Cameron was, until his mid-thirties a
writer of mawkish features for a Scottish paper and a sub on the Daily
Express. Then, almost overnight, he became the quintessential foreign
correspondent. Equipped by nature and upbringing with infallible irony and
bullshit detectors, he roamed the globe, filing reports of sharp wit and
intelligent world-weary wisdom.
From the Inchon Landings, Korea, 1950:
“There was a wandering boat, marked in great letters PRESS, full of
agitated and contending correspondents, all trying to appear insistently
determined to land in Wave One, while contriving desperately to be found
in Wave Fifty.”
From his famous suppressed account of
how the UN’s ally, South Korea, treated prisoners: “They have been in
jail…long enough to have reduced their frames to skeletons, their sinews
to string, their faces to a translucent terrible grey…They are roped and
manacled…They clamber, the lowest common denominator of personal
degradation, into trucks with the numb air of men going to their death.
Many of them are.”
And from aftermath of the Six Day War:
“The tanks and vehicles litter the desert like the nursery floor of an
angry child.”
All the more surprising, then, his
career should also include one of the more farcical attempts at a
celebrity interview. The year was 1958, the venue a posh London hotel, and
the subject Liz Taylor. She greeted him in a negligee and with champagne
at the ready, and Cameron was taken with her charms it was some while
before he popped the first real question. How, he asked, are the economics
of Hollywood affecting you? Miss Taylor’s reply shook him. “Well fuck
that! What about your proposals for a new contract?”. She had mistaken
him for a fancy movie agent, the interview was over before it started, and
Cameron, as he later wrote, “found himself out on the landing in no
time.”