Why adman Harold Mitchell says ‘no’ to alcohol

Ad king Harold Mitchell’s business story is well known. Less known is his private battle with alcohol.

Harold Mitchell and Chris Raine, CEO of Hello Sunday Morning, a charity that helps people with alcohol problems. Picture: James Croucher

Harold Mitchell will never forget the moment.

The former advertising king was out to dinner in his home town of Melbourne with his then wife Bevelly, and their two young children, Stuart and Amanda.

“Bevelly told me I was about to eat a dessert that might have ­alcohol in it,’’ Mitchell tells The Weekend Australian. “I then remember two little 10-year-old hands quickly pushing it away.”

Such was the concern of the Mitchell kids for their Dad, who had previously told them that their grandmother was an alcoholic. As was their uncle. Both have now passed away. He had also told his children of how he had sadly followed in the footsteps of his mother and brother for five years of the wildest times of his life until he realised the drink would also kill him.

“Now I can’t watch movies that might be about people drinking too much. I can’t hear stories about families where the mum and the dad are drunks and I think about the kids. That is probably the impact it has had on me. It makes me sad about society. We all want a perfect life and that is not the way it is,’’ Mitchell says slowly over lunch at Rockpool in Melbourne, where he drinks only mineral water.

It is why Mitchell, who is on first name terms with the likes of Rupert Murdoch, has recently agreed to become the patron of a charity using technology to tackle alcohol abuse in society.

Known as Hello Sunday Morning, the group encourages people struggling with alcohol problems to share their experiences on a mobile app, Daybreak, where they can access real-time online support from a community of people or engage one-on-one with qualified coaches.

Hello Sunday Morning has a range of corporate and philanthropic partners including Vodafone, NIB, Macquarie and Google, as well as Mitchell’s own Harold Mitchell Foundation and the Ian Potter Foundation.

Google has even invested to apply machine learning to this particular challenge.

“When Hello Sunday Morning came along, I identified with it very easily and gave them some money to get it started.

“It (alcohol abuse) is a terrible curse of our society. With a little bit of help, it doesn’t have to be that way,” Mitchell says. “I just know there are some people who say ‘If he can give it up, then I can’. Society is not too good at helping each other ... on lots of things.”

Mitchell’s business story is well known: the son of a Stawell sawmiller who watched his parents separate when he was a child and never finished high school, who came to Melbourne at the age of 16 with just $10 in his pocket and ended up starting his own media buying company, Mitchell Communications.

It later became Mitchell & Partners and Mitchell became the nation’s most powerful media buyer, before selling out to Britain’s Aegis Group for $363 million in 2010. Two years later, Japan’s Dentsu agreed to buy Aegis in a $4.8 billion deal, delivering Mitchell another payout. A year later Mitchell stepped down from the business he founded in 1976.

Just this week Dentsu said it would drop the Mitchell brand, changing its name to Dentsu X, marking the end of an era in Australian advertising industry.

Mitchell also made headlines when in 2013 he decided to undergo lap-band surgery to lose weight and improve health; he lost 70kg.

He and Bevelly also separated that year.

What is less known among the public are the intimate details of Mitchell’s own battle with alcohol, which started two years after he moved to Melbourne from Stawell. He remembers his first job in an advertising agency surrounded by what he calls “incredible, creative, amazing people” who were “all heavy drinkers”.

“I didn’t drink till I was 18. I only ever drank to excess a handful of times, but by my early 20s I realised there is a difference in people. Some can handle alcohol. Some cannot. And I cannot. Some just cannot stop drinking once they start,” he says.

“It sounds like I was in the gutter. I wasn’t. But I just knew that I couldn’t control alcohol.

“I would have a couple of drinks, but then within a few days would have drunk too much. And then would not drink again for a while. And then the pattern would start again. Somehow I worked out I couldn’t control it. I tried to stop and for about six months, did and then didn’t.”

Interestingly Mitchell only ever drank beer. “I never liked spirits and I finished up having a collection of about 70 bottles of Grange Hermitage that I gave away,’’ he says.

By the age of 23 Mitchell realised he needed help. He looked up Alcoholics Anonymous and went to a meeting in suburban Melbourne. He only needed to go to two.

“There I found something of a pattern. Some of the brightest and most well known people in the city were at the meeting there. So it is not just the no-hopers in the gutter. Or labourers. I became aware that this can happen to anyone. It is never spoken about. There are people hiding it in different places. It can make a difference to anyone’s life. It made a difference to my life — I would not be here, for example.”

Mitchell stresses he was never an angry drunk and never drank alone, but more to fit in with the fast-paced world of advertising. But he still cringes at what he could have become if he didn’t stop. “I wasn’t an aggressive drunk where I would punch people or anything like that. But I think if it went on, I would probably have done something bad or stupid by drinking all the time,’’ he says.

“The thing you realise is that you can never ever have another drink. Ever. That is the hard bit and the easy bit. I might say I’ll have one now. Then tomorrow I would have two. And I would be drunk by the weekend. That is what alcohol does.’’

Mitchell now hasn’t had a drink in over 50 years. He says quitting alcohol is about “respect for yourself”.

“If you lose respect for yourself, that is the tough bit. That is a big thing. You have to be a lot to yourself. And by being drunk you lose that self-respect,” he says.

Hello Sunday Morning chief executive Chris Raine notes that for all of Mitchell’s admirable support for the arts and charities — think of the likes of Opera Australia, CARE Australia and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health — he has “never supported anything quite like this”.

“He really cares about this particular issue. His style and what he has achieved is enormously helpful for me — to have his mentorship and coaching is invaluable.

Raine says Hello Sunday Morning’s goal is to put a “massive dent in the way we provide treatment to people who have this issue”.

Some 70 per cent of Hello Sunday Morning members are women — not because women are more likely to abuse alcohol, but because they are more likely to reach out for support.

Hello Sunday Morning is also staffed by people who have battled their own alcohol issues. Raine himself is a case in point, as is general manager Jamie Moore.

The group has already secured government funding and is asking for more to provide support for Daybreak so the app can be made available without charge.

Raine says the proposed cost to taxpayers of $6m over three years pales in comparison to the estimated $15.3bn cost of harmful drinking to Australia.

“We don’t want government to pay for all of it. We want to be a semi-sustainable organisation — it is a partnership between government, corporate Australia and the philanthropic sector,” he says. “We want to make it free and easy for people who want this support in their life.”