• 8/8/2006
  • England
  • staff
  • Telegraph.co.uk

Mouth cancer may have changed the way property tycoon Elliott Bernerd looks but it won’t diminish him, he tells Elizabeth Grice

Up-front is a term that could have been invented for Elliott Bernerd, the property tycoon who refused to hide away after his face was mutilated by mouth cancer.

Two colossal operations left him with much of his chin missing and his speech impaired but he returned to a life of active wheeling and dealing as if it were something his doctors had prescribed.

Wearing the white surgical mask that has become his trademark, he addressed a public gathering at the Royal Society in London last month. “I hope you can hear me,” he rasped. “It’s not my choice I’m this way.”

Courage is the word that comes to mind, but it doesn’t begin to do justice to the combative streak that has played a big part in his resumption of public life and entrepreneurial chutzpah – probably even to his survival. “It depends on willpower,” he says, “on the sheer determination not to be pushed to one side in society – and why should I be?”

His greeting to me is as much a challenge as an introduction: “I’m Elliott Bernerd. I’ve a sore mouth from my operation. If you don’t understand me, there’s nothing I can do.” It takes concentration at first because his tongue and lip movements are so restricted but Bernerd is a man used to making himself understood.

He has just given £1 million to Saving Faces, a charity run by Prof Iain Hutchison, one of Britain’s leading oral and maxillofacial surgeons, to fund a facial surgery research programme. This has been matched by £1 million from Cancer Research UK for a clinical trial.

Though Hutchison didn’t operate on Bernerd, he became his medical mentor throughout the ordeal and the two are now firm friends.

“Elliott is the supreme example of an indomitable human being overcoming adversity. He has never exhibited any weakness at all; never shown any hint of self-pity. He has a phenomenal drive and power,” says Hutchison.

Though mouth cancer is as common in Britain as leukaemia and melanoma, and twice as common as cervical cancer, much less is heard about it because the inevitably disfiguring surgery, affecting the most public part of the body, makes many patients reclusive.

“There are two ways of dealing with something like this: you sit in a corner feeling sorry for yourself, or you get on with it. I just get on with it. You can’t wrap yourself in cotton wool. Of course, I’d rather not be in the position I’m in. But that feeling lasts for about one moment in 10. In the other nine, I say: I am a very fortunate person to be here. Feeling sorry for myself doesn’t help.” He blames his cancer on cigars, stress and overwork.

Bernerd, 60, a Londoner who left school at 15 with no qualifications, has been a giant of the UK property industry for 30 years. Chairman of the group Chelsfield Partners, he features 217th in the current Sunday Times Rich List, at an estimated worth of £277 million.

He made his name developing Britain’s first American-style business park, Stockley Park, near Heathrow, and had huge interests in Paddington Basin and White City. He owned Wentworth Golf Club, was chairman of the South Bank arts complex and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

“He was very much the debonair man-about-town,” says a financial commentator. “He had a certain good-looking schmaltz and women found him irresistible.”

It was towards the end of 2000 that he discovered “something very simple in my mouth. It felt like an ulcer but it wouldn’t go away. When it was diagnosed as cancer, my reaction was very simple: fear, surprise and then, because I am a fighter, the determination to fight.”

“It is the most mutilating and socially isolating cancer,” says Bernerd, whose own psychological robustness has been a revelation to friends and continues to be a scourge to business rivals. “Patients who have cancer in the head and neck tend to stay at home, they lose touch with their friends, they become hermits, they’re frightened to do anything, they retreat into themselves.

He approached Hutchison – whom he’d met socially before – for a fourth opinion. Who was the world’s top oral and maxillofacial surgeon, he wanted to know. Hutchison recommended Jatin Shah at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York.

‘I wanted the operation done there and then,” Bernerd says, snapping his fingers. “I wanted the cancer out. I didn’t want to mess around.” He moved his office, his secretary and his family to New York and continued to work from hospital. The first operation lasted 14 hours. A year later, the cancer returned and he underwent more extreme surgery, lasting 22½ hours.

“I handled my problem my way, with a very radical solution,” he says. His ex-wife, his estranged wife and his two grown-up daughters supported him throughout.

In the entrepreneurial sense, Bernerd was given up for dead but astonished his rivals by embarking on an 18-month fight in 2004 to take his company private. “Some of them expected me to lose my edge,” he says, a smile behind the mask. “Some hoped. Some of them have had a shock. I won the fight.”

“In a short time, you forgot about any disabilities he had,” says one business associate. “What he did would have been monumental even for a man who was 100 per cent fit and 30 years old.”

Then, just weeks after selling Chelsfield in a £2.1 billion deal, Bernerd was busy assembling a team of financial backers for what has become Chelsfield Partners.

There may be an element of bravado in Bernerd’s refusal to let the disease conquer him but the people around him are in awe of what he has achieved, the scale of his physical rehabilitation and his apparent indifference to people’s reaction to his damaged face.

Always suave and impeccably turned out, Bernerd was a man for whom appearances mattered. They still do, but now he is grateful simply to be alive. “The only thing you are interested in is the next day. Whether the sun is shining or it is raining, it’s wonderful. How you look becomes less of a priority.

“The mask is my invention. I don’t have to wear it at all. What’s under it is not all that frightening, I can assure you. But I’ve got into the habit.”

Most mouth cancer patients are fed with food supplements through a “peg” in the stomach and, after his second operation, Bernerd was told he would never have food by mouth again. (He refuses to go into detail about the surgery, but his jawbone was reconstructed with bone from his leg, leaving him with very limited tongue movement.)

He took the news with characteristic defiance. “I enjoy flavour and taste, so I taught myself to eat by mouth. I can have everything I want now – pasta, potatoes, fruit, sausages and fried eggs – but I have to have it puréed. Certain of my taste buds are more acute than they were before. I can work out what’s in the food, even the herbs.”
His chef prepares it specially for him. And when he goes to London’s River Café, a place where he feels comfortable because his special requirements are understood, the co-proprietor-chef, Ruth Rogers, looks after him in the same way.

Though he has trouble with certain consonants and projecting his voice seems an effort, Bernerd’s ability to communicate is astonishing for a man with so little movement in his tongue and lips.

“I have my moments,” he says. “When I’m overtired, it’s harder to talk. It depends on how happy or unhappy I am.” He has become so expert in managing his condition and its side-effects – coughing in the night, a dry mouth – that Hutchison sends other patients to him for advice.

Bernerd has refused requests to speak about his illness because he doesn’t want to be the subject of voyeuristic journalism, and he declined to be photographed for this article. Even now, he is reserving aspects of his singular medical history to be written up in a medical journal.

“It’s not about me,” he says repeatedly. It’s about a cause that he and Hutchison are passionate about – the need for a scientific exchange of data between Britain’s leading surgeons so that new and better ways can be found to treat mouth cancer. A team of independent researchers will work with surgeons to recruit patients into clinical studies.

“Saving Faces is the only charity dedicated to this,” says Bernerd. “The survival rate for mouth and neck cancer is 60 per cent. I would like it to be 80 or even 90 per cent. We have a huge resource that is being lost to the world – every day, every week – because records of what surgeons do in their individual operations are not being kept. Once we have the data, we can make fast inroads into what will and will not help.”

Hutchison believes a centralised system of analysis is essential. He envisages a data bank and a tumour bank. “The tumour that is removed is gold dust. It could be used for genetic studies or to trial new drugs. Surgeons often forget to collect samples.”

Saving Faces runs programmes in schools to illustrate – gruesomely, in the case of mouth cancer – the dangers of smoking. It’s an initiative Bernerd supports fiercely. “I can’t bear the smell of smoke now and I won’t have anyone near me who smokes. I find it repugnant for what it represents, not for me, but for society.”