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

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.

‘He said, “It’s really important to know how things work, son, ’coz otherwise