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Ramsay's impressive alias CV |
The wild lifestyle and the pressure of running the Kings Cross Whisper juggernaut , including many battles with
government authorities , police , councils , wowsers , bible bashers and even an investigation by the CIA for
poking fun at the F1-11
fighter bomber eventually got at Ramsay
and Blake.
Both decided on the
same day to get out
before they were carted off in straightjackets. In an unusual commercial winner take- all settlement , they
tossed a coin . Blake won and the
hydra- headed monster was his.
Before he headed off overseas , Ramsay cleaned out his penthouse and in the wardrobe he found 61 shirts and
two sacks filled with two
shilling pieces , the proceeds of past Whisper sales. He went to Hong Kong where he worked on The Star
which employed a gaggle of Australian
reporters including Peter Blake , Steve Dunleavy, Roger East
and Dennis Booth , the latter being
the sporting and racing editor.
Blake and several other reporters put money into a betting
system devised by Booth and
in two weeks they won
33,000 Hong Kong dollars , a lot of money in those days, and were looking
at early retirement. However, the next week they lost 20,000 dollars . The Star
was renowned for its gross front page pictures, one showed a banker’s body
on the footpath taken after he had
jumped from a 10-storey building .
Dunleavy was already a cult figure in Hong Kong
when Ramsay arrived. Described as
a dashing “ Errol Flynn ” type , Dunleavy was a snappy dresser , handsome and
caused many a heart to flutter in
the colony .
Ramsay, on the other hand, was scruffy , sharp tongued and
had a “ weird sense of humour ”. He was dragged out of a
smoke and flame filled
hotel room after falling
asleep with a cigarette in his hand
. As a reporter , he was regarded as a “terrier”
who relentlessly chased up angles. From
Honkers, Ramsay went to
London and started
a variation of the Kings Cross
Whisper ,the Soho Whisper, but it bombed out . He then became the
head of the London sports
desk at
United Press International . By the time he skipped to America he was said to have been barred from
every pub in Fleet Street.
In America , Ramsay met a rich Hungarian woman who ran a chain of clothing stores . According to the legend , Ramsay lived in a plush apartment and had a telex machine in his bedroom on which he used to send abusive messages to News Limited executives. From time to time he got together with Dunleavy who was an ace reporter, an American celebrity. Ramsay’s American Dream crashed when his partner caught him naked in a closet with a maid and he was given the flick .
Out of the blue and on a
bender , Ramsay called up Dunleavy
one day and asked if he
could doss down in his swank
apartment . Dunleavy was going
out of town but arranged for Ramsay to have access . On
his return to New York ,
Dunleavy went to his apartment and was shocked to find his expensive lounge reduced to a pile of charcoal , the premises reeking of
smoke. There was no sign of Ramsay ,
no skeleton in the ashes
, no explanatory note .
Days later, Ramsay rang
Dunleavy and in a husky voice said
he supposed Steve
had noticed the lounge . He explained that he had fallen asleep with a
cigarette and woke up to find the lounge
destroyed. Somehow, he had
escaped injury.
Ramsay returned to Australia and worked on the Sydney Sun . He suffered a stroke and went to the Journalists’ Club in a wheelchair, unable to speak . When he died in l997, aged 67 , he was described as one of the great larrikin journalists of modern Australia. NEXT : The end of an era .
