Phillip Adams (2 page)

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 showcases 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.'

***

Phillip Adams was born on July 12, 1939, just as the curtains were going up on World War II. He entered the world in Maryborough in central Victoria, where his father Charles was the Congregational minister. Charles and his wife Sylvia lived in a drab little weatherboard manse with a tennis court of buckled asphalt, beside a dull-looking brick church. It was hardly inspiring to young Phillip, let alone to his mother. Nor even to his father — it seemed all members of the Adams family were unhappy with their lives.

Glancing around Adams' Sydney office, I realise how far he's come from the little boy whose miserable childhood of neglect, hardship and abuse by a hated stepfather seems drawn from the pages of
David Copperfield
. I asked him what he remembered of his early life.

‘My earliest memory, aged two, was looking up at the sky, which I thought was on fire, flames everywhere.' Adams' eyes wandered off as though he was playing back the scene in his head.

‘I could see the flames through the peppercorn trees,' he continued, ‘and I remember waddling in fear towards the manse and pulling open a battered flywire door to find my father, who told me not to worry because it was only lightning. My father was a petite, shiny little Englishman who not only polished his shoes frantically but even polished the soles. He had come to Australia aged fifteen after being rejected by his mother, who had worked in vaudeville with Charlie Chaplin as a juggler and seal-trainer.' Having lived such a colourful life, no wonder his grandmother was disappointed with her boring, somewhat obsessive son.

‘What about your mother?' I asked.

‘She was extraordinarily pretty. She told me later it upset other women in the church. She was depressed about living off my father's very low wage. I don't doubt she would have pushed and shoved him into enlisting in World War II as an army chaplain.'

Once his father was off to war, his mother ‘immediately got a job in the rationing service, which gave her liberation, a chance to meet other men, and a wage. She left me, aged three, with my maternal grandparents, Bill and Maude Smith, who raised me on their little flower farm in East Kew in Melbourne for most of the next ten years.

‘My mother was to me like a fairy in a Disney cartoon. She used to arrive at the farm and take me on bike rides. My father was a strange, distant man, who used to post me coconuts from the war, with my name and address on them — a common thing for fathers serving in the Pacific Islands to do for their children back home. The coconuts were my strongest memory of my father. At times also, Father would come home and be enormously emotional with me, which puzzled me because he was almost a total stranger, as was my mother.

‘I rarely saw either parent and, when I did, it wasn't really successful. I remember my father, in uniform, arriving at the farm, taking me by the hand and walking me up High Street, East Kew, for my first day at East Kew Primary School. I remember crying all the way and not wanting to be left there. I didn't understand what my parents were up to or where they were. What I did understand was that I was living with my grandparents on a little flower farm at East Kew.'

***

Bill Smith and his identical twin brother Fred grew flowers commercially on four acres of land that, these days, is covered with faded brick-veneer houses in suburban Melbourne. All that remains of the farm where the brothers grew violets, chrysanthemums and poppies for the Queen Victoria Market is a street name, Violet Grove. The farm had a draught horse, an old plough and an outside toilet. Adams' grandparents were incredibly poor. Aged four or five, Phillip didn't realise he was poor until he went to school in handmade clothes and felt humiliated next to his better-dressed schoolmates. Living in a little sleepout at the farm, he lay in his old brass bed wondering whether there was a god and what colour dead would be. He agonised over these questions night after night.

It would not have been surprising for young Phillip to grasp at a comforting fable or to believe in God to give him peace, but he found he couldn't believe what he was told in religion classes at school. He thought it was nonsense.

‘The important thing about this,' he told me, ‘was that I had never heard the words “eternity” or “infinity”. I had never read a book and I had no-one to talk to about it. People later assumed it was a reaction against my father's Christianity. It was nothing to do with that. I hardly ever saw him.'

Adams is well known as an atheist but said he didn't reject God at this early time of his life. ‘He was never in contention,' he explained. ‘My objection was that, whenever religious teachers at school told me there had to be a God because there had to be a beginning of everything, and God created everything, I would ask, “And who created God?” I once asked my grandmother and she boxed me on the ear, the only time she ever hit me. I realised I was on to something. It was the most important moment of my life, from which everything else followed.'