Mitchell Harold - Living Large

LIVING LARGE

The World of

HAROLD MITCHELL

To Bevelly and Stuart and Amanda, and my grandchildren
Alex, Jordan, Ryan and Sam.
You make my life worth living.

16 Lighting up a room: Getting to know Xanana and Kirsty Sword Gusmo

I thank Bevelly, Stuart and Amanda for their support and love. Thanks to Peter Wilmoth for listening to my stories and getting them onto the page. To Louise Adler and her staff at Melbourne University Publishing, thank you for your faith in this book and the encouragement along the way. Thanks to Ian Roberts for his ongoing friendship, advice and good memory. To Adrienne van Denderen, thanks for such great support in the offi ce and in so many other ways. And thanks to my friends, family, colleagues and associates in the world of the arts and advertising over the past forty years, who have allowed me to have these stories and memories.

You know that feeling when you wake up and you cant quite remember whats wrong? You just know somethings not the way it should be? And theres a feeling in your gut like youve been kicked by a horse? And it takes a few moments for your brain to adjust to reality? And then you wish it hadnt?

Its 1990, and a glorious autumn Saturday morning in country Victoria. The sky is an azure canvas, smudged here and there with some whipped-cream clouds. Its 5.30 a.m. I cant sleep so I get up and wander around the bushland surrounding our house. The magpies are making their beautiful warble; the sun is rising over the valley beyond our house. And thats when the first tears come. I hold onto our fence, look over at the bushland and stand there and cry.

I am $32 million in debt, through no fault of my own. Its so much money its almost ridiculous to contemplate. I have nothing to pay it back with. I am a bankers pen stroke away from losing everything, maybe even the house to which I had brought my two beautiful children home after their birth, the house where I had spent so many lovely years with my wife Bevelly, where I had watched my children Stuart and Amanda take their first steps.

Could this be my reward for all my hard work?

Life should have been perfect. And it would have been, except I was the only one of a group of businesspeople who wanted to own up to the $32 million debt. The music had stopped, and I was the only one left on the dance floor.

The weekend dragged. I was out of sorts, couldnt concentrate, couldnt sleep, wondered where I was going, I wondered what would happen to us. How would I get out of this?

Two days later I was in my office in Melbourne when the phone rang. It was Kerry Packer.

Harold, I hear youve got some problems, son. Can I help?

Theres a strange feeling when people are kind to you. His call was so unexpected, but so gratefully received, that my emotions were raw again.

Kerry offered me a loan of $1.9 million, interest free.

Come and see me.

A couple of days later I flew to Sydney. I walked in; we shook hands. His assessment of my business strategies in relation to the series of poor investments Id got myself involved with had a typical Packer economy about it. Harold, he said looking down the barrel at me over his desk, youre an idiot.

True to Kerrys personality, he wanted to know the detail of how I had made so many mistakes. Kerry was intrigued as to what it was all about and wanted to go through it in his forensic way. He wanted the who, the what, the where. That was what he had spent his life doing.

Kerry and I never signed any paperwork about the loan. It was his commitment, his word, and I went away and prepared to work hard for seven years to pay it off. A couple of weeks later on a Sunday night I turned on the news on TV to see that Kerry Packer had had a heart attack on the polo field and was critically ill in hospital. I was aghast. It was only the next day that I thought of the offer hed made, which had yet to be completed.

A week later I received a phone call from Kerrys secretary, who asked if Id call Kerry, who was recuperating at his country property, which I did. A voice not as strong as usual came to the phone. OK, son, well go through with that. What an amazing man. Fresh from his near-death experience, he still cared about our arrangement.

That loan was critical in my life. I was carrying such enormous pressure that I didnt know where to go next. It was just enough to keep everyone at bay. It took me seven years to repay that debt, which wasnt easy to do.

This chapter in my life taught me so many lessons.

It taught me the value of kindness and loyalty. It taught me that having high levels of debt can be very dangerous, that you can lose a lot of sleep, suffer a lot of angst and fear, and that you can nearly lose your house and place your family in jeopardy. It taught me that even though a friend had died for eight minutesIve been to the other side, and let me tell you, son, theres f nothing there, he is reported to have observedhe still had a sense of duty and thoughtfulness to ensure that a promise was honoured.

These lessons were hard to swallow but easy to grasp. They made sense. And they would help me so much in the future.

Writing these words, I am sixty-seven years old, and Im a happy man. Im proud to say Ive spent my life learning and acting on lessons. I dont want to be preachy; its just that learning lessons is what made me what I am today.

I am a living example of the adage that you never stop learning. Having nearly been yet another victim of the 1980s, the decade that killed so many dreams and brought so many back down to earth, I was able to build a very successful business, and one of the reasons is that I kept my mind open. I know plenty of would-bes who could have done something with themselves in business, but they thought they knew everything so learned nothing. Theres a trail of them in business, especially from the 1980s. They were talking when they should have been listening. Kerry Packers greatest quality? His capacity to listen and absorb. And he did pretty well for himself.

Theory: the bigger the unrestrained ego, the less you learn. A big ego and tin ears are very dangerous characteristics for a businessperson.

Same for a husband. I have been married to the same woman Bevellyfor forty-six years. My marriage has been one of the great triumphs of my life, especially, it must be said, in the world of advertising and media where business might succeed but marriages fail. Bevelly has never been shy in expressing her views, a quality in her I have always both admired and found strength in. There are many sycophants in my world, yet Bevellys honesty has kept me grounded and reminded me of the best things in life, like love through good times and bad. And, believe me, she has seen both.

I have two great children, Stuart and Amanda, and I have four beautiful grandchildren. I have a business that, together with some extraordinary contributions from both Stuart and Amanda, and many others, is a success.

Its said I am a pioneer of a new way of placing advertisements, as a so-called media buyer. Its true that I and a handful of others changed the way advertising works in Australia. Im proud of that. An idea I had in 1974elevating the people working the advertising budgets and working out how to best spend clients moneymight have sounded crazy in the mid-1970s, especially to the advertising agencies who couldnt believe the control was being taken away from them. Boy, did they hate that. Now its just the way its done.