The surprising decade-long friendship between the pot-stirring 'leftie' columnist and 'Australia's richest man', billionaire Kerry Packer.
From the moment Kerry Packer - after one of his famous eruptions - pointed at Phillip Adams and snarled: 'Come and have some dinner' and took him off to a nondescript Chinese restaurant in Kings Cross, a strange, close friendship that lasted over a decade began. What intrigued Phillip Adams during that first, very long conversation, was that Packer quietly admitted that he didn't know how to talk to people. 'Much of what Kerry had to say was so wistful and apologetic that I soon suspected the great hulk sitting opposite had been an abused child. The way he veered from rage to vulnerability seemed typical.' This forged a strong connection with Adams; the comparison of their childhoods, different in many ways as they had been, also had some eerie similarities.
While Packer's death had prompted fawning knee-jerk reactions and quick hagiographies, Adams felt that the no one was drawing a more complete picture: what about the life of wasted opportunities? Adams hopes to add a few pieces to the Packer jigsaw, by providing Pepys-like glimpses of someone he liked as a bloke but deplored him as a citizen. He writes: 'It's surely important to understand the reason the richest and most powerful people have their weaknesses and uncertainties. Kerry Packer was an abused child and, consequently, consumed with self-hatred. He had many a harsh critic but none harsher than himself.'
