Kerry packer, p.1
Kerry Packer, page 1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Part One: Building the Empire
Chapter 1 Park Street
Chapter 2 Kerryvision
Chapter 3 Bush Yarns
Chapter 4 The Deals
Chapter 5 Packer Under Fire
Part Two: Packer at Play
Chapter 6 Toss You For It
Chapter 7 The Turf
Chapter 8 Sporting Ambitions
Chapter 9 Packer’s Toys
Part Three: Fanta & Finger Buns
Chapter 10 The Health Report
Chapter 11 Smoking and Fuming
Part Four: Larger than Life
Chapter 12 Picking up the Bill
Chapter 13 On Deadline
References
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
It is possible that no individual has been more influential in shaping Australia’s culture than Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, AC. For 30 years, via his Consolidated Press Holdings, Kerry Packer controlled television’s perennial ratings leader Channel Nine and as much as 60 per cent of the nation’s magazine market.
The majority of what Australians actually watched, read and believed in the latter part of the 20th century came through the prism of Packer.
The average Australian might reasonably question the qualifications of a jet-owning, polo-playing, globe-trotting billionaire to determine the relevance of Seinfeld or sewing patterns to their daily lives.
But beneath all the billionaire clutter, Kerry Packer had quite a bit in common with large sections of Australian society: a cheeky humour, a competitive drive, love for his kids, a passion for sports and movies. No-one would more begrudgingly don a dinner suit than the billionaire eating burgers in front of the television.
Packer was a paradox: known to all, known by few.
Born into great wealth, the younger of two sons had a childhood punctuated by a life-threatening case of polio, stints in boarding schools and apparently little attention from his strict and detached parents. He was sent to some of Australia’s most exclusive and academically admired schools, but was notable mainly for his efforts in sports. This included boxing, both sanctioned and spontaneous.
The baron of publishing was dyslexic. He bulldozed right through it: ‘I don’t read much, but I spend a lot of time talking to people who do.’ The son dismissed by his father as ‘boofhead’ inherited a business in 1974 valued at perhaps $100 million. When he died 31 years later on Boxing Day 2005, he handed his own son James control of a media, property, agriculture and gambling empire worth $6.9 billion.
Kerry Packer made the bulk of his fortune from the media, but he vigorously shunned its intrusion into his own or his family’s life. Adventurous journalists were very quickly met with legal and even physical threats. He gave interviews sparingly and only, it seemed, when it suited a particular political or business ambition.
Privately, Packer was known to enjoy one-on-one lunches and telephone conversations with trusted friends and staff that would last for hours. He would natter about weather, sports, anything. ‘He would sit with smart people and just suck their brains out’, is how one former executive put it.
Those who knew him understood Packer’s empathy for the man in the street. In the days after Packer’s passing, Garry Linnell, the then editor in chief of the flagship The Bulletin, remembered this advice from his boss:
‘Out there, there are many of them earning—what’s the average wage? About 50K? They’re earning that, and some a lot less. How do they get by on that? How do you raise a family and pay a mortgage and just do what you have to do? Don’t forget ’em. You journos always do.’
This book seeks not to glorify Kerry Packer, but to expose more of his humour and humanity; qualities that were strategically kept close.
I’m grateful to say I never formally met Kerry Packer. To a mere deputy editor on two of his successful motoring magazines between 1983–90, a summoning to the chairman’s office on the third floor would have been highly unusual and possibly terminal.
Among the young employees of my ilk, Mr Packer was a mysterious force that pervaded the building. Actual sightings were rare. Yet our cheeky nickname ‘Uncle Kerry’ (whispered, after a shoulder-check) conveyed the respect and affection felt for the proprietor who empowered us to produce the best magazines we could. They carried our reputations, as well as his.
Only twice in my six years at Park Street did I see Mr Packer in person. Both occasions were close encounters; both involved elevators.
I was waiting in the foyer to meet a colleague. There was a sudden flurry of activity, with three or four security staff erupting through a side entrance. One mouthed hurriedly into his walkie-talkie: ‘Visitor has arrived, visitor has arrived.’
In the next instant, the quite breathtakingly tall figure of the chairman swept through the door, surging past me towards the lifts. The burly security guards looked like tugboats flitting around a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
About a year later, I would have a much closer encounter, riding wordlessly in the lift in the exclusive company of Kerry Packer AC. (I’m thankful it wasn’t the lift car in which someone had scratched “Packer can’t play baccarat” into the stainless steel panel).
Recalling the experience now, I’m in awe of the quick wit and opportunist instinct of one well-known, knockabout writer with The Picture magazine, who often told the story of being alone in an elevator with the chairman—when the lift lurched to a halt between floors.
Packer jabbed at the lift buttons. Then grabbed the emergency phone. It’s not known who answered, but the lift’s other occupant was able to imagine a telephone receiver being held 10 centimetres from a smoking column of cervical vertebrae.
Packer slammed the phone back onto its hook. The elevator became a cosmic sinkhole of silence.
The writer chirped: ‘Gee, I hope they fix this soon. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got work to do.’
When it was my turn, I was too dumbstruck by Packer’s presence to say anything.
The elevator had arrived at my floor and the doors opened. It had one occupant. My eyes climbed slowly up the man-mountain in front of me. Not only was Kerry Packer 15 centimetres taller than me, and more than half as heavy again; facing him, he seemed to taper upwards to infinity.
In a millisecond, I had to weigh the dilemma of possibly breaching protocol by entering the lift, or being seen to waste time by waiting for the next one. I smiled weakly, stepped aboard, and rode a while in his great shadow.
Kerry Packer was larger than life, but very much in life. This book is a collection of stories, gathered from people who knew him, from those who have documented him, and from the folklore that inevitably grew up around him. At heart, they’re just stories of a remarkable Australian.
Kerry Packer was probably destined to be remarkable—one way or another. He was born on 17 December 1937 into circumstances that rarely seem to produce inconsequential types. A look through the ledger of Gettys, Hearsts, Fords and Kennedys suggests that a child in this kind of family could turn out as either a brilliant and respectable scion, or a frustrated and rebellious dropout.
In young Kerry’s case, for a long time the odds appeared to be stacked towards the latter. And if the popular version of Packer family history is to be believed, the tallest hurdle to acceptance was his tough and uncompromising father, Sir Frank.
In the 1979 book As The Twig Is Bent, Kerry said of his father: ‘There are any number of people who can go out and fly a jumbo jet, but there’s a very elite group of people who can design it and make it work, and my father was a designer and a person who could make things work … I was able to fly the plane he built, but I couldn’t have built it.’
According to Kerry, Sir Frank’s Consolidated Press empire was founded on an inheritance from his father, the gruff, tough Smith’s Weekly newspaper pioneer, R C Packer, who died in 1934. Kerry estimated that inheritance at £10,000, around $175,000 in today’s money—though many figured it had been rather more.
In 1931, at just 25 years of age, Frank had already made a small fortune from a masterful piece of publishing bluffery, involving the mooted launch of a cheaper rival to Sydney’s Sun. The innovative Australian Women’s Weekly, launched in 1933, gave the Packer play even more momentum.
Tales of Sir Frank Packer were legend around Australian Consolidated Press (as it was known from 1957), even decades after his death in 1974. He was said to have often returned to the office from long, late dinners and randomly fired any employees who happened, through diligence, to be still at their desks.
‘Younger journalists would be often distressed by this, and the older hands would say, “Don’t worry about it, just come back in on Monday”,’ says Patrick Cook. The cartoonist worked on several ACP titles, including The Bulletin and Cleo.
The late Donald Horne, who served many years on Packer’s Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin, recounted in his 1985 memoir Confessions of a New Boy being sacked for taking a company car on an assignment to rural Cessnock, 160 kilometres from Sydney. Frank blasted him for not catching a bus.
Another employee, it was said, made the fashion error of wearing a red cardigan to work. On seeing this, Sir Frank observed, ‘I see you’re a Communist. You’re fired.’
A favourite story concerned a young lad who was leaning on a desk, apparently chatting up the receptionist. Sir Frank strode up and collared him from behind. ‘What’s your pay each week?’ he thundered. Thirty dollars, sir,’ said the startled kid. Sir Frank thrust his hand in his pocket, leafed out a wad of notes and thrust them into the kid’s hand. ‘There’s four weeks’ pay. You’re fired!’
As the kid slunk off down the hall, the chairman barked after him: ‘What department were you from?’ To which the kid replied, ‘I don’t work here. I’m a courier.’
Paul Barry, in The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, reported a different version, centred on Sir Frank’s unwritten claim on a particular lift in the Park Street building. The doomed ‘employee’ who happened to be inside when it stopped in front of the raging Sir Frank was a deliveryman from the Post Office.
The elevator attitude chimes with Patrick Cook’s recollection. ‘That’s what they said about Frank: “It’s Frank’s world, you’re just living in it.”’
Despite the Packer wealth, it cannot have been a cushy childhood for sons Clyde, born on 22 July 1935, and Kerry two years later. Kerry, however, would always staunchly defend his ‘strict, but magnificent’ father and his mother Gretel who, he said, ‘believed that her function in life was to look after her husband and I don’t disagree with that.’
When he was five, Kerry was sent to boarding school—in Cranbrook, just a few hundred metres from the family home in Sydney’s elite Bellevue Hill. The threat of Japanese invasion prompted his parents to send him to live with an aunt in Bowral, 120 kilometres south-west of Sydney. There, at age seven, he contracted polio, the disease that paralysed lungs and limbs and left many children from the mid-1940s with lifelong, crippling injuries.
Kerry spent nine months in a Sydney hospital in an iron lung, before being dispatched to Canberra under the care of a nurse. He spent two years there, making a total of four years away from his parents.
As told in As The Twig Is Bent: ‘I had seen nothing of them, except for seeing my mother perhaps half a dozen times. It was the war and my father was working for the army and my mother worked hard in the Red Cross. It wasn’t a matter of their not wanting to see me, it was a matter of getting on and doing things, which is something that I believe was right.’
Illness, long absences and as yet-undiagnosed dyslexia conspired to make the remainder of Packer’s schooling a chore. He directed his energies instead towards sport, and at Geelong Grammar in Victoria, where he was sent to board at age 12 or 13, he was a vigorous competitor in everything from boxing and rugby to cricket and tennis.
The latter sport gave rise to one of Packer’s better-known school stories, which he told with some glee in a Parkinson in Australia interview in 1979. The young Kerry had returned to Sydney just hours earlier from Geelong, a formidable, daylong journey, and was playing snooker with his father. Kerry’s mother, unpacking his bag, called down that she couldn’t find his tennis racquet.
‘Eventually the old man’s done his lolly at this,’ Kerry recounted. ‘He said, “For Christ’s sake Gretel, do you want me to send him back to pick [it] up?” And she’s not going to be outdone at this stage. She said, “Yes”. And the next thing I know, I’m on a train back to Melbourne.’
Interviewer Michael Parkinson enquired, ‘What did you do when you got there?’
‘Oh, I just sent him a telegram and said, you know, “Arrived Melbourne safely. No love, Kerry.”’
It was never in doubt that the sons would follow Frank into the family business. Kerry was dispatched to work in the machine room where first the Daily Telegraph, and later the Australian Women’s Weekly was printed. It was hard, dirty, physical work that involved cleaning the enormous presses and lugging away bundled newspapers and magazines.
Sir Frank may have designed and built the plane, but he had little faith in his younger son’s ability to ever take the controls. Clyde, meanwhile, was already rising through the editorial suites.
Clyde Packer had been an accomplished student at Sydney’s Cranbrook school and later, Geelong Grammar. Erudite and articulate, he was the heir-apparent from central casting. Clyde was made a director of Australian Consolidated Press at age 21 and editor-in-chief of the artsy fortnightly The Observer magazine at 22.
With his progressive attitudes, however, Clyde would not be a great admirer of his father. The relationship at Channel Nine, which he described as ‘a very equitable arrangement: I had the responsibility and he had the authority’, eventually reached critical mass. In 1972, Clyde resigned from the family business and effectively, from the family’s control.
‘He was an intensely agreeable man who, unusually, wore a kaftan at all times,’ remembers Patrick Cook, who worked on one of Clyde’s first ventures as an independent publisher, the risqué sex advice magazine Forum. ‘He was the brains that [Sir] Frank wanted to leave everything to.’
Clyde’s split from the Packer program left Sir Frank with only one other heir. And, Sir Frank was in poor health, with steadily worsening heart and respiratory conditions.
Kerry Packer assumed the role of chairman on the death of his father on 1 May 1974. For all his defence of his father, some close to him—like advertising man John Singleton and cricket star Tony Greig—knew the truth. Singleton rarely breaks his silence on the subject of his mate ‘Kerro’, but in the 2006 documentary Big Fella: The Extraordinary Life of Kerry Packer, he revealed: ‘The happiest moment of his life, by a mile, was the day his dad died. He told me that on half a dozen occasions.’
Clyde would complete his detachment from the family business in 1976, selling his share to his younger brother and departing for a new life in Northern California. In an eerie coincidence, Clyde would receive a kidney transplant at the age of 63, the same age at which Kerry would receive his. Clyde died in the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in 2001, aged 65.
Part 1
BUILDING THE EMPIRE
1
PARK STREET
It’s hard for most Australians to think of Kerry Packer without the familiar suffix: Australia’s richest man. Yet those who worked with him in the extraordinary era of the early 1970s—as he began to build the hugely successful stable of magazines that would become an empire—got to see an uncertain, chrysalis-like character emerging from the shell of his father’s scorn and criticism.
Cleo magazine had its origins in a derailed deal with Hearst to publish its Cosmopolitan title in Australia. Cosmopolitan magazine was catching the new wave of feminism sweeping across the world, but the Packers’ arch-rival in publishing, John Fairfax Ltd, was first to jump on board.
Ita Buttrose, an ambitious section editor on Packer’s Telegraph, had already mocked up an alternative. Packer flicked through the mock-up and, as Buttrose related in her autobiography Early Edition: My First Forty Years, he smiled at her: ‘Right. We’ll publish this one. I want it on the streets six months before the Australian edition of Cosmopolitan comes out.’ And that’s how things operated at 54 Park Street, headquarters of Packer’s beloved ACP.
Sir Frank Packer, by then no longer a healthy man, flatly opined that the alternative being pushed by his son—its name shortened to Cleo from Buttrose’s original proposal, Cleopatra—was bound to fail. He gave Kerry his approval to go ahead, but the old man’s motive was quite possibly to see his second son stumble and be put back in his box.
Andrew Cowell, from Belle magazine, was the art director singled out by Buttrose to design the groundbreaking Cleo, the first issue of which appeared in November, 1972. Cowell dealt with Packer almost daily, in the unexpected setting of the proprietor wandering up to his desk and stealing Cowell’s cigarettes.
Cowell, then in his early 20s, says he found Packer, by then in his mid-30s, always interesting and interested. And not especially intimidating. ‘Everyone just saw him as Ita’s boss. In those days, you still had Sir Frank, Harry Chester, David McNicoll. Kerry was very much the new generation.’
‘He’d always just sit down and start talking about something. He’d ask what I was doing, then go off into a story about something. And he was always giving insights.
‘I remember him telling me once that it’s really important to understand the business you’re involved in. He said that’s why he appreciated working on the presses—and he did understand print really, really well. He said he can service a TV camera—but only just, he said, because he’d learned on the ones with valves and now they were coming with transistors.
