Warren Beatty and me: the inside story of James Packer’s breakdown

His reputation shredded, at war with Mariah Carey and crushed by debt, James Packer reveals how his gilded life unravelled.

James Packer and Warren Beatty. Picture: supplied

The sky in Los Angeles was still jet black when James Packer stumbled out of bed on the cool autumn morning of ­October 28, 2016. He’d barely slept a wink in a fortnight and the previous night had been no exception. Holed up in the guesthouse of the vast estate that is home to movie legend Warren Beatty, perched atop the storied Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, Packer looked every bit a nervous wreck. For weeks the favoured dawn panacea for the chain-smoking billionaire had been a few of his favourite menthol cigarettes and a shot or two of straight vodka, and by dusk he’d have drained the bottle and more.

Today there was no need for even a shot glass. His plane was due for takeoff at 6am, so his chauffeur was waiting. Packer grabbed his ­favourite vodka and, for the first time in his life, sculled straight from the bottle. Half of it was gone in less than a minute. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, his car hurtled down ­Mulholland Drive and onto the freeway. Its ­destination was Van Nuys Airport, known as the “airport to the stars” for the extravagant collection of private jets that adorns its aprons. With Packer were his best friend and old schoolmate Ben Tilley and his legal eagle Guy Jalland.

By 6am, as the first rays of light glimmered on the tarmac, Packer was comatose on the couch of a chartered Bombardier Global Express. He was bound for the sanctuary of his polo ranch ­Ellerstina – named after his family’s NSW property, Ellerston – 12 hours’ flying time away in Argentina. When he finally regained consciousness, he thought he’d been in the air for five ­minutes. In reality, it had been five hours.

Ten months out from celebrating his 50th birthday, Packer was coming apart at the seams. Born into great wealth and given all the advantages money could buy, he’d become a friend, ­confidant, partner and lover to A-list celebrities, political leaders and powerful business figures. Yet one of Australia’s most ­recognisable and scrutinised corporate giants was staggering under the weight of being heir to the multi-billion-dollar fortune that his father Kerry had built and handed down to him.

Beyond a circle of his closest friends and ­confidants, few appreciated the depth of the ­personal crisis into which he had sunk. To the cynics, he was the sort of person for whom there was unlikely to be much sympathy had his private traumas been public knowledge. Yet among those who inhabited his private world there was deep and growing consternation about what was ­happening to the man they called JP, the real, troubled and tormented James Packer.

In the ­rarefied atmosphere of Packer’s high-­flying life, where he counted among his inner ­circle names that ordinary people know only as untouchable celebrities, Warren Beatty had grown to become one of his closest friends. Packer first met Beatty in 2014 through Packer’s Hollywood film production company RatPac, which he’d formed with film producer Brett ­Ratner in 2012. Beatty, who has been dubbed the “Prince of ­Hollywood”, introduced Packer to a bunch of big names in America and gave Packer free rein over his three-bedroom guesthouse, part of the sprawling Los Angeles compound the movie star calls home with his wife, four-time Oscar-nominated actress Annette Bening, and two of their four ­children. The 2.7ha estate ­features three residences, including a Mediterranean-style mansion where Beatty and Bening live.

While Packer and Beatty, 81, first met doing business, their ­relationship has become so much more. “Warren is a very kind man who is living a huge life. He was generous enough to let me live in his guesthouse for almost three years,” Packer says now. “This is said with zero disrespect [to my father]. Mum met and ­absolutely adored Warren. And Dad and Warren would have loved each other. I ended up calling Warren ‘Dad’.”

James Packer with, left, Jeffrey Bleich, former US ambassador to Australia, and Warren Beatty, right, at Beatty’s Los Angeles guesthouse. Picture: supplied

In 2014, when RatPac had helped bankroll Beatty’s first screen-acting role in 15 years in the romantic comedy-drama Rules Don’t Apply, it financed the film in a joint venture with New Regency ­Productions, owned by Israeli businessman and Hollywood film producer Arnon ­Milchan. Milchan had first introduced Packer to Israel during a week-long visit in mid 2013. They dined with then president Shimon Peres and prime ­minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Packer became intoxicated by the country and its politics. For a time in 2016 and 2017 Israel became his official place of residence when he bought a house adjacent to Netanyahu’s in a wealthy gated community in the beachside town of Caesarea. Packer became so close to the Netanyahu family that he sat with the official party when ­Netanyahu spoke to the US Congress and UN General Assembly in 2015. But it was a connection that soon became toxic.

By early October 2016, as his 88m-long luxury cruiser Arctic P drifted off the coast of Israel, the Australian was deeply embroiled in a corruption scandal involving the Israeli PM and Milchan. It was being alleged that Netanyahu had accepted lavish gifts from both Packer and Milchan. The police eventually claimed that Netanyahu’s family received from both about $US280,000 worth of free champagne, cigars, food, accommodation and even tickets to a Mariah Carey concert. Packer was under mounting pressure to testify about his actions to the Israeli authorities in the saga that became known as Case 1000. Israeli media was speculating that he could be charged. But there were also other things on Packer’s mind at the time.

On October 11, Packer was met on board ­ Arctic P by Robert Rankin, who was both chairman of his casino company, Crown Resorts, and boss of his private company, Consolidated Press Holdings (CPH), Crown’s biggest shareholder. At Rankin’s side that day was Michael (Mike) ­Johnston, the financial controller at CPH. With the rocky Israeli coastline as a backdrop, they ­presented Packer with more details of a ­radical plan to split Crown’s local and offshore businesses, which had been approved by the Crown board and announced to the sharemarket in mid-June. Packer had stepped off the Crown board in December 2015 after resigning as chairman four months earlier to pursue his Hollywood dreams, so Rankin was squarely in strategic control of the casino group. Packer recalls: “Rob and Mike ­presented me with this straw man, if that’s the right word, which showed Crown separated into Crown International and Crown Domestic. Off the back of that, what it showed was dividends to CPH increasing by 10-15 per cent a year. And I just didn’t believe the numbers. In August, two months into the fiscal year, we were missing budgets every day. And then I got these forecasts. The numbers they were presenting were, in my view, optimistic.”

Rankin and Johnson knew their boss was unimpressed. After they had finished their presentations and quietly headed downstairs, Packer stayed on the top deck slumped in his chair. He stared blankly at the documents for another 10 minutes and then turned to Guy Jalland. “I don’t know if I started crying, but I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to have $1.4 billion of debt any more. Why am I doing this?’ ” he recalls. In addition to Crown’s woes, CPH was swimming in debt after Packer had negotiated a $1.25 billion framework to split the family fortune with his sister Gretel, which was signed at the end of 2015. And CPH’s costs were seemingly out of control. “Subconsciously, I had lost confidence in Rob [Rankin],” Packer says now, reflecting on that time.

But worse was to come. A few hours later, Packer jumped aboard his private jet bound for Los Angeles, leaving Israel for the last time. He received an urgent text ­message from Rankin to call as soon as possible. Rankin had some horrific news: 19 of Crown’s staff, including Crown’s head of international VIP business, Jason O’Connor, were being held at two detention centres in Shanghai for allegedly committing gambling crimes in mainland China. The Crown share price immediately fell 20 per cent.

Rocked by the biggest scandal ever to hit his company, Packer was lost for words and paralysed with fear when he returned to Beatty’s guesthouse on the evening of October 13, 2016.

Warren Beatty, a deeply private man, doesn’t do media interviews; 16 biographies have been written about him and he never spoke to any of the authors – nor, he claims, has he read any of them. Yet, with Packer’s assistance, he has agreed to talk to me on a cool and cloudy late-spring morning at his Los Angeles mansion.

From the road it is a blink-and-you-miss-it address at the end of a sharp corner on Mulholland Drive. After walking through a nondescript wrought-iron gate, you make your way up a long concrete driveway, past a Porsche, a Mustang and a Mercedes convertible parked at the base of the entrance stairs where Beatty’s affable, 30-something bearded assistant greets me and shows me to the library. When Beatty finally arrives he plonks down in his favourite chair with a box of pencils, a yellow notepad and a chunky landline phone at the ready on its left arm. He nibbles on cashews and drinks green tea as we cautiously start our conversation. After some initial guarded responses about how he got to know Packer, he starts to open up about his friend.

“He has been both graced and victimised – and I would say more graced – by the inheritance,” Beatty says. “He is a very good father. He has a very good relationship with the mother of his children. I met James’s mother; I liked her. I thought she was fun. I’ll tell you what an important factor is, and I think you should emphasise it: this little thing called humility. I think he has genuine humility. If humility is genuine, you can learn faster.” Beatty never knew Kerry Packer, who died in 2005, but he wishes he had. “I have never questioned James about his father – that is so deep. I would not want to in some superficial way invade that territory. But of the people I know that knew Kerry Packer, I don’t know that the father had the capability of self-analysis that I think I see in James,” he says.

A young James Packer with father Kerry in an undated photo. Picture: Bauer Media

In October 2016 Beatty was a central figure in a remarkable fortnight in James Packer’s life. It started on the afternoon of October 14, when he paid his friend a visit at his guesthouse. Packer says of his state after learning of Crown’s China arrests: “I didn’t know what to do when I got back to LA, so I was just drinking. There have been stages of my life when I drink way too much. I was drinking straight vodka then. Straight tequila later. Warren rang me the day after we arrived and I didn’t really want to see anyone. But Warren said, ‘I am going to come over and say hello.’ So I am waiting at the guesthouse and it is the afternoon and Warren comes in, sits down and we start speaking. He said, ‘I think you need to see someone. A psychiatrist. And you need to check the medicines you are on.’ ” In Israel earlier in the year Packer had been put on powerful medication that now made it difficult for him to function.

Beatty, who doesn’t smoke or drink and is in remarkable condition for a man of his age, knew plenty of people in Hollywood who had been helped by psychiatry. He made a few phone calls. “I am one of those people in Hollywood who still believes in certain things that Sigmund Freud [the founder of psychoanalysis] and other ­compatriots in the field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis espoused,” says Beatty. “I believe it is very valuable. I feel that so much can be accomplished by that, making ourselves happier by not resorting to the prescription drugs that are sold on every television show that we see.”

Within two hours of Beatty’s talk with Packer, they were in a suburban psychiatrist’s office. The star of hit films such as Shampoo, Dick Tracy and Bugsy had taken it upon himself to drive his sick friend – who had more than 60 times his wealth – to the clinic. Beatty looks slightly taken aback when I ask him why he undertook such an act of generosity. He responds with just four words: “He is a friend,” he almost whispers, slowly, before repeating himself. “He is a friend.”

A single sentence was on Packer’s mind as he sat frozen in Beatty’s luxury Lexus as it hurtled down Mulholland Drive. When he arrived at the psychiatrist’s office, it was the only one emanating from his lips. “I am going broke,” he told Beatty’s doctor of choice.

Each day, Mike Johnston was emailing his boss his usual five-page report on CPH, which showed in minute detail how Packer’s wealth had changed over the previous 24 hours. It recorded the value of his shares in Crown, his private equity investments, the value of his “shareholder assets”, such as his two Sydney properties (his Bondi apartment would be sold in early August 2018), his homes in Israel and Aspen, his apartments in Switzerland and Dubai and his Argentinian polo ranch. And, of course, his two private jets. Most importantly, it detailed his net debt position – his cash minus borrowings and provisions. And on that day in LA, the report was flashing red.

“The daily reports I was getting from Mike Johnston showed my net worth was $3.5 billion, but I was convinced it was going to zero,” Packer says. Revenues at Crown Resorts were falling off a cliff. After spending billions to upgrade its ­Melbourne and Perth properties, the company had missed its annual budget by more than $100 million. Packer reckoned it meant the business was worth $3 billion less than he had hoped. And now the China arrests had trashed the company’s reputation on the global stage.

But as Packer sat before him, Beatty’s doctor had more on his mind than money. He asked Packer how much he had been drinking. The answer from his patient was blunt: “A lot.” The doctor quickly responded: “How much is a lot?”

“I probably said a bottle of vodka a day, but I think it was more than that,” Packer recalls. “I was still relatively lean at that point. So vodka was my alcohol when I was leaner.” The doctor urged Packer to cut back on his alcohol intake, and he reluctantly pledged to have no more than five vodka nips a day.

The doctor also took Packer off the powerful drugs that had been prescribed for him eight months earlier in Israel and put him on another form of prescription medication to help his mood. As Packer left, they shook hands on an agreement that he would return every day for the next month. When Packer walked out of the psychiatrist’s office that evening, Beatty was still in the waiting room. He drove his friend back to his guesthouse in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Packer’s vodka pledge lasted only two days. On October 17, after receiving more bad news about the Crown crisis unfolding in China, he sat in a chair at Beatty’s guesthouse and polished off a bottle of vodka before cancelling his psychiatric appointment. He repeated the ritual the next day. On the third day, as he was three-quarters through another bottle, his staff stepped in. ­Jalland, Tilley and Packer’s then adviser in Los Angeles, former Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, as well as the staff at Beatty’s guesthouse, were fed up. They pleaded with Packer to return to the psychiatrist and offered to go with him for what is known in psychiatry as an “intervention”, where urgent actions are performed to bring about a change in people suffering from substance abuse or other psychiatric issues.

Packer reluctantly agreed. But as Crown’s share price continued to fall, a single thought remained front and centre of his mind: he was going broke. Surrounded by his closest friends in the psychiatrist’s office, he felt too embarrassed to admit he was going to lose everything. Instead, he simply listened as the psychiatrist asked pointedly: “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

The shock tactics had no effect. The next day Packer again drank himself into oblivion. It prompted his staff, led by his devoted butler at Beatty’s guesthouse, Nat, to try another tack. This time they succeeded in getting Packer to visit Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in LA. There Davis introduced his boss to a new doctor, a non-psychiatric specialist, who took a series of blood tests. It brought back bad memories of six months earlier, when Packer had agreed to similar tests and the results had been shocking. They had revealed for the first time the extent of the damage he was doing to his liver. “I stopped drinking for a couple of months after those tests and when I went to Israel it was easier for me not to drink, because of the way my house was staffed and the fact there was no alcohol in it,” he recalls.

But the results of this latest round of tests in LA would be surprisingly different. “I can’t believe this,” the doctor told Packer. “You are perfect everywhere!” Elated, Packer immediately called Arnon Milchan, who was also in Hollywood, to extol the success of his vodka diet. ­Milchan called for a celebration, which Ben Tilley was asked to organise. But Tilley was in no mood to party. The man known to gossip columnists as “the billionaire’s babysitter” had had enough and point-blank refused. Tilley had always been one to speak his mind. For years he had travelled the world with James’s father Kerry playing poker and golf. Sometimes he’d had to stand his ground in the face of Packer Sr’s volcanic temper. This time he did the same with his son. A fierce row ensued, and Tilley not only lost the fight, he lost his job, with Packer sacking him on the spot.

Packer then turned on his loyal assistant Ian Morris, who had served him for a decade and a half after starting as a deckhand on Arctic P. He too was fired with immediate effect. An angry Morris packed his bags and headed to the ­Beverly Hills Hotel, where he booked a one-way airfare back to Sydney. It would take six months of ­Packer’s pleading before Morris returned to his job. Packer now says he couldn’t do without him. “Ian Morris is fantastic to me. He never ceases to amaze me with his wit and wisdom, and he is selfless in his service,” he says. “He comes from humble origins in Sri Lanka and has seen a lot of the world. He loves Israel with a passion and is incredibly knowledgeable about the Jewish faith. We are friends first and foremost.”

Tilley had assured Morris that day that he wouldn’t be far behind him as he headed upstairs and packed up his own belongings. But before he left, he decided to confront a steaming Packer one last time. “Well, son, I’m all packed, I’m leaving and I won’t darken your door again,” Tilley said, standing in the doorway, bag in hand. (James and Tilley regularly address each other as “son”, a figure of speech favoured by James’s late father.) But the boss was now having second thoughts. He asked Tilley to wait. After 20 minutes of soul-searching, the two were tearing into a bottle of tequila together, best friends again.

Tilley hoped Packer’s mea culpa might herald a return to sanity. But he was wrong. “Then I really started drinking,” Packer recalls. He had taken the positive blood test results as a licence to kick things up a notch.

With Mariah Carey, May 2016, New York City. Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

On October 28, 2016 in Australia, gossip ­magazine Woman’s Day dropped the biggest bomb of all. With a front-page exclusive, it broke the news that Packer had abruptly ended his engagement to pop singer Mariah Carey, blaming her new reality TV show Mariah’s World and her extravagant spending. If Packer thought his ­problems with Crown, China and Israel were bad, the break-up with Carey was off the Richter scale. Once the US celebrity websites got the story, it became a feeding frenzy. Despite months of tortuous negotiations, Packer and Carey had never formally settled on a prenuptial agreement. So after the break-up the advisers for both sides had begun working quietly on a suitable settlement. After one ­confidential meeting, a sum of $US5 million was put on the table and was close to being agreed. But when the Woman’s Day ­article was read in LA, Carey’s camp reportedly jacked up their demands to $US50 million. Carey and her fiery then manager, Stella Bulochnikov, took the article – which they assumed had been planted by Packer’s side – as a declaration of war, even though Packer and his advisers argued ­otherwise, and still do. “I had absolutely nothing to do with the story,” Packer declares now.

In Beatty’s guesthouse on top of Hollywood on Mulholland Drive, Packer felt trapped. There was no garden to walk in, just a small balcony and a long concrete driveway that led to the front entrance of the guesthouse. There was no escape. Jalland and Tilley were deeply worried that things had suddenly become far too intense in Los Angeles. They quickly agreed that only the billionaire’s secluded Argentinian polo ranch could provide solace. With Packer’s plane in maintenance, Tilley quickly found a replacement that would take his boss to safety. The next morning Packer bade farewell to Beatty, his staunch friend during the most difficult period of his life.

“By the time the Israel so-called Case 1000 had become public, the China arrests and Crown’s sale of Macau had occurred and the break-up with Mariah had happened, I had become toxic,” Packer says now. “The phone stopped ringing and people were out when I called them. There were, of course, a few exceptions. Every month or so Warren would ring. And apart from my kids, he was the only person I travelled to LA to see.”

They still keep in touch and have lunch together every few months at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s famed Polo Lounge, a favourite with generations of Hollywood stars. They sit at the table Beatty has called his own for more than 20 years. “Warren has continued to be a friend, even when it was less fashionable to be my friend,” Packer says. “And for that I am truly grateful.”

When presented with Packer’s compliment, Beatty struggles for a few moments to find the words to respond before muttering, softly: “Well, that’s, that’s, um, that is very nice to hear.” He eschews the parental label to describe his relationship with Packer. “That would not come to mind, a father figure,” he says, slowly. “I would say a friend.”

With its lonely tree-lined lanes, locked gates and armed security guards, Ellerstina, an hour’s drive from Buenos Aires, is one of the few places in the world where Packer genuinely feels safe. When he arrived, he plonked himself on his favourite cream couch, which looks over the lush polo field he calls the Field of Dreams. To the left of the TV in a grand floor-to-ceiling bookcase is a photo of his late father with the ranch’s founder, Argentine polo legend Gonzalo Pieres Sr. Alongside are photos of Packer’s children Indigo, ­Jackson and Emmanuelle, including one with their mother, his former wife Erica. In the corner of the room stands a stunning model of the $2.2 billion Crown Sydney casino hotel, due to open in 2021.

For days, Packer barely moved from a line between his bedroom and the couch, often ­simply staring at the giant television screen on the wall. And for a time he kept drinking: ­morning, noon and night. Through the fog of alcohol, cigarette smoke and prescription medication, Packer tried to take stock of the horrors of the previous weeks and months. Again he sought psychiatric help and was prescribed new drugs he says were “very bad for weight gain. When I went to Argentina I weighed around 100kg and blew out to 130kg,” he says, noting the medicine also “changed my tastebuds”.

But the Argentinian refuge provided Packer, Jalland and his advisers with vital time and space. Each morning Packer and Jalland would methodically work through the issues before them. This process would prove to be a turning point as Packer pulled back his drinking and started to focus on how to turn his business and his life around. As one observer familiar with the period puts it: “For weeks it simply became a question of survival for them and getting through each day.”

“I thought the pressure James was under was just massive,” Jalland recalls. “It was coming from every direction. It was very personal. And every day I was moved by his ability to deal with it and get through it. It makes me emotional now. We had to sit there every day and just deal with it.”

Crown’s then executive deputy chairman, John Alexander, visited Ellerstina in the weeks after Packer’s arrival, and they discussed making him chairman. “James was not in great shape because he had the whole weight of the world on his shoulders,’’ Alexander says. “We talked about changes to how we were going to run the place, the priorities and what was needed. They were then discussed with the board and the board signed off on them.”

By early 2017, Alexander had taken two jobs in one at Crown, replacing both chairman Robert Rankin and chief executive Rowen Craigie. In December 2016 the board had voted to abandon its plan to split the company, instead selling down its casinos investment in Macau, worth more than $1.6 billion. It was a decision supported by Packer and CPH. By the time Crown sold the rest of its Macau stake in May 2017, it had made six times its original investment. And it effectively saved Crown’s staff in China, putting them on a path to release two months later. Yet the subsequent recovery in the Macau gaming market and the increase in the Melco Crown share price in the 18 months after the sale enraged Packer.

The horrors of 2016 had left Packer, for the third time in his life, suffering a nervous breakdown. Those who know him well and saw the private pain of his two previous mental crises say this latest iteration was by far the worst. It led him in March 2018 to acknowledge to the world for the first time that he was battling mental health issues as he resigned from the Crown board for the second time in two and a half years.

The news came as a shock to many, but not to Warren Beatty. “I don’t pry, but I think he’s in a process of self-analysis that we certainly don’t see in certain public figures – who I won’t name – who are carrying infinitely greater responsibilities,” he says. “This process is continual. I think we all need to continue to be re-examining. I think it is very open for him to come out publicly that he is attempting to evaluate the health of what he is going through or doing.”

Packer’s first breakdown occurred after the infamous 2001 collapse of One.Tel when his father was still alive. The Packers lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the mobile phone company, which was also backed by Rupert ­Murdoch’s News Corporation [publisher of The Australian]. In the wake of the disaster, James was unrelentingly punished for a year by his father before Kerry realised what damage he was doing to his son. It followed a troubled childhood during which Kerry had ruled over his household and at times terrified his son, as Kerry’s own father had done. James and Kerry reconciled before Kerry passed away in late 2005 but the One.Tel episode cost James his first marriage to swimsuit model Jodhi Meares.

“His father was often unhappy but not ­necessarily depressed,” says long-time Packer family adviser and former Labor senator Graham Richardson when I ask if he thought Kerry ­suffered from the same ailments as his son. “Kerry carried with him great anger that he would explode with regularly. For Kerry that was enough of a release for whatever tension he held within. James does the same thing but it is ­obviously not enough. I don’t think James has had the release that his father had.”

Packer with, from left, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and Brett Ratner in Macau. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Packer’s second breakdown came after Crown was saddled with debt when it paid too much for a laundry list of casino investments in the US just before the global financial crisis hit. Four years later, the stresses of the Sydney casino bid and the distractions that came with his move into ­Hollywood film production cost him his second marriage, to Erica Baxter. After they divorced, Packer followed Erica and the children when they moved to Los Angeles.

The Sydney casino success pushed Packer into a world he now acknowledges was “wild, really wild”. When Crown Sydney was approved in late 2013, the RatPac film production company was in full swing and he was rubbing shoulders with Hollywood A-listers Martin ­Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. By late 2013 and through 2014 there were media reports linking him to supermodel Miranda Kerr, and in 2015 his romance with Mariah Carey blossomed.

At the same time, the stunning success of his Sydney casino licence bid saw him bombarded with casino opportunities in places as far afield as Cyprus, Rome and Sri Lanka. He was also opening others with his Macau partner, Lawrence Ho, in the Philippines and Macau. Suddenly, Packer was building a global brand and a global company. Publicly, he appeared to be revelling in it but privately, he was falling apart. While he lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the One.Tel disaster and billions during the GFC, this time around Packer acknowledges he lost something far more important than money.

“I haven’t actually had a company threatening financial loss this time. I lost $100 million on ­RatPac, but that was basically it, and I made $100 million in the US at the same time on other ­investments,” he says. “Macau is so heartbreaking because I lost my reputation, and serious people treat me differently, both because of the charges that were levied against our staff in China and because we sold out of Macau. This time I have lost my reputation globally. I am not sure how easy it is to get it back a fourth time. I am really not sure.”

He turns to Greek mythology in an attempt to explain the most exciting yet tumultuous period of his 51 years on Earth. “With RatPac and ­Hollywood, Mariah, Israel, China, all of those things, I was like Icarus,” he says, referring to the fable of the man who crashed to earth when the sun’s heat melted his wings of feathers and wax. “I flew too close to the sun.”

Edited extract from The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer, by Damon Kitney (HarperCollins, $45), out October 22.