“I wear these for comfort and economy,” he explained, “and they dry in minutes.”ĭonald’s niece, Patricia Kershaw, 81, remembers one of the only times she remembers her uncle starstruck. On another occasion, he arrived at a London hotel to meet Cary Grant to find the Hollywood legend washing ladies panties in the bathroom. “My response: ‘You eat, Marilyn, I’ll watch your figure’ - induced a playful slap on my arm.” Unaware about the time difference between London and California, she would sometimes phone him to talk in the early hours of the morning.ĭonald later remembered how, as he flew with Monroe from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona, where she was filming Bus Stop, she turned down the plane food saying she needed to watch her figure. He also struck up a close friendship with Marilyn Monroe, for whom he was a shoulder to cry on during her marital woes.
He remembered how, on his first trip to Hollywood, he’d only just checked in at a Beverly Hills hotel when Humphrey Bogart called his room from the desk downstairs, scolding him for not getting in touch as soon as he had arrived.ĭonald then spent the weekend on the star’s yacht with Lauren Bacall and other Hollywood stars. Soon he was befriending stars on both sides of the Atlantic. who know their amps and ohms if not their Beethoven.” He described the band members as “four cheeky-looking kids with stone-age hair styles. In September 1963 he was one of the first journalists to profile a new Liverpool group called The Beatles, in a double-paged spread entitled ‘Four frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys who are making £5,000 every week’.
He then found his natural place as the Mirror’s entertainment reporter and Hollywood correspondent. More scoops were to come thanks to a mole in the Buckingham Palace boiler room who revealed details of the birth of Prince Charles, and how he had been told to put six hot water bottles in the Queen’s coach so she could keep warm on the way to Westminster Abbey of her coronation. His whole family adored him, but we always had to coax the stories out of him.”īefore police came in to arrest him, he bequeathed his favourite suit to Madame Tussauds with the request: “I would be obliged if the trousers were immaculately pressed.”įrom crime, he became a royal correspondent, which he said he “thought was a natural progression”. “But he was more interested in just being the best dad. “I remember him introducing me to stars at film premieres and bringing famous friends like Shirley MacLaine and Cary Grant back to our flat. But even in his 90s, he made those around him feel young. Dad was young in spirit and annoyed about his old age. He was wonderful, bright and funny right up to the end. Within minutes of meeting people he’d have them laughing. Speaking to the Mirror, his son Paul, 81, said: “He was an incredible man who had a great zest for life. In the 50s and 60s, when the Mirror was the world’s biggest-selling paper, if stars wanted to talk, they talked to him.Īnd until this week, when he died aged 102, the man who went sailing with Humphrey Bogart, joined John and Yoko on their honeymoon protest bed and had the Beatles round for tea was one of the last journalistic links to the golden age of Hollywood.īut those who knew him insist that in his later years, while still as alert and engaged as ever, he would rather talk about anything than his own illustrious career of Hollywood friendships, scoops and triumphs. In an era of Hollywood immortals, one newspaper reporter became a legend in his own right – Donald Zec, the Daily Mirror’s showbiz writer, consistently scooped the rest of Fleet Street as he schmoozed the biggest names of the silver screen.ĭonald counted stars like Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant among his friends.
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