Playing to Win

by Jeff Apter

  With that, John ran down the corridor to Jillian’s dressing room, and closed the door.

  ‘I’m madly in love with you,’ he said, dropping to his knees. ‘Will you marry me?’

  Jillian didn’t think twice.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Right then,’ said John, ‘I’ll see you after the show’ – and with that he tore back to his dressing room to prepare for the next performance.

  They planned to marry in April 1973.

  Every performance of Charlie Girl required Johnny to belt out a song called ‘Give it a Go’. It was fast becoming his mantra. ‘I guess that sums me up okay,’ he’d say about the song. ‘I’ll have a go at just about anything.’ ‘Anything’ now included married life.

  But before that, Johnny had two problems to deal with: a head-to-head with his future mother-in-law, Phyllis, who he sometimes quietly referred to as ‘the dragon’, and the fury of an increasingly angry, erratic and overbearing manager.

  Phyllis Billman believed that her daughter was too young to marry; Jillian was only 17, six years younger than Johnny. Johnny talked Phyllis around, but they did clash.

  ‘You’re not marrying my daughter, you Pommie bastard,’ she’d roar at Johnny, when some new wedding planning problem arose. She even threatened to tear up the marriage licence. Johnny, typically, would smooth things over, so much so that he and Phyllis grew very close.

  But Sambell still presented problems for the soon-to-be-newlyweds. He would pull Johnny aside and whisper, ‘Don’t do this. It’ll ruin your career.’ He even insisted that Johnny lie to the press: ‘Wedding? What wedding?’ he instructed his charge to say when asked about it.

  Jillian’s parents had planned a double wedding; Jillian’s sister Judy was to marry her partner, Vincent Grech. But Sambell stepped in and insisted this mustn’t happen; if this wedding was going to take place – against his wishes – he could at least ensure his star wasn’t deprived of the spotlight. Sambell had big plans, he wanted to turn the wedding into an event starring Johnny, and he nitpicked virtually every aspect of the wedding day, all in the name of his protégé, angering the Billmans more and more with each change, and driving Johnny and Jillian nuts.

  One round table at the Billman household left Jillian in tears. Who was getting married, she wondered? It was starting to feel like Sambell’s wedding, not hers – he’d even insisted on being Johnny’s best man. And as if Sambell wasn’t enough trouble, some of Johnny’s more besotted fans had been hassling her, sending threatening notes through the post. She was accosted in the street by a woman wielding a knife. It was all way too much.

  Ian Meldrum became a go-between, and tried his best to mediate. He liked Sambell, but, having grown close to Johnny and Jillian, could appreciate the chaos Darryl was creating. However, it muddied the waters that Meldrum was a journalist and now had his mitts on the biggest scoop in the Australian entertainment world – Johnny Farnham was about to get married. He even had proof: the wedding invitation.

  In the end, Meldrum couldn’t resist. He broke the news in Go-Set in February 1973, running a 1000-word story and a copy of the invite. Sambell leapt into action, denying the story, undermining Meldrum’s supposed ‘exclusive’. This put Molly’s nose way out of joint; he spoke with 3AK, saying that he’d stake his entire career on the veracity of the story. He and Sambell argued – a ‘rather fierce argument’, as Meldrum told the Melbourne press.

  The whole thing was a mess. Johnny and Jillian just wanted to get the wedding over and done with, which wasn’t really the ideal way to approach one of the most significant days of their lives.

  On 17 April, just days after Johnny was declared Victoria’s Youth of the Year, he was riding in a taxi when talk turned to his upcoming nuptials. Tomorrow was his wedding day.

  ‘I have one piece of advice,’ the cabbie told Johnny, glancing at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Always fall asleep in each other’s arms. It’ll keep your marriage strong.’

  It was wise counsel – and something Johnny never forgot.

  The worst-kept secret in Australian music had now been made public by Meldrum, and several thousand eager fans gathered outside St Matthew’s Anglican Church in Glenroy on 18 April. Onlookers clamoured for any and every available vantage point, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Johnny and Jillian as they arrived. The wedding party included both sets of parents, as well as Johnny’s assistant, Jean Nair, matron-of-honour Judy Grech, Johnny’s sister Jean, bridesmaid Lynette Bateman – a close friend of Jillian’s – and flowergirl Tracey Bateman. Among Johnny’s groomsmen was his brother, Alan. Sambell stuck close to Johnny’s side.

  ‘Don’t do it, Johnny!’ yelled a few heartbroken fans, their voices ringing loud and strong. Some got close enough to tear at Jillian’s dress; they just couldn’t believe the King of Pop was getting hitched. The cries and wails of Johnny’s grief-stricken fans could still be heard by the wedding party as the ceremony began.

  Several hundred more fans staked out the reception at the Dorset Gardens Hotel. Two hundred guests had been invited and as everyone eagerly awaited the newlywed Mr and Mrs Farnham, the sun set against a picture-postcard backdrop of rolling green hills and sturdy eucalypts, like something from a McCubbin painting. It was undeniably romantic.

  Then it happened: there was a whirling roar in the distance and a tiny speck appeared in the sky, growing larger by the second. Neither fans nor guests could believe what Sambell had conjured up: an orange chopper was transporting the Farnhams from church to reception, a ride of two minutes, tops. A limo be damned, Sambell figured – what could be more impressive than a helicopter? (The Australian Women’s Weekly went so far as to describe their arrival as ‘all very glamorous – even slightly James Bond-ish!’)

  A chant erupted, shattering the bucolic serenity – ‘We want Johnny! We want Johnny!’ – as the chopper hovered overhead. The local police who had gathered to keep the peace shifted a little uncomfortably; they’d seen Festival Hall crowds run amok and prayed it wouldn’t happen here. Not today. Please.

  Johnny was visible in the jump seat, waving at his fans and friends. As soon as the chopper reached terra firma, Johnny leapt out and ran to the other side, where he took Jillian’s arm and helped her through the scrum of photographers and fans that had formed. Blue was Jillian’s colour of choice: she wore a long-sleeved gown and matching blue lace colts and shoes. A blue lace headband held back her mane of wavy hair. She looked great, if more than a little nervous. As for Johnny, he turned on the charm, waving and mouthing ‘hello’ and ‘g’day’ as he joined his guests, trying his best to downplay how stressful the whole event had been.

  Sambell might have had major issues with the wedding itself, but he couldn’t pass up the chance to throw out a few tasty whispers to the press. Speaking with journos outside the reception, he revealed that Johnny and Jillian had plans to build their first house, a love-nest, possibly in rural Kilmore.

  ‘And I’m off to London shortly,’ Sambell threw in, ‘to discuss a new musical for Johnny.’ Sambell also talked up a proposed TV show for his charge, not a one-off special this time, but possibly as many as 26 half-hour shows. The sky was still the limit for his number-one client.

  ‘Why the helicopter?’ someone asked.

  ‘Why not?’ Sambell replied. Anything for Johnny.

  In the lead-up to the event, Johnny hadn’t thought much about Sambell’s warning, that marriage was the worst possible career move; he loved Jillian too much to even consider this. But it did start to eat away at him when he and Jillian returned from their Brampton Island honeymoon and he plunged back into a new, hectic schedule. The crowds started to thin out; his records didn’t sell.

  ‘I was naive enough to think people who were enjoying my music would have been happy for me,’ Johnny later admitted. ‘I soon learnt that getting married was sudden death for a pop star. My career went very quiet; nobody wanted to know me.’ Johnny Farnham was about to di
scover that Sambell had been right.

  Not that he was short of work – anything but. In early June, Channel 9 screened the clumsily titled special Ted Hamilton and Johnny Farnham Together Again for the Very First Time. Logie-winner Hamilton was currently starring on Channel 9 as police constable Kevin Dwyer in Division 4.

  Johnny also lined up for a variety show with Colleen Hewett at the Sydney Opera House, which had only been open for a matter of weeks. Farnham’s relationship with Hewett extended beyond music; they became partners in a Melbourne restaurant named Backstage, located in Spring Street, along with Hewett’s partner, Danny Findlay. Johnny admitted that food was an industry ‘I didn’t know about’ and that he ‘wasn’t a businessman’s arse’ – and over time, Backstage would prove as onerous as Johnny and Sambell’s nag Seascape.

  Johnny’s grasp of the charts continued to slip. He released a flurry of singles between April 1973 and early 1974 – ‘Everything Is Out of Season’, ‘I Can’t Dance to Your Music’ and ‘Shake a Hand’ – of which only one, ‘Season’, reached the Top 10. ‘Shake a Hand’ peaked – if you could call it that – at the very unflattering position of 91, and promptly disappeared from the charts. It was a very tangible warning sign for Johnny: he’d lost his magic touch. It would be another six long, empty years before he’d record his next Top 10 hit.

  Johnny looked on as the more successful Australian acts of the moment, such as Helen Reddy, Rick Springfield and Olivia Newton-John, shifted overseas in the early 1970s, having outgrown the small Australian market. Newton-John won her first Grammy, and scored her debut US Top 10, with 1973’s ‘Let Me Be There’; Reddy was fast-tracking her way to becoming the world’s biggest female act, on the strength of hits like ‘I Am Woman’ and ‘Delta Dawn’ and headline-grabbing moves like referring to God as ‘she’ in a Grammy acceptance speech. Springfield broke into the US Top 10 with the whimsical ‘Speak to the Sky’; soon enough he’d be starring in his own cartoon series. Another expat, Peter Allen, was working on ‘I Honestly Love You’, a future worldwide number one for Newton-John.

  Domestically, the rise of such rock reprobates as Skyhooks and AC/DC was but a few power chords away. Former Easybeat Stevie Wright was poised to record the epic ‘Evie (Parts 1, 2 & 3)’, arguably the greatest single in Oz pop history, while William Shakespeare, John Paul Young and Ted Mulry (with and without his Gang) were busily cornering the pop market. Even ageing rocker Col Joye, who’d been another early mentor of Johnny’s, had returned to the charts with ‘Heaven is My Woman’s Love’, while Johnny O’Keefe had done the same with ‘Mockingbird’. Farnham’s label EMI were having far more success with breakout acts such as singer-songwriters Ross Ryan, whose ‘I Am Pegasus’ was huge in 1973. Russell Morris, who recorded for EMI subsidiary label Harvest, did equally big business in 1972 with the soaring ‘Wings of an Eagle’, which clung to the charts for the best part of five months. But Johnny was adrift in a commercial wilderness, short of hits and ideas.

  And how did Sambell and Johnny counter this? They retreated to the safety of the theatre. Johnny took refuge in a production of Pippin, again produced by Kenn Brodziak, slated to open at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s in February 1974. Johnny was cast in the titular role, one of Charlemagne’s sons, and was paired with the equally golden Colleen Hewett. Farnham also struck up a friendship with the English actress Jenny Howard, a venerable theatre veteran.

  ‘The show’s young star, Johnny Farnham, and I get on so happily together,’ Howard gaily told a reporter backstage. Johnny and Howard would reminisce about England; they discovered they shared Essex roots.

  Billed modestly as ‘the most breathtaking, stunning, star-studded musical comedy in a decade’, Pippin Oz-style did reasonable business in Melbourne, ran briefly in Sydney and bled money in Adelaide. But it didn’t match the success of Charlie Girl. And it came nowhere near the success of the Broadway original, directed by stage legend Bob Fosse, which ran (and ran and ran) for almost 2000 performances and won five Tonys. It seemed that Australia’s theatregoers were tiring of Johnny Farnham. Apart from the obligatory Carols by Candlelight spot, Johnny wouldn’t return to the theatre until 1992, when he’d be cast as no less a character than Jesus Christ himself.

  In late July 1974 Channel 10 began screening It’s Magic, a variety show aimed at a younger audience. Johnny co-presented the program with Hewett. It was billed in the press as a ‘fully integrated music show’, based upon an idea by Johnny Young and his partner Kevin Lewis. It’s Magic was filmed in and around Pippin rehearsals and performances, hardly the perfect scenario for a new project. When shooting was over for the day, as Hewett related, ‘we’d then rush to the theatre to put the wigs on’. It was a relentless schedule. Johnny, always politic with the press, admitted, ‘it was a bit of a strain – but worth it’. A Fairfax photographer snapped the pair popping the cork on a bottle of champagne, toasting their new show. The headline declared: ‘Bubble and Fizz Before Work’, but their smiles seemed a bit forced. This was work, hard work.

  There was a fun segment on the show, mostly ad-libbed, called ‘The Kids’, in which Johnny and Hewett would sit in a sandpit and grumble about ‘grown ups’; sometimes Johnny would hoon around the studio on a kid’s pushbike. Yet despite some solid press – ‘I’ve run out of superlatives to describe this show,’ gushed a reporter for The Age, ‘it is a great day when Australians can watch their own talent on screen’ – It’s Magic screened for only 13 weeks and then quietly faded into Oz television obscurity.

  Proving far more popular, Channel 10’s Young Talent Time, hosted by Johnny Young and featuring stars-on-the-rise like Jamie Redfern and Debbie Byrne, was a couple of years into its record-breaking 18-season, 800-plus-episode run. When the Young Talent Time troupe visited Sydney’s Luna Park, the crowd response was so fervent that the cast was forced to escape through a tunnel in the park’s scenic railway. In 1973 the newly crowned King of Pop, Young Talent Time’s Jamie Redfern, packed Melbourne’s Festival Hall, until recently Farnham’s happy hunting crowd. Johnny’s old fans had found a newer, fresher face to love. Farnham agreed to cameo on Young Talent Time, but it was a big comedown.

  How could he break his career slump? Was Cliff Baxter right – was it time to move on from Sambell?

  In late 1974, Glenn Wheatley, Johnny’s former flatmate, was en route to Melbourne, where his future lay with a group under development that would become the Little River Band. Wheatley’s plane reached Darwin on 23 December 1974; he was travelling with his wife, Alison. The next day, having been warned of a huge storm heading Darwin’s way, they caught what turned out to be one of the last flights to leave the city, headed for the Gold Coast, where Wheatley’s parents lived.

  Flicking through the local newspaper the next morning, Wheatley was shocked to read of the apocalyptic Cyclone Tracy, which killed 71 Darwinians and pretty much flattened the northern capital soon after his flight departed. He turned on the TV and ‘watched with horror the devastation of Darwin’: he and his wife had come close to being among the victims.

  Still reeling from the news, Wheatley found a distraction: his old housemate and buddy, Johnny Farnham, had a gig in town, a New Year’s Eve bill with Colleen Hewett, on the beach at Southport. Wheatley decided to see what Farnham was doing. What does a King of Pop get up to, he wondered, when he isn’t the king anymore? Wheatley was about to experience his second shock of recent days.

  Five years earlier, while still with The Masters, Wheatley had shared a big bill with Johnny, and others, called Operation Starlift, which played to full, frantic houses in Adelaide, Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Johnny’s fans sometimes had to be dragged away from the stage; the backstage area was like a battlefield, littered with the bodies of young girls who’d passed out. Seventy female fans in Hobart needed treatment during Johnny’s set. (Wheatley had to step over the bodies to reach the stage.) Operation Starlift drew 6000 punters to Brisbane’s Festival Hall, a bigger crowd than The Beatles had pulled in 1964. And now th
is? Wheatley asked himself, as he looked on. Johnny’s gig was a disaster.

  Wheatley was a man on the move. Having sacked Sambell in early 1969 after it became apparent Johnny was absorbing too much of his manager’s energy, he established Drum, an agency that managed acts on the rise (The Sect and The Expression, among others) and promoted local shows. Wheatley also took over the management of The Masters Apprentices; he and the band travelled to the UK in May 1970, courtesy of a contact at the Sitmar cruise line, who offered them working passage on the Fairstar. The Masters remained in England long enough to record two influential albums, Choice Cuts and A Toast to Panama Red, before splitting in 1972.

  After a moment of pure clarity in the wake of a sold-out Masters’ gig – ‘Where did all the money go,’ he wondered, ‘if not to us?’ – Wheatley then turned his attention full-time to the business of music. He worked for the Gem-Toby Organization in the UK and also spent time in America, where, among other things, he helped arrange concerts for Richard Nixon’s 1973 presidential inauguration. He worked with Michael Jackson; they shared a dressing room at the Academy Awards. And Wheatley had a green card, a priceless document for someone in his position, organised for him by US Vice President Spiro Agnew. Impressive. Wheatley returned home and set up The Wheatley Organisation.

  Wheatley had two key sources of inspiration. The first was a book entitled The Business of Music, which he carried with him like a talisman. The second was an article called ‘The Day Radio Died’, written by an American music industry exec named Stan Cornyn, and published in Billboard. Cornyn’s story became Wheatley’s MO: ‘How do you think outside the box?’ Cornyn wrote.

  ‘His article had a profound effect on me,’ admitted Wheatley. He needed to be imaginative to succeed in the music biz.

  Wheatley had developed a very simple philosophy as a manager: he treated the artist as he would have liked to have been treated when he was a musician. He also had a clear goal, to manage the first Oz band to conquer the United States, while still operating out of Australia. Wheatley would achieve this with Little River Band.