Larry Writer’s unforgettable, meant-to-be stint in London
Charles and Di, 2am phone calls from Kerry Packer and a Barry Humphries centrefold. In London, this journalist got more than he bargained for.
It was 1981 and I was cocooned in my comfort zone. Every day I drove the gridlocked 40 kilometres from Sydney’s Northern Beaches to Kerry Packer’s ACP magazine empire in the city. There I edited pages while inching up the corporate ladder to the management floor where, like the other executives, I’d wear a suit and shout at people. At day’s end, another 90-minute drive home; after watching Kojak and Columbo, I’d collapse into bed, rise at 6am and set off again. It was the only life I knew or wanted.
Then I was appointed ACP’s London bureau chief, representing The Australian Women’s Weekly, Cleo, The Bulletin and Australian Business. My protestations that I was happy doing what I was doing went unheeded.
I landed at Heathrow in a petulant funk, homesick even before I cleared Customs. Not even the company mansion, two doors down from the famous Duke of Wellington pub in Eaton Terrace, with a fig tree in the garden and Sir Terence Conran, Lulu and Enoch Powell as neighbours, could raise my spirits. Then there were the 2am phone calls from Kerry Packer that invariably meant driving through dark, sleety streets to the office to grapple with the ancient telex machine, which projectile vomited kilometres of paper across the floor.
But soon I was loving my job, assigning stories about Australians in Britain, politics, celebrities, sport, the Falklands War and Charles and Diana. It was said, possibly in jest, that our royal correspondent, the venerable Anne Matheson, had interviewed Charles I.
I interviewed the sweet guys of Duran Duran, icy Candice Bergen, Dame Joan Sutherland and the fabulous Barry Humphries who inexplicably agreed to pose nude as Botticelli’s Venus for Cleo’s centrefold. Humphries’ stricken expression as the photographer cajoled, “Just one more, Baz!” remains vivid. As does legendary jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli’s reply – “Whisky and beautiful young men” – when I asked what inspired him.
I met Sheilah Graham, the lover of my literary hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was immortalised by him in The Last Tycoon and with him when he died. Graham became a friend. She was a great eccentric, her memories of the author punctuated by sudden outbursts of singing.
The end of my London stint was not pleasant: close the office, retrench the staff, sell the company house. Sad and harrowing tasks but at least in the case of Eaton Terrace, a good buyer was found: an Australian dentist.
Back at ACP headquarters I was different. Sacking good people taught me I was not management material. I climbed down the corporate ladder, sold my house and moved to the city. And I began writing books.
That trip changed my life and not just professionally. One day, I met a beautiful woman who’d lived in London. “Where?” I asked. “Oh, in Eaton Terrace with a dentist friend of my parents. Two doors down from the Duke of Wellington, with a fig tree in the garden.” We’ve now been married 30 years. Some things were meant to be.