Phillip Adams (35 page)

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The unmentionable scandals of Lord Byron:
Ashley Hay, a Sydney journalist and author, started planning a book about Lord Byron's women and found he had so many of them — in one year in Venice, she said, he slept with a hundred — that she would have to write nine books to cover them. So she wrote
The Secret
(Duffy and Snellgrove) about his marriage to the prim heiress Annabella Millbanke and tried to find out why she left him after only 54 weeks taking their baby daughter Ada with her, would never tell anyone why and never saw him again. The story is full of rumours of Byron's incest, sodomy and affairs. Ashley Hay told Phillip Adams on
Late Night Live
on August 3, 2000, rebroadcast on March 7, 2008: ‘Annabella spent the rest of her life justifying her decision to leave Byron and persecuting his reputation. He was incredibly charismatic and women swooned when they saw him and queued around the block to marry him. But Annabella was very different. She was earnest, and serious about her religion. They had a candid and intellectual correspondence in the 18 months after she rejected his first marriage proposal. He needed to get married; he needed a wife and he needed the money.'

Adams: ‘Did he know what the secret was?'

Hay: ‘He sent letters to her saying neither her lawyers nor her father would tell him why she left him. The year of their marriage was his worst financially. All the people he owed money to pressed him for payment. Annabella was pregnant in the third month of their marriage. Originally when she left him, she said he was mad. She took pride in being unflappable and he took pride in getting people to lose their cool. She saw her duty in being there and bearing the extremities of life and he tried to get her to show him human responses.'

Adams: ‘Now that no-one is listening, what about Byron having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh?'

Hay: ‘There was a rumour about it in 1814, before the marriage. Annabella seized it and ran with it for 40 years.'

Adams: ‘He threw the idea of incestuous love around at a dinner party. He liked to throw hand grenades into conversations.'

Hay: ‘He wanted to play to the audience. If he could make someone splutter in their soup, so much the better. People were interested in how the other half lived. Incestuous relationships cropped up among the romantic poets.'

Adams: ‘Perhaps incest could account for all the British aristocracy's inbreeding problems. Byron's status as a celebrity seemed to collapse in on itself.'

Hay: ‘When London started to turn against him and take his wife's part, the mob that had created him was getting ready to cut him down. He left the scene, thereby opening the opportunities for more and more rumours. Augusta admitted to having an affair with Byron before his marriage. Annabella said he had admitted it. She started taking memos of meetings and there are 450 boxes of these.' Adams: ‘Vampires come into the story.' Hay: ‘Byron is someone you can say anything about, and there was a novel published by one of his mistresses, Caroline Lamb, which had a vampire sub-plot. There was also a novel by his physician called The Vampire that leans strongly on Byron as its lead character. There was a rumour that he killed one of his mistresses and had a cup made out of her skull, so no wonder the rumour arises that he drank the blood of his murder victims.'

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How Bobby Kennedy inspired America:
Barack Obama's 2008 US Presidential campaign echoed one 40 years earlier, when Bobby Kennedy gave America a message of hope and promises to end the Vietnam War. Americans were beginning to doubt they were the noble, courageous people they believed they were, after city riots in 1965, '66 and '67 and television films showing marines setting fire to Vietnamese villages. On
Late Night Live
on June 11, 2008, Adams read from a book,
The Last Campaign: Robert F Kennedy and the 82 Days That Inspired America
by Thurston Clarke (Henry Holt): ‘Bobby's determination to end the war was based on a belief that it was immoral. The only sin, the author said, was America's pride.'

Thurston Clarke said by phone from the US: ‘Bobby was torn as to whether he should get into the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He had painted himself into a moral corner. He condemned the war as immoral but people asked how could he say that and not campaign for President against Lyndon Johnson, who was escalating it? There was no good answer. Bobby was saying, “How can I support Johnson over the war, but people will be just as angry with me if I do not support him?” Jackie Kennedy said the same thing would happen to Bobby as happened to her assassinated husband, President Jack Kennedy, because some people hated Bobby more than Jack.'

Adams: ‘You describe Ethel as “recklessly frank, guarded, canny, guileless, brash and sensitive, a devout Catholic who threw wild parties.”'

Clarke: ‘She was one of the reasons the reporters described the campaign as a joyous adventure. They all had premonitions. There was black humour among the photographers, “Are you going to miss it?” Bobby was no saint. He had been a ruthless political enforcer for his brother. But after his brother was killed, things changed and he changed. The 82 days of his campaign was when he was at his best. He was absolutely hopeless at small talk and often stumble-tongued as an orator, certainly less charismatic than Jack but more passionate and hence more convincing. His shyness, vulnerability, the way his arms and legs shook when he talked, the way he stuttered, all these were very appealing to audiences. People saw him as so alone and so frail that they wanted to throw their arms around him. No-one wanted to throw their arms around Jack Kennedy because he was reserved. When Bobby spoke, it was as if he was asking the crowd to come to a conclusion. He used to think things out with the crowd. People in minority groups and blue-collar workers found a common bond with him.'

Adams: ‘Would he have won the nomination and the presidency?'

Clarke: ‘Yes.'

Adams: ‘What a different world it would have been.' (Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian angered by Bobby Kennedy's support of Israel, shot him in a passageway off the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5, 1968, and Kennedy died 26 hours later. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic Party nomination but was beaten by Republican Richard Nixon in the presidential election. Sirhan Sirhan was still in jail in 2010, 42 years later.)

Chapter Twenty-One:
Adams' Artifacts — His Ghostly Friends

Phillip Adams owns Australia's largest private collection of artifacts but he didn't have any interest in collecting until he was walking down Bond Street in London with Barry Humphries in 1972. Humphries seemed to believe that American Express would make him use the card all the time and he rushed into expensive stores buying a monocle in one, a scarf in another and then, in another, a Cecil Beaton hat from a little man who looked like the villain Uriah Heap in Charles Dickens'
David Copperfield
, grovelling in front of him. Uriah Heap told Barry, “Sir, that hat is a bargain” and Humphries replied, “I abhor a bargain. I insist on paying extra,” and flashed his Amex card. Adams left them to it and wandered off down Bond Street until, in the window of a shop with ‘By Royal Appointment' over the door, he saw a little blue amulet about the size of a fingernail with a card on it saying it was Egyptian, four thousand years old and cost ten pounds. He didn't know until then that he could buy things so old so cheaply. He bought it and still has it in his office in Sydney. It sat on a shelf to my left whenever I had tape-recording sessions with him.

Within a few years the little amulet had been joined by thousands of friends, totalling 4,100 objects stored in various places. As catalogued by Consulting Arts, they included: 1,512 antiquities; 546 pre-Columbian artifacts; 347 from Europe; 299 from Asia; 128 from Australia (including Wes Walters' portrait of Adams, which won the 1979 Archibald Prize); 90 American artifacts, 50 tribal artifacts, 31 Near and Middle Eastern items, 46 others and 30 fakes and questionable objects. (Consulting Arts, which spent 18 months cataloguing the collection, said: ‘Every museum and major art ­collection has ­forgeries.')

Adams told me, ‘Your attitude to antiquity changes dramatically as you become an antiquity yourself. When you're in your twenties and collect pieces of Egypt, you still feel on top. When you're past seventy, you realise the pyramids have won. They will be still here when you've gone. So your sense of triumph in obtaining a piece of ancient Egypt is mitigated by the realisation that you don't actually own it but you have it for your brief lifetime. It's almost like you rent it.'

Adams has a special affection for Egyptian art because of its serenity — ‘People say Khmer culture is serene, but Egyptian is more so. In Eastern art, the eye line is downcast and inward looking. In Roman art, the beginning of modern portraiture, the eyeline is directly looking at you. In Egyptian art, the eyeline is beyond you and beyond the horizon because the Egyptians looked to eternity.' Adams collected items that intrigued him, so the collection grew and grew and is undisciplined. He only occasionally sells items because he falls out of love with them or they become suspect. He has not bought anything for quite a while. In the past, he bought from dealers in Australia, New York City, Los Angeles, Amsterdam or London, often from Sotheby's. Once, when he opened the Phillip Adams Antiquities Gallery in Toorak in Melbourne, he phoned Graham Geddes, a local antique dealer, to try to borrow some Spanish tables. Geddes came around to his shop and said, ‘What's all this crap?' He knew nothing of antiquities as distinct from antiques but Adams believes Geddes is now one of the world's biggest antiquities dealers.

After Adams moved to Sydney in the 1980s and while he was taking part in the Bicentennial telecast on January 1, 1988, the pro-Nazi National Front raided his 1840s house in Darlinghurst, spray-painted the sandstone walls with choice words such as ‘Adams is a multi-racial cunt' and was starting to smash his artifacts collection when the police arrived. So he moved his collection to several safer locations.

These days, Egypt and most other countries ban antiquities exports, in contrast with the days when archeologists filled their own or national galleries with relics stolen on Tutankhamen or other digs. Diplomats still steal relics in diplomatic bags. So do international pilots. Street markets are full of relics stolen not by Europeans but by locals. Soldiers' and locals' mass looting of relics in Iraq after the US invasion could have been avoided if the American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield had not been more intent on knocking over statues of Saddam Hussein than on saving 5,000-year-old antiquities.

Once when Adams walked into a dealer's shop in Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles, and asked a salesman the price of an item, a voice called out from the office above, ‘Is that Phillip Adams?' He could tell the voice was Australian, he had never met Adams but guessed it was him because Adams was well known as a collector. Ironically, most antiquities are not expensive. Adams' are valued at from $100 to $1million each and average $4,988, according to his catalogue. Egyptian antiquities are the most valuable, averaging $8,373 followed by European art (averaging $5,314), Near and Middle Eastern art ($1,839) and Oriental art ($1,242). The biggest numbers of items are statues and sculptures (1,404 items), household items (618), paintings and wall and floor art (378), funerary and religious equipment (243), jewellery (103), arms and armoury (83), furniture (69), musical instruments (61), numismatics and philately (45) and books and ­manuscripts (17).

The world antiquities market goes up and down and many items don't gain in value. When Adams went to the Nelson Rockefeller exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, he found it cost more to buy a Rockefeller replica than the original item. He said the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is ‘a wreck, and I love it.'

He told me a story about William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), one of the greatest Egyptologist in history and connected by family to the Matthew Flinders, who circumnavigated Australia from 1801 to '03. Petrie was digging near Cairo in 1903, at a time when no image existed of Khufu (known as Cheops), who was the Pharaoh of Egypt from 2589 to 2566 BCE and who built the Great Pyramid of Giza, the tallest building in the world until the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Petrie was digging when one excited archeologist rushed up to him with the base of an ivory statuette 7.6cm high, carrying Cheops' name but without the head. Petrie's archeologists searched like demons and found the head after three days and, stuck together with glue that has dribbled down the side, the statuette is in a glass case in the Cairo Museum, where Adams found it on a trip to Egypt. As he was admiring it, one of the tourist police came up and asked, ‘You like it?', to which Adams replied, ‘I'll give you 12 Egyptian pounds (a few Australian dollars) for it.' The man looked around, went away and came back with a screwdriver, apparently planning to pick the lock. Adams had to persuade him that he had been joking.

The five-week trip to Egypt in January 2009 with his partner Patrice Newell and their daughter Rory was Phillip's eighth but Rory's first. She was 17 and Adams wanted her to have a comprehensive experience of one of his favourite places. They travelled from Abu Simbel in South Egypt to Alexandria in the north and had a great time in the Library of Alexandria, whose curator once appeared on Late Night Live when he was in Sydney. Behind the Egyptians' engaging smiles was mounting concern about how they would feed their families as the world financial crash hit tourism, which provides about eighty per cent of Egypt's income, concentrated into a few weeks every winter.