This observation of Genghis Khan—‘he wasn’t lovable, but he was bloody efficient’—might be applied to Arctic P, which began life in 1969 as one of the world’s largest ocean-going, ice-classed tugs. Yes, a tugboat. If your 11,000-container super carrier or five-star Queen Mary 2 breaks down in the north-Atlantic, the Arctic is the nuggetty, grimy-faced Charles Bronson character that comes to the rescue.

  Packer bought the vessel in 1993 and initiated a year-long, $40 million refit in Malta, during which its interior was transformed into that of a luxury yacht.

  Arctic P is said to include accommodation for 12 guests with spa baths in each suite, along with a cinema, indoor swimming pool and the obligatory helipad on the aft deck, along with a sizeable speedboat and a smaller watercraft. She retains a crew of up to 25.

  Arctic P’s snub nose, low sides, upright superstructure and forest of radar domes and observation towers are the pure antithesis—or the Packer anti-statement—of superyacht styling. But from the sunny shores of Sydney to the ice floes of Alaska, there’s virtually nowhere that Arctic P need fear to float, and Boat International magazine once named her among the world’s top five expedition yachts.

  Businessmen of Packer’s stature need to be able to travel at will. In a one-day round trip from his Sydney office, via chartered plane and helicopters, Packer once personally inked a deal with Rupert Murdoch, who was luxuriating on his 48 million yacht Morning Glory in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.

  He maintained a small air force of his own, the centrepiece being a McDonnell-Douglas DC-8 that had served its first 16 years as an airliner in the US with United Airlines before passing in 1985 to Hawaiian Airlines. In 1991, ‘N897OU’ was converted to VIP private-jet spec for Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press.

  This DC-8 was the long-range ‘62’ version, which featured an extra-large wing and forward-raked engine mounts—modifications that gave it a fuel capacity of some 95,500 litres and a range of 7400 nautical miles. By coincidence, or perhaps not, that range accommodated a non-stop flight from Sydney to Las Vegas (around 6700 nautical miles).

  Not that he needed to burn his own petrol money: the Vegas casinos maintain their own fleets of biz-jets, to scoop up high rollers when they feel the itch. More than once, Packer was ferried from London in the MGM Grand’s Gulfstream V.

  According to Paul Barry’s The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, the DC-8 was leased at a cost of $4 million annually, and featured a main bedroom with en suite, a dining table for 12 and separate quarters for the crew. It’s also been suggested that Packer’s polo ponies were frequent DC-8 flyers.

  In 1998 the DC-8, by now re-registered as VP-BLG, was fitted out as a sort of flying hospital to ferry Packer to New York for heart surgery. (The DC-8 left Packer’s hands in 2001 and was most recently plane-spotted as the official government jet of the Republic of Togo.)

  Meanwhile, Packer’s smaller Falcon 200 jet stood in for shorter trips—including, most generously, those for which it was on 24-hour standby on behalf of St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. Packer had donated the little jet’s services for the nationwide collection of organs bound for transplant.

  In May 2005, Packer’s Falcon 200 had a spot of trouble when it clobbered an errant kangaroo on the runway at Snowy Mountains Airport, near Cooma. The roo caused $400,000 worth of damage to the Falcon’s control flaps. It’s not known whether Packer was on board at the time, but it’s well known that he was angry: Packer claimed that the local shire council was negligent in failing to secure the airport boundary.(In early 2006, just months after KP’s passing, James replaced the Falcon 200 with a $61 million Bombardier BD-700 Global Express biz-jet.)

  For shorter hops there’s never been a substitute for a helicopter, and with the exception of a small Bell 47—presumably relegated to rural duties, along with a pair of Cessna 172s registered to the company—those of the Packer squadron were obviously KP-sized.

  One of a pair of prominent Packer-choppers is the Sikorsky S-76B, a $14 million machine capable of seating up to 12 people, and unusual to find in private hands. The two dozen-odd S-76s registered in Australia are more typically employed in ferrying crews to offshore oil rigs and remote mine sites.

  The Sikorsky is a sleek and handsome craft, with a wheeled undercarriage that retracts in flight. Packer’s 1986-build example was nattily registered in 1999 as ‘VH-CPH’ (Consolidated Press Holdings). It’s finished in frosted silver over a deep navy blue with a dark red stripe.

  Wearing the same colour scheme, although more the helicopter equivalent of Sly Stallone in an Armani suit, is the Bell UH-1H Iroquois 205. The fabled ‘Huey’ of US and Australian military history, the stretched ‘205’ specification is able to carry a 1500 kilogram payload and is configurable for up to 14 passengers or six stretchers. This example was built to US Army order in 1963, spending time with the US and later the German military. In 1999 it was ‘civilianised’ by US specialist, Garlick Helicopters, and sent to Australia.

  In Packer’s possession, the Huey flew only about 100 hours in ten years. It’s now in the hands of Precision Helicopters, in Coffs Harbour, NSW, where it has flown several fire-fighting and flood-relief missions.

  Christopher Lee, in Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, relates a story of Packer, John Cornell and an expectant Delvene Delaney being flown to a World Series Cricket game at VFL Park by helicopter. Packer, sitting up front in the (unnamed) chopper, asked the GTV9 Melbourne pilot Geoff Longland, ‘Are these things as safe as light aircraft?’

  Longland assured his boss that they were actually safer; that indeed, if the power were shut down to the main rotor, the blades would continue rotating and the chopper would just glide in to a landing.

  ‘Okay,’ Packer said. ‘Turn the fuckin’ thing off.’ And against the voluble protestations of Cornell, the billionaire businessman and his nervous passengers made a voluntary noiseless landing at VFL Park.

  Like Fitzgerald said: The rich are very different.

  Part 3

  FANTA & FINGER BUNS

  10

  THE HEALTH REPORT

  The big dog in any fight usually has the advantage. And they didn’t come much bigger, or fight much harder than Kerry Packer. At around 190 centimetres and 120 kilograms at the peak of his fitness, Packer was physically intimidating and he knew it. He once confessed, ‘I don’t know any other way to manage people, other than to scare the shit out of them.’ He was a bloke who seemed bellicose and bulletproof.

  In truth, Packer was enduring a rollercoaster ride of health issues that were as large and leveraged as the rest of his life. To the best of everyone’s ability the details were always kept from the public record, not least for the reason that the physical status—and even the travel itineraries—of stratospheric CEOs like Packer can pressure the share values of their businesses.

  It’s been suggested that Packer’s increasingly mercurial moods in the last years of his life were a by-product of the cocktails of medications he had to take just to stay alive.

  In the weeks after Packer’s death, James Packer gave some insight to the physiological time bomb that his father had been for a long time. ‘There is no doubt that if you looked at the list of his ailments, they would have felled most people,’ he said, on the documentary made by his father’s Channel Nine. ‘And there’s no doubt that, at the age of 50, if someone had said to Dad, “You’re going to live to 68” … It’s too young, but I think from where he was at 50, most doctors would have said, no way.’

  Kerry Packer had indeed been lucky to make it that far. At age seven, he fell victim to one of the waves of polio epidemics that swept Australia between 1930–50. The disease confined many children—including Packer—for months or even years at a time. Many were left with lifelong crippling injuries. From 1944, when Packer was stricken, to 1954, there were more than 17,000 cases notified and some 1000 deaths.

  Packer spent nine months in an iron lung (actually, wooden ones were used in Australia), the pressure-machine helping his paralysed lungs to keep operating. Immobilisation of the patient was itself a critical part of the treatment, to avoid long-term damage to the spinal cord, nerves and muscles.

  Those who came to know Packer later in life simply couldn’t imagine this non-stop, insomniac, bull-at-a-gate individual in repose for such a length of time. ‘I would think in a different age he’d have probably been diagnosed with ADHD or something like that,’ says cricketer Greg Chappell, in all seriousness. ‘He wasn’t somebody who could sit still.’

  The condition of dyslexia, the learning difficulty specific to reading and writing, had been known about since the late-19th century. But more widespread understanding of it would not come until the latter part of the 20th century. Packer was almost certainly dyslexic; later in life, reading would be one area that his formidable mental powers could not dominate. But in his early learning, further hindered by his medical isolation and subsequent relocation to Canberra, Packer himself seemed to have accepted his father’s assessment of him as a ‘boofhead’.

  He bounced back physically, as he explained in his 1977 interview with journalist Terry Lane.

  ‘I was academically stupid and my way of surviving through school was sport. I used to play everything. I was never a great natural talent, but I worked hard at all the sports that I played and I became reasonably competent at all of them.’

  At Geelong Grammar he acquitted himself more than adequately in a variety of sports and continued to spend enough time on the golf course that, in his early thirties, he played off a handicap of five.

  In 1974, however, when at age 36 he inherited the multiheaded media business from his father, exercise and physical fitness began to take a back seat to the instant gratification of burgers, cream buns and lung-burners.

  There were stories of Packer looking for instant fixes to his bad habits, investigating miracle diets and stop-smoking methods, including hypnosis. Around a decade and a half would pass before Australia’s richest man began to comprehend that he could not simply pay someone to do what he would have to do for himself.

  Packer’s first major, publicised health scare in adulthood occurred in 1983, when he collapsed at The Australian golf course. It has been variously reported as an angina attack and a full-blown heart attack. He was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, in Sydney’s inner-east, run by the Sisters of Charity.

  For the Sisters, surgeons and staff, it would be the beginning of a long, often loud, challenging and wonderful relationship, the benefits of which would extend well beyond the parties directly involved.

  In May 1986, Packer was again on the golf course, this time at Gleneagles in Scotland, when he collapsed and was rushed to hospital in London. There, he underwent operations for the removal of a cancerous kidney and diseased gall bladder. The urging of his doctors, plus the financial freedom provided by Alan Bond less than 12 months later, prompted a Packer-sized embrace of polo.

  For the next three years he trained quite hard, lost weight and made some more, fairly credible attempts to give up smoking.

  Then, in October 1990, while playing for his Ellerston White team in the semi-finals of the Australian Open Polo Championship at Sydney’s Warwick Farm racecourse, Packer suffered a massive heart attack that left him clinically dead for around seven minutes.

  It’s part of Packer legend that what was needed to save his life was a defibrillator; that only around 40 of NSW’s 800-plus ambulances were equipped with one; and that one such ambulance, one of only 12 on duty for the entire Sydney metro area that day, happened to be driving past Warwick Farm during those critical few minutes.

  Astonishingly, within three days of being dead, Packer was popping back into his Park Street office to keep an eye on the shop. The following weekend, he was back watching the polo. A week after that, Packer underwent bypass surgery, under Dr Victor Chang at St Vincent’s.

  KP was 53 years old—the same age his mother had been when she died of heart failure in New York, where she had flown for heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. Kerry’s grandfather, RC Packer, had been just one year older when he died in 1934, also of heart failure. Kerry’s father, Sir Frank, had made it to 67 before heart failure and pneumonia claimed him.

  KP had no obvious reason to be confident of a long life.

  In September 1995, Packer suffered another suspected heart attack, collapsing at the Hakoah Club in Sydney. In July 1998, with his private McDonnell-Douglas DC-8 (a converted passenger jet) fitted out with medical equipment and staff, he flew to New York for another bout of bypass surgery.

  It came in the middle of an Australian Broadcasting Authority enquiry into cross-media ownership. Arriving at the Cornell Medical Centre in New York, Packer checked in as ‘James Fairfax, no fixed abode’. James Fairfax was the former chairman of the rival Fairfax publishing group.

  The following year, Packer was in Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital having more surgery to clear his arteries. By now, despite other angioplasty surgeries to clear his kidney arteries, his remaining kidney was beginning to fail. His helicopter pilot and friend Nick Ross acknowledged, ‘[Packer] has had a rough bloody track medically all his life. Hasn’t had a great deal of quality living in the last seven years. I wanted to help him, so I did.’

  Ross’ help was to donate one of his kidneys to his boss, a gesture that naturally touched Packer profoundly. The transplant was life-saving, but required ongoing therapy with anti-rejection drugs and steroids. One of the side-effects—were it miraculously not already present—was severe diabetes, which ignites another downward spiral.

  Diabetes introduces a hardening of the arteries and associated heart problems. In 2002, some measure of how far medical technology had advanced lay in Packer’s being implanted with a defibrillator. A dozen years earlier, Packer’s whacker had arrived in a NSW Ambulance; this one was about the size of a matchbox. The unit had to be replaced after about 18 months, obviously in another surgical procedure.

  In his last few years, Packer was often accompanied by a medical team equipped for any emergency. While he had shown a lifelong stoicism where medical matters were concerned, eventually the drugs, the hospitalisations, the gradual removal of the freedoms that made his life worth living, would culminate in a very logical decision to let the whole business wind down.

  FANTA AND FINGER BUNS

  Australians were always oddly fascinated by Kerry Packer’s predilection for junk food. Here was Australia’s wealthiest man, able to indulge a diet worthy of a James Bond villain, choosing instead to gorge on working-class grub.

  For Packer, just possibly, it wasn’t entirely a matter of choice.

  He was not a man blessed with good health, and he very obviously had the willpower to achieve almost anything and the wherewithal to eat well. And yet, in the face of obesity, diabetes, heart and kidney problems and the unending advice of his doctors, Packer was strangely powerless to resist hamburgers, cakes, soft drinks and chocolate bars.

  The same might also have been said of smoking and gambling, both of which were vigorously pursued and personally justified.

  Alcohol often features on such lists, but Packer had eradicated it early from his life to become, with his idol Sir Don Bradman, one of the most famous teetotallers in Australia.

  As with so many aspects of his life, Packer’s abstinence from alcohol spawned a variety of myths and whispers. Packer himself, on The Don Lane Show in 1977, said ‘Well, originally my father bribed me. He said, I will buy you a decent car when you’re 21 if you don’t drink and you don’t smoke.’

  Packer was equally dismissive of it in 2000 when, after his kidney transplant, he told ABC TV’s Australian Story: ‘I’ve got a face of a drinker, but the truth of the matter is I’ve always been a teetotaller.’

  That wasn’t quite the truth of it, as a subsequent, two-part Australian Story in 2014 revealed. It dug into the details of an horrific car crash in 1956 near Goulburn, NSW, in which the car Packer was driving collided head-on with another car. The three young men in the other vehicle were killed instantly. The 18-year-old Packer and his occupants—a mother and two children, family friends—escaped with injuries.

  In giving details of the crash, the program interviewed former Packer friend Phillip Adams, who ‘dimly’ recalled KP once telling him that this tragic event had marked the end of his drinking. Despite the sinister undertones, the accident had been thoroughly investigated at the time and the Coroner’s report concluded that the vehicle carrying the three young men had been on the wrong side of the road. The Coroner cleared Packer of any blame.

  However, the complete abstinence from drinking might suggest an inability to moderate; addictive tendencies, in other words. Packer once admitted as much to football coach and friend, Roy Masters. It’s a template that certainly fits Packer’s gambling, smoking—and his diet.

  In general, Packer’s favoured fat and sugar delivery systems were simply those from an earlier era, when popping out for some takeaway meant a two-fisted burger with the lot, a can of Fanta or Coke or Passiona, finally cemented in the stomach with a lamington or a caramel slice.

  11

  SMOKING OR FUMING

  For a man with such formidable capacity to get things done, Kerry Packer struggled for much of his adult life with giving up the gaspers.

  His suspected heart attack in 1983 prompted his first earnest attempts to stub out smoking. Packer recruited professional help from the Smokers Clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney and began buying cartons of the then-new nicotine chewing gum.

  Neither the clinic nor the chewy got very far, but Packer was again attempting to abstain at the time of his 1990 heart attack on the Warwick Farm polo field. Packer survived seven minutes of death—and walked towards the lighter.

 

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