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

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