Larry Schwartz
He was one of the highest flyers in Australian entertainment who fell back to earth owing millions. So why has Glenn Wheatley decided to stick around?
FINALLY, it took a cardboard box filled with bed linen to bring tears to the eyes of a fallen tycoon.
Glenn Wheatley had already watched the $6 million Toorak mansion, fine furniture, art works, fixtures and possessions slip from his grasp. When the trustees for his creditors came for the keys to his Porsche, he filled in a docket to show that it was “in car park C5 on the third floor”.
Three months after the sale of his and wife Gaynor’s estate, the trustees were back again at his office. “They brought back my sheets in a cardboard box, dropped it in front of my desk and said: `I’m sorry, Mr Wheatley, but we realise that it was illegal to sell your bed linen. So we brought it
back.’ “I tell you, that day I broke down and cried and I had to leave the office. In front of everybody. That was about as humiliating as it could possibly get.”
Glenn Wheatley fell hard. But, when it all came crashing down, the high-profile manager of some of the biggest names in Australian music, including John Farnham, rejected legal advice to declare himself and Gaynor bankrupt.
Instead, the Wheatleys entered a scheme of arrangement to deal with debt initially reported at $16 million. A proportion of income from a job he now has with the American-based management group IMG goes to the creditors.
“Gaynor and I want to pay our dues on this,” Wheatley says.
“We’re not running away from it.”
HE WAS the man of the legendary Midas touch, who once trashed a tuxedo belonging to a former flatmate and down-on-his-luck singer John Farnham, in the slops bucket of a Queensland club, and went on to remake the singer into Australia’s biggest star, with its biggest selling album.
Now, chastened by the hurt and financial loss he has caused himself and others, including Farnham who lent him a reported $650,000 towards the end Glenn Wheatley knows that after his ill-fated attempt to set up The Ivy nightclub, he is all too fallible.
“There was a time during all of that I would never have sat down and looked at all of this,” says Wheatley, glancing at the Royal Botanic Gardens as he sits on a bench.
It was not like this once. There was never time to sit and smell the flowers. Instead, thoughts like this would be forever racing through his mind: “There’s got to be things that have got to be done. There’s got to be people you’ve got to be talking to. More important people I should be talking
to. “I cut people off because they weren’t high enough up the scale that could help me. I was crazed at that time.”
WE met late on a Saturday afternoon. He had been shuttling his children back and forth from friends. I half-expected him not to turn up. It had taken weeks of calls and a meeting at his Carlton office to reach the point where he felt ready to talk about his rise and fall.
Though he has rejected offers to sell his story to several women’s magazines, Wheatley has a book publisher interested. He is keen, as he puts it, to set the record straight.
Still he hesitated, mulling over misgivings and each time we spoke the promised interview seemed elusive. So cautious is he now, he worries about harming his relationship with IMG by looking as if he is courting publicity for himself.
“I am nervous about this,” he confides over the squawk of gulls and squeal of children. “Do people really care that I have come a cropper? How many people are happy to see this smart-arse highflier take a fall? Probably a lot.”
Though Wheatley believes he has been made an example of by the trustees of his scheme of arrangement, and subjected to greater scrutiny because of his high profile, neither he nor Gaynor wants sympathy.
He is still smarting at persistent newspaper reports such as one that alleged he was “piloting a new black BMW 320i around town while wife, Gaynor, who makes do with a four-wheel yuppiemobile has been vocally prominent in Georges, trying on horribly
expensive fashion … “
Then there was the report on a dispute with performers and their union that prompted him to withdraw a live `Jesus Christ Superstar’ album after he says he invested $35,000 or more in its production. He says he offered the entire cast a royalty that would have provided them with more than
the usual fee.
He regrets the way he was featured “hoofing” it across a Sydney car park late last year to avoid an `A Current Affair’ television camera crew seeking an interview on allegations by a builder involved in refurbishing the Ivy, who reportedly at one stage alleged that $2.3 million in material and
work had been lost.
“We had a fight with a builder that was horrific. That was a shocking period of our life. I tried to sack him because he was four months late. He was part of the BLF. Thank you very much.
“That was when I was getting police headquarters telling me to stay away from the building site because it’s violent down there. I’m going: `What’s gone wrong? How crazy is all this?’ The building site was jinxed.”
The dark days began with the 1990 collapse of the Pyramid Group, from which he had borrowed heavily. Wheatley attributes his downfall not to the Ivy itself, but to a decision to dabble in property development to house the nightclub. “The lesson to learn was horses for courses. What do
I know about property and construction? I was advised at the time that negative gearing was the big `buzz word’.
“I found this building for $1 million. `No, it’s not big enough.
You need something bigger. I’m talking like sub-stan-tial.’ I found a building for $4 million. `Now you’re talking.’ I was totally encouraged into it. And things got out of control. A property developer I ain’t.”
In the end it came down to this. From a 650-square-metre “Hollywood-style” mansion with semi-circular driveway; heated swimming pool; spotlit grass tennis court; four-car garage; and much more.
Down, down, down to uneasy nights at his mother-in-law’s home sharing a rubber Lilo for a bed with Gaynor and their three children.
Then came loss of superannuation, life insurance, savings in accounts, including one held by his 10-year-old son, Tim. How to explain changed circumstances to the boy who one morning woke his father to ask about a newspaper report headlined “WHEATLEY: $100 IN THE BANK”?
“AND I’m waking up and thinking, What am I going to say? My response was, `Oh don’t tell your mother. I only told her we had $50.’ He went off chortling to himself’.”
He took Tim down to the Botanical Hotel and told him the big white house in Toorak, the radio networks, the cars . . . your dad has lost them all.
If Wheatley has gained insight from misadventure, it is that he put business ahead of family in the frenzied pursuit of success. The affection of Tim, now almost 11, and his sisters, Samantha, nearly 10, and Kara, 9, matters much.
“I am going to be a lot more open with Tim than my father was with me,” he says. “He didn’t know how to communicate. He didn’t know how to talk to me . . . To this day, I don’t ever remember my father telling me that he loved me. He never kissed me. He never embraced me once.”
The older of two sons of a Brisbane truck driver who reckoned his biggest achievement was surviving Tobruk, Glenn Wheatley decided early that there must be something more to life beyond the horizon. His father, he says, “never had too much to show for his life and I think that had a
bearing on me”.
He would not want to end up, as did his parents, with so little that he and his brother, Paul, had to pay for their funerals. “But, were they unhappy? I don’t know. I don’t think my dad knew anything too much more than a life of sheer hard labor.
“My mum battled to try and keep the books, to keep the family intact. She was the strength and I think I get more from her than I do get anywhere. Even long in death, she is still part of my life.”
He often thinks of her. “The image that really will live with me forever . . . was on more than one occasion coming home and finding mum on the back porch of our little, little weatherboard home.
“She was crying because we didn’t have enough money left over to buy the weekend joint of meat which was the treat for the week. Also, dad used to smoke roll-your-owns all the time and she would like to be able to buy him a small packet of Turf filters for the weekend . . .”
A country girl used to hardship, his mother thought an occasional meal at a local Chinese restaurant was a luxury. “When I’d finally come up to Brisbane or the Gold Coast where she (later) lived and take her to a restaurant, she couldn’t come to grips with spending that sort of money.”
How must she have looked upon a jetsetting son who, at the height of his fortune, could afford to fly from Melbourne each weekend to barrack for the Sydney Swans and was part of a consortium that lost millions on the club.
THE skills that would make him were evident from an early age. By 15 he had begun an apprenticeship as a photolithographer. But a paid job was not enough. Ever a hustler, he fronted weddings with a camera uninvited, handing out personalised cards on the off-chance someone might
want to buy prints.
More lucrative still, he organised dances at which he played guitar in a band that called itself The Boys, sold the tickets, even turned up the heater to sell more Coca-Cola. On his 17th birthday he was able to pay Ë700 cash for his first car, a Morris Mini Minor 850.
It reflects a pattern that persists to the days when he would stand firm and broker the toughest of deals with entrepreneurs Harry M.
Miller and Garry van Egmond, who wanted John Farnham to star in a revival of `Jesus Christ Superstar’.
It was a deal, Wheatley once told me, that culminated in Harry M.
going down on bended knee as if to ask God whether he should agree to the proposal. Wheatley crept up alongside and whispered: “Do it Harry. Do it.”
Van Egmond marvels at Wheatley’s ability to negotiate a “fantastic deal” for Farnham when ‘Superstar’ had its run extended. He was able to do so because he had made Farnham a star again, rescuing him from an eternal round of the club circuit in the mid-1980s when he discovered his
old St Kilda flatmate singing at a Queensland venue backed by a woeful “nowhere, four-piece” band that had not rehearsed. He cringed when Farnham stopped mid-song to count them in again.
Outside, singer and manager “ceremoniously took his black tie suit and threw it into the slops bucket” and vowed to get a decent band and get back on the road to glory. Out of this came Australia’s biggest-selling (1.4 million copies) album, Farnham’s `Whispering Jack’. It is “sacred ground
to us”, Wheatley says.
Wheatley regards Farnham as his best friend, all the more so because their relationship has persisted despite the singer being among those who had lent him money. He is sensitive to reports that this “may have cost” Farnham $650,000.
“I borrowed money from him in the dying days of keeping that building (The Ivy) alive and when it all collapsed, he was caught up like everybody else . . . He had to make sure it didn’t affect the friendship . . . I don’t even think he thought twice.”
Nor, by some accounts, has he lost the old magic. Farnham’s musical director, Lindsay Field, is a close friend of the Wheatleys. He remembers that at a restaurant last year, Wheatley came up with the idea of a concert to raise money for Rwanda.
He was under the impression it would basically be a small affair. A week or two later the concert was televised live at the National Tennis Centre.
Many others were involved but it could not have happened without Wheatley, Field says.
The 1980s were a dizzying time when Wheatley was alternating between roles in rock managment and radio boss. He was instrumental in founding Australia’s first commercial FM radio station, 3EON in 1980.
With the financial backing of the Heine brothers, developers of the Malvern Central shopping complex, he took it over six years later, along with the Sydney station 2MMM.
Three months after the acquisition, he was approached by the Sydney- based Fink family, with a tantalising $130 million offer. “That’s when I think the madness started. I had shareholders going, `Glenn this is crazy. We could walk out of here with a $40 million profit.
But I was torn with guilt because I had made such a commitment to both radio stations personally and I felt like those staff were looking to me for their security.”
He clearly took great pride in the venture: “It was a great feeling. Here I was with 2MMM in Sydney potentially one of the most powerful radio stations in the country and to walk on to that floor and basically get the accolades that I was getting at the time was probably the greatest high that
I have ever had in my entire life.”
In 1987, with the prospect of making the network the biggest in Australian radio, he was persuaded to sell the Fink family a 51 per cent share and became the managing director of Hoyts Media, an arm of the Fink family-owned Hoyts Corporation.
Rather than take cash, at the time of the Hoyts acquisition, Wheatley kept a paper shareholding. When Hoyts Media was floated two weeks before the stockmarket crash of October 1987, shares plummeted from $1.30 to 54 cents and never really recovered. “My paper fortune went straight
out the window,” Wheatley says.
“I sold out my shares. That was a dark day in my life. I miss those stations something awful. Every time the ratings come out I still look at them. I live with ratings.”
AT a reunion of the Everton Park State High School in Queensland last year, Glenn Wheatley was surprised by the number of schoolmates who had not left the old neighborhood. “They bought sections as they called it, blocks of dirt. Some of them two blocks from their parents’ home and
they all married and live in the community.
“I felt very early that if I didn’t make a break that I would get locked into it.” Not yet 17, he had a steady girlfriend and was talking about settling down like everyone else “I guess I panicked a little, I thought, `oh no’.”
He recalls the day he took the family back to the old neighborhood.
The children dozed in the backseat as the car glided through a suburbia he says was “as west in your culture as you are ever going to get”.
Remembering unpaved footpaths, mum’s home-sewn school uniforms and barefoot games of football, he felt a little like Chevy Chase trying to rouse the kids in some `National Lampoon’ vacation movie.
To make his point, Wheatley leans across and shakes you vigorously.
At 47, there is still a boyishness about him. He wanted his children to see the old home. But they slept on.
“The students of 1961 carry in their hands the torch of achievement,” says the school magazine editorial. “Whether it burns bright or low depends to a large extent on our aims and ambitions today.”
Who would have singled out this particular boy with short back-and- sides, fringe brushed backwards, from class photos? Public servant Craig Porter persuaded him to join a band that was known ultimately as The Town Cryers.
“Glenn was the unofficial leader of the band. He’d always organise the gigs. He had the PR skills none of the others had,” recalls Porter.
Jim Keays, vocalist with the popular 1960s band, Masters Apprentices, recalls another band Wheatley played in: Bay City Union.
He didn’t think much of them but marvelled at Wheatley’s ability to ensure they always had work. Keays lured Wheatley across to the Masters Apprentices.
Years later, Keays would detect a change of attitude in Wheatley. He was no longer the fresh-faced bass player easily reduced to tears by bandmates annoyed at his haircuts and general failure to live up to the desired bad boy image.
In the mid-’70s, determined to establish a band that would make it big in America, Wheatley took the Little River Band under his wing as manager. They would eventually tour the US 13 times and enjoy enormous commercial success.
He is working on an autobiography tentatively titled `Paper Paradise’. Its title comes from an LRB song. It was derogatory but oh so prophetic, he concedes, quoting lines: “Hey, you’re going to lose your paper paradise It only takes a spark to make it burn.”
Others may talk of his verve, but Wheatley believes he has a long way to go to regain his stature. “I want to show the city,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the highrises beyond the gardens.
“I want to show business that I’m still capable. I guess that one thing I fought for all my life is credibility. “I lost a lot through this. When the smell of death comes around in business, you are persona non grata for a while.”
The Sunday Age, 19th of February 1995
Larry Schwartz Writer 