Phillip Adams (17 page)

***

Adams told me some anecdotes from other personalities he has known: He said, ‘I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with Peter Faiman, the
Crocodile Dundee
director, when Peter gave me a joint. I kept laughing for a week and started to like it. We went to a horror movie and I wandered out of the cinema and couldn't find my way back to
The Bride of Frankenstein
.'

It showed Adams that narcotics are not for him and he thinks Faiman wanted to teach him that. Faiman had given up marijuana and he warned Adams, whose only previous experience of it was when Richard Neville (the
Oz
founder and current futurist) gave him a joint and nothing happened.

Earlier, when Adams was a partner in the ad agency Monahan Dayman Adams in Melbourne, he would go into the Channel Nine studios and watch Peter Faiman as a television director juggle the world, with up to nine cameras recording a program — Faiman directed many Channel Nine shows, often interspersed with commercials Adams had planned. He has always found that other people's skills are mysterious to watch and was astonished by how Faiman organised the programs, made the cameras dance and at the same time was a choreographer and a psychologist to the temperamental performers.

Adams said Faiman was ‘appallingly' treated by Paul Hogan and John Cornell over their
Crocodile Dundee
film, which Faiman directed. ‘He could have made it a much better film, but they wouldn't let him cut it the way he wanted to.'

Peter Faiman also directed The Nine Network's four-hour
Australia Live
, which from 70 locations around Australia and overseas recorded a day in the life of Australians on January 1, 1988. The first of a multitude of celebrities on camera was Adams, at Uluru. Before the program, Faiman asked Adams to write speeches for about 20 world leaders who would take part, including US President Ronald Reagan. He wrote the speeches in a day for what he believes is still the world's biggest telecast.

***

Neither Adams nor Peter Faiman want to be anyone except themselves, but Bob Ellis, the eccentric, audacious, outrageous, quirky but skilled and funny left-wing writer, always wanted to be other people, according to Adams. For a long time, Ellis wanted to be David Williamson, then he wanted to be Adams, but finally he discovered that being Bob Ellis was great.

‘He had an extraordinary gift with women but also quite spectacular halitosis,' Adams said. ‘Bob took part in one of the annual Australian Film Institute Awards, in Perth. Another person on the program was an American actress called Brenda Vaccaro, who was outraged by the newly-launched vaginal deodorants. I introduced her as the President of the Society for the Promotion of Natural Body Odours and Bob as Australia's playwright with the most halitosis and left them to it. I don't know what the outcome was.

‘Another of my memories of Bob Ellis was when I was chairman of the Australian Film Commission and Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. It was a delicate time in negotiations for film funds and Bob hated Fraser but was obviously going to win an award that night. At the hotel before the awards, I told Bob he had to behave himself, gracefully accept his award and not bucket Fraser, in spite of wanting to do so. He promised me he would behave.

‘I sat in the audience with Brit Eckland. The awards were made of plastic and were so weak that they disintegrated on the stage. Every time someone was presented with an award, a bit would fall off and the stage was littered with pieces of broken AFI awards. Ellis arrived on stage drunk. Fraser presented him with his award, which started to fall apart in his hands. He forgot his promise to behave, bucketed Fraser and vomited — on national television.

***

Long before US President Jack Kennedy's sexual shenanigans became public knowledge, the late British author Malcolm Muggeridge told Adams about them, which upset Adams because he held Kennedy in high regard. Muggeridge said Kennedy was second in sexual low-jinks only to Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader who used his office largely for sexual purposes but in Milan in April 1945 was hung upside down by Italian partisans — not yet a fate of any Australian politician. No-one published newspaper stories about sexual affairs by Kennedy or Mussolini in those days and it was the same when Junie Morosi had an affair with Jim Cairns, the Australian deputy prime minister.

***

Bill Kelty (Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1983 to 2000) is ‘The Killer Koala,' according to Adams, because he looks like one. ‘He is as tough as old boots but one of the smartest strategists and he should be working for Barack Obama. He and Paul Keating were a great double act.

‘Bill and I believe the Australian political system has deep troubles. Not only does the public despise it; the politicians do also. They are bored, irritated and frustrated, particularly by being whipped into line to vote on bills, often against their consciences. The only time politics really comes to life is in conscience votes.

‘Bill and I came up with the idea that a party should campaign and seek a mandate on only a handful of issues such as foreign affairs, health and education, and let MPs vote as they and their electors want on all other issues. It would revitalise all parliaments and make politics more interesting to politicians and the public. I played with this idea in a series of
Australian
columns but Bill and I couldn't get Paul Keating to take it seriously. No prime minister or premier likes the idea of losing control. This great and glorious idea has never been taken up by any party.'

***

Dr Philip Nitschke is another person who has campaigned long and hard for a basic change in society, and failed. He is the founder and director of the pro-euthanasia group Exit International and he was the first doctor in the world to administer a legal, voluntary, lethal injection (in Darwin, before the Federal Government overruled the law). His successive campaigns have failed to change Australian laws, but Phillip Adams says, ‘He's a hoot! He could help people to die laughing — that's not a bad idea! He should introduce the idea of laughing yourself to death. He is one of those odd people — those with passion and talent. They don't fit in, so they stand out.'

***

Another person who stood out, but for different reasons, was the late, unlamented Sydney entrepreneur and banned stockbroker Rene Rivkin. Phillip remembers him struggling free of a $400,000 Bentley ‘like a maharajah demounting from an elephant's howdah', settling into his favourite possie at the Dee Bee Restaurant in Double Bay, Sydney, fingering his gold worry beads and reciting his variation of the Rosary, in spite of his parents being Russian Jews. On that day in ‘Double Pay' (as it is called), he was happy and expansive, until Adams told him the colour of his Bentley (imperial purple) was ‘crook.'

Over the years, Rene Rivkin's fortunes rose and fell like his moods. Adams told me, ‘A few months later, I shared a plane with Rene's wife Gayle to Hayman Island, where Rene and I were to speak at a convention. Rene asked me at the hotel, “What are they saying about me?” I told him of rumours about arson, a $50million insurance payout, and murder.' (Rene was implicated in the Offset Alpine printing-plant fire. His former chauffeur, Gordon Wood, was in November 2008 jailed for murdering Wood's former girlfriend, Caroline Byrne.)

‘At the convention, Gayle Rivkin told me, “He's living on Prozac.” Rene said, “It's all that keeps me going.” Gayle said, “But it's changing his personality.” I said, “That can only be an improvement.”'

It was not Rene's only problem. He was sentenced to nine months' weekend detention for insider trading; he had surgery for a tumour; he collapsed in jail; he was banned for life from stockbroking; Gayle and he divorced; he went broke and sold all his paintings and properties; then he killed himself, aged 61, in 2005.

***

More of Adams' anecdotes: He doesn't have a suit, but once he had a sports jacket, which he bought to be presented with his first Order of Australia badge by the Governor General, Sir Ninian Stephen, in 1987. Then he lost the badge. He wrote to the GG at Government House in Canberra, asking whether he could make him another one. He pretended he thought Sir Ninian made the badges at the back of the garage. The GG's secretary wrote back to say he could have a new badge but it would cost him $9.90. Adams told me, ‘Some people work for nothing for charities all their lives and get one of these things and it's worth $9.90. That's hilarious!'

Also in the queue at Government House waiting to be presented with an award was Charles Spry, the chief of ASIO. Adams said to him, ‘Here's a turn up, you the head spook and me the naughty leftie, both getting a gong.' Adams asked Spry to show him his ASIO file and Spry strenuously denied there was one. But when the National Library asked Adams to give a speech, he agreed to do so if they produced his ASIO file, and they did. ‘What shattered me was that several people had reported me to ASIO. Their names had been blacked out but you could guess who they were. The file is still current.'

***

One wet day Adams was shivering in a New York City doorway when the actor Stuart Wagstaff slid past on the footpath. Stuart had a toffy West End image for the theatre, although his childhood had been harrowing and he was brought up on a little English farm and Adams had heard him say in a radio interview that a horrible childhood makes it almost impossible to be loved. Adams said to Wagstaff when they met in New York, ‘Stuart, how good to see you. Let's have a cup of coffee because I owe you an apology. I always thought of you as an effete, upper-class lad.' They had a cup of coffee and Phillip told Stuart that damaged-goods children's capacity to love takes a lot of time to work through.

***

Adams himself was ‘lying at death's door' (his words) in a Sydney hospital after ‘massive surgery' when, as he was coming out of the anaesthetic fog, he saw Jim Soorley, a former Catholic priest and from 1991 to 2003 the Labor Party Lord Mayor of Brisbane, sitting at the end of his bed. ‘I told him to bugger off because I thought he'd come to give me the last rites.'

Soorley did not bugger off but cheered Adams up. Like Carmen Lawrence, he is a lapsed Catholic — ‘they bring with them the great strength of Catholicism, its universality. It is the world's biggest multinational corporation.' Jim Soorley achieved a lot as Lord Mayor of Australia's biggest local government area, from improving the sewerage to starting the Brisbane Festival of Ideas. He is now a management consultant and until recently wrote a column in the Brisbane
Sunday Mail.

***

Another newspaper, another era, another city —
Nation Review
, the 1970s, Sydney and the most colourful character Phillip Adams has ever known, Gordon Barton. Gordon came from Java, got three degrees simultaneously at Sydney University (which then changed the rules), drank with The Push, admired the notorious philosophy professor, John Anderson, who used to recommend free love in the 1950s, built a fortune from the Ipec transport company he formed, expanded into merchant banking in Tjuringa Securities, started the Australia Party, which became the Australian Democrats, became a careless millionaire in the way he spent his money, conducted multiple affairs at the same time, and in 1970 launched
Nation Review
, which was how Phillip knew him.

Adams, together with a string of other left-wing
Nation Review
contributors, poked fun at the establishment with verve and style, which were words that fitted Gordon Barton, the Australian version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby character.

By 1981,
Nation Review
was costing Gordon too much money and he asked Adams to meet him in his city apartment. Adams told me the story, ‘As Gordon's butler filled the open fire with mallee roots that Gordon had freighted from Victoria, he offered me
Nation Review
for not much money at all. I was about to shake on it when he showed me a file of unsettled libel actions and I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”'

Barton closed
Nation Review
, got bored with Australia, set up Ipec in Europe and moved into a medieval castle in Holland, where according to Valerie Lawson in
The Sydney Morning
Herald,
he once met a group of bankers dressed in a suit of armour. Within ten years, he had to sell his European Ipec to pay for losses on his Australian companies. It was the start of a sad decline — sad for such a rip-roaring entrepreneur. He became increasingly deaf and started to lose his memory and his reasoning and he died in Spain in April 2005, aged 76.

Chapter Eleven:
The Ideas Adams Gave Two Premiers

From one idea, others flow: Greg Mackie owned the Adelaide bookshop Imprints and took part in Adelaide Writers' Week … He listened regularly to Phillip Adams'
Late Night Live
on Radio National and realised it was a festival of ideas … So he asked Adams to help launch the SA Festival of Ideas in 1999 on alternate years to Writers' Week. Adams has played a large role in developing the ideas festival and chairing many sessions ever since. Often the speakers have already had conversations with Adams on
Late Night Live
. Mike Rann, the South Australian Premier, told me by phone from Adelaide, ‘The festival is a wonderful event that attracts thousands of people to sessions ranging from astronomy to feminism and modern Islam to sex.' The 2009 festival theme was ‘Pushing the Limits'. The man who originally came up with the idea, Greg Mackie, is now Deputy CEO of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in SA.