Phillip Adams (13 page)

How often do you listen to or read Phillip?

‘I'm not a radio listener, not even
AM
or
PM
on the ABC. I find they interrupt my thought processes. I read Phillip's column in
The Weekend Australian Magazine
. Not every weekend does it bounce off the page, but it has a lot of bounces. The storyline, the colour of the words, the beauty of the words, the analogies and synonyms are there. He's an attractive writer, and also a sought-after speaker. I've never seen him disappoint an audience. It's never ordinary. The facility is there, the wordsmithing, the pre-cooked phrases, the pre-cooked thoughts, the compositional quality, and the showmanship it takes to put it across. He is also a charming person. “Charming” is not a word you throw around much, but you can with Phillip. He makes the person he's speaking to feel important. The subject he's got might not enthuse his imagination, but he makes a fist of it.'

How has Phillip's advertising and marketing experience helped the Labor Party?

‘Some of the world's sharpest minds are in advertising — you've got to be smart to see the standouts, to pull the issues out and put them into a campaign. It never surprised me that he was a powerful force in advertising; also in films. He was very influential, when I was treasurer, in setting up the Australian Film Commission and in general support for the film industry. That's part of the Australian story. People who have a position, like him, influence you and ones who have thought-out positions tested over time are always valuable to speak to because they have a framework.

‘Phillip's influence in the Labor Party has probably declined a little, but that happens to us all. You can't be a topical, fresh-faced person forever. The years wear you down and your complexion has a less rosy hue. You become more pasty. That's happened to him and to me. We see each other regularly and talk about local and world politics.'

Do any sections of the Labor movement criticise Phillip?

‘Occasionally, if he offends someone. Most Labor people know he's a kindred spirit. He doesn't agree with everything Labor does or says and he has sympathies for the big mass party of the moderate left. But he's never toed the party line.'

Did he have any influence with Kevin Rudd as prime minister?

‘I think he did. He has some contact with Kevin. I'm pretty certain Kevin would regard him as a sane character with a balanced view and would regard his counsel pretty well.'

What drives Phillip?

‘A determination not to fall by the wayside, the compulsion to keep fresh and to keep his older mind current. And that means climbing over the issues and the facts and synthesising and distilling them as always. When you've been doing that for decades, it doesn't necessarily get harder but it's still laborious. Phillip suffers the labour for the benefit of remaining current.'

Why does he have so many listeners and readers, do you think?

‘The two Fs: framework and facility. All facility and no framework, not worth listening to or reading. All framework and no facility, the same. You need both and he has both. He has the framework and he has the colour, the adjectives and synonyms, the story-telling, the pre-cooked thoughts, the high cuisine. All good restaurants have the marinations going and the other ingredients going, and they bring them all into the grand presentation at the end. That's what Phillip does.'

An image of Phillip at a stove flashed into my mind. Given that I've never seen him make anything more complicated than a cup of tea, it was amusing.

How would you describe Phillip as a man?

‘He's a softie to a fault. He should have said no to you and he didn't. He's a softie and, frankly, anyone with any brains is soft. What's the point of being hard? We're only here for a certain time. His neurons are running around at a great pace.'

Does he have any good or bad habits?

‘He likes cars. His silhouette is a bit like the comic character The Little King.' Otto Soglow drew The Little King in 1931 in
The New Yorker
and from 1934 worldwide, until both Otto and the fat Little King died in 1975.

‘Phillip's overweight,' Keating explains, in case I didn't understand the reference. ‘But you can't exercise your way into immortality, and I think Phillip understands that. You can't exercise your way into not ageing. So he's not going to even try.'

What are his demons, then?

‘You never quite know what people's demons are. I don't know what Phillip's are. I think if I had to say what his principal demon is, I'd say it's the threat of loneliness.'

I said, ‘He likes being alone for some of each week.' I've both observed this and been told this by Adams himself.

‘But he's not alone. He's got many friends. He's a person who would suffer greatly from loneliness.'

How do Patrice and Phillip seem as a couple?

‘It's a partnership that has gone on for a very long time. And always well, in my observation.'

Phillip has had many successes. Has he had any failures?

‘Phillip might like to have been elected to Federal Parliament, and he would have been good enough to have been. Given his attachment to the public realm, it's hard to think he might not have liked to be elected. He is a commentator more than a proselytiser. It's very hard to be a commentator. You're asked to comment on a whole lot of things because of the complexities of modern life, the flow of information, the frequency and velocity of events. To be a commentator of note today and to be able to stand your ground for decades is very difficult to do, and Phillip does it with élan. He is a great listener to audio books in his car. It's a lazy way of reading books, but as he drives for three hours each way between his nirvana in the Hunter Valley to his office in Paddington every week, it is far more absorbing than listening to the squalor of talkback radio. Phillip is an unusual person to be a rural burgher on a farm in the Hunter Valley. You'd expect him to be an urbane urbanite.'

Paul Keating extended his hand. As I shook it, I felt a sense of opportunity lost, not for my conversation with him, but for his role in public life. However you regard his politics, Australian public life has been more boring without him. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the University of New South Wales and he emerges from time to time to call politicians nasty things, making headlines. But I wonder if he'll ever take a bigger role again, or if he would even want one.

Chapter Nine:
Eight Prime Ministers Adams Has Known

When next I see Phillip Adams, I decide to continue the prime ministerial theme. My conversation with Paul Keating has inspired me to find out what other prime ministers Adams has known and to dig around in that brain of his for some insights into the people who have shaped Australian history the most. ‘So,' I begin once we're sitting down with cups of tea, ‘prime ministers'.

Adams begins talking about John Gorton, who he said was clueless and incapable of spin but totally genuine. The day after Prime Minister Harold Holt disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach in Victoria on December 17, 1967, John McEwen, the deputy prime minister, said his Country Party would not remain in the Coalition if deputy Liberal leader Billy McMahon, Holt's logical successor, was made prime minister, because he didn't trust him. This put John Gorton, minister for education and science, into contention as Liberal leader against his main rival, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck. Adams' friend Barry Jones had already raised Gorton's credibility by interviewing him on his Victorian radio and national television show. Gorton was a larrikin and fond of a drink. He was also fond of attractive young women, which made him popular with the voters but not with the Liberal Party.

But he was elected party leader on January 9, 1968 and prime minister the next day. He invited Barry Jones to a sleepover at The Lodge to thank him and to talk about Jones and Adams' plans to revive the Australian film industry.

Adams told me, ‘Barry told me that he was sitting with John by the fire at The Lodge and John said, “I don't know what to do about the Canadians. I've never liked Canadians.”

‘Barry said, “It's different there now because of Pierre Trudeau.”

‘Silence. “What's Trudeau?”

‘“The new prime minister of Canada.”

‘“What happened to Lester Pearson?”

‘“He lost his job.”

‘“Hang on,” said John. “I had to sign a letter to this Trudeau bloke.”'

Adams laughed at the memory, as I did. Pierre Trudeau was prime minister of Canada from 1968 to '79 and again from 1980 to '84, outlasting Gorton by many years. But Adams wasn't finished with the Gorton anecdotes yet.

‘Another time, John was holding a press conference on an Asian tour when someone asked him what he would do about the general SEATO situation and John was heard to ask an aide, “Who the fuck is General Seato?'” Adams roared with laughter. SEATO was the South East Asia Treaty Organisation.

‘Then there was the time when Barry and I visited John at his office in Parliament House. On his desk were signed photos of the Pope, Harold Wilson and another man with epaulets. I asked him who he was and he said, “Fucked if I know.” It turned out to be Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

‘Gough Whitlam looked as if he should have been a Liberal prime minister and John a Labor one. That minced-up face of his was a good face.' Gorton's face had been mutilated when he served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. ‘I liked him all the more because he backed our film project. Barry and I would write speeches for him and I remained quite good friends because he was a strong nationalist and he hated the fact that we had sold the farm to foreigners. Also, he was a republican. He said the British wanted Australians to roll over on their backs so the Poms could trickle their tummies like a dog. His nationalism did him no good in his own party. The Liberals used his strong flirtations with Liza Minnelli and Ainslie Gotto against him, but their main aim was to get rid of him.'

At John Gorton's ninetieth birthday celebration in 2001, Adams was the only one there from the left. The Liberals despised Gorton but pretended they cared. Gorton told Adams he was quite enjoying the bizarre event, where people who loathed him were pretending to love him. John Howard spotted Adams and told the function how Gorton had associated with people who were not the Liberals' usual friends and one of those associations had led to the film industry.

‘It was Howard's olive branch to me,' Adams told me. ‘He kept offering them and I kept rejecting them. Soon after his birthday, John Gorton died.' The date was May 19, 2002.

‘The Liberals don't have genuine affection for their ex-leaders, like the Labor Party has,' said Adams. ‘Even when they're disasters, Labor loves them. You couldn't not like John Gorton. He was as rough as bags, immensely vague and didn't know what was going on, but totally genuine. He just didn't have any skill at spin. He wasn't a thoroughbred Liberal out of The Melbourne Club. It was the first time the club had lost control of who would be prime minister. In some areas, he was very progressive. In others, he was hopeless.

‘The myth is that he used a casting vote to vote himself out of the prime ministership when he called a party meeting in March 1971 and a motion of confidence in his leadership was tied. The myth is just a myth. Under the party's rules, a tied motion is automatically defeated. Gorton said, ‘That is not a vote of confidence, so the party will have to elect a new leader.'

***

After John McEwan retired as Country Party leader, his successor Doug Anthony told the Liberal Party that the veto against Billy McMahon no longer applied. So the Liberals elected McMahon to succeed John Gorton. McMahon, his wife, Sonia, and little ‘Nugget' Coombs, the Reserve Bank Governor, mounted the stairs in Washington with Sonia's thigh flashing in the picture that went around the world. Adams wrote that it looked as if Snow White was down to her last two dwarfs. Soon afterwards, Tony Staley, a Liberal MP, came to Adams with a job offer from McMahon and Adams said, ‘But I've just described your boss's wife as being Snow White down to her last two dwarfs.' Staley said, ‘The PM thinks that's funny.'

When I ask Adams about it all now, he says, ‘Billy as prime minister was a joke from start to finish, probably our most underwhelming PM, a non-event, but a cunning little bugger. Afterwards, he disappeared into the mists of time. Once when I was staying in the Sebel Town House in Sydney, all I needed was a nap.

‘I told the switch, as a joke, “No calls, unless it's a prime minister.” I literally collapsed on the bed and the phone rang.

‘The reception asked, “What about an ex-prime minister?”

‘I said, “Which one?”

‘They said, “Sir William McMahon.”

‘I said, “Put him through.”

‘Bill said in his squeaky little voice, “Hello.”

‘I said, “Hello, Bill.”

‘Bill said, “Who's that?”

‘I said, “It's Phillip.”

‘He said, “What can I do for you, Phillip?”