James Packer
A candid James Packer opens up in a new biography
JAMES PACKER’S ROMANCE WITH pop diva Mariah Carey was “fun to begin with”, the billionaire has revealed, speaking publicly for the first time on his failed relationship with his ex-fiancée. “Wherever we went we were on the top table and that was because of her, not me. She was kind and she took an interest in my life,” Packer, 51, tells author-journalist Damon Kitney in new biography The Price of Fortune – The Untold Story of Being James Packer.
Mariah, 48, “is insanely bright”, Packer enthuses. “That is before you get to the voice, which is out of this world. I probably went to 10 of her concerts and they were all fantastic.”
But the troubled businessman, who earlier this year admitted to mental health issues, recalls that shortly before he was due to marry the star, “I was in a bad, bad way”. In February 2016, alone in his Aspen, Colorado home, Packer was struggling to cope with personal and financial pressures. Thankfully, close friends moved in to take charge and help him through the difficult weeks ahead, even fending off
Mariah’s camp, which wanted James to buy the singer a $250,000 wedding dress. It was all a far cry from how the relationship had begun.
The couple first met at Packer’s mountain mansion in Aspen in late 2013, introduced by Hollywood film producer Brett Ratner, and they kept in touch, seen together at a movie premiere in Hollywood in July 2014. By June 2015 the couple were first photographed strolling hand-in-hand on the Italian island of Capri, as they lived it up on Packer’s boat the Arctic P.
Next, it was on to a private Sting concert in Cannes, a dinner in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and intimate lunches with the rich and famous. Carey “was always wonderful in a room. She has the most wicked sense of humour – and is lightning fast,” Packer reveals. “For me to sit around a table with these people was humbling and hugely exciting.”
In January 2016, the smitten businessman proposed over dinner in New York. “Packer chose the three-michelin-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park to get down on one knee and propose to Mariah on the evening of January 21,” Kitney writes. “It would have been the third marriage for both of them. Plans were made for the couple to be married at Bora Bora in French Polynesia on March 1, 2016.” But trouble was brewing. “There were already problems trying to negotiate our prenup,” Packer recalls.
By February 2016, James was battling a deep depression, exacerbated by his financial wrangle with sister Gretel over her share of their late father Kerry’s estate. “James was completely
stressed out, having to get a billion dollars to pay his sister out which would place him heavily in debt,” Kitney tells WHO. “Then he had this added pressure of a March wedding to worry about and he went into meltdown mode.”
Friends ensured he went to Israel for treatment. Packer recalls: “Mariah was very upset when I was in Israel because I had just disappeared.” The wedding was eventually cancelled, but the couple remained together until late September 2016. Packer says the relationship ended after he returned from the Tel Aviv funeral of former Israeli president Shimon Peres, rejoining his fiancée on the Arctic P, moored off the Greek island of Corfu. “I then head back to the boat, Mariah and I break up and Mariah gets off the boat,” he tells Kitney.
The book quotes a source saying Packer took full responsibility for the breakup. “James just felt he needed to cut the cord. He just felt like they seemed like different people compared to when they first met.” They have not spoken since the split two years ago. Kitney reflects: “The types of people James has met and befriended is quite incredible. That’s testament to the charming part of his character that draws people to him. But a lot of people in James’ life have abused the trust he’s placed in them.” •
The Price of Fortune, The Untold Story of Being James Packer by Damon Kitney is out Oct. 22.