| Larry Schwartz |
| He’s one of the few survivors of `80s excess. At nights, he weeps for the world’s poor. But if he lost his fortune, Rene Rivkin says he still might kill himself. AT HIS lavish 50th birthday party on the Sydney harborfront earlier this year, many wise men came bearing gifts for Rene Rivkin. “Beautiful things,” he says, when asked about presents from the likes of Graham Richardson, Laurie Brereton, Rodney Adler, Ray and Diane Martin, and John and Caroline Laws. “I love beautiful things. “I got a 2000-year-old piece of pottery from one of these people. I got a gold watch from another one. I got three sets of gold cufflinks. I got some beautiful books. I got four or five caricatures of me by various cartoonists. I got a beautiful 1910 Lalique decanter which I love …” But Rene Rivkin wants it known he is not as self-serving as some might think. “I think all the PR would be that I’m not a caring human being, that I don’t give a f… about anybody. That is entirely untrue.” The view of the harbor from his desk takes your breath away. But former stockbroker Rene Rivkin has his mind on the worries of the world. Way up in a 33rd-floor office that is a rent-free gift from a city firm for which he trades on commission, he seems close to tears at one stage. “Life’s been good but I am a caring person. I’m not that selfish that I can say to myself: `My life’s good, therefore f… the Rwandans’ … “It actually makes me unhappy that there is so much misery in the world. And, when I am down and depressed, I can cry about these things.” Enveloped in the easy intimacy he exudes, it does not seem incongruous to hear this from a man less known for compassion than taste for pricey art and fancy cars. Not until later do you pause to reflect, for instance, on the luxury of owning 400 to 500 ties, including the red one he wears with elephant motifs – of a kind John Elliott favors for luck. “These things actually bring out tears in me,” he says about the world’s problems. “That leaves me unhappy. I think it’s a rotten place. I think the world is a total failure. I lie in bed thinking I’d like to be out of here so at least I don’t have to look at it … It’s no good saying I am a have. Yes, I am a have. What about all the have- nots?” A brief biographical note from his office describes him as “one of Australia’s most quietly generous philanthropists, lending financial support to many charities and non-profit organisations”. There is no reason to doubt his compassion even if his is a lifestyle that contrasts so jarringly with that of those for whom he weeps. His friend Rodney Adler, chief executive officer of the FAI Insurance Group, agrees. “A lot of people have this illusion of Rene being ruthless: it’s just so far from reality. This is a very kind guy. This is a guy who can’t fire anyone because it upsets him too much. He gets other people to do it if he has to, and it takes maybe months and months to make a decision …” That he may be perceived as uncaring seems to bother Rivkin more than the way he used to be lampooned, as he was in a front-page article in `The Australian Financial Review’ of June 1986. That story disclosed his habit of playing the world markets by telephone at night while on the toilet. For a while he fiddles with a spare set of gold worry beads, explaining that these are for formal wear. The casual set of 33 24- carat beads lost in Surfers Paradise in May has not been recovered despite the promise of a reward of $2000 and a sharemarket tip from the market’s most famous tipster. Rivkin lights up a second Monte Cristo cigar, size No.2. He smokes three or four a day. Never inhale, he cautions. A caffeine-free diet Coke can lies empty on the desk. He drinks 15 or more a day. He attributes his relative good humor these days largely to the controversial drug for depression called Prozac, prescribed by a psychiatrist he visits fortnightly. He says he takes twice the average dose. “I used to wake up with butterflies in my stomach with a premonition that something was going to go wrong, and there were mornings when I just couldn’t face the world. When I just had to stay in bed. That’s gone … “I’m definitely more able to cope with life: I’ve never been as happy as I am today.” RENE RIVKIN rose to prominence in the 1980s, brokering deals for Kerry Packer, Sir Peter Abeles, Alan Bond and Singapore investor Lee Ming Tee, among others. He is said to have been involved in some of the biggest sharemarket raids (Myer, Arnotts, Wormald and Brambles). A mate of Bob Hawke, his friend Graham Richardson has said of him: “I don’t believe Rene has an evil thought in his head.” At one stage, he was a partner in John Singleton’s ad agency. In lieu of the real Rivkin, the agency had a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Rene, trained to say: “What are you doing?” “What are you doing?” From the start, he was louder than life in a staid, tweedy profession. “I was an unusual stockbroker. I think that my confreres in the industry didn’t like me very much for a variety of reasons. One of which was my high profile and the other one was my obvious success, because a lot of stockbrokers basically over the years haven’t made much money.” MORE than just a colorful figure of the ’80s he has remained standing while many a high-flier has fallen. Rivkin puts his personal wealth these days at at least $20million and says you need only look at his lavish lifestyle to know he is “more than a survivor”. His trademark cigars and gold beads were seen to epitomise a time of excess and Rivkin himself was depicted again and again as the ’80s archetype. “Look at me. I’m not in jail. I’m not charged with anything and I won’t be. I think that the greed that you refer to is now either in court or in jail …” Nor, he hastens to add, did he go broke. “It is just about impossible for Rene to collapse,” says Adler. “Rene does not put all his eggs in one basket; Rene is diversified. I have never known him not to be very liquid.” Several years younger than Rivkin, the FAI boss has detected a recent change in Rivkin. “What we are seeing is a metamorphosis of Rene Rivkin. He is becoming a little more conservative as he gets older. He is certainly losing his flamboyance. He is not as keen on media recognition as he was in his youth and he is much more likely to try to preserve wealth, knowing how hard it was to build.” What Rivkin calls semi-retirement entails running a printing company, trading on the sharemarket and involving himself in such ventures as a planned golf driving range on a block he and close friend Trevor Kennedy (former Australian Consolidated Press managing director, now chairman of the Sunshine Broadcasting Network) have in the heart of the CBD. Asked about Rivkin, Kennedy notes not just his intelligence or his wiliness as a trader but his basic decency. “He’s a very trustworthy and trusting person,” says Kennedy, who has an office alongside Rivkin’s and regularly drops by for a game of backgammon, adding: ” … he’s also a bit mad.” Rene Rivkin has never seen the need to insure the exquisite antiques and artworks at his home in the eastern Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill. Nor the collection of fine cars: the Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, Bentley turbo, Mercedes 500 SL, Mercedes 300 SE Cabriolet, BMW 750i, Jaguar XK150 drop-head coupe, a hot rod and others. He says he is a “strong atheist”. Even if there is a God, he wants nothing to do with a deity that is not both omnipotent and benevolent. If anything, he sees signs of malevolence instead. “Would you torture these tortured children of Rwanda or Bangladesh or Ethiopia, or would you get off your arse and do something? … If you and I can work it out, why can’t he?” His convictions were tested in late 1980s surgery to remove a brain tumor he says was “the size of a golf ball”. In hospital, he considered prayer for a few hours. Time to put up or shut up, he told himself then. “But, not being a hypocrite, if I started praying and survived then it would mean I would have to go and pray for the rest of my life and be a believer, go to synagogue and do all the sorts of things that religious Jews have to do … I remember distinctly lying there saying: `F… it! I’ll stick to my views.”‘ Frankness, he says, is one of the eccentricities with which he is happiest. He and wife, Gayle, argue over his insistence on discussing their arguments with others. “The reason I tell my friends is that maybe I am wrong. I’m not infallible. She doesn’t want to ever convey to our friends the subject matter of our disputes. That’s washing your linen in public etc. I don’t understand that.” Rivkin has said he would seriously contemplate suicide if he lost his fortune. “Yes, yes,” he tells me. “Aren’t you going to die anyway? Now, if I say to you that all of a sudden Rene Rivkin’s broke, Rene Rivkin can’t have fun any more … And so I only want to live while it’s fun …” He enjoys the company of people younger than himself. On the floor, he had it with employees of other broking firms, drawn by his success and charm. Now he frequents a coffee shop in inner-suburban Potts Point. “I have been adopted by the people there, who are from all walks of life … Some of them are plumbers. Some of them are unemployed. One is a tattooist.” Then off to the office where he spends about 10 hours a week at work, chatting or playing backgammon with Kennedy. Then he is off home for an afternoon nap to compensate for sleep lost while trading at night on the New York, London and Paris markets for himself and friends. RENE RIVKIN was born in China, his parents in Russia. He enjoyed a pampered lifestyle. “We had 10 or 12 domestic staff. My father used to work three or four hours a day and then we used to go to the Shanghai Jewish club.” Overweight and spoilt rotten by his mother, young Rene was just 14 when he came upon a prospectus for United Telecasters and applied for 200 shares, borrowing 50 from his dad. They soared to 125 and he concluded that share trading was “an unbelievable way to make money: you don’t have to work for it”. After studying law at Sydney University on a Commonwealth scholarship, he joined the stockbroking firm, J.J.North in 1970, and was so successful he soon persuaded one of the partners to leave with him to start a business. Until 1987 he was half-owner of James Capel Australia. The missing beads were made for him in Singapore 25 years ago. He had first seen men with olive-wood worry beads, while he and Gayle were holidaying in Greece soon after his marriage in 1973. He then smoked three-and-a-half packets of cigarettes a day and she insisted he quit. “I started to fiddle with those and gave up smoking. I didn’t smoke anything for 10 years so they were purely functional at that stage.” Ten years later, in 1983, he took up cigars. That year he threw an extravagant farewell party at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the eve of his departure for London. He intended staying away for a few years but was back within six months. The party was “another typical, sick, Jewish, manic- depressive nonsense”, he says. He denies reports that he left Sydney because he was disillusioned that Labor had come to power. “I just had a very severe nervous breakdown and thought I wanted to live in England. God knows why. We arrived in London. I walked into this expensive apartment in Mayfair that I had rented. We walked in the front door and I said: `Gayle, it’s a mistake. Let’s go back.’ “They all thought I was crazy. Which I was. And they refused to come back then. All I did was lie in bed and cry for six months.” For some years, Rivkin and Co. had a Melbourne office but he felt very much the outsider here. “I don’t know if it was because I was not Establishment or because I was not Establishment and Jewish, to boot – which is doubly bad.” He revels in his Jewishness. “You look at me, am I not Jewish? Do I not behave Jewish ?..” To Rivkin, Jewishness has little to do with the synagogue (“I have a hatred for it”) or with God. To him, Jewishness is “in there somewhere in my tummy, in my heart”. Defining it is an age-old conundrum. He claims his famous disdain for physical exercise is “very Jewish, very Jewish”. For one seemingly unstable, he is blessed with domestic stability. “No one as mad as Rene could survive without Gayle,” says Adler. Rene and Gayle Rivkin have sons aged 21, 20 and 15-year-old twins. Their daughter is seven. The children have been brought up as liberal Jews though they would not be considered, Jewish in the Orthodox tradition because Gayle is Anglican. Ironically it was she, he says, who insisted on their Jewish upbringing so that they would be secure in one tradition. Does she still go to church? “No, no, no,” he laughs. “She’s an atheist. I won there …” All things considered, he seems quite pleased with himself. “There is no drawback in being 50 as opposed to 30. It’s only its proximity to 70. I’m as fit as a 30-year-old. I feel mentally as alert. I feel my memory has never been better. My business acumen has never been better. My feeling for the economy has never been better.” He worries about infirmity but not about the hereafter. “I think one of the advantages of atheism is that I’m not afraid of death … You see I can’t get to purgatory, I just get to a long sleep. I actually like knowing what I am doing and you guys don’t know what you are doing. You don’t, do you!” There is clearly no middle ground for Rene Rivkin and, despite his certainty that he will escape purgatory, no sense of a Heaven either, up on the 33rd floor. What they say about Rene… Graham Richardson — “I don’t believe Rene has an evil thought in his head, which separates him from most of the people I know.” Rodney Adler — “He is a very volatile character and that’s why people call him mad, because he is mad.” Trevor Kennedy — “He’s a very trustworthy and trusting person, a very generous and loyal friend. He’s also a bit mad.” THE SUNDAY AGE, 25-Sep-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 