Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

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.

In 1996, Packer handed over a new BMW car to Sydney socialite Di Jagelman, after losing a bet over which of them would successfully quit first.

The evidence of one of the rare failures of Packer’s iron will was to be seen in the photo taken of his desk on December 28 2005, two days after his death: an opened pack of Dunhill grey cigarettes, in an ashtray immediately to hand.

Packer was either chugging through cigs at the rate of 80 a day, or instructing his secretary Pat Wheatley to dole out a daily ration of just five. Among his executives, KP’s state of nicotine numbing became a reliable barometer for the reception they could expect to receive.

Part 4

LARGER THAN LIFE

12

PICKING UP THE BILL

Stories about Kerry Packer dropping millions of dollars on business and gambling ventures aren’t hard to find. Far less evident, however, are the stories of this billionaire helping out loyal employees who’ve fallen on hard times, or complete strangers in need, or hospitals and institutions whose services he would never conceivably use.

That’s not because Packer never did any of this. He did plenty. But Kerry Packer losing $10 million on the tables at the Las Vegas Hilton or the London Ritz was something people wanted to read; Packer giving $30 million to cancer research, or $10 million to each of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the Westmead Children’s Hospital wasn’t quite as newsworthy.

Packer strove as hard to keep secret his philanthropic giving as he did his gambling embarrassments.

Critics of the wealthy point out that, to someone of Packer’s financial means, donating $10 million is equivalent to an average person donating $1000. Mathematically, that’s true. And it’s always enlightening to ask them: ‘So, when did you last donate $1000 to charity?’

Packer’s philanthropy seemed almost non-denominational. Quite aside from donating to medical institutions, he was known to—on a whim—fly a group of children to Disneyland, buy cars for unsuccessful quiz-show competitors, fund the preservation of a species and personally leap to the rescue of fallen friends.

During the Sydney debut of World Series Cricket, player David Hookes had his jaw smashed by a fast-rising ball. Packer instinctively took the situation into his own hands and raced the wounded sportsman in his Jaguar to St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.

Gerald Stone, writing in Compulsive Viewing, reflected on the actions of a man he would later come to know well. ‘[T]here was something in Kerry that reacted