by Philip Luker
‘While you loathe people like him being around,’ Adams told me, ‘you miss them when they’ve gone.’
***
I asked him about Bob Brown, the openly gay leader of the Australian Greens. Phillip said Bob is one politician with ‘total integrity, although as a party the Greens sometimes drive me nuts. People don’t realise that Bob started green politics in Australia and what he did with the Franklin River in Tasmania was the first time any green group had really organised themselves politically.’ Brown led Australia’s biggest conservation battle, in 1982, to save the wild Franklin from being dammed for hydroelectricity.
Adams continued, ‘Bob showed that environmental activism could have political expression through a party. He’s still there. At a Sydney Town Hall meeting on illegal migrants, he got a standing ovation before his speech. In his strange, amateurish way, he showed he was a person of total integrity. I have great respect and affection for him.’
***
What about Carmen Lawrence, the West Australian Labor premier from 1990 to ’93? Adams said, ‘She’s terrific on social justice issues. She should have been a prime minister.’
While a nasty hiccup destroyed Lawrence’s political career — a Royal Commission found that she had misled the State Parliament concerning her knowledge of and role in the tabling of a petition — her media presence remains: Phillip often gets her on Late Night Live.
‘One night I had three women on the program,’ Adams said, ‘Carmen and two British Labor MPs who had voted against Tony Blair backing George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. I found that all three of them were lapsed Catholics. I wouldn’t mind joining the Catholic Church briefly so I could become a lapsed Catholic myself.
‘It’s all too easy to denigrate politicians. People globally have poor regard for MPs. There are good people in all parties.’
***
Then I asked him about Joan Kirner, the Labor premier of Victoria from 1990 to ’92.
‘I once spent an hour with her at a public meeting in Melbourne,’ he said, ‘and I admired the way she used various strategies to handle people who came up to speak to her. I learned from her tactics, because I have similar problems with people who recognise me. I never know whether they’ll punch me or pat me on the back. I find aggression — but preferably without a punch or a knife — easier to handle than affection.’
***
Joan Kirner was ousted by the Liberals under Jeff Kennett, who was premier of Victoria until 1999.
‘Jeff was somewhat toxic,’ said Adams, ‘but you had to be gobsmacked by his audacity. He closed local councils, ran a Reagan and Thatcher-style privatisation campaign and transformed Melbourne, which had been slowly dying. Like Keating, Kennett used power while he had it. But he terrified people.’
***
Next came Neville Wran, the New South Wales premier from 1976 to ’86.
‘The first time I met Neville was when I arrived in Kerry Packer’s office to talk about film finance and there was Neville, looking embarrassed, being a Labor premier, to be seen with the personification of rampant capitalism.
‘Neville was doing a deal with Kerry to sell the state lotteries jointly to him, Rupert Murdoch and the British racehorse owner Robert Sangster. I was horrified about it and after Neville left, I told Kerry, “This is terrible, the worst kind of privatisation. You don’t need money from lotteries.” Kerry said he wanted to see whether Neville could deliver.’
Adams concluded that Nifty, as Wran was called, was building himself a media buffer zone by selling the lotteries to two media magnates, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.
Another time, Neville Wran, Kerry Packer and Adams had dinner together. ‘Neville is a great raconteur,’ said Adams. ‘When he’s telling a story, he walks around the room; it’s a show. When he left, Kerry said, “I’m worried about Neville. He’s got no money.” I replied, “You mean he’s got no money like you’ve got money.” Kerry said, “He’s got no fucking money.” I was pleased to hear that rumours about Neville accumulating money were untrue.’
Neville Wran once told Adams, ‘What you’ve got to look out for is politicians who go to the races a lot and bet heavily.’ He told Adams about shysters and lobbyists who came to his office, high up in a city building, to offer him money and he said to them, ‘I’m going to chuck you out the fucking window!’ Once, when Neville’s wife, Jill Hickson, organised a celebration of Neville’s successful term as premier, each of his ministers was required to do a turn.’
***
‘Bob Carr, who was Neville’s minister for planning and the environment, chose to do a song and dance act.
‘It was not a pretty sight,’ Adams told me. ‘Like me, he lacks physical co-ordination. When he was made leader of the NSW Labor Party’ (in 1988) ‘he came to my studio at 2UE very depressed. He didn’t want to be premier; he wanted to be federal foreign affairs minister, because that was his passion, along with American history and politics. He is very intelligent and interesting but I always thought he was a disappointment as New South Wales premier.’ Carr reigned from 1995 to 2005.
‘Towards the end of his political career,’ Adams continued, ‘I asked to see him to record five minutes on George W Bush’s imminent visit to Australia. Two hours later I’d taped enough for two programs and Bob showed no sign of stopping. What amazed me was that at no time did the phone ring or his chief of staff come in. I suddenly realised that a modern premier is front of house and does photo ops and public occasions, and ten-second grabs for the 6 p.m. news. The real work is done elsewhere. Bob was passionate about the environment and opened a lot of national parks but didn’t really get on top of the central issues that would plague New South Wales for years to come.’
***
Adams said the most impressive social reformer of all Australian premiers was Don Dunstan, who openly declared himself gay but only towards the end of his career as South Australian premier from 1967 to ’68 and 1970 to ’79. At Adelaide University he met his first wife Gretel and they married in 1949, four years before he won the Norwood seat he held for the next 26 years. In the late 1960s, he was still energetically heterosexual and in 1974, as premier, he had an affair with one of his staff, a Malaysian, Adele Koh. Gretel and he were divorced and he married Adele two years later after she told him she was pregnant. By that time he was sexually ambiguous and after she died of cancer in 1978, he read in her diary that she had not been pregnant. The next year, he announced his sudden resignation as premier. (Apparently the media attended his home for this televised announcement which he made at home in his pyjamas after collapsing and sleeping for 40 hours.) In 1986, he met Stephen Cheng, they became partners and in 1994 jointly opened a restaurant, Don’s Table. Don died of cancer, aged 72, in 1999.
Adams called Don ‘the Pierre Trudeau of Australia’ although more consequential. Trudeau redefined Canada as its prime minister in the 1970s and ’80s. Don Dunstan recognised Aboriginal land rights, decriminalised homosexuality, appointed the state’s first female judge, relaxed censorship and drinking laws, overhauled the upper house of parliament, lowered the voting age to 18 and encouraged the arts. With Phillip’s help, he established the South Australian Film Commission (see Chapter Four) and nationally he helped abolish the White Australia Policy. Adams told how he was invited to the tenth anniversary of Don’s death in February 2009. Everyone who could find one wore a Dunstan-style safari suit. The Premier, Mike Rann, announced the formation of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, with Phillip as chairman.
***
Mike Rann, who was Don Dunstan’s press secretary and speech writer, did the same jobs for Don’s successors as premier, Des Corcoran and John Bannon, and was elected premier himself in 2002. His Labor Party won again in March 2010, although it lost two seats. Phillip said, ‘Mike energetically pursues Don’s commitment to social change and justice and likes people to realise this.’ Al Gore, the former US vice-president and the world’s best-known environmental activist, named the S
outh Australian Government as the one doing the world’s best job on climate change. South Australia has little manufacturing industry, an ageing population and is at the dry end of the Murray River.
***
Adams praised Rupert Hamer (Victorian Liberal premier from 1972 to ’81) because, like Don Dunstan and Mike Rann, he was good on cultural issues. Adams told me, ‘When Rupert attended the launch of the Melbourne Film Festival, he got a standing ovation from the largely left-wing audience. Another time, after I convened the Friends of The Age to try to keep The Age independent, Rupert phoned me to say he would hold a judicial inquiry into The Age’s independence — the Norris Inquiry’ (see Chapter Seventeen).
***
Adams told me some anecdotes from other personalities he has known: He said, ‘I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with Peter Faiman, the Crocodile Dundee director, when Peter gave me a joint. I kept laughing for a week and started to like it. We went to a horror movie and I wandered out of the cinema and couldn’t find my way back to The Bride of Frankenstein.’
It showed Adams that narcotics are not for him and he thinks Faiman wanted to teach him that. Faiman had given up marijuana and he warned Adams, whose only previous experience of it was when Richard Neville (the Oz founder and current futurist) gave him a joint and nothing happened.
Earlier, when Adams was a partner in the ad agency Monahan Dayman Adams in Melbourne, he would go into the Channel Nine studios and watch Peter Faiman as a television director juggle the world, with up to nine cameras recording a program — Faiman directed many Channel Nine shows, often interspersed with commercials Adams had planned. He has always found that other people’s skills are mysterious to watch and was astonished by how Faiman organised the programs, made the cameras dance and at the same time was a choreographer and a psychologist to the temperamental performers.
Adams said Faiman was ‘appallingly’ treated by Paul Hogan and John Cornell over their Crocodile Dundee film, which Faiman directed. ‘He could have made it a much better film, but they wouldn’t let him cut it the way he wanted to.’
Peter Faiman also directed The Nine Network’s four-hour Australia Live, which from 70 locations around Australia and overseas recorded a day in the life of Australians on January 1, 1988. The first of a multitude of celebrities on camera was Adams, at Uluru. Before the program, Faiman asked Adams to write speeches for about 20 world leaders who would take part, including US President Ronald Reagan. He wrote the speeches in a day for what he believes is still the world’s biggest telecast.
***
Neither Adams nor Peter Faiman want to be anyone except themselves, but Bob Ellis, the eccentric, audacious, outrageous, quirky but skilled and funny left-wing writer, always wanted to be other people, according to Adams. For a long time, Ellis wanted to be David Williamson, then he wanted to be Adams, but finally he discovered that being Bob Ellis was great.
‘He had an extraordinary gift with women but also quite spectacular halitosis,’ Adams said. ‘Bob took part in one of the annual Australian Film Institute Awards, in Perth. Another person on the program was an American actress called Brenda Vaccaro, who was outraged by the newly-launched vaginal deodorants. I introduced her as the President of the Society for the Promotion of Natural Body Odours and Bob as Australia’s playwright with the most halitosis and left them to it. I don’t know what the outcome was.
‘Another of my memories of Bob Ellis was when I was chairman of the Australian Film Commission and Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. It was a delicate time in negotiations for film funds and Bob hated Fraser but was obviously going to win an award that night. At the hotel before the awards, I told Bob he had to behave himself, gracefully accept his award and not bucket Fraser, in spite of wanting to do so. He promised me he would behave.
‘I sat in the audience with Brit Eckland. The awards were made of plastic and were so weak that they disintegrated on the stage. Every time someone was presented with an award, a bit would fall off and the stage was littered with pieces of broken AFI awards. Ellis arrived on stage drunk. Fraser presented him with his award, which started to fall apart in his hands. He forgot his promise to behave, bucketed Fraser and vomited — on national television.
***
Long before US President Jack Kennedy’s sexual shenanigans became public knowledge, the late British author Malcolm Muggeridge told Adams about them, which upset Adams because he held Kennedy in high regard. Muggeridge said Kennedy was second in sexual low-jinks only to Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader who used his office largely for sexual purposes but in Milan in April 1945 was hung upside down by Italian partisans — not yet a fate of any Australian politician. No-one published newspaper stories about sexual affairs by Kennedy or Mussolini in those days and it was the same when Junie Morosi had an affair with Jim Cairns, the Australian deputy prime minister.
***
Bill Kelty (Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1983 to 2000) is ‘The Killer Koala,’ according to Adams, because he looks like one. ‘He is as tough as old boots but one of the smartest strategists and he should be working for Barack Obama. He and Paul Keating were a great double act.
‘Bill and I believe the Australian political system has deep troubles. Not only does the public despise it; the politicians do also. They are bored, irritated and frustrated, particularly by being whipped into line to vote on bills, often against their consciences. The only time politics really comes to life is in conscience votes.
‘Bill and I came up with the idea that a party should campaign and seek a mandate on only a handful of issues such as foreign affairs, health and education, and let MPs vote as they and their electors want on all other issues. It would revitalise all parliaments and make politics more interesting to politicians and the public. I played with this idea in a series of Australian columns but Bill and I couldn’t get Paul Keating to take it seriously. No prime minister or premier likes the idea of losing control. This great and glorious idea has never been taken up by any party.’
***
Dr Philip Nitschke is another person who has campaigned long and hard for a basic change in society, and failed. He is the founder and director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International and he was the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, voluntary, lethal injection (in Darwin, before the Federal Government overruled the law). His successive campaigns have failed to change Australian laws, but Phillip Adams says, ‘He’s a hoot! He could help people to die laughing — that’s not a bad idea! He should introduce the idea of laughing yourself to death. He is one of those odd people — those with passion and talent. They don’t fit in, so they stand out.’
***
Another person who stood out, but for different reasons, was the late, unlamented Sydney entrepreneur and banned stockbroker Rene Rivkin. Phillip remembers him struggling free of a $400,000 Bentley ‘like a maharajah demounting from an elephant’s howdah’, settling into his favourite possie at the Dee Bee Restaurant in Double Bay, Sydney, fingering his gold worry beads and reciting his variation of the Rosary, in spite of his parents being Russian Jews. On that day in ‘Double Pay’ (as it is called), he was happy and expansive, until Adams told him the colour of his Bentley (imperial purple) was ‘crook.’
Over the years, Rene Rivkin’s fortunes rose and fell like his moods. Adams told me, ‘A few months later, I shared a plane with Rene’s wife Gayle to Hayman Island, where Rene and I were to speak at a convention. Rene asked me at the hotel, “What are they saying about me?” I told him of rumours about arson, a $50million insurance payout, and murder.’ (Rene was implicated in the Offset Alpine printing-plant fire. His former chauffeur, Gordon Wood, was in November 2008 jailed for murdering Wood’s former girlfriend, Caroline Byrne.)
‘At the convention, Gayle Rivkin told me, “He’s living on Prozac.” Rene said, “It’s all that keeps me going.” Gayle said, “But it’s changing his personality.” I said, “That can only be an impr
ovement.”’
It was not Rene’s only problem. He was sentenced to nine months’ weekend detention for insider trading; he had surgery for a tumour; he collapsed in jail; he was banned for life from stockbroking; Gayle and he divorced; he went broke and sold all his paintings and properties; then he killed himself, aged 61, in 2005.
***
More of Adams’ anecdotes: He doesn’t have a suit, but once he had a sports jacket, which he bought to be presented with his first Order of Australia badge by the Governor General, Sir Ninian Stephen, in 1987. Then he lost the badge. He wrote to the GG at Government House in Canberra, asking whether he could make him another one. He pretended he thought Sir Ninian made the badges at the back of the garage. The GG’s secretary wrote back to say he could have a new badge but it would cost him $9.90. Adams told me, ‘Some people work for nothing for charities all their lives and get one of these things and it’s worth $9.90. That’s hilarious!’
Also in the queue at Government House waiting to be presented with an award was Charles Spry, the chief of ASIO. Adams said to him, ‘Here’s a turn up, you the head spook and me the naughty leftie, both getting a gong.’ Adams asked Spry to show him his ASIO file and Spry strenuously denied there was one. But when the National Library asked Adams to give a speech, he agreed to do so if they produced his ASIO file, and they did. ‘What shattered me was that several people had reported me to ASIO. Their names had been blacked out but you could guess who they were. The file is still current.’
***
One wet day Adams was shivering in a New York City doorway when the actor Stuart Wagstaff slid past on the footpath. Stuart had a toffy West End image for the theatre, although his childhood had been harrowing and he was brought up on a little English farm and Adams had heard him say in a radio interview that a horrible childhood makes it almost impossible to be loved. Adams said to Wagstaff when they met in New York, ‘Stuart, how good to see you. Let’s have a cup of coffee because I owe you an apology. I always thought of you as an effete, upper-class lad.’ They had a cup of coffee and Phillip told Stuart that damaged-goods children’s capacity to love takes a lot of time to work through.