Phillip Adams Read Online Free PDF Page A

individuals who went on to help shape Australian culture in the second half of the twentieth century. They included Donald Horne, Leo Schofield, Bruce Petty, Peter Carey, Fred Schepisi and Richard Walsh. Phillip was one of several Communist Party members who worked in advertising at the time, although Phillip and many others quit the party after Russia crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when Phillip was seventeen.
    Others who had good jobs in advertising kept their party membership quiet — in contrast to Phillip, who even now often mentions his brief membership in print or on air, to give himself a touch of notoriety. The Communist Party of Australia was dissolved in 1991 when it had fewer than a thousand members, but the Socialist Party of Australia renamed itself the Communist Party and still publishes The Guardian from its office in Surry Hills in inner-city Sydney.
    Even Labor Party members kept their membership quiet. The Labor Party often had difficulty getting ad agencies to run its campaigns or finding announcers to broadcast its voiceovers because the announcers were required by law to identify themselves at the end.
    Television was launched in Australia in 1956 and soon afterwards Phillip found himself running Briggs and James’ television department; some of his staff were twice his age. Bruce Petty had been drawing cartoons for The New Yorker, Punch and Esquire , and he and Phillip started making television commercials together. Phillip switched agencies and joined Paton Advertising, which was run by elders of the Toorak Presbyterian Church. At that time, Brian Monahan, a businessman with a background of selling ads in Time , and Lyle Dayman, an artist with advertising experience, owned and ran the small agency Monahan and Dayman and their market research consultant recommended that they hire Phillip as a copywriter.
    Brian and Lyle were impressed by Phillip’s creative ability and not only hired him as copywriter and creative director when he was only in his twenties but — to make sure they didn’t lose him — gave him an equal partnership in the agency, which then became Monahan Dayman Adams (MDA), with just a handful of staff.
    â€˜Straightaway the agency went ahead in leaps and bounds because of Phillip’s brilliance,’ said Brian Monahan as he sat opposite me in his South Yarra terrace.
    His wife had just brought us coffee and cakes, and as she was leaving the room I asked her if she had found Adams attractive; so many women did and do.
    â€˜He was not my type,’ she said.
    â€˜He’s an insomniac,’ said Monahan of his former colleague, ‘and sometimes he’d work all night. He’s got such an intellect that, unlike others driven by physical exercise or something else, his brain drives him. It doesn’t stop for a minute. Maybe he can’t stop it going so fast. He often said that it annoyed him that people used so little of their brainpower. Perhaps he was out to show he wasn’t going to waste a minute. Like a brain athlete, he was training his brain all the time.’
    According to Monahan, Adams is a sincere person with empathy for those less fortunate than himself. His interest in others is also genuine. Monahan saw evidence of this in the way Adams was always helping people in the office with their personal problems. He was the father confessor and the agency’s unofficial resident psychologist, sought out by executives and staff for help with their personal problems. Brian Monahan said he himself had once sought Adams’ personal advice about a problem. Almost paradoxically, however, Adams was fairly anti-social and going to an office cocktail party was his worst nightmare.
    â€˜But some of the girls in the office had an eye for him and would melt in his presence,’ Monahan commented, smiling. ‘He could hypnotise women with his intellect and he enjoyed their company and they enjoyed his. He was selling