Phillip Adams

by Philip Luker

  ‘And now going. All kids must go. Into an unknown future in a world with unprecedented problems. A young woman full, nevertheless, with confidence and hope. Determined to do something about those problems. Bon voyage, Aurora.’

  ***

  I wanted more information about Phillip’s partnership with Patrice Newell, and got it from Matt Noffs (Ted Noffs’ grandson). Matt, who was thirty-one in 2010, meets Adams regularly and at one meeting, Adams asked him, ‘Do you have a strong woman? You need a strong woman.’ Matt Noffs told me, ‘When I met Patrice, I knew what “strong” meant. Patrice is an incredibly sharp, tough, resourceful and knowledgeable woman who matches Phillip’s intelligence. You can tell she’s the ruler of the family. I’ve heard Phillip say that’s why they live separately half the week, when Phillip stays in Sydney to broadcast — not so many arguments.

  ‘When I see them together,’ Noffs continued, ‘they act as if they could kill each other, but they’re also loving towards each other. They hold each other and adore each other. Each is trying to get the most out of life, all the time. When they’re apart, it’s work, and when they’re together, it’s family. Patrice told me Phillip’s a big softie who wants people to think he’s tough, which is why he’s abrupt on the phone.

  ‘Phillip told me that when Patrice wants something, she just goes for it. He’s her number one advisor and she takes his advice very seriously. But it’s not as if he runs anything. She runs the home and the farm.’

  Chapter Thirteen:

  An Edgy Friendship with Packer

  Phillip Adams and Kerry Packer were the most unlikely friends but Adams got to know Packer well enough to fathom him. He witnessed a wide range of explosive confrontations and daring ventures. Packer told Adams he was besotted with Ita Buttrose and he treated her better than some of his other women. He treated his wife Ros appallingly. Idi Amin invited Packer to come hunting elephants in Uganda and Packer wanted to breed them in Northern Australia — until Adams told him they might migrate to Perth and tread on cars in the street.

  ‘I loathed Kerry Packer from afar,’ Adams told me, ‘disapproved of him utterly, as apparently he disapproved of me. I regarded him as a great lumbering Nazi and he regarded me as a vile sort of communist. But I needed ten thousand dollars to tie up the budget for a film, The Getting of Wisdom. I contacted Packer’s office in 1977 and asked whether, the next time he was in Melbourne, he would be kind enough to drop into my office in St Kilda Road. He turned up with Harry Chester, who had been his father’s bank manager and was now Kerry’s mentor. Packer and I looked at each other with great suspicion and open hostility.

  ‘I said, “Look, I need ten thousand dollars for a film you wouldn’t like. Got no car chases in it, no-one gets shot but it’s going to be a good film.”

  ‘He said, “I don’t deal in ten thousand dollars. You can have a hundred thousand or nothing.”

  ‘We were showing each other our dicks in a ritualistic sense. I said I didn’t need a hundred thousand.

  ‘He said, “Everyone needs a hundred thousand dollars.”

  ‘I said I suppose we might … okay.’

  So Adams decided to keep going, and that was the beginning of Adams Packer Films, a venture backed by Australia’s richest, toughest businessman, a King Kong capitalist, and managed by one-time communist Adams, who at the time was still in advertising but not enjoying it, and leading a hectic life writing columns and making films.

  The week after striking the $100,000 deal, Adams went to Packer’s office in Sydney to finalise the contract. The Tank Room outside Kerry’s office was where Kerry’s father, Frank, used to drink with his lieutenants after work, and Kerry continued the tradition, although he had abandoned alcohol for Passiona after surviving a fatal car crash when he was aged eighteen — he had been driving and the three others in the car were killed.

  In the Tank Room with Adams and Packer that evening were David McNicoll (former Daily and Sunday Telegraph editor-in-chief and later a Bulletin columnist), Trevor Kennedy (Bulletin editor and then Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press chief executive), Sam Chisholm (head of the Nine Network) and Ita Buttrose (one of Kerry’s former mistresses and Women’s Weekly editor). In Adams’ words in a later article, McNicoll was Colonel Blimp, Chisholm was James Cagney and Buttrose was the Queen of Park Street, the Packer headquarters in Sydney.

  Crusty David McNicoll, who had the bearing of a man who believed he was born to rule, told the gathering he’d been to Canberra to sign D-notices on behalf of Australian Consolidated Press — lists of topics that the Australian media agreed not to touch because of ‘national security’. Kennedy (more recently the associate of Rene Rivkin and Graham Richardson in the Offset Alpine affair) asked whether the Petrovs, whose deflection to the Soviet Union had been a good publicity stunt for Prime Minister Robert Menzies, were still a D-notice subject. McNicoll said they were and Kennedy remarked that their whereabouts should be a Bulletin story.

  Packer, who liked to obey the law, exploded. ‘You write one word about them, Kennedy, and your arse’ll hit the Park Street footpath,’ he said, and started monstering almost everyone in the room. The Tank Room regulars were used to Packer explosions, although some turned white as their turn came. Adams, sitting in a corner of the room, watched it all with amazement. After it was all over Packer said to him, ‘Come and have some dinner.’ He felt at home in cheap Chinese restaurants and they went to one in Kings Cross.

  Adams felt confident enough, with a $100,000 Packer cheque in his pocket, to take on the big man over his Tank Room behaviour. He told Kerry, ‘That’s the ugliest performance I’ve ever seen from a human being. Your tantrum was hideous. Why the hell do you yell at people?’

  Packer stared into space for a long time and then said, ‘Because I don’t know how to talk to them.’ Suddenly Adams realised that Packer was probably afflicted with the same sort of pain from his cruel father as Adams had received from his neglectful parents and violent stepfather. A terrible childhood has nothing to do with class.

  They stayed at the Chinese restaurant until 3 a.m. and Packer asked Adams about a whole lot of things, including black holes.

  ‘That’s what I’ve got inside me, a big black hole,’ Packer told Adams. The close friendship they ultimately shared revealed to each of them the fact that they had one particular thing in common: their brutalised childhoods. They even discovered that at school they had the same nickname, ‘Boofhead’.

  As Peter Best, the composer, told me: ‘When Packer and Phillip teamed up in Adams Packer Films, Packer was the opposite of everything that Phillip stood for but there was something about Packer that Phillip liked. And, it seems, the reverse was also true.’

  ***

  Adams has written a biography of Kerry Packer that has remained unpublished. He emailed me a copy. In it Adams wrote that Packer told him that he had been besotted with Ita Buttrose for a long time but couldn’t find the courage to tell her; Adams found this remarkable. Finally Packer found his nerve and sent a dozen roses to her office. When he told him, Adams remarked, ‘I bet her high heels made scorch marks in the carpet when she came to thank you.’ Packer met his match with young Ita, whose ambition was as great as her talent. She had started off as a fifteen-year-old secretary on the Women’s Weekly, and as Cleo editor had persuaded actor Jack Thompson to pose almost nude for the first issue. Packer told Adams that he didn’t like Cleo but liked the money it made and was grateful to Ita for that. But after Ita took over editing the Women’s Weekly and it became the world’s most successful magazine for penetrating into almost half Australia’s homes, Packer told Adams, ‘They say it’s Ita’s Women’s Weekly. It isn’t. It’s my Women’s Weekly. Ita didn’t make the Women’s Weekly. The Women’s Weekly made Ita.’

  When Richard Walsh was managing director of the book company Angus and Robertson before he had the same role in Packer’s magazine empire Australian Consolidated Press, he sent Adams an inflammatory novel by a senior editor fired by Ita. In
it, a voluptuous editor had an affair with a powerful tycoon whose potency was not up to scratch. Walsh told Adams it would make a good film; Adams replied that he didn’t think Adams Packer wanted to make a film of the novel. It never saw the light of day, but Adams believes that Pat Wheatley, Packer’s PA, photocopied it and distributed a few copies around the office.

  Years after Packer’s affair with Ita ended, Ita rang Adams and said she was about to go into Kerry’s office to tell him she was leaving to become the Daily Mirror editor and asked him to try to do a deal with Myer, the department store chain, for her to be its front person in television ads — an idea Phillip had put to Myer earlier but which Packer had vetoed. Adams told Ita he could hardly arrange such a deal in the hour between when Ita quit Packer’s company and signed on with Rupert Murdoch.

  Adams told me, ‘I phoned Packer and asked him to behave with dignity when Ita arrived to quit; later Ita told me that Packer burst into tears. Packer’s relationship with Ita had not been a frivolous one for him.’ In the unpublished biography, Phillip wrote that he believes that Packer loved her.

  Loyalty meant everything to Packer. After Ita had later fallen out with Rupert Murdoch (it didn’t take long), she started a magazine called Ita, but she told Adams that Packer had done all he could to hamstring its distribution. After six years, it closed.

  Adams made fun of Packer, Ita Buttrose, Trevor Kennedy and David McNicoll in columns in The Age, The Bulletin and The Australian, some of them reprinted in his books. He devoted a whole column, called “Thomething thpecial,” to Ita’s well-known but now less-pronounced lisp: ‘Hello. Thith ith Ita Buttrothe, editor of the Authralian Women’th Weekly, thittingb here in the thudio, thmiling at you from the thcreen …’ Many readers wrote to complain about the column and Packer was outraged , but Buttrose told Adams she thought it was hilarious.

  Ita was only one of Packer’s mistresses, when both were comparatively young. Paul Barry says in his unexpurgated The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer (Bantam/ABC Books) that Packer had a four-year affair with an African-American model, Carol Lopes, who killed herself in 1991. After the affair ended in the early 1980s, she organised summer bordellos in rented beach houses at Palm Beach in Sydney and arranged for prostitutes from London, New York and South America to fly to Sydney, where they were paid $10,000 a week to service some of Packer’s business and political friends. But Packer cut her off later in the 1980s and she said in a 16-page suicide note found in her apartment, ‘Kerry Packer is the only family I know. He has taken care of me for twelve years. I have been denied access to him … I have no alternative but to end my life.’ After Packer died, it was revealed that shares in property worth at least $10million were given to his long-time mistress Julie Trethowan, who managed the Hyde Park Club, owned by Australian Consolidated Press. She was close to him until the end of his days.

  Adams told me, ‘Adams Packer Films was possibly Packer’s smallest company but, funnily enough, it was the only one carrying his name. It made not only The Getting of Wisdom but also a string of other films which were not to Packer’s taste at all. One was an adaption of Tom: A Child’s Life Regained, in which John Embling, co-founder of the Families in Distress charity I promoted, told how he tried to save a deeply disturbed schoolboy from suicide. Packer writhed during the first screening, from recognition and boredom.’

  He didn’t like Paul Cox’s Lonely Hearts either, but roared with laughter when he saw Kitty and the Bagman, about the Sydney brothel-keeper Tilly Devine, because his father Frank used to be one of her patrons and sometimes had to escape over a back fence when police raided the premises. Tilly’s arch rival in the Sydney brothel business was Kate Leigh and each owned not only a string of brothels but also sly-grog shops when Sydney hotels opened only until 6 p.m. and not at all on Sundays. They created publicity for themselves as their own spin doctors by having public fist-fights and abusing each other in the pages of Truth and the Daily Mirror. I interviewed Kate Leigh one day when she arrived at Truth, where I was a cadet reporter. Truth had far more guts than present-day Sunday newspapers and specialised in two ex-detectives exposing quack doctors, the kind of story now covered by commercial television current affairs programs.

  Adams told me, ‘Packer had genuine affection for Ros’ (his wife) ‘but he treated her appallingly and not only by having affairs, which Ros was well aware of. One night I was sitting in Packer’s study in Bellevue Hill in Sydney when he abused Ros for having the room repainted — in exactly the same colours as it had been for generations.’

  Adams also told me that Packer’s daughter Gretel was very special to him and that they adored each other. ‘She knew of her father’s torments. I always thought she could take over running the company from her father. James was a gentle, soft boy with no killer instinct when he was young, although the American Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlap toughened James up when Dunlap ran the Packer empire for a time.’

  ***

  Adams’ friendship with Packer lasted for the next couple of years. They would often spend Monday nights together. Packer’s personal assistant, Pat Wheatley, or his mentor, Harry Chester, would phone Adams and plead with him to come to Sydney because Packer was in another black hole or ‘impossible’. They would sometimes send a plane for him.

  Adams said in his 1994 oral history for the National Library, ‘I started to make Packer more user-friendly; I even persuaded him to be interviewed by Michael Parkinson for British and Australian television — he was well known in Britain because of his launch of World Series Cricket. I also persuaded him to agree to be interviewed for Terry Lane’s book The Twig is Bent. In the interview, Packer typically defended and praised the father who had brutalised him and ruined his childhood.’

  Adams told me, ‘Like many very rich and powerful people, he was lonely and trusted no-one. When the Seven Network planned to screen a film called Holocaust, he told Sam Chisholm, the boss of Nine, to screen a rival documentary about the Holocaust in the same timeslot, not because he cared or knew anything about the Jewish Holocaust — it was just to spoil Seven’s film.

  ‘I told Packer, “You don’t muck about with the Holocaust. It’s not just another program.”

  ‘Packer replied, “Son, what’s the Holocaust?”

  ‘I told him about it. He hadn’t read about it, or if he had, it had not made any impression. He was far more interested in football, gambling, TV dramas and Chinese restaurants. He knew nothing about world affairs except that few Australians cared about them. When Russian soldiers invaded Afghanistan, he told me, “The Russians will clean up those fucking Afghans in ten minutes.” As time would tell, the Afghanistan mujahedeen cleaned up the Russians but the war continues today.’

  Adams said Packer regarded himself as hideous. He had a particular hate of trade unions. Packer, the adman John Singleton and broadcaster John Laws organised an anti-union petition. Adams told Packer, ‘You don’t know anything about trade unions’, and one night took him to the gloomy Melbourne Trades Hall, where the sight of Packer caused as much astonishment as if Hitler had been spotted in London. They climbed the stone stairs scarred by generations of hobnailed boots and Adams made Packer read a memorial to the battle for an eight-hour day. Then, typically, they went to a Chinese restaurant in Little Bourke Street.

  Packer chose the Imperial Peking at The Rocks in Sydney for Trevor Kennedy’s fortieth birthday. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who were at the time jostling for the Labor Party leadership, were there. Packer said. ‘My father would turn in his grave to see me here tonight surrounded by Labor riffraff, but they’re more fun than the Liberals.’ Adams told the birthday party that he had first met Trevor at Oxford, ‘where Kerry Packer was doing his PhD in greed’. Twenty years later, when relationships between Keating and Packer had soured, Keating used the same line.

  ***

  When Adams and Patrice bought a farm not far from Packer’s huge Ellerston property at Scone in New South Wales, Packer arrived at their place in a helicopter and told them
to hire his manager’s brother to run it (they did) and to get a cattle dog. Packer even told them a well-worn story of how to choose a cattle dog: ‘Get a litter of pups and throw an empty tin at them. They’ll run off yelping. The first one that comes back to sniff the tin — that’s your dog.’

  Adams said, ‘Kerry, that must be the way you choose your executives.’

  His strongest memory of Packer is the ‘black hole’ conversation. His regret is that Packer never used his great wealth and power for any great purpose. He made billions from two licensed addictions, television and gambling, but didn’t leave behind a foundation or a university. Kerry Packer died aged sixty-eight on Boxing Day 2005 and is buried on his Ellerston property.

  One of the most critical points Adams made about Kerry Packer in his unpublished book on him was: ‘Australia did a lot for Kerry but in the final analysis, what did Kerry do for Australia? Kerry cracked it for his first billion when he sold the Nine Network (largely his father Frank’s creation) to an over-eager Alan Bond. It was a licence to print money.’ He was the most skilled and successful television proprietor and programmer in Australia’s history. The network started to decline when Packer became terminally ill and has never recovered.