Money does count in life story killed off by ‘dominating’ billionaire Andrew Forrest
The woman commissioned by Andrew Forrest to write his official life story has instead gone very, very rogue.
The woman commissioned by Andrew Forrest to write his official life story has instead written an extraordinarily vivid and at times scathing account of the iron ore billionaire.
Previously seen only by avid readers of the Australian Journal of Biography and History, the essay by Nichola Garvey describes the at-times dominating and parsimonious traits behind the country’s second-richest person.
It also details the events that led to the book being abandoned after four years of graft by Garvey as Mr Forrest tried to draft Peter FitzSimons as a co-author.
When contacted by The Weekend Australian, Garvey said the piece was written as part of her PhD as an academic exercise. She said that while Mr Forrest was incredibly challenging at times, he was a good person who tried to get it right. “It was an awfully tough gig writing his biography but on balance my view of him is positive,” she said.
Garvey (no relation to this reporter) had been working on an official history documenting the stellar rise of Mr Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group when the magnate approached her in 2011 to discuss potential authors for his own biography. Among his suggestions was novelist Tim Winton.
Eventually, however, the job fell to Garvey.
“One could argue that I had reasonable credentials: I knew him, I could write, I wrote biography, but above all (and with the benefit of hindsight), I think I ended up with the job because I was a person Forrest thought he could control,” Garvey wrote in her Journal piece.
Garvey said Mr Forrest’s appetite for control quickly became a central theme, in both his business success and his polarising effect on people.
“His driving need to control, and his ability to orchestrate events and manipulate people to get what he wanted, was a dominant character trait. Like all dominant character traits, it was both an asset and a liability,” she wrote.
She described Mr Forrest as a likeable character and a “larrikin with impeccable manners”, writing that she too “drank the Forrest Kool-Aid” after spending three days with him in the Pilbara.
“His overenthusiasm and abundant compliments came across as a touch disingenuous, but I still liked him, and his showmanship was highly entertaining,” she wrote.
But Mr Forrest could also be highly combative, and not just in his business dealings. After working with the Vatican on his campaign to end global slavery, the magnate fell out with “the highest echelons of the Papal administration” due to Mr Forrest’s refusal to cede control to the Vatican.
“For Forrest, charm and pugnacity were as complementary as salt was to pepper in his pursuit of control,” Garvey wrote.
That behaviour was reflected with extreme effectiveness in what Garvey dubbed the “kiss, kiss, kick” approach: “The way in which Forrest would court people, flatter them, literally hug them, throw an arm around their shoulders, call them his family, joke and laugh … and then, whammo!”
Mr Forrest’s appetite for control, according to Garvey, was behind his original decision to commission a biography. Andrew Burrell — at the time a journalist with The Australian — was working on an unauthorised version and “it got under his skin that someone was attempting to tell his life story”.
The publication of Burrell’s book prompted Garvey to scrap her first draft of Mr Forrest’s story and instead start again with an account focused on the business. The change meant the project, already a year old, would take another three years to complete.
A draft manuscript was finally completed in 2015 but then got bogged down, Garvey wrote, over her takes on certain events.
Garvey brought in her writing mentor FitzSimons to read and edit the manuscript in an attempt to break the impasse. Mr Forrest responded by suggesting FitzSimons should be co-author.
The iron ore magnate agreed to pay FitzSimons “a substantial sum” to become co-author, but the deal hinged on Garvey signing over her rights to the manuscript and all future royalties to Mr Forrest. She insisted she too should also be paid for signing over those rights.
The book stalled again, apparently permanently, after Mr Forrest tried to negotiate with the book’s publisher. The magnate, Garvey wrote, wanted “complete control” and offered the publisher 10 per cent of sales rather than the standard of about 40 per cent.
Mr Forrest, she wrote, was “notoriously parsimonious” even after he became Australia’s richest person and if he did pay for something he made sure to point it out.
“While much of Forrest’s story is about power, a lot of it is also to do with money — how it has motivated Forrest, his acuity in the employment of capital, how he uses it to manipulate people by withholding and promising it and his absolute obsession with it, despite all of his declarations to the contrary.”
Garvey is now a PhD student at the Australian National University.
FitzSimons told The Weekend Australian on Friday that he had been stunned by Mr Forrest’s “truly great life story” and hoped to see it published one day.
“(Forrest) did a great negotiation, he got a great deal with my publisher but in the end he wasn’t happy with the final deal he got so he said ‘no go’,” FitzSimons said.
A spokesman for Mr Forrest said he cared deeply for his family, staff, fellow Australians and for the welfare of people around the world and wished Garvey well.
“Andrew is extremely passionate about every aspect of his private and professional life, which may be misinterpreted by some people,” the spokesman said.
“He respects that people may form personal opinions of his character, behaviour and work ethic, however opinion is not always an accurate record of truth.”
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