By Chris Johnston
ADVERTISING mogul Harold Mitchell is 67 now with not a grey hair on his head and, he insists, no hair dye in his bathroom cupboard. He's also shrunk considerably after lap-band surgery this year in which an adjustable strap was put around the top of his stomach to restrict the amount he ate.
He was described as morbidly obese in 2006 at 165 kilograms. Last Christmas he weighed 150. Yesterday he weighed 102. It's all relative, but he looks a million dollars. Or rather, he looks $150 million, which is what he was last estimated to be worth.
Harold Mitchell in his office.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Mitchell's new memoir is called Living Large. It traces his life from dysfunctional, poor beginnings in Victorian alpine timber towns - with an alcoholic then absent mother and a knockabout bushman father - to the BRW rich list and head of Australia's largest media-buying agency.
It was ghostwritten with former Age journalist Peter Wilmoth and includes intimate details of Mitchell's colourful dealings with the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer, Kerry Stokes, Jeff Kennett and Gough Whitlam. It also details his recovery from financial ruin in 1990.
He says it is a tell-all book only in the sense that it tells all he knows. ''You don't write a book too often, and there are people in it who are interesting characters and there are examples of that interesting character. I didn't want to offend anyone and hopefully I haven't, but writing about life is writing about people.''
Yet the title of the book is a cipher. He regularly refers to his size and the meaning it has had in his life.
A chapter on obesity is called ''Eat Drink Man Woman''; he explains how he gave up smoking and drinking in his 20s but had trouble controlling food and considers himself lucky he never took up gambling because he'd probably have trouble with that too.
In another passage he talks about the fat puns used in newspaper stories about him: ''colossus'', ''larger than life'', ''big man about town''.
''When I got to my 60s,'' Mitchell said yesterday, ''it was clear the weight thing was a battle and I had to work it out.''
One day last year a grand-daughter saw him leaving the shower. ''She said to me, 'Grandpa, you've got two bellies,' and I decided she was right and I had to do something because she was four and I wanted to see her at 21.''
The book tells the sorry story of Mitchell's mother, Lorna, who walked out of the family when he was 15. His father, Harold snr, raised him and his three siblings.
In 1963 he found his mother working in a pub but never saw her again. ''I went to her funeral and I make speeches often but I got 20 words into it and couldn't finish.''
The epilogue is about the Black Saturday bushfires. Mitchell lives in St Andrews, where 22 people died.
He says he was already re-evaluating his life in the process of getting the book written, but ''suddenly you realise life ends too quickly for some, and it will for me, and what did it all mean?''