Phillip Adams (22 page)

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.

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.'