The Beaver at 84

On the terrace of his villa, La Capponcina (Little Capon), overlooking Monte Carlo, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, leans on a Malacca cane. He looks as old as he is: 84. Age has bleached his skin to wrinkled parchment; one foot is shoeless, a concession to gout; a floppy, broad-brimmed straw hat shields him from the hot Mediterranean sun. But the sun has not been up much longer than the Beaver, and he is not there merely to bask.

A messenger arrives as bidden, with all the papers from London. The Beaver frowns intently through them all, giving special attention to the London Daily Express, the muscular morning giant of 4,300,000 circulation that is the cornerstone of his press combine. Soon the terrace is littered with newsprint that has been studied swiftly and as swiftly discarded. "Vines!" booms Beaver brook, and he begins firing orders to his private secretary at so rapid a rate that Vines, who is a mere mortal of 30 years, cannot keep up and sends for a tape recorder. Then off to London by air goes the latest batch of Beaverbrook commands.

Say It with Passion. But even running four newspapers--the Express, the Sunday Express (a separate newspaper), the Evening Standard and the Glasgow Evening Citizen--cannot absorb the Beaver's tremendous energies. Only this spring he took a second wife, the former Lady Dunn, widow of a lifelong friend. He was as excited as the youngest swain. "I am very glad to get her," he said. "It isn't often when you get 84, and find yourself still interesting to a woman." He has just published his twelfth book, The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George. Like most of his earlier volumes, it records the first-person impressions of a man who not only lived through more than half a century of British history but helped to make it. And the Beaver has by no means reached the last chapter. Gratified by the critical acclaim accorded his latest work, he has already set industriously to work on two more. "Making a good book, that's my passion now," he says. "I dictate day and night."

The words may be true as far as they go, but they hardly go far enough. No one activity has ever been able to contain the Beaver's passion; it burns in everything he says and does. "I am the victim of the Furies. On the rock-bound coast of New Brunswick," he said, recalling his Canadian youth, "the waves break incessantly. Every now and then comes a particularly dangerous wave smashing viciously against the rock. It is called The Rage. That's me." On reaching 70, a nice round retirement number, he thundered: "I'll not give up my temper. I'll not give up my passions. I've enjoyed them far too much to put them away. I'll not give up my prejudices, the very foundation of my strength and vigor." When a new acting managing editor was hired for the Daily Express in 1961, the proprietor had ionic characteristic advice: "Passion. That's the thing. I don't care what you put in the paper," he said, "so long as you say it with passion."

Crusader in Chains. No matter who is editor, the Daily Express continues to mirror the pride, the prejudices and the indomitable spirit of the man who took it to greatness. The Beaver refuses to recognize defeat in anything. "I always dispute the umpire's decision," he says. History ruled against the Beaverbrook dream of restoring the glory of the British Empire; but instead of bowing to the decision, the Beaver only threw chains around the tiny figure of the crusader that adorns the Express's masthead, and vowed never to remove them until the dream comes true. The chains are still there.

"When a man hits me," says the Beaver, "I wait until he's not looking and then hit him twice." More than one Prime Minister suffered from those blows. Only yesterday by the Beaverbrook chronology, he wielded power enough to force two Prime Ministers to the sidelines and send another into office. He and Stanley Baldwin, Britain's post-World War I Prime Minister, fought for years. Baldwin said he would not have such a man as the Beaver in his house. Said the Beaver blandly on one occasion: "I have always been ready to agree with Mr. Baldwin--when he is right."

Nor can Harold Macmillan escape The Rage. "I know Macmillan well," says Beaverbrook, who is inclined to sympathize with the Prime Minister, if only on the ground that he is a Conservative. "He was my under secretary during the war when I was running the Ministry of Supply. I have high regard for him and warm feelings of friendship." But friendship would not forgive Macmillan for what the Beaver regarded as an equivocating stand on the Common Market. The Express was passionately opposed to Britain's entry and expected everyone to feel and act the same way. "I would have gone to any length to kill the Common Market," said Beaverbrook. "If it meant killing the Conservative Party, I would have been sad, but it would have been a necessary evil."

The necessary evil was averted, thanks largely to Charles de Gaulle. But if France's Premier should care to claim credit for keeping Britain out of the club, he will have to wrestle with the Beaver. "We already had the Market beaten," says the Beaver, lightly dismissing De Gaulle. "We turned the country against it. It was the work of the Express."

Pulse Beats for Tomorrow. Such fresh journalistic triumphs mean more to the Beaver now than a lifetime of towering memories--and a few towering defeats. He has not forgotten the young man who assaulted England with a $5,000,000 fortune gained by cornering the Canadian cement market, and the ambition to buy or bulldoze his way to Whitehall. Perhaps, after twice coming agonizingly close to occupation of No. 10 Downing Street, he can still taste the bitterness of defeat. And he can surely still savor the enormous pride that he and all England felt in 1940, when, as Churchill's Minister of Air craft Production, he lofted the horde of Spitfires and Hurricanes that won the Battle of Britain. But all that was yesterday. The Beaver's pulse beats, like any newsman's, for tomorrow.

Another man might look upon Beaverbrook Newspapers, Ltd. as a monument to himself: a press empire second in size only to Cecil King's mammoth Daily Mirror newspapers (9,700,000 to 16.7 million) -- and second to none, among the country's popular press, in professional competence. But to the Beaver, his papers are simply an extension of himself, a setting for his unslaked passions, fighting tools, the instruments of his will.

"Journalism is the most fascinating of all professions," he has said, and although his years may counsel him to let younger men take over, he argues with that decision too. "Goodbye for ever," he told the Express staff sadly, in November 1927. No one believed him. No one believed him in 1948 either, when he retired once more. "It's been an annual event for 20 years," said his son Max, who as an R.A.F. group captain flew the fighter planes his father built, and who will one day, if he lives long enough, inherit the Beaverbrook crest and empire.

At 84, the first Baron Beaverbrook has apparently banished the very word mortality from his private lexicon. "I am an old man," he said recently, sensing a fell presence outside the door, "and I should be ready to go, but I am not."

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