60 Minutes trailblazer and legendary TV producer Gerald Stone dead

"I don't care what it costs." It's been a long time since those words echoed down the corridors of power in television, and in the fractured and budget-constrained modern TV era might never be heard again.

But they were the words Nine's former proprietor Kerry Packer used when charging the reporter-turned-news producer Gerald Stone with the task of bringing news magazine 60 Minutes to Australia. "That was a wonderful brief for any producer to have," Stone later said of Packer's order.

Legendary news and current affairs producer Gerald Stone.Credit: Jacky Ghossein

Stone, whose colourful career in television news and current affairs is unequalled, has died. He was 87.

Journalist Ray Martin, who was, with George Negus, Ian Leslie and later, Jana Wendt, part of the original 60 Minutes lineup, praised his former boss as a journalist with "a touch of tabloid but a heap of class".

"He would say, be accurate, but don't be worthy," Martin said. "Which made 60 Minutes the perfect vehicle for Gerald Stone. It was TV as an entertainment medium but at the same time it was about storytelling, about breaking news and about people."

Martin said Stone "made you believe that you could do better. It's a huge skill to inspire people, and in his own style he luxuriated almost in Jana's emergence, and my emergence, and Negus's emergence, and other people [he worked with], like Stan Grant.

Gerald Stone and 60 Minutes reporter Jana Wendt in 1981.Credit: Nine Network

"Gerald regaled these [careers] as, I will say trophies, but I mean that in a kind sense. He would stand back and watch Jana glow and realised he'd played an important part in her development," Martin said.

Wendt remembered her mentor, former boss and friend as a "commanding presence; tenacious in the hunt for stories, demanding, and fierce in competition."

Gerald Stone (front) with George Negus, Ian Leslie, Jeff McMullen and Jana Wendt.Credit: Nine Network

"In the early 80s, to me, a rookie reporter on whom he took a chance, he was dazzling," Wendt said.

"Over the last 20 years, long after our work relationship ended, Gerald turned into a very dear friend, brimming with warmth, kindness, and charm.

"I will miss him very much."

Born in 1933 in the United States and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Stone graduated from Cornell University with a degree in political science and, in 1957, landed his first job in journalism, as a copy boy in the newsroom of the "Grey Lady", America's newspaper of record, The New York Times.

In 1962 Stone emigrated to Australia with his wife Beth, and their two children Klay and Jennifer, landing in Sydney on a Bristol Britannic, a 139-seat turboprop passenger plane operated by the airline Canadian Pacific.

The same year he was hired by the Daily Mirror in Sydney and, in 1965, spent three months in Vietnam as a special correspondent for The Australian and the Daily Mirror, and the following year published an account of his experiences, War Without Honour.

All that glitters is not gold ... Gerald Stone and the failed experiment of a joint Sydney/Melbourne newscast on Nine.Credit: Fairfax Media

The book, which explored controversial topics such as how well the Australian public was informed about events in Vietnam's theatre of war, and whether Australia's leadership was itself "objectively informed" of the facts, is a revealing glimpse into Stone's interrogational nature, his passion for journalism but also his fearlessness when called upon to question the industry's processes.

In 1967, Stone moved into television, first as a reporter on the ABC's This Day Tonight program. And in 1974 he was hired by Sir Frank Packer for a new current affairs program on the Nine Network, Federal File.

A year later Stone ascended to the position of news director at Nine and, perhaps proving that not everything he touched during television's golden age truly glittered, presided over the failure of News Centre Nine, a two-city nightly news broadcast co-hosted by Brian Henderson in Sydney and Peter Hitchener in Melbourne.

In 1978 came a conversation with Sir Frank's son Kerry Packer, running Channel Nine after his father's death in 1974, which would launch him into the most colourful, and defining, chapter of his career.

The younger Packer asked Stone to launch an Australian edition of the American current affairs program 60 Minutes. "I don't care what it costs, just do it and get it right," Packer told him, according to Stone. Depending on the circumstances in which Stone was re-telling the story, there was occasionally an expletive somewhere in there.

And on February 11 the following year Australia's 60 Minutes was born, making its debut with three "star" reporters - Martin, Negus and Leslie - would, each Sunday night at 7.30pm, file reports from various locations around the world. In 1982 Wendt joined the program.

"This was an era in Australia that was filled with hypocrisy, sacred cows who had lived too long with people paying lip service," Stone remarked years later. "And there is nothing like hypocrisy to bring out good journalism."

And despite the many names which have graced the show's reporting lineup over the years, from Richard Carleton to Elizabeth Hayes, those first four – Leslie, Martin, Negus and Wendt – still remain inextricably linked to the show's enduring brand.

Gerald Stone in 1979 with his original 60 Minutes reporting team: Ray Martin, Ian Leslie and George Negus.

Later, asked which reporter was his favourite of the many who had stood in front of the show's iconic ticking stopwatch, Stone demurred. "That's a very good question; questions don't always need to be answered," he said.

As the puppet master of 60 Minutes in its infancy, Stone made the series the greatest show on earth.

It was Stone who sent Ray Martin to interview Lindy Chamberlain and ophthalmologist Fred Hollows, on tour with KISS and into an encounter with the queen of country, Dolly Parton, and George Negus to the front line of conflicts in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, and into his memorable clash with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Stone also sent Ian Leslie to the Philippines, where he was held at gunpoint, and Jana Wendt to meet Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, into Imelda Marcos's shoe cupboard, to the streets of Gaza and to an encounter with rock icon Mick Jagger, who jokingly responded to her pointy pen by calling her a "bossy boots".

"It was challenging because everybody would say it's an American rip-off. And certainly it had the American format," Stone said later, reflecting on the show's success. "It was quite a different program in Australia because Australia didn't have that many good stories to tell. It was a small country.

"So we had to go overseas and I think that's how we made our mark," Stone added. "Showing people what happened overseas. People might not care what happened in Nicaragua, but they might care about what George Negus did in Nicaragua."

Stone's greatest career regret, Martin said, was sending cameraman Brian Peters and reporter Malcolm Rennie to East Timor in 1975.

Peters and Rennie, along with three members of a Seven Network crew, reporter Greg Shackleton, sound recordist Tony Stewart and cameraman Gary Cunningham, were murdered by Indonesian troops in Balibo.

"Gerald took the loss of the crew in Balibo to the deepest part of his heart," Martin said. "Forever more, yes, he wanted to go to a war zone, but there was always a sense of relief, which was so discernible, when you walked out of a war zone and reported that you were safe.

"As a tough news editor he still had to send you to dangerous places, but you realised that [the events in Balibo] had left an indelible scar on his heart. When we talked about Gerald, he was able to make the tough decisions, but there was compassion of character that came before them."

Martin notes that of the three most significant programs in the history of current affairs in Australia - the ABC's Four Corners and This Day Tonight, and Nine's 60 Minutes - it is revealing that Stone was heavily involved in two of the three.

"That was the benchmark," Martin said. "He believed you had no right on television to be worthy, you had to entertain, but you had to be accurate in what you did."

Martin cites an oft-quoted line of Stone's as a glimpse into his mind: "When we first started 60 Minutes, he said, look, we'll let Four Corners tell the story of the great flood. We will do a colourful profile on Noah."

Gerald Stone as a young reporter working for the ABC in Australia.Credit: ABC TV

After leaving Nine Stone took senior posts at the Fox Network in the United States and Channel Seven in Australia, and between 1995 and 1998, he was editor-in-chief of The Bulletin. Stone also served as a director on the board of SBS between 2000 and 2010.

In addition to his work as a reporter and producer, Stone later returned to his career as an author. In 2000 he wrote the book Compulsive Viewing: The Inside Story of Packer's Nine Network and, just seven years later, Who Killed Channel 9? The Death of Kerry Packer's Mighty TV Dream Machine. In 2002 he wrote a biography of advertising and radio titan John Singleton, Singo: Mates, Wives, Triumphs, Disasters.

Gerald Stone during his tenure as editor of The Bulletin.Credit: Glenn Shipley

Nine Entertainment chief executive officer Hugh Marks paid tribute to Stone's role in the formative years of the Nine Network today, saying he "occupies a lofty pedestal in Nine's history and a profound place in our hearts." (Nine is the owner of this masthead.)

"With its great story telling and high production values 60 Minutes changed the way we watched television, and launched scores of now celebrated careers," Marks said, in a message to staff.

The show's success "four decades later remains an ongoing testament to Gerald's capacity to produce great content through his sheer good instincts about stories, the people he chose to tell them, his gimlet eye for angles and detail and his uncanny ability to make it so relatable to a huge audience," Marks said.

Marks said Stone was deeply respected and admired by his colleagues. "His raw American accent never left him, nor his warmth, humility and charm," Marks said. "But he was also a feisty character who gave as good as he got, especially in the odd colourful disagreement over programming decisions with Kerry Packer, a feat in itself."

Marks said a memorial would be held for Stone at Nine's former Sydney studios in Willoughby. Due to Covid restrictions attendance would be limited and the event would be made available online, Marks said.

In 2015 Stone was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for "significant service to print and broadcast media as a journalist, editor, television producer and author". And in 2017 he was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.

The heart of his power, Wendt said in 2017, lay in his ability as a storyteller. "He had an instinct for a story," Wendt said. "He knew what a story was. It was in his bones. And he knew how to tell a story, to a particular audience."

"At the time ... Australians were not very interested in what happened in the rest of the world," Wendt said in 2017. "But eventually as we all know he turned that somewhat unwanted idea into, to borrow his own book title, a book that he wrote some years later, compulsive viewing. And that's no mean feat."

Gerald is survived by his wife Irene, his two children, Klay and Jennifer, and two grandchildren, Louis and Gina.