Phillip Adams by Philip Luker

Author:Philip Luker [Luker, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Media and journalism, Australian history
ISBN: 9780994256454
Publisher: JoJo Publishing
Published: 2015-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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