a huge tub of ice cream from Savori, an Italian down half a mile away. And it we all went in fifteen minutes. It was a hot day. And so my father carried another tub of ice cream. And then my mother started stocking cigarettes. And finally, she had a full-blown

Harold Evans12:29

Little grocer's shop

Presenter12:30

And school was wonderful, as I said, you just loved it.

Harold Evans12:33

I love school. Well, my brother uh my two of my brothers went to grammar school and uh uh and um two John and I went to Saint Mary's Road Central School, which was midway between uh elementary school where you left at fourteen.

Harold Evans12:47

and the grammar school, the real snobs, where you left at sixteen.

Presenter12:51

You mean you didn't pass the scholarship?

Harold Evans12:52

I didn't pass the eleven plus to get to the grammar school. I passed the eleven plus to get to the central school, but the important point was that I got a blazer and a hat. And St. Mary's Mental School was a superb headmaster who took five of us through matriculation. And um in the evenings he would keep us back and in his study we would go through As You Like It and Midsummer Night's Dream and I can remember Mr Marzen doing Pyramus and Thisbe through the wall.

Harold Evans13:21

And that Shakespearean tuition of course obviously fired my excitement about Shakespeare, which we'd previously regarded as a great bore.

Presenter13:29

Record number three.

Harold Evans13:31

Record number three is canon and quartet from Beethoven's Fidelio and uh of course it's a beautiful piece of music, but when I was on the Ashton Underline Reporter as a young journalist, Eric Marsden,

Harold Evans13:44

came invalided out of the fleet air arm.

Harold Evans13:47

and appreciated Beethoven and opened my eyes to Beethoven. I was sent to Bellevue to review the Halley Orchestra with Sir John Barbaroli. Can you believe it? I was sixteen and this has stayed with me forever.

Presenter14:57

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Kirsten Flagstadt, Josef Grindel and Antona de Motte singing part of the quartet Mir Istso Vunderbaal from Beethoven's Fidelio with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Fjurtwengler and memories for my castaway Harry Evans of Eric Marsland and the Ashton underline reporter circa 1944 you were seeing

Harold Evans15:17

Nineteen forty three forty four.

Presenter15:18

What was the office like?

Harold Evans15:20

The office was wonderful. It was a brick, red-brick office in National Line Town Square, which was a cobbled town square with the town hall opposite and the coroner's office behind. And one went up the stairs at the back to a clanking noise of the linotype machines. In one corner, smelling of damp paper and ink, was the reporter's room with the telephone box in the middle. And then this kind of Battle of Britain fighter-pilot atmosphere with these young men lounging around. And I was sixteen.

Presenter15:49

They taught you how to fiddle your expenses, I bet.

Harold Evans15:51

Well, I what happened was that a man called J. W. Middlehurst was the uh news editor, and at the end of the first week, when I'd written about five or six columns of local news, he sent me and said, Runa, run on and uh

Harold Evans16:03

Translated this is where are your expenses? And I said, I don't have any, I've walked everywhere. And he gave me a piece of paper, he says, ba translated meant take this down to the cashiers. If you don't have expenses, they'll think you're not working. And when I got down there, they thought I was bringing my dismissal slip because at the end of my first week, and I gave them this thing and they gave me three pennies. So I was introduced into corruption at an early age.

Presenter16:27

How much did you earn, in fact?

Harold Evans16:28

One pound a week.

Presenter16:30

And mainly names at the funeral gates are going to be stories.

Harold Evans16:32

Well, actually it um it was everything. It was funerals, but it was inquests, but it was the council meetings, it was the courts, always looking for a juicy sex case that we could sell to the news of the world.

Presenter16:44

Did you sell any?

Harold Evans16:45

We did. But the reporting was very varied. We'd be sent to cover the Halley Orchestra and we'd be sent to cover plays and councils and inquests. I would write something some weeks I would write eleven full columns in the paper.

Presenter16:58

Record number four.

Harold Evans17:00

Number four is Western. When I went to America in nineteen fifty six and Enid, my first wife, came, we went West and I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted to be live with the Indians, and I did, because I wanted to write a book.

Harold Evans17:15

about the myth of America and the reality of the West, the gold mines and so on, and Edie took a photograph of me slumped on the back of this horse. I became a better rider later.

Speaker 417:27

Never rob a mother or her child, And there never was a man with the law in his hand That could take Jesse James when alive.

Speaker 417:39

Old Jesse had a wife who loaned for his life, children they were brave. But that dirty little cow, That shot Mr. Howard, Has laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Presenter17:56

Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, and Ed McCurdy singing Jesse James. You did your national service in the RAF, Harry, just after the war, and you edited a magazine for the lads there. Now I came across a little cutting that said

Speaker 418:02

However,

Speaker 418:06

I

Harold Evans18:06

Uh BAP

Speaker 418:06

Uh

Presenter18:08

It didn't sort of circulate too well, this magazine,'cause it was got boring aeroplanes on the front, so you put a naked Diana Dawes on the front, isn't it?

Harold Evans18:15

Well, she had a she had a muff in a strategic place.

Presenter18:18

Leaning on a style, huh?

Harold Evans18:19

That was John Starr. She was a local lady. And of course it was a huge sell out in the camp.

Presenter18:24

But the point is that that what you showed then, and indeed as you said, you you already sold stories to the news of the world, you were never averse to a bit of naked populism, to coin a phrase.

Harold Evans18:35

I didn't make a habit of it.

Presenter18:37

The point is that that

Presenter18:39

You wanted serious journalism that could be popular. Rot sets in when popular journalism becomes trivial, and that's been the problem here, hasn't it?

Harold Evans18:41

That could be

Harold Evans18:42

Right.

Harold Evans18:46

The problem here, hasn't it?

Harold Evans18:48

Yes, I think it's very important to not to be too stuffy about it, but serious journalism, and sometimes it's done by when it's done by popular papers, it's really wonderful, because then it's getting a wider audience and may have a greater impact. And we're not to confuse

Harold Evans19:05

You know, sort of invasions of privacy and intrusions and all the malicious gossip with serious journalism, that's just rubbish.

Presenter19:11

But there's so much of it. I mean, we are obsessed. The press is obsessed with celebrities.

Harold Evans19:15

I know it's the same in the States too. And there are not enough celebrities to go round, so you have two choices. One is to manufacture more, so people become celebrated for being celebrated. And then secondly, the other thing another thing that can be done is to pull them up and then bring them down, then put them back up again.

Presenter19:34

So what do we do? I mean, you you said earlier on that you used to call the press here half free. We're more free than that now, not least because of you. We're not as free as they are in the States. But nevertheless, freedom has brought with it this kind of cascade of information that hasn't necessarily led us to where you might like.

Harold Evans19:49

What?

Harold Evans19:51

Sue, I don't think the freedom has anything to do with what I'm talking about here, because there's always been a certain intrusion and gossip, and some people invite it and want it. My concern about the half-free press is when it's restricted from doing really serious things by the laws of contempt or sometimes of libel and by habits of secrecy in government, local government in particular.

Speaker 420:18

Uh

Harold Evans20:19

Don't forget uh Lord Northcliffe said it best, he said, News is what somebody wants to suppress, everything else is advertising.

Presenter20:28

And that remains the case today? Do you think we haven't arrived anywhere better than where we were when you first became editor of the site?

Harold Evans20:35

We are some it's rather like Kabelio's funeral march. A lot of solemn noises, a lot of shuffling of feet, and not much movement forward.

Presenter20:46

Well, we'd have certainly have more freedom. What it seems to me you you are asking for is is greater moral vision to accompany it.

Harold Evans20:53

Absolutely, I think.

Harold Evans20:56

The question is freedom for what? The United States press is the freest press in the world, incomparably freer in every way than the British press, and yet it has not distinguished itself in the Clinton impeachment saga. And in many instances the freedom is not being used properly, and so we have to ask ourselves the question.

Harold Evans21:18

If there's freedom and it's not used properly, is it not a betrayal of the public trust?

Presenter21:23

Record number five.

Harold Evans21:26

Uh this is uh Dido's Lament, Remember Me from Dido and Aeneas. I just chose it for its beauty rather than for any particular memories.

Presenter22:39

Jesse Norman singing Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Lepard. So, Harry, fourteen glorious years at the Sunday Times and then Rupert Murdoch buys it and the Times from the Thompson Organisation. You resisted at first along with the journalists and then you accepted his offer of the editorship of The Times. It was a bait and you swallowed it, wasn't it?

Harold Evans23:02

Yeah.

Speaker 423:02

Mm-hmm.

Harold Evans23:02

Yeah.

Harold Evans23:03

Yes, but um we don't want to go into all the details of that, but the point was that um I was on the Board of Times newspapers and we got uh Rupert Murdoch to agree to various very strict conditions to keep the independence and freedom of both the newspapers and those were sanctified those particular provisions were sanctified by Parliament.

Harold Evans23:27

And, as he later said, they weren't worth the paper they were written on.

Presenter23:30

But did you believe that Rupert Murdoch would stick by that agreement? You believed that he would not interfere editorially with you as Roy Thompson hadn't before him?

Harold Evans23:38

Absolutely.

Presenter23:39

How long before he started to um try and influence what you were putting in the paper?

Harold Evans23:44

Oh, not for the first six months at all.

Harold Evans23:47

And I have to say this about him, and let me make it clear, that though I think that losing me was a loss to freedom of the press, I think he more than compensated for that by fighting the print unions and winning. And uh whopping and bringing great freedom and variety to the British press through new technology.

Presenter24:09

Sure, and he he took on the print unions and won, as you say. But nevertheless, do you think?

Presenter24:14

That that was his game plan all along, to move you to the times where you didn't have a power base. He moved you away from your power base. He said he wasn't going to interfere, and in the end he did.

Harold Evans24:16

Yeah.

Harold Evans24:18

Due to the time

Harold Evans24:20

Right.

Harold Evans24:24

Yes, well yes, he did. Mrs Thatcher made it all eas easy for him by and and John Biffin and uh the full story of that has never really c I told most of it in my book Good Times, Bad Times, but uh I think it was a deliberate thing. Uh we weren't uh hostile to Mrs Thatcher, we were critical from time to time. One of my offences, for instance,

Harold Evans24:47

I apparently learned later was to publish an article by Edward Heath.

Presenter24:51

But Rupert Murdoch is, of course, much more powerful today than he was then. You said about that time that

Presenter24:59

Mrs Thatcher in the end fell in with him I think you've used the phrase behaved as his poodle.

Speaker 425:04

Mm-hmm.

Harold Evans25:05

Yeah.

Presenter25:06

He is a very powerful man, even more powerful now. Do you think that Tony Blair is in danger of doing the same?

Harold Evans25:11

I think Tony Blair's a man of enormous integrity and I don't think there's any danger of that myself. Uh I haven't seen any evidence of it and

Presenter25:20

No, but of course it was enormously tactically important when the Sun put gave its backing to New Labour at the last election, wasn't it?

Harold Evans25:25

into new Labour at the last election, wasn't it? I hear what you say, Sue, but I think Labour would have won the election without the Sun, and I think Labour can win the next election without the Sun or without the Times or without News of the World.

Presenter25:34

Yeah.

Presenter25:37

Okay, but looking at Rupert Murdoch himself, he is so powerful, it is very difficult for anyone to take him on, isn't it?

Harold Evans25:46

If he wants to take you on, yes, in the United States or here, I suspect that the editors of the papers today, since his interests are so much bigger, have somewhat more freedom. He uh is very active in the United States and and has done a very revolutionary thing there in breaking up the oligopoly of three television networks and introducing another one.

Presenter26:07

So you admire him in many ways?

Harold Evans26:09

I admire many qualities of his. It's like Milton's Paradise Lost. The most interesting character is Lucifer. And if Rupert had uh real deep respect for journalistic integrity, he would be a formidable force indeed.

Presenter26:23

Record number six.

Harold Evans26:25

Uh this is uh Mozart clarinet quintet. Um has a particular memory for me because uh Nick Tomlin, who was one of the most brilliant reporters on the Sunday Times, was practising the clarinet when he'd taken leave of absence from the Sunday Times when the Yom Kippur War broke out.

Harold Evans26:47

And me and my colleagues decided that the person who should go and report for us was Nick. And he went and he got killed. Uh and at the memorial service we played the clarinet quintet.

Presenter27:56

George Peterson, Arto Grumio, Kojai Toyoda, Max Le Sue and Janos Schultz playing part of the second movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. You've been in America, Harry, for sixteen years now. Another lifetime really, certainly another life. Your second wife, Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, then the New Yorker and our Talk magazine.

Presenter28:18

Together you've become one of the most celebrated couples stateside. How easy was that for you, because I don't want to sound rude, but you're not sort of naturally glamorous, as it were.

Harold Evans28:29

The point of it is the Americans are enormously welcoming.

Harold Evans28:32

I arrived and after

Harold Evans28:35

teaching at the university, Duke University, I was then invited by Mort Zuckerman to uh run a publishing house and then to take over a news magazine.

Harold Evans28:45

And before you know where you are, you're part of the life there. And then Say Newhouse asked me if I would start a travel magazine, so I started Condon as Traveler.

Presenter28:48

Come.

Harold Evans28:55

Magazine in New York. And that there, if you want a glamorous job, that was the most.

Harold Evans29:00

exotic and wonderful job I ever had because I would spend the afternoons looking at wonderful colour transparencies of gorgeous places with the most delightful stuff and then we'd decide whether we would go to Venice or whether we would go to the Bahamas and what we would do next. I mean it was why I gave up that job, I don't know, except that the invitation to go to Random House was too exciting.

Presenter29:23

Well, exactly. You went to Random House, you moved into publishing. So not only had you changed cultures, you then changed jobs from journalism to publishing.

Harold Evans29:28

Yeah.

Presenter29:31

Huge chasms to step across. And you didn't do it without difficulty because I think they were quite kind of. Difficult with you when you first got there.

Harold Evans29:40

No, no, no. Well, no, well there were um I mean, publishers publishing houses are very suspicious of outsiders and people who've not grown up, and I understand w why that should be. I was actually really enchanted by publishing. I'd done a little of it at the Sunday Times because we started our own books.

Presenter29:56

Yeah, but Random House is quite different.

Harold Evans29:58

But Random House is a major publishing house and very sophisticated. However, you know, it's not a bad training to have edited the Sunday Times and to have been at US News and World Report and to have been in Condonast, to arrive at a publishing house. I knew a lot of people and actually I took to publishing much with great joy.

Presenter30:16

But did they take to you?

Harold Evans30:17

Well, yes, I was. Well, there was some suspicion at first. For instance,

Harold Evans30:23

We had a book on Saddam Hussein.

Harold Evans30:25

a biography, just as the Gulf War started and I said, let's uh take an advertisement on the news pages. There was absolute horrific silence and we can't possibly advertise on the news pages, we only advertise on the books pages.

Harold Evans30:38

However, I had a wonderful time with the editors and everybody else at Random House and within

Harold Evans30:44

A few months. In terms of commercial success, we had a record number of bestsellers in my seven years there.

Presenter30:52

Record number seven.

Harold Evans30:53

I'm particularly excited by this p recording. The Penguin books are bringing out discs in which writers, not musicologists, say what the music means to them. And Paul Johnson's written a very nice essay about Wagner, a controversial figure. And Should You Be Put Off Wagner's Music Because He Was Associated With the Nazis. It's a very good little essay and it actually makes you think a lot.

Presenter32:14

The Vienna State Choir and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir George Schulte, performing part of the Pilgrim's Chorus from Wagner's Tannhuizer.

Presenter32:22

So now you're in your seventies, Harold Evans. You've retired from publishing and from journalism, but retirement is not a word you even like to hear mentioned in connection with your name, I think.

Harold Evans32:33

Well it it's just uh I mean it

Harold Evans32:36

It suggests golf clubs and slippers, which is wonderful, but I'm I don't that's not my life. I've left running newspapers, but I write a political column for The Guardian about the American election, which I find quite fascinating. I'm uh writing two books with Little Brown, Time Warner. But I have more time to say I will now stop work at four o'clock'cause my my son is coming home from school and we can have a

Presenter32:55

Mm-hmm.

Harold Evans33:03

A game of something together.

Presenter33:04

And how often do you get to see your wife, who kind of presumably rushes in and out of the window?

Harold Evans33:06

Presumably rushes in and out. She's a wonderful mother. She gets up very early in the day.

Harold Evans33:13

And uh but she's home in time for the evening with the children, six o'clock until nine o'clock, say, and so she's always there.

Presenter33:22

So you've got no desire at all to get yourself marooned on a desert island.

Harold Evans33:27

Actually, now you've said it, when can we go?

Presenter33:32

Last record.

Harold Evans33:34

This is Winsom Marsalis, who's of course a brilliant trumpet, and he's such a marvellous person. When I was president of Random House, I restarted a modern library, and I included in it The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a great book about growing up as a black man.

Harold Evans33:53

And I gave a dinner for Ellison shortly before he died, and then Winton came along and played this.

Harold Evans34:02

at the memorial service and then once we applaud he went on and played more and more and he played trumpets for the whole afternoon for us.

Speaker 434:53

Uh

Speaker 435:05

Uh

Presenter35:09

Winton Marsalis playing the opening of Vivaldi's concerto for two trumpets and strings with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Lepard. If you could only take one of those eight records, Harry, which one would you take?

Harold Evans35:21

I think if I could only take one, I think I would take Bach, St. Matthew, Passion, the entire thing.

Presenter35:27

Yeah.

Harold Evans35:27

Not just a fragment of it.

Presenter35:28

And your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare.

Harold Evans35:31

I would take Shelby Foote's History of the American Civil War.

Presenter35:35

What?

Harold Evans35:36

I would lay out the battlefields on the sands with pine cones and needles and leaves, and arrange Robert E. Lee forces at Gettysburg and the charge of pickets up the across the great vast expanse where they get murdered by the Unionists.

Presenter35:51

And what about your luxury?

Harold Evans35:53

I find luxury very difficult. This has really given me a problem. I my first thought.

Harold Evans35:58

I may even by my last was be a really beautiful pair of silk pajamas with somebody in them.

Harold Evans36:05

But Amseur does not allow.

Harold Evans36:08

But even without them. Even without I don't want a cell phone, even without the person in them. I think a pair of silk pajamas would be very nice.

Presenter36:15

Harold Evans, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Speaker 336:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.