Kerry Packer
Inside the mind of Kerry Packer, a man who shook off a lonely childhood to become one of Australia's most powerful figures.
A sick, lonely child who grew up to command a hugely influential media empire, Australian tycoon Kerry Packer led a death-defying life that still fascinates.
Many are reluctant to talk publicly about him – some through loyalty, others through fear of what remains a powerful family. Nevertheless he continues to cast a long shadow.
Those who are willing to go on the record recall an impressive, larger-than-life character. 'He was a very big man,' recalls his former lawyer - now Federal Communications Minister - Malcolm Turnbull.
'And there was always a slight undertone of menace - sometimes genial, sometimes a sort of mocking menace - but there was a something unsettling about his presence.'
Packer's temper was legendary but those who knew him talk of a complicated, contradictory character.
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'There is a tendency to see Kerry as a mono-dimensional raging tyrant, the great Citizen Kane type of press baron, always pounding the desk and hurling abuse at minions,' Turnbull says.
Kerry Packer was born on December 17, 1937 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia as Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer. He was a producer, known for Channel Nine Cricket (1979), WCW Thunder (1998) and The Frost Programme (1977). View the profiles of people named Kerry Packer. Join Facebook to connect with Kerry Packer and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to.
'It was a much more complex picture than that.'
A difficult childhood
It was Kerry’s grandfather, Robert Clyde Packer, who started the media empire. A journalist from Tasmania, he made his way to Sydney and worked on several papers.
Robert's son, Frank, worked for him and later established the Australian Women's Weekly, which was the foundation of the family fortune.
By his own admission, Kerry had a lonely, disrupted childhood. His parents were involved in the war effort and at the age of five Kerry was sent to board at Cranbrook, down the road from the family mansion. Not long after, following the midget submarine attacks on Sydney Harbour during World War II, he was sent to live with an aunt at Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands. While there he contracted polio and pneumatic fever, spending nine months in hospital before moving to Canberra for two years to recuperate.
Broadcaster Phillip Adams, a Packer confidante in the 1970s and '80s, recalls: 'He never talked much about his mother except to point out that neither mum nor dad had much time to visit him when he was suffering from polio.
'Incidentally that polio became a part of Kerry's insecurity. It left one side of his face palsied. Kerry thought everyone could see that half his face was locked and he began to think of himself as the Elephant Man. He used to talk to me about his ugliness and whenever there was a cartoon in the paper he’d study it, convinced that they were drawing the face.'
In a revealing interview in 1978, Packer recalled that by the time he returned to school in Sydney he was so far behind the other children he became 'a bit of a laughing stock'. He admitted this contributed to 'the hardening of the shell'. Packer’s dyslexia, which was an issue throughout his life, likely contributed to his difficulties at school.
The sins of the father
By all accounts Sir Frank was a harsh, unloving father. A heavy drinker with a ferocious temper, he was an oppressive presence in Kerry’s life. In interviews after his father’s death, Kerry laughed off the beatings and humiliations, repeating the mantra that his father was a great man, strict but fair. But those who knew him tell a different story.
'If the father belittles the son and undermines the son that is incredibly damaging and I think Kerry suffered from that,' says Malcolm Turnbull.
'The myths and allegations that swirl around Sir Frank Packer understate the reality,' says Phillip Adams.
'He was a monster and Kerry knew he’d been treated appallingly. We're not talking physical brutality, we're talking psychological torture, which Kerry responded to with a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome. He always spoke of his father as being tough but fair, when clearly the old monster wasn't.'
Early in their unlikely friendship, Packer invited Adams to have dinner with him.
'We went to a very ordinary Chinese restaurant at [Kings] Cross where we talked until three in the morning,' Adams recalls.
'We ranged over a huge pile of topics and then he got round to black holes. What's a black hole? Having just read Stephen Hawkins on the latest I gave a reasonable description of what we thought they were and he stopped me.
'He said, 'That’s what I've got inside me, a great black hole'.' And in that minute I realised I was sitting with someone who was as badly damaged a human being as any I've ever met.
'And I grew very fond of him because I saw how devastated he'd been by his monster father and his equally reprehensible mother.'
In a sense Kerry was an accidental mogul. His older brother Clyde was supposed to inherit the company but he was unable to deal with Sir Frank's incessant bullying and interference. In 1972, he quit the company and turned his back on the family.
'The monkey on Kerry's back was the fact that his father didn't value him as much as his brother Clyde,' says publisher Richard Walsh, who worked for Packer for 20 years.
Kerry was regarded as the idiot son, dubbed 'boofhead' by his father. When Clyde quit the company, Kerry felt unworthy of a role he had never expected and was desperate to prove himself.
His first opportunity came in 1972 when he and Ita Buttrose launched Cleo magazine. Sir Frank never believed in the project so its instant success provided an enormous confidence boost to Kerry, who inherited the company 18 months later when his father died.
'He was determined to end his life richer than his father,' Walsh says.
The success of Cleo wasn't enough to guarantee he had left his father's accomplishments in the rear-view mirror; Kerry needed more. If Cleo gave him confidence, World Series Cricket established him internationally as a force to be reckoned with.
Packer's alternative cricket competition only lasted two years in the late '70s but its legacy is astonishing. It made cricket a truly professional sport and pioneered the kind of lively cricket broadcasting we take for granted today.
Most importantly, it guaranteed Packer exclusive rights to broadcast cricket in this country. For this, ultimately, was what World Series Cricket was all about. He saw the commercial potential of cricket broadcasts and was willing to risk everything to wrest exclusive rights away from the ABC.
As Ian Chappell says: 'He wanted the rights to cover cricket in Australia. Cost him a lot of money but eventually he got 'em.'
But despite his many accomplishments, a sense of unworthiness haunted Kerry Packer throughout his life.
'It's odd for a man of such success and power, but I think he was struggling with a lack of self esteem and it took him a long time to overcome that,' says Malcolm Turnbull.
He needed constant reassurance, was unable to trust people and found it difficult to make friends. By most accounts he was not a happy man.
He was easily bored, prone to outrageous tantrums. He sought distraction in gambling, risk-taking behaviour and indulging his various appetites and addictions.
His infidelities were legendary, as were his addictions to cigarettes and junk food.
So the fact that he didn't touch alcohol was a significant and uncharacteristic act of self-control. He had been a heavy drinker but stopped abruptly in his late teens.
When asked about this by Don Lane in 1977, he explained that his father made a deal with him: if he didn't drink until his 21st birthday he'd give him a sports car. He says he got the car and by then had got used to not drinking. Variations on this story are retold by various friends and employees.
But why did his father, an enthusiastic drinker, make the bet in the first place? Phillip Adams may have the answer.
'He told me he'd been involved in a fatal car accident, that he had been drinking, and that he has never drunk since.'
The accident occurred in September 1956, when Kerry was 18. Kerry was driving back from the snow in a car belonging to Mrs Ash, a friend of the family's. He had been sleeping in the passenger seat but took over driving half an hour before the accident. Mrs Ash was asleep next to him, while her two young boys slept in the back.
At about 1am, on a straight stretch of road just before Goulburn, Packer was involved in a collision with an oncoming car containing three young Canberra boys. They all died instantly, while Packer and Mrs Ash were badly injured.
In evidence at the inquest into the boys' deaths, Packer said the car veered onto his side of the road, he tried to swerve but was unable to avoid the collision. He said it wasn't his fault and the coroner agreed, concluding 'I cannot attach any blame to Mr Packer.'
The police officer said there was no trace of alcohol on the boys; there was no mention of alcohol and Packer. In 1956 it was not standard procedure to test for alcohol in the blood.
So had Packer been drinking?
He testified at the inquest that they stopped at the Kosciuszko Hotel in the afternoon and at Cooma for dinner. He wasn't asked whether he'd had anything to drink. The accident occurred many hours later.
Adams insists his recollection is accurate. 'I didn't interrogate him about it but he told me he'd been involved in a fatal accident, that he'd been driving and that he'd been drinking. He also said that it was that moment, or that event, that made him decide to give up drinking and to the best of my knowledge he never drank again.'
It would explain the bet with his father, who flew to Goulburn after the accident to take control of the situation.
Even as a grown man, Kerry found it hard to emerge out of the shadow of his father's influence - sometimes putting himself in danger to avoid it.
In August 1975, civil war broke out in Timor and Channel Nine journalist Gerald Stone was given the chance to cover the situation by chartering a Japanese fishing trawler.
'I had to call up Kerry to ask permission to pay,' recalls Stone, 'And his answer really shocked me. He said, 'OK, but only if I go with you too.'
Stone was not thrilled about taking his boss into a war zone but had no choice if he wanted the money. It was not a comfortable journey. 'It was a little Japanese fishing trawler,' Stone says, 'And Kerry kept banging his head against the bulwarks because it was made for Japanese.'
To Stone's dismay Packer brought along a small arsenal of guns and would shoot cans of soft drink he’d thrown into the sea. 'I said, 'Look, put away the guns at least when we get there or we will be in big trouble. Journalists are supposed to be protected but you’re not protected if you’re carrying a gun.' He finally agreed to that. He didn't like it but he did agree to it.'
That wasn't the last Packer saw of guns on that trip. Stone recalls an exchange with Fretilin soldiers.
'A group of Fretilin soldiers came up and were very friendly and Kerry was there looking at their rifles and things like that, and they were happy to show him. They were happy to give their guns away, which showed them to be rather naive, but anyway...'
During the assignment, Packer, Stone and the crew were at Dili airport when shooting broke out.
Stone and the cameraman ran towards some large barrels to see where the shooting was coming from.
This so alarmed Packer that he called out to Stone, his increasingly panicked voice captured on tape.
'I had been part of [the Vietnam war] and I think I knew when to take chances and when not to, and we wanted to know where the firing was coming from because the Fretilin were supposedly in control ... and there it was on this tape, that you could hear Kerry yelling in the background,' says Stone.
(The cameraman, Brian Peters, was one of five Australians killed in Timor by Indonesian special force soldiers less than two months later.)
Packer had brought his inflatable Zodiac boat along and at one point he used it to ferry refugees to safety on a nearby island. Shortly after, he and the crew flew back to Darwin, allowing the trawler to be used to transport a large group of refugees to Australia.
Stone recalls that as soon as they landed in Darwin, Packer called the office to find out the latest readership figures for the Women's Weekly, which had just undergone a radical makeover from broadsheet to the size we know today.
Stone believes the reason Packer went to Timor was because he was so nervous about the figures and needed a distraction.
As it turned out, the redesign was a great success.
'I congratulated him because the ratings were so good, and he said 'Well son, who cares about that but you don't want to be the man who f***ed The Weekly.'
'And that’s basically what he was. He was so afraid that he would have messed up in his dead father's eyes, that he wanted to get away from it all.'
Packer goes to Timor
Kerry Packer accompanied reporter Gerald Stone to Timor’s 1975 civil war.
Another form of escape for Packer was his legendary love of gambling. He won and lost millions of dollars at racetracks and in casinos around the world.
'He was a completely addicted gambler,' recalls Graham Richardson, a former Labor senator who became Packer's adviser.
'He was hopeless. That was the thing that gave him the biggest single buzz. I think overall he probably wasn't a happy man and he needed escapes and I think going over to London and gambling was a great escape.'
Both Richardson and Phillip Adams suggest Packer's love of gambling went beyond simple enjoyment, hinting at a deeper psychological reason.
'While I'm not admiring of the sainted Sigmund Freud, I think he got it right on gambling and I passed this on to Kerry,' Adams says.
'I said, 'Sigmund Freud reckons the reason you gamble is because you want to lose'. I said, 'You want to be punished for being you.' Kerry’s response to that was a long, thoughtful and, I think, significant silence.'
Richardson recalls: 'There were reports in the paper that he'd lost $22 million in a weekend and it was a very big deal in Australia at the time.
'And he came back and said, 'How much trouble am I in with this, son?’ and I said, 'Oh a shitload, mate. Can't you go and lose two million? We can sell two million.'
'He said, 'You don’t understand gambling do you? The only thing that matters is it has to hurt if you lose, and I've got to lose a lot a f***in' money before it hurts.'
For most people, losing $22 million would be a low point. But for Packer, the darkest chapter was in 1984. Accusations that he was involved in tax avoidance, drug dealing and murder were published in Fairfax's National Times following leaks from the Costigan Royal Commission, which had questioned Packer earlier that year.
Although the paper used the code name Goanna, it was commonly known it referred to Packer and he outed himself a few days later in an aggressive and extensive rebuttal written by his lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull.
The episode took an enormous toll on Packer.
'A lot of people would have said that he was suicidal,' Turnbull recalls.
'I don’t think Kerry was ever likely to take his own life but I know he certainly thought about it. He was becoming increasingly concerned that he could never get out of this thicket of injustice into which he had been flung and that it could result in his company, his family, losing the television licence. So Kerry was thinking, 'Is my family better off without me?', 'Am I better off checking out?'.
It is generally agreed that Costigan over-reached and most of the accusations levelled at Packer were untrue.
'It was all ridiculous,' says Phillip Adams. 'Kerry had been in many ways a very naughty boy but he wasn't the Kerry Packer that Costigan saw.'
After Costigan handed down his findings no charges were ever laid. Packer was publicly exonerated some years later but he remained scarred by the incident and never fully escaped the taint of the affair. It hardened his dislike of the Fairfax papers and made him a more private, less trusting person.
Easily bored, Packer sought the rush of adrenaline wherever he could get it. Often this was at the gambling table but he also regularly placed himself at physical risk.
Phillip Adams remembers him as a terrifying person to be in a car with.
'He'd take me for these terrifying warp speed drives around Sydney, shouting joyously over the engine, like Mr Toad. I think by exposing himself to physical danger he found a useful distraction.'
I'll tell you how I'm feeling. Leave me alone and get out of my way.
Richard Walsh recalls Packer telling him he'd been involved in 10 'death-defying moments' in his life. Of these perhaps the most famous was the massive heart attack he suffered while playing polo in 1990. He was clinically dead for seven minutes and was only saved because a nearby ambulance was carrying the special equipment required to restart a heart.
Packer would later donate half the funds necessary to put such equipment in every ambulance in NSW – a not entirely unselfish act, one might argue, given his ongoing health problems.
Just days after his heart attack, Packer was back at the polo. When questioned by journalists about his health he lost his temper, resulting in one of the most memorable bits of footage of Packer. Enraged, he leapt from the moving car and rushed towards the camera, putting his hand over the lens and shouting: 'I'll tell you how I'm feeling. Leave me alone and get out of my way.'
The incident did much to create an aura of invincibility around the man, but to those in the Packer inner sanctum, Kerry was more often loving and generous than formidable.
He and Ros were 'incredibly relaxed, very chilled out,' says Jodhi Meares, speaking for the first time about the Packer family.
Meares, who was married to Kerry and Ros' son James from 1999 to 2002, says the Packer lifestyle was far removed from the one she was used to.
'James and I came from really opposing lives,' she says. 'In my world if you wore a suit you were going to court. So it was a very new kind of experience for me.'
Meares describes the Packer compound at Bellevue Hill in Sydney as enormous but welcoming. 'I felt like Alice in Wonderland after she'd eaten the cookie and shrunk,' she laughs. 'Everything was just huge and the ceilings were high. They were big men, they needed big furniture. I remember sitting in the couches feeling like I might get engulfed. My feet couldn't touch the ground, you know, I felt like a child.
'But it was a very warm environment – very casual, lots of laughter, dogs everywhere running around in and out and barking and Kerry telling them what to do. It was a real family home.'
As a daughter-in-law, Meares saw a different side of Packer than most and viewed his quirks with amused indulgence. 'Kerry's famous temper definitely did not let you down in any way, shape or form,' she laughs. 'But it was beautiful. I mean, that was the theatrics. For some reason, John Cleese comes into my mind.
'People that withhold information – that makes me nervous. I'd much prefer to be yelled at or to understand the person or to be communicated with. And that was Kerry – he was a wonderful communicator.'
Not that Meares is suggesting this was the whole picture. 'There's no question Kerry was a tough man – I mean Kerry was a pirate; he was a tough and very smart man – but I think people with a hard exterior are often the softest inside.'
Kerry Packer was, by all accounts, a good father to the young Gretel and James.
'I saw Kerry as a very tender father and obviously much more loving, more responsive than his own father was,' Gerald Stone says.
In a 1978 interview with Terry Lane, Kerry spoke with admiration of his wife and children:
'I have a wife who has brought my children up 'til this point in time I guess, and she's done a fantastic job. They're great kids. They really are great kids, I'm very proud of them and I'm proud of her, because she's the one who's done it.'
I think she saw herself as a marathon runner and everybody else as sprinters.
Kerry Packer Net Worth
Ros Packer devoted her life to raising James and Gretel, tending to the impressive gardens of the family estates and pursuing an ever-growing number of philanthropic causes.
'Ros Packer I've always admired greatly,' says former cricketer Ian Chappell. 'I'd class her as a very gentle person. Now maybe anybody’s going to be gentle when you compare them with Kerry, but that would be unfair because I think Ros is a very gentle person. She used to send fruit boxes into the dressing room during World Series Cricket. Maybe she was trying to wean us off the beer and get us onto some healthy food but I always thought it was a very nice gesture.'
Al Dunlap recalls Ros fondly from his time working for the Packers in the early 1990s. 'I liked Ros. She was in my view a highly intelligent woman. I think Ros could handle Kerry very well - 'cause it wasn't easy. She was a very capable woman.'
Phillip Adams recalls Ros Packer as 'stoic' and 'graceful', attributes that would have been useful in the face of Kerry’s well-documented womanising.
Richard Walsh believes Packer simply assumed Ros would adapt to his lifestyle.
'His father was also a womaniser and I think he just thought that's what rich blokes did,' says Walsh.
'It was a loving marriage in its own peculiar way. My sense of it was that she's a bright, intelligent woman and she would know which way the world was going.
'Ros once said there was only one Mrs Packer, and that was her. In a way that meant she occupied the palace and nobody else did. I think she saw herself as a marathon runner and everybody else as sprinters – that the real relationship of Kerry's life was with her.'
As James grew up, a sense of dynastic responsibility began to weigh heavily on father and son. Both would have been aware of the saying 'from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations', and Kerry had already defied the odds by increasing the family fortune. James, representing the fourth generation, was virtually in uncharted territory.
'Kerry didn't have the luxury to pretend to his children that their lives were going to be simple because they weren't,' says Meares. 'They were complicated and I think he felt a responsibility to help them understand that as much as he could.'
Phillip Adams recalls how this process unfolded.
'Jamie was the sweetest, softest, most shy little kid but then Kerry decided he had to toughen Jamie up and make him into James so he did a very Packer thing. He brought to Australia a notorious businessman called Al 'Chainsaw' Dunlap and Dunlap was given the job of turning Jamie into James. I watched this transformation with fascination as the quiet, soft, gentle boy was turned into an iron-clad Packer and I've always felt sorry for Jamie that he had to go through that process.'
Dunlap was hired in 1991, not long after Kerry’s near-fatal heart attack, so the issue of succession was a pertinent one. 'When I first met James, he was just a very nice young man and he was interested in polo and beautiful women but he wasn't tough like Kerry,' Dunlap recalls. 'But when he learned what had to be done, I felt that he toughened up and I felt that he was a very quick learner. He did not want to disappoint his father and I thought that was a great motivating factor in his life.'
Ian Chappell also recalls a young man desperate not to let the family down. He worked with James briefly on Wide World of Sports and recalls James once declining a drink. When he asked him why, James replied: 'I don’t want to be the one who stuffs it up.'
James Packer initially struggled with Dunlap's mentoring.
'I remember Jamie came in the office one day and he said, 'You know, Al, this just isn't worth it.' I said, 'What’s wrong Jamie?' He said, 'Well, you chewed me out all day this week, my dad chews me out when I get home, it isn't worth it.' And I said, 'Well, Jamie, your dad's the richest man in this country, you're going to inherit billions of dollars.' And he looked at me and said, 'You're right, what do you want me to do?' And I always thought that was kind of funny.'
The succession still didn't go smoothly. Over the next 15 years until his death, Kerry found it hard to hand over the reins of the company and often treated James badly.
'James, I think, was for Kerry a bit of dilemma,' says Graham Richardson.
'He gave him too many bollockings publicly, which I didn't think was all that flash, but he was trying to toughen him up, trying to make him hard enough to run the company.'
As Kerry’s health fluctuated during his later years, so too did his involvement in the businesses. This caused obvious friction with James, who was trying to establish control over the empire. The tension between them was most obvious when it came to Channel Nine.
'Kerry became emotional about the things he was involved in and in his later years he almost loved Channel Nine to death,' Gerald Stone recalls.
Kerry Packer Wealth
'James came along and said, 'Well who cares about whether it's number one as long as you're making the most money?'. James was just doing what he thought a businessman should be doing but Kerry loved that station so much he didn't want to part with it.'
James Packer has had his share of business failures but since his father's death he has increased the value of the company, steering away from investments in media and concentrating on the gaming industry.
'James has proved himself to be, I think, a much better businessman than his father,' Stone says.
'His father did a lot of things by emotion, by instinct. James certainly has his instincts but he's also shown himself ready to get out of a business when it's not working for him. He thinks much more with his head than Kerry did. Kerry always thought with his heart.'
Kerry Packer was a large, powerful man and an excellent sportsman but was plagued by ill health for much of his life. Even before the near-fatal heart attack in 1990, there were signs that all was not well. He was a heavy smoker and had his gallbladder and a kidney removed due to cancer in 1986.
'I didn't think he was ever going to make old bones,' says Richard Walsh.
'Clearly he had a weight problem; he had been asked by doctors many times to give up cigarettes and hadn't. I was aware that good health was not one of his notable advantages in life.'
'Health was a big issue for a long time,' says Graham Richardson. 'Not so much with the heart attack; it was really the kidney that Kerry was sick from. With the heart attack he recovered and he was normal. But the kidney complaint was worse because that limited him and I don’t think Kerry Packer had ever been accustomed to any limitation.'
One of Packer's senior executives Lynton Taylor recalls a steady decline as his illnesses mounted.
Kerry Packer World Series Cricket
'The worse he became the more tablets he had to take and they were equally debilitating. After his kidney transplant he was on so many tablets that his health was affected by the medication in order to balance his blood.'
Ian Chappell remembers seeing Packer at a cricket lunch not long before he died and being struck by how frail he looked. 'Kerry was a shell of the man that we knew,' Chappell says. 'He'd lost a lot of weight, he had hearing aids, he looked gaunt.'
As the pair chatted, Packer complained about his health. 'So I said, 'Kerry, despite all the money you've got, would you still say that health is the most important thing?' And he said, 'Son, far and away the most important thing.' And I got the feeling in that conversation that he'd pretty well had enough.'
Richardson visited Packer days before he died. 'I was probably one of the last people, if not the last person, outside the immediate family to talk to him and I was stunned by how weak he was. He was very thin. And he told me that it was that very day he'd lost his sense of taste. And he'd decided he wouldn't get any treatment. There'd be no dialysis. He'd just go.'
Packer died in his home on Boxing Day 2006, days after his 68th birthday, surrounded by family.
Gerald Stone recounts his final moments as they were described to him. 'My understanding was that he seemed to be going asleep with everybody around him, just sort of fading away. And then he suddenly perked up again and said, 'Am I still here? How f***ing long is this going to take?' That was Kerry Packer right to the end.'
Credits
Writer: Greg Hassall (Australian Story)
Editor: Cristen Tilley
Designer: Ben Spraggon
Developer: Simon Elvery
Illustrator: Lucy Fahey
Built with Shorthand
For more video on Kerry Packer's life, visit the Australian Story website.
© 2014 ABC
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