Ian Ball, veteran America correspondent obituary
Ian Ball, who has died aged 88, was for some 40 years the Daily Telegraph’s leading America-based reporter; he covered Nikita Khrushchev’s clashes with Vice President Richard Nixon in Hollywood and Moscow, then watched the curdling of the American dream as President Kennedy’s death and the protests against the Vietnam War led to the seediness of the Watergate scandal.
He was the doyen of British newspaper correspondents in America; Manhattan was his beat and he made it his home from the moment he arrived there in 1956. He never moved to the suburbs and lived stylishly in Upper Manhattan, always within walking distance of his office on Rockefeller Plaza.
A debonair, workaholic writer whose prose wove a seamless blend of wit and polish, Ball had only one fault, according to the paper’s sub-editors: his stories were too long.
Deeply immersing himself in the culture of the United States as his Australian accent faded, he never panicked, seemed to know about everybody and everything, rarely needing to consult press cuttings, and could file at least five stories a day, ranging from the serious to the funny.
Even in his later years, he could exhaust much younger colleagues, asking them at 2am – after a night out – “Where now?”, while always arriving next day at the bureau at around 8.30am.
One morning in 1960 he arrived at the paper’s office to demonstrate to astonished colleagues a new dance he had encountered in the fashionable Peppermint Lounge. Slipping off his jacket he segued into what appeared to be some kind of fit.
Jaws dropped as he started swivelling his knees, swaying his hips and waving his arms with an expression of transcendental bliss on his face. The dance was called “The Twist”.
A journalist’s son, Ian MacDougall Ball was born on March 25 1929 in Melbourne, Australia, where he went to Box Hill School, and captained the cricket and football teams. He started his career on the local Camberwell Observer before moved to a shipping beat on the Melbourne Herald, reporting the bitter dockside wars of the communist and Catholic unions.
With the typical antipodean wanderlust of the time, he moved to the Auckland Star in New Zealand and then several papers in the Pacific islands before arriving in Britain 1950 to join, first, the Coventry Evening Telegraph and then, at the age of 21, The Daily Telegraph as a general reporter.
He left to work for the Globe and Mail in Toronto for a time but returned to the Telegraph start learning Russian before being sent to America for the first time.
He accompanied Nixon to Moscow in July 1959, and on Khrushchev’s visit to Hollywood two months later saw the Soviet premier threaten to go home for claiming to have been shocked by the high flouncing skirts on the set of the film Can Can.
The leaders’ Moscow encounters, conducted through interpreters, included a debate in an American model kitchen over the superiority of rockets or colour television.
It was only in the Siberian boom town of Novosibirsk that there was a genuine burst of emotion from a crowd, though Ball shrewdly observed that the enthusiasm was less for Nixon than for the first foreign visitors since the 1917 revolution.
Settling back in New York, Ball married the Vogue model Lele Lewis, and flitted around the Americas as a busy “fireman”. With London five hours ahead of New York, he showed that he could file stories as rapidly from a beach in Acapulco as from his office desk, as well as carry out such errands as buying a self-stirring saucepan for Lady Hartwell, the Telegraph chairman’s wife.
Having seen Charles Laughton’s portrayal of a cruel Captain Bligh, RN, in the 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty, and finding that the 1962 production with Trevor Howard was no more generous, Ball decided to refute the case of the “bad Bligh” theorists.
In 1972 he took a sabbatical, hitched a lift with the French Navy and, accompanied by his wife, their two young sons and daughter, arrived in the Pitcairn Islands, rowing through the surf in a longboat. He spent several months there, put his children into a local school and wrote a book, Pitcairn: Children of the Bounty.
He was hard hit by Lele’s death after nearly 30 years of marriage but he was sustained by the support and sympathy of an old family friend, Ellen Bernstein, sister-in-law of the West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein, who later became his wife.
She introduced him to a new layer of society which enabled him to interview leaders of the revolutionary Black Panther party. A particularly horrifying experience for him was the Jonestown Massacre of 1978, in which members of a religious sect committed suicide in Guyana. For a week he filed daily stories as the more than 900 decomposing bodies being uncovered.
In the dying days of the Hartwell era he was widely tipped as a candidate to succeed WF Deedes as editor of the paper, but he was considered too old and to have been out of the country too long.
He remained fascinated with every facet of the newspaper business, including type and make-up, and some of his ideas were incorporated in The Daily Telegraph reborn on the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s. Indeed he bombarded the new editor, Max Hastings, with recommendations for a new typeface so often that he was known as “Modern Bodoni” in the office.
He had a passion for works of art, especially the modern, exotic and native; he owned an extensive collection of Haitian primitive paintings.
One of his idiosyncrasies was a refusal ever to take out any insurance for himself or his possessions and, inevitably, during the years, he lost much from theft, including his valuable coin collection. “Welcome to Manhattan, baby” was his comment after being told that his apartment had been burgled.
With the same verve and enthusiasm that he displayed in his work and play, Ball, in his late fifties, without so much as a lesson, took up painting, inspired by the scenery on a visit to Cuba.
He would get out well before dawn to work on his canvases. He delighted in the rich colour of toucans and pink flamingos while doing surrealistic political cartoons of President George W Bush.
He admitted he was no good at faces, so any figures in his pictures were painted from behind. He did one monumental work on the fall of the Berlin Wall and wrote a witty piece for the Telegraph Magazine for weekend painters.
Eventually declining health led him to retire to Italy; but he could not master the language. So in 1992 he moved to Coconut Grove, Miami, where he bought his first house four days before Hurricane Andrew struck. It took off the roof; water poured through the keyholes, and he was trapped for 20 hours. But the building was sturdily built on coral and had a large banyan tree in the garden which saved it from being flattened.
Characteristically, Ball refused to leave when rescuers arrived, saying he had sufficient food and champagne: “It was a good way to meet the neighbours.” Although none of the American telephones worked, he filed his copy to the paper on a Chinese instrument which did not depend on outside electricity; and in an allusion to his origins he called the house Wombat Key.
In 2012 he produced an illustrated book, They Took their Easels to Miami, in which he imagined what such artists as Edward Hopper, Man Ray and Georgia O’Keefe would have made of southern Florida. Ball’s other enthusiasms included Russian history, cooking and breadmaking.
Ball’s life had more than its fair share of problems but he never complained. When his cancer returned for the 11th time he faced it with equanimity.
“I felt lousy, of course,” he recalled, “but I never thought of blaming Humphrey Bogart. I blamed myself. Guilty of foolish behaviour, but cigarettes were immensely pleasurable and seemed to be an essential part of a foreign correspondent’s toolkit. If anybody asks me to sign a petition to banish the weed, my response is Sam Goldwyn’s line: ‘Include me out’.”
He is survived by his wife and children.
Ian Ball, born March 25 1929, died April 16 2017
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