Bert Newton had a gift of making everyone feel comfortable
TV icon Bert Newton didn’t need scripts or autocues to win over fans from all walks of life or save one reporter from being a quivering mess. Leave your own tribute.
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When Bert Newton was still in his prime back, I went on his show to promote a new book and found out just why he would be remembered as the face of TV. This is what I wrote about the encounter back in 2003.
You are the next guest on Good Morning Australia. The host, Bert Newton, has his pants around his ankles.
He stands on the coffee table of his Channel 10 set parading in fishnet stockings. Sexy models have just been upstaged by an ageing man with meaty thighs.
The crew is still sniggering at the outrageousness of it all as Newton cuts to an advertorial. A producer jokingly shields your eyes from the spectacle but what’s the point? A national audience got to see it.
Newton has spotted you standing inside the studio, the quivering mess masquerading as his next interview who stumbles among the cords snaking across the floor, who ducks under monitors and light screens fully imported from the Death Star, who dodges cameras and generally bumbles around 15 or so crew like a fool heading sideways in a street march.
Newton fumbles with the correct belt hole. Now his pants are safely hitched beneath his portly belly. Outbreaks of giggling echo. “Come sit down,” he says, showing you to the couch.
Newton has read your book and he knows the subject. He reads all the books of authors on his show, always on the premises, because his lines between duty and pleasure, private and public, are closely guarded.
He asks after mutual acquaintances and praises your work during the lull. His questions are bright and insightful. You begin to relax. With this bloke, maybe you can arrange words to form sentences.
Then the lights shine. Newton introduces you with congratulations.
LEAVE YOUR TRIBUTE TO BERT IN THE COMMENTS, OR EMAIL US HSLETTERS@HERALDSUN.COM.AU
Your heart pumps perhaps 1000 times in the next five minutes. Then it’s over. You walk out reeling from the shock of your first television appearance. You are blushing, too, because Newton has been so kind.
His is one of many in a long line of your media interviews.
Finally, it seems, an interviewer has actually listened to your answers. You can’t remember much, but you can still see the friendly smile. You can still feel the curiosity in the questions.
Newton can make anyone feel warm. Maybe that’s his gift, and perhaps it would have shown up in other ways had he pursued, as he hoped to for a time growing up, the Catholic priesthood. It’s certainly one of the main reasons he can draw an audience many decades since his first time on air as a precocious boy scout.
It is a few years into a new millennium.
Newton’s viewers of today are younger than ever before, and about one in four letters are from fans 21 or under.
It is Newton’s “tremendous adaptability”, says Channel 10’s then Melbourne general manager, Kerry Kingston, that has enshrined his status at a television station tilted at younger markets.
It’s no wonder that Newton’s close-up photo at the studio’s Melbourne reception desk is magnified more than any other. As Bob Hope once said, Newton is Australia’s Bob Hope.
GMA has been going for 12 years. It probably wouldn’t last 12 months without Newton. The blend of chat and cooking and advertorial would bore without the sort of host who plays running gags involving clumps of hair blowing off his head.
Maybe you’ve heard it all before. Newton launches one-liners as if he selects the appropriate funny from a memory catalogue. Yet still it’s fresh. He always works on the run. No autocues, no scripts. It’s the only way he learned to do television.
He looks much the same as ever, the big face with ready expressions – cheesy grin, boggle eyes – to bamboozle the most earnest of guests.
He always wears a jacket and tie.
He can fluff a line here or there but they often slip through unnoticed. He can turn a sneeze into a gag or dress up a camera glitch. He can swap silly for earnest – Benny Hill for The 7.30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien – in an instant.
“He can relate just as well to John Howard as a little old lady appearing on the show for the first time on her 90th birthday,” says comedy writer Mike McColl Jones.
He credits Newton’s longevity to his continuing interest in the world around him, as well as his willingness to accept the past as the past.
Newton remains unruffled like few other performers, he says, so long as he has his religious medals to wear and his Cedel breath freshener on hand.
“He knows what’s going on,” he says. “He’s probably better informed than most current affairs people.”
You are calmer on returning to interview Newton a few weeks later. There is no on-air appearance, well, not unless the playful host, as he has done in the past, decides the writer in the room might be useful comic fodder.
Draughts sail through the studio but the atmosphere is warm. You find yourself clapping when the crew does, and laughing along after Newton has cut to the commercial break.
Newton chats on the couch in between segments. Today’s line-up includes a palmist who pauses to study Newton’s sex life until the host cuts in: “Only girls”.
Patti mock seduces two of the floor crew before trying it on with her reluctant husband. She is cooing a Marilyn Monroe song in character.
Fresh from squeezing a raw dim sim on-air – and declaring the result a win for those who don’t eat pork – Newton wipes filling from his fingers.
He pre-empts your line of questioning.
“When will I give it away?” he asks himself.
“It’s tied in with my passion for the industry. I’m not all that thrilled with the promotion. I’m not all that thrilled with (giving) interviews. The job itself is the thrill.”
Newton pauses to sum up what he means. There was a Barry Humphries TV interview. Humphries described being on stage as being “alone at last”.
“That meant a lot to me,” Newton says. “It can be a form of escapism. I handle television better than I handle some aspects of life. When I walk away from television each day, I then have another life that is totally different.”
In the early days, Newton shared his private life with his fans. Birthdays and engagements were celebrated on air. Three hundred were invited to his Melbourne wedding to Patti McGrath in 1974 and 10,000 tuned up.
“There is a sort of acceptance,” Newton says of his on-air longevity. “Whatever people see in me they also know that I’m quite harmless.”
He feels tickled when people approach him on the street, though he knows where to go when he doesn’t want to be bailed up.
He reads at least three and up to seven newspapers a day, front to back, and as many “women’s magazines” as he can find to ensure he stays “contemporary”.
These are his duties.
His pleasures include political and entertainment biographies, the occasional novel and a glass of fine champagne.
He has “Catholic” tastes in music. Holidays are nice, but only for the first week. He goes to church every Sunday and names Ben Chifley, Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke and John Howard as his favourite prime ministers.
He has strong opinions on many issues but learned early on that declaring them might ostracise his broad constituency.
He believes his main vehicle, television, is taken too seriously and that scripted variety shows lack appeal.
Perhaps his views on the Catholic Church are as close as he gets to forceful opinion. “I think it’s a sad time for the churches, especially those of the Christian faith, but a lot of problems they’ve got they brought on themselves,” he says.
Newton will allude to his publicised financial problems of 1993, when he owed close to $1m and admitted a penchant for punting, but he won’t dwell on them.
Such things are private (showbiz gossip has it that Newton was repaying debts until the turn of the century). It is one of few Newton scandals in an industry enveloped in rumour.
Channel 9’s Pete Smith, a long-time friend, says that Newton was a victim of being too honest with prospective business partners.
With Newton, what you see is very much what he is. “He’s the same heading up the Logies as he is at a birthday party for one of my kids,” Smith says.
Yet no television personality is quite the same off camera. David Letterman, of The Late Show, mined comic material from his heart surgery but shied from speaking seriously of the trauma.
In a 1995 profile, an Esquire writer said that Letterman’s “happiest moments are the moments he is not himself. Most days he yearns to be somebody else”.
Many stars worldwide project a bonhomie through the glass eye that they cannot emulate in real life. No one is affable all the time.
Off-camera, at least two regular GMA guests feel Newton’s insistence on perfectionism.
McColl Jones and Newton’s friend Don Lane agree, although both point out that no one could succeed for so long without demanding exacting standards.
McColl Jones remembers Newton and Graham Kennedy once screaming at each other during an ad break, serving up 10 minutes of TV hilarity, then resuming to scream at the next break.
“I have seen him tear shreds off people who are less than professional both in front of the camera and behind the scenes,” says close friend Philip Brady.
“He can nail somebody with his turn of phrase or by showing his disgust or disappointment. He’s a lovely friend but I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.”
Yet to quote Brady solely on Newton’s occasional outbursts would be unfair. The two have known and worked with each other for close to 50 years and Newton, says Brady, is “one of the most outstanding human beings I’ve ever known”.
Newton is the first to call or visit when crises strike, he says, and has always nursed him through lulls in his career.
Newton relishes sitting on the couch at home watching Judy Garland movies, Brady says, but his most treasured perch is in front of the camera.
Newton “wants to be loved by everyone”. “All he wants to do in life is spread love and laughter,” he says.
Lane, with whom Newton worked for eight years on the Don Lane Show, remembers a Newton who liked to socialise. After the show Newton would invite all into his dressing room for movie trivia contests that he always won.
He liked a drink, too.
When Newton and a director once visited Lane for a chat in his hotel room in the mid 1970s, Lane, a non-drinker, was amazed to count 14 empties in the wastebasket after they left. “He liked going to the pub and hanging out with the other guys,” Lane says.
Perhaps Newton has mellowed over the years. Brady describes a solitary man fond of driving to a vantage point overlooking the Yarra River to eat takeaway chicken.
Newton himself volunteers that he doesn’t have many close friends. Many mates, perhaps, and an eternal flood of goodwill, but few close friends, and none – to his regret – from childhood.
Newton accepts that show business can be a tangle of promises broken by ratings or revenue figures. He doesn’t say it, but Newton hints that he is afraid of being let down.
His Marist Brothers schoolteachers have been close friends. Patti is his best friend. “From an early time I was always attracted to friendships with older people in the industry and therefore many of my friends have died,” Newton says.
“But I’ve got a couple of mates in the industry who I see not nearly as much as I should. In some ways I guess I’m a loner. I’m not alone, and I’m not lonely, but I am a loner.”
Newton is known as a sensitive soul who is both easily moved and stung. Yet for a showman long attuned to the cruelties of media gossip, for a private man forever locked into the public gaze, he can also be surprisingly frank.
After a breakdown in 1964, he told of his “fear and terror” after being medicated with LSD. “Every colour of the rainbow flashed at me like lightning,” he wrote in his 1977 autobiography.
Newton asked for a $46,000 fee to appear at the 2003 Logies. “I think I had a mad moment when I may have thought that I’d been recycled as Frank Sinatra or Johnny Carson or whoever – maybe even God himself,” he said afterwards.
Close friends credit Patti’s guidance for his continuing success. Family has always been important to Newton.
In his 1997 This Is Your Life tribute, the couple exchanged loving asides that might have been corny if not so obviously genuine.
Newton spoke of missing his mother and sister Alice, who died of cancer, every day. “Every day I think how lucky I am that I’ve got him,” Patti said.
McColl Jones likens the couple to the Bob and Dolly Dyer partnership. “Bert has always had a home to go home to,” Smith says.
Newton keeps in contact with Kennedy. Their career paths are a contrast. Kennedy made several comebacks in the 1980s but his stardom shrivelled by choice.
Newton has always driven himself to the edge of exhaustion. He is renowned for his willingness to commute between cities to meet engagements. More musicals loom. He may not covet prime time but he does need to keep busy.
“I’m starting to slow down a bit,” Smith says. “He romps around the stage (in musicals) then wakes up to be in the office at 7.30 the next morning to do live television. That I can’t work out.”
Newton started his career as the youngest but now he is one of the oldest going around. “I certainly owe Graham because he was the man who forged the trail for Australian television,” he says. “The one thing I’m proud of about myself was that I wasn’t one of those people who was envious of Graham.”
It’s 40 minutes since the show finished. Newton’s eyes water. His on-air bounce has wilted. In 20 minutes he will retrieve his buzz to record the next day’s show.
He takes on that faraway look he wears sometimes in the ad breaks, when he sits in his chair, feet plonked on the coffee table, swigs Diet Coke and seemingly stares without seeing.
Newton has been comparing money problems to a car accident in which no one is hurt. The imagery prompts a thought.
“I dreamt last night that for some reason the car I was driving ended up in a swamp,” he says.
“I was unable to get out of the swamp and I remember thinking in the dream, ‘well at least I’m here, and the most important thing is surviving’.”
So what happened next?
“I woke up and it was time to go to work,” he says.
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