Aussie Ad Executive Shares the Secret of How He Remade His Life

The 40-year-old man in the mirror was Bryce Courtenay and his image was a picture of Dorian Gray.

He stood overweight and flaccid in limp sweats. An old Rugby football injury--four cracked vertebrae healed by the stalwart silence demanded of public schoolboys--made him hunch and rest one leg on tiptoe to contain the pain.

Courtenay saw an aged Australian rheumy from working until dawn, and deeper damage done by years on the Crocodile Dundee Diet--five packs of cigarettes and two dozen beers a day.

“I saw a dead man,” Courtenay recalls. His Sydney colleagues might only have seen a corporate killer; a wealthy, honored and hugely envied Australian advertising executive. “But I realized that this obese little guy would not be alive in five years. I had everything and nothing.”

Yet he did have the power of one.

So he returned to nothing.

“I resigned from J. Walter Thompson that morning. I stopped drinking that day. I stopped smoking that day. And I put myself in hospital that day.”

There--after surgery that left him a statue in a body cast for three months--Courtenay drew an outrageous plan for the rest of his life.

Nothing to it. He would form a new advertising business into a multimillion-dollar concern to guarantee college educations for his three sons. Then he would sell the agency and retire to write a dozen novels. Of course they would become best sellers.

At 55.

Oh, yes. Despite the spinal fusings, he vowed to recover and run marathons.

Courtenay was in Los Angeles recently.

He moves now as a proportioned, broad-shouldered welterweight.

He has run 17 marathons and one in a little over three hours.

His sons have their higher schooling.

Harrison, Robinson & Courtenay Ltd. of Sydney, Australia, with annual billings of about $85 million is without its founding partner because Courtenay sold the agency for $2.5 million.

He has written his first novel.

It is on best-seller lists in England, Australia and South Africa and Random House has printed 75,000 copies for U.S. distribution, which, the publisher says, is significant for any first novel.

At 54, Courtenay is a year ahead of his schedule.

“This has left me enormously bemused,” he said. That’s because he realizes he hasn’t paid full dues as a writer. “I don’t come to writing having written 42 reasonable poems and 19 short stories for Playboy. I just sat down one day and started hacking out some words.”

Commented New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of Courtenay’s middle-aged hacking: “If a shrewdly programmed computer were to design the ultimate international best seller, it couldn’t do much better than this first novel. On almost any scale of measurement ‘The Power of One’ has everything. . . .”

Noted a London Sunday Times reviewer: “A very reassuring book . . . already halfway to the screenplay for the film that must surely follow.”

He’s Taken a Meeting

That, too. While in Los Angeles, Courtenay met with Warner Bros.

“But whether it (the book) becomes a movie . . . is not one of life’s major decisions,” he insisted in an interview.

But battling for personal beliefs against setbacks, copouts, and the easy compromise is integral to the new and improved Bryce Courtenay.

It also is that power of one at its purest.

“The power of one is that thing that makes all people who have a tendency to succeed, succeed,” he explained. “It is the highest level of (personal) survival. I really believe that life is a question of letdowns and broken contracts. We can exist within that situation or we can prevail.

“The power of one is the person who insists that he will prevail.”

It follows that success against long odds and short change is the theme of Courtenay’s first novel.

South African Childhood

This time, the grit truly is with Peekay, a 5-year-old white South African boy growing through adolescence during World War II. Peekay is Oliver Twist, a Lord of the Flies, young Jim Graham in “Empire of the Sun” and through his uncluttered eyes, the author’s message becomes an expose without direct comment against an enduring inequity: apartheid.

“The Power of One” is not Courtenay’s autobiography.

It certainly is a chronicle of his spirit.

He grew up in small-town South Africa, “of generations of English stock . . . one of those families that holds itself up proudly but never amounts to anything.”

Courtenay’s father, a lawyer, was killed in a car crash two months before his son was born. His mother was a dressmaker.

“So there I was, poor, but not aware that I was poor until I got a scholarship to a very exclusive boarding school,” Courtenay explained. “I suddenly realized I had no pocket money and only one of everything and that was patched and worn.”

But he was a solid athlete and a straight-A student who read everything by Dickens before he was 11.

“I was writing novels and reading them to my mother as the Singer sewing machine would be going,” he remembered. “She never heard them but that didn’t matter. There was nothing else, at 10 or 11, that I wanted to do but write.”

Young Courtenay also learned to rock boats. Such as his stand against segregation during student debates at that very proper boarding school.

“I started, literally, as the child in the book, suckling a black woman’s breasts,” he said. “I could never actually overcome . . . this idea that people were people and that skin couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it.”

Chastised for his debate position, he was summoned to the headmaster’s office: “He said: ‘Look, black is black and white is white and never the twain shall meet.’ I said: ‘You are wrong.’ He said: ‘You are an upper-middle-class South African boy who is destined for greatness and you must forget this kind of nonsense.’ ”

But Courtenay didn’t. He repeated his stand to a committee of uncles and cousins when they proposed he follow Courtenay tradition and study at Oxford University before becoming a lawyer. “I told them: ‘I can’t do it. I can’t become a lawyer and come back to South Africa and do anything else but defend the situation that the black man finds himself in.’

“My family seriously questioned my sanity. Suddenly, chop, my line of support was gone.”

His power of one, however, was intact.

Courtenay still wanted to write.

So he followed the power to the ways of Jack London.

A Young Wanderer

Courtenay boxed, bummed and backpacked the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). He worked deadly jobs (“of 15 guys who joined with me, nine died in the 18 months”) below ground in Rhodesian copper mines until he had hoarded enough money to pay for English studies at King’s College, London.

Courtenay wandered to Norway and won a merchant seaman’s ticket in a waterfront poker game. The next slow boat from Oslo was headed for Australia.

“The bosun said to me: ‘When you see Sydney you’re probably going to jump ship.’ At 7 o’clock one morning we were coming through the (Sydney harbor) Heads and the water was like a millpond and startlingly beautiful.

“There was this large, white house with trees and bougainvillea spilling out onto its own beach. I said: ‘One day I’ll own that home.’ ”

Courtenay jumped with loose change and a pack of cigarettes. He leaped straight into advertising.

“Television was just breaking in Australia and I had taken a (TV) course while in London,” he said. “That made me less of an idiot than anyone else. I somehow parlayed this . . . as an expert in writing television commercials. But mostly on the strength of looking at BBC television commercials and rewriting them.”

Swift Rise to the Top

In five years, he became creative director, then Southeast Asian chairman and then World Board member for McCann-Erickson. He repeated the ascent at J. Walter Thompson.

And 17 years after arriving in Sydney, he bought the 100-year-old harbor-side house with the bougainvillea spilling onto the beach.

But, as Courtenay sees it now, his career was an obsessive, self-destructive pursuit. “In becoming successful in life, the cost was my own conscience, my questioning of what was morally right or wrong.

“I was brilliantly camouflaged. People would point and say: ‘There’s a complete personality.’ Yet there was the most incomplete personality you’ve ever seen.”

And what personal price this masquerade? Why his lust for prizes and the acceptance of peers?

“I wasn’t like that when I had nothing to lose,” he reasoned. “The moment I had something to lose, I started becoming what the system required.”

Then he saw that Bryce Courtenay in a mirror.

“Suddenly, I could no longer justify the compromises,” he remembers. “I had to see what was under this swaddling cloth. What was the power of one?”

Against the Odds

It was, for openers, deciding against a medical suggestion for a series of back surgeries over a period of two years. Courtenay opted for one massive operation and three months immobile in a chin-to-toenail body cast.

Staring at a hospital ceiling, he massaged the power again. The ceiling became a blank sheet of paper. Courtenay concentrated. He began to type mental outlines.

“By the time I had spent the three months, I had typed the scenarios for 17 books,” he said.

Still, he couldn’t just limp away from life and become a writer. There were responsibilities to the wife he still considers after 32 years to be “my dearest friend . . . a strange, strong woman.” There also was the mansion of his earlier memories, for which he was personally indebted for almost $800,000.

But he could start his own advertising agency, build it for a decade and then sell it. “That would pay off all my debts, and I could start my second life,” he continued. “I flogged (sold) it (the agency) almost on the day 10 years later for an indecent amount of money, paid off my debts and had enough to start writing and live for six years.”

He began marathon running as much for resolve as for exercise “because, again, this (running) is the hardest thing to do.

“And here I am, right now.”

Storytelling Ambition

Where he is, is touring in support of his book and realigning cynical interviewers who presume he is interested solely in movie and paperback money. “I made enough from selling the agency to be superannuated for life,” he says. Nor is he lusting for the prestige of best-seller lists. “I only want to be there so that people will read my story.”

For he sees himself “as an absorber of human beings, and the human condition absolutely fascinates me. So this second part of my life is to be a storyteller, not to be a popular novelist, not to write a grand story.”

He is intrigued by the subjection of the human spirit and how freedom of that spirit, freedom of voice and freedom of the right to be oneself is increasingly denied, more so in the Free World.

And he believes that progress is not always attained by choosing intellectual reasoning over emotional exertion.

“The reason I wrote ‘Power of One’ is that I had been at a dinner party and had heard the usual intellectual crap about apartheid . . . everybody is against it, everybody over-intellectualizes it, they all know the writers who write about it, so on and so forth.

“I got home and said: ‘Nothing ever gets done unless you feel it emotionally. Nothing is wrought by logic. It is all wrought by emotions.’

“I thought: ‘I’m going to write about apartheid. Not as a statement. Not as a flaming sword. I am going to write it so that people feel it.’ ”

And what greater vessel could there be, he reasoned, than the non-judgmental perspective of a child growing up within apartheid?

Rediscovering the Child

The only difficulty would be in re-creating the clear reasoning and receptiveness of a child. So Courtenay studied hypnotherapy.

“I learned very quickly how to age-regress myself down to being 5 years old,” he said. But it was not a pleasant reclamation. “I used to hate going down there because I used to come out with dreadful tears,” he said. “I was just a small child crying. But I understood how 5-year-olds can hurt, very deeply, and not just because they have been rejected but from loneliness and fear and confusion.”

As a storyteller, Courtenay says, he wants to deliver only one message: That life’s pulse is set by love, freedom and human concern for others. “I don’t want to find beautiful and spiritual answers. I don’t want to find wonderfully smooth, intellectualized ideas.”

“The storyteller,” he says, “has only one right: To point out that the human spirit exists and when it touches us we do things which are valuable. And when we deny it, we cease to be valuable.”

Since caves and the coughs of animal predators in the time between light and darkness, he believes, storytellers have been society’s release from fear and loneliness. Today, their opponents are cynicism, snobbery and intellectual division.

“The most remarkable words that have ever been created are: ‘Once upon a time . . . ‘ “ he said. “Whenever you say it, you can feel everybody opening up. Somebody is going to enchant me with simplicity and a story about things that I love, cherish and understand.”

Of the great storytellers, he explained, Dickens said: “Life doesn’t have to be like this, it can be better.” Sir Walter Scott noted: “The common man in each of us, even though the man is an aristocrat.”

Courtenay says he is saying: “You don’t have to be circumspect, you don’t have to be knackered (worn down) to live life, you don’t have to compromise.”

As with storytellers from Matill Makejoye to Garrison Keillor, Courtenay is a terminal romantic.

So, during a book promotion visit to South Africa, he drove back to find the home where it all began. It was a 400-kilometer journey. He arrived at 6 a.m. and climbed a hill to see and photograph his mother’s little house as it reappeared through the dawn mist.

“When the mists cleared, it wasn’t there,” he said. “It had been demolished.

“I must confess I started to laugh because it was so corny, so melodramatic and the moment so beautifully punctuated with nothing.

“The human permanence had disappeared. Nature had won again.”