Why did Mariah Carey and James Packer really break up? Photo / Getty Images
The world was stunned when pictures first emerged of James Packer and Mariah Carey together. But this was no holiday fling. The two had fallen hard and fast, and were engaged to be married months after they started dating.
Below is an edited extract from The Price Of Fortune: The Untold Story Of Being James Packer, which is out now.
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Packer did his best to turn a blind eye to Carey's diva whims, which included bringing along her personal stylist, hairdresser and makeup artist when they travelled together. In late January 2016, the New York Post's celebrity gossip column Page Six reported that a few days after she flew from New York to Los Angeles with Packer, Carey flew her Jack Russell pet dogs Cha Cha and Jill E Beans in their own seats on an American Airlines flight. Each was also accompanied by its own staff member. Page Six also claimed she spent at least $US45,000 a year on spa treatments for her beloved pooches.
Australian gossip magazine Woman's Day later reported that while she was dating Packer, Carey was spending $100,000 a month ordering exotic flowers from around the world to be delivered wherever she happened to be.
Packer and his staff also did their best to tolerate the whims of Carey's (then) personal assistant and manager Stella Bulochnikov.
Bulochnikov took Packer ring shopping in New York, where he bought a massive 35-carat Wilfredo Rosado-designed engagement ring from her uncle in the city's jewellery quarter on 45th Street. Packer chose the New York three-Michelin-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park to get down on one knee and propose to Carey on the evening of January 21. It would have been the third marriage for both of them. Plans were made for the couple to wed on Bora Bora in French Polynesia on March 1, 2016.
But trouble was brewing.
"There were already problems trying to negotiate our prenup," Packer recalls, without commenting further on the details.
Carey told Complex magazine that she was in favour of a prenup.
"We would like for (a prenuptial agreement) not to be a big thing, but the reality is it has to be. Because there's things that are specifically mine, and he's got huge friggin' conglomerate stuff, and I'm not looking to take that from him. So it has to be dealt with. Anytime you get married to somebody (it does) — and I should know. This'll be marriage number three."
Celebrity news site TMZ subsequently described the agreement as an unromantic, 37-page document stipulating that Carey would receive $115,385 per week in the event of a divorce, up to a maximum of $30 million, adjusted pro-rata on a weekly basis. But it was never agreed on.
In early 2016, Packer was in panic mode after having concluded a $1.25 billion agreement to divide his family empire with his sister on Christmas Day 2015. Shares in his Macau casino company were still falling and Crown shares had slumped to their lowest level in two years. The GFC had been a deeply traumatic event for Packer, testing his judgment and his nerve in ways which revealed elements of his character that few would have expected in someone with such a privileged life and immense personal wealth. He became depressed, put on weight and took up smoking again. He became fanatically obsessed with the money he was losing at the time, petrified that less than five years after inheriting a multibillion-dollar fortune, he might lose it all.
In the years that followed he vowed to never again be caught with too much debt. Yet by the end of 2015, he had again taken on more debt than he could psychologically handle in an effort to pay Gretel out. More threateningly, in light of the fallout between them, he had agreed to Gretel having personal guarantees over all his assets. He was terrified she could one day take everything from him.
The life of dating a diva was also starting to take its toll, and Packer's friends were seriously concerned about his mental and physical welfare.
Packer now recalls sitting at his home in Aspen in February 2016 when the house phone rang. "It's a call I will never forget.
"It was from a man I once knew who lived in Israel. I thought the world of him. He said, 'Jamie, I'm worried about you. You're unwell.'
He told me to rely on my friends nearby to tell me what to do next. That was code for (relying on) Kerry Stokes," he says.
Stokes had been spending the American ski season, as he does each year, at his hunting lodge — a two-storey, six-bedroom, six-bathroom penthouse for which Stokes had paid $US15.5 million for in 2002 — at the exclusive Beaver Creek in Vail, Colorado, two hours' drive from Aspen. In the years following their détente after the battle for CMH, Packer had often been to see him there. This time Stokes returned the favour and turned up with his wife, Christine, on Packer's doorstep in Aspen. Also there was Packer's good friend Thom Knoles, a maharishi (or master teacher) of Vedic meditation, a mental technique for relaxation developed 5000 years ago in India. Knoles, who is based in Phoenix, Arizona, had a meditation practice in the leafy eastern Sydney suburb of Woollahra for 29 years, where he worked with other rich-listers, including construction tycoons Bruno Grollo and son Daniel (whom he had introduced to Packer more than two decades earlier).
"My wife, Christine, and I went up to Aspen. We took a fair bit of time out of our schedule. We cared for James. When you are close to somebody, you have to try to help them," Stokes says. In this vein he then made a remarkable decision: to unilaterally take charge for a time of Packer's personal affairs. "It just needed to be done," Stokes says, without flinching. It was a remarkable move by someone already chairing his own publiccompanies, Seven West Media and Seven Group Holdings.
"With due respect, those around James and those executives (like Robert Rankin), they accepted I did have authority (to manage James's personal matters). I made the decisions," Stokes says. "It was easy for me to say, 'No, you are not spending $250,000 on a wedding dress. No you are not moving this here. You are not doing that.'"
Stokes also rearranged CPH's small internal board of directors. "All I did, in effect, was put in place some controls that made it easier for people there to do their jobs. It was never envisaged previously that James would not be there," Stokes says.
Rankin, who was not on the CPH board, continued overseeing the business interests of the company, including chairing Crown. But Stokes had little to do with Rankin.
"He avoided me at that point in time," Stokes says before one of his trademark grins. "I didn't see much of Rob."
After having endured the horrors of the GFC, Packer's debt phobia was beginning to have telling physical effects, which were horrifically apparent to Stokes and Knoles in Aspen.
"I was in a bad way, a bad way," Packer recalls. A blizzard in West Buttermilk meant his Global Express jet couldn't make it into Aspen airport. Instead it flew into Rifle, an hour and a half's drive away. Stokes helped a panic-stricken Packer into the front seat of Knoles's car, which Knowles then drove the 70 miles to Rifle where Packer's plane was waiting to take him to Israel. Knoles recalls of the day: "I thought, 'Now we are going to get somewhere.' I felt, 'Now we are at the moment of truth, now we are going to get some decisions Made.'"
Stokes says Packer, at the time, was "confused".
"We agreed it would be good if he spent some time in Israel. Away from all the controversies and the pressures and the intensities … My concern was that (he and Mariah) were both in bad places and that James needed some space. He had friends in Israel who were concerned about his welfare. I felt comfortable he would be looked after there."
Stokes was always worried that Packer and Carey had both fallen into the relationship on the rebound from bad breakups.
And he was concerned about their fast-paced lifestyle. After Packer's arrival in Israel, Stokes organised for Packer's pilots to take his plane in for unscheduled maintenance to ensure Packer wouldn't be able to leave Israel quickly. "He wasn't happy at one stage. In good humour, of course. But I certainly incurred the wrath at the time of his fiancee and her agent. They were threatening to go to the police for me kidnapping James.
"There were some strong words said. They wanted to charter a plane from Las Vegas to Israel, and I wouldn't approve it. I was accused of separating the lovebirds," Stokes says, before adding with a proud grin: "I said I was prepared to pay two economy fares to Israel if that was helpful."
Packer's memory of the time is hazy, but he recalls, "Mariah was very upset when I was in Israel because I had just disappeared."
Stokes also did more than physically separate the then not-so-happy couple. In hindsight, it proved to be the ultimate act of friendship from a one-time adversary.
"I did postpone his wedding," Stokes volunteers without flinching. "We did have some issues at the time because Mariah's agent was most insistent that they would not be separated and the wedding take place … James was upset at not seeing (Mariah). But he wasn't sure. He was obviously engaged to her. He was obviously emotionally involved. The fact that it was postponed, he was happy to get the chance to get himself into a better place.'
When Packer eventually returned to America in March to be reunited with his fiancee, he still had wedding bells on his mind. But Stokes had quietly ensured the moment had passed. "James was still reasonably intent on marrying her (after Israel). But the boat had been moved, the occasion had been cancelled, circumstances had changed. To restart it all was not easy. During that process it (the wedding) all fell apart," Stokes says. "In retrospect that was good for James. James's welfare was paramount. He needed care at that stage."
Stokes stresses he had nothing against Carey. In fact, he liked her and enjoyed her company.
"I saw Mariah and James together. The times they were together, they seemed truly happy with one another. I just thought it had moved too quickly for James and he was being railroaded. I was more concerned about the influence of her agent, Stella," he says.
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Packer and Carey were last photographed together on the island of Mykonos in Greece in late September 2016.
"We were there between the 15th and the 20th of September. Mariah is there and I'm not drinking. I'm still on the very strong medication (he was put on in Israel) and I'm the worst company in the world," Packer said. "She's the opposite. (But) Said with respect, she's understandably strung out and stressed out about her own things. It is not as though she hasn't got a lot of pressure and a lot on her mind … It's not a good trip. I see the pilot video of Mariah's World. I have to go to the next Melco board meeting in Macau and agree with her to meet in Naples."
Packer and the Arctic P featured prominently in the rough cut of the show's first episode, which was set to debut on the E! entertainment pay-TV channel in America on December 4. It was "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous".
"And whether James was in it specifically or not, it became apparent to him that it was going to be a billionaire husband/boyfriend thing and that was going to be a significant thematic," says one friend. "That was going to be a complete nightmare for him, given his (business) interests in Macau, Israel and RatPac, let alone Crown."
Despite his dalliance with Carey, Packer wanted to be viewed as a serious global businessman. But the friend stresses that Packer never asked to be edited out of the series, as has been suggested. His lawyer, Guy Jalland, apparently asked for Carey's people to show him the signed consent forms from Packer allowing his image to be used in the series. They never materialised.
"James is not someone to invite cameras into his personal life," says another friend.
It was widely reported that Greece was the site of their relationship breakup. When news broke a month later of their separation, People magazine reported a representative of Carey claimed that the pair's Greece vacation in September had taken a turn for the worse.
But Packer says it happened later. He left the Arctic P when it was moored off the Greek island of Corfu on the morning of September 26, to head to Macau, Hong Kong for a regularly scheduled board meeting of Melco Crown Entertainment. The day of the Macau board meeting, Shimon Peres — former president of Israel, who in early August had celebrated his 93rd birthday with an intimate private dinner at Packer's home at Caesarea — passed away after battling complications from a stroke two weeks earlier. Packer made a flying trip to Tel Aviv for the funeral, where he sat in the second row, before leaving Israel the same day to return to meet Carey on the Arctic P that evening when it was docked in Naples.
"I then head back to the boat, Mariah and I break up and Mariah gets off the boat," is all Packer will say of the split.
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Packer and Carey have not spoken since the day they last saw each other on the Arctic P in Naples more than two years ago. They apparently have no plans to.
When asked about Packer's whereabouts in early 2017, Carey replied pointedly: "I don't know where the motherf***er is."
By March this year her attitude had apparently softened. That month she revealed in an interview with People magazine that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2001, a condition associated with episodes of mood swings ranging from depressive lows to manic highs. In that interview, the little she said of Packer indicated that time might be healing her wounds.
When asked why she had been engaged to a billionaire like Packer, she replied: "I wonder what I was thinking as well. The whole situation was a whirlwind. But I definitely wish him the best."
This is an edited extract from The Price Of Fortune by Damon Kitney, published by Harper Collins.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.