You’ve all done very well today

Sunday column

I cannot get enough of the book I was given last year, A Man Walks Out Of A Bar. Let us turn to image number 11,  House Bar,  Royal International Hotel 

This photograph is all I need to carry me back to the opening days of my exciting career as a young breweries executive.

The hotel house bar -  any hotel house bar - was a scene, four decades ago. It was where you could drink outside the hours permitted to mere mortals. 

The Royal International hotel, four decades ago, was also a scene in its own somewhat elderly way, like the Playboy mansion came to be, fading glory, wooden panelling, soft low lighting, sound also softened and lowered by the abundance of carpet and drapes, a vague mood of private club.

But it was the pride of the fleet, flagship hotel of the Dominion Breweries empire, made in the fashion favoured by the man who ran the show: brewer, publisher, managing director, art patron, credit reformer, Sir Henry Kelliher.

Do you see, in the photo, the art in the heavy gold frame? They were everywhere:  in the offices, the boardrooms, DB hotels across the country, arrived by way of the annual Kelliher Art Competition.

Kelliher was not interested in modern art as such, Waikato museum writes, rather in encouraging artists “to record the beauty of the country for posterity”. Generally they would be landscapes. Typically they would evoke a utopian New Zealand where waterways were pristine and the ravages of intensified human occupation not quite so visible.

A utopian New Zealand: beer came in a few basic flavours and if you had a licence to run a pub or a bottle store you were made in the shade. And yet, or because of it, the two huge breweries with their comfortable duopoly were both wearing a very flabby looking balance sheet. Brierley Investments had run their eyes up and down all this and bought into DB, and that’s where I come in.

My idea of getting a job has mostly been to say yes when someone asks me. In my last year of law school, one of the bosses at the ad agency where I was the delivery boy offered me a job as a suit. I was watching all my mates joining queues of 20 and 30 to apply for law clerk jobs and thinking, I don't have the best marks. They won't give me the job, so I was doing absolutely nothing about it. And now here was a guy offering me a job. 

I said yes.

I became a suit in an ad agency and I hated it. A couple of years on, I was chatting with the boss's PA at the agency I’d now moved on to and she told me her husband was wondering if I'd like to come and have a chat. He was one of the new bosses Brierley had put in to run DB. 

I said yes.

They gave me a car, they gave me a credit card. They told me: we want to make new and better bars. Go and look at all the pubs in the North Island. Bring back some ideas. Tell us what's working and what's not.

Reader, if you think that sounds like the job for me, let me add there were also many opportunities to drop into race meetings all the way up the North Iskand. What a time I had. 

I pushed Deep in the Heart of Taxes into the car cassette player and made my way north with DD Smash. I hit the Bombay Hills about three weeks later in the late afternoon, coming down onto the southern motorway with Radio Hauraki playing Union of the Snake, a baked blue haze sitting over Auckland.

I checked into the Royal International hotel and discovered - in the house bar - a group of DB executives in town for the evening. My boss waved me over, introduced me to the assistant manager of the Royal International hotel, said: he can show you some good places. Off we went, the two of us.

He said: where's your car. He said: I’ll drive. Off we hurtled, down to Freemans Bay for him to collect something from his flat, then to Parnell then down into the city then on to another and another, and he's got a too-cool-for-school routine and I’m thinking well you're the Aucklander, I’ll follow you and I just keep drinking and now its two in the morning and we’re on our way to some club and  he knows a shortcut behind Aotea square and we’re rounding the corner with tyres squealing when flashing lights come on and hello, that's the end of our night. 

He’s out of the car, he's blowing in the bag, we’re  going the short distance up the street to the Central Police station, and aren’t you lucky, Auckland, how very conveniently located everything is here. 

In the cold fluorescent light they take him off to be processed and I can't remember now at what point I got reunited with my keys but basically that’s the last I saw of my new best friend and colleague.

I have no idea how things worked out for him. I know my own career went pretty well for the next few years with more promotions and more responsibility and plenty of drinking and keeping up my rat end of the rat race bargain. 

In one sense it was my dream job. In another it was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done. Me and drink. What a great combo. 

There was not by any means any kind of blind- eye management culture. You were told expressly: You get a drink-drive conviction, you lose your job. But it didn't stop people from drinking in unwise ways and I don't mean just me but I do in particular mean me. And on it went for four years until I had a heart attack.

This might be a good moment to say wait a minute did it not occur to you to try to be a lawyer?

In her excellent new Netflix show, Fran Lebowitz explains how people from elsewhere come to New York and succeed because they are unimpeded by any conception of how impossibly tough it is. If you grew up there, you knew, and didn’t try.    

I'm not that outsider. I’m the small town kid who was easily impressed and intimidated by any bigger town. There will be better smarter people here. I won’t waste my time asking. don’t even try. So I settled for jobs where they actually asked me.

And then I gave up on that altogether and did my own thing. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think I could do a job. I’m game for almost anything. It’s more that I don't think  people will believe I can.

Occasionally, over the years, I have actually applied when I thought I had an undeniable abundance  of experience, and got a perfunctory no thanks and that can really firm up your resolve to be your own boss. I’ve ended up, mostly, employing myself. 

But that photo. It captures so much.

I never met Sir Henry; he had already departed. But his shadow was long, especially in Auckland. Staff from the old era would describe how each day would end with his making his way to the door, turning back to them all, lifting his arm in greeting or benediction and saying in rounded patrician vowels: you've all done very well.

It sounded a little bit comical, and they told it that way, affectionately, but also what they described was a human warmth.

Ministry of Drink, Doug Myers described the culture he set about undoing at Lion breweries.

Brierley went into DB with the intention of remaking the business into everything that would be lionised in the 1980s: lean, mean, efficient, bold.

That entailed, in particular, undoing a sweet deal the workers had going at the breweries which led to a couple of prolonged strikes and eventually capitulation. 

What would begin as a correction would tend to end up as an unravelling of workers’ rights. 

Up and down the business, up and down the nation, the same process was at work: greater competition in the name of better economic performance.

The brewing industry itself enjoyed a cosy monopoly thanks to a licensing system that enabled you to make outsize profits and a somewhat mediocre selection of beers. To be fair to Rogernomics and my future boss the Minister of Justice, that system was also being set up for sweeping deregulation. 

Ostensibly those DB executives were champions  of competition and efficiency, but in practice they quite liked comfortable protection.

After the heart attack I picked myself up, dusted myself off and set up a licensing consultancy offering services to anyone who fancied opening a bar once deregulation should arrive. 

When a story appeared in the Dominion interviewing me about this, there were, a PA told me, exclamations in the executive suite along the lines of who, our David? Saying what?

One of them got on the phone to ask what I was thinking. I recollected the dumbfounded look on his face at a management retreat when I’d raised the prospect of coming deregulation. Incredulity. But that would just be open slather he had said. 

You can't see the Royal International hotel today. You haven’t  been able to see it for decades now. 

In the frenzy of the ‘80s property boom, DB joined in and parcelled up a bunch of its properties into a development vehicle called Acadia, as best I recall, and I think the Royal International was in the  portfolio. In due course the wrecking ball reduced it to an empty slab of concrete on Victoria St and then the crash reduced Acadia to rubble too, and whatever was supposed to happen on the site never quite did.

To this day it remains an empty slab, that place just below the Sky Tower where you can get a bungy ride. 

You can doubt yourself too much, and settle for maybe too little. 

You can also imagine yourself up to the job of President of the United States and come down an escalator to say so.

And you can imagine you’re going to be a titan of the new economy, and thirty years later all there may be to show for it will be a hole in the ground with a bungy ride.