Kerry packer, p.2
Kerry Packer, page 2
‘He said, “It’s really important to know how things work, son, ’coz otherwise they’ll con you …”’
Cowell was seeing the early evidence of Packer’s ability to soak in opinion and information, feeding the gut instinct that first found its voice in Cleo, and would later make Channel Nine into the powerhouse of television.
‘Cleo was his,’ Cowell says. ‘He created it, he gave the people who created it the room to breathe. It was, “If you think it’s a good idea, go for it.”’
‘It was a time when it was all changing really quickly, it was really exciting. Photography was changing dramatically, people were starting to use a lot more colour. Up till then, if you were really lucky, you might have one-third of a magazine in colour; Cleo was 50/50.’
Cartoonist Patrick Cook was another early contributor to Cleo. He, too, recalls an electric atmosphere where, in the months after Cleo’s zeroine-to-heroine ascendancy, anything seemed possible.
‘I can’t think of anything that was mentioned to me that Kerry had rejected as an idea—the centrefold, the sealed sections. It was very bold for its time. I think he was more prepared to take a chance and see if it sold. And when it sold, that did it.’
Ita Buttrose, speaking to George Negus in 2004 on ABC TV’s George Negus Tonight, recalled that Kerry Packer wasn’t always entirely fearless. ‘The only time I ever remember Kerry looking a bit pale was in the very early days of Cleo, when we were putting in a story about how female masturbation could help overcome frigidity …’
Still, Kerry Packer was prepared to try anything that would tickle Cleo’s readers, for every circulation gain meant another finger-salute at Sir Frank.
Packer wandered over to Cowell one day for the customary smoke, greeting the art director with: ‘Son, you look like shit. You need a break. Why don’t you go and have a look at what’s happening in other publishing companies around the world? Go to America, go to Europe.’
Cowell says he wasn’t quite sure what this meant. But he mentioned it to Buttrose and—in the way that things worked when Kerry Packer wanted something done—a wad of plane tickets and traveller’s cheques was soon lobbed wordlessly on Cowell’s desk.
Cowell’s trip lasted three weeks, most of that time spent in his native London, with a few days’ stopover on the way home to visit printers in Hong Kong. Cowell gorged himself on the smorgasbord of European magazines available in London. It was one of these—a German magazine—that gave Cleo its titillating sealed section, and Cowell one of his most treasured ‘cigarette-break moments’.
On his return Cowell presented the German magazine to the Cleo printers, who stood there, shaking their heads. The sealed section, they said, was too complicated to produce.
‘That’s when Kerry came in, grabbed a cigarette—“And what are you guys talking about?” And these two guys obviously thought, “Oh shit.” I said, “Oh, we’re just trying to do this, but apparently it’s really complex …” I thought they were telling me the truth, to be honest. I was sure the Germans were the only ones who could do it.
‘Kerry said: “Bullshit! All you’ve got to do is move the turning arm so it doesn’t fold short, then it will only trim off that length.”’
Cowell was gobsmacked by his boss’s knowledge of printing and binding, though he shouldn’t have been, given Packer’s hard, grinding apprenticeship. The two printers, caught bang to rights, snivelled: ‘Yes, yes, we’ll investigate that method, Mr Packer.’
‘Don’t investigate it. It will fucking work.’
Cleo was a tearaway success.
Two years later, Cowell had relocated to London, floating around the magazine scene. In early-1979, he got a call from Ita Buttrose, asking if he’d consider returning to Sydney. Two nights later, Packer called two night later and made an offer. Cowell remembers it along the lines of ‘get your arse back here’. By the time Cowell reached his London desk the following morning, there sat a manila envelope with the necessary paperwork.
If there’s one word that comes up often in discussion about Kerry Packer (aside from the favourite, four-letter one), it’s ‘loyalty’.
‘Oh, loyalty was an enormous thing to him,’ says Cowell. ‘Huge. I think if he ever thought you were trying to take the piss you were in deep trouble. If, on the other hand you were good and you worked hard, I think it was very much appreciated.’
Back at ACP, Cowell was soon named overall creative director. About a year after his return, he committed to buying a small house in Sydney’s inner west.
Cowell approached ACP managing director Rob Henty and asked: ‘Mr Henty, I want to buy a house and I need a deposit. Is there any way I could borrow it?’
Cowell grins as he recalls: ‘Literally two to three hours later Rob Henty said, “Come up and see me.” So I went up and there was this little letter that said ACP had loaned Andrew Cowell, interest-free, repayable on demand, the amount of $10,000 … The next morning I went to the bank and there it was.’
A couple of years passed. Happy as Cowell was at ACP, the opportunity to change tack and edit a magazine at another publishing house was a challenge he couldn’t resist. But there remained the matter of the $10,000 loan, which he’d made no effort to pay off.
‘So I had to call Rob Henty and say, “Mr Henty, I’m actually resigning and I want to leave quite quickly, because I’ve been offered this job I really want to do … My big concern is obviously that I owe you $10,000.” He went and had a chat to the boss, and then I get the call: “Mr Packer would like to see you.”
‘So I went up there and he says, “Son, you’ve got a real problem. You owe me money.” And then he asked why was I going, what was I going to do.
‘I think he really enjoyed winding me up. And then he said, “Well, what are we going to do about this, then?”, holding up this piece of paper. I said, ‘Obviously I can’t pay it all back now, but I’m very happy to come to any arrangement with you’. He was being very friendly, except for the slightly menacing bits.
‘He just said: “Listen, you’ve done a fantastic job for us, and I think you’ve helped make me a shitload of money.” And he just tore up the piece of paper. “Let’s call it quits. Best of luck. And son, if it doesn’t work out, you ring me first.”
‘And I did go back, but I never really had that much to do with him again. By that time, Kerry was right up in the stratosphere, you never really saw him.’
A decade after the shaky foundations of Cleo were laid, Packer’s confidence in his stewardship of the magazine empire was total—cemented, in part, by his trust in his loyal and creative staff.
Cleo was the first of many successful magazines ACP launched with Kerry at the helm. Other star titles included Harper’s Bazaar, Ralph, Madison and NW. All with high circulation figures and reaping big advertising dollars at their peak.
Not all their ideas hit home, of course. One of those rejected titles sits fondly among Cowell’s memories of Kerry Packer.
‘Ita and I were doing a dummy for a new men’s magazine, before he went and got Australian Playboy. The dummy for that was called Packer’s. The Packer name was very much the quintessential Aussie male, brash arrogant, confident—we thought it was a good name. But he looked at the front cover and went, “Nah.”’
Adjacent to Kerry Packer’s sprawling Park Street office on level three was The Tap Room, a small lounge area where executives were invited—nay, expected—to attend informal, end-of-week drinks. Receiving that first phone call from Packer’s PA was like being a ‘made guy’ in the Mafia.
Not everyone would feel inclined to loiter of an evening, but the Tap Room sessions were a good forum for keeping communications open around the Consolidated Press group. More importantly, they were about keeping the Boss entertained.
The Tap Room was very much the inner sanctum, where Packer would sometimes tell—and sometimes even tolerate—stories against himself.
FACING THE BULL ELEPHANT
Television shows like Dynasty and Dallas would have us believe that tycoons all inhabit opulent, oak-panelled and art-directed offices worthy of colonial statesmen or homecoming polar expeditions. The image didn’t quite carry to Kerry Packer’s office on the third floor of Australian Consolidated Press headquarters in Park Street, Sydney.
KP’s office is most frequently described with its dominant paintings of a lion astride a fresh kill, and a bull elephant, its back to the rest of the herd, staring straight over Packer’s head at the occupants of the 1970s-style, plush teal visitor’s chairs. Directly opposite his chair was a large television monitor which was almost always on.
Leading up to the office, and its adjoining Tap Room bar area, the walls of ‘Mahogany Row’ were lined with almost 50 original Norman Lindsay cartoons and drawings from the then century-old archives of The Bulletin. But Packer’s office reflected his tastes as a Fanta-from-the-can and B&H man.
‘By the standards of the rising corporate brilliance of the day, it was rather a modest office,’ recalls Trevor Sykes, a frequent visitor in his roles as editor of The Bulletin and later, Australian Business. ‘There wasn’t much flashness about Consolidated Press, as you’ll remember … He liked it because he knew where he was, he had his car parked right across the road. It just suited him.’
‘What you normally saw first of Packer were the soles of his feet—because he had his feet up on the desk, he was leaning back on the chair. Yep, feet on the desk. He was always relaxed. Unless he wasn’t.’
Of course, such was the physical presence, the reputation and the sheer aura of Kerry Packer, he could have pontificated from a play-pit of Lego blocks. He was known to have advisers trail him around a golf course, and his executives naturally dropped everything to go wherever they were summoned.
The most unimaginable visits ever made to KP’s office were two that occurred while he wasn’t there. During the night of 28 April 1995, a person or persons managed to evade the Park Street alarm systems, sidestep security personnel and make their way directly to Packer’s seat of power on the third floor.
Their aim was eerily precise, for they went to his personal safe, hidden within the drinks cabinet, and spent an estimated 30 minutes blow-torching the 1940s-vintage Chubb unit. The thief or thieves made off with a staggering $5.3 million in gold ingots. And staggering the crooks must have been; the 25 gold bars amounted to 285 kilograms. They also filched a jar of gold nuggets, plus gold and silver necklaces.
Park Street’s security guards were obviously questioned. Bulletin cartoonist Patrick Cook remembers: ‘The security guards were not, frankly, Rhodes scholars. When I went back into the office, there was a completely different outfit running security. The others had been rissoled on the spot. Small brown smears.’
The crime remains unsolved.
Almost eight years later, on 16 January 2003, a pair of armed bandits gained entry to Packer’s office, tying up a member of the late-night cleaning staff. They, too, seem to have spent minimal time in going straight to Packer’s top drawer and stealing his 9 millionm Glock pistol.
The gun was licensed, but Police were undecided on whether to charge Packer for failing to properly secure the weapon.
Packer voluntarily surrendered his pistol licence the following month, when it expired anyway. Perhaps he’d finally worked out he didn’t need a side-arm in his office.
THE PACKERPHONE
Packer’s ingested his news from watching television and talking to people. It was extraordinary for a businessman of his stature to do both for hours on end. Long conversations were Packer’s information lifeline. They were a luxury afforded by his ownership of the nation’s most news-centric commercial television network, and the most venerated weekly news magazine, not to mention his other business, sports and technology titles.
Packer could simply pick up the telephone at any time of the day or night and usually ask the newsmakers themselves.
And he did … literally at any time of the day or night. Executives knew they were effectively on call 24/7, and Packer had a positive genius (whose embodiment, from 1974–92, was his secretary Pat Wheatley) for tracking them down, anywhere on the globe.
In Park Street and the separate Nine Network executive office, a technology not universally understood in the 1970–80s allowed the Big Fella’s telephone to simply override any other live call on the recipient’s yellow ‘Packerphone’. One editor could be in the middle of a conversation with another editor, and suddenly have the chairman there instead.
2
KERRYVISION
Frank Packer’s two sons were disparate characters. Clyde was urbane and intellectual, with a growing curiosity of the alternative culture around him, while Kerry—dyslexic, an academic failure, quick with his fists—seemed destined to be useful mainly for lifting heavy things. In 1960, Clyde was editor-in-chief of The Observer magazine, while Kerry laboured in the basement among the printing presses of his father’s cherished Daily Telegraph newspaper.
That same year, Sir Frank made the landmark acquisition of the GTV-9 television station in Melbourne. It would join his TCN-9 in Sydney, the station that had introduced television to Australia in 1956, and thus make the Packers unquestionably the most powerful people in TV.
Unsurprisingly, it was Clyde who was steered towards the television business. By 1970, he was joint managing director. The problem was that the other joint was his father. Their relationship exploded in 1972 when Sir Frank, never shy in using his media interests to express his political beliefs, forbade Nine’s A Current Affair from airing an interview with then-ACTU president, Bob Hawke.
Clyde’s subsequent departure in 1976 from Australia—and with it, the sale of his one-eighth share of the family business to Kerry for $4 million—sealed the future direction for Kerry Packer. But in fact, Kerry Packer had initiated the process a few years earlier.
In 1972, while Clyde was clashing with their father, Kerry was starting his bold and spectacularly successful magazine venture with Cleo. But for several years already, his goal had been to rid the business of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers—a masthead his father had acquired in 1936.
Sir Frank’s ailing health opened the door enough for Kerry to get his wish in May 1972. He and Rupert Murdoch had attended a boxing match together in Sydney and, sat in the car afterwards outside Murdoch’s hotel, discussed various means of merging their respective morning (Daily Telegraph) and afternoon (Mirror) papers to compete with Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald and Sun.
They agreed instead that Murdoch could buy the two Telegraph titles for $15 million. As the papers had regularly lost money, the deal was too good for even sentimental Sir Frank to refuse.
Beyond the state of the Telegraph titles, Kerry believed that newspapers themselves were yesterday’s news. He would say as much in a 1977 interview with Murdoch’s newspaper, The Australian:
‘To be perfectly honest with you, I think that you people who are involved in print media don’t quite understand that you are now the second-class media … your influence is nowhere near as great as the broadcast media.’
The interviewer asked: ‘Your father would never have agreed with that?’
‘No, of course he didn’t. But you see one of the greatnesses about my father was the fact that emotionally, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to sell the Daily Telegraph. It tore him to shreds. But he stood back from it as a businessman and said ‘It’s a good deal’ and I was pushing him all the time to sell.’
Kerry Packer and television were made for each other.
He watched hours and hours of television each day—and, as many Nine employees would learn, at any hour of the night. One visitor to Packer’s Bellevue Hill home in the late 1970s told of Packer watching four televisions simultaneously; the advent of split-screen monitors must have been a godsend.
Employees paint a picture of Packer as Nine’s editor-in-chief, a one-man quality control department who—despite running magazine, rural, property and whatever other businesses—seemed magically able to perform this job 24 hours a day.
The image of an autocratic proprietor in the radiation haze of several television monitors, barking ‘get that shit off the air!’ down the telephone, seems quaint in today’s era of media empires owned by faceless pension funds.
Packer’s influence on television would not be limited to his own network—though most agree that the quality he demanded, and received, from his own stations, set the standard for rival networks. Like his father, Kerry did not hesitate to use political influence to further his business interests.
In many landmark examples, Packer was an undisputed winner, to an extent that even the impartiality of Prime Ministers was called into question.
It was Packer who, in August 1977, first approached Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to invest in a satellite for national television broadcasting. In turn, the 1985 launch of AUSSAT would lead to the overhauling of ‘two-station’ ownership restrictions and their replacement, in 1986 by the government of Bob Hawke, with new ‘cross-media’ ownership laws.
Packer had been instrumental in their drafting, and it was more than happy coincidence that the cross-media restrictions pertained more to the proprietors of newspaper and radio than to magazine barons.
National-network potential made existing two-station networks incredibly hot property, and Packer’s two Nines were the hottest. Thus would play out the biggest and best-known of Packer’s incredible business deals, the selling—and relatively prompt re-acquisition—of Nine to Alan Bond, for $1.055 billion. Kerry Packer famously said you only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime.
Into the 1990s, Packer was no less active in lobbying for terrestrial stations to be given a ten-year head start in the new, digital television technology. He was early into the pay-TV game in a joint venture with Optus Vision, while Rupert Murdoch would team with Telstra. In 1998, Packer would acquire 25 per cent of Murdoch’s Foxtel in the fallout from Super League.
