Image-maker whose charm and pithy slogans helped Mrs Thatcher and the Tories conquer Labour
Lord Bell
E
DWARD LEWIS, who
has died aged 99, was a
film producer whose
exceptional run of credits
from the 1960s onwards
may be less significant than
the place he inhabits in
Hollywood history.
For his third feature,
Spartacus (1960), Lewis
hired the screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo, who had
been blacklisted by the
entertainment industry for
refusing to testify before the
House Un-American Affairs
Committee 13 years before.
Lewis agreed to serve as
Trumbo’s “front” – the
creative whose name would
grace the script pages.
Sharper eyes may have
spotted evidence of
subversion in the film’s
rousing climax, in which the
hero’s fellow slaves defy
their Roman interrogators,
each in turn claiming the
identity of the fugitive
Spartacus. Yet the behind-
the-scenes masquerade
continued for much of the
shoot’s duration.
In his 2012 memoir I Am
Spartacus! Making a Film,
Breaking the Blacklist, the
star Kirk Douglas suggested
that Lewis found it tricky to
maintain the pretence:
“Every time Eddie Lewis
told someone he was
writing Spartacus, it
embarrassed him.” But only
when the film was well into
production – making it hard
for the heavily invested
studio to pull the plug – did
Lewis reveal his
screenwriter’s identity,
insisting that Trumbo be
given full credit and salary.
Universal’s acquiescence
led to protests from the
American Legion, yet on its
1960 release, Spartacus was
hailed as a triumph, going
on to win four Oscars, a
Golden Globe, offhand
approval from the newly
inaugurated JFK (“it was
fine”) and a lasting place in
the cinematic canon.
More importantly, the
film’s success changed the
way the industry perceived
those who had been
blacklisted. After writing
Otto Preminger’s Exodus
(1960), Trumbo was rehired
by Lewis – this time without
the need for subterfuge – to
write the Universal-released
The Last Sunset (1961) and
Lonely Are the Brave (1962).
In return, Trumbo
presented his former front
with a copy of his novel
Johnny Got His Gun bearing
the inscription “To Eddie
Lewis – who risked his
name to help a man who’d
lost his name.”
Edward Lewis was born
in Camden, New Jersey, on
December 16 1919 tofurniture maker Max Lewis
and his wife Florence (née
Kline). He was a restless
youth but eventually served
as a US Army captain in
England during the Second
World War.
After the war, he moved
to Los Angeles, and met and
married Mildred Gerchik.
Mildred, from an activist
background, nudged
Edward’s politics Leftwards.
The pair adapted a Balzac
play for the cinema, The
Lovable Cheat (1949), which
succeeded in carrying them
into the entertainment
sector. Lewis served an
apprenticeship in television
before joining Douglas’s
Bryna Productions in 1956,
claiming: “I couldn’t make a
living as a writer, so I
became a producer.”
After Spartacus, he
worked consistently for two
decades, producing many of
the director John
Frankenheimer’s strongest
films, among them the Cold
War thriller Seven Days in
May (1964), the cult science
fiction Seconds (1966) and
The Iceman Cometh (1973)
starring Lee Marvin.
Politics remained central
to Lewis’s work. He
resumed his writing career
with Brothers (1977), about
the relationship between a
black activist and a jailed
Black Panther. Then he
produced Costa-Gavras’s
Palme d’Or-winning Missing
(1982), on the 1973 Chilean
coup. After overseeing the
successful miniseries The
Thorn Birds (1983), Lewis’s
final production was an
Oscar-nominated farmland
drama, The River (1984).
In retirement, he wrote
fiction and plays. In a 1987
Los Angeles Times piece
promoting his musical The
Good Life, he reflected: “I’m
bothered by the cynicism
and negativity everywhere
today. I’m an optimist; I
believe there can be a good
life.”
Edward Lewis’s wife died
in April and he is survived
by two daughters.Edward Lewis, born
December 16 1919, died
July 27 2019Edward Lewis
Producer of Spartacus who
welcomed blacklisted writers
Lewis: ‘There can be a good life’L
ORD BELL, who has died aged
77, revolutionised British
politics by introducing
commercial advertising
techniques into general election
campaigns; in doing so he
became a friend and confidant of the
Conservative Party leader Margaret
Thatcher and made himself the best known
media image-maker of his generation.
Yet Tim Bell was a complex character,
and his buccaneering style – he boasted of
making up research, doing “terrible things”,
claiming “irrelevant expenses”, and
admitted to having snorted cocaine on a
regular basis when working for the Tories- grew increasingly out of keeping in a PR
industry striving to clean up its act.
In his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, first
with Saatchi & Saatchi, then on a personal
basis, Bell’s packaging of the Conservatives
was considered by many to have played a
vital role in the party’s three successive
elections victories in 1979, 1983 and 1987.
Possibly the ultimate stamp of approval
came when the Labour Party, which had
previously derided the Tories use of
advertising, imitated his tactics in the 1980s
by creating the “Red Rose” image.
Bell was not a thinker or a party
strategist; he often seemed to find political
theory dreary. But he had long been
fascinated by political advertising. In the
mid-Seventies, he and Sir Gordon Reece,
the cigar – chomping television producer
who had become head of communications
at Conservative Central Office, decided that
Margaret Thatcher, the new leader of the
Conservative Party, had a future and set
about turning her from a shrill Tory matron
into what one journalist described as “a
cross between Winston Churchill and Mrs
Miniver”.
The means would be television: they
filmed her, over and over again, with a huge
production team in order to get her to hit
the right tone, to pause dramatically, and
enunciate clearly. Bell’s attention to detail
extended to such details as telling her to
shift from buttock to buttock during
interviews so as to look less frozen.
Bell also turned out to be a past master at
presenting complex political ideas in ways
that were easily understood and he
persuaded the Tory leader to adopt tactics
long taken for granted in the US.
Although he was not personally
responsible for the 1978 campaign poster
“Labour Isn’t Working” (the work of the
copywriter Andrew Rutherford – in his
later memoirs, Bell would recall that it left
the Tory leader completely bewildered,
because she had no sense of irony), it came
to represent the new way, encapsulating a
promotional message in one phrase.
Public meetings were replaced by
speeches to cheering supporters, designed
to present the sound bite for the evening
news. Dull “talking head” party political
broadcasts were replaced by shorter,
sharper products with memorable slogans.
Mrs Thatcher offered photo opportunities
by the dozen; off the cuff remarks were
reduced to a minimum.
During Mrs Thatcher’s time at No 10,
Bell’s political involvement and flamboyant
lifestyle, his penchant for the quotable
phrase, and his charm (a colleague once
described him as the one man for whom
dogs would cross the road to have their
heads stroked) ensured that he was rarely
out of the headlines.
The publicity did no harm to his
commercial activities during the 1980s and
his work earned him a fortune, which
enabled him, among other things, to do a
considerable amount of charity work – about
which he kept uncharacteristically quiet.
Mrs Thatcher’s faith in Bell was not,
however, shared by other members of the
political establishment. During the 1987
campaign the party chairman Norman
Tebbit had attempted, amid much acrimony
and ultimately unsuccessfully, to exclude
him from the inner team advising the Prime
Minister at Central Office. Her Downing
Street press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham
found many of his ideas “absolutely bloody
barmy” and was grateful that he was not
allowed to interfere with government policy.
There were also growing doubts about
his business activities.
In the late 1980s Bell had co-founded
what became Bell Pottinger, a PR firm
which developed a reputation for working
on behalf of clients with “reputational
issues”, among them David Mellor, Neil and
Christine Hamilton, the late Chilean
dictator General Pinochet, Alexander
Lukashenko the authoritarian president of
Belarus, and the governments of Sri Lanka
and Bahrain. But in August 2016 Bell
abruptly departed from the company.
When, the following year, Bell Pottinger
was expelled from the Public Relations and
Communications Association, for actions
“likely to inflame racial discord” in relation
to its work for the Guptas, an Indian-born
South African business family with strong
links to South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma,
Bell gave an interview to BBC Newsnight,
supposedly in Bell Pottinger’s defence,
which was widely seen as a PR disaster.
During his questioning, which was
interrupted several times by his mobile
phone going off, Bell admitted that he had
been the most senior Bell Pottinger director
at an initial meeting with the Guptas; but he
claimed that he advised colleagues that the
company should not handle the business
and had subsequently left the firm after his
fellow directors had dismissed his concerns
about its “smelly” relationship with the
South Africans.
Newsnight’s presenter Kirsty Wark then
read Bell his own email of January 26 2016,
stating: “The trip was a great success and we
will put forward a deal whereby we will earn
£100,000 per month plus costs and I will
oversee this and make further reports.”
There were those who saw the interview
as a “work of genius” designed to put the
last nail in the coffin of his old company.
Bell’s feud with its former chief executive
James Henderson, who was reported to be
aiming to clean up the agency’s reputation
by moving away from “untouchables”
towards City and financial PR, was a matter
of record. Bell, according to the
Machiavellian thesis, did not go on
Newsnight to shore up Bell Pottinger’s
reputation but to bury it. A few days later
the company had to call in the receivers.
Bell, meanwhile, had established a rival
agency, Sans Frontières (the name of the
Bell Pottinger unit that had handled the
firm’s lobbying and consultancy work for
the governments of countries such as
Belarus and Sri Lanka), one of whose senior
consultants was quoted as having
experience in “advising UHNW (ultra-high-
net-worth) individuals on extremely
sensitive issues concerning cross-border
transactions, criminal wrongdoing and
cultural heritage”.
“I try, with mixed success, not to give a
f--- what people think of me,” Bell wrote in
his 2014 memoir, Right or Wrong.F
rom the early 1960s until the late 1980s
Bell often claimed to be Australian,
informing one journalist that he had
been “born in Balmain, Sydney, and left at
the age of two”. In fact he was born in
Southgate, north London, on October 18
1941 to an Australian mother and an Irish
Protestant linen salesman father. Mark
Hollingsworth, in his unauthorised
biography of Bell, The Ultimate Spin Doctor
(1997), suggested that this fib might have
helped Bell to overcome the British class
system, giving him an advantage with
clients when the public-school educated
gentlemen running the advertising industry
were on their way out.
Young Tim’s father, an alcoholic,
abandoned his family when his son was five,
later moving to South Africa, and in 1952 his
mother married Peter Pettit, the solicitor
who had handled her divorce. The family,
including Tim and his two older sisters,
moved to Barnet, where Tim was educated
at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School.
He decided against university, starting
work with ABC television in 1959. After two
years there, he worked for a series of
advertising agents, beginning with Colman
Prentiss & Varley. In 1963 he moved on to
Hobson, Bates and in 1966 began a four year
spell at Geers, Gross as a post boy.
His decision to join Saatchi & Saatchi at
its start in 1970 as managing director while
still in his twenties launched his career. In
his 15 years at the company (he was
chairman and managing director of Saatchi
& Saatchi Compton from 1975), it grew from
having a staff of 10 into one of the largest
advertising agencies in the world.
His secret was what one colleague
described as “an ability to charm money out
of clients”. As well as the Conservative Party
contract, the agency picked up a list of blue-
chip companies including British Airways,
Sainsbury’s, Trust House Forte and
Cadbury’s.
The basis of his successful decade
working for the Conservatives was his
relationship with Mrs Thatcher; the linkbecame increasingly personal rather than
corporate. “I have to start this story with
Margaret because she changed me
completely,” he wrote in his memoirs Right
or Wrong, “I loved her.”
He was not blind to her foibles, however,
recalling that when her aides drafted a joke
comparing her opponent Jim Callaghan to
Moses and urging him to “keep taking the
tablets”, she tried to change it to “keep
taking the pills”.
She also had an unfortunate habit of
using the word “pussy” to illustrate the
inability of people who “couldn’t organise
things”, and Bell lived in dread that one day
she might announce publicly that Callaghan
“couldn’t even organise pussy”. When he
finally broached the subject, she stared at
him and said: “What’s wrong with ‘pussy’,
dear? What do you think it means?”
His feelings for her were reciprocated. Bell
was one of the few outsiders invited to
Chequers for the Thatcher family Christmas
Day lunch, though as he later recalled these
were joyless affairs. Presents were not
exchanged; there were no fun traditions like
the wearing of Christmas jumpers, playing
silly games or singing carols; and children
were banned from the festivities altogether.
Instead, the day was centred around the
Queen’s speech, with Mrs Thatcher
glowering at anyone who interrupted the
broadcast by coughing or even moving in
their seats.
Their relationship survived rumours
(later confirmed) of Bell’s heavy cocaine use
in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Bell’s
conviction in 1977 (before he began working
for the Conservatives, admittedly) on
charges of indecency after he had exposed
himself while masturbating at his
Hampstead bathroom window in full view
of female passers-by. It even survived the
occasion when Bell made, during a private
dinner bugged by a magazine, disparaging
remarks about Mrs Thatcher’s son, Mark.
(“He is a twit,” he was quoted as saying. “In
my opinion he has absolutely nothing to
offer the world.”)
Bell was at her side during her
Götterdämmerung in the autumn of 1990. It
was even Bell who announced the news of
her death in 2013. After her memorial
service he felt only a “black, bleak finality”.
After the 1983 general election, largely
thanks to Bell, Saatchis was well on the way
to becoming the biggest ad agency in the
world, but relations between the brothers
and Bell were cooling. In his memoirs he
did not hold back on the Saatchis:
“detached”, “scheming”, “without scruples”
and “brutal” were some of the terms used.
It was no surprise when in 1985 he left
Saatchis and joined Lowe Howard-Spink &
Bell as chief executive, later becoming
chairman, following a management buy-out
in 1989, of Lowe Bell Communications,
which completed his transfer from
advertising to PR.
Although Saatchis kept the Conservative
Party contract until after the 1987 election
and the party chairman Norman Tebbittried to distance him from Central Office,
Bell continued to advise the Prime Minister.
He had no formal role but was summoned
secretly two weeks before the poll, when
Mrs Thatcher feared that the Tories’
lacklustre campaign was losing them the
election.
Bell effectively created an alternative
campaign, based on the slogan, “Britain’s a
success again, don’t let Labour ruin it.” This
was pressed on Saatchis, who amended it to
“Britain is great again. Don’t let Labour
wreck it.” Characteristically Bell maintained
that his was better as it contained “people”
rather than “polemic” words.
Lowe Bell Communications was floated
in 1994 as Chime Communications, a
holding company of which Bell became
chairman and which included the Bell
Pottinger group, and over the years a series
of mergers and acquisitions saw Bell
Pottinger grow into the largest UK-based
public relations consultancy.
Bell had always advised senior managers
in tricky situations. During the miners’ strike
he had been public relations adviser to Ian
MacGregor, hitting on the idea of getting the
Coal Board chairman to wear a light suit to
disguise his dandruff. He was also involved
in the board’s “Back to Work” campaign.
As he built up his PR business, he
attracted the cream of British businessmen,
including Lord Hanson, Lord Sterling and
Lord King, who employed Bell to advise
both their companies and their personal
campaigns.
Overseas Bell worked for the Sultan of
Brunei, Jacques Chirac when he was
running for French president, and the
Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky (Bell
handled the media attention behind the
poisoned Russian ex-spy Alexander
Litvinenko, who died in hospital in
November 2006).
In December 2006 Bell successfully
lobbied on behalf of the Saudi government
to discontinue the Serious Fraud Office
investigation into alleged bribes in the
Al-Yamamah arms deal. Other clients
included the Malaysian Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad during the Pergau dam
development aid controversy (at the same
time he was advising the head of GEC in
Malaysia, one of the UK companies
criticised for its involvement in it).B
ell often popped up on panels and
current affairs programmes discussing
the issues of the day, served on various
arts and public administration bodies and
was chairman of the Conservative Party’s
“Keep the £” Campaign.
Not all his interventions were helpful to
the party. In 2011 he sealed the (albeit
temporary) demise of his old friend Liam
Fox by helping one of his clients to pass
bank account details to The Times revealing
a conflict of interest in the way Dr Fox’s
adviser Adam Werritty was funded.
Bell always claimed that when assessing
whether to lobby on behalf of a client, he
weighed the “direction of travel” of a
government, only representing authoritarian
regimes if they promised to reform. In late
2011, however, The Independent ran a
front-page story based on an undercover
investigation of Bell Pottinger.
Posing as agents from the government of
Uzbekistan, journalists from the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism secretly recorded
Bell Pottinger senior executives boasting of
their easy access (via a former Conservative
MP) to the Cameron government and others
overseas, suggesting that they could
“drown” out negative coverage of human-
rights violations on Google and “sort”
Wikipedia entries, and explaining how a
despotic regime could improve its
international standing while keeping child
labour for up to two decades.
According to industry insiders, the
allegations upset Bell Pottinger’s parent
company Chime, which was a listed entity
at the time. About six months later, in May
2012, Bell led a £26.5 million management
buy-out of Bell Pottinger, in a deal in which
James Henderson was thought to be
instrumental.
As well as buying a 25 per cent stake
himself, Henderson also became chief
executive and set to work to reposition the
firm, shifting its focus from “geopolitical”
work to more traditional financial PR.
Before the scandal over the Gupta family
erupted, he was beginning to make
progress. In early 2013, Bell Pottinger had
one FTSE 100 client, Imperial Tobacco. By
2016 the figure had risen to five.
By this time, however, relations between
Bell and senior executives at Bell Pottinger
had reached a nadir. They were said to have
gone into free fall after Bell published his
memoirs, in which he remained
unapologetic about his work for some of the
world’s most reviled characters and
admitted to lying: “Charles (Saatchi’s) great
line was ‘why tell the truth when a good lie
will do?’ and there was many a time when I
would adopt the same philosophy.”
Subsequently he gave an interview to the
Financial Times in which he said that
bankers were “all complete criminals”, even
though Bell Pottinger’s client list was
stuffed with bankers.
Notwithstanding his business activities,
Bell was deeply committed to charity work,
playing an active role in raising funds for
Red Nose Day and Cancerbackup and
underwriting with his own money the
Charity Projects company and the Compass
Theatre Group.
In later life he suffered bouts of serious ill
health. He had had Type 2 diabetes since his
50s.
Bell was knighted in 1990 and given a life
peerage in 1998.
He was thrice married, first in his 20s to
Suzanne Cordran (dissolved 1985); secondly,
in 1988, to Virginia Hornbrook, with whom
he had a son and a daughter. That marriage
was dissolved in 2016 and the following
year he married Jacky Phillips. She and his
children survive him.Lord Bell, born October 18 1941, died
August 25 2019Bell and, below, the 1978 Saatchi & Saatchi campaign poster which represented a new approachABBIE TRAYLER-SMITH/ CHRIS WARE/GETTYMIKE FANOUS/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTYObituaries
The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 27 August 2019 *** 25
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