Phillip Adams (21 page)

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.