A long-time Packer
senior executive and former PBL board member today confirmed on ABC
radio that Kerry Packer’s “close friend” Julie Trethowan was, in fact,
his mistress.

Former magazine queen Nene King spilled the beans on Packer’s special “friend” while espousing the virtues of gossip to Jon Faine on Melbourne’s ABC radio this morning.

The former editor of the PBL-owned Woman’s Day told
Faine that the key to selling truckloads of women’s magazines is to
pack the pages with gossip. But when asked by Faine if the recent story
about Kerry Packer’s romantic links to Trethowan was appropriate fodder
for the pages of Woman’s Day, King paused. The former editor admitted that she “knew Julie well” – but “I wasn’t going to interview her for Woman’s Day.”

While
King confirmed she knew about the affair, as for running the story on
her gossip pages – “I would have nothing to do with that at all.” Said
King: “You know how far you can go,” adding it’s about “loyalty.”

Leading
businessmen all have their mistresses, King continued, naming paper
mogul Richard Pratt and the late British billionaire James Goldsmith as
examples.

Nene’s advice to editors of women’s magazines in a
nutshell: gossip is nearly always good, but your publisher’s
indiscretions, unlike Brad Pitt’s, are off limits. Instead, large doses
of “loyalty” are highly recommended – take King’s ode to Kerry in her Melbourne Weekly column a few weeks back, in which she fondly remembered the way “sweet” Kerry referred to her as his “cash cow.”

“I
was so lucky during my time at ACP. I had two wonderful men on my team:
Kerry and James Packer. They were marvellous to me,” she wrote.

“I
didn’t realise at the time, but I was the only person who ever used his
loo. I was desperate, so I used it. I complained to him that he left
the seat up, which I hated. There was a framed Alan Bond cheque on the
wall, for one billion dollars… Kerry Packer was wonderful, and I
loved him. I am so lucky to have known him and to have worked for him.”