by Philip Luker
One of the more complimentary points Adams made about Packer in the book was: ‘He was like King Kong, but he had a sensitive side. He was insatiably curious about everything, intensely loyal to the handful of people he felt he could trust and determined to be a better father to James and Gretel than Frank had been to him and his brother Clyde.’
The book told where Adams and Kerry used to meet: ‘He came to my (previous) home in Melbourne a couple of times and later to our farm in the Upper Hunter, but mostly we’d meet in the gloomy Packer mansion in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, shadowed by giant Morton Bay fig trees and protected by security men and Rottweilers, or in the suite he had inherited from his father at the Australia Hotel in Melbourne, or we’d talk for half the night at one of the secret apartments he had bought around Sydney for R & R.’
They often compared their childhoods: ‘Like me, Kerry would try to gain approval from his school class by provoking teachers with smart-alec comments. Where we differed was that Kerry had bounced back from polio to become remarkably good at sport whereas I was absolutely bloody hopeless. Kerry happily conceded that he was academically stupid but used to play everything. At school, he lived for sport.’
‘Kerry used to ask me how I defined a friend, and answer it himself: “A friend is someone who stands beside you when you’re in the wrong.”
‘My friendship with Kerry faded after we became neighbours in the Hunter Valley. There was no row, no yelling. It was just that Kerry was high maintenance and I got busier. He’d phone me occasionally, write me a thank you note for something, and became a billionaire. My strongest memory remains his ‘’black hole’’ conversation all those years ago.’
Chapter Fourteen:
Bob Ellis on the Intellectual Santa Claus
I am sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of a Sydney city building, waiting for Bob Ellis, the legendary literary figure, screenwriter and Labor Party stalwart. It has taken me weeks to get Ellis to agree to meet me about Phillip Adams. I don’t think it’s because he’s reluctant to talk; it’s just the way he is. We are meeting at this building because he said he’d be there writing speeches for a Labor Party figure.
When I arrived at the café I called him, as agreed.
‘I’ll be down soon,’ he said and hung up.
Half an hour later, I was still waiting. So I called again.
‘I’ll be down soon,’ he said once more.
My hopes weren’t high. But I waited anyway, for another half-hour and reviewed my notes on Ellis.
In June 2004, George Negus, in an ABC Television program George Negus Tonight, affectionately described Bob Ellis as ‘a wise old romantic fool’. On the program Ellis said, ‘I fell in love a great deal at Sydney University and I proposed, I think, to fourteen girls, knowing they’d say no, but liking the thrill.’ Bob’s wife, the screenwriter and novelist Anne Brooksbank, was one of the many girls who fell for him and she told the program, ‘We were both twenty-three at the time and he was very skinny.’ (He certainly isn’t now.) ‘He had a sort of intensity and an intellectual attack and he could make you laugh.’ Others who attended Sydney University at the same time as Bob, in the 1960s, were Clive James, Bob Hughes, Germaine Greer, former Justice Michael Kirby and Bruce Beresford. George Negus ended the program by saying, ‘Don’t stop being Bob Ellis, not that I think there’s much chance of that, do you?’ Bob replied, ‘No chance.’ He is a poetic ratbag, although well worth listening to and reading.
Suddenly Ellis is in the coffee shop, all moveable chaos and rumpled shirt, and he motioned me towards a table as far away from the other patrons as possible.
As we sat down, I said, ‘I’ll hold the tape recorder close to you so the background noise doesn’t get in the way.’
Without saying anything, Ellis took the tape recorder from me and held it to his mouth. I didn’t even have to ask a question — he just proceeded to talk.
‘Phillip Adams is the best in the world, in all of history, at what he does, the best interviewer, brow to brow, of the greatest intellects of our time. He meets, as an equal, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Miller, whoever, and gives them an intellectual run for their money.’
I raised my eyebrows at the superlatives but didn’t have a chance to say anything. The Ellis charge continued. This is the easiest interview I’ve ever done.
‘Phillip, who never went to university, runs what I call our spare university, Late Night Live, with the most user-friendly Australian voice and accent. He is quite remarkable. And when he vanishes one night from the earth, people will be amazed at what they’ve lost. They’ve come to take him for granted as a kind of intellectual Santa Claus.
‘There is none like him. He has the combined gifts of Michael Parkinson and Malcolm Muggeridge. He covers both ends of the spectrum. I’m a writer and the hardest thing to achieve as a writer is clarity. The greatest writers have clarity above all and Phillip has that clarity. There is never a doubt as to where he is in his mind and where you are following him. He goes to depths and shadows and ambiguities and heights that you can’t imagine can happen on mere radio in a mere conversation with a stranger, often a person he has not grappled with before, and often in another country.’
Even though I suppressed a laugh at Ellis’s ability to talk without seeming to draw breath, I was also impressed by his verbal dexterity. While I agreed with the tenor of what he’s saying about Adams, he’s no slouch himself. And he continued, not knowing my thoughts because I have no chance to express them.
‘Phillip rode Howard fatigue, as Julian Burnside called it, over all those eleven years of torture, wrongful imprisonment, invasion and death. It hurt him, as it hurt me. His survival as an ABC broadcaster was narrowly achieved. Howard told the ABC to sack Phillip in 1997 or 1998. Phillip rang me, and over the next thirty-six hours my wife Anne and I rang everyone and asked him or her to ring and write to the ABC. It saved him. Phillip told us we were his campaign managers. Once Phillip survived, it followed that Kerry O’Brien’ (the then presenter of Lateline on ABC Television, and later presenter of The 7.30 Report) ‘survived. Two critical people survived in the most critical ingredient in our democracy, the ABC. It was close and scary. Never underestimate Howard’s capacity for manipulation. At another time he said, “What we need is a right-wing Phillip Adams”, but what he meant was, “We need Phillip Adams erased from the Australian consciousness”. Howard’s one purpose in life, and to some extent the Liberal Party’s purpose, is to get a result. For example, Kim Beazley got 400,000 more votes than Howard in 1998 and Howard called that a mandate for the GST.’
Ellis was clearly enjoying this chance to talk about Adams — or perhaps he just likes talking. He galloped on.
‘Late Night Live is an equality of discourse, an assumption that you won’t get left behind, that you are as acute an observer as he is. Kevin Rudd spread his phone calls around, before and after he was made federal Labor leader. He spoke to Phillip and he spoke to me. He was a notorious leaker, conniver, conspirator and flatterer. Rudd has the absolute equivalent of an ABC voice. He’s like a prefabricated ABC newsreader, with no natural accent.
‘When I was pro-Kim Beazley — and I still am — Phillip was pro-Rudd, because he believed Beazley had dropped the ball over Tampa.’ Ellis was referring to the incident in 2001 involving Afghan refugees who were picked by a Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, after their boat to Australia became distressed. John Howard’s federal government used the issue to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment and make it a key election issue. ‘But by campaigning as guilefully as he did, Beazley saved Rudd in his seat.’
***
Bob Ellis drew breath and continued, ‘Phillip’s influence on the Labor Party is less strong now. I put the critical years as 1968 to 1976 or ’77. He got the film industry up after befriending John Gorton. He mounted a campaign to dislodge Whitlam and install Jim Cairns and he wrote Cairns’ speeches, thereby nettling Whitlam.’
Ellis believes that it will be five years before the L
abor Party gets out of the mess it got into over the Tampa. ‘It was a shocking matter,’ he said. ‘Those couple of months turned many Labor voters into Greens supporters.
‘Because Phillip was of that camp, he was regarded as unrealistic and unable to count the number of seats we would lose. He said he didn’t care how many; we had to save our integrity. It did matter. If we had lost Rudd’s seat — which we would have, if we had followed Phillip’s advice — we would still be in the Howard era and festering in a squalor of self-contempt and we would maybe not have got out of it.’
Ellis paused to take a sip of water.
‘His double act with Barry Jones was wonderful, over films and over ideas. I wish he’d done more film production. He was brilliant at it. He became a film bureaucrat rather than a producer. During his expensive divorce from Rosemary and his acquisition of most of the antiquities of Egypt, plus a great deal of money (from selling his share of Monahan Dayman Adams) and a Rolls-Royce, he lost perspective until he became a full-time ABC broadcaster. There was a gap of six or seven years when he became self-indulgent. He was a womaniser and a quite successful and secretive one for a good few years before he met Patrice. I heard it so constantly that he had affairs towards the end of his first marriage that I believed it. I first met him in about 1966 and went to the house in Melbourne where he lived with Rosemary. She was not intellectual.’ It was a cruel way to dismiss Rosemary.
‘Everyone feels intimate with him but no-one really knows him,’ said Ellis. ‘He doesn’t go to parties much, never carouses, never drinks. Late Night Live is a gift. But we’ll be surprised by the strangers at his funeral because he has so many relationships, conducted by phone, letter and email. In friendships, he skips like a stone over the water. And like many great men, he dominates any conversation he’s in. Kenneth Tynan once said about Ernest Hemingway, “Ernest not only closes the subject but sits on the lid”, and Phillip is the same. He is driven by a tormented childhood, a hated father, a curious upbringing with his grandparents, and a lack of formal education. What do these people have in common with him: Charles Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Judy Davis, Noel Coward, Tom Stoppard and Alfred Hitchcock? No university education, although each of them seems to have one. People without a university education often have a Brideshead Revisited vision of what they’ve missed. So Phillip is constantly striding through his undergraduate years long after others have left them behind. He’s still an undergraduate. It’s like an ongoing tutorial that he’s in, every night.
‘No-one treats interview subjects as well. We’re in an age when very shallow women ask you about your sex life, or something, by way of interview. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to turn on Channel Nine, you’ll see what I mean. Phillip is the majestic exception to the others. He’s comfortable in his own skin and confident of his abilities. But he’s aware that he’s not an artist in the usual sense, although he’s perhaps the most-read columnist in our history. He’s never done what he threatened to do, go to Sardinia and write a great big bloody novel or something like that. I think he’s a little ashamed of his spiflicated attention span in that he doesn’t last long in any one place or discipline. His ideal venue is to be out of town chairing an ideas festival and having coffee afterwards with the speakers. He’s secretly convivial and doesn’t know it. He actually enjoys crowds but he’s so infrequently in them that it doesn’t occur to him that it’s what he most enjoys. He likes to be the life of the party but doesn’t go to parties. He’s a gregarious recluse. I’m like that, too. I’m never happier than when I’m alone in a Chinese restaurant reading a book review. But if I go to a writers’ festival, I’m over the moon with the company.
***
‘Phillip preaches to the converted but every now and then a person he has interviewed changes our thinking. There are fewer fundamentalist Christians around because of him: the people who listen to him talk to their families, and so on. Today I have been re-reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins came into our consciousness through Phillip. These are subtle influences but they are real. We are immensely a better country because of Phillip. And we’re a worse country because of John Howard. The rollback of decency is happening partly because of Phillip and largely because of the extraordinary impact and reach of the ABC which, especially in country towns, has civilised Australia over the past fifty years.
‘Phillip once made an interesting concept and it has passed into the language. He said a referendum on capital punishment might be won by the people who want capital punishment, but you had to measure the intensity and the thoroughness of the thought that went into the votes. And the votes from the left would always, by that measure, be greater. The total intensity of belief and intellectual wrestling would always outweigh that of the right, which was always shallow.’
Ellis and Adams were both contributors to Nation Review, the weekly newspaper which was founded by the quixotic transport magnate Gordon Barton and from 1970 caught a wave of left-wing, anti-establishment feeling until materialism (and a materialistic shortage of advertisers) killed it in 1981. Other left-wing contributors to Nation Review included Mungo MacCallum, Michael Leunig, Germaine Greer and Francis James.
‘Phillip and I meet from time to time over the years,’ Ellis said. ‘He is always over-amusing. He treats our meetings as if he was compering a comedy show. One night I got really drunk and we had a whole hour on Late Night Live. I can’t remember what was said but Bob Carr, who was not yet the New South Wales premier, rang up and said it was the best night of radio he had ever heard. Clearly we did something right. I’ve never been as good with Phillip since and I get a little irritated by his man from America’ (he means Bruce Shapiro) ‘who talks at such length over matters of no great significance. There is a kind of intimacy. Some friends who don’t see each other for years on end have an instant intimacy. I see Germaine Greer maybe once every five years, but the conversation resumes at the same level. There is little diffident politeness at the beginning of our conversation. We just pick up where we left off. Phillip and I are like that.
‘Phillip is a year and a half older than me, or something.’ In fact, Phillip was born in 1939 and Bob in 1942. ‘We’re both overweight and aware of our mortality. We’re both privately scared of death. I wish I saw more of him, but these days you can catch up just by pressing a button on a computer. I feel unworthy to interrupt whatever he’s doing. He’s very abrupt. He ends the conversation when he wants to. But consider what he might have done. Imagine he was in the Senate and he was the font of ideas. It’s also true of Kerry O’Brien. These broadcasters, who are touched by the best minds, are always the best-informed people. They’re not just well read, they’ve done this brow-to-brow thing, and what a loss they are to politics! In Britain, there are some people who are both broadcasters and politicians.
‘But you have to address the question as to whether Phillip is lazy or not. You can be active and also lazy. He’s never written a significant book, and I’ve written twenty.’ I smile at this small evidence of hubris. ‘He’s not a writer in the way you understand writing. He doesn’t enjoy words as much as he pretends to do. His Australian columns don’t have as much impact as Late Night Live has, because no-one in his camp reads The Australian. If Phillip would still be writing for The Age and also for The Sydney Morning Herald, it would have improved his attack and his impact. Writing for The Australian is like not writing at all, because it’s so corrupted by Rupert Murdoch’s will to reduce the western world’s intelligence. Phillip gets lost in the wash.’
Bob Ellis abruptly handed back my tape recorder and shuffled off out of the building. I felt a little bit like I’d been mugged, but, like George Negus, I hope Bob Ellis goes on being Bob Ellis. He is a good writer, sometimes a bit hard to take, but he adds a distinctive taste to Australian society.
Chapter Fifteen:
Late Night Intercourse
Phillip Adams aggressively flatters his highly-qualified Late Night
Live guests, in spite of what The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy, ‘Professors have no more brains than other people, but they have a Diploma, and generals have a Medal.’ In 2011, Phillip Adams has been presenting the program for 20 years and the ABC will all the year promote the anniversary on-air and hold functions attended by Adams in all capital cities. Gail Boserio, LNL’s acting executive producer, issued a statement late in 2010 outlining celebrations of the ‘extraordinary milestone’, stressed that the program is ‘all about ideas’ and added: ‘Phillip Adams’ experience as a broadcaster, his innate curiosity, his passion for ideas and wicked sense of humour have not only guaranteed compulsive listening but ensured an impressive rapport with people from every walk of life.’ LNL’s audience of more than 350,000 people is rising. Worldwide it’s a unique program. This chapter tells how it’s done.
Adams is too nice to his guests and interrupts them too much although no-one is better at making their audience feel the presenter is talking only to them. But the program works and the internet is taking it around the world. Adams told me, ‘I assume familiarity and try to make people laugh, no matter how serious the subject is. Once people have even chuckled, they’re human again.’ There are not many laughs on Late Night Live. Certainly there are some chuckles and many smiles and Adams tries (sometimes too hard) to turn them into laughs, thus giving the program a cheeky irreverence, even when discussing topics that are important, as most of them are. He believes being light about serious subjects does not diminish them, but makes them bearable. James Lovelock, a scientist and environmentalist, was once on-air with Adams to discuss potentially millions of people dying from global warming. It was so depressing that Adams started to laugh. Then Lovelock laughed with him.