The knife meets the whetstone
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 5: Addicted to Celebrity
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Matthew Condon
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Matthew Condon's biography and other articles by this writer
The use of celebrities in marketing fascinates me. Why are we so addicted to stargazing?
from the unpublished manuscript, "Seduction and Sales", by Peter Foster
Writer frank Moorhouse has said that Queensland's Gold Coast is the perfect destination for an annual nervous breakdown. The place is an abrasive amalgam of Kings Cross and the Costa del Sol, strips of powdered sand and garish light, pot-bellied tourists and cosmetically altered locals. Here, skin can harden like leather.
It's a place where tough southern cops come to retire, only to find the criminals of their past have also settled in the neighbourhood to see out their lives in the sunshine. I recently bumped into a senior officer of my acquaintance who once commanded one of western Sydney's toughest precincts. Just retired, he had bought a house on the Isle of Capri, and a boat, and was already in coast apparel – patterned shirt and loafers. On a stroll through Surfers Paradise one evening with his wife, he had seen two gangsters who had haunted his career. They, too, were in bright shirts and slip-ons. He merely shook his head, speechless.
If a landscape could be psychologically diagnosed, then the Gold Coast would be bipolar. Happy families and drug dealers. Picnics and knifings. It's a spotted tie worn with a striped shirt. In the trendy suburb of Main Beach, for example, there is a 24-hour convenience store on one corner of exclusive Tedder Avenue and a plastic surgeon on the other. Here, some years ago, as the city's young A-list wined and dined, a man streaked through the restaurant strip with a knife wound to the neck, the victim of a drug deal gone wrong. It gave the patrons something to talk about over their wagyu. Even the local mobile phone transmitter tower has been fashioned into a fake palm tree. All of it, a hall of mirrors.
It was here that notorious Australian businessman Peter Foster suddenly re-emerged in January 2003. He flew into his old home town like a disoriented bird fleeing the European winter, trailing television cameras and tabloid journalists. I remember the media scrum on the television news – Foster pushing his way out of the Coolangatta terminal and into the sunlight, encased by reporters and dozens of prickly microphone booms, as if swallowed by an anteater.
He was, of course, global news. He had returned home as a consequence of the so-called "Cheriegate" scandal. He was lover to the equally notorious Carole Caplin, who in turn was best friend and "lifestyle" adviser to Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister.
Foster had assisted in the purchase of some real estate for the Blairs. He had, by all reports, secured them an astonishing bargain. And that was that. Until the press smoked out his involvement and his past, yet again, engulfed his present. He was the Bai Lin slimming tea fraudster, the "conman", the cad. He had been jailed on three continents. How could he have gotten so close to Downing Street?
He was refused re-entry to Britain when the scandal broke and moved to Ireland. Then it was suggested he leave Ireland, too. So he came home, leaving Caplin and the Blairs and the grubby dust storm of Cheriegate behind.
If it had been anyone but Foster this may have been a tragic love story. The couple torn asunder, forced apart by dark political forces. The anguished phone calls and declarations of fidelity across 16,000 kilometres of land and ocean. The emotionally buoyant text messages.
On the Gold Coast, the locals loved it. This infamous son, in a place that bred them like thoroughbreds, had returned. It was here he was brought up and went to school, became an entrepreneur before most of his contemporaries were old enough to drive. Ran nightclubs and squired exotic women. He had money to burn. They called him the Kid Tycoon.
In that first week of his exile, he dined at a fashionable seafood-and-steak restaurant in Main Beach called Shuck, occupying daily the same table in the front section of the house, under white winged-sail roofing and the shade of poinciana trees. He rarely finished a meal uninterrupted. The locals sought his autograph, leaning over the railing of the restaurant with business cards and slips of paper for him to sign. They had their photographs taken with him. They slapped him on the back and welcomed him home. "Good on you," they said. "We're behind you." A time-honoured Australian compliment for anyone who was sticking it up the "Poms".
You could see, in those early weeks, the press photographers with cannon-sized lenses snapping him from side alleys and passing cars. His morning trip to the newsagent was reported. If he bought a pie from the local bakery, the type was recorded by the press, as was its relationship to his diet and girth. Peter Foster had settled back home after almost 10 years, and he was a celebrity.
I HAD GONE TO SCHOOL WITH FOSTER at nearby Aquinas College in Southport in the late 1970s. It was a Catholic school presided over by the Christian Brothers. An all-boys college, it was the sort of school that virtually emptied at lunchtimes, with surfers of all ages pedalling frantically to the beach, their boards in tow, for a handful of waves between classes. In the afternoons, half the boys' uniforms were damp with seawater.
Foster was, I recall, intelligent and affable, yet shy. That shyness seemed to translate into a sort of world-weariness, way out of synchronicity with his actual age, so he occupied that middle ground among his peers, not overly popular, but not ignored. He was, even then, something of an enigma. He was different, yet it was impossible, then, to ascertain the true source of that difference.
It was difficult to ignore him. At about 15 he arrived at class with briefcases that contained watches and shark-tooth and pig-tusk necklaces for sale. It was rumoured (and later proven correct) that he leased a string of pinball machines to high-rise apartment buildings in Surfers Paradise. The pocket money of kids his age ended up, well, in his pocket.
While he was never completely aloof, there was a feeling that part of him was somewhere else – in a more exciting place. So it was not surprising that by senior year, he was not among our ranks. He had simply moved on.
In a very short time we started reading about him in the local press. He suddenly emerged, fully formed, as the world's youngest boxing promoter. As we poured over maths and physics and the history of the 20th century, he was pictured in dapper suits surrounded by beautiful women and famous fighters. He took champagne and judged beauty contests. The schoolboys he'd left behind could merely ogle.
I did not see him for 23 years. In Fiji in 2001 to cover the election there for a newspaper, I overheard two staff in the Sheraton Denarau talking about a Peter Foster who'd been in the bar the evening before. I asked them about him. He lived only a few hundred metres away, in the Sheraton villas. I made an in-house call and within half an hour we were sharing a beer by the pool.
He struck me, then, as some sort of exotic exile. I had vaguely kept track of his exploits over the years – the Bai Lin tea scandal, the affair with model Samantha Fox in London, the trading offences and extraditions and custodial remands and court appearances. He took me to say hello to his mother, Louise, with whom he shared the villa. We talked of the past, and books, and Peter's plans to establish a writers' retreat on one of the neighbouring islands. He was writing his memoir.
He may have settled in Fiji for life, if he hadn't become involved in the impending election. He was a great supporter of former deputy prime minister Dr Tupeni Baba – the "Nelson Mandela of the South Pacific" as Foster described him – and had put money into his campaign. Then the local press established the connection. And Foster's past was regurgitated. And he was asked, not so politely, to leave Fiji forever.
SO, POST-CHERIEGATE ON HIS RETURN TO THE GOLD COAST, I contacted him. Inviting me to luncheon at his favourite table at Shuck, he and I reminisced about old school colleagues. He is a man attached to his past, at times sentimentally so, and has an almost photographic memory for times, faces and places. His recall of teachers and students and assorted incidents left me astonished.
During that first luncheon I admired his shirt and said so. It was pale blue, long-sleeved, and of quality material and cut. He found the compliment amusing. He said it was one of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cast-offs. An item chosen for Blair by Foster's girlfriend, Carole Caplin, and later rejected by the PM.
I thought he was joking. But he said it was true, poked a foot out the side of the table, and displayed half of a beautiful pair of brown loafers. Also the PM's leftovers. They were very nice, and very expensive, items of clothing. That he was sitting opposite me, wearing clothes meant for one of the most powerful men in the world, left me as agape as the schoolboy I was all those years ago.
Sitting in that little restaurant at Main Beach, he regaled me with stories about "Tony", as he called him, and amusing details about the Prime Minister and his wife. And other stories – of celebrities, and travel, and business dealings – that constituted his peripatetic life. He is a brilliant raconteur, with innumerable tales at his disposal. He always seemed to be on the fringe of exciting things.
In those early months we met weekly. Sometimes we'd go to Tooley's bar at Main Beach. Ten minutes after ordering a beer, his mobile would ring. "It's Carole," he'd say. Then he'd be gone. For five minutes. Or an hour. Sometimes in the quiet alley behind the bar. Or you'd see him pacing the street, the phone to his ear.
On some evenings Caplin would ring 10, 15, 20 times. He would always politely excuse himself, and return elated, or depressed, or riddled with anxiety. Carole doesn't want me to drink. Carole wants to know whom I'm having dinner with. Carole this. Carole that.
On two occasions I had to verify to her on the phone that I was, indeed, a male, and that there were no females present in our party, and that no, Peter had not drunk too much. She phoned from London as if she were living around the corner. "Women," he'd say, exasperated.
It made for interesting conversation; it was both peculiar and thrilling to hear him relay Caplin's latest anxieties about herself, about Cherie, about Tony.
In his initial exile, while bitter about being booted out of the United Kingdom and separated from his beloved, it was Caplin who kept him even of temperament and even hopeful about a future with the constant contact. He seemed to grudgingly enjoy her incessant calls, inquiring about whether he'd done his washing, or was eating healthily, or was getting enough sleep. The whole bizarre arrangement kept him afloat. And out of mischief. The more he was pinned to his mobile, and Caplin, and the façade of a relationship with all its minutiae conducted halfway around the world, the less he thought about the Blairs, and being banished from his life "over there". He often expressed incredulity at how he'd got involved with the whole "nutty" crew, and the thought ended there, with raised hands and the fading of a laugh.
Throughout the year he attempted a fitness regime. He employed a personal trainer and spent agonising hours on the beach shedding his European winter physique. He went for long walks on the sand. Strangers would say "G'day" and shake his hand. "Good to have you back. Good on you, Peter."
Invariably he would end up lunching or dining in the evening at Shuck, or "the office" as he called it. There his favourite table became something of a tiny stage for locals and visiting celebrities, kept permanently reserved for him by restaurant owner Scott Budgen. The patronage swelled. They waited for Peter Foster.