Geoffrey Edelsten, the Jewish doctor who made medicine glitzy and grubby

ASHLEY BROWNE reflects on the colourful life of a Mt Scopus boy whose tawdry flair and dubious ethics propelled him into the spotlight and then prison

WHEN I CHANGED JOBS a few years back, moving from editing the official AFL website to editing the Australian Jewish News, there weren’t too many high-profile identities who followed me from one title to the other.

One who did was Dr Geoffrey Edelsten.

There were times in the football job when an angry Edelsten would call the AFL to complain about references to pink helicopters during his short-lived, but high-profile period as the owner of the Sydney Swans.

I tried it on again at the AJN, in a piece about Jews in football, headlined People of the Boot, which would be the forerunner of the book of the same namethat Dashiel Lawrence and I jointly edited 2018.

I figured that Edelsten, while born Jewish and who had minimal contact with the community at that stage, might not see the story. I was wrong.

The paper had barely hit the streets when an angry Edelsten was on the line threatening legal action if there was no retraction. “The helicopter wasn’t pink. It was blue and white, and it was used to get between my various medical clinics so that I could deliver babies,” he growled down the phone.

He got his retraction and I managed to stay out of the website he created where he railed against the journalists who he felt had wronged him over the years.

But when Dash and I were mapping out our book, we passed on devoting an entire chapter to Edelsten, despite his amazing life story and the brief but important contribution he made to the history of AFL football. It just wasn’t worth the trouble or the potential legal fees.

Edelsten passed away last Friday, aged 78. For so long one of Australia’s most intriguing and at times, high-profile figures, he died alone at his flash St Kilda Road apartment, and spent the last few months of his life as a virtual recluse.

He had both a normal and unremarkable Melbourne Jewish upbringing. He was born in Carlton in 1943 at the time the inner suburb was the beating heart of the community, attended Princes Hill Primary and later Mount Scopus College. He then studied medicine at Melbourne University, graduating in 1966.

It was at this time that his entrepreneurial flair emerged. He established a Melbourne-based record company, Hit Productions, and is listed as the co-writer of songs I Can't Stop Loving You, Baby and A Woman of Gradual Decline for a band known as The Last Straws. He later co-produced the single Love Machine for a group called Pastoral Symphony that included Glenn Shorrock, later the lead singer of The Little River Band.

According to various biographies, he worked as a resident doctor at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and then practiced general medicine in rural New South Wales. In 1971 he and a partner founded Preventicare, which provided diagnostic tests and computerised history-taking for doctors around Australia. The idea was sound, but the finances behind were not and it lasted only a few months.

He spent a few years in the United States then returned to Australia and over the next few years, he established several medical centres. Medicare was introduced by the federal government in 1984, Edelsten’s clinics embraced the concept of bulk-billing – the first in Australia to do so – and he established more medical clinics across NSW. They were open 24 hours and featured chandeliers, grand pianos in the foyers and mink-covered examination tables.

Eventually he would own 13 such centres and his 200 doctors were seeing 20,000 patients a week. It made him a wealthy man and he lived accordingly.

But this being Australia, he only became a household name when he entered the world of what was then VFL football. Despite being a passionate Carlton supporter, he emerged in late 1985 as the successful bidder for the financially-strapped Sydney Swans, which the League had decided would become the first club to be privately owned. He handed the League a cheque for $6.4 million for his own place in Australian Rules history.

He transformed the club immediately, enticing a host of big names, including Greg Williams who would win the 1986 Brownlow Medal and four-time premiership coach Tom Hafey. With his flair for marketing and public relations, the Swans became the talk of Sydney and attracted capacity crowds to the SCG.

Whether or not Edelsten paid any money out of his own pocket to buy the team remains a mystery. Many at the Swans believe he was merely the front man for a company called Westeq, who laid out the cash. In any event, he was removed as chairman of the Swans before the end of the 1986 season, at around the same time as the NSW Rugby League rejected his bid to purchase the Cronulla Sharks.

Edelsten’s world turned sour after that. He was deregistered as a doctor in NSW for having unqualified staff conduct laser surgery and was sent to prison for a year in 1990 after contracting known hit-man Christopher Dale Flannery several years before to assault a former patient.

He kept a low profile for a few years upon his release but then moved back to Melbourne and in 2005, he and some partners established the Allied Medical Group, which was sold in 2011 to US company Sonic Healthcare in a deal that was reportedly worth $200 million.

Edelsten never met a camera he didn’t like. With his jet-black dyed hair, bright suits, fast cars and busty young women by his side, his picture regularly appeared in the Melbourne papers, while at the same time monitoring every word written and said about him in the media.

He was a regular on the red carpet at the prestigious Brownlow Medal, much to the chagrin of the AFL, but he was a major benefactor of his beloved Carlton Football Club, which made him a life member in 2013, and that was one of the perks they afforded him.

All the time he was a high-flyer, Edelsten was never particularly close to the Jewish community, although in the late 1980s, the music school at Mount Scopus College was named for him after he made a large donation.

None of his three wives were Jewish, although his lavish, 550-guest marriage to Californian fitness instructor Brynne Gordon, who was 41 years his junior, held at Crown Casino, featured a chuppah and a ceremony conducted by Jewish actor and Seinfeld star Jason Alexander. The Nanny’s Fran Drescher was also in attendance although both Alexander and Drescher later admitted to both not knowing Edelsten at all before the wedding.

In his last few months, he spoke regularly with Rabbi Chaim Herzog of Chabad Melbourne CBD and while not a shule-goer, he was a financial supporter of Chabad, as he was also of Magen David Adom.

On Monday, four days after he passed away, the website of the Melbourne Chevra Kadisha said details of his burial were still to be confirmed, but it was confirmed that he would have a Jewish funeral.

He had no children with any of his wives, but he had a son, Matthew Beard, following a brief relationship with a former patient.

Photo: Geoffrey Edelsten and his second wife, Brynne Edelsten, posing for photos on the red carpet at the Brownlow Medal awards in Melbourne, in 2014 (Joe Castro/AAP)