The Press: The Star’s Star

Two plainclothesmen strode last week into Cairo’s Metropolitan Hotel, rapped on Correspondent William (Steve) Stevenson’s door and gave the Toronto Star’s 33-year-old roving newsman 24 hours to get out of Egypt. Also expelled for spreading “falsehoods and fabrications to mislead public opinion”: the London Evening Standard’s pretty Anne Sharpley, 26, and the London Daily Mail’s fortyish Eileen Travis, a U.S. citizen. That made a total of five correspondents sent packing since Egypt seized the Suez Canal.*

While Cairo’s foreign press corps worriedly met to plan some defense against expulsion, Correspondent Stevenson flew to Rome and, in the black-and-white Japanese kimono that he wears while writing, pounded out the reply to his office’s urgent cable to FILE STORY SOONEST MOSTEST BESTEST. Star readers soon learned in glittering detail that Stevenson first offended the Egyptians by trying twice in the same day—and getting arrested both times—to get an interview with Ex-Premier Mohammed Naguib, under house arrest 15 miles out of Cairo. What riled the Egyptians even more was his story reporting that a onetime Nazi propagandist and Jew baiter named Johann von Leers is employed at the Ministry of National Guidance and that other Germans are advising the Egyptian general staff.

On the Go. Stevenson’s latest adventure was made to order for his self-cast role as the romantically dashing foreign correspondent who lets nothing—sometimes not even the facts—get in the way of a good story. A World War II Royal Navy flyer and jet test pilot, Stevenson has been forced out of Yugoslavia, denounced by the Peking radio for his stories after a trip through Red China, and scolded by the Canadian government for breaking a story on Canada’s highly secret “flying saucer”—a saucer-shaped aircraft expected to fly 1,500 m.p.h. In Korea, where he won the Canadian Press Board Award for foreign correspondence, he was lost for four days behind enemy lines. In Indo-China, where the French “were so disorganized they let me fly their planes,” a cyclist threw a bomb under the restaurant table that he was sharing with three officials (it was a dud).

What keeps Stevenson on the go is a paradox as a roving correspondent of the Star, he takes his orders from the city desk, and whenever he runs out of assignments and returns to Toronto, he is routinely assigned to the 7 a.m. rewrite shift to work on obits. To avoid this, he thinks up his own assignments, e.g., hunting the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas, when the foreign front is relatively quiet.

The son of a British Foreign Office official, Stevenson came out of the war a lieutenant commander and took his first newspaper job pedaling a bicycle on rural news beats for England’s weekly Leighton Buzzard Beds and Bucks Observer. He had worked his way up to Fleet Street by 1948, when he moved to Canada. The Toronto Globe & Mail fired him after three weeks as a deskman. Then he joined the Star. In 1949 his first self-invented foreign assignment took him to Yugoslavia to check up on 3,000 Yugoslav immigrants who had left Canada for Tito’s Marxist paradise and wanted to get out again. Stevenson’s stories of their misery produced official Canadian protests to Belgrade, which refused him a visa renewal but let the Yugo-Canadians out.

Local Angle. Along with tenacity and a melodramatic flair, Stevenson’s colleagues credit him with phenomenal luck. During Tito’s visit to London, Stevenson happened to be standing alongside the man who threw a magnesium bomb at the dictator. Another time, while flying over the China Sea, Correspondent Stevenson looked out of the plane and saw the Communists shoot down a British DC-4 right in front of him.

Stevenson has seen only a few copies of the Star during the last two years, ever since he took it upon himself to move his wife and three children to Hong Kong, where he can visit them without risking Toronto rewrite. But he always watches for the local angle. “What the Star liked most about my stories from Red China,” he says, “wasn’t the big inside stuff, but a story about riding down the Yangtze River in an all-aluminum ferry boat made in Canada.” The informality of the Star’s communications with its roving reporter sometimes leads to confusion. His last chore in Cairo was to grind out 3,000 urgently requested words on aid to backward nations for a Sunday feature. After his flight from Egypt, the Star cabled that its Sunday weekly was advertising just the opposite: a feature on the “challenge from Asia.” So Stevenson accommodated with 3,000 challenging words, then flew to Cyprus.

* The others: the London Daily Express’ Sefton Delmer and the News Chronicle’s Ray Hardy (real name: Nureddin Abdul Hadi), a citizen of Jordan.