They are dragons you fight your whole life. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. I have won and lost. They are addictions, and they can strike anyone, rich or poor, middle class, working class or aristocrat. My addictions have included alcohol, cigarettes and food. At different points in my life they have all held a special place in my heart. At other points in my life, I have had to treat them like plutonium.
With cigarettes, it was cold turkey. One day I was smoking four packets a day, the next none. That was in my late twenties. With alcohol, that was also the only way I could walk away: that is, sprinting in the other direction. Food has been the addiction I have fought the longest. It’s been a lifelong battle.The will has been there to make my relationship with food a good and healthy one, but my successes with diets have been outstripped by my failures to resist.
You’ve got to eat, but you don’t have to drink. It’s fun, it’s social, it brings people together and, with wine, it’s a world of enquiry and discovery. But it’s discretionary. And, at the age of twenty-three, with all my friends and colleagues making a point of getting hammered many if not most nights, I used all the discretion I could find and gave it up.
A friend who used to work with me, Peter Hickox, spoke to Good Weekend magazine about my addictive personality, saying that after I gave up alcohol I turned to tobacco, going through four packs of cigarettes a day. He suggested a feature of my life was that I always had one weakness. Maybe there’s something in what Peter said—I may be susceptible to an addictive personality, which is why I never tried gambling.
Before I got married, I enjoyed all of the drinking action that went with living in a shared house with three other young men. Maybe I enjoyed it too much. When I first arrived from Stawell I didn’t drink at all. Then, quite quickly, I got caught up in it. Living with other men in a share house, it was easy for a culture of drinking to develop. Saturday night was usually drinking night. Everybody drank. And in advertising there would be drinking after work when you could afford it. Six o’clock closing meant you drank far too much in too short a time: the six o’clock swill, that terrible indictment on both drinking men and liquor licensing laws. Civilized drinking hours were still years away. In the meantime, we young advertising hotshots slugged it back as quickly as we could, before the clock chimed six. This was when I started to drink seriously, always beer, and lots of it. I was eighteen years old, and in trouble.
As I rose through the ranks at the advertising agency, I found the drinking increased. And I wasn’t handling it. I started to realize that the beer was affecting me more than it should. Others seemed to be able to handle having a few, but I felt myself not in control after three or four beers. It started to worry me.
As a young executive in an advertising agency, you would drink at lunch from time to time, and occasionally I would drink too much. But I didn’t drink to get drunk. I realized I was drinking only as much as all the people around me. The advertising agency was also near the law courts. The law courts had court reporters who would go to the local pub, and it seemed to be an everyday part of their life. There was Jack Darmody and Fred the Needle and all the journalists who were such colourful characters, and I fell in with the drinking lifestyle.
In the early 1960s, when I was first married, I’d go out, then come home very late, which I didn’t think was right or fair. Bevelly was very good—she stuck by me, but I don’t think she would have forever. She was a tough kind of person from a very strong working-class background and wouldn’t have been shocked by what she was seeing. But I thought my behaviour was highly inappropriate. I didn’t do what other drunks do—yell and shout and scream abuse—but, looking back at it, I am not very proud of the fact that I had drunk too much. I was letting myself down, as much as anything.
One night Bevelly and I went to see The Blue Max, a 1966 British film about a German fighter pilot on the Western Front during World War I, starring George Peppard, James Mason and Ursula Andress. We enjoyed the film, and afterwards went and had a few beers at a pub. After that I decided to drive home—drunk. Bevelly was furious, because I was clearly in no condition to drive. It was a stupid thing to do, and I never did it again. And I have never watched The Blue Max again either because of the memories it would summon.
Bevelly put up with a lot. She has spoken about her frustrations at my drinking all Friday night and all the next day, and sometimes not coming home. She didn’t want to live like that.
I made a huge decision: I would stop drinking. I vowed I would never have another drink for the rest of my life. I told Bevelly. She told me it was a brave and good decision, and that she would support me. But trust took some time to come.
Having decided at twenty-three never to have another drink, I found it was hard. In the space of about six months, I tried and failed two or three times. I realized that an alcoholic was someone who had it in their make-up that they can’t have alcohol. As tough as it is, we can’t drink.
In 1965 I went to two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in St Kilda where I saw some very well-known people from Melbourne society. I realized it wasn’t just working-class people who drank too much; it was the whole range. Then I saw a father and a son. And it started to make me think perhaps it runs in the family. I found out only after she’d left that my mother drank too much, and I thought about it an awful lot. I went to AA only twice because I found it too depressing. Still, I’d learned a couple of things. One was that alcoholics can’t have even one drink. That’s just the way it is. Alcoholics are different people. They shouldn’t touch alcohol. Luckily for me that was easy.
I remember my last drink: an Irish whiskey with the advertising representative from Time magazine. We clinked glasses and I knew, although he didn’t, that my life was going to change when I’d finished that drink. It was 1965, and I was twenty-three. I never had another drink. And I never missed it.
Stuart and Amanda were always aware that I had given up drinking. One night at dinner, when Stuart was ten and Amanda six, we’d finished the main course and the dessert arrived. The children realized the dessert had alcohol in it. I took a spoonful and brought it to my mouth. At that moment, two little hands reached up and gently pushed it away. I was touched that the children were being so supportive and watchful, even at their early age.
Not drinking for the past forty-four years has had some great effects. I think there’s little doubt that I’ve struck some great deals and negotiations over lunch because I’ve been sober.
In 2007 I attended the launch of Margaret Olley’s autobiography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Barry Humphries launched the book. A photographer asked the three of us to appear in a photograph. We all had to smile, so I thought, what can I say to make them smile? So I said: ‘I wonder if the photographer realizes that we’re all reformed drunks.’
I still enjoy wine; I just don’t drink it. I have a cellar with three thousand bottles of wine, much of it well and truly past its use-by date. In the 1970s, as I travelled in to Clarendon Street, South Melbourne, to work on Saturday mornings, I would drop in on this licensed grocer. He used to have three-dozen bottles of Grange Hermitage delivered each year, and I’d buy a dozen. I didn’t know much about it, but I thought it could be useful. I put them in our cellar at St Andrews. Gradually it built to a collection of a hundred and fifty bottles of Grange. Now that licensed grocer doesn’t get any allocated to him. I give them away. I’ve got a hundred now. The only way to develop a really first-class cellar is to not drink.
I was often invited by the Nine Network to their corporate box at the MCG for the Boxing Day Test. I worked out a way of saying thank you and by doing so started my own tradition. Each time I would thank my host by taking him a bottle of Grange Hermitage from my cellar. Then the MCG tightened the rules, saying you weren’t allowed to take any alcohol in. So I would smuggle it in, using my brother-in-law as a mule. He was terrified. He would distract the gateman as I walked through with the bottle of Grange underneath my coat. I never found anyone who didn’t die of nerves helping me in this project. I told a journalist at the Bulletin about this, which upped the ante, because now the guards knew we were coming.
We own a part of a vineyard at Heathcote. People say it’s wonderful wine. I love visiting the vineyard, walking between the vines, checking the new growth, enjoying knowing that these vines will produce some excellent wine that will make people happy. I enjoy that whole journey. But it’s a journey I cannot, for the rest of my life, fully embrace.
But food has been something I’ve always embraced. I love eating, and I haven’t always had a healthy, low-fat diet.
My four-year-old granddaughter once cut to the chase in the most vivid of ways. Looking at me leaving the shower one day, she asked: ‘Grandpa, why do you have two tummies?’
I am a big man, there’s no doubt. A magazine profile opened with the description of me as ‘morbidly obese, technically speaking’. The 2006 article, in Good Weekend, reported that I had lost 40 kilograms in the past eighteen months and that I would have to replace my entire wardrobe. The journalist wrote: ‘At his bulkiest, when he tipped the scales at 165 kilograms, he had cascading chins and an almost spherical torso—think of a beach ball in a pinstriped suit.’
But I haven’t always been large. There’s a photo of me on the wall in my office looking quite slim. It’s not there for motivation. I find my motivation to lose weight elsewhere. I find it in not wanting to die, in being able to enjoy my family—my wife, my children and my grandchildren. There are plenty of reasons to bring my weight back to a sustainable level. The aim is to get down to 90 kilograms and live to ninety. It’s a beautiful set of numbers.
For me it’s been a lifetime of diets. They have all failed, to a greater or lesser extent. When I lost 40 kilograms in 2005, I gradually put it all back on. Just slowly, but back it went. You eat a little bit and it creeps up on you, then another little bit. I have a metabolism that can’t handle it. When I diet, my metabolism says: ‘He’s never going to feed me again.’ So it would process slowly what I ate. I had the Jenny Craig advertising account for a long time, so I went on the Jenny Craig diet. That was OK. I lost some weight but, again, it crept back on.
In 2004 my family was starting to worry about my weight. My daughter Amanda rang my friend Kerry Stokes and asked him to talk to me, and he was happy to do so. After the Athens Olympics, Kerry asked me over to his office. ‘Your family is worried about you,’ he said. ‘If you don’t lose weight, you’ll die.’
Kerry gave me a videotape and told me about lapband surgery. Before embarking on that, I wanted to try to lose weight through another diet. That’s where the 40 kilograms went, and I kept that off for about two years. Then progressively I put half of it back on, little bits at a time; I didn’t notice it. A bit here, a bit there. Anyone who has a weight problem would relate to this: this is your life, and you’d better get used to it. The issue is a dragon that needs to be continually slayed. You can’t relax with what you eat; it’s too dangerous. But that’s not always easy to achieve. I found that as I got busy, I would forget about the diet and eat. Working very long hours meant food was fitting in around the work. All fat people know that.
There was also some body image tied up in the weight. Jenny Craig once told me—and I think I believe this too—that sometimes I was comfortable in the weight because it was a great defence. Bigness has often helped in business. Jenny said the reason I put weight on was my mind telling me to have a presence. I wasn’t tall, but I was large—harder to ignore. If I have to deal with people I believed the weight was giving me more power. I mean, who is going to listen to some short little skinny guy when we’ve got to do a million-dollar deal? That’s probably always been in the back of my mind, although that theory falls down when you look at short men who are powerful such as Bob Hawke or Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone.
I thought a lot about all this and some of the myths that exist about food and eating. I said to a doctor that I thought I ate too late, and he said: ‘No, nothing to do with it. You eat too much.’
I’m lucky. At sixty-seven, I was just young enough to have the lapband surgery. Another two years, and it would have been too late. I don’t have time left to lose the weight and put it on again.
Before the operation I had nine weeks of losing weight. That’s probably so they could find my stomach. The best way to say goodbye to my old life was to do a farewell tour of the restaurants I had enjoyed so much over the years. One day we had takeaway for lunch from the Flower Drum, Australia’s best Chinese restaurant. We had chicken sandwiches by Peter Rowland. And we went to Pellegrini at the top of Bourke Street, one of Melbourne’s first authentic Italian places and, after fifty years, an institution of the city. At Pellegrini I always needed to borrow a tea towel having pasta. So I decided to have three hundred napkins made with the restaurant’s logo stitched into it. So when I dined there I could bring my own napkins.
I still go to Pellegrini today. Going there is always such an interesting experience, quite apart from the home-cooked Italian food and great coffee. I like to sit in the back room where the pasta is dished out from the ancient stoves. It’s a lot of fun. You sit at a big communal table that seats about twelve and have your meal. Often you sit and chat to the person sitting next to you. It could be anyone. Could be Bert Newton or former AFL coach Denis Pagan, both regulars. Could be Billy Joel, who comes in when he’s touring Melbourne. One day I was sitting next to and chatting to a young woman. I said: ‘Do I know you? What do you do?’
She said: ‘I’m a singer. I’m Kate Ceberano.’ Kate had her child with her so I gave her a napkin. She was beside herself, and so was I.
We then moved on to Neil Perry’s restaurant, Rockpool, at the Crown Entertainment Complex. I walked in, and there were several people from Fairfax, including chairman Ron Walker. ‘Ron,’ I said, ‘this is symbolic, me being here today sharing my final meal with you.’ His face dropped, until I explained.
It was a good lunch. I said to the waiter: ‘No need to see the menu, waiter. I will have a large plate of your most expensive steak.’
That night there was a dinner at Silks, at Crown, for the incoming chairman of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which happened to be me. So another big dinner. It was turning out to be quite a farewell tour. And only two commitments left: we got the famous dim sims at South Melbourne market, but couldn’t get to Jim’s Greek Tavern in Collingwood because they weren’t open for lunch. And that was that.
They knocked me out, I woke up and it was all over. My stomach had been tied.
I was walking around within an hour and a half of the operation. The next morning, having had an X-ray to make sure everything was in order, I checked out and went to the office. I wasn’t being silly. I took Friday off because there was a one-day cricket game.
I’m serious about the mission. In early December 2008 I weighed 150 kilograms. After the pre-surgery diet I was down to 134 kilograms. Seven days later, in mid-February, I was 126. The weight is sliding off me. I still go to most of my favourite restaurants, I just have much smaller portions than I used to. I am grateful to Dr Gerard Mangan for his help in my weight loss, and to Dr Paul Kelly for decades of being a wonderful family doctor. When you are taking on what I took on, you need all the support you can get.
The big challenge now is whether my skin can keep up with the rest of my body, and whether I can find a tailor to regularly adjust all my suits. I can report that, as of the end of June 2009, I am just under 108 kilograms.