Ghosts of father Kerry and uncle Clyde haunting James Packer’s European vacation

Photos showing a convalescing James Packer hosting a party of pals and their model girlfriends on board a luxury yacht brought groans from deep within the Packer camp this week.

James Packer stayed inside his yacht as friends sunned themselves on the deck. Picture: Backgrid

PHOTOGRAPHS this week showing a convalescing James Packer hosting a party of pals and their model girlfriends on board a luxury yacht in the south of France brought groans from deep within the Packer camp.

The images were shot the same day a spokesman for Packer’s private investment company confirmed the billionaire had resigned from the Packer family’s primary investment vehicle board of 64 years, Consolidated Press Holdings, and from the boards of other companies.

If a paparazzo’s lucky scoop of the troubled businessman arriving for the European party season — for years an annual event on the casino boss’s social calendar — forced the hand of Packer’s lieutenants sitting on the news of his latest and perhaps final corporate retreat, there would be no word of it in despatches.

James Packer’s mates including Karl Stefanovic and Ben Tilley were keeping the tycoon company on board his luxury yacht in the French Riviera this week. Picture: Backgrid

The announcement was also preceded, five days earlier, by News Corp’s revelation Packer’s new Barangaroo casino has a legal fight on its hands to preserve its views of Sydney landmarks the Opera House and Harbour Bridge — one that threatens to cost Crown $2 billion a year in hotel room occupancies.

That could prove a sizeable hit to Crown which is now the subject of a five-yearly review of the casino’s operation licence by the Victorian Government — a review that will look in some detail, one presumes, at the $300,000 fine handed down by Victoria’s gambling regulator in April after the operators of Melbourne’s Crown Casino were found guilty of tampering with poker machines.

But James Packer was far from those battles last week, drifting in luxury on the azure oceans of the French Riviera, not far from where Elton John and David Furnish were watching their young sons Zachary and Elijah play in the golden sand of Saint-Tropez and where Packer’s ex love, American model Jennifer Flavin, was spied buying gelato with husband Sly Stallone and their three daughters Sistine, Sophia and Scarlet.

Packer ex, Jennifer Flavin, was holidaying in nearby St Tropez with husband Sylvester Stallone and their daughters. Pictures: Mega

Keeping Packer company on the splendid mega-yacht he has leased for what some sources are calling “the first summer of his retirement” is a party of some 10 less famous types.

Most famous in the group is Channel 9’s eternal goodtime boy and longtime Packer hanger-on, Karl Stefanovic.

Others in the group include Kerry Packer’s poker buddy Ben Tilley, who is understood to be on Packer’s payroll, and Stefanovic’s camera-ready fiancee Jasmine Yarbrough.

Though their host remained out of the sun while the photographers snapped away, Packer can clearly be seen inside the cabin of the boat looking withdrawn despite the gaiety around him.

It is only two months since Packer was discharged from a Boston private hospital and rehabilitation centre following six weeks treatment for issues that close sources maintain have plagued him for years.

His hospitalisation was considered so critical in March, his octogenarian mother Roslyn dropped everything and rushed from Sydney to Packer’s side in snowy Boston to support and participate in his inpatient treatment program.

Generally one wouldn’t expect to find a man as troubled as Packer heading directly from treatment in Boston to Cabo in Mexico and then on to Europe’s elite party locale to hang — in polo shirt, shorts and thongs — with some of the most fashionable people of Europe, including Packer’s own pretty model companion, Canadian Kylie Lim.

Elton John and David Furnish joined actor Neil Patrick Harris and his family while holidaying in the same area as Packer and his mates. Picture: Instagram

Sources say Packer has been encouraged to surround himself with loved ones as part of his recovery from what his spokesman has previously described as “mental health” issues brought on, to an extent, by his inclination towards reclusiveness.

Sadly there has been no sign of his three children, his mother, sister Gretel and her family and his two ex-wives on board the yacht this past week.

Erica Packer was sighted in Saint Tropez with Packer’s young children Indigo, Jackson and Emmanuelle on July 2. Two days later a forlorn looking Packer had ice cream with his children in Portofino, Erica seemingly otherwise engaged.

Packer is now just two years shy of an important milestone.

His late father, media titan Kerry Packer, was 52 when he suffered the heart attack that left him clinically dead for eight minutes while playing polo at Warwick Farm. It resulted in a lifesaving heart bypass.

It came just two years after 50-year-old Packer Sr instigated the biggest corporate coup of his career — the sale of his two Channel 9 television
stations to Alan Bond for a billion dollars.

James Packer is now the same age, 50, but recent events have inspired comparisons not to Kerry, but to his older brother Clyde, who ditched the family business altogether at age 37 — selling out to younger brother Kerry for the bargain knockdown price of just $4 million.

Clyde took his $4 million and quit Australia for LA where he spent the rest of life largely estranged from his family, battling manifest health issues, though happy.

Upon his death in 2001, Barry Humphries wrote in eulogy of Clyde: “You haven’t been in showroom condition … for quite a while.”

The same could easily be said of Clyde’s nephew, James, who now wrestles with both large and formidable Packer ghosts.