Phillip Adams Read online

  Phillip Adams

  The Ideas Man: A Life Revealed

  Philip Luker

  Published by JoJo Publishing

  First published 2011

  'Yarra's Edge'

  2203/80 Lorimer Street

  Docklands VIC 3008

  Australia

  Email: [email protected]" or visit www.classic-jojo.com

  © Philip Luker

  Author’s email address: [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this printed or video publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  JoJo Publishing

  Editor: Ormé Harris

  Designer / typesetter: Chameleon Print Design

  Cover image: The front page photo of Adams was taken by Bob Finlayson of News Ltd at the Abbey Restaurant, Glebe, Sydney, in November 1999.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Luker, Philip.

  Title: Phillip Adams : the ideas man : a life revealed / Philip Luker.

  ISBN: 9780994256454 (eBook)

  Subjects: Adams, Phillip, 1939-

  Authors, Australian--Biography.

  Journalists--Australia--Biography.

  Motion picture producers and directors--Australia--Biography.

  Dewey Number: 070.92

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  eBook Conversion by Winking Billy

  “He’s been around the media for decades, he looks more like a priest than a radio jock, he talks proper, he has an amazingly retentive memory, he’s accessibly cerebral, he wears his biases on his skivvy, he polarises opinion and opinion-makers, he applies historical perspective to his views and discussions, he attracts by far the most significant interview subjects from around the globe to his program, he probes and banters with them as an equal, he gets himself properly briefed on the detail, he gives his subjects time and space to be discursive and therefore, often, illuminating, he breaks all the rules of talk radio, he is an Australian institution and an international-calibre broadcaster who would distinguish the airwaves of any radio station anywhere. He is Phillip Adams.”

  — Eric Beecher in The Reader in December 2003

  About the Author

  Philip Luker did an Arts course at Sydney University and then became a newspaperman on the Sydney Daily Mirror, The Sun, the Daily Telegraph, The Australian Financial Review and the London Daily Mail.

  He backpacked (before the word was invented) through 48 countries and was the first Australian journalist to get into Communist China, in January 1956. The articles and photos he sold, including a cover story in Time and a front-page series in all US Hearst newspapers, paid for the rest of his world trip, during which he travelled right through North, Central and South America and Africa. At Los Angeles Airport he met Marilyn Monroe on her way to marry Arthur Miller — she held on to his hand while he thought of as many questions as he could.

  Back in Australia and wanting to run his own business, he successively launched, published and edited four management newsletters, Foodweek, Inside Retailing, Greenweek and Mediaweek, all of which concentrated on controversy and personalities and all of which are still being published by others. He wrote and published the books How to Handle the Green Revolution and Inside the Food Industry.

  He returned to Africa to interview Australian doctors and nurses working for Medecins Sans Frontieres and, back in Australia, continued to interview MSF volunteers returning home and had a hundred stories published about them.

  Luker lives in Sydney with his wife, Margaret. One day he wrote to Phillip Adams to ask whether he would co-operate over a biography. This book is the result.

  Acknowledgements

  Phillip Adams always received me at his Sydney office with courtesy, a cup of tea and a willingness to talk about his professional life, anecdotes, experiences and beliefs. He seemed to believe I had agreed not to delve into his private life. He never asked me to agree and I did not do so, either verbally or in writing. Adams said in his original letter to me, “I would not be happy with a heavy emphasis on my private life.” This book does not heavily emphasise his private life.

  Did he believe that, after working as a journalist for fifty years, I would not try to find out about his private life, just because he didn’t want me to? Any worthwhile journalist who is refused information from one source tries to find it from another. My first duty in writing this book is to its readers, to tell them as full and honest a story as I can about Adams the man as well as Adams the journalist and public intellectual. Presumably, Adams’ first duty is also to his readers and listeners. Ironically, most information about his private life came from his own mouth in a National Library oral history he gave me written access to.

  Irina Dunn worked hard at finding me a good publisher and found one in Barry Dorr and his partner Jo. Their company, JoJo Publishing, worked swiftly and expertly to arrange the publishing and marketing of the book after it had been skillfully edited and managed by Ormé Harris, designed by Chameleon Print Design, and proofread by Merryl Scott.

  The nineteen prominent people whose phone numbers Adams gave me as friends who might give me information and insight into him all agreed to do so, and I met all except two of them personally: Hugh Mackay, Peter Best, Peter Faiman, Matt Noffs, Brian Monahan, Lyle Dayman, Bruce Petty, Fred Chaney, Alan Snyder, Ranald McDonald, Carmen Lawrence, Philip Nitschke, Jim Soorley, Dick Smith, Bob Brown, Mark Aarons, John Cain, Barry Jones and Bob Ellis. Chris Bullock, the former executive producer of Late Night Live, told me how it operates and I watched it go to air twice. My conversations with these twenty people were always enjoyable and often very funny. All twenty were obviously fond of Adams but also mentioned his human frailties. I owe them my sincere thanks.

  I contacted Paul Keating, Mike Rann, Anna Bligh and Bob Carr without help from Adams but they also were willing to talk about him. Only one of all these people, Bob Carr, asked me to tell him what I would quote from him. Only one person, John Howard, swiftly declined to meet me about Adams and there is no need to wonder why. Bruce Shapiro, Late Night Live’s US correspondent, told me how he has enjoyed talking with Adams every week for twelve years. The willingness of all these associates to talk about him shows the warmth of his people relationships.

  Adams told me he would leave it to me to contact some of the ‘hostiles’ as he calls them, and I did so: Bob Hawke, Alan Jones, Gerard Henderson, Philip Ruddock, John Brennan, Miranda Devine and Piers Akerman.

  The National Library’s Manuscripts Department gave me access, with Adams’ permission, to the 500 boxes of letters and emails listeners and readers have sent him over almost forty years, and the library’s Oral History Collection gave me access, again with Adams’ permission, to its verbatim record of the two-day conversation Margaret Chalker had with him. The Weekend Australian Magazine gave me permission to reproduce extracts from his columns and Penguin Books gave me permission to quote from books of his columns where it holds the copyright. Bob Ellis, James Woodford, Alan Ramsey and Ashley Hay gave me permission to quote from Late Night Live sessions where Adams interviewed them.

  The book could not have been written without continued support from my wife Margaret and daughter Trish Luker. Thank you all. I enjoyed my contact with you and enjoyed the research and writing.

  — Philip Luker

  To Margaret

  ‘Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,

  When you see her call you across a cro
wded room,

  Then fly to her side and make her your own,

  Or all of your life you may dream all alone.’

  — from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific

  Contents

  A Crowded Life

  Childhood Notions of Death

  Supping with the Devil

  Having Fun Making Films

  The Phillip Adams Enigma

  The Good Guy and the Flip Side

  The Angry Old Left-winger

  Keating Pre-cooks Adams

  Eight Prime Ministers Adams Has Known

  Hilarious Tales of Politicians and Others

  The Ideas Adams Gave Two Premiers

  Phillip Adams’ Seven Women

  An Edgy Friendship with Packer

  Bob Ellis on the Intellectual Santa Claus

  Late Night Intercourse

  Letters to Adams—Bashings and Body Odours

  Adams and Other Media Grumpies

  Outspoken Views—He Stirs the Possum

  Best Columns—Songs of Satire and Dogs

  Ten Bonzer LNL Episodes

  Adams’ Artifacts — His Ghostly Friends

  What Drives Phillip Adams

  Appendix—Awards and Appointments

  Index

  Chapter One:

  A Crowded Life

  Phillip Adams is a public figure who has generated his fair share of controversy and many people dislike him and his views. His office is tucked away in a pink building in a back street of Paddington in the Sydney eastern suburbs. It is lined with pictures and books and filled with antiquities — the largest private collection of antiquities in Australia. In contrast to the exterior of the building, this is undeniably a man’s office, huge, untidy, dusty and gloomy, with no sign of a woman’s touch. The carpet is rumpled. At the back of the office are a toilet and a very small, dark kitchen with no sign of food.

  Apart from a brief chat by phone the previous day, when he warned me that ‘several people have wanted me to co-operate with them over a biography and I have always declined’, this was our first conversation. I can’t help but wonder why he invited me to visit if he didn’t really want me to write about his life. Perhaps he was ambivalent about the idea but, whatever his motives, he greeted me with a handshake and a soft smile at the front door and invited me to come inside and sit down. He sat behind his huge desk and listened politely as I introduced myself, outlined my journalistic experience and described my plans for the biography.

  ‘Now,’ he said, once I had finished, ‘I’ve been asked to do this many times before and I’ve always said no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have a busy life,’ he replied, ‘and I believe my columns and my program reach a far wider audience than a book could.’

  I began to explain my reasons for wanting to write a book about his life and why I thought it needed to be written. He put up some arguments against it. He said, for example, that his first wife, Rosemary, insisted in their divorce contract that he must never discuss her or their marriage with anyone. He suspected that their daughters would side with their mother and refuse to meet me. And he did not want to talk about his personal life. In my fifty years as a journalist, many, many people have said they would not tell me anything but I have ended up finding out quite a lot about them. For almost an hour we conversed, and then, suddenly, he said, ‘All right, I’ll do it.’

  I stopped talking, nonplussed. This was not what I expected to hear after his considerable attempts to dissuade me. But before I had a chance to say anything else, he began talking about his childhood while I frantically took notes — his change of heart was entirely unexpected, and I had not brought my tape recorder.

  ***

  Like most Australians, my first impressions of Phillip Adams were drawn from his ABC Radio National program Late Night Live and his Weekend Australian Magazine column. But Adams’ on-air manner of cultivated intimacy only hints at the man behind the public persona.

  I was attracted to his laidback style, which seemed at odds with his otherwise intense personality. He makes each listener feel he is talking solely to them, while his interview guests are made to feel that they are the most important people in the world. His language is in a colloquial but well-bred Aussie style and he has such a brilliant mind and computer memory that he can grasp whatever subject his guests raise.

  I always liked the way he could mask a robust ego behind a humble front and display his huge knowledge with an earthy Australian lingo. I also appreciated the fact that most of the people he interviews on LNL are more interesting than the subjects of other print and radio interviews. Not only that, but Adams lets them finish their sentences rather than talking over the top of them — and that’s rare.

  Few Australian journalists have been as prolific as Adams. He has written about three million words in books, newspapers and magazines; and he’s spoken many more words than that as host of Late Night Live, four nights a week for twenty years. But these words don’t describe his personal regrets or indicate his weaknesses. They hint at his joys but don’t provide the details. It’s the details that I’m interested in as his biographer.

  In spite of this background, he has never published an autobiography. More surprising, for a man whose hallmark is the conversational interview, is his reluctance to speak with prospective biographers. But this attitude makes me all the more determined to get to know the man who, despite leaving school at fifteen, is so comfortable conversing with academics, authors and other experts on subjects ranging from wombats to nuclear science.

  He has known eight Australian prime ministers and most of the state premiers since the 1960s; he has grasped ideas (his specialty) from the arts, culture, commerce, agriculture, the law, media and science and stored what he has learnt in a magnificent brain which, even now he is past seventy, works almost 24 hours a day.

  Along the way, Phillip Adams has crossed paths and occasionally come to blows with some of Australia’s most prominent people: politicians, ad-men, film directors, business leaders, broadcasters and media tycoons. The list reads like a who’s who of Australia — and includes former prime ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, current and past state premiers Mike Rann, Anna Bligh, Carmen Lawrence, John Cain and Bob Carr; psychologist Hugh Mackay; cartoonist Bruce Petty; ex-Age publisher Ranald McDonald; film and television director Peter Faiman; actor Barry Humphries; composer Peter Best; media tycoons Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch; former federal ministers Barry Jones and Fred Chaney; writers and commentators Bob Ellis, Mark Aarons and Gerard Henderson; entrepreneur Dick Smith; Professor Robert Manne; and Adams’ former advertising agency partners Brian Monahan and Lyle Dayman — an extraordinarily diverse list, reflecting the life of this unique Australian.

  This book is a record of my conversations with these people and with many of Phillip Adams’ friends and critics, who share their memories and reflections on his life and career and offer candid observations and criticism. The critics include Bob Hawke, Philip Ruddock and Alan Jones. I also draw on interviews with Adams in which he characteristically stirs the possum over how to elect an Australian president, why voters have become more conservative, how companies indulge in paedophilia and where Melbourne is different from Sydney. My interviews with him also provide rare glimpses into his personal life and his thoughts on his own career.

  I condense extracts from a selection of Late Night Live interviews that showcase his skills as an interviewer, from Hazel Hawke talking about her life before and after Bob to Miriam Margolyes telling how the cruel adulterer Charles Dickens saved fallen women. I also examine the responses of ordinary Australians to Adams’ columns and radio programs in some of the tens of thousands of letters he has received and which are now stored at the National Library in Canberra.

  Which takes me back to where I first began to know of Phillip Adams — Late Night Live, where his ability to turn a sophisticated and intricately researched interview into a casual, friendly conversation showcase
s the qualities that have remained constant throughout his busy life and eclectic career. It seems appropriate to reflect on his life through the words of those who know him best as well as making many observations of my own.

  Here then is Phillip Adams, a man of conversations and ideas.

  Chapter Two:

  Childhood Notions of Death

  I used to have this strange feeling of falling upwards through the galvo roof. There were searchlights in the sky, like fire, because it was wartime. I was lying on a brass bed in a little sleepout at the flower farm my grandparents ran in Melbourne. I lay there, having the feeling of falling upwards, through the roof, through the pine trees, up and up through the clouds, into eternity. I was appalled by the idea of something that went on and on forever, equating it with the notion of death.’

  Even at the age of five, an awareness of mortality drove Phillip Adams. ‘It was the greatest fear of my life, and it was a result of isolation. So I yelled out, “Phillip Andrew Hedley Adams, 798 High Street, East Kew, Victoria, Australia, the British Empire, the Southern Hemisphere, the World.”’

  Sixty-six years later, Adams is still pedalling at the same frantic pace, with the spectre of his mortality pursuing him. ‘It gives me a sense of urgency to do all I possibly can in the miserable time span allotted after deducting the hours when I’m too young, or too old, or asleep, or on the dunny. The other factor is survival, coming out of my unpleasant childhood and the need to escape it. Off I go on another day. Life’s been a whole series of days.’