Laws unto himself

FOR decades he ruled the airwaves and even now, at 77, he can cause a stir. John laws looks back on his life - and his regrets.

John Laws

"I DON'T know what the recipe is for happiness, equal parts of this, that and the other, but I do believe two-thirds fatalism is pretty important." - John Laws, Book of Uncommon Sense

The doorman is dispatched to manoeuvre the Rolls-Royce Phantom, the size of a small tank, out of a tight spot. Jodee Borgo - a friendly, chatty woman who has been his personal assistant for 18 years - and I wait in the private lobby at the end of Sydney's Woolloomooloo Wharf, beneath a beautiful painting of a woman in a blue dress. He's a very good boss and she has become part of the family, Jodee tells me, but she never forgets he is the boss and she is the secretary. He loves reading, she continues, devours books. "We got him a Kindle but he can't come to it." He's a good man, she reiterates, an interesting man, but "I can't lie, he can be difficult". Like a fussy mother on an outing, she carries a hessian bag with things he might need - fresh orange juice, various pills, diced fruit in plastic containers, eye-drops, a blood-pressure machine.

GALLERY: The long career of John Laws

A door opens and he appears, steadying himself on a walking stick topped with a silver lion's head. There's a chunky gold lion's head ring on his finger, and golden lions' heads for cufflinks. He's 77 but looks ancient as he pauses for a moment like a Galapagos tortoise on its hind legs. And then he speaks. "Hello." It's deep and rich and unmistakable. It's a voice that's been described as music to a woman's ovaries - a voice that would curl a frangipani. It's the voice of John Laws.

He shuffles out to the Roller - its doors are open and the engine is idling - and we settle into the giant leather seats as he steers us through the bowels of the wharf and out into sunlight. Jodee does most of the talking and Laws answers any direct questions in short sentences. Do you see much of Russell Crowe, I ask? The actor lives above the sprawling two-storey apartment occupied by Laws and his wife Caroline. "Yes," he says. "He pops in occasionally. He's very good to Caroline." Then, silence. After a bit, I ask him who his closest friends are - people who know him well that I should talk to. "I don't really have friends," he says. "You'll have to ask Jodee. Caroline... if she'd talk... You could talk to Jodee."

In traffic, a passing truck driver recognises him and honks a friendly toot. Laws smiles and waves and Jodee informs me that wherever they go people still adore him, "don't they John". This encounter with the friendly truckie is about as close as Lawsy, the great voice of middle Australia, ever physically gets to any of his listeners. Ten minutes later we arrive at 2SM in Pyrmont, a roller door opens and the car slides into the two reserved spaces. Upstairs, his "handmaidens", as he calls his producers, are working on his scripts in an open office. He insists they wear dresses or skirts, never long pants. "Good morning Mr Laws," they chorus as he enters his studio. The morning newspapers are fanned out before him on a massive desk in his enormous studio. He sits before the golden microphone and flicks through The Daily Telegraph while Jodee brings him an orange juice in a scotch glass and a container of watermelon, cut up into little pieces. He takes a bite and red juice dribbles down onto his crisp white linen shirt. "I think that Bob Carr is a loose cannon - I know you like him," Jodee says. "He's pretty intelligent," Laws replies. "Did you see the golden origami microphone someone sent in?" she asks. "Yes," he replies, examining the paper masterpiece. "I must thank them."

"Thirty seconds," says a voice. "Ten seconds." And then, show time - "Da, dunna, da, dunna, na Hello world, I'm John Laws..." The sound is comforting and familiar, like cicadas in summer, or Richie Benaud describing a sweetly timed on-drive racing to the ropes. The man himself somehow changes. He comes alive. For three hours he is the Golden Tonsils, the larrikin broadcaster, the battler's advocate, Australia's friend. For three hours he forgets that he is an old man with a dodgy back and a walking stick who's prone to periods of great melancholy. He forgets that he is the man his friends and children say they hardly know.

If you are not the lead dog, the view never changes. - John Laws, Book of Irreverent Logic

"There is a view among many people," says a rival broadcaster, "that it's embarrassing for a bloke that has reached the heights he has, as one of the most significant broadcasters in the nation's history, that he is peddling his wares on 2SM, a station that is a step up from a community radio station." Laws is beamed out to 22 radio stations across rural NSW, southern Queensland and to Alice Springs. In Sydney, his home town, he shares the category of "other" with a gaggle of community radio stations which battle for a small slice of the metropolitan market. Jodee tells me he's number one in Newcastle.

After decades as the undisputed leader of the savage pack that inhabits commercial radio, Laws now has a rear-end view of his great rivals. Ray Hadley and Alan Jones are far off in the distance - with an abundance of backsides in between. Laws hasn't been top dog since the early 2000s, after Jones and Hadley defected from his old station, 2UE, to John Singleton's 2GB. It must have been galling for a man who had ruled the airwaves for decades to be done over by Jones, who he has dubbed "that vicious old tart", and Hadley, the man who used to wait around the station just in case Lawsy called in sick.

Laws began broadcasting in Bendigo in 1953 and by 1963 he was earning more than the prime minister. A decade or so later he was pocketing more than the boss of BHP and was said to be the highest-paid radioman in the world. He pioneered talkback in this country and the housewives of Australia took to him like a box of Bex. His show was syndicated to radio stations throughout the nation and, it was claimed, two million people listened each day - they loved him, they believed him. He had the power to make or break radio stations simply by staying or leaving, the power to transform a brand such as Toyota or Valvoline. Politicians and advertisers grovelled at his feet. Bob Hawke would leave cabinet meetings to talk to him. Paul and Annita Keating spent weekends with him and The Princess, his wife Caroline, at his house on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney, or at his Cloud Valley Farm on the NSW Central Coast. "Forget about the press gallery," Keating said. "If you educate John Laws, you educate middle Australia." He was the undisputed king.

And then came the Cash for Comment revelations in 1999, where Laws and Jones were found to have trousered secret commissions worth millions. Laws had been doing this for years and his listeners understood he was being paid to say nice things about Toyota or how good the service was on Qantas - not that there's a lot to complain about in first class. However, they were angered to discover he'd stayed silent when a patron was killed in an altercation with bouncers at Sydney's Star City casino - which he had a $250,000-a-year deal with.

Then there was the backflip on banks, which many listeners thought unforgivable. Laws had been bollocking them for years and had more than once castigated Keating for the banking industry's "avarice and greed" and the way they treated his listeners. "I am the capitalist," he said to the then treasurer, "and you're supposed to be the socialist; but I think I am more sympathetic to these people [the customers] than you are." He was, until his agent negotiated a $500,000 deal with his once "immoral" foes for favourable coverage.

Ten days after the deal was signed, Tony Aveling from the Australian Bankers' Association made a "surprise" call to the show. Laws, the furious attack dog, rolled over while the banker tickled his tummy and tossed him golden dog biscuits. A listener sent in an angry fax demanding to know how much he'd pocketed to come to heel. He read it out on air: "You're nothing more than a cheap whore." Laws paused that exquisite pause and said, "I'm not cheap."

The Cash for Comment afffair damaged Laws more than Jones. The punters always knew that Jones, the musical-theatre-loving bachelor, with a butler and a matching pink tie and pocket square, was not one of their mob, but Lawsy! Then, as now, he could not see what he had done wrong - he pleaded he was simply an entertainer, a salesman. His station, 2UE, was found to have breached the code 90 times - it was later fined $360,000 for further breaches by Laws. "He never got it and he never really recovered," says a 2UE manager from the time. "He limped on, but it was the beginning of the end."

In 2007, with his ratings on the slide, he announced his retirement to great fanfare. "You'll be very greatly missed," said the then prime minister John Howard. "Nobody has become such an institution in Australian radio like you." Kevin Rudd weighed in: "You can't retire," the aspiring PM said. "Institutions don't retire, they go on forever." It didn't last. As soon as his two-year non-competitive clause expired, he was back. It left many wondering why a man who was so fabulously rich, who had achieved everything, felt compelled to go back for more.

Many people need more help than that to which they are entitled. That's why we have families. - John Laws, Book of Uncommon Sense

After his show, and before another boozy lunch, Laws and I sit down for a beer and a chat on the western balcony of his apartment, looking over a slice of harbour to the Boy Charlton Pool and the grand Port Jackson figs leading to Mrs Macquarie's Chair. To the north, a couple of Navy ships are tethered, like ornaments at the end of the garden. The balcony is off the Laws' Venetian room, where Kerry Packer had his last meal out before he retreated to die.

I want to talk to him about his childhood. His oldest mate, retired newsreader Brian Henderson, told me that in the 50 years they'd been friends he couldn't recall Laws ever speaking about his youth, or his parents. His son Josh says getting information about his dad's early years "is like pulling teeth". According to journalist John Lyons, who interviewed Laws over two years in the early'90s for his book Laws: A Life of Power, his mother was a cold, hard woman and a terrible snob, and his father, who was 49 when John was born, was remote to the point of being unknowable. The first six years of his life were spent in New Guinea and the most vivid memories of those early years were, Lyons wrote, "of how the vein on the side of his father's head would stand out when he was in a rage and how his mother could not bring herself to touch him". When war broke out Laws, his mother and sister moved back to Australia while his father, who owned a trading store, stayed on. He lost everything and came back to Australia broke and a broken man.

Laws today is defensive of his parents, dismissing their behaviour towards him as being a matter of the times and of circumstance, but the hurt is obvious. "My father died when I was 15 and I really didn't have any relationship with him at all," he says. "He felt he'd let us all down and he became very distant to me not to my sister, but to me." Years ago he wrote a sad and bitter poem about their relationship called "My Childish Need for Love":

I didn't fit the bill / of requirements on your list of essentials for the perfect son / ... and you never did have to fulfil my childish need for love.

His mother was a "thoroughly decent and honest woman" but "kind of stiff and taut, always on the edge". He can't recall her ever giving him a hug. At the age of 12 he was struck down by polio and was hospitalised for months before being sent to Sydney's Knox Grammar, which he hated. "I didn't explore friendships a lot," he tells me. He was a tall, gangly kid with bad acne who the headmaster singled out at assembly as the boy who would go nowhere. He left at 15 to go jackarooing and with a burning desire to show his dead father, his mother and all those wankers at Knox that he could make it in the world. He'd prove them all wrong. He'd sing songs with Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, talk policy with Keating and shuck oysters with Packer. Brett Whiteley would squat at his farm at Oberon and produce some of his finest works - he'd chat about that and others things with his great mate, Margaret Olley. He'd earn tens of millions and build beautiful houses and buy fabulous paintings, sculptures, boats and a fleet of luxury cars. He'd fly first class and stay at the world's finest hotels. He'd claw his way to the top until there was nowhere left to climb.

But the master salesman could never quite convince himself - he could never sell John Laws to John Laws. For all his adult life he has been haunted by self-doubt. Black clouds roll in and hover, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks.

What do you think about during those bleak days, I ask, as we sit on the balcony in the sun with that million-dollar view over his shoulder. "I think about the things I've done that I feel I shouldn't have done. I think about people I have hurt unintentionally, or hurt knowingly. I think of all the things I could have done and didn't do, all those kinds of things... I regret my selfishness, that I was more concerned with becoming famous rather than cuddling my little girl or my little boys."

Behaviour has consequences. - John Laws, Book of Uncommon Sense

While researching this article I came across a piece in The Australian Women's Weekly about Laws' marriage to Caroline in 1976, his third and her second. She'd been married to a charismatic, swashbuckling rogue called Dick Hagon, who owned coffee plantations in the Highlands of PNG, where she had lived with their four daughters. Laws' first marriage was at the age of 21 - it lasted seven years and produced two boys. It ended when his wife, Sonia, burst into a Sydney motel room with a couple of private detectives, searching for grounds for divorce - and found it. He was in bed with the woman who would become his second wife, Yvonne. They would go on to have three children, two boys and a girl, before he left her for Caroline.

The Weekly omits these details but there is a heartbreaking line in the otherwise flowery article. "The fifth Laws, a fair-haired four-year-old named Sarah, was with her mother and, says Laws, is the only one of his children he doesn't really know." Laws peers into his beer when I read him this. "When she was born the marriage fell apart and she was taken away by her mother and I never really got to see her until she was two years old. Then I saw her irregularly. It was those ridiculous times when you got to see your children between nine and three on a Saturday, or some bullshit. It was heartbreaking but it was my fault, I made a mess of it and I've had to live with it."

He has reconciled with Sarah, and says they now have a close relationship, as he does with all his children, apart from his second eldest boy, Luke, who is estranged from the entire family. He's become a "bit reclusive - lives in a tree or something ... He's not a fool, but he wants to live like one". Do you think you may have played a part in damaging him? "I fear I did, but there are always casualties in marriage break-ups in this case the casualties would have been greater had the marriage not broken up. It's not healthy for little kids to hear their mother and father screaming at each other and breaking things."

Then, he suddenly changes the subject. "Have you got Jodee's number there? Can you ring it, we need to organise lunch." She does everything for you, I remark. "Yes, thank God for Jodee." She makes a booking and we head off to one of the expensive restaurants on the wharf, near where Laws's luxury cruiser, La Carolina, is berthed. Apart from driving to the studio, he rarely steps outside this exclusive little world on the wharf, except to fly to Italy.

Laws' eldest son from his second marriage, Josh, is the child Laws nominates as the one I should talk to and we meet at a Surry Hills cafe. Josh, 46, is an illustrator with his own business. He tells me that the melding of the families was "kind of like The Brady Bunch, but not every episode had a happy ending".

He has fond memories from his early childhood of weekends on the farm, camping with his dad and riding motorbikes. And then, at the age of nine, his parents split and he was shipped off to boarding school in the country, which, for a little boy who'd just witnessed a bitter divorce, was "fairly horrendous".

Josh is proud of his father and insists he is not bitter. However, he does have one great regret - he wishes he could know him better. "When I was at boarding school I used to think, 'Right, when I leave here I am going to get to know my old man'. I left school and 10 years later realised I was at the same level and it would never change." He knows his father loves him; he's just very difficult to reach. "It's like they say, 'a plumber's pipes are always leaking' - well, dad communicates on radio for a living, and he's very good at it, and yet sometimes at lunch you can be speaking to him for 10 minutes and you'll realise he hasn't heard a word."

Despite this distance, his father is good in a crisis. "When he realises the situation is serious he can be great - he has all the answers and gives great advice and says all the right things," Josh tells me. "He treats me like one of his listeners."

"I used to worry that work would kill him," Josh continues. "But it was pretty obvious retirement would have killed him quicker." He was lost without work - he had no idea what to do with himself. He had no purpose, no structure to his day and he had too much time to think, and it seems some of those thoughts weren't all that pleasant.

The dream is what we would all seek were it not for our own mundane lives. To understand the existence of the dream is to be awakened. Not to be awakened is to lose all hope, hence the necessity to keep the dream alive. - John Laws, Book of Uncommon Sense

A couple of months ago Carol, a nurse, called the show to share her story of sexual abuse from the age of six by her father, uncles and brothers. "My God they were having a good time with you," Laws said. Carol told him her mother didn't believe her and thought it was her fault. "Was it in any way your fault? You weren't being provocative?" She replied, "No, I was just a little girl." His questioning caused howls of outrage that left Laws bewildered - he says he wasn't condoning sexual abuse, he spoke kindly to Carol and she never complained. He even encouraged her to keep the dream alive. But his approach showed him to be completely out of touch, a man from another era. He couldn't see why victims of abuse, or anyone else might be offended by his line of questioning. Just like he can't quite understand why his female colleagues might resent being called sweetheart, or handmaidens forced to wear dresses. A week later there was a rowdy protest outside the 2SM offices organised by GetUp! and Destroy the Joint, armed with almost 40,000 signatures, calling on him to commit to education on sexual assault. Jodee was sent down to deal with it.

But on this day in the studio there's no controversy. He handles his callers - no matter how inane - gently and with patience, and delivers sage advice, like a father to a son in crisis. He rails against parents who fail to have their children immunised ("What's the matter with you people?") and shootings in western Sydney ("I bet you the people involved were not named Smith and Jones"). He promises his listeners he'll get that "jumped up little public servant", immigration minister Brendan O'Connor, to talk about the latest boat. The minister never arrives. He laughs and jokes. Shirley from Newcastle phones in just to say she hasn't spoken to him since 1974. At the end of the three-hour show he's on a high.

"When I was retired I felt pretty worthless," he says. "I didn't think I was making much of a contribution to society." And you do now? "I do. I definitely do." He's keeping the dream alive because without it he'd be dead. What Laws gets from radio is "that marvellous feeling of being wanted. Everyone should feel wanted".

We bid the handmaidens farewell. It's a lovely autumn day, perfect for the other Rolls-Royce, the convertible. Jodee opens the glove box and hands him a leather cap and we set off into the sun with the roof down, to the strains of a violin concerto on Classic FM - he rarely listens to commercial radio and I comment that he probably wouldn't be a John Laws listener. "No, probably not." Asked whom he admires on radio he nominates Margaret Throsby, and then, reluctantly, Alan Jones, "but only for his success".

After a doctor's appointment we head to China Doll, a chic restaurant on the wharf, where the waiter has a table and an ice-cold beer waiting. Caroline joins us and Laws gives her a loving kiss. "She's as beautiful as the day I married her," the old salesman says.

Friends and relatives say she is able to handle John's dark moods as she potters around, doing her own things. They seem to have a lovely relationship and he says to me at one point, "I don't need other people, only Caroline." I had mentioned to Jodee that I interviewed Caroline's ex-husband Dick Hagon years ago, in New Guinea. Caroline brings it up and talks a bit about her time in the Highlands and then says, "but we won't talk of him too much, John gets terribly jealous, don't you darling?" He wasn't listening.

Brian Henderson told me he always marvelled at Laws' ability to drink and seemingly be unaffected, and so do I. We move through beer to wine, while munching on prawn dumplings and scallops and then he and I have an amaretto to finish off. Caroline says I must come and see the sunset from the balcony in a few hours. I stagger off into the city and return at 6pm.

Jodee pours us a Wild Turkey and Caroline a glass of wine. The sun has already set so Caroline, with Jodee in tow, takes me on a tour of the apartment while he watches Tracy Grimshaw on telly. Down a hall, past a Whiteley sketch, is a large corkboard with photographs of friends they've had for dinner - there's a star on every fourth or fifth person. "They're the ones who are dead," she says. "Terrible, isn't it."

There's art crammed everywhere: a Rodin sculpture sits on the kitchen bench, 16th-century Portuguese tiles adorn a balcony, a 2200-year-old Crouching Venus sits on a lounge room floor near an oddly placed Roman column. "You see this painting," Caroline says, pointing to a work by the Australian impressionist John Peter Russell of a peach tree in bloom. "Van Gogh touched this painting - it inspired him for some of his later works." Laws calls out from his chair, "Emphasise how good our security is."

She shows me down a hall to where they have separate adjoining bedrooms, each with a large single bed, overlooking the harbour. In his dressing room there are walls of nude sketches and drawings and an open cupboard with hundreds of suits and sports coats, all arranged by colour. The tour takes more than an hour, and several glasses of wine. It's getting late; Jodee books a table on the wharf.

John sets off early, so as not to hold up Jodee and Caroline. I say my goodbyes to the women and follow a few minutes later. I see him hobbling along the boardwalk with his lion's head stick for support, alone in the night.