Agent to the stars

BY DENISE MCNABB

AT 75 Harry M Miller still commands regular column centimetres in Australian newspaper celebrity pages and gossip columns.

His reputation as a philanderer may be on the wane, but his circle of friends and acquaintances is wide and stuffed with A-listers. He's a gregarious man with a flamboyant personality and sartorial style, although, as he says in his new autobiography, he has also been described as an "obnoxious prick". He couldn't see it at the time but does now.

What most Australians – and many New Zealanders – know is that Harry MMiller is a showbiz doyen with a long, successful track record as an impresario promoting and protecting celebrities, rock stars and newsmakers, organising glamour milestone events and touring legendary shows such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair on both sides of the Tasman. The long list includes Joe Cocker, Dusty Springfield and Kiwi Lindy Chamberlain, for whom he acted as an agent after she was put on trial for the murder of her baby at Ayers Rock, though she claimed her daughter was taken by a dingo.

Miller, like Chamberlain, has seen the dark side of life behind prison bars. His was for fraud and the 10-month jail term still rankles.

So, too, does his miserable childhood in New Zealand, dominated by his mother, "Sadie", for whom he has few kind words.

This is not the first book about Miller's life – author Dennis O'Brien wrote one 26 years ago, not long after the infamous jail stint over the collapse of his Computicket business. Miller once told O'Brien his book was lifeless and there was nothing funny in it.

"Dennis told me that I was as funny as Dracula. That's the funniest thing he ever said."

Miller says he wanted to write his autobiography to put the record straight to tell it warts and all, to colour the vanilla but with "no bullshit".

Every Saturday morning for five months, Miller sat down with Australian publisher and author Peter Holder and recounted all he could remember, with some help from news clippings and friends and colleagues, whose anecdotes are also recorded in the book.

There was much more than could be accommodated in 350 pages, including too much blasphemy.

"I took out 27 'f----' even though Peter says I use the word all the time," he laughs.

Confessions of a Not-So-Super-Agent rollicks along with liberal smatterings of gossip about the internationally famous and Australian-centric famous – which are bound to have readers turning to certain chapters first, particularly details about the women in his life, including three wives. He's had five children from different relationships.

Miller sets the record straight about US singing great Eartha Kitt for whom he acted as an agent. Contrary to rumours, he says he never had his way with her. She did squash a banana in his hand, though, while he was in an elevator in the Grand Hotel in Auckland in 1962. When the door opened it was squeezing through his fingers.

"With a quick pinch of my bum, she purred to the assembled throng `Mr Miller has had an accident'," he says.

Miller is humble enough to concede he would have been way out of his class to have ventured further with Kitt, but not so with Shirley Bassey who he toured many times in both Australia and New Zealand

In Wellington she once summoned him to her motel room to kill a moth.

"Almost an hour later, the moth wasn't the only spent creature in the room," he says.

Miller shares the dalliances of others in the book – including former Australian prime minister John Gorton who disappeared backstage with a "young and feisty" Liza Minnelli.

"Let's not beat around the bush here – yes, they did it," he says of the superstar singer, who has been touring Australia again in the past few weeks.

Miller has an enduring relationship with media, fluctuating between detest and begrudging respect. He has newspaper clippings by the boxload about his shows and himself – so many that much has been archived at the National Library in Canberra.

You get the feeling Miller still hasn't entirely moved on from his jail stint for fraud over the Computicket collapse. It was a computerised booking system ahead of its time in 1976, but it crashed in 1979 owing millions. Miller does lengthy spleen-venting about the severity of the sentence for the gravity of the crime. It saw him jailed for putting public money for shows into his ailing business when it should have been held in trust.

He has much to say about so-called agendas of politicians he names, police and the venal attitude of the media to him both then and many years later when they would attach the tag "jailbird" to anything they wrote about him.

He continues to counter the demons by starting each day with meditation and questioning himself. "Who am I?" he asks. "You think about who you are and the type of person you are and that is good."

MILLER'S LIFE started on January 6, 1934, at the Ponsonby Rd Nursing Home in Auckland after a 10-hour labour which he says his mother could stretch to a three- or four-day ordeal depending on how naughty she considered him to be at the time of retelling. He grew up in a house in nearby Malaya St, off Richmond Rd.

"When we had Jesus Christ Superstar touring in New Zealand years ago, I took my daughter Brook with me,' he says.

"One morning we jumped into a cab and drove around to Malaya St so I could show her my humble beginnings. I walked up to the house, knocked on the front door and this big Samoan man opened the door.

"I said `I was born in the house' and he just said: `You are f------ putting me on.' That's it. He didn't let me in.

"I supposed my mother gave a rat's arse about me but she had a funny way of showing it," he says.

She criticised him for using the M of his middle name, Maurice, even though he did it to distinguish himself from another Harry Miller in Sydney who frequented gossip columns at the time.

Miller's Jewish parents were married in New Zealand after arriving from Britain and their first child was a stillborn daughter. Young Harry never got to know his father because he died when Harry was only two after painful last years in Green Lane Hospital after breaking his back as a result of slipping on a plum stone on wet cobbles.

Harry was no angel and when his mother couldn't cope any longer she packed him off to boarding school in Wellington.

"The lesson I learnt out of my childhood is to indulge your children with love and care," he says.

It's a recipe he has faltered on himself at times with his own children, largely through being an absentee dad as his job took him on the road for months at a time when they were young.

"My oldest son, Simon, used to say, `Dad's no good until you turn 16 then he is terrific."'

After having paid scant attention to his schooling, Miller had found he had the gift of the gab for selling everything from nylon socks and petticoats to electromagnetic cookers. There was also a disastrous foray into the restaurant business and a stint as a farmhand. The latter left him with a debilitating legacy – deafness after he fired a noisy shotgun without using ear plugs.

It's only in the last three years that technologically savvy hearing aids have brought sound clarity back into his life.

Miller's first taste of Australia was when he took off to sea on the merchant ship Monowai, first as a bathroom attendant, then as a waiter.

The ship plied the Tasman and Sydney beckoned. Miller's super-salesman talents soon found a niche in the world of marketing and organising shows and events. He had already done some entertainment management and promotion as a sideline in New Zealand where his first act was the Howard Morrison Quartet.

New Zealanders beat a path to his Sydney door.

"I think every New Zealander visiting Sydney in the 60s would ring me up as I was the only Kiwi they knew of in Australia," he says.

To this day, Miller still attributes putting on the musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar as his greatest successes.

The most humbling experience, he says, was staging the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 in Australia.

"I had a very wide brief to take a national celebration and make it a real thing to the man on the street. I could do whatever I wanted and I did. It was terrific. I was very lucky."

He was in New Zealand recently for Howard Morrison's funeral, the first visit to his homeland in six years.

He couldn't believe how lively Auckland had become and how good the restaurants were.

As for the future, Miller intends to keep working but he also wants to drive the "love of his life", Sydney caterer and businesswoman Simmone Logue, on a trip through Europe next year.

It would mean taking a break from the job that still consumes at least three days of his life.

"Yes, I am a salesman at heart," says Miller. But he wouldn't have it any other way.

Denise McNabb is Fairfax Media's Australia correspondent.

Confessions of a Not-So-Secret Agent by Harry M Miller with Peter Holder, published by Hachette, rrp $55 (hardback).

- © Fairfax NZ News