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The Christchurch Civic
Creche Case |
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MARK COOTE/Sunday Star Times FRANK'S FAREWELL: Frank Haden has
written his last newspaper column, forced out of print after 50 years by the
prostrate cancer which is slowly killing him. Frank Haden has written his last newspaper column, forced out of print
after 50 years by the prostate cancer which is slowly killing him. He talks to
Rosemary McLeod. "What they don't appreciate
is that I'm always right!" Flashes of the great, provocative Frank haden
are still gloriously there, but this is a Frank enetering the final stages of
cancer, his edge and memory blunted by morphine. His illness has become the
veteran journalist's final story, though he'll never write again. Few people have known about
Frank's prostate cancer, which he has lived - and worked - with since it was
diagnosed in 1998. Those who know him will understand that he'd want to tough
it out, and would shrink from the prospect of pity, but the time has come
when even the effort involved in sitting at a computer has become too
painful. His cancer spread into his bones
five months ago, and tomorrow Frank will be asking his doctor direct
questions he has so far avoided; questions such as, "How long have I got
to live?" and "Can you really help me manage the pain if it gets
worse?" He has lived six years longer than
was first predicted. "My specialist applauds the
columns I write, thereby demonstrating his superiority at every turn, and
says the protracted delay in things turning bad means somebody up there
wanted me to go on writing. That sort of ego massaging is music to my
ears!" His specialist was not alone in
reading Frank, though not everyone agreed with him. Frank attracted more
letters to the editor than any other columnist in this newspaper in his 17
years of writing for it and its forerunner (and well over 50 years in
journalism). He has listed his favourite issues
as "The Iraq invasion, the persecution of Ahmed Zaoui, compensation for
uncontrollable thugs, euthanasia, prostate cancer screening, anywhere/anytime
speed cameras, quack medicine, the excesses of the Treaty industry, Parole
Board decisions, nuclear power, global warming myths". He has claimed that he doesn't
U-turn on his views: "I spend a lot of time saying `I told you so!'
after being proved right." Frank now tells even his final
illness as a story, one involving a challenge to the health system. It's a
matter of getting the facts right, of making complicated technical matters
simple to understand, of being logical - all attributes he would expect from
well-crafted news. "There's quite a liberal
amount of tumour material pasted on the third and fourth vertebrae - looking
rather like Vegemite on toast," he explains. It's for this reason that
he now lives between a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy armchair and a hospital bed
set up for him at home, his elbows padded to avoid pressure pain, swallowing
his way through a medical menu of 30 pills a day. Maybe we always believed Frank was
indestructible: he has, after all, been writing energetically up to the age
of 76. Certainly his age never counted against him; he was 61 when he was
sent to Auckland from his long-time Wellington base to try to save the doomed
Auckland Star. There was, he concedes, no future for afternoon papers, and he
now doubts how genuine its management's intentions were. "The number of times I nearly
killed myself in the service of INL (Independent Newspapers Limited). "In 1992, I neglected what
was obviously a very bad case of the flu because I was doing things that had
to be done, and I fainted. I had pneumonia. I've had a shadow on both lungs
since then, and I was told on no account to get the flu again, or it would be
the end of me. I've always felt aggrieved that nobody appreciated these
efforts." The irony is not lost on Frank
that he's dying of a disease which is detectable by regular screening, and
which he argued the case for in columns well before he became ill. "It was the basis of a
terrible fight I had through the column in 1993 with Karen Poutasi and the
Ministry of Health, on the need for all men to be tested regularly. "It's a simple examination,
it costs bugger-all, and it involves no pain. "I've made as much of a fuss
as I can about the need for men to be tested for prostate cancer, and now
here I am with prostate cancer which would have come to light if I'd been
part of a screening process. "The Ministry still won't see
reason. They've got a completely lunatic idea that women are much stronger
than men; it doesn't matter if they're given a fright and told they've got
uterine cancer or breast cancer... Whereas men being weak vessels are unable
to stand the strain and trauma of a warning that they could have cancer. It's
an insane assumption that men and women are different in that insulting way!
I mean, for God's sake!" We who have worked with Frank know
well the way he builds his arguments, lacing logic with absurdity, and
sometimes defending both with equal vigour. Not for nothing was he known in
the trade for the past 25 years as Mad Frank. Although he has always deplored
the use of exclamation marks, his own speech is peppered with them like
buckshot, often pointing up his more outrageous assertions. Colleagues on the
Dominion once collected them into a slim volume of quotations designed, for
the most part, to appall. He has been gleefully
anti-feminist, anti-Maori activist, and anti-liberal. Frank is unsure, now, of exactly
when he began column writing after a career which culminated in the
editorship of two newspapers (the Sunday Times and the Auckland Star). "It was (Geoff) Baylis' idea,
when he was editor of the Dominion, that I should be doing a weekly
trouble-making column. I corrected him when he said a weekly right-wing
column. I said I'm simply NOT a right-winger. I hold a lot of inflammatory
ideas that might seem to some people to be right-wing, but I'm not at all.
Stripped to bare necessities I'm quite a compassionate kind of person, so long
as people are prepared to take a fair measure of responsibility. "I lose patience quickly with
people whose first port of call is to say, 'It's not my fault'. To people who
say that, I say `It bloody well IS your fault!' I've had an astonishingly
hard life in a lot of areas and never felt that I had to lie on the floor and
wail about what a rough time everybody's given me. I'm not like the Parnell
Panther, moaning about being in a dog kennel!" (Mark Stephens, the
rapist known as the Parnell Panther, has described being kept in a dog kennel
when he was a child.) Frank was
born in 1929, the year of the Wall St stockmarket crash that heralded the
Great Depression. This, and another great misfortune of his young life, must
have shaped his view of the world. "Yes, I have memories of the
Depression. Bread and dripping -which I quite like, actually. Dripping is
much nicer than butter! "My father was an Englishman
who came here in 1926 to sell motorbikes. He had a shop in Manchester St in
Christchurch. "My father used to race on
weekends, but under sufferance, because if he wanted to sell motorbikes, he
had to be seen flogging them about in the sun... I used to be there on
Saturday mornings smelling the petrol, as they used to race and go for
records, and I did a bit of racing myself later. "I've got sound stories that
are nothing but exhaust noises - of the Isle of Man and other races; some
just recording an Aston Martin on a test bed. These would be played when we
had a little holiday home in Martinborough. We'd sit and listen to motorbike
exhaust noises. It's the nicest noise there is, a very loud exhaust noise!
That's why I get furious with television, because what comes out when they're
transmitting motor races is not exhaust noises but techno, the worst noise
that humanity has ever perpetrated!" Frank has owned motorbikes on and
off for most of his life, the last a Honda 400 which took him to his office
and back in the past few years. "A light bike, certainly nothing
glamorous or remarkable or romantic or exciting" - as opposed to his
favourite bike, the BSA Clubman 350cc he once raced. It may seem paradoxical - as much
about Frank is - but his other great listening love is Bach. "There are
two great categories of music. Bach is one category, and everyone else is the
rest." Frank's mother hoped that his love
of the mechanics of language, and of argument, would lead him into law, but
that didn't last, any more than did his Catholicism. "Once you start to see
through bullshit then you see through all bullshit," is how he has
explained his disillusionment with the church - leveraged into a lifetime's
disillusionment with all authority, even newspaper proprietors'. Frank
credits his many years as a sidelined senior newspaperman to his refusal to publish
"lying" apologies to the Press Council when it found against him. "I was a law clerk, 19, and
the smell of dusty files drove me across the street to the Press, where I
took a job for exactly 25% of the previous salary. I had to hang about and
wait until I was 21, when you were no longer able to employ people for
nothing. I have to thank an extremely indulgent and self-sacrificing mother.
At that age I should have been contributing to an orphaned household, and it
was the end of her dream of me being a lawyer. Law was a prestigious
activity, and far better paid." There is more to that story; the
death of Frank's father when he was still at college, and his youngest
brother had only just been born. A simple hernia operation ended in tragedy
because doctors believed at that time that patients should not stir from
their beds after abdominal surgery. Frank's father developed a blood clot
from lying in bed, and never came home. His mother was left alone with six
children. "I was summoned by the rector
(of St Bede's College) and told in the quadrangle that I'd better go home
because my father had died, which I didn't take very kindly to because I was
fonder of him than I had realised. Once I figured it was a useful thing to
do, I did actually weep. Until then I'd thought that weeping was a bit like
real men and quiche. "The family got by with
EXTREME difficulty, because that was at a time when they stopped the pension
as a penalty for accepting what my mother had every reason to regard as her
right. Her father had died and left her enough money to get a new roof on the
house, and get other jobs done to put the family home put in good order. "The Public Trust officer
handling her case didn't know, and the Public Trust office didn't tell him,
that if he gave my mother all this money in one year, that would be over some
arbitrary limit. They said nothing, then when they had handed over the money
they told her that her pension would now stop for the next 12 months! So in
addition to being at school, for the next 12 months I had fulltime labouring
jobs - in a brickyard and as a carpenter's labourer - and I also did a stint
in the freezing works. "Luckily it was a time of
full employment. I was as big then as I am now, so my holding down a male job
like this didn't worry anyone. Also, several very kind neighbours admired the
way my mother was coping, and made sure I got jobs. I had to give up my
bedroom and move out to the verandah, and the room was taken over by two
boarders, whose contribution was absolutely vital. We had to have that
money." It's tempting to find in Frank's
early experiences an explanation for his dogged sense of duty and loyalty,
learned no doubt when he became the sole support of his family. His marriage
to his tolerant wife Merle, too, has lasted 50 years, producing four
daughters and seven grandchildren. He has confessed to regrets that he put
work before his family, and often quotes his wife's dry observations on his
failings in that area. I remember him rather proudly claiming that Merle said
if one of their children was run over, he'd call a newspaper before he called
an ambulance. The urge to challenge authority
figures, one that marks any good journalist, may well have emerged after the
death of his father from medical misadventure, and witnessing the
bureaucratic callousness towards his recently widowed mother. Maybe, too,
that willingness to work hard, and admiration of his striving mother,
unleashed his columns on welfare dependency. "Very, very rarely have I
been writing just to provoke," Frank says. "My columns were
virtually always written because I felt something quite deeply; I very rarely
stitched something together knowing I was out of line for the best of
reasons. So many of my columns infuriated people who couldn't understand why
I'd taken this particular line when in fact I'd bloody well meant it! I'm not
a tongue-in-cheek writer at all." Frank now talks about what he
calls the end of the world, his concern that the planet will use up its
resources in the next 50 years. "We're deep in the shit. It takes a lot
for me to say that, but we are. The picture we have is of the
apocalypse." Is this a parallel for his
situation? "The coincidence has not evaded me." It's hard to ask a man as quixotic
and wilful as Frank just how serious he has really been, with statements like
his oft-quoted, "I am always right!" Reluctantly, Frank admits he
has been pulling everyone's leg at least some of the time. "Of course
nobody can be always right, but people jump when you say it!" And do you like that? There's a
long pause. "Yeah. I would have to admit I'm a deliberate provocateur,
because that's what making people jump is. I'm reluctant to admit it, because
it's pushing me hard on to admitting a substantial character flaw."
Namely? "Insincerity." What makes a good columnist? "To be a good columnist you
have to be a journalist to begin with, and a good columnist is one who won't
take yes or no for an answer. I would not want to be pompous about the role.
It's to produce material at regular intervals that you hope will keep people
interested enough to keep the editor buying it. "You can be a perfectly
adequate journalist without being a columnist. A lot of people TRY to be
columnists, and you can feel them, like monks in The Da Vinci Code, lashing
themselves into producing a column they don't want to produce at all. If
you're a columnist it runs easily once you get started, but there are a lot
selling a column a week who are obviously not sold on the idea at all." In the end, does journalism
matter? "Of all the possible human
activities, journalism matters more than most, because it interprets the way
things are for people who've got ears to hear, and eyes to see. If not for
journalism the world would be a meaningless sort of place. We'd be in terrible
strife without people telling us what's going on and why it's happening, and
why our reaction should be a certain way. That includes columnists of course.
"They're a wonderful thing,
something that newspapers have got over television. Television produces its
yellers and shouters, but newspapers have got their answer in the columnists.
Nobody quotes a television person as having an opinion. Look at the Sunday
Star-Times and its columnists! Marvellous bloody things when you add them all
together!" Have you got anything to say about
ending your column? "No," says Frank, "I'm not into curtain
calls." He once observed, in typically
provocative fashion, that "People shouldn't retire, they should just
die. You should die when you're not useful any more." He would still
believe it, and has some difficulty facing a disease that takes its own slow
time. His mother, he says, always envied people who dropped dead suddenly
because "they got away with not dying". |
