Welcome to LA, Richard Johnson

Tabloid Baby pal Richard Johnson is leaving his job as editor of the New York Post's Page Six and moving to Los Angeles. Johnson has been at the helm of the most influential gossip column of our time for close to twenty five years, and a made a little gossip himself along the way while steering the column from the days of Sukhreet Gabel and Mark Gastineau. We'd have thought Johnson would have headed West fifteen years ago to become a television star, but he was to be respected as one of the last of the print guys. His skipping of the medium and move to a News Corp, "digital venture" signals the death of print gossip as far as we're concerned. Long live Jim Brady and Neal Travis.

Click here to read Richard Johnson's goodbye to New York. Last line:

In the words of J.J. Hunsecker, "I love this dirty town."

Steve Dunleavy sighted in New York City

Tabloid legend Steve Dunleavy has been sighted in New York City, looking good-- and smoking!

Dunleavy (center) was with bigshot political and journalism pals at the Water Club Friday afternoon, when he was photographed with a pair of ageless tabloid television veterans who've each racked up legendary status of his own. Frank Grimes and Steve McPartlin reportedly bumped into Dunleavy as he was on his way outside for a cigarette.

Sightings of the NY Post columnist, formner editor, A Current Affair star and Elvis What Happened author have been few and far between since his retirement in 2008.

79

Rupert Murdoch is 79 today.

Send your birthday wishes to rmurdoch@newscorp.com.

EVEN THE NEW YORK POST ADMITS IT

Hours to go. Go vote. Watch this space for earliest returns.

Steve Dunleavy's Last Column

October 3, 2008
The New York Post

I MAY BE GOING -
BUT I WON'T BE GONE

REAL men don't cry, but on Wednesday night if my eyes were dry, there was a Niagara cascading from my heart.

It was the occasion of my retirement at a monster bash at the Bourbon Street Bar and Grille in Midtown.

Perhaps I have made bigger decisions in my life, it's just that I can't remember when.

But when the bones get a bit creaky, you can't stay at the dance too long. So with a thousand moments of doubt, I regretfully decided to put my cue in the rack.

When you are 55 years in the business, 41 of those years working for the greatest news organization in the world, parting is not just sweet sorrow. It can be bloody torture.

Sure, when I made the final decision, I was awash in self-pity and doubt - that is, for just about a nanosecond.

Suddenly, you compile the camaraderie, the laughs, the exhilaration (with a few spills along the way), and you scold yourself for not realizing that you are not completing- but beginning - another chapter in a wonderfully happy life.

This company has sent me from Bogota to Baghdad, Lima to London, Kentucky to Kabul, Tampa to Tel Aviv.

How lucky can one guy be? How lucky to go into retirement with all that behind you.

I never spent a single hour at Columbia School of Journalism, except when I gave a lecture to journalism students - and I was about as popular as a fire hydrant at the Westchester dog show.

It's only those who are lucky enough to work for Rupert Murdoch who know what I am talking about.

This organization is filled with news hounds, young and old, guys and gals who take their jobs pathologically seriously - but, heaven forbid, don't take themselves seriously.

In my day, a misguided era in which the job was consumed by booze, tobacco and carousing, perhaps we were a little (little?) wilder, but the result of victory in the pages of the newspaper was the same.

Of course, then to atone for our sins, my friend and colleague Piers Akerman in Sydney says, "Forgive us our press passes." All of it has made me a pretty happy fellow.

Oh, yeah, I will miss those great cops and firefighters, the nutty judges and politicians and the criminal lawyers who were more colorful than an explosion in a paint factory.

And, of course, I will miss that great crew of the media militia - the reporters at The Post. And the leader of this wonderful far-flung empire, the boss.

Now I promise you, this is not goodbye. I promise you I'll be around to continue doing what I do best, being a pain in the rear end.

New York Post editorial honors Steve Dunleavy

The New York Post
October 3, 2008

THE DUNLEAVY DIFFERENCE

After a newspaper and television career spanning 55 years, including some three decades at The Post, our friend and colleague Steve Dunleavy has hung up his notebook.

Not that the hyperkinetic Dunleavy hasn't earned a rest - though a truly retired Steve is hard to imagine.

Joining The Post in 1977, he's been a reporter, an editor and a columnist.

Readers across the five boroughs came to love his no-nonsense columns - but none more so than the members of New York's uniformed services, especially its cops and firefighters.

He did more than cheer them on in print: He raised money for the families of officers killed in the line of duty. Indeed, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said at a packed farewell bash Wednesday night, "He was always there."

Dunleavy never talked down to his readers, nor did he lecture them.

All he ever wanted to do was tell a story. And that he did - simply, clearly and effectively.

Which is why he was always able to do what too few in this profession can: He connected with his readers.

So Steve Dunleavy's colleagues wish him a long and happy retirement.

He had a hell of a ride.

Video: New York Post covers Dunleavy send-off

The New York Post
October 3, 2008

A NIGHT OF POMP-ADORE
SENDOFF FOR POST'S DUNLEAVY

By CLEMENTE LISI

Cheers, mate!

Some 400 friends and colleagues of legendary Post columnist Steve Dunleavy marked the retirement of the tabloid titan at a big bash in the Theater District - calling him a "man of the people" who'd do anything to score a scoop.

Dunleavy, famous for his oversized pompadour and trademark cigarette, called it quits following a 55-year career that included chronicling the famous and infamous while collecting big bar tabs and even bigger stories. "I'll miss you all," Dunleavy, 70, told the crowd packed inside Bourbon Street Bar and Grille on Wednesday night.

Those who honored Dunleavy included News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy and former "A Current Affair" host Maury Povich, accompanied by his wife, Connie Chung.

"Your dedication to your work, your inspiration to others and loyalty to the paper defies description," Murdoch said as Dunleavy and wife Gloria looked on. "It's exceptional. I've never seen anything like it my whole life."

A defender of cops and firefighters, the Australian-born scribe famously arrived in New York on New Year's Eve 1966 with 10 bucks in his pocket and joined The Post a decade later.

Although he covered presidents and dictators, Dunleavy made a name for himself as the defender of the little guy. In his columns, Dunleavy pulled no punches - lambasting liberals and sticking up for cops. "He's larger than life," Kelly said of Dunleavy. "Everyone in uniform loves him."

Dunleavy, who traded newsprint for TV in 1986 to work as a reporter for "A Current Affair," returned to The Post in 1995.

Cassidy, who presented Dunleavy with a fire helmet, said, "your success is related to the fact that you've never forgotten the common man."

clisi@nypost.com

Steve Dunleavy Tabloid Master Class Part 5

On the occasion of his retirement, journalism legend and cultural icon Steve Dunleavy will be feted by Rupert Murdoch, friends, colleagues, admirers and competitors at a party in Manhattan this evening.

In celebration of his influential career, we continue with Steve Dunleavy's master class on tabloid journalism.

This morning's lecture is entitled:

"All's Fair in Love, War & Newsgathering."

More to follow. Stay tuned here.

(From the Tabloid Baby-Frozen Pictures production: Steve Dunleavy: The Man and His Music.)

Why Steve Dunleavy has been missing in action

It was ten years ago this morning that Burt Kearns awoke at the Paramount Hotel in New York City to find a message had been slipped under his door. The note read: "Frank Sinatra died. See you in L.A. Steve." Hours earlier, Burt had been facing Dunleavy in a sitdown in an Italian restaurant across the street from Langan's on 47th Street, trying to assure the tabloid legend that what he'd written about him in his forthcoming book was not going to get him arrested or deported. Dunleavy was not entirely reassured, but in the months to follow would be one of the few tabloid television heavyweights (Maury Povich, Rafael Abramovitz & Eames Yates were among the others) to support the memoir Tabloid Baby publicly without knowing what potentially toxic secrets were lurking between the covers.

We've been aware of Steve's absence from the pages of the New York Post since December, when he'd offered to write a column on the Roman Catholic Church's ban of the song Danny Boy at funerals, and have known about his health issues for months, but we haven't let on because mateship trumps scoopship, and one thing Steve Dunleavy has taught many of us is the value of mateship.

Now Steve's let the cat out of the bag, or the cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river, but in any case, it was his decision how and when to talk about it. He did this morning, with his old mate Jim Brady:

James Brady On Media
Desperately Seeking Dunleavy
James Brady 05.15.08

Star reporter for the New York Post, tabloid TV news hound, best-selling author--colorful, brawling, carousing Australian Steve Dunleavy was missing in action.

Dead? No, there would have been an obit. Stopped drinking? Not bloody likely, mate. Had Rupert Murdoch in a pious moment sacked the rogue? Not Murdoch's fiercest, most loyal and longest-running attack dog. Yet not a single, outrageous bylined story in three months. Where was Steve Dunleavy when the newspaper and nation needed him?

"It's m' legs, mate," he said when I called his Long Island home. "Sitting or lying down, no problem. It's the walking. You remember how I sprinted from bar to bar? Today I lurch from bar to bar." He blathered on about some long-time hereditary problem with his legs--vascular, something about pressure on a spinal disc, three hours of tests at Mount Sinai.

"I went to some Mickey Mouse Long Island doctors, which was my mistake. I spent two months in the Keys, sun and salt water, a little condo we have, but it didn't help. I don't use a cane but have an old shillelagh. Then Roger Wood (long-time Post editor in chief) suggested, "Go see that boy Howard Rubenstein (the PR guru). He represents every famous doctor in town." They've put me on five weeks of meds. If that doesn't do it, there's always the surgery option."

And is he drinking now? Dunleavy sort of failed to respond to that one. "Rubenstein is on top of things," he said evasively.

I sought to console my old partner in crime. "I miss work terribly," he said. "But I can't go out. If I were running up a daily 'thumb-sucker,' [his dismissive term for a Frank Rich-type opinion column] I could do it from home. But I have to be out reporting."

Dunleavy began life as a 16-year-old copy boy on the Sun in Sydney. "Five dollars a week. Then I moved to the Sydney Daily Mirror and earned my cadet ship. My dad was a famous press photographer on the Sun and we became very competitive." (He once deflated the old man's tires to beat him on a story).

And wasn't Dunleavy "a tea boy" on the South China Morning Post? "No," he said huffily, "I was a reporter by then." UPI hired him in London and in 1966 sent him to New York where he worked the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. trick in the old Daily News Building on East 42nd Street. "UPI was a great organization then, but cheap. You didn't ask for a $10 raise because your boss probably didn't make that much."

Murdoch hadn't yet invaded America but had a news bureau upstairs in the same building, and when Dunleavy "bumped into Neal Travis in the elevator," he took on a second, part-time job "as a casual," as a freelancer was then known, afternoons. "I could use the money." He went full time in November 1967 for Rupert's bureau. "An exciting time, Charles Manson, the 1968 riots, Vietnam."

When Murdoch launched his tabloid weekly, then the National Star, in 1974 and hired me for $50,000 as an editor (I also wrote the gossip column free under a pen name), he introduced Dunleavy. "He'll be your chief reporter but don't give him a title or any authority. And don't drink in the same bars he does."

The Star newsroom on Third Avenue was a roughneck operation, mostly Aussies and Fleet Streeters, but some steals from the Daily News. Plus a freelance stringer named R. Couri Hay, today a flack for nightclubs and the darling of East Side society women, but then a bowtie-wearing errand boy innocent of grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Evenings Hay hung about, making long-distance personal calls, rifling desk drawers and reading people’s mail, and when Dunleavy caught him, he chased him around the room, cursing and throwing ashtrays at him.

It was rarely dull. There was the night a blizzard buried Manhattan and Dunleavy, "reclining" with a young woman in a snowdrift outside Elaine's, and had his foot run over by a snowplow. Snarled Pete Hamill of the Daily News, "I hope it was his writing foot."

When Murdoch bought the Post, along came Dunleavy. "Son of Sam" was Jimmy Breslin's story. But Dunleavy scored a nice "second day" beat by wangling a 3 a.m. at home interview with Sam Carr and his dog, shouting "police reporters, police reporters," when the startled Carr pulled a cocked pistol.

As Teddy Kennedy was concocting alibis for the drowning at Chappaquiddick, Dunleavy and Ray Kerrison spent a week at the Cape where, to prove or disprove something, Dunleavy stripped to swim the swift-flowing channel as Kennedy allegedly had. "I was an Australian and a swimmer," he said. And when the story and photos of the swim ran next morning, said Dunleavy, "The place looked like Jones Beach with 30 or 40 reporters in the water."

When Elvis Presley's disaffected bodyguards offered to tell (or sell) their story, Dunleavy was dispatched to Dixie where he and the bodyguards, sequestered and drinking in a rural motel, cobbled together a series of stories for the Post--and for a paperback original, destiny struck! On the book's official pub date, Presley died. Elvis, What Happened went straight to No. 1 on The New York Times list and stayed there 16 weeks.

All this notoriety led to his being put on TV. "The Boss sent me to Channel 5 News and I didn't know a damned thing about television, but I learned." That led to the syndicated Murdoch show, A Current Affair, anchored by Maury Povich, and a spin-off called The Reporters.

Celebrated for first-punch fights at Costello's now defunct saloon and for sleeping overnight in a straight-backed wooden chair in the Post's city room when the paper was on South Street, in recent years Dunleavy has been favoring a booth at Langan's, a pub near the Post's current midtown HQ, for his recuperative overnight naps.

And if the brave new meds don't kick in, and the legs don't respond, would Dunleavy agree to an operation? "Don't want to, and face it, mate. No one wants to operate on a 70-year-old man who's burned the candle at both ends. And in the middle."

(...a tip of the Tabloid Baby hat to David Peterkin for keeping us informed...)