WHAT’S NOT TO SMILE ABOUT?
The problem with calling your company "virgin" is that people are likely to ask you about the first time you did It. Virgin Group founder and chairman Richard Branson was a 16-year-old schoolboy at a party, and he has been grinning ever since.
"I was making love quite badly," he says, "since it was my first time. And this girl had this incredible orgasm. It went on for quite a long time, then it subsided. I got off the bed, the orgasm started again, so I climbed back on top and started all over again, only to have her whisper in my ear, 'Asthma attack ... asthma attack ... ambulance ... ambulance ...'
"So, er..." he says, searching for the lesson in the story, "So, um ... So now, of course, I only go out with women who have asthma."
He sniggers, winningly.
The 236th richest billionaire in the world is sitting at a table outside Doyles at the Quay in Sydney, drinking a skinny latte and gazing into the middle distance. Branson speaks without catching the listener's eye, more out of shyness than shiftiness, and tells his candid stories with trailing pauses and buffered hesitations, as if he is still not sure what to make of them. He says "um", "er", "ah" and "but" more than anybody I have met.
Branson lives on Necker Island in the fortuitously eponymous British Virgin Islands, but often flies to Australia to announce various initiatives to save the planet and expand his businesses. At some point in his visit, he is generally photographed throwing a beautiful woman into the water.
A famously dyslexic, much-beaten survivor of the British public school system, Branson, 58, was the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a judge. He made his sentimental first million as proprietor of Virgin Records, a discount retail chain from which he eventually launched his own record label, and released the first albums by Mike Oldfield and the Sex Pistols, although not at the same time. For decades, Branson was known at the lazier fringes of commentary as a "millionaire hippie entrepreneur" or an "eccentric hippie businessman", largely because he never shed the long hair and Viking beard that were already provocatively unfashionable when Virgin signed the Pistols in 1977. It is possible Branson is the last public figure in the world to be regularly labelled a "hippie" although, he says, "Because I was working from the age of 15, I could never really get too stoned. So I don't think I was your classic hippie, but I was a '60s lad."
The qualifier "eccentric" was usually shorthand for "enjoys long-distance hot-air ballooning". When he was not throwing women into the water, Branson, despite owning several airlines and a railway company, seemed to prefer travelling around the world in a bucket tied to a balloon. These days, however, he sets his sights several atmospheric layers higher, and plans to become the first hippie in space. His space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, hopes to launch sub-orbital flights in 2009, and Branson proposes to take the maiden voyage with his father (who will then be 92), his mother (who will be 89), and his two adult children.
Branson estimates he has founded about 400 different businesses in his career. In Australia, a suitably motivated brand zealot could use a Virgin Mobile phone to book a ticket on a Virgin Blue flight from Broome to Melbourne, to connect with a Virgin Atlantic flight from Melbourne to London, with a Virgin credit card, which they could pay off discreetly with a loan from Virgin Money. (They would be hard-pressed, however, to find a can of Virgin Cola to drink while the operator placed them on hold.) Branson is in Australia when I speak to him to announce yet another business: a new Virgin airline, V Australia, which is scheduled to begin flying between Sydney and Los Angeles in December this year.
For all his successes, Richard Branson gives the impression of being a kind of bumbling billionaire, a Hagar the Affable. He has a glow about him, of wealth and health and cheerful cheesiness. If you did not know he was an eccentric billionaire hippie businessman, you would still guess he was somebody: an Icelandic chat-show host, perhaps, or the keyboard player in a recently reunited '60s supergroup.
Like his beard-sake Colonel Sanders, Branson never ages, in part because a quarter of his face is hidden by hair, and in part because he is rarely seen without his toothy smile, which freezes his expression into something resembling a schoolboy's delighted smirk at a suggestively shaped potato, or his girlfriend's asthmatic orgasm.
Richard Branson is married to joan Templeman, his second wife and the mother of his children, but always seems to be accompanied by half a dozen manicured blondes of indeterminate function. I ask him if billionaires have groupies. He pauses, as if about to formulate a complicated response, which will take into account the delicate nuances that colour the intricate socio-biological nexus between wealth and sexual attraction. Then he says, "Yes."
Go on.
"I was sitting with my children," he says. "I had my daughter on my lap and this girl sidled up to me - I'd met her briefly before - and she whispered to me, 'Would you like to come back to my room? Twenty minutes would be good, but 40 minutes would be better!' "
How does he deal with that kind of attention?
"It's very flattering, but I've managed to stay with my lady for 32 years by smiling a lot, being surrounded by beautiful women, but keeping my hands in my pockets, basically," he says, with practised but unconvincing resignation. "There's a lot of temptation but, sadly, I can't touch.
"I wouldn't mind having two lives, really," he reflects. "One married life, and ... er, but, anyway, you can't have everything in life."
He appears to solve the problem of temptation by throwing women in the water.
"Yeah, that's true," he admits.
Is this something he only does in Australia?
"Er, no," he admits. "It's a worldwide thing. And I generally throw myself in to cool myself down as well. If you're the chairman of a company and you go to a party, if everyone's going to have fun in that party and they all work for you, it's important that you let your hair down first. It's important that you go in the pool first and it's important that you ... bring the rest of them into the pool with you."
Some people might find it a bit draining, flying around the world, throwing people in the water and encouraging them to have fun. Is it lonely being the 236th richest billionaire in the world?
"No, it's not lonely," he says. "I can pick up the phone to Al Gore or Nelson Mandela, or anybody really, and they can take my call and I can get things done. I have the most full-on, incredibly varied, enjoyable life of anybody I know, so I'd be a very sad person if it was lonely."
Of course, Branson is not the only 236th richest billionaire in the world. According to Forbes magazine's 2008 billionaires' list, there are 10 other people who also possess personal fortunes of $US4.4 billion. Is it like the pop charts? Does Branson check out the list every year to see if he has knocked Chinese electronics retailer Zhang Jindong off the number 227 spot?
"No," he says. "The only time I looked at a wealth list was when I was nearly bankrupt, and I was really pleased to see The Sunday Times [Rich List] would have me up in the top 20. When my bank manager was around, I'd say, 'Read that. I'm very rich. Don't worry.' But now that things are going quite well, and I don't need to worry too much about whether I'm on the list or not, I generally don't look at them."
So doesn't he have any ambition to unseat Zhang Jindong?
"Well, actually, that has been the one thing I have been fighting for all my life," he concedes. "Zhang Jindong is the one I'm really determined to overtake."
I knew it.
When richard branson was still at school, he began his first successful business publishing Student magazine. He sold advertisements in Student while studying for his "O" levels, and the magazine was a far greater success than Branson's academic career.
Although Branson participated in many of the activities favoured by students in the 1960s - including demonstrating against the Vietnam War and, of course, growing a beard - he did not actually enrol in higher education. But Student - started with a £4 float from his mother - printed contributions from artist David Hockney and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and Branson interviewed Mick Jagger and John Lennon for its pages.
Another thing that students used to do was buy vinyl records, even though LPs were comparatively expensive and students were comparatively poor. Branson wound up Student in 1970, after his best friend tried to unseat him as publisher and editor and turn the magazine into a co-operative. The last issue contained an advertisement for cheap mail-order records, a business that became Virgin Mail Order Records, which grew into the Virgin Records retail chain.
One way Branson found to undercut established high-street shops was by avoiding paying purchase tax. He was arrested in 1971 for selling records in the UK that he had pretended to export to Europe. He spent one night in a cell, and his mother had to put up the family home as surety to get him out on bail. He was able eventually to settle the matter out of court.
In 1972, Virgin stores begat the Virgin record label. Its first release, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and gave the company a solid - if somewhat ethereal - financial base. The label's hippie image was kicked in the head when Branson signed the Sex Pistols after the band had been dumped as too dangerous by both EMI and A&M.
"That was great fun at the time," says Branson, "and it certainly sent Virgin into the stratosphere, but I don't think I would sit down and listen to the Sex Pistols. I don't think anybody actually listens to the Pistols as such." (In fact, he says, he enjoys the music of Peter Gabriel and Lenny Kravitz.)
In 1984, Branson founded Virgin Atlantic Airways, initially to fly between the UK and the US, but later to add a number of other long-haul routes from London. Virgin Atlantic's main competitor was the hugely profitable British Airways, which launched an extraordinary campaign of dirty tricks against Branson's company, including, allegedly, spreading lies about Virgin Atlantic, hacking into Virgin Atlantic's reservations computer, and having BA workers pose as Virgin Atlantic staff to poach customers.
(Years later, in 2007, BA and Virgin Atlantic were found to be colluding to fix the prices of fuel surcharges. BA was fined £270 million by the UK Office of Fair Trading and the US Department of Justice, but Virgin Atlantic escaped penalty because its lawyers had alerted the OFT to the practice - after first establishing the company's immunity under the Competition Act's "leniency policy" towards whistleblowers.)
In 1992, Branson sold Virgin Records to sustain Virgin Atlantic. That same year, he sued BA and its chairman for libel; BA countersued but settled in 1993. Branson won £500,000 damages, which he distributed among real Virgin staff as the "BA bonus".
In 1997, Branson entered the UK's hilariously inept privatised railway system with Virgin Trains, an enterprise that has suffered from years of reliability and punctuality problems, not all of them of its own making. "It was tough, waiting for the new trains and waiting for them to upgrade the track," he says, "and we had some brand damage over the six or seven years. We had that horrible derailing when Network Rail [owner of Britain's railway infrastructure] couldn't get their track right. [In February 2007, a Virgin train from London Euston to Glasgow derailed, seriously injuring eight people and killing one 84-year-old woman.] It could've been an absolute disaster, but because the train's built like a tank, 99 per cent of everybody survived."
Now, says Branson, the trains are "brilliant" and the service is "spectacular", two adjectives not commonly associated with British railways, and perhaps not the words that Britain's exhausted commuters would choose.
Branson entered the Australian domestic air-travel market in 2000, with Virgin Blue. A few months before the new airline was launched, Virgin's lawyers issued letters threatening legal action against small Australian businesses such as Virgin Wheel Repairs in Kings Park, Sydney, unless they changed their names, destroyed their stationery, disconnected their phones and - most humiliatingly - paid the costs of preparing Virgin's own warning letters to them. What was all that about?
"We have a brand, Virgin," says Branson, "and our whole reputation is wrapped up in that brand. If we think somebody's trying to pass off, then we have a team of people who very zealously try to protect that brand. If they're obviously not passing off, then we won't have a chance.
"There are people who use the Virgin brand like in, say, the Virgin Islands, who are 100 per cent legit, but there are others who definitely try it on."
Branson owns one of the British Virgin Islands. Did he threaten to close them down unless they sold it to him? "Exactly," he says, laughing. "Yes. So we sorted that one out."
There are those who suggest that, although Branson might have been whimsically drawn to the name "Virgin" Islands (or "Necker" Island, for that matter), the most attractive thing about the archipelago is its status as a tax haven.
Does he ever wish he had not called his company Virgin? "No," he says. "The alternative name was going to be Slipped Disc Records, and Slipped Disc Airlines would not have worked."
Branson says he had a "gut feeling" that Virgin Blue would be successful in Australia. "And it's worked spectacularly well," he says. "It's made, I think, a massive difference to a lot of people's lives."
I flew Virgin Blue this morning.
"Ah," he says. "Were they all right?"
They were eight minutes late, actually.
"Oh, f... , okay."
But all four hosties - Carly, Rachel, Karen and Leila - were good-looking blondes. How come?
"Well," says Branson, "we've already been to court once, and been prosecuted in Australia, for having the most attractive young girls flying for us ... and we got about a 10 per cent lift in sales the following year."
(Virgin Blue was found guilty of "unconscious" age discrimination in 2005, when the company was taken before the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal by eight former Ansett flight attendants, all of whom had applied for jobs with Virgin Blue, all of whom were over 35, and none of whom was hired.)
"But, anyway, um ... we are a young airline," says Branson, "and, actually, I'll get into trouble for saying it, but I think that the kinds of people who fly as stewardesses or stewards ... generally speaking it's something for young people. And I personally don't see any harm in bringing a bit of glamour back to the airline industry. I'm not embarrassed about the fact that we've got the best-looking girls and guys."
Branson says he flies with Virgin airlines rather than in a private jet. He likes to talk to passengers and staff, and scribble notes of what they tell him. He hunts around in his pockets for an example, and pulls out a scrap of paper, about 10 $50 bills and a Virgin credit card.
Doesn't he have a wallet?
"I don't have a wallet," he says, "no."
Is that because there is no wallet big enough?
"There's this very small guy who runs Formula One [Bernie Ecclestone]," says Branson. "And somebody said to him, 'Is it a disadvantage being so small?' And he said, 'No. When I stand on my wallet, I'm pretty tall.' "
The year 2008 is a pretty good one to be a hippie. The children of the revolution were kept on the run throughout the 1980s and '90s, pursued by pseudo-puritans who blamed the "permissive society" for everything from AIDS to illiteracy. Suddenly, however, every other businessman and politician is a tree-hugging, earth-loving, waste-recycling, climate-watching Gaia worshipper. Or, at least, they are pretending to be.
Despite his long hair and beard, Branson was initially doubtful about climate change. "About 10 years ago," he says, "I read a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist [by Danish author Bjørn Lomborg]. It was very comforting for me, being an airline owner. The gist of it was that the world's going towards another ice age, and global warming's great news. I thought, 'Fine, we'll start another airline.' "
Unfortunately, eight years after founding Virgin Blue, Branson now believes Lomborg to be wrong and, in line with the fashion for opening hostilities on non-sentient forces, he has declared war on climate change. He plans to establish a "war room" to beat "the enemy" of carbon build-up, and Virgin is offering the $25 million Virgin Earth Prize to anyone who can invent a process to extract carbon from the earth's atmosphere. "As one of the biggest polluters in the world - because I have a number of airlines - I feel an even greater responsibility to do something about it," he says.
That is because it is his fault.
"It's definitely my fault," agrees Branson. "So we've said 100 per cent of the profits we make from our 'dirty' businesses will be put into researching and developing clean fuels."
In February, Virgin Atlantic flew a passengerless 747 from London to Amsterdam partly powered by biofuel (a mix of coconut oil and babassu oil, extracted from the babassu palm), proving that biofuel could be used in jet engines without damage to the plane. Branson sees himself as "towards the practical end" of environmental thinking. "We're not doing it as a charity," he says. "We obviously hope that, if we can develop a clean fuel, it will be a very successful business.
"There are greens who, I think, do themselves a big disservice," he continues. "For instance, when we flew the 747 using coconut oil, Greenpeace attacked us for, um ... for, er ... I can't even remember what reason they gave."
Cruelty to coconuts?
"Something like that. They will argue we should just ground all our planes and nobody should fly. And yet, if there's an environmental conference somewhere, they'll certainly want an airline ticket to get there ... and they will ask us for one."
Branson predicts technology will supply the solution to global warming. But he believes individuals should still strive to reduce their carbon footprint so the climate does not pass its "tipping point" before science can save the day. "If I've got kidney failure," he explains, "a dialysis machine's not going to cure it, but it's going to prolong my life and I'm going to be very wealthy."
Uh?
"Very pleased that dialysis machines exist," he corrects himself. "We need to do everything we can to delay getting to that tipping point, so that technologists can come up with the answers."
There is an endearing boyishness about Branson. He does not seem old enough to be battling global environmental catastrophe when he could be playing outside with his balloon. But Branson had a strange and challenging childhood in the unlikely setting of Shamley Green, a small village in Surrey. His mother, Eve, continually set physical challenges for him and his sister, to test and build their spirit and endurance.
"I know today she'd get arrested," he says, "but her attitude was that she just wanted us to stand on our own two feet and she didn't want us to be, as she would say, 'mollycoddled' or pampered too much. She wouldn't let us watch TV. We had to get out there and do things. That was her approach and somehow we survived. If she told us to get on our bicycle and ride 400 miles somewhere, obviously there was always a risk that we wouldn't make it, but by making it the whole way, we got an enormous satisfaction."
He thinks his mother's child-rearing method was, on the whole, "a good thing", but has no praise for the British public schools that repeatedly tried to beat his dyslexia out of him.
"I personally think it's pretty atrocious that an eight-year-old can have his trousers brought down and he could be beaten until he bled," he says, "and that was the kind of thing that happened to me on a number of occasions."
It was a sexual thing, wasn't it?
"I think there is a serious danger that, with a lot of those masters, it was sexual," says Branson. "I also think that, on the whole, one-sex schools are not a good idea. It's just unnatural. Kids should be brought up in two-sex schools. And boarding schools I don't think are such a great idea."
The Bransons raised their children, Holly, a doctor, and Sam, a male model, "the complete opposite" to the way Richard grew up.
Rumour has it that Sam is dating the singer Natalie Imbruglia. "So I read," says Branson. "No, I'm afraid Natalie Imbruglia has been a family friend for a long time." Then, with the sudden, alarming candour that punctuates his conversation, he admits, "He might have lost his virginity to Natalie, I've got a funny feeling. But that was some years ago. And before she was married."
I wonder if there is anything Branson regrets not having done. "I'd love to be able to sing," he says. "I'd love to be able to dance. I'd love to be able to speak languages. I would love my wife to just sort of say, 'Richard, I think you should go and mess around for a few weeks', but I'm certainly not complaining. Life's f...ing good."
It's almost midday, and branson has to leave for a meeting. He tries to pay our bill, but the manager of Doyles waves him away.
"It is bizarre," says Branson. "When you're struggling, you always have to pay full price for everything, but when you're successful, no one will take your money. You have to insist."
Once again, he struggles to find a moral in the experience. "Um, um, so, um ... yeah."
Then a strange thing happens. The manager of Doyles is listening to a pitch from an advertising salesperson from the free magazine Where In Sydney. The ad guy has discounted a third-of-a-page space from $195 to $185, but the manager asks Branson to take over the negotiation. "How many issues are they taking?" Branson asks.
"Twelve thousand," says the ad guy, alarmingly. "Oh, how many issues? We haven't got to that part yet. We distribute 12,000 a week."
The ad guy is speaking very quickly - even for a salesperson - and very nervously. He obviously does not relish going head-to-head with the 236th richest billionaire in the world over a third-of-a-page advertisement for a fish restaurant.
"How often are they going to advertise?" asks Branson. "Just once?"
"No, three months," says the manager.
"I'll tell you what," says Branson to the ad guy, "we'll do $150 for the first entry, and then you can negotiate it. Go on. $150."
Branson holds out his hand to shake, the manager holds out his hand, and the ad guy has no choice but to miserably offer his hand, too.
I catch up with Branson later in the afternoon as he struggles into a red wetsuit at North Bondi car park. I realise I have rarely seen a man with a beard wearing a wetsuit. It makes him look a bit like a Troll doll perched on the end of a coloured pencil.
He is supposed to be shooting a grab for the reality TV show Bondi Rescue, but the film crew has not turned up. He has acquired an entourage of attractive women - including surfing world champion Stephanie Gilmore and another very cute pro-surfer called Carly - whose purpose is not entirely clear. Some of them change into wetsuits, too.
When it becomes apparent that he is not going to be on TV, he decides to get in the water anyway, accompanied by a couple of Bondi Rescue lifesavers on jet skis.
The odd thing about this trip is that Branson never appears to have anything particularly pressing to do. He asks Gilmore for a shoulder rub to give him the "power" to surf, pats cute Carly on the bottom several times with his surfboard, and announces, "We're just going to have some fun now."
I appear to be the only person who knows what this means.
One of Virgin's public relations consultants on the beach wears an ivory-white dress as brief and delicate as a summer nightshirt. She has licorice hair and caramel skin, and Branson looks like he might eat her.
"We must get that dress off," says Branson, although it is barely on.
He lures her to the ocean's edge with lupine charm, and - here it comes, here it comes - splash! He pulls her into the water.
Branson grins like a golden chimpanzee. It is the prank that always pleases, the icebreaker that melts every woman's heart, and it is just as funny as the first time he did it.