By Ed Boyer

COPYRIGHT 2001 Los Angeles Magazine, Inc.

A KILLER TORNADO BLEW TED THACKREY JR. FROM THE WICHITA Eagle into Los Angeles journalism in the 1950s. A whirlwind of his own making lifted him out more than 30 years later. Thackrey landed at the Los Angeles Examiner after its city editor saw his lead on the twister: “A small Kansas town died in its sleep last night.”

After 13 years toiling for Hearst, Thackrey moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1968. A peripatetic newspaperman from New York, he had arrived with a certain celebrity because his father had edited The New York Post and his stepmother, Dorothy Schiff, was the Post’s owner. Thackrey quickly established himself as one of the top writers in the building while securing a reputation as a genuine character–a throwback to an era when newsrooms were afloat in alcohol and reporters didn’t let facts interfere with a good story.

Obituaries were Thackrey’s showcase. When Sterling Hayden died, he wrote that the actor’s life “seemed almost the stuff of fable; a Hollywood publicity writer’s dream run amok.” That also could have been Thackrey’s epitaph, except that many of Thackrey’s adventures were not documented. Tales of his days as Hemingway’s sparring partner or his exploits as an RAF fighter pilot raised eyebrows. So did his vague accounts of shadowy roles he said he played in the Biafran civil war and as a U.S. agent in Vienna. A mail-order minister, he bestowed upon himself the title “Bishop of Belmont Shore and Paraclete of Alamitos Bay.”

Thackrey was also a Hollywood body-and-fenders man, bumping out rough spots in screenplays. He said he wrote a dozen books, including the Edgar-nominated thriller Preacher, which was made into a television movie, and ghostwrote nearly 40 more. Columnist Rona Barrett, who insisted she had written her novel The Lovomaniacs, was “thrown for a loop” when the Times’s David Shaw told her several characters had the same names as Thackrey’s friends.

Another reporter once accused Thackrey of plagiarism in his account of a fire that began: “All the dead were strangers.” When the reporter slammed a script containing that line on his desk, Thackrey calmly pointed out that he had contributed dialogue for the movie. Sure enough, the credits said he had.

In 1986 Thackrey, who died of cancer in July, inaugurated the Only in L.A. column. The next year he wrote that a Ku Klux Klansman had testified that he had burned a cross on a couple’s lawn as a joke. It turned out there had been no such testimony. The Times ran a correction. Top editors pressed Thackrey to reveal his source. He produced a wire story–one he had fabricated. So ended his days at the Times. After he retired, he spent a decade freelancing for an Orange County weekly.

“I liked Thackrey,” says former Times-man Jack Jones. “But he made stuff up all the time? He recalls phoning in notes on the arrival of a planeload of Vietnamese orphans. The kids couldn’t speak English. Their sponsors had nothing exciting to say. “The next morning, there on page 1 under my byline, was a story with all kinds of quotes,” Jones recalls. He demanded his editors never again put his name on anything Thackrey touched. When he arrived home, his wife told him: “I know I haven’t said this to you in a long time, but I just loved your story this morning.” ◼︎