Annette Sharp: Why my 2019 interview with Andrew O’Keefe ended abruptly

Andrew O’Keefe laughed, cracked jokes and opened up about his life during a 2019 interview with Annette Sharp. But a single question turned the ebullient showman into AO’K the lawyer — and the interview was over.

It was as though a switch had been flicked at some subcellular level inside Andrew O’Keefe as we eyeballed each other across the dining table belonging to the Seven Network’s ethereal and fussing director of publicity.

It was October 4, 2019, and I’d just crossed a line.

Following a year in and out of rehab facilities, Seven had offered O’Keefe up for a rare interview. But in an unusual twist, the interview was to take place at the home of Seven’s publicity boss, Susan Wood.

Her Pyrmont townhouse was apparently considered a safe place for our meeting.

Andrew O’Keefe leaves Waverley Court in June last year after assault charges involving his ex-girlfriend were dropped. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

On the surface the interview looked to be a peace offering.

I’d been badgering Seven for more than a year regarding O’Keefe’s spiralling health issues and Seven’s apparent complacency.

All inquiries about O’Keefe and any history of drug use had been repeatedly denied by Seven, swatted away with the haughty indifference one can expect from an organisation that routinely supplies five-day-a-week personal drivers to habitually drunk executives to ensure they make it into the office every day while remaining off the road, out of the newspapers and out of jail.

O’Keefe, Seven’s then 48-year-old game show ratings champion, had been in and out of rehab for “exhaustion” — as he called it — and mental health issues for part of the previous year.

Ten months earlier he’d been axed from the helm of Weekend Sunrise after a rumoured incident in a toilet at a Seven Christmas party. My inquiries regarding that, too, had been airily dismissed.

Promotional pictures for Andrew O’Keefe Shouts Johnny O’Keefe.

After checking into rehab in April 2019, production on the top-rating game show he hosted, The Chase, had been halted from May to July — a fact that had tested the patience of network bean counters and forced the network to run repeat episodes of the game show, risking the loss of justifiably furious advertisers.

Further rehab stints would follow for O’Keefe in the next two years. But on that Friday morning in 2019 he would be mine for 30 minutes.

I was asked to stick primarily to one subject, his forthcoming partly self-funded concert tour, Andrew O’Keefe Shouts Johnny O’Keefe, in which he performed the songs made famous by his uncle, one of the nation’s most celebrated rock’n’roll stars.

A question about substance abuse abruptly ended Annette Sharp’s interview with O’Keefe.

After some toing and froing about the timing of our interview, 10am Friday was locked in.

Soon after I arrived, the apologies from Seven’s soon-to-be former publicity director began.

O’Keefe was running late. There had been some confusion with the limo driver hired to bring him to the meeting, so I was told.

Tardiness, as I’ve learned more recently, had become a hallmark of O’Keefe’s work during his final years at Seven.

Eventually, around 40 minutes later, O’Keefe strode in looking a little too sticky for a mild October day and talking a little too quickly. He appeared to be vibrating and he had with him a guest, a woman. It struck me at the time that she was a witness to what was to come.

The interview would begin with Seven’s representative explaining why we were in her compact dining room.

“You guys are going to have a chat here — and when we get to anything we need to say pause on, we pause,” she said, speaking deliberately, slowly. Looking intently first at me, then O’Keefe.

It was as though she was instructing two battle-weary pro wrestlers before a grudge match, each of us suspected of having a knife in a sock.

“Mmm mmm mmmm mmmm” O’Keefe agreed, beginning what became a pattern of seemingly nervous repetitive interjections.

“Annette’s come here — and you’ve come here — to do a story and we’re going to see how we go,” our referee explained.

“Terrific, terrific,” O’Keefe said agitatedly, chewing hard on his gum.

O’Keefe at his father Barry O’Keefe's funeral in 2014.

Over the course of the 80 minutes, O’Keefe loosened up and opened up. He cracked jokes and laughed hard, perhaps at times too hard, while talking about the “mania” afflicting the men in his family, the dissolution of his marriage, his role as a father and recent conversations with his children, his largely absent father who “loved dress-ups” and would climb into bed with the 14-year-old O’Keefe at 4am for a catch-up cuddle, his shifting role at Seven and the “expansion” of his soul.

He gave himself over to the interview, every word of it performance art.

Occasionally he’d give too much.

“It’s one of the sad ironies of our culture, isn’t it, that game show hosts get paid about as much as the top haematologists at St Vincent’s hospital,” he said, making what seemed an oblique reference at the time but which would turn out to be comment on his relationship with a doctor he was then newly romancing, and some 15 months later would be accused of assaulting. Those charges concerning St Vincent’s haematologist Dr Orly Lavee were dropped last year on mental health grounds.

O’Keefe and Dr Orly Lavee, who he was later charged with assaulting. The charges were dismissed on mental health grounds.

“I grew up believing that wearing a three-quarter-length fox fur coat and silver nail polish in the summer in the middle of Double Bay was good — and that wherever you went someone would give you a cigarette and a whiskey,” he said at one point, addressing growing up in his Uncle Johnny’s shadow, something that shaped the star O’Keefe had become.

Fleetingly he addressed, though wouldn’t identify, an unnamed childhood injury that still torments him: “ … there’s another issue that I won’t go into that was … um … particularly poignant that came up after … 40 years … um … which I knew the existence of but had never really impacted me in the way that it did …”

When asked about his inpatient status at a rehab clinic, O’Keefe’s handler quickly shut the question down: “Sorry Annette.”

O’Keefe attempted to explain his minder’s sensitivity with another battery of words that addressed the “values” and “sensibilities” of “the insurance company”, presumably the one Seven employed to insure The Chase.

And then the question I had left until the tail of the interview and felt compelled to raise after Seven’s publicity boss suggested I rephrase an earlier question about “substance” abuse.

The publicist didn’t care for the word “substance”.

The star confronted AAP photographer Joel Carrett outside Downing Centre Local Court in 2019.

“I was going to ask you very specifically about cocaine — but I can tell from the … tone of our conversation that I wasn’t going to get an answer” I said, attempting to lead O’Keefe.

It was at this point O’Keefe changed, stiffened and became the aggressor in the room.

Gone was the ebullient showman. Before me now sat AO’K the lawyer, and with an icy disregard — and a lower tone of voice — he brought the laughs to an end.

“I … um … yeah … no, that wouldn’t get an answer but I can also say this, that, um, if anyone ever did a deep dive on that there would be no evidence in a medical sense.”

At this point our interview came to an abrupt end — though not the spiralling health issues that would ultimately cost O’Keefe his job 14 months later and continue, tragically, to plague him.

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