A Asaresult, he wanted no item to be more than twenty-five words long, followed by three dots. He was, at the time, heavily under the influence of Walter Winchell, Earl Wilson and suchlike night-owl columnists in the New York tabloids that were air- freighted to him weekly. B Flattering though it was to be entrusted with this commission, there was a snag. It had to ‘sizzle’ - a favourite Eilbeck word — with exclusive snippets about ‘the people who really mattered’ - to Eilbeck’s mind, anyone with an aristocratic title, or money to throw about in casinos and nightclubs. Unfortunately, I did not have a single suitable contact in the whole of London. C This might be a review copy of some ghosted showbiz memoirs that might be good for a 150-word anecdotal filler. One day Eilbeck dropped a re-issued volume on my desk ~ To Beg! am Ashamed, the supposed autobiography of a criminal. It came complete with one of his headlines: “IT’S STILL A BAD, DANGEROUS BOOK’. | asked him what was so bad and dangerous about it. ‘I haven't read it,’ the Features Editor confessed cheerfully. ‘Two hundred words by four o'clock’. D_Onone desperate occasion, with the deadline looming yet again, we fell to working our way along Millionaires’ Row in Kensington, questioning maids and chauffeurs about the foibles of their rich employers. This enterprise came to a stop after someone called the police. a This proved to be a foretaste of his favourite method of floating an idea. While the assembled feature writers clustered around his desk skimming the newspapers and intermittently quoting some story that might with luck yield a feature angle, Eilbeck would be scribbling away on his pad. Cockily trumpeting his newly minted headline - ‘WOULD YOU RISK A BLIND DATE HOLIDAY?’ or ‘CAN WOMEN BE TRUSTED WITH MONEY?’ — he would rip off the page and thrust it into the arms of the nearest writer - ‘Copy by four o'clock.’ This was for the benefit of one of the paper's more irascible executives who was a passionate believer init. It had been noticed that when he was told he would have a bad day he would react accordingly and his miserable colleagues would go through the day quaking in their shoes. My job was to doctor the entry to give his colleagues a more peaceful ride. My month’s trial with the Mirror quickly expired without my having done anything to justify my existence on the paper, but since Eilbeck didn’t mention that my time was up, neither did |. | pottered on, still trying to find my feet. Occasionally opportunity would knock, but it was usually a false alarm. Not always, though. But many of Eilbeck’s madder flights of fancy had no chance of panning out so well ~ even | could tell that. Seasoned writers would accept the assignment without demur, repair to a café for a couple of hours, and then ring in to announce that they couldn't make the idea stand up.