‘I lost count of the millions of pounds that were passing in front of me’
‘I bungled an attempt to hang myself’
‘The pain of his existence left me’
I’D WALKED out of my first two marriages with nothing. My third divorce, from multi-millionaire David, netted me about 20,000 Canadian dollars, after I had optimistically returned the bulk of my divorce settlement in return for our reconciliation. Being female and all but penniless in London, and approaching 50, is awkward. I had no property, nothing in storage except research folders, and not remotely enough for a down- payment to buy a flat.
Salvation came in the most unlikely shape. I was working on a column dealing with some proposed legislation on date rape. At this sensitive point, the phone rang:
‘Come to dinner at the Clermont. I’ll pick you up at nine,’ said Joe Dwek, which gave me time to agonise nicely over what to wear to one of the most expensive restaurants in London.
Dwek had been at some point backgammon champion of Europe. We had met at a reception at the home of John Aspinall, who had opened the first London casino and founded the Clermont Set, a tight group that included aristocrats and high politicians — gamblers all, and some quite notorious, including Lord Lucan.
Casinos have their hierarchy, and the Clermont Club in Mayfair was near the very top. Dinner with Joe that Tuesday night was forcibly intimate in a room where noise was buried in thick fabrics and the lighting dimmed.
Out of the murky light, a large presence loomed. He had something of a boxer’s face, with a very slightly flattened nose, thick, fleshy lips and a complexion that had seen better times. About 6ft 2 in and radiating confidence, this goliath took up all the oxygen around our table.
I had no bloody idea who he was or why Dwek was being so deferential. (He was, it turned out, Australian media mogul Kerry Packer, a severaltimes billionaire.) The conversation between the two men was short and muted. After he left and we had finished our dinner at a leisurely pace, Joe said: ‘Kerry wants you to come upstairs. You’ll find it interesting.’
My column deadline was nagging at me. ‘Sorry, really can’t.’
‘Just for a few moments,’ said Dwek. Our destination was a very small private room on a high floor. At one end was a counter with a dealer behind it and upholstered bar-stool chairs for about four people.
The dealer riffled the cards. Kerry indicated that I was to sit beside him, then produced a cheque that paused for just a second in front of my eyes. It was for £500,000.
The card game began. Kerry Packer versus the house. What I remember most was how very quiet everything was. There were five people, and not a shiver of noise apart from an almost imperceptible sssst of the cards being dealt. It was as if we were all sitting inside some enormous pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.
As the cards were revealed, Packer would make a decision; sometimes it was unsuccessful, and he would write another cheque for £500,000. I lost count of the millions of pounds that were passing in front of me with the casualness of a Visa slip for a cardigan.
Packer won double-figure millions of pounds that night. ‘Thank you for joining us,’ he said politely as we walked down a flight of stairs to the cashier.
After a moment I was handed a Clermont cheque for £100,000 made out in my name. ‘You understand,’ said Dwek, ‘that Kerry’s winnings are not to be made public.’ ‘I can’t possibly take it,’ I replied, actually meaning it.
‘Don’t be silly,’ replied Dwek with a slight tone of irritation. ‘That’s how it works. Kerry will be offended.’
I had some fear of being bought, though God knows why since neither Dwek nor Kerry had evinced the slightest interest in me. Simultaneously, in a small patch of my mind lurked the thrilling possibility of keeping it. But out came all the pro forma denials again.
Dwek again replied in a tired way. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Kerry does this. Just take it and you can cash it right here.’
This was 1989: I cashed it and found I was holding half a mortgage. In the cloakroom I handed the attendant a £50 note, thinking I was being very generous. She was an elderly lady, rather frizzled, and took it with thanks but no excitement.
‘I think the attendant was quite pleased with my win,’ I said grandly when I joined the two men. ‘You gave her all of it?’ Packer said curiously. I felt like a trespasser in a new world.
The next evening, I was once more working on my column when the phone rang. Dwek and Packer were at a restaurant and I was to join them. Tempting, I said, but quite out of the question.
‘You can’t say no,’ Dwek said. ‘You must be there.’
I went back to work. Twenty minutes later a chauffeur was outside my door. ‘I’m to bring you to Mr Packer,’ he said.
Packer was about three years older than me. I knew something about his reputation for women — his mistress in Australia, the ladies reputedly hired for entertainment during his long airplane flights — and his legendary lines, like the one to the chap he bumped into at a Las Vegas casino. ‘Don’t you bother me,’ said the man selfimportantly, ‘I’m worth three hundred million.’ ‘Toss you for it,’ replied Packer. There was something almost thuggish about him, as if at any moment he would abandon all civilised convention, tear his food with his hands and physically maim anyone in his way. I felt no personal interest, but I could see his appeal, although his louche world was far too sordid for me.
When the chauffeur dropped me off at the restaurant, Packer and Dwek were sitting at a circular table with what appeared to be most of South America. Packer was taking his polo team on a boys’ night out.
The evening turned into something resembling a family outing. Polo players, Packer and I climbed enthusiastically into cars to go off to a Chelsea cinema that was playing Pretty Woman.
Packer seated me, the sole female present, next to him. At the moment when the hotel manager in the film looks at the jewellery Richard Gere has borrowed from Beverly Hills jeweller Fred’s, and the camera goes in for a closeup of the — very real — ruby and diamond necklace, Packer nudged me contemptuously: ‘Chicken feed,’ he said. Like a video loop, the previous evening repeated itself after the film, only this time with a handful of polo players crowded together on a small sofa in the private room at the casino.
I sat on the stool next to Packer, and he won more millions. Each polo player, as well as myself, went home with £100,000.
Packer responded to my heartfelt note of thanks with an invitation to lunch. When he came to pick me up, he looked at my shelves of books.
‘Do you read all these?’ he asked, as if it was just barely possible that anyone, let alone a woman, might.
As lunch ended, Packer offered to take me shopping.
‘What do you like?’ he asked. ‘Chanel?’ I declined, and that ended the matter.
Not long afterwards, I moved to a flat in Knightsbridge. Waking up in my bed under the sloping ceiling with a skylight overhead wiped away all remnants of my depression.
In a colossally happy moment that every female on the planet will recognise, I bumped into my ex-husband, who was buying an enormous home nearby. I took him to my flat.
His surprise on seeing that I was not living in squalor was palpable. See, see, see, I wanted to shout, I can live without you.
When he left that day, the pain of his existence left me.
ADAPTED by Corinna Honan from Friends And Enemies: A Memoir by Barbara Amiel, to be published by Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, on October 13. © 2020 Barbara Amiel.