In 1992, Ken Fletcher rang me from his home near Windsor Castle whispering: “Say a novena for me Hughie. Disaster has struck!”
Ken’s boss and friend, the Irish-American Chuck Feeney, 60, had decided to pull back from his world empire to look after his dying nephew, Jimmy Fitzpatrick. So Chuck installed professional management from the US to run his global business empire … and Fletch had been summoned by the new boss to Head Office in Savile Row.
“This bloody lame brain in a shiny suit calls me in,” Ken told me, “and he says I’m not contributing anything to the bloody company! And the bugger sacks me! He’s put the kybosh on everything! The rotten bloody bastard has asked for my house back as well!”
Ken’s topsy-turvy life had been upended yet again.
Typically, he immediately went to complain to Chuck.
Chuck Feeney, understandably, didn’t want to overrule the management he had just put in charge, so he offered Ken an alternative: he would personally employ Ken to be his “man in Australia” … if Ken was prepared to move back to Brisbane.
Though born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, near New York, Chuck considered himself Irish (he chose to be buried in Dublin) because that was his heritage: so he thought Fletch would be happier back in Australia.
“Whether Ken enticed me, or I enticed him to fly over to Brisbane, is still up for decision,” Chuck told me later.
“I could always see that Ken was very, very Brisbane-oriented, I’d say even Annerley-oriented. And … I suppose I just thought Australia was a new frontier, a part of the world I’d never been to.
“Oh, I’d been to Sydney a few times, but never done anything there. So I said to Ken, ‘We’re always looking for business investments and you can be our scout in Australia.”’
Thus on May 7, 1992, Chuck and Helga Feeney arrived in Brisbane with their friend Fletch.
“When we were circling above Brisbane, Ken was pointing out the window, saying enthusiastically: ‘That’s it!’” Chuck said. “I like it, it’s a nice place to be.”
They booked into the Heritage Hotel overlooking the river where they were put into the penthouse suite, and – knowing no one else in town – invited Ken’s friends around for drinks.
Chuck, a man with big blue eyes and a generous head of hair, pulled me aside and whispered the truth of the matter: “I thought the boy should come home.”
Meanwhile Fletch was exclaiming, “What a beaut Hotel! Chuck, you should buy the bloody joint!”
Chuck replied, “The only reason we’re in the penthouse, Ken, is that we have an option to buy part of the group.”
Fletch was flabbergasted and excited by Chuck’s wealth, and he, too, pulled me aside, saying: “You’ve got your computer software companies, your oil and gas wells, your cashmere factory, your Brandy distillery, your resort hotels in Bali, and in Saipan, and in Phuket and an 800-room resort in Guam!
“And then there’s the block of apartments in San Francisco: 865 of them! Chuck took me to a castle in Ireland that he turned into a Hotel we stayed in!
“On the way out here we went to a multi-level Shoppingtown in Hawaii and were on the travelator when this woman came running squealing: ‘Mr Feeney, Mr Feeney you are in store!’
“Chuck owned the bloody lot. The bloody lot!”
Irish journalist Conor O’Clery, in his biography of Chuck Feeney, wrote: “Once again Chuck relied on a personal connection to introduce him to Australia: Ken Fletcher, one of the heroes of Australia’s golden tennis era. Fletcher had a reputation as something of a larrikin – someone who disdains authority and enjoys life.”
Chuck told us his arrival in Brisbane had not been propitious. He had to sign an immigration declaration where one of the questions was: “Do you have a criminal record?”
Chuck, always fast with a wisecrack, quipped to the official: “I didn’t know it was still necessary.”
This officious official pointed at him and said: “You … over there!”
“They descended on me and my luggage and picked through everything,” Chuck said, a bit bewildered.
Back in his hometown as Chuck Feeney’s man in Australia, Ken Fletcher decided to base himself on the Gold Coast 50 miles south.
He said he preferred the Gold Coast for its “more relaxed lifestyle”.
But Chuck saw through this.
There was a casino on the Gold Coast, and no casino in Brisbane. So Chuck believed Ken was attracted to the “Jupiters Casino lifestyle”.
“No Ken,” Chuck said emphatically. “I prefer that you live in Brisbane. It’s the capital … and it’s too nice.”
Chuck was Ken’s good friend; but he was also now his boss.
In his whole life Ken had never had a boss, so this decision was difficult to accept. But he realised he had to give in … and rented in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point.
His teenage son Julien arrived from London and moved in with his Dad.
Not being (in his own words) “a car perv”, Fletch was delighted when Chuck – who refused to own a car because of the expense – splurged out and bought him a second-hand Mazda.
Fletch could well have brought home a billionaire who was swaggering, loud, boastful and ostentatious; instead, he arrived with a man who always wore a cardigan, always carried books, and who travelled so much he could distinguish between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese in a restaurant.
“In fact,” Chuck told me, “while sitting on planes the only two groups in the world I have difficulty telling apart are Irish and Australian.”
Chuck Feeney was chivalrous, spoke softly, and never looked for attention. And he had recently come up with a unique idea.
He would give away all of his money to those in need whilst he was still alive … because he believed most philanthropic foundations got bigger and fatter and richer to make everyone there feel more important.
He told me: “I want to help people now when they need it!”
Chuck called this his RAT Theory … Remaining Allocated Time. He had already anonymously given away $200 million and told me: “You know, it’s very hard to give away even one billion dollars, because each year the money keeps piling up.”
It took time because he would only give money to projects he chose as worthy: “You can’t give money to people who ask for it or there will be a queue ten miles long.”
Chuck was now in his early 60s; he was worth $11 billion; and he estimated his lifespan at 85 ... so he judged he didn’t have time to muck around. (He eventually achieved his objective and, after giving away his fortune, lived in a rented apartment in San Francisco with his wife Helga until his death in 2023 aged 92.)
In London, when he had told Fletch that he was going to give away all his money to medicine and science, Ken responded: “If you’re going to give it all away then you better give some in Brisbane well.”
But when he got here, Chuck was dismayed to find there was no culture of philanthropy among Australia’s rich: “There are whole law firms in New York devoted purely to philanthropy,” he told me.
Each night they were in Brisbane, Chuck and Helga took Ken’s friends out to dinner where Chuck talked US and Irish politics, told jokes, and plied us with books … plus feature articles he’d torn out of magazines on aeroplanes.
First thing he did when he boarded a flight was to gather as many of the magazines as he could grab – so he could confiscate the articles he liked.
At restaurants he often pinched the menu … so he could compare dishes and prices with his own restaurants around the world. One night he hid a giant plastic Menu in his cardigan without anyone noticing and proudly showed it off to us later.
It was difficult for people who didn’t know him to understand that most of the time the answers given by this billionaire businessman were facetious.
When I asked him how many people worked in his office, Chuck said: “About half of them”.
One time I was sitting in the Board Room of his Brisbane office in Edward Street with Billy Lee Long (who was in the Hopman tennis squad with Ken).
Chuck had read my story on Billy in my book Queenslanders and said, “Of all the people in your book the one I’d really like to meet is Billy Lee Long.”
Eventually, Chuck and Ken flew the 1,000 miles north to Cairns on the Great Barrier Reef to meet Billy, who showed Chuck around.
Chuck walked into his Board Room, looked over his glasses at me and Billy lounging back chatting at his long table, and said: “We’re down-sizing. One of you two will have to go!”
Chuck Feeney would give a huge exaggerated wink with his right eye when kidding; if you mentioned the name of a person he didn’t like, he would brush them aside with a fly-swatting wave of the right hand across his face, palm downwards.
Whenever a waiter offered him cracked pepper Chuck replied: “No, thank you. It gives me haemorrhoids.”
He didn’t complain when, after a few visits to the same restaurant, the Brisbane waitress started calling him “Charlie”.
No doubt she just couldn’t bring herself to use the word Chuck when serving food. (In Australia nobody vomits; we chuck.)
Fletch thought she was being cheeky, but Chuck told him not to interfere: “It’s kinda sweet of the gal. The only person who ever called me Charlie was my mother.”
A reserved man, the thing Chuck most enjoyed about Fletch was his outspoken, unexpurgated way of talking. He loved Ken’s phrase for business executives – shiny suits – as well as other Fletch favourites like “he’s not my cup of tea”, “he’s gone ape” and “he’s dead from the neck up”.
At the extreme southern end of Brisbane’s Moreton Bay, on an island called South Stradbroke, one of Chuck’s executives had paid $13 million for 121 acres of wilderness that stretched from the calm of the Bay to the pounding Pacific Ocean.
With water frontage on both sides, the company plan was to build another of Chuck’s Pacific Resorts.
Now that he was here, Chuck wanted to see this site for himself. So he took Ken with him on a ferry for a look.
On arrival Ken, of course, spoke out.
“Now Chuck I’m gonna give you my two-bob’s worth. Your drongos paid far too much for this bloody mosquito-infested scrub! It’s too out-of-the-way for tourists. You can’t drive here! Every time you want to change a lightbulb you’ve got to get in a bloody boat and go to the Gold Coast. You’ve got too many dingbats in shiny suits working for you!”
Chuck didn’t blink.
He later told me: “Ken helped me speak a language I’d never learned.”
Chuck needed to learn Australian.
When Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister, he gave a press conference on arrival back from a trip to Singapore and Bangkok. Rudd was ill with a cold, and Chuck watched on TV as the PM told reporters: “I’ve got the dreaded lurgy”.
Chuck was shocked!
He couldn’t believe that the Prime Minister of Australia would announce such a thing. And on national TV.
But I explained: “He’s just saying he’s got a cold.”
“Ohhhh …” Chuck said, “I thought the lurgy was the clap!”
Fletch also gave Chuck helpful local advice.
When Brisbane taxi drivers objected to Chuck’s many short fares within the CBD, Ken advised: “Just tell them you’ve got ‘a crook leg’.”
“What does that mean?” Chuck asked.
“Don’t worry, just say it,” Ken ordered … and Chuck found it worked a treat.
From Ken, Chuck learned that a maniacal driver was a hoon; a shout in a pub meant to pay for a round of drinks; and — best of all from Chuck’s point of view — a crooked business deal was a rort.
In fact, Chuck ended up adopting that word.
He liked it because his wide-ranging philanthropic activities included funding The Centre for Public Integrity, a US website to expose corruption. Plus the OpenDemocracy website.
So he urged me to set up a website in Australia called: rortsrortsrorts.
This knowledge of Aussie lingo came in very handy when Chuck was in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, where his charitable foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, was building a University. (As Chuck also did in Danang: I gathered he was, in his own way, trying to atone for the Vietnam War.)
An Australian diplomat kept saying “Goodonya” to a team of bemused Vietnamese medical academics who thought they spoke English, and Chuck was able to translate: “He’s praising you.”
Chuck, Kenny, Farid Khan and Billy Lee Long would hold “Board Meetings” once a week whenever they were all in Brisbane at the same time.
Billy Lee Long told me the routine:
We would meet in an indoor swimming pool on Thursday afternoons at 4 pm.
There were of course no secretaries at these “board meetings”, no phone interruptions, no eavesdroppers; it was a valuable time to get exercise and share jokes and stories.
Then, at precisely 4.50 pm we were all out of the pool, showered, dressed, and at exactly 5 pm we’d all be upstairs in Chuck’s apartment watching his favourite TV program: PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer from the USA.
Chuck always said: “This a great program. I can learn in 60 minutes what is happening in the US and many countries around the world.”
At the end of the program the presenter says: “This program is proudly sponsored by RG Edwards, Franklin Mint, and viewers like you.”
Chuck keeps repeating, “great great program”.
Then Kenny pipes up: “Chuck! If it’s such a bloody great program why don't you sponsor it?”
As is his way, Chuck simply avoids a reply to Kenny and says “Let’s go for dinner, let’s go Chinese in the Valley.”
Six months later, in September, after our board meeting in the pool, we are in the same scenario and the TV presenter says ... “This program is proudly sponsored by RG Edwards, Franklin Mint, Atlantic Philanthropies and viewers like you.”
Kenny says “Chuck! You did it! About bloody time!”
And again, as is his way, Chuck simply avoids a reply to Kenny and says “Let’s go for dinner, let’s go Chinese in the Valley.”
But I did see that twinkle in Chuck’s eyes, and Helga gave me and Kenny and Farid a wink behind Chuck’s back.
Billy Lee Long said last week from Cairns that every time he hears the song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, he recalls that special moment they all shared: Chuck, Helga, Farid, Billy and Kenny.