Packer’s luck hits a high
So much has changed in three years
JAMES Packer is renowned for his dark moods, especially when it comes to having his photograph taken.
Walking into his teak-lined office at Crown Melbourne promptly at 8.30am one day, JP – as his senior team refer to their chairman – was in an unrelenting frame of mind.
He was there for an interview about Chinese gamblers, which would be the cover story for a new magazine.
He didn’t mind a brief chat. But he was not going to pose for a picture. No way.
“I just don’t feel like it,” he snapped. Gently persuaded by the photographer, who had already been there for more than an hour setting up his equipment, the casino boss relented eventually but grudgingly. “OK, just one frame. One.” “It was a very intimidating situation,” the interviewer said. “He’s a big man and he was thunderous.”
Hard to believe, then, his transformation from an intensely private billionaire to one of the most photographed me on earth.
And the new James Packer seemingly couldn’t be more delighted to be the focus of a very public nautical love story co-starring America’s crooning sweetheart Mariah Carey. How times change. At the time of that awkward magazine photoshoot, late in 2012, Packer’s marriage to second wife Erica was heading towards separation and he was constantly jet-lagged, racing between his Crown resorts in London, Perth, Melbourne and Macau.
While Packer’s once bulky frame was shrinking fast by then, thanks to a $25,000 gastric banding surgery, the stresses of the fast-moving casino business were weighing heavily on his every waking minute.
As a former casino employee puts it: “It’s a highrisk business when you are dealing with Chinese high-rollers who are prepared to fly in and drop $1 million on their first hand of poker, just because they feel like it after a few glasses of cognac on a Friday night”.
Packer has always been one of the few in the business prepared to accept the biggest bets from the sparse but most important “whales” as they are known. Turnovers for single sessions can reach $20 million.
But the house doesn’t always win. Huge losses are frequent, offset by redundancies and cost-cutting in other areas of the resorts. It’s a precarious juggling act with a lot at stake; it can risk the building of future resorts not to mention the employment of 15,000 staff in Australia.
Just to add to the stress at the time were the constant demands to try to secure permission from the NSW Department of Planning to build Crown Sydney in the heart of the city.
It was a pet project – Packer knew his late father Kerry had always dreamt of a casino in the city where James was born.
Fast-forward three years. In alluring summer waters of the Mediterranean, Packer, 47, is now apparently in a very different state of mind.
Looking constantly freshly showered and a little flushed, whether sporting a crisp white evening shirt or a fluffy bathrobe, he is repeatedly photographed smiling and seemingly very much in love with 45-year-old Mariah.
The news that the pair were an item, or “Pariah” as the wry folk on Twitter quickly dubbed them, nearly broke the internet. Just last year, Packer – previously linked with supermodel Miranda Kerr – said candidly that “my personal life is a disaster”.
But then Mariah happened. Not since that famously fateful week when Princess Diana was courted by Dodi Fayed before their tragic Paris car crash in 1997 had the Med hosted such fascinating romance and drama.
Here again was an eligible, wealthy playboy son squiring a famous woman from port to port on board his father’s ridiculously large yacht – in this instance Kerry’s beloved converted icebreaker, the 88m Arctic P.
Stolen kisses, bikinis, jet skis and determined paparazzi chasing their fast-moving prey between Capri, Sardinia, Cannes and Antibes. It was a familiar backdrop.
Gossip websites have speculated that Packer pursued the singer “vigorously” after being dazzled by her performance in Las Vegas just six weeks ago.
But friends of the Crown boss have said Mariah has been on the scene for quite some time; she is a key part of Packer’s new “Californian family” in Los Angeles where he has quietly been carving out a new life for himself since 2013.
James is said to have also wanted a break from Sydney after feeling “totally humiliated and embarrassed” by the public brawl with his best mate, Nine boss David Gyngell, outside his Bondi apartment in May last year.
Whether Packer’s and Mariah’s summer tryst on board the luxury of the mothership Arctic P, where their every whim is being met by a staff of 25, will prove to have longevity can only be guessed.
But he is said to call her four-year-old twins by their nicknames, Roc and Roe, and friends say they have never seen him happier.
“He’s clearly in the shape of his life and seems very happy but he does have a tendency to go into something 100 per cent sometimes and then get bored,” the friend says.
And the high-octane demands of the Crown business will always be calling for attention.
But for now, a new life sailing along with Mariah is all part of Packer’s very cinematic American dream.