Hello Darling!: The Jeanne Little Story

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Photo: Robin Powell

A journalist and editor for ten years, Siobhan O’Brien has been published in most major Australian newspapers and magazines, and currently contributes to the Sydney Morning Herald and POL Oxygen magazine. Siobhan is the former launch editor of indesign magazine and <www.indesign.com.au>, and acted as the associate editor for Vogue Living and Monument. Siobhan has also written a number of books, including the very successful A Life by Design: The Art and Lives of Florence Broadhurst. Siobhan currently lives on the South Coast of New South Wales with her husband, fellow author Greg Duncan Powell, and their young children, Eve and Earl. For more information on Siobhan and her books please visit <www.siobhan-obrien.com>.

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THE

Jeanne Little S T O RY

S I O B H A N

O ’ B R I E N

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First published in 2006 Copyright © Siobhan O’Brien 2006 The author Siobhan O’Brien asserts the moral rights to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: O’Brien, Siobhan, 1971– . Hello Darling!: the Jeanne Little story. ISBN 978 1 74114 802 2. ISBN 1 74114 802 2. 1. Little, Jeanne. 2. Women entertainers — Australia — Biography. 3. Women television personalities — Australia — Biography. I. Title. 792.092 All photographs are courtesy of Jeanne and Barry Little from their private collection Index compiled by Russell Brookes Set in 11.5/18 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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This book is dedicated to working mothers everywhere.

‘When asked why she started the women’s movement, Betty Friedan recalled her mother’s frustrated life: too much power inside the home, not enough outside it.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The more plentiful the work, the less time to be neurotic.’ Marlene Dietrich ‘Not failure but low aim is a crime.’ Katie Mitchell (Jeanne Little’s mother)

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Contents Preface

ix

Strange kinda woman

1

1 Who’s that girl?

5

2 Born to be wild

31

3 London calling

61

4 Homeward bound

87

5 Everyone’s in love with you

113

6 The train kept a-rollin’

135

7 The times they are a-changin’

149

8 Lady willpower

167

9 Life is a cabaret

183

10 Still crazy after all these years

211

Epilogue

225

Notes

231

Acknowledgements

237

Index

239

vii

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Preface

FIVE

MONTHS INTO WRITING THIS BOOK,

I

INVITED

JEANNE

and Barry Little to stay with me at Bawley Point on the New South Wales south coast, where I live with my husband and two children. I arranged for the Littles to stay in a selfcontained cottage on a nearby property, and since they did not have wheels, I filled their fridge with tasty goodies, including a curry that my husband had cooked the night before. Jeanne was obviously touched by the gesture. ‘Oh Siobhan,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have! We could’ve just called a taxi and gone to a restaurant.’ For those who have not been to Bawley Point, you should understand that there is not much here except sun, sand and scrub. The nearest township is a half-hour drive away. And so I replied: ‘But there are no taxis in Bawley Point, Jeanne.’ ix

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HELLO DARLING! ‘Well,’ she pleaded, ‘I could’ve just grabbed a rack of lamb.’ And on the conversation went, until it dawned on Jeanne that we were not blessed in this neck of the woods with the conveniences of the inner-Sydney suburb of Paddington, where the Littles live. The following night—the curries consumed and the cupboards bare—we invited Jeanne and Barry for dinner. At 6.30 pm I knocked on their cottage door to ferry them up the hill to our home. Jeanne met me at the door dressed as if she were attending a society event. She wore a stunning silver and black jacket, with matching tailored trousers, diamanté earrings like disco balls, and false eyelashes like spiders perched on her eyelids. But the pièce de résistance was a cropped platinum blond wig. ‘It keeps my head warm,’ she said as my eyes wandered up towards the crown of her head. I blinked and thought, ‘This is the most surreal moment of my life.’ It then occurred to me that I should have invited more people (and perhaps made more of an effort). Still, in typical fashion, this did not worry Jeanne. She marvelled at my two-year-old’s vast teddy bear collection and seemed just as impressed as my baby son with the discovery of his tongue. Glamorous? No. Fun? Definitely. The second most surreal moment of my life happened the very next day. For the most part, during their stay of three days, Jeanne, Barry and I confined ourselves to the four walls of their cottage. We bantered on for hours, about Jeanne’s childhood, x

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Preface her marriage, her career. What was it like to grow up without a father? How did she cope with her brush with cancer? Barry’s input was equally as enlightening: he talked about his yearning to be a writer, his passion for the East. Finally, I played cryptic games with Jeanne and Barry in a thinly disguised attempt to psychoanalyse their relationship. One of these sessions was particularly wonderful, yet particularly exhausting, and worked wonders on our appetites, and so I suggested we go out for lunch. As the three of us approached my car in the driveway, it occurred to me that I still had two baby seats strapped into the back of the vehicle. Barry promptly ensconced himself in the front, and so there was nowhere left for Jeanne to sit. What happened next was interesting: no matter how vigorously I insisted that I remove one of the baby seats, Jeanne would not allow me to go to the trouble. ‘I can fit,’ she said, as she proceeded to clamber into one of the seats. ‘Honestly, it’s no bother at all.’ It was at this moment that the words of Jeanne’s daughter, Katie Little, rang in my ears: ‘Once Mum puts her hoof down, she won’t budge.’ Doubtless, I let Jeanne have her way and it was in such a manner (with Jeanne’s neck akimbo, head up around the roof and her hips miraculously moulded to my son’s micro-seat) that I took the Littles on a ten-kilometre roundtrip to the local café. As I looked in the rear-vision mirror, I thought to myself, how do I psychoanalyse this? Jeanne Little won’t remember when I first met her. It was at Sydney’s Surry Hills Festival in 1999. Both of us had been xi

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HELLO DARLING! invited (along with a host of other media celebrities, including a 130-kilogram Polynesian transvestite with bosoms the size of my head) to anoint the main street’s best retail store. There were six judges altogether—writers, editors, performers and personalities—who were selected to march along the street, in and out of about a dozen shops, providing each with a score. We looked much like the Pied Piper and his rats, with Jeanne Little as the piper. We left no stone unturned as we assessed every fit-out, product and display, and scribbled down numbers and ticks on our very official-looking clipboards. There was even a category that evaluated the X-factor of a store: that indefinable je ne sais quoi. We added this to the tally and gave each entrant a score out of ten. Being the most famous judge, it was Jeanne’s job to announce a winner. As she unveiled the results from a makeshift stage, she took the opportunity to make a speech about what a ‘knockout’ Surry Hills was. With our job done (and our clipboards tossed conveniently into the nearest wheelie bin), the five other judges and I retreated to the nearest pub for a bevvie. As I stared into my beer, my mind mulled a few things over. Was this my reward for all the years of hard work as a journalist and magazine editor? Was I destined to sacrifice my weekends for appearances at public events like this— traipsing about inner-city Sydney with a bunch of people who were most probably as bored as I was? Or had I, perhaps, overlooked something: this was one of life’s xii

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Preface serendipitous moments, an opportunity waiting to happen. The brown beer bubbles fizzed and popped. Writing a biography on Jeanne Little was the last thing on my mind. About a month later, I telephoned Jeanne to interview her for a Good Weekend article that I was writing on Sydney socialite and wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, who had been murdered in 1977. I didn’t declare myself as the person she had met at the festival, for fear she might take me for the 130-kilogram transvestite. When Florence Broadhurst was alive, she was very close to the Littles and their anecdotes about her infused my story with much colour and life. I am forever indebted to them for that. In 2004, I penned Broadhurst’s biography: A Life by Design. Jeanne Little was the natural person to launch the book, and it was on that evening that we first joked that my next project was to write her biography. By June 2005, I was doing exactly that. What I have discovered, in this, one of the most enjoyable tasks of my life, is that Jeanne and Barry are unique individuals. But they also have a special kind of synergy—a symbiosis—which makes it hard to see where one person ceases and the other begins. From my point of view, they could not have been better to work with: they are generous, courteous, dedicated, focused. At one point Barry phoned almost daily (‘Here’s your daily phone call,’ he’d say to me with a laugh), but at no point were either of the Littles meddlesome or insistent that certain material should appear in, or be cut from, the book. As my agent said to them: ‘A biographer can say things about xiii

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HELLO DARLING! you and your life that you could never say about yourself.’ This was something that Jeanne and Barry understood right from the beginning. As a result, I was provided with the freedom to write about Jeanne as I see her, not as she wishes to be seen. The most articulate description of the biographer’s role that I have ever seen appeared in a recent article in Sunday Life. The reporter, Tim Elliott, wrote: ‘it takes a special type of masochist to write biographies. Lashed to his subject as if to a raft, the biographer must weather all manner of storms.’ Certainly, writing a biography is akin to having a really, really intense relationship, in a really, really short space of time. While writing this book, Jeanne Little permeated my every waking thought, peppered much of my conversation and stopped me from having a decent night’s sleep. The ups and downs of Jeanne’s life had a tangible effect on me: I cried when there was a death in the Little family and high-fived myself exultantly on the couch as I watched early re-runs of the Mike Walsh Show. Her presence in my life even had an effect on my children. I became concerned when my daughter started dreaming about Jeanne Little. The final full stop on any project creates myriad responses: for a biographer, it marks the end of a journey. My relationship with the Littles will never be as intense as it was this last year or so. It’s not every day that you get to learn everything about someone. Even though the completion of this book means moving on, Jeanne and Barry will xiv

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Preface always have a special place in my heart. My life has been abundantly enriched by the experience of knowing them. Siobhan O’Brien 2006

Note: With a name like Siobhan, I know what it is like to have a name that incites confusion. I have been variously referred to as ‘soy bean’, ‘Sabina’, ‘Shoven’—anything but the correct pronunciation, ‘Shevaun’. Similarly, the enunciation of the name ‘Jeanne’ changes depending on who’s doing the talking. The French say ‘Jeanne’ so that it rhymes with ‘pun’; the English say ‘Jeanne’ almost as it reads—‘Jean’; but it is the way the Scots say it (as if it has an ‘i’ before the second ‘e’—hence ‘Jeanne’) that is the correct version for our much loved Jeanne Little.

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Strange kinda woman Here I am with a flat chest, three strands of hair and the worst voice in Australia. I think I’ve really capitalised on having little to offer—Jeanne Little

THE

FIRST TIME

JEANNE LITTLE

APPEARED ON TELEVISION SHE

was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and she wore a funky frock that featured large elephants marching across her swollen belly. It was 11 September 1974 and Jeanne had received a telephone call at 11 am from Peter McCormack, the assistant producer of the Mike Walsh Show, shot live from the Channel 10 studios. He asked her to appear on the top-rating program that afternoon. Just the day before, a maternity fashion spread that featured Jeanne modelling her designs—including the dress with the elephants—had appeared in Sydney’s Daily Mirror. It had caught McCormack’s eye. Three other guests who were due to appear on the Mike Walsh Show that day had cancelled, and Peter invited Jeanne to talk about the zany outfits 1

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HELLO DARLING! that she designed, with promises of a free plug for her dress shop in Sydney’s Paddington. Jeanne agreed. For her it was a leap of faith. Although opportunity rang a bell in my head, I’d never watched daytime television in my life—I didn’t even know who Mike Walsh was! Our family were encouraged by our mother to work, work, work, so no one ever watched television during working hours. I decided to look as glamorous as possible for my first and what I thought would probably be my only appearance on TV. I wanted to look like a Hollywood star. Mike Walsh was holidaying in the United States and it was writer, producer and media celebrity John-Michael Howson who sat in the host’s chair that day. According to Jeanne: I just walked on and screamed out ‘Hello darling’ in my usual way and when the host yelled ‘Hello darling’ straight back, I thought, goodness me, isn’t Mike Walsh camp? John-Michael Howson thought that the producer was pulling his leg, that Jeanne Little was, in fact, a drag queen. It took some time before it clicked that he was talking to a woman. John-Michael explains that Jeanne’s appearance was totally ridiculous, like a sketch out of I Love Lucy. ‘I was so thrilled to have someone interesting on the show; my guests 2

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Strange kinda woman were usually so boring I went home every night to a valium and cerapax cocktail.’ Within minutes of Jeanne’s appearance, the Channel 10 switchboard was jammed with calls from viewers asking, ‘Who was that woman with the dreadful voice?’ and ‘Was she for real?’ The Daily Mirror trumpeted ‘A Star is Born!’

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Chapter one

Who’s that girl? I know people think I’m peculiar, but I can’t help it—Jeanne Little

MOST AUSTRALIANS WON’T REMEMBER JEANNE LITTLE FOR HER Logie awards, her eyelashes, her wacky dresses or even her zany sense of humour—what they do remember is her voice. When she calls for someone to fix her washing machine she doesn’t have to introduce herself. The plumber or the carpenter will say, ‘Oh my goodness, is that really you Jeanne?’ People think I put my voice on, but why on earth would I want to create a voice like this? Her enunciation has been described as ‘the nasal whine of a Hills Hoist in need of a good oiling’, and as being capable of ‘boiling the fat from a taxidriver’s neck’ and ‘rasping the rust from the laundry roof’. One journalist from The 5

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HELLO DARLING! Australian described interviewing her as not unlike ‘holding a conversation with a chainsaw’, while another, from the Sydney Morning Herald, depicted her coarse tones as ‘vulgar, elasticised vowels shoved up the nasal cavity past a larynx rinsed in Draino’. Jeanne remarks: ‘I read these and I think, “Ow, I really am revolting.”’ She reckons the nicest thing anyone said about her unique drawl was that it was memorable. The true story about Jeanne Little’s voice is startling. She was born at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital, on 11 May 1938 (she will tell you 1941, but as her husband Barry explains, ‘Don’t all great stars fudge their age by about five years?’), the youngest of seven surviving children: Norman, Charlotte (Lottie), Alexander (Sandy), Catherine (Cathie), Margaret and Elspeth (Elsie). Not long after she was born, her father dropped her on her head. Jeanne says: I was six months old when my father took me to the pub to show me off to his mates, who managed to save me from harm by catching me each time I rolled off the bar where he kept depositing me between drinks. On the way home I wasn’t so lucky. When a pint-sized Jeanne landed on the footpath, her head split open ‘like a ripe watermelon’. The accident left a scar, which is still visible, on her forehead. Jeanne was rushed to The Randwick Children’s Hospital and, over the next few days, she developed a cough that turned into diphtheria. The disease can cause paralysis, 6

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Who’s that girl? swelling and permanent damage to the neck, throat and respiratory muscles. In Jeanne it affected the pitch of her voice. It was this condition, mixed with a broad Australian accent, an inherited Scottish drawl (my mother’s Scottish brogue was so thick she used to call me ‘Jin’) and God knows what else, that gave me the worst voice in the world. It comes out sort of ocker. We all have crosses to bear in life and this is mine. However, I have to admit I am naturally loud, probably because my mother was so deaf. I often joke that it’s like the chicken and the egg— did I shout because my mother was deaf or did she go deaf because of my shouting? Jeanne stayed in hospital for three months, during which time her family came to see her in white, sterile clothing and viewed her from behind a clear screen because she was so contagious. According to Jeanne’s sister Cathie, ‘When our little sister finally came home, she didn’t recognise any of us, not even our mother.’ Jeanne claims her first word was nurse. Jeanne’s accident was another reason—on a long list of reasons—for her mother, Katie Mitchell, to leave her alcoholic husband, Norman Landstrome. Katie had attempted to leave him once before, but was told by her mother that she’d made her bed and had to lie in it. As Jeanne explains: After having two children my mother asked my grandmother if she could escape this monster by returning to 7

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HELLO DARLING! her parental home, until she could get her life in order. But my grandmother refused. She didn’t understand that having an awful drunk giving her constant children was a ghastly life for my elegant mother. Katie Mitchell was eighteen years old when she left her home in Glasgow, Scotland, bound for Australia with her younger brother John in 1912. They emigrated to ‘the land of opportunity’ after their father, John Spiers Mitchell, suggested they establish whether it was a good place for the rest of the Mitchell clan to settle. Shortly after the teenagers arrived in the rudimentary city of Sydney, an enterprising Katie took up her trade as a tailor in the CBD. Always keen to make extra cash, she also acquired private clients for sewing and repair work at night and on the weekends. Katie’s hard work kept food on the table back home in Glasgow. Her father had lost his job because of his involvement with union activity. According to Jeanne: My grandfather acted as a spokesperson for a bakery strike and when it was over all the other bakers went back to work, except for him. Because he spoke out, he found it impossible to find re-employment and it put a great strain on my grandparents and their family. Without my mother’s hard work, I don’t know what they would have done. Fortunately this financial struggle was short-lived. A year after Katie and John arrived in Sydney they were reunited

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Who’s that girl? with their father, mother and four siblings. Katie and John abandoned the boarding house in Zetland, where they had been living, and shifted with their family into a more substantial freestanding cottage in Waterloo. It did not take long for Jeanne’s grandfather to find work as a janitor with a publishing company, and later as an elevator attendant at David Jones on Elizabeth Street. Even as a child Katie Mitchell had shown promise, grit and tenacity. Jeanne describes her mother as ‘the inspiration of my life. A feminist before feminism was invented.’ She was a natural with the fundamentals of running a business, and had both administrative and creative skills. By the time Katie met Norman, she was twenty years old and considered quite a catch. She was attractive, levelheaded and enterprising. She had put deposits on three modest houses in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria and installed tenants to pay them off. Twenty-six-year-old Norman Daniel Landstrome, an itinerant blacksmith from Warwick, Queensland, on the other hand, had no responsibilities and was virtually emptyhanded. He had recently arrived in Sydney, after leaving his Swedish father, second-generation Australian mother and his two sisters behind in Queensland. The country life had been too sleepy for the spirited Norman, who yearned for adventures in the big smoke. According to Jeanne’s sister Cathie, her parents met at the Sydney City Mission, which in its formative days was a place for young people to meet one another and socialise.

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HELLO DARLING! My mother spent all her leisure time there. One night there was a dance, and my father, who was walking past the Mission, just happened to look in. He was invited into the hall and then he noticed Katie and asked her to dance with him. It was the beginning of many other nights at the Mission and eventually a romance started to blossom. Jeanne says her mother thought Norman was charming and handsome, with a wicked sense of humour and certainly very intelligent. My grandfather and Uncle John, her younger brother, did not approve at all. But my mother, swept off her feet by my father’s raffish charms, married him in spite of their objections. Katie and Norman were married on 8 January 1915 at Chalmers Church on Chalmers Street, Surry Hills. It was about a year after they first met. The Presbyterian ceremony was given a personal touch when a friend of the family, minister Davey Brandt, performed the service. But no amount of prayers and blessings could save this romance. As Cathie recalls: What my mother hadn’t realised when my father asked her to marry him was that he was a big, big drinker. She was obviously extremely disappointed, but hid her feelings, especially when the babies started to arrive. 10

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Who’s that girl? Unfortunately having a lovely family did not stop Norman from drinking. In fact he got worse and worse as the years went on and became terribly abusive. It soon became apparent that Norman was lazy and without direction, and he squandered money. As Jeanne explains: My father liked to big note himself, he spent more than he could afford, shouting drinks, often for the whole bar. When my parents married, he frittered away the family’s hard-earned money. It was only a few years after the wedding that Jeanne’s sister Lottie remembers visiting Davey Brandt with her mother and younger brother Sandy. The purpose of the visit was not for religious purposes, but for marriage counselling. The minister provided a shoulder for my mother to lean on. It was obvious from the start that there were problems between my parents and he offered advice on her marriage. You couldn’t talk to people in those days about a failing marriage, and a lot of people, like my mother, turned to the Church for support. Katie’s complaints were justified. Her husband had on one occasion rammed a carving knife half a dozen times though a wall in the kitchen after he heard rats squeaking in 11

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HELLO DARLING! the wall cavity, hunted down a cattle dog and shot it after the animal bit his daughter Cathie on the knee, and let a feral cat loose in the family home (‘He said he won it in a raffle at the pub and laughed his head off as it hissed and spat and tore the place up,’ says Jeanne). On another occasion, when Norman returned home late from the pub, he waltzed into the dining room where the family table was meticulously set for a dinner party. ‘It was absolutely beautiful. My mother had spent hours ironing the linen table cloth, shining her best china from Glasgow, preparing the food and making it look beautiful as she always did,’ remembers Jeanne. Without saying a word, Norman ripped the tablecloth from the table and smashed the expensive china into a thousand pieces. As Lottie explains, her father’s abuse was not physical but mental. He was never provoked or prompted. He just exploded. It was a tense atmosphere; as kids we were aware not to upset the apple cart, so to speak, so we behaved ourselves. Jeanne remembers that Norman did sometimes display a softer side. She says he was ‘strangely protective’ of his children and there were moments when he curled up in bed with them and made them laugh. Yet despite these glimpses of tenderness, Jeanne was aware that her mother deeply resented Norman and blamed him for much of her grief, such as the death of her newborn son John in 1919. Says Jeanne: 12

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Who’s that girl? ‘My father insisted on taking my brother John to the football. He contracted a contagious flu and later died.’ Eventually, Katie made up her mind to act, regardless of the consequences. One Saturday morning in early 1942, while her husband was, according to Cathie, ‘in hospital on one of his many attempts to dry out’, Katie packed her bags and her children into the car and left the family home on President Avenue in Brighton-le-Sands, Sydney. Jeanne was four years old. Just two years before, Katie had purchased an old run-down weatherboard home known as ‘Belomena’, located at 21 General Holmes Drive in the same suburb. She had an eye for property, and this place looked like it was a good investment. She moved her children into this residence and left no forwarding address for her husband. Says Jeanne: She was amazing, my mother. She took off with her brood of seven in the days before welfare and no help. She always said, ‘Whatever a man can do, a woman can do better.’ I can remember her always working so hard, carrying sacks of vegetables home over her shoulder like a poor wharfie, looking after us, cooking all the time, when she was really such a creative woman. In one fell swoop, Katie declared her independence and set her family on a new course. After years of putting up with an unpredictable man who was prone to flying into a rage, the family were at last living in peace. Cathie, who was thirteen years old at the time, remembers feeling 13

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HELLO DARLING! a great sense of relief; we despised him. The family realised that we would only survive if we left him. This was the beginning of a lovely life for all the family. We were finally free. Sister Lottie, three years older than Cathie, echoes this sentiment, but adds: I don’t think my father was surprised in the least that my mother decided to leave him. He’d been away a lot staying with his sisters anyway, trying to sort himself out. He realised things had come to pass between him and my mother, and he knew the family didn’t accept him anymore. He really was on the outer. We simply let him go and once we did we never looked back. But Jeanne’s husband Barry claims that while the family might have abandoned Norman that day in 1942, his memory continues to play upon the emotions of his children. He says: I remember sitting at a dinner party not so long ago with all of the Mitchell children present. It was a big family get-together. All they talked about all night was what a beast Norman was, what he used to do, what he used to say, how he treated their mother, how he treated them. All of his children are hugely emotionally wounded by his presence, he looms like a dark cloud over their lives.

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Who’s that girl? Soon after they were married in 1915, Katie and Norman kick-started an ornamental ironwork business. Katie designed the meticulous patterns on the kitchen table, while Norman welded them in a shed in the backyard. Like most of the entrepreneurial endeavours initiated by Katie, the business was a resounding success. It was not long before it expanded and the newlyweds set up shop in a sizeable factory on Lawrence Street in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria, and later on Euston Road in the same suburb. Jeanne’s sister Lottie remembers ‘cows wandered freely’ in close proximity to her parents’ new workplace. But true to Norman’s nature, he soon lost interest and squandered his time and money at the pub with his mates. His two sons, Norman Jr and Sandy, took over the business in his stead. When the marriage finally came to a halt in 1942, Katie—keen to wipe her hands of the financial burden of supporting her husband—took out a loan, bought Norman’s share of the business, and gave him the former family home on President Avenue in Brighton-leSands and the factory on Lawrence Street. But, as Jeanne explains, an eternally dissatisfied Norman always ‘felt that he had been given the raw end of a deal and so he secretly set the factory on fire while pretending to be at Mt Victoria in the Blue Mountains, and claimed the insurance for the property of £170.’ However, this was not the last Katie heard of her wayward ex-husband. As Jeanne’s niece Faye Dunne explains: 15

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HELLO DARLING! After Norman was banished from the family home he was simply referred to as ‘the old man’, never ‘father’ or ‘Norman’. The ‘old man’ would send Katie letters full of vitriol and venom. He was, to put it bluntly, a mean old drunk. The family would read his rantings and ravings, laugh at this rubbish and toss his letters away. In 1961, less than twenty years after his family left him, Norman Landstrome passed away, after a lonely and bitter life. According to Jeanne’s sister Lottie: I went and saw him at Concord Hospital shortly before he died. I was with my mother and my two brothers. He was unconscious by the time we arrived. None of us remember what was wrong with him; it could’ve been heart trouble, I really don’t know. I’d been away overseas and had only just returned. There were only six people at Norman’s funeral: his exwife Katie, three of his children—Lottie, Norman Jr and Sandy—and Jeanne’s Uncle John and Auntie Lottie, who commented at the time, ‘Isn’t it amazing that the six people who hated him most are the ones who are here?’ Jeanne was unable to attend. ‘I don’t really remember why. I think I was away,’ she says. Katie Mitchell made a lot of changes when she became single. She changed the family name by deed poll from her married name, Landstrome, to her maiden name, Mitchell. According 16

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Who’s that girl? to Jeanne she morphed into a ‘blend of a mother and a father’. Traits as a disciplinarian came to the fore. Jeanne describes her mother as ‘generous but strict’ and remembers, for example, that when they visited her Uncle John’s for afternoon tea, her mother issued the following warning: ‘Don’t let me catch you putting your hands forward for more than one cake.’ Not long after Katie changed her family’s name, she changed the name of her business to The Mitchell Brothers Ironworkers and moved to a new factory on Euston Road. Now, Katie and her hardworking sons—whom, Barry Little claims, Katie ‘treated like kings, while her daughters, though she loved them, were left to pick up the scraps’—produced the decorative ironwork. Some of their best examples are still featured on such prominent architecture as the gates of the University of Sydney and the old Parliament House in Canberra. Other sites of note that once had the Mitchell Brothers Ironworkers stamp on them included the entrance of the Central Railway electric train station, the Callan Park Mental Asylum and department stores such as Sydney Snow’s, Anthony Hordern’s and the Hub. Then, in late 1942, when Jeanne was just four years old and three years after the Second World War had been officially declared, Katie Mitchell’s son Norman was conscripted by the Australian government to help stem the Japanese advance. Her youngest son Sandy and ex-husband Norman would join him a year later. At home, the wail of air raid sirens filled the air in Brighton-le-Sands. The military 17

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HELLO DARLING! installed themselves in nearby Cook Park, which had long been a weekend playground for the Mitchell children. Antiaircraft guns, air raid trenches, searchlights and barbed wire became commonplace along the Brighton-le-Sands beachfront, while a boom was placed across the entrance to the Georges River, and sand-bag defences installed either side of the Cooks River Bridge on General Holmes Drive. Brightonle-Sands’s proximity to Sydney airport and Botany Bay meant that it was particularly vulnerable to attack. The mood on the streets was bleak. Shop windows were taped and boarded up to prevent them from shattering in possible air raid attacks and streetlights were dimmed. Picture theatres were closed, sporting events cancelled and major landmarks camouflaged to avoid aerial detection. First-aid posts appeared in schools and church halls, while preparations were made in case women and children, the aged and the sick, needed to be evacuated to the country. Although Sydney was well prepared for an attack, its inhabitants were still taken by surprise when it was invaded. On the night of 31 May 1942, before Norman Jr had been conscripted, three Japanese midget submarines attacked the city. The invaders hid in the Georges River for several days before they penetrated the defence barrier in Sydney Harbour, sank a ferry and damaged buildings in Rose Bay. ‘When I was very young,’ says Jeanne, ‘I remember my mother walking along Brighton-le-Sands beach at night watching out for these Japanese submarines. She felt like she was doing her bit for the war and Australia.’ 18

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Who’s that girl? Nothing could shield children from the panic that permeated the Australian consciousness. Air raid drills became a daily occurrence for Jeanne’s sisters Cathie, Margaret and Elsie at the Brighton-le-Sands school. Students’ school bags not only contained their lunch and their homework, but a strange mishmash of goodies that included, according to one historian, ‘a piece of rubber to bite on, two pieces of wood to hold on to and two half tennis balls filled with cotton wool to protect their ears in the event of an air attack’. Some school-children even wore an identity disc inscribed with their name and address in case they became separated from their parents. Others were evacuated to the Blue Mountains and to towns in western New South Wales. These precautions were not in vain. Almost a month after the attack by the Japanese submarines, Sydney was shelled by a Japanese ship, which caused extensive damage to Bondi, Bellevue Hill and Woollahra. Later, when Norman Jr and Sandy were at war, they frequently wrote home. According to Jeanne one letter outlined news of their father ‘in the wilds of New Guinea contentedly eating bully beef stew out of his hat’. Katie Mitchell was a survivor: she did not succumb to the ravages of war or the hardship of life without a husband. When her sons left to fight, she managed the ironwork business on her own. Where most Australians lived a handto-mouth existence, Katie’s business continued to make a profit. In between developing new designs for her ironwork, balancing the accounts and feeding five children, Katie found time to renovate the family home. Says Jeanne: 19

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HELLO DARLING! I’d often come home from school and find her under the bathtub at work on the plumbing or up on the roof painting the corrugated iron. She also removed excess sand from the ceiling, to stop it from sagging or, worse, collapsing. My mother simply never stopped. In 1945 the Japanese surrendered, and in Brightonle-Sands a postwar clean-up was launched that involved stripping miles of rusted barbed wire from the beachfront and upgrading the local roads, which had taken a battering from hundreds of heavy military vehicles over the preceding five years. Around this time, Katie decided she wanted to perform a postwar clean-up of her own. She sold the family’s renovated weatherboard home to her daughter Lottie (and Lottie’s new husband Edward Goulder) and found a new, modern brick home that boasted views of the beach. Though conditions were still cramped, the new Mitchell residence, located at 4 The Grand Parade, Brighton-le-Sands, was a mark of Katie Mitchell’s success. ‘My mother always yearned for a home that had water views and now she had achieved her dream,’ says Jeanne, who remembers this period of her life with great fondness. My mother used to feed the seagulls in front of our house on leftover oatmeal porridge soaked in boiling water. The gulls would grab some and fly madly up high. I wondered if the porridge was burning their throats and I couldn’t 20

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Who’s that girl? ever decide whether my mother was kind to the birds, or whether I should have reported her to the RSPCA! When Norman Jr and Sandy returned from abroad in 1945, there was no room for them in the house, and so the garage was converted into makeshift sleeping quarters for them. ‘I remember when my brothers came home—these strange, tall men, they had been gone so long—they were like strangers to me,’ recalls Jeanne. No accommodation had been built in Brighton-le-Sands during the war and when the suburb was faced with an influx of ex-servicemen, most of whom were keen to marry and start families, they had nowhere to live except with their parents. Almost everywhere these young men could be found living in caravans, sleepouts, converted sheds and even salvaged tramcars. The Housing Commission of New South Wales devised a plan to solve the problem, and large numbers of three-storey flats and cottages were erected in the suburb in 1946. This started a building trend that would alter the character of the suburb.

Jeanne Little was five years old when she started her education at Kyeemagh Infants School in 1943. But she walked home every day at recess because she didn’t fit in. As her sister Lottie explains: ‘When Jeanne was young, she was exceptionally timid, not theatrical like she was when she was a teenager.’ According to Jeanne, she was self-conscious because of her voice: 21

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HELLO DARLING! Even as a child people used to make fun of my voice and I’d feel so ashamed. I used to have a high squeaky voice. I read somewhere that Marilyn Monroe was made to scream and shout to give her a husky, deeper voice—it dropped by about two registers. So I used to go to the backyard and scream until my mother said, ‘Come inside or the neighbours will think someone’s hurting you.’ In any case it felt too controlled at school; it was such a contained environment and I wanted to bust out of it. Why wouldn’t I want to come home? It was much more interesting than it was at school. It was nothing for my mother to have sixteen people over for lunch. By the time Jeanne entered fifth grade at the age of ten, she showed such promise that she was one of two students fortunate and bright enough to be selected for Hurstville Opportunity School. The other student selected was Annette Marsden. She describes Jeanne as having a high IQ, but a bit vague. During home science we were washing up the dishes after we’d cooked something delicious and the teacher said, ‘Great cooking Jeanne, but can you put some more elbow grease into the dishes?’ Jeanne searched through the cupboards for ages and finally said, ‘Miss Haven, where will I find the elbow grease?’ Despite Jeanne’s academic ability one of the teachers at Hurstville made life difficult for her. ‘The teacher picked on her 22

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Who’s that girl? because she was so shy and found it hard to answer questions,’ says sister Cathie. ‘Jeanne ended up stressed and unhappy. It was a very traumatic time for her.’ It was around this time that Jeanne developed a stutter, which she has continued to struggle with throughout her life. As Jeanne explains: I really hated school because of that stutter. I used to hide under the desk because I was too afraid to speak when asked a question. When it was roll call I thought, ‘Ohhh, no! Here comes my name.’ Jeanne says she still stutters when she is extremely stressed, especially on live television or radio. In the 1980s she provided this description of her condition to a reporter: My stutter comes in spasms. But every so often, perhaps on the telephone, I stutter non-stop. I find myself going ‘yech, yech, yech’ like a maniac and thinking, ‘Oh you idiot, you’re ruining this!’ Niece Faye Dunne provides this insight into Jeanne’s condition: Jeanne’s brother Sandy stuttered as well. Just like Jeanne, he was incredibly artistic—he drew these amazing pictures and went on to become an art teacher. It is very interesting that the two most talented, creative children in 23

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HELLO DARLING! the Mitchell family were stutterers. In a way I feel that Jeanne’s and Sandy’s creativity suffered because they weren’t truly encouraged to pursue their talents when they were young and consequently this could have brought on their affliction. Nowadays Jeanne and Sandy might have gone to art school or studied theatre, but back then they were encouraged to put their heads down and do what was considered correct. Katie did make allowances with Jeanne, but she still expected her to study hard and do what was considered the right thing to do, the proper profession. It was not until 1983, almost thirty-five years after her stuttering first became apparent, that Jeanne (who is now a devoted patron of the Australian Stuttering Foundation) did something about her condition. The motivation came after she stuttered almost non-stop during an interstate interview with ABC Radio in Perth. Back in Sydney, at the now defunct Prince Henry’s Hospital, she completed a three-week course for stutterers, which was a combination of relaxation, breathing techniques and methods to slow the speech. After she completed the course she joked with the press that she was ‘now ready to read the ABC news’. Jeanne was three years old when her grandmother on her mother’s side, Charlotte Drummond Sanderson, died. Her grandfather, John Spiers Mitchell, lived alone in Sydney’s Marrickville for a while, but finally moved in with Katie 24

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Who’s that girl? Mitchell and her brood. ‘Gramps’ slept on the couch in the living room. Jeanne remembers her stout, bald grandfather being as much a fixture of the living room as the huge armchair in which he sat. He smoked a pipe stuffed with aromatic tobacco, recounted tales of his Scottish childhood and rarely ventured out. Says Jeanne: He had a wonderful sense of humour that was quite subtle—you had to look out for it. He had a great way of conjuring up an image or doing something funny, like sneaking out of the room when he couldn’t bear to listen to Elsie playing the piano. Like her mother, Jeanne’s grandfather was a crucial influence. In many ways, he replaced a father she never really knew and didn’t want to know. But, despite a generally sunny outlook, Gramps had endured a childhood devoid of parental love and affection. Jeanne claims he suffered from an ‘inferiority complex because of his upbringing’. Gramps was the result of an affair between Elizabeth Spiers, a sixteen-year-old florist, and wealthy businessman John Mitchell, who was married with two children. Gramps’s father had turned his back on his mistress and newborn but, due to the determination of the young florist’s father, Mitchell was brought before the court and ordered to take custody of the child. The newborn’s fate was sealed. Gramps was destined to grow up in a privileged environment, with a father, stepmother and stepsiblings who were indifferent to him. Explains Jeanne: 25

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HELLO DARLING! As a kid, Gramps was quiet and sensitive. His only refuge was with the cook in the kitchen, where genuine love and laughter was heaped on him. She encouraged him to do his own cooking, bake cakes and crimp little pastries. Consequently, happiness and cooking were inextricably linked for Gramps, who later became an apprentice pastry chef to a leading bakery in Glasgow. The home in which Gramps lived out his final years was filled with an abundance of noise, love and laughter—a different world to the polite pitter-patter of maids serving tea in lofty rooms or dusting lamps in long, carpeted corridors. Life with Jeanne and her family was hectic. When the house wasn’t full of visitors, the family was at church (or fundraising for it), making a splash at the local swimming pools, zooming around the roller-skating rink, strolling along the nearby boulevard of shops or watching a movie at the cinema. Says niece Fay Dunne: It was a wonderful place for the children to grow up. The postman would tether his horse across the road under the tree and you could walk along the sand dunes right up to the airport. On the weekends and after school, Cathie, Lottie and Margaret performed their Highland dance steps in the lounge room, Elsie practised her scales on the piano nearby, while 26

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Who’s that girl? Jeanne drew pictures of elves and imagined tiny singers who lived inside the gramophone. Nevertheless Katie ran her business and her home with military precision, spoilt her sons ‘because that was the Scottish way’ and rarely indulged in anything light-hearted or playful—except when it came to Jeanne. Jeanne’s niece Faye Dunne explains: Although she was a good mother, who was a very artistic woman herself and who obviously loved her children, she was still steeped in that old dour Presbyterian mould. She was an avid churchgoer who frowned on anything too fun or too frivolous, especially the demon drink. She never freely said ‘I love you’, or truly expressed her emotions, and in that sense, her emotions and those of her children were stifled. Jeanne was probably the only one of the Mitchell children who could truly express her emotions, possibly because she received so much love herself as a child because she was the baby. According to Barry, Jeanne was ‘the apple of her mother’s eye’. While as a rule Katie generally shunned anything fun or frivolous she always made allowances for—and in some instances encouraged—this aspect of Jeanne’s character. When a teenage Jeanne made a pair of tailored grey trousers from a common household ironing blanket, and a sundress from some tea towels, Katie had nothing but praise for her daughter’s ingenuity. Says Jeanne: 27

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HELLO DARLING! I would make an outlandish garment, cut to the navel and slashed right down the back, which I’d be wearing to a party that night and my mother would say, ‘That’s so clever Jeanne.’ Anyone else’s mother would have had a heart attack. Consequently, Jeanne learnt early on in life that ‘fun and frivolity’ translated into ‘love and affection’. It was around this time, Jeanne says, that her mother indulged in some creativity of her own: she started to write science fiction and biographies. I have vivid memories of Mumma writing those mad novels on her typewriter that was perched on the end of her ironing board. Fantastic science fiction things about microfilm hidden in Ayers Rock. Wonderful! She died at eighty-four and was still doing all those things. Whenever she reworked the manuscript, she didn’t throw it away, she wrapped our lunch in it. Cathie remembers transcribing her work: My mother went through a phase when she wrote short biographies on all the people she met during the Depression. She was very social and when people came into the house she would serve them scones and tea and ask them all about their lives and later write about them. 28

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Who’s that girl? When she found time, Katie also acted in voluntary stage plays for a local theatre troupe. She made costumes for her appearances, such as a kangaroo rug which she threw over her shoulder for her appearance as a cave woman. Katie also spent much time prophesying people’s lives by gazing at their palms or into their teacups. ‘Seldom did a visitor leave without getting their fortune read,’ says Jeanne. To some, these pursuits might seem ‘fun and frivolous’—but not to Katie Mitchell. Everything had a purpose. She was an overachiever who believed that as long as her pursuits had an aim she was not squandering her time. She wrote the manuscripts because she believed she might get them published, she acted in the plays to raise money for the local church, and she was a firm believer in things of a superstitious nature. Her credo was: ‘Not failure but low aim is a crime.’ It is Jeanne’s favourite saying and one that she has always tried to live by.

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Chapter two

Born to be wild I think my dress sense is psychological, darling—Jeanne Little, People Magazine

JEANNE

INHERITED THE GIFT OF

‘MAKING

SOMETHING FROM

nothing’ from her mother, who was an expert at turning trash into treasure. At Christmas Katie would saw the limb off a coral tree, drag it indoors and decorate it with homemade ornaments; cook pumped leg of hogget to taste like ham; and make clothes and gifts from upholstery and tablecloths. Jeanne’s school shoes were lined with cereal packets which disintegrated when it rained and she wore a school uniform that had been passed down from her sisters and repaired countless times. Jeanne remembers how her mother once transformed a piece of white sharkskin that she found at a garage sale into a tailored suit for her father. He paraded it proudly before his mates at the pub, before he returned home to burn it after they called him ‘a poofter’. 31

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HELLO DARLING! As Jeanne’s niece Faye Dunne explains: The Mitchells were quite well off with wonderful cars like convertible Jaguars and great houses. They never wanted for anything, but Katie really imbued the old Scottish thing in her children that one never spends one’s wealth. Jeanne’s sister Cathie provides this perspective: All the outfits, gifts and toys in the house were handmade. Even when clothes were falling apart our mother would sit up stitching them late into the night on her massive treadle machine that no one was allowed to touch. As a consequence, making something from nothing was in our blood. When Jeanne first started to sew, on a small sewing machine that was a present from her Uncle John, she used her mother’s dressmaking scraps, and raided the drawers in the kitchen and the garbage bin for whatever she could find. These early examples of Jeanne’s fashion attempts are the blueprint for the clothes for which she later became famous: she has made dresses from steel wool and lavatory chains. As a child, though, fashion became the outer manifestation of a vast and largely untapped inner creativity. Of all the dresses that Jeanne Little made for her appearances on the Mike Walsh Show there are three that stand out: one 32

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Born to be wild is made from 3000 one-dollar coins, another from dozens of milk-bottle tops, and the last from slices of burnt toast. The first of these was a 1920s ‘flapper’ inspired creation, designed by Jeanne to celebrate the release of the gold coins that superseded their paper equivalent in 1984. On 18 June that year, Jeanne wore the shimmering, figure-hugging design on the Mike Walsh Show as she presented a film on the making of the coins. The Daily Telegraph featured a photograph of Jeanne wearing the dress on the same day, the journalist hoping that the dress would ‘increase public enthusiasm for the new coin’. Daughter Katie Little remembers helping her mother with the second design: We had two huge boxes in the TV room of milk-bottle caps and, for weeks on end, Dad and I had to sit up and flatten them all, while Mum sewed each one on to the dress individually. Night after night, that’s all we did— just sat there and flattened milk bottle caps. And that was normal, that’s what we did. The third creation—made from three loaves of bread— was inspired after Mike Walsh called Jeanne in a panic when a guest dropped out for the next day’s show. As Jeanne recalls: He said, ‘Dream up something with food.’ Mike often relied on me to come up with ideas and it was because of 33

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HELLO DARLING! a lack of funds at the studio that I became inventive on television. I had nothing in my pantry that I could turn into a segment. I went to a late-night deli and they didn’t have anything I could send up or talk about, so I came home and went to bed. At five o’clock in the morning I woke up in a lather thinking, whatever can I do? I made myself a cup of tea and something made me open the freezer that was filled with three loaves of bread. ‘Well this is it,’ I said to myself as I gently toasted the slices and sewed them onto a bit of cheesecloth. Jeanne wore the outfit on the show that day. When she made her entrance, she lifted one of the strategically placed pieces of bread and said cheekily, ‘Mike, I raise a toast to you.’ Food was a common theme for Jeanne’s fashion antics on the Mike Walsh Show. She made a hat out of frankfurters and another out of pizza; a necklace and earring set from uncooked pasta (which she proceeded to cook that night for dinner); and an evening dress from prawn crisps. Not all of these culinary masterpieces went to plan: Once I made a thing for my head out of fish. I had calamari for earrings, but the spot was delayed for a couple of days. I put it all in the freezer but when I wore it, the fish and calamari had all started to go rotten. Daaarling, did it smell! Katie Little remembers: 34

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Born to be wild It was fun growing up with Mum, there was always something happening. Once, when I had to build a volcano for a school project, she said, ‘Great! Use the Nutri-Grain for people.’ I remember once having a friend over to stay from a straitlaced background. She came downstairs and said, ‘Mrs Little, I’m bored,’ and Mum absolutely lost the plot, and said, ‘Bored? No one can be bored!’—like it was the worst insult you could make. Mum went straight upstairs where she had garbage bags full of material and next thing you know we were making macramé pot-plant holders and dresses for our dolls. When food no longer inspired Jeanne, she fashioned clothes from industrial waste and refuse. She made a dinner suit from black plastic, a raincoat from bubble wrap, a slinky silver shirt from the remnants of house-gutter flashing, and a bridal gown out of a mosquito net and the plastic wrapping from Big Ben pies. ‘She even made a hat out of LP records and another out of plastic chip packets. She’d put them in the oven and melt them,’ says Katie. Jeanne says her spare time was spent trawling through cheap fabric shops for material, and the hardware shops as well, making outfits out of wire anything and everything. I knitted sweaters out of old stockings in all shades of colours or out of plumbers’ silver tape. 35

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HELLO DARLING! Whenever she couldn’t find the materials she needed, Jeanne raided the unlikeliest of places: the newsagency, the garage, the garbage bin—even the local pet shop. She made outfits from pleated newspaper, plaited tissues and crinkled aluminium foil. One of her many fashion phases focused solely on industrial waste. There was a time when I made this dress out of lavatory chains. The French designers were big on things like that, but you couldn’t buy such an outfit in Australia. So I got a silver grey taffeta slip and sewed lavatory chains in a strip around the neckline. Once I had it on, it looked like a chain-mail hula skirt hanging around my neck! Jeanne made her entrance at a party wearing the dress. When I started to dance—the twist was all the rage at the time—everyone was watching me and it was awful because the chains were cutting up those around me— people were bleeding all over the place. Finally I fell into the swimming pool and I heard two women saying, ‘I hope she rusts to death!’ Our friends are still talking about it. When Jeanne ran out of materials for her outrageous creations, she invented themes: she made countless dresses that were ‘low budget’ or that could be worn in ‘ten different ways’. One creation, fashioned from a T-shirt that cost her 36

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Born to be wild five dollars, looked like it was straight from the Paris catwalks. Another was made entirely from flowers: she was hosting a segment for the Cancer Council’s Daffodil Day. Soon Jeanne Little’s ‘DIY style’ became just as famous as (and inseparable from) Jeanne Little the character. Wherever she went she always made sure that she looked the part. According to John-Michael Howson, ‘She really is the last of the great glamour queens.’ But as Jeanne explains, ‘Well, I might run into Sir Robert Helpmann or Frank Thring and I don’t want to be outdone.’ No event is considered too much trouble for Jeanne. It doesn’t matter whether she is the patron of a floral festival in Goulburn or being interviewed by an international newspaper, she spends hours creating an extraordinary outfit for the occasion. When Jeanne was invited in 1996 to assist with a charity event for SIDS Red Nose Day in Canberra, she turned up dressed as a baby in a giant red nappy and a red nose. It was not until Jeanne was almost fifteen years old that she discovered make-up, false eyelashes and hair dye. She’d just left Kogarah Home Science School (like other famous students Clive James and politician John Hewson before and after her), after shifting there from Hurstville Opportunity School in 1951. Jeanne’s teachers, who recognised her natural academic talent, vigorously encouraged her mother to send her youngest daughter to university, but Katie ‘thought that was a total load of rubbish’. She had other plans for Jeanne 37

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HELLO DARLING! —she wanted her to acquire administrative skills and become financially independent. As soon as Jeanne left school, she dyed her hair blond. I wore a kilo of make-up and the biggest false eyelashes. I bumped into a girl I knew rather well at school and after talking to her for fifteen minutes, I realised that she didn’t have a clue who I was. ‘How wonderful,’ I thought. ‘I’ve killed off Plain Jane. Here comes the new me, world.’ The transformative powers of cosmetics must have seemed like a miracle to such a shy and self-conscious teenager. As Jeanne told a reporter from the Sydney City Monthly in 1980, in her typical self-deprecating manner: ‘I’ve had to work hard at it, because I’m so plain. The true me is too horrible even for me. I love the miracle that happens when the stencil is filled in.’ Now Jeanne simply admits that she uses make-up (which she ‘still has to chip off at night’) as a mask: Do you know how I put on a disguise? I wash my face! My face just goes down the sink. That way I can go around the supermarket mooching about like a whitehaired old lady. If I don’t open my mouth, no one knows it’s me. Working life started for Jeanne Little in the fashion department of Coles in Rockdale, while she was still a student at 38

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Born to be wild Kogarah Home Science School. She recalls the experience fondly: ‘like playing shop’. She remembers the store being ripped off by ‘old ladies who winked at me before they scuttled out the door’ and the day a female customer came in and tried on ten dresses that Jeanne pinned and tapered meticulously for her. The customer purchased six of these only to return the next day with her husband, who claimed that Jeanne had mesmerised his wife and demanded his money back. Jeanne’s retail career was short-lived. In 1954, when Jeanne was sixteen, her mother booked her into Chartres Business College, which was located in Sydney’s CBD. It was here that Jeanne studied shorthand, typing and business principles for five months, before she found a job as a secretary at the Permanent Building Society not far from college. According to Jeanne, her mother said at the time: ‘You must study something other than designing otherwise you’ll starve to death.’ But as sister Cathie explains: She wouldn’t take my advice on appropriate office attire. I tried unsuccessfully to dress her in full skirts with narrow waists and shirts with puff sleeves like all the other girls were wearing, but she didn’t want them. As far as I’m concerned this was the beginning of Jeanne being way out. According to Jeanne: 39

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HELLO DARLING! My mother and sister Cathie encouraged me to wear simple clothes to work, like a tweed jacket with lapels and a pleated skirt. I felt so plain. I wore this to my first interview, but every day from then I wore a little more make-up and clothes that were more interesting. The rebellious teenager wore to work risqué dresses that were cut across one shoulder and left the other shoulder exposed, while one outfit featured a skirt that jutted out at acute angles because it had eight starched petticoats underneath. She wore sequins, lamé, feathers and fur, aluminium foil and metres of shredded chiffon that she used to imitate ostrich plumes. I wore gold and silver accessories in the daytime with casual high-tech clothes, something nobody ever did in those conservative times. Increasingly my days at the office were spent preparing for that night’s party and recovering from the one the night before. My whole life seemed to revolve around parties and party clothes. I still remember my first office Christmas party. I wore a dress that revealed my midriff and a large fake ruby in my navel. There was another time I thought my teeth looked off before going to a party, so I dried them with a towel and put on three coats of pearl nail varnish. I was so pleased with myself because everyone looked at me so closely—until I realised the varnish was chipping off. 40

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Born to be wild Her sister Cathie suggests the reason Jeanne had so much time to make her dresses was because she was such a quick worker: She’d finish her entire day’s work by lunchtime. So she’d spend the rest of the day running up dresses on the portable sewing machine that she had in her office. According to Jeanne, it was around this time that she started to call everyone ‘darling’: ‘I was meeting so many people and if I called them “darling” I wouldn’t have to remember their names.’ Jeanne soon outgrew her job at the Permanent Building Society and shifted to a new position working on the accounts at Permewan Wright, a large retail organisation on Sydney’s Phillip Street. She shared an office with Kerry Lawrence (née Woodcock), whom Jeanne refers to as her ‘first best friend’. Kerry can still remember the moment they met: On the day I started I went and saw the boss, and he said, ‘I’ll take you next door to meet Jeanne, you’ll be working with her.’ And as he finished saying it, he rolled his eyes and raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Actually, she’ll be in the ladies’ room. I’ll just leave you to it.’ So, I sat down at my desk and started working and, after a few minutes, the door to the ladies’ room swung open and out came Jeanne in the most extraordinary outfit, her hair all done perfectly, a face full of make-up, and she said, ‘Hello 41

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HELLO DARLING! daaarling, it’s sooo nice to meet you.’ She was as warm and as over the top as you can imagine. When Kerry later went into the ladies’ room she realised why her boss had rolled his eyes. It was filled with half-finished hemlines, beaded bodices, dress cuttings and hair dye. Jeanne’s avant-garde appearance meant that it was hard to miss her on the street. According to Kerry Lawrence: People’s heads would just swivel. I remember her wearing a bright canary yellow outfit one day and we walked uptown at lunchtime and I got angry on Jeanne’s behalf at all the people staring. She said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, if I want to be crazy they can look.’ Jeanne says that this canary yellow outfit was a copy of Yves St Laurent’s brand new trapeze line. A big triangle shape, with inverted pleats on either side that made the shape stand out. When people stared at me, I looked at them pityingly, thinking, ‘You poor things, you don’t know a thing about fashion.’ Cathie remembers her youngest sister attracting strange looks whenever she wore a green plastic bag over her head (with holes cut out for her eyes and mouth) to protect her elaborate hair-do from the weather: 42

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Born to be wild She’d saved up and bought herself a Mini Moke with a floral canvas top. It was always breaking down. When it did, she’d jump out of the car in her sky-high mini-skirt, high-heeled shoes and plastic bag over her head. She’d lean over the bonnet and tinker with the engine and get tooted at by the passing parade of cars. Only now does Jeanne realise that the strategically placed plastic bag must’ve made her look like ‘some member of the khaki Klu Klux Klan . . . but at the time it seemed the most ordinary thing in the world’. When Jeanne wasn’t getting looks from passers-by, she was attracting the attention of a well-groomed group of men who worked in the advertising department on the same floor as her office. According to Jeanne, these men talked to her in the elevator, laughed good-naturedly at her voice and paid her compliments on her ‘fabulous’ appearance: When I first met them I thought they were much nicer and much more interesting than most of my girlfriends, and they certainly knew much more about the latest fashions. I was so naïve. I didn’t even know what the word ‘homosexual’ meant. One of these men—Peter Pascoe—reckons the first time he saw Jeanne she was sitting at a typewriter wearing a large polka-dot bow at her neck and a matching polka-dot dress and she said, 43

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HELLO DARLING! ‘Hello darling’, and I was taken aback. I’d never seen anyone like her and the only time I’d heard such a voice was when I watched Lina Lamont in Singing in the Rain. Jeanne and Peter hit it off immediately. A few weeks later Peter invited Jeanne to his twenty-first birthday party, which he says was ‘a backyard affair with plenty of beer kegs; my nan soaked up the grog like a Wettex and my straight and gay friends mixed without it being a problem’. Jeanne turned up in an outfit that Peter describes as ‘an outlandish yellow and white striped balloon dress with legs in it. Everyone thought, “What is this?” It was as if an alien had landed.’ Jeanne’s entrée into the gay demimonde meant that her social life was a swirl of nightclubs, parties, movies, dances, opera and theatre. Her eyes were opened to the glitz and glamour of such pioneering drag clubs as the Purple Onion in Kensington in the 1960s and Capriccio’s in Darlinghurst in the 1970s. Peter Pascoe used to accompany her to the Purple Onion most Sunday nights. He describes the venue, which is today acknowledged as Sydney’s first ‘real’ drag club, as ‘absolutely jam packed with queens and trannies’. Even though at that time in Sydney there were more famous nightclubs that featured regular drag acts—such as Patches, the Jewel Box and Les Girls—these were designed to attract a straight clientele. The Purple Onion was a gay club that featured drag at its best. It was cutting edge and risqué. But as Peter explains: 44

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Born to be wild Nowadays it would be confused with a church social. You see worse things on television. But the drag queens were very talented. They mimed shows like The Sound of Music, and the costumes were spectacular—ostrich feathers and spangles. But because the joint was so small the sets were pretty crude. And I think it was BYO and they put on cold sausage rolls. According to Jeanne: Being a devotee of Paris fashion and exquisite eveningwear I remember the first time I went to a drag show. It wasn’t the drag queens that took my eye but their fantastic, brilliant, over-the-top gowns, often made from simple bits and pieces, paper flowers and just about anything that would sparkle. I was hooked. How dull I was in the dreariness of suburban life. Why couldn’t I apply makeup like these boys, wear outrageous clothes that looked elegant and chic as if they weren’t aware of anything unusual. According to David Mitchell, who met Jeanne at the Purple Onion in 1966: It was a small club with no décor. It had masonite walls, dark lighting, and when they wanted everyone to leave they’d turn on the fluorescent lights and all the queens would flee into the night. 45

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne’s niece Faye Dunne also accompanied Jeanne to the club: When I was about fifteen years old, Jeanne, who was like a big sister to me, started taking me to parties and things. I remember being taken to the Purple Onion and I was completely oblivious to what was going on. I just thought the people on stage were a whole bunch of weird-looking women. It simply didn’t dawn on me what was going on. Jeanne and I were the only women in the place. David Mitchell says that Jeanne and Faye used to frequent the club ‘wearing identical outfits that Jeanne had run up. The only thing that differentiated them was Jeanne’s afro wig.’ According to Jeanne: Being the only girls in the club didn’t worry me a bit. The boys were so friendly, as if we had met them all before, and their wonderful sense of humour attracted me too. My sister Lottie has a fantastic sense of humour, quite droll and witty, which her daughter—my niece, Faye Dunne—has inherited. We found that a quick comeback was the way of the gay crowd. The outfits that I created for Faye and myself always had to be a bit mad. I made Faye a green velvet full-length dress and we dyed her hair green with food colouring. That had everyone in stitches. I wore something similar, so as soon as we walked in we were a laugh a minute. 46

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Born to be wild As David Mitchell remembers it: ‘The drag queens adored Jeanne because she would say things to them like, “Darling, you’re as thin as a bee’s wing, truly”, or, “you’re so talented you should be scooped up and taken overseas”.’ David suspects that much of Jeanne’s style of humour stems from this frenetic period of her life, which continued until her early twenties. ‘You can’t invent Jeanne’s unique brand of camp humour,’ he says. ‘It’s grown up with her; it’s completely natural and now part of her.’ Even though Jeanne and David Mitchell frequented the same parties in the 1960s, it was pure coincidence that David worked as her segment producer on the Mike Walsh Show from 1974 to 1980. David had another passion: producing drag shows at venues such as Kinsella’s, Ivy’s Bird Cage and Capriccio’s. It was at the latter that he produced The Wizard of Oz in 1975 and cast Jeanne to do the voiceover for the character of Dorothy. As she recalls: On opening night this beautiful little drag queen came onto the stage, in a blue and white spotted dress with a little dog under her arm and said, ‘Oooh Toto!’ in my dreadful, dreadful voice. I was sitting in the audience and screamed and jumped under the table. It was such a shock. And the audience just went wild, it was just mad! Dormie McIvor, an interior designer, was another friend whom Jeanne met at the Purple Onion. The duo became 47

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HELLO DARLING! inseparable and spent most evenings sewing party clothes, drinking cocktails and attending society events such as the Movie Ball and the Black and White Ball. For her first attendance at the Movie Ball, Jeanne designed a slinky black dress, which featured a bodice lined with a silver fox cape that her mother found at a thrift shop; while for the Black and White Ball, she made a silk chiffon outfit littered with a mosaic of rhinestone stars, pinned two long platinum hairpieces to her short hair, and painted her eyelids silver. Faye Dunne remembers going to a party with Jeanne and Dormie: Dormie made a three-foot high Christmas tree for me to wear on my head and I had to lie down in the back of the car because I couldn’t sit upright. Jeanne had painted herself black all over and wore little pasties over her nipples and an exotic headdress. When she walked into the room she stopped the whole party. According to Peter Pascoe: ‘Gay men would run over and cluster around her and just scream with excitement.’ Jeanne and Dormie did more than just party together. They worked together, too. When Revlon launched ‘Glitter Glamour’—a new range of cosmetics—Dormie was hired to do the promotional work at Farmers, one of the city’s leading department stores. According to Jeanne, Dormie’s dark Italianate looks made an instant impression on a visiting company executive who was looking for a new ‘face’ for the company. ‘After months of rifling through hundreds of 48

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Born to be wild photographs of male models, the American executive declared, “this is the man we’ve been looking for,” and signed Dormie on the spot.’ In his new role as ‘Mr International’, Dormie’s face was emblazoned across newspapers and department stores around the city. Then the advertising team suggested that Dormie needed a ‘Glitter Girl’ to work alongside him. He chose Jeanne. During her lunch hour every day, Jeanne would leave her boring administrative job and scuttle across to the ‘Glitter Glamour’ promotion, where she would metamorphose into Glitter Girl, complete with metallic clothes and a wig. Remembers Jeanne: I’d hurriedly get dressed among the stock in the basement. Then I’d wander casually through the store and into the make-up department, where Dormie would be waiting for me, surrounded by a bevy of women. ‘Oh, it’s Glitter Girl,’ he’d say. ‘Do you always dress like that when you go out on the town?’ I’d then sit up in a chair; he’d slap a blob of cream on my face, take off my makeup and embarrass me by carrying on about my blackheads. I was the guinea pig for a host of night creams, astringents and eye shadows. In fact, Dormie did such a good job that the company printed a ‘before’ and ‘after’ poster of me and displayed it in the store. Camp culture was slowly emerging into the mainstream via television and music in the 1950s and 1960s. Leading this 49

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HELLO DARLING! cause was superstar Edna Everage, the cult television program the Mavis Bramston Show (which satirised social mores and featured ‘camp’ characters on Australian television for the first time), Blankety Blanks (a celebrity game show that was rife with sexual double entendre) and other icons from Australia’s camp pantheon of the era, including Robert Helpmann, Peter Allen, Jamie Redfern and JohnMichael Howson. But life was a thorny ground for homosexual people in Australia during this era. Most gay people socialised among themselves and lived a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ type of existence. Homosexual acts between men were illegal. The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation argued that homosexual people should not be employed in public service positions because they might gain access to sensitive national security–related material, and that the ‘characteristics found in many homosexuals—instability, willing self-deceit, defiance towards society—gave them a special propensity for treacherous behaviour’. In 1958, the superintendent of police in New South Wales went to the extreme of calling the ‘homosexual threat’ ‘the greatest social menace’ facing Australia. Police frequently raided gay gatherings, while some newspapers published the names of gay venues and the people who frequented them. Consequently, many parties went underground. As David Mitchell explains: Word would go out about a party and a truck would come by and pick people up on a certain corner 50

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Born to be wild and take them to an undisclosed venue, so the cops wouldn’t know where the party was being held. Peter Pascoe attended a number of parties that were raided by police: One was in Surry Hills and it was like a gangster movie; they burst in and sprayed the place with bullets. Everyone just scattered. Another time I was having a drink with a friend—that’s all we were doing, just having a drink— and the police arrived and we were told to get out. You had to be very careful where you went, and when you did go out, everyone was on guard. It was so bad; it was like a communist witch hunt. Peter was one of the lucky ones; many homosexual people were brutally bashed by police. Jeanne’s friend Robyn Moody suffered at the hands of authority: He was beaten to a pulp by the police simply because he was gay. It was not an unusual occurrence back then. It was largely accepted when it happened. When I saw Robyn after the attack it was absolutely devastating, he was mentally deficient. He said, ‘Jeanne I’ve lost my memory and my mind.’ And he died a short time later. Carmen, the famous drag diva, remembers being beaten out the front of the Purple Onion: 51

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HELLO DARLING! I got beaten up there four times a week, either as a gay man or in drag. They used to pull our wigs off as we walked down the street. We were beaten up so badly it’s amazing I still have a face left. It is not surprising that homosexual people from this era felt like aliens. But so did Jeanne Little. She was not like other women. In fact, as David Mitchell explains, ‘She was not like anyone else you would ever meet.’ She was loud, proud and she was not frightened of being different. She had a wicked, biting sense of humour; a cynical, bitchy take on society; and an insatiable appetite for exaggeration. She was (and still is) completely at home within the confines of camp culture. Even though most of Jeanne’s memories of her early years are positive, her eyes fill with tears when she remembers one night that she would rather forget. Jeanne was seventeen years old when she was sexually assaulted at a party which she had attended with friends in the city. The attack occurred when she went into one of the bedrooms in the apartment to touch up her make-up. As Jeanne explains: I was quietly putting on my lipstick and this guy came in and just grabbed me and was trying to rape me. I said, ‘No, it’s my time of the month.’ But he didn’t take any notice, and he just kept forcing himself on me. I didn’t want to scream because he was a friend of the hosts. 52

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Born to be wild It was terrible, just terrible. I think he thought he was being romantic, I’m not sure. Jeanne went home that night and, much to her horror, found she was bleeding profusely. The following day she took herself to the hospital and her ‘mother always wondered why’. As Jeanne explains: I couldn’t get over it, that this guy had done this to me. I just said to my mother, there’s something wrong with my insides; I have to have a few tests. After that I never left a party to do anything. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t like talking about it. It brings back bad memories. He called me later, after the attack, and wanted to apologise—to go for a walk with me on the beach. But I thought, why would I want to do that? I saw a program recently that showed women who had been raped and sexually abused, and do you know, many of them don’t say anything about what’s happened. I know exactly how that feels. In 1956, when Jeanne was eighteen years old, she met her first serious boyfriend, Bob Cobbin, an Englishman who was a diver with the English Navy. According to Peter Pascoe: Bob was one of the nicest, most attractive guys you could ever meet, with a body like Mr World. All the girls and boys were mad about him. He didn’t have a problem with the gay guys and one night one of the sailors aboard his 53

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HELLO DARLING! ship invited him to a big dance at the Petersham Town Hall. Bob went along and there he met Jeanne. He simply couldn’t resist her. Peter and the new couple went to countless parties together. At one of these Jeanne wore a ‘bright orange and yellow dress with Hawaiian motifs all over it and she had her bosoms pushed up and taped like Jane Mansfield’. At another, Jeanne drank too much champagne and fell into a rose bush where, Peter says, she was ‘cut to pieces and had to be dragged out still talking at a hundred miles an hour. When she arrived at the hospital, the nurse had to tell her to shut up.’ But the night that stands out for Peter was a big dance where all the gay guys were standing around Jeanne and screaming and God knows what else. Jeanne was being her usual mad self and Bob was sitting over on the lounge just relaxing and looking at her with stars in his eyes. This guy came over and sat next to Bob, and he happened to be Robert Helpmann. Bob turned to him, oblivious, and asked, ‘What do you do for a crust mate?’ Life was a constant stream of social engagements for Jeanne and Bob and they escorted many friends from party to party in Jeanne’s Mini Moke. According to Peter: Jeanne wasn’t the best driver in the world and everyone in those days would drink and drive. One night she was 54

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Born to be wild driving along and she said, ‘What are these stupid people doing running in front of the car?’ And I said, ‘Jeanne, you’re driving on the footpath.’ Even though Jeanne was having fun, her affair with Bob was not destined to last. One night she visited Peter at his apartment in Rushcutters Bay: She was very upset and she asked me whether I thought marriage between her and Bob could work. And I said to her, ‘I think he’s one of the most fantastic guys I’ve ever met, but he won’t be able to talk to you about the kind of world you’re interested in—fashion, current affairs and the things you really love.’ A few days later, it was Bob’s turn to visit Peter’s place. Jeanne had refused his marriage proposal. ‘He was absolutely devastated,’ says Peter. ‘He absolutely adored Jeanne, worshipped the ground she walked on. Poor guy, but it simply wasn’t meant to be.’ Then, around 1960, Jeanne Mitchell met a certain Barrington (Barry) James Little, an interior decorator who spent much of his time dreaming of becoming a novelist. The young Barry was attractive in a conservative, bookish kind of way: he was pale-skinned and trim, with a dark mop of hair parted to one side. He had sleepy, chocolate eyes that sometimes appeared distracted and distant, at other times focused and intent. Angular eyebrows made him look instantly inquisitive; a long, straight nose instantly refined. 55

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne and Barry had a mutual friend named John Politzer. According to Barry, Jeanne had left an impression on John, who ‘raved about this girl with the amazing voice who called everyone darling’. One Saturday night, John persuaded the introverted Barry, whose weekends were usually spent at the typewriter, to accompany him to a party in Willoughby in northern Sydney. ‘I didn’t want to go,’ recalls Barry, ‘but at the last minute I changed my mind.’ It was on the way to this party that Barry met Jeanne at the North Sydney train station. ‘She turned up with her friend Kerry Lawrence in a snazzy MG driven by a male friend. They were on their way to the party as well and John and I followed them.’ According to Jeanne, she and Barry hit it off immediately. I felt for the first time in my life that here was a person that I could just sit and talk to all evening, instead of doing my usual party act and running around frantically like a chook with its head cut off. I used to spend the whole time circulating, talking to everyone in turn and never staying too long with one group or one person. Barry had recently returned from his first trip to the East; he had been abroad for three months and was entranced by Japanese, Thai and Javanese design and culture. He says: I bored her all night with my stories. She was a great listener. I had never met a girl like her. We sat and talked all night. I remember thinking then, that night, I could marry this woman. 56

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Born to be wild When Jeanne first met Barry she assumed he was gay. It was a short-lived misunderstanding. ‘I quickly learnt otherwise when he asked me out and seduced me,’ she says. ‘Like many other people in that era, I had assumed all decorators and designers were gay.’ On the night they met, Jeanne and Barry had a few dances, and Jeanne wondered whether she’d ever see him again after the red glitter she had plastered all over her shoes ended up stuck to Barry’s brand new Italian loafers. She was pleasantly surprised when, a few days later, he phoned and asked her to a cocktail party that he was organising for the Interior Decorators Society of Australia. Barry was an executive member for the society and he wanted Jeanne to be his hostess. Her role was to help with the drinks and canapés, but in reality it was a barely concealed date. Jeanne says she was ‘determined to be as avant-garde as the interior designers’, so she modelled her outfit for the evening on the work of French designer André Courrèges, who is renowned for his geometric space-age designs. Says Jeanne: I went to the local hardware store, picked up some lengths of clear plastic sheeting, which I made into a micro minidress with extended shoulders and a zip down the back. She completed the outfit with artificial daisies (strategically positioned and glued into place), thigh-high boots and a flesh-coloured body stocking. As the night progressed, Jeanne’s daisies dropped off one by one (leaving her almost 57

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HELLO DARLING! naked), and she fled, fearing that her dates with Barry were destined to be a series of fashion faux pas. Jeanne and Barry’s second date was at the Florence Broadhurst wallpaper studio in Paddington. The theme for the party was ‘Hawaiian style’. According to Jeanne: To avoid looking like everyone else, instead of wearing a floral sarong I donned a full-length white sheath with garlands of white orchids down to the ground. All our designer friends said how stunning I looked and I felt pleased that I had worn something different. Jeanne had been a convert to hair dye for some time, but it was around the time that she was first dating Barry that she started to experiment with her hair in earnest. One day, she spotted a model on the cover of Vogue who sported ‘frizzy blond hair that looked like the sun. I thought, “I have to have that look by tomorrow.” ’ She purchased a DIY perm kit, loaded her hair with chemicals and waited for the magic to materialise. But Jeanne was in such a hurry that she didn’t read the instructions and the curlers fell out one by one, with her ruined hair attached. ‘All my hair had gone to jelly and when I looked in the mirror my hair was an eighth of an inch long.’ Jeanne ran downstairs in tears to her family, who were having breakfast, and they rolled about laughing because except for a few burnt clumps of hair she was completely bald. And so Jeanne discovered wigs, hats and turbans. ‘It was like a whole new world had opened up to me.’ She made hats 58

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Born to be wild from disposable refuse, such as ice-cream containers and margarine tubs, which she covered with fabric and adorned with flowers and feathers. She transformed lengths of fabric into turbans and exotic headpieces, and experimented with wigs in various colours, lengths and styles. They are adornments that she continues to wear to this day. When she appeared on Parkinson in 1980, the host asked, ‘Is that hair yours?’ to which Jeanne replied, ‘Owahh, nooo,’ as she reached up, placed a hand on either side of her hairpiece and wiggled it from side to side. She then explained to twenty million British viewers that the reason she wore wigs was that ‘people think you look beautiful and glamorous until you turn around’. Jeanne’s biggest fashion faux pas occurred six months after the Florence Broadhurst party. Barry had invited me to have dinner with him at a romantic restaurant. Violins played as we danced cheek to cheek and he thrust me backwards and kissed me passionately and the wig flew off my head. He got a terrible shock. The next time he rang me it was to say goodbye—he was going overseas and didn’t know when he’d be back.

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Chapter three

London calling Jeanne is now rarely without her false eyelashes in public. She often removes them at a dinner table and puts them in her pocket, only to later find them floating in the washing machine—Daily Mirror

PATIENCE IS NOT ONE OF JEANNE LITTLE’S VIRTUES. WITH BARRY gone, London beckoned and a date was set. Travelling without company, however, is not Jeanne’s style, so she invited Kerry Lawrence—her good friend and work mate from Permewan Wright. To raise the funds for the trip, Jeanne and Kerry busied themselves with odd jobs for the next six months, assembling hotdogs at Sydney’s Royal Easter show, selling lingerie door-to-door and painting houses. Soon they had earned enough for a trip aboard the SS Strathmore, a ship destined for the United Kingdom. On the day of Jeanne and Kerry’s departure, family and friends crammed into their third-grade two-berth cabin with welcomed champagne and unwelcomed advice. As the ship pulled away from the dock just over an hour later, Jeanne 61

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HELLO DARLING! waved to her mother, who stood on the platform amid the crowd and the fluttering streamers. Katie Mitchell mouthed the words, ‘Look after yourself.’ It was the first time her youngest child had been away from home. Jeanne was well prepared for the six-week journey. So she could travel lightly, she made a fuchsia pink chiffon dress that could be worn in at least a dozen styles, including a halter-neck frock, a playsuit, a sarong, a sundress, an evening gown and a kaftan. She wore the dress everywhere she went— by the pool, in the bar, in the ballroom and sightseeing in Colombo, Cairo and Athens. It earned her the nickname Pinky. The journey on board the SS Strathmore featured a relentless round of cocktail parties, concerts, swimming pool events and nightly competitions. One night, Jeanne and Kerry were invited to a fancy-dress party that was to be held in the ship’s ballroom. Jeanne had no fabric, so she retrieved a red jumpsuit from her luggage, borrowed a pitchfork from the ship’s furnace room and made a hat that featured horns. Jeanne dressed Kerry as a purser. She borrowed fifty handbags and purses from people on the ship and got Kerry to carry them all. The outfits won first and second prize respectively. When Jeanne and Kerry weren’t dressing up or partying they were recovering from the night before. They befriended a barman, who constantly plied them with free drinks, which meant they were usually among the last patrons to leave the bar. They slept in late, sunbaked all afternoon, read by the pool, played quoits or table tennis—until it was time to get ready to party again. According to Jeanne, her new 62

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London calling friends, honeymooners Julie and John, also taught her to play five hundred and poker. These friends escorted Jeanne and Kerry on daytrips to Hobart, Fremantle and the ship’s first foreign port, Colombo. Jeanne remembers this city not for its splendid harbour but for its mishmash of narrow alleyways and decaying buildings. When the foursome had had enough of exploring the city, they spent the afternoon in a restaurant where they ordered tandoori chicken and beer. As the afternoon drew to a close, the proprietor of the restaurant ushered John aside, took him through some beaded curtains into the back alley, and sold him several large sapphires. That night when they returned to the ship, John triumphantly flaunted his stash of gems to his wife, Jeanne and Kerry, before he ordered French champagne and threw an impromptu party in his cabin. The last thing Jeanne remembers before she fell asleep was singing a duet with Kerry. The ship’s next port of call was Cairo, the capital of Egypt. It was here that Jeanne rode a camel, viewed the treasures of the Pharaohs and feasted on barbequed goat’s meat in a restaurant with views of the Nile. This stopover was followed by a day trip to Athens, where Jeanne climbed to the top of the city’s Sacred Rock—the Acropolis hill—and explored the Plaka district at its base. It was here that Jeanne wandered through the ancient streets and explored the galleries, cafés and traditional wine taverns. The ship wasn’t due to depart until midnight, so a group of us from the ship settled into a restaurant and ordered 63

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HELLO DARLING! retsina wine and platters upon platters of the most delicious food, carried out by a gorgeous Greek family—the mother, the father, the daughters. We kept ordering umpteen bottles of the wine after we’d finished eating and by the time the basouki players started their music, we were ready to dance. Michael, a Greek university student, was sitting at a nearby table. He’d been chatting to Jeanne—as best he could, in his broken English—for most of the evening and offered to teach her to dance to his native music. According to Jeanne the night swiftly turned into a wild session of smashing plates, standing on tables and singing. When it was time for Jeanne to leave, Michael insisted on catching a taxi with her back to the ship. In the back of the car, he nuzzled and kissed her and tried to convince her to stay. Even as Jeanne looked down at him from the lofty height of the ship’s deck, Michael blew her kisses and beckoned her back on shore. According to Jeanne, she said to her friend John, who was standing beside her on the ship’s deck, ‘I wish I could thank him properly.’ To which John replied, ‘Say “Thello na kanoume erotas”, it means thank you.’ So Jeanne screeched out: ‘Thello na kanoume erotas’, which, when translated into English, actually means ‘I want to sleep with you’! For most of the journey the sun had been shining and the skies clear. But it was when the ship sailed into the Bay of Biscay on the western coast of France and the northern coast of Spain that it ran into trouble. The Bay of Biscay is a body 64

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London calling of water that is frequently referred to as the Valley of Death. This is due to the continental shelf that extends far into the bay, which results in patches of shallow water in many areas and creates the rough seas that the region is known for. Jeanne remembers the sea becoming rough in the middle of the night. Waves crashed across the deck, lights flickered, china smashed in the galley and all the furniture, including the piano, slid across the room. People were flung about and Kerry and I just cried as we clung to the sides of our beds. We somehow managed to make it up onto the deck, where everyone was green, and the crewmembers attached ropes to the side of the ship that we had to hang onto to stop us from going overboard. Soon they were lashing heavier pieces of furniture to the handrails fixed to the walls of the lounge. At the height of the storm, the ship seemed to rise up on its beam end and hang there for a few terrifying seconds before it plunged into the trough of a mountainous wave. A few days after their ordeal, Jeanne and Kerry arrived, unscathed, at their destination. It was a relief to feel solid ground under their feet. As they waltzed through the customs hall at the dock in Southampton, Jeanne looked over at her friend Julie and remembers thinking that she had gone to a lot of trouble to fix her hair that morning. It wasn’t until later, when they were sitting in the back of a taxi, that 65

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne discovered that John’s sapphires were hidden in his wife’s beehive. Artifice was an art form on London streets in the 1960s, and for the first time in her life Jeanne Little fit right in. Women wore outrageously long and dark eyelashes, and impossibly pale lips and skin. By day their hair was styled on obtuse angles, while by night they opted for obvious headpieces which they piled high atop their heads. It was a baby-doll look that was epitomised by models such as Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Verushka and Penelope Tree, who wore thighhigh skirts and dresses constructed from leather, PVC and plastic discs, and flowing shirts that featured cheeky cutouts and peep holes. Cat suits and geometric patterns were all the rage. Fashionable women of this era thumbed their noses at the visible curves, the couture and the long white gloves of the preceding decade and embraced a look that was flatchested and androgynous. Men also flirted with gender bending. They dressed up in Edwardian and Victorian imitations complete with frills, furbelows and bright sparks of colour. They grew their hair long, to below the collar. Jeanne wrote about what for her must have been a visual feast in a letter to Barry in 1969: Over here the shops are crammed with adorable winter clothes and I had the audacity to try on a gorgeous black coat completely lined with thick black-and-white zebra fur and I had to say it didn’t look as nice as on the hanger 66

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London calling because it was fifty guineas. Often, of a lunch hour, if I feel a bit sad I walk down Bond Street (I work in Piccadilly which adjoins Bond Street) and I just gaze in the windows of Charles Jourdan, Georg Jensen Silver, which has the most beautiful starkly designed jewellery, and Polly Pecks Boutique, where I love raking through their racks of gorgeous clothes, and umpteen other exclusive shops with doormen outside to keep out the scum. On arriving in London, Jeanne and Kerry spent two weeks in an inner-city hotel organised by their employers—London’s Brook Street Secretarial Bureau. But they soon realised they couldn’t afford the hotel bills and so they moved into a spartan flat in Swiss Cottage, near Hampstead Heath, with Di and Joanne, two Australian expatriates whom they had met aboard the SS Strathmore. Julie and John had other plans. They continued their honeymoon with a tour around Europe and wrote postcards from time to time. Jeanne claims her new residence ‘was low rent. It had a brothel opposite which worried me at first, but the woman downstairs said that it kept decent women like us safe.’ The apartment was located on the second floor and featured two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, and offered limited views of sprawling neighbourhood rooflines. The bathroom, located at the end of a narrow hall, was shared with the two Indian doctors who lived on the floor above them. The girls’ new home was extremely cold in winter—it was linoleumfloored, uninsulated, and had an unreliable heater that was 67

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HELLO DARLING! expensive to run. The cost of using the bath was exorbitant. The gas meter only heated the water when it was fed shillings, which meant the luxury of a bath cost two pounds, and the bath took an hour-and-a-half to fill. ‘Most nights we gave up and simply bathed with a sponge in the basin,’ says Jeanne. On those rare occasions when Jeanne did have a bath, she would top the meter up with coins and return to her flat to watch television until the bath was ready. But Jeanne soon noticed that her skin and hair were suffering.

I knew I wasn’t eating the best—I was having a milkshake for breakfast and a soda for lunch, and I once broke out in boils—but my skin had became rough and flaky and my hair was becoming as stiff as a board. I thought the English water must be hard, and I used to go on and on complaining about it to every local that I met.

One night she discovered the cause of her skin problems. Instead of returning to her flat to watch television, as she usually did after she filled the gas meter with the contents of her purse to run the bath, she went back to the bathroom shortly after she turned the hot water on. To her surprise, she discovered one of the doctors from upstairs rinsing a large colander of rice in her bath. According to Jeanne: ‘He didn’t look at all guilty, he just nodded his head and said, “Lovely hot water”, before trundling off on his way. No wonder my skin was in such a state, I’d been starched!’ 68

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London calling Jeanne had a variety of jobs while living in London. The main one was as an accountant at the famous London department store, Fortnum & Mason. She supplemented her income by working first as a waitress at a café called The Golden Egg in Leicester Square and, later, on an assembly line at an electric blanket company in a seedy suburb of London. Of all her jobs, Jeanne loved her stint at Fortnum & Mason the best. Fortnum’s, which is located in the London suburb of Piccadilly, has been an institution since 1707, its fame resting almost exclusively on its upmarket food hall, which many people simply stroll through just for the experience. Jeanne’s memories include: seeing the Queen shopping for handkerchiefs, Dirk Bogarde sampling pâté in the charcuterie and all the members of The Beatles, who were practically mobbed by everyone, including the employees. Fortunately I had a boss who was kind enough to always let me know when there was someone interesting in the store and he’d let me go down and have a look. Jeanne wrote about her experience to her family at the time: Working at Fortnum & Mason is a riot. The groundfloor grocery staff wear tails and sell eggs at 9/- a dozen and smoked salmon for £15.15.0, but I think I told you about some of their ridiculous prices. There is a gentleman who serves scrubbed potatoes by the pound 69

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HELLO DARLING! and a titled lady who hand-dips chocolates on the sixth floor. Princess Margaret is always ordering gulls’ eggs, which have greyish black shells and are served cold with salad, I believe. Jeanne’s stint at the electric blanket company wasn’t as glamorous. It was a job that she stumbled across when one of her flatmates spotted an advertisement for light assembly work in the newspaper. The advertisement read: ‘Any age, colour, sex. No previous experience necessary. Apply evenings.’ Jeanne was the only applicant, and so they employed her on the spot. But Jeanne’s boss barked out orders, blew her whistle with military precision at the end of every shift, and turned Jeanne into a bundle of nerves. ‘It was hard making ends meet when we were in London,’ says Jeanne. ‘Wages were so low and the cost of living was so high but you just did what you had to do and got on with it.’ Jeanne’s stint at The Golden Egg wasn’t much better: I applied to the restaurant saying I had previous experience as a waitress. Well, what a shock! On my first night I was given thirteen tables to serve. I was just hopeless. I served sweets before mains and got everything wrong. I served a huge table of people their food and, feeling relieved to have done that, I started serving another table. But the first table of people kept waving me over. In a bit of a temper I went over to them and said, ‘Yes?’ and they said meekly, ‘Could we have some cutlery?’ Of course, 70

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London calling I was fired at the end of my first shift. I just hopped onto the train and bawled my eyes out. Sick of the nine-to-five grind, Jeanne and Kerry decided to go to Paris one weekend. ‘It was during the Easter break and everyone we knew was away,’ says Jeanne. ‘So we caught the train to Dover, then the boat across the Channel. On the way to Paris, we treated ourselves to an expensive supper and a bottle of French champagne.’ Kerry says this splurge left them short of funds so they spent the rest of the weekend eating ‘yoghurt sprinkled with sugar that we pinched from a café’. When the girls arrived in Paris it was midnight and they couldn’t find a bed. Because it was Easter the inner city had been booked out for months. Kerry’s smattering of schoolgirl French obtained their ticket out of town on a train to Malesherbes, a small town located to the northwest of Paris. They were the only people on the train. When it pulled in at Malesherbes station half an hour later, Kerry alighted onto the platform, but Jeanne, who was struggling with a heavy suitcase, got trapped inside the carriage by the automatic doors. The train just kept going and I screamed out to Kerry, ‘Wait for me, wait for me, I’ll come back.’ So, I jumped out at the next station, but it was late by the time I got there and the station workers, who were finishing up for the night, had put up iron barricades. They must not have 71

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HELLO DARLING! been aware that I had alighted from the train and as I proceeded to climb over these barricades they ran after me shouting, ‘Non, c’est fini, mademoiselle.’ The only French I knew was ‘bon ami, bon ami’ which I said repeatedly as I pointed towards Malesherbes and tried to explain the situation. My mother had told me that her bath cleaner Bon Ami meant ‘good friend’ in French. They probably thought, what’s this woman carrying on about a cleaning product for. Finally Jeanne managed to communicate her predicament to a taxi driver, who drove her back to a frantic Kerry. But there was more to come. Says Jeanne: It was now after two in the morning and we were both so exhausted, we had to find somewhere to stay. So we rang the night bell at the nearest hotel and called out to the proprietor, who stuck her head out of the upstairs window in curlers and proceeded to shout back at us. Before we knew it all the neighbours had woken up and were sticking out their heads to see what all the fuss was about. All the lights went on in the houses along the street and it was mayhem. One of these disgruntled residents called the local police, who proceeded to cart Jeanne and Kerry off to the police station. It was here, in the company of a few drunks and prostitutes who had been locked up for the night, that the gendarmes 72

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London calling plied Jeanne and Kerry with whisky and card games, as they took so-called notes of the incident and made phone enquiries about vacant accommodation. After about an hour, at Kerry’s insistence that ‘it had been a long day and they were tired’, the gendarmes drove Jeanne and Kerry to a small hotel. ‘It was a seedy but homely sort of place, with a big-busted woman at the reception desk and a couple of girls lounging on the couch nearby,’ says Jeanne. ‘We signed our names in the register, and the gendarmes insisted they see us up to our rooms.’ Kerry says: At first we thought they were being extremely gentlemanly, carrying our bags up for us, but we walked up together to the first landing and we thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Obviously they expected that they were going to get payment in kind, because the first one peeled off at the first landing with Jeanne, and the other one went up to the next landing with me. The police had booked not one but two rooms for us. Obviously, they wanted to get each of us alone. Jeanne says she ‘almost flipped’ when the gendarme sat on the edge of the bed and proceeded to take his boots off: But next thing the phone rang—it was Kerry calling from her upstairs room. She had somehow managed to convince her man to come back later and then proceeded to convince mine. She told them that we would enjoy their 73

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HELLO DARLING! company much better after a few hours sleep, perhaps at breakfast. She then coerced the two gendarmes out of our rooms and locked the door behind them. We slept in one of the rooms top to tail until it was barely light and we caught the first train back to Paris. On their return to London, the girls found that their adventure French had reignited a passion for travel. They were sick of the short, cold London days and spending their weekends in overheated cinemas, watching the same movie over and over again just to keep warm. Says Jeanne: We were desperate for some sun after a winter in London. I had started to make coats out of old tartan blankets that my mother had sent over and gazed longingly at fur-lined boots that I couldn’t afford in the shop windows, it was so depressing. Then some friends told them about Lloret de Mar, a small fishing village seventy kilometres north of Barcelona. Descriptions of the heat and the long stretches of the glistening Mediterranean coastline were enough to whet their appetites and, a few months after their Paris trip, they booked a two-week holiday with the only money they had left—their return airfares to Australia. The two friends stayed at a hotel in close proximity to the beach (where they spent their days sunbaking, swimming and reading) and an underground bar (where they spent their 74

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London calling nights drinking cava, eating tapas, listening to flamenco music and flirting with boys). They interrupted their stay at the village with a weekend trip to Barcelona, where they strolled down Las Ramblas, the tree-lined boulevard packed with itinerant artisans, buskers and tourists; sampled wine in a traditional bodega; ate Catalan fare and attended a mass in the crypt of La Sagrada Família, the church designed by architect Antonio Gaudí and where he is buried. It was an enlightening experience, followed, the next day, by the blood, brilliance and barbarity of a bullfight. Jeanne and Kerry must have looked odd as they lined up for tickets for a Sunday session at the Placa de Braus Monumental, or La Monumental, Barcelona’s main bullring. They were two blond, pale-skinned Australian women in a sea of mostly olive-skinned, dark-haired Spanish men. As Kerry recalls: We were so naïve. I don’t think we had even thought about what we were doing. But we went ahead and bought the tickets and there we were in this gigantic arena filled with these Spaniards who roared and clapped and whooped when the bull came roaring out. We just sat there and didn’t know what had hit us. La Monumental has a long tradition of providing a gory spectacle, which culminates in the carcass of a bull—or, from time to time, the carcass of an unfortunate matador—being dragged from the ring. It is the matador’s job to attract the 75

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HELLO DARLING! bull in a series of passes, before he attempts to manoeuvre the animal into position for the final, fatal thrust of the sword that is called an estocada. Sometimes this estocada is successful, sometimes it is not. A clumsy estocada is, from a traditional perspective, thought to ruin the entire performance and evokes loud protests from the crowd. When the estocada fails in the bull’s so-called ‘quick, clean death’, it is the matador’s job to cut the bull’s spinal cord with a second sword, which kills it instantly. Jeanne and Kerry watched this ancient Spanish ritual with their mouths agape. There were six bulls scheduled to appear in the arena that day, but the adventurous duo only stayed to see one of these beasts fight for its life and then dragged out of the stadium by a team of donkeys, as the sand was raked in preparation for the next bull. According to Kerry: We were bawling our eyes out by the end of it and all the Spanish men were laughing their heads off at us. We soon realised we had to get out of there. So we fled to the train station and bought tickets back to Lloret de Mar, but the train broke down well before our stop and so we had to get out and walk along the road. But we didn’t know how to get back home and so we thumbed a lift. Two Spanish men in a farm truck stopped to pick them up. Jeanne and Kerry climbed into the back of the vehicle and sat alongside a bevy of pigs and chickens. Says Kerry: 76

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London calling Talk about taking your life into your hands. The men insisted on us going out with them that night, but we’d already accepted an invitation from some German guys that we’d met before we’d left Lloret de Mar, so once again Jeanne and I were in a spot and we thought, ‘How do we get out of this one?’ We just went back to our hotel that night and locked ourselves in our room. We were too scared to go out in case we ran into the wrong people. The following morning, the girls got up at the crack of dawn and returned to London. In early 1969, still in London, Jeanne met Ken, who was soon to be her boyfriend. She describes him as ‘an upper-class Englishman with a lisp who was an obsessive rock climber’. Ken frequently dropped around after his daily studies at the University of London, and practised belaying—a rope management technique used to protect a climber against a fall—on his girlfriend’s apartment door. As Kerry explains: Ken frequently came around with his friend Stephen, who was also a mad keen rock climber. They practised climbing up the drainpipe. I’m sure the neighbours thought it was very strange to have grown men hanging off the drainpipe or the apartment door, dressed up in all their gear. I’m surprised that the door didn’t come off its hinges. One weekend, Ken and Stephen asked the girls to come mountain climbing in Wales. According to Jeanne: 77

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HELLO DARLING! These boys were serious climbers: what they did wasn’t for the faint-hearted. So, when they invited us on the trip, we thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what are we up for?’ Ken told me that he had a friend who had climbed to the top of the Matterhorn, stepped back to admire the view and fell to his death. So I was slightly concerned about the trip to Wales! Kerry says: In those days the University of London had an isolated climbers’ hut right at the top of the mountain, and that’s where we stayed for the night after we did all this treacherous mountain climbing. When we arrived at the top, it was blowing a gale, but the most difficult part of the weekend was that we had to run, not walk, down the other side of the mountain the following morning because it completely comprised of loose shale. Once we started running, we couldn’t stop until we reached the bottom. Jeanne and mountain climbing is an odd match, and although Ken was keen, Jeanne wasn’t so sure of her feelings. She decided to ‘cool things off’ by pretending that she was ‘busy’. ‘Ken was lovely but a bit gung-ho for me,’ says Jeanne. ‘He was obsessive and possessive and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.’ On one occasion Jeanne and her flatmates arrived home at 9 pm to find Ken sitting in the living 78

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London calling room after he let himself in by climbing up the drainpipe. So Jeanne came up with a plan: Ken had been pestering me for ages to come and meet his mother, who lived in the country, and I finally agreed. For the occasion I wore a skin-tight mini-dress, vulgar jewellery and heavy makeup, and I chain-smoked the entire time. I told his mother that I was the direct descendant of one of the convicts from the First Fleet. Ken left me well and truly alone after that. It was around this time that Kerry discovered she was pregnant. She had met Michael, an English pilot with the Royal Air Force, aboard the ship from Australia. They had lost touch, but then fate intervened when Michael met up with some friends he had in common with Kerry and they passed on her details. They soon began dating, and when Kerry fell pregnant the couple decided to get married. In late 1969, they moved to North Yorkshire, where Michael was training to be a pilot. Not long after Kerry’s marriage and her subsequent departure from London, another of Jeanne’s flatmates, Joanne, left as well. Now it was Jeanne and Di who shared the rent at the Swiss Cottage apartment. Jeanne continued to travel sporadically to Italy, France, Portugal and Spain. When she wasn’t travelling, she hosted a number of parties and, more often than not, these were attended by Colin Morrow, a friend of Jeanne’s who lived in New York, but who was frequently in 79

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HELLO DARLING! London on business. Colin was a ‘shoe pirate’, which meant that his job was to fly to Europe, source a stash of the latest in fashionable footwear and take the products back to the United States, where they’d be copied and sold at a third of the price. Whenever Colin was in London, he never failed to catch up with Jeanne, who explains: Colin was very good-looking and extremely charming when he was sober—which wasn’t often—but as soon as he had something to drink he turned into an absolute monster. He had a few chips on his shoulder: he was gay and his mother was Afro-American, and he tried to hide both these aspects of his self. Once he came to one of the parties that we had at Swiss Cottage and he drank a bottle of vodka and slammed his fist through the front windowpane. He said he did it because he was feeling claustrophobic. We got booted out of the apartment for that. Jeanne and Di could barely afford to move. According to Jeanne, their landlord yelled after them as they packed their belongings into the car: ‘Thank God I don’t ever have to listen to that dreadful voice again.’ Jeanne’s new address was in Maida Vale, in northwest London—she had been in the city for almost four years. It was on her first day in Maida Vale that she received a letter from Barry Little. It was the first she had heard from him since she had left home. He had recently returned to Australia from his sabbatical abroad, 80

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London calling where he had lived in a variety of locations throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. It was when he was in Vienna that he received the news of the untimely death of Stuart Low, Australia’s leading interior designer and Barry’s former employer and mentor. Barry cut his trip short, returned to Sydney and bought Stuart Low’s business. It was shortly after this that Jeanne responded to Barry’s letter: When I received your card I was thrilled to bits! I haven’t changed a bit except for perhaps quietening down for the better and dressing a lot more sombrely, which perhaps all adds up to growing old. One girl at Fortnum’s who said I looked my age was fired the following day, so I guess no one else will be game to say so. Could honestly rave on for years but will see you before then and promise to write again telling you of my definite plans. Actually I have to come home because my family are sick of sending me money . . . Lots of love to one of the sweetest people I know, you. Rat Face P.S. Tammy Grimes never signs her proper name and uses similar aliases. Jeanne booked her flight back to Australia for December 1970. She arranged to fly home via New York so she could visit her friend Colin Morrow. Besides, Jeanne had always wanted to visit America’s most vibrant city. A few days 81

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HELLO DARLING! before she left, Jeanne made plans to meet Colin at JFK airport: she would fly in from London and he would fly in from Chicago, where he would be on ‘business’. But the plan fell through when Colin’s flight was cancelled due to bad weather. Not knowing how to get in touch with her friend, Jeanne spent the night at a nearby hotel that featured vibrating beds and twenty-four-hour erotic movies. She’d been directed to the hotel by an information clerk at the airport. Almost as soon as I arrived at the hotel, the phone rang. I thought that Colin had somehow tracked me down, but it was the information clerk from the airport, who wanted to come to see me. When I politely declined, there was a long silence and then he started breathing heavily down the phone line. I hung up, and by the time the phone rang for the third and fourth time, I just let it ring out. After a sleepless night, Jeanne arrived at Colin’s door the following morning, to find him recovering from the night before. He had assumed she’d returned to Australia when he couldn’t locate her at the airport. The two friends ate lunch, imbibed a bottle of champagne, talked until late afternoon and then went to a Manhattan bar that was packed with patrons. They arrived home at five in the morning and slept in until two. Jeanne and Colin did not stop partying for the next fortnight. Life was a whirlwind of cocktail parties, dinner parties, jazz clubs and nightclubs. It seemed glamorous, but 82

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London calling there was trouble brewing beneath the surface. According to Jeanne: Colin was lonely, depressive and possessive. He’d get into a temper and try to create a fight. On reflection I recognise that he got a kick out of me being dependent on him, because he always insisted that he and his friends pay my way. But his moods fluctuated dramatically from moment to moment and I was worried because I felt like I’d lost control of the situation. Colin’s bad behaviour surfaced a number of times, including one night when he and Jeanne were turned away from a restaurant because it was about to close. Colin mistakenly interpreted this as a personal rejection, and proceeded to scream abuse from the street until the proprietor called the police. Similarly, every time Jeanne tried to book her flight home to Australia, Colin would call and cancel it. ‘I was beginning to feel disturbed and afraid,’ Jeanne says. ‘Colin was frightened that when I left he would be all alone. He filled his life with people and parties and alcohol to keep his demons at bay.’ To add to the confusion, Colin, who was homosexual, asked Jeanne to marry him. It was at this point that Jeanne knew she had to leave. Jeanne spent her last day in New York wondering how she was going to make it to the airport. Just the night before, she dined at a restaurant with Colin and his friends. They had a ‘farewell’ dinner—although the guests were not 83

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HELLO DARLING! privy to her impending departure, as Jeanne had omitted that specific detail for fear of Colin cancelling her flight— and she paid the bill. Now she was destitute—she didn’t even have change for the bus. According to Jeanne, the following day she walked ‘about twenty blocks in a daze’, not knowing what to do, when suddenly she saw a sign that read: ‘We buy your blood’. It was not long before Jeanne had a needle in her arm, and she watched as a pint of her blood flowed along a tube and into a plastic bag. The relief came when the gum-chewing receptionist handed her a tendollar note. As Jeanne commenced the long walk back to Colin’s apartment, she started to feel nauseous, dizzy and weak. She hadn’t eaten much that day, and so stumbled into the first café that crossed her path. She ordered a coffee and a doughnut, before she fainted and collapsed onto the floor. Jeanne regained consciousness as a waitress pressed a glass of water to her lips, while the manager ushered her off the premises. ‘I think he thought I was bad for business,’ says Jeanne. ‘But somehow I managed to pay him and I stumbled back to Colin’s apartment.’ Fortunately for Jeanne, Colin was away on ‘business’ that day. She left him a note and didn’t hear of him until years later when he moved to Sydney: Colin had lost his job, his teeth and someone told me they saw him ‘dealing’ on the footpath in Kings Cross. It was incredibly sad for this to happen to someone who had so 84

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London calling much potential—he had been so outgoing and goodlooking. But he couldn’t cope with his demons. It was only later that Jeanne found out that Colin was into S&M. One day he was picked up by someone, and it went too far. Colin was found trussed up in leather and straps. He had been murdered.

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Chapter four

Homeward bound Barry, you’ll never have a dull moment as long as you live—A well-meaning friend at Jeanne and Barry Little’s wedding

LIKE

THE WOMAN THE THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD

JEANNE LITTLE

had become, the Australia that she had left behind had grown up. The mood of the early 1970s was coloured by a massive surge of nationalism fuelled by soon-to-be prime minister Gough Whitlam, and his attempts to have a distinctively Australian national anthem and to finance domestic arts. But this was not the only change. Since the late 1960s many social mores, laws and beliefs had been challenged, particularly in the realms of civil, Aboriginal and women’s rights. In 1967, Australian Aboriginal people were given the right to vote in federal elections; in 1970, Germaine Greer launched her book The Female Eunuch, which challenged the oppression of women and espoused sexual liberation; in 1972 Cleo magazine appeared with naked male centrefolds 87

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HELLO DARLING! and stories on orgasms; and in 1973 Gay Pride Week was celebrated, which hoped to ‘change the mind of the prejudiced, the fearful, the conditioned and the sexually repressed’. There was some opposition, of course: in 1972, the Reverend Ian Herring declared that ordaining women would be ‘analogous to consecrating a meat pie on God’s altar’; a Democratic Labor Party senator noted that Australians could not have his kind of family life ‘if you go to bed with all the Germaine Greer supporters you meet up with’; while the then Mayor of Port Lincoln in South Australia claimed he had nothing against Aboriginal people but asked: ‘How would you like them to live next door?’ Jeanne Little was in her mod phase when she arrived at Sydney airport in 1970. Her outfit included round-toe, laceup shoes designed by Mary Quant, a black mini-dress that she’d run up on the sewing machine, and a dark, oblique bob that she’d had styled by renowned hairdresser Vidal Sassoon before she’d left London. The shock of seeing her contemporaries trotting around in ‘tight, bright summer dresses teamed with stilettos and severely lacquered hair that looked like stiff meringues’ is still palpable to her. After four years of blending (as much as Jeanne Little could) into the crowd, she would, once again, have to get used to being the odd one out. At first Jeanne’s avant-garde appearance meant that she found it hard to get a job. But it was precisely this that prompted an old friend, Jimmy Fishburn, to cast her in a play called The Women, which he was directing at the Independent Theatre. The play featured an all-female cast, and had 88

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Homeward bound been written by American editor, playwright, social activist, politician, journalist and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce in 1936. It centres on the idleness of wealthy wives and divorcees, and came about when Boothe Luce overheard a gossip session in a women’s restroom. It was adapted for the screen three years after it was first released and has continued to this day to be a source of inspiration in theatrical and feminist circles. For Jeanne’s brief appearance (she was cast as a ‘dumb blonde with appendicitis, who only had three lines to recite’) she made a gold lamé dress that revealed her midriff. At each performance, as she waited in the wings, Jeanne busied herself with sewing, ironing and stitching costumes for the cast. During one performance, Jeanne accidentally filled the iron with liquid starch and proceeded to iron the lead actor’s dress until it was as stiff as a board. There was nothing we could do, so the leading lady had to wear it the way it was, which wasn’t too bad once we managed to get her into it. Except that she made crackling noises as she moved around the stage. But all was not lost: Jeanne’s meagre theatrical offering resulted in her first review. The critic wrote: ‘The dressing was very good especially the gold lamé dress worn by a walkon at the end of the first act.’ It was around this time that Jeanne and Barry began seeing each other on a regular basis. When they were not at work, they spent as much time together as possible— 89

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HELLO DARLING! at parties, restaurants, movies, with friends. Until this point their relationship was—except for ‘the occasional passionate kiss’—relatively platonic. ‘We each had the world to conquer before we would commit to anyone,’ explains Barry. ‘We were young; we wanted to be free to do as we pleased.’ Now, after knowing each other on and off for around a decade, they had different relationship needs: they sought commitment and trust. They were lucky to find those qualities in each other. And they were also able to communicate—and laugh—freely with one another; they held a mutual interest in design, literature and current affairs; and they had an indefinable chemistry that Barry describes as ‘electric’: What I loved about Jeanne when I first met her was that she was happy to be herself; she didn’t care what anyone thought. I was sick of the mediocrity in Australia and there was certainly nothing mediocre about Jeanne. Jennifer Benjamin, who has known Barry since the 1950s, remembers one of his first reactions to Jeanne: He said to me, ‘I met the most incredible woman. I can’t even describe her. She’s quite mad, I don’t even know where to start.’ I asked him if he’d see her again, and he said, ‘Yes, I think I will.’ It was not long after Jeanne’s return from abroad that the couple were engaged. She says that he proposed. He says that 90

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Homeward bound she proposed. Either way, when Barry broke the news to his mother that he was going to marry Jeanne, she allegedly said: ‘That’s nice dear, but you can always get divorced if it doesn’t work out.’ As Barry explains, ‘My mother was a very jealous, possessive woman, particularly because I was her only child. I think that’s why it took me so long to get my act together with Jeanne.’ As Jeanne remembers it: Our relationship was more serious at this time—we were older and wiser. I realised I wanted marriage and a family. But Barry was still fairly non-committal. It wasn’t until my old friend Dormie called out of the blue from the United States and told me that he had a job for me that Barry felt concerned that he might lose me and so he proposed. When asked about her relationship with the man that she clearly adores, Jeanne says: Our partnership has been a bonding of the souls in the truest sense of the word. The moment I met Barry, I knew he was the only man I would ever love. If I didn’t marry Barry, I probably would never have married. Doubtless, theirs is an incongruous match, described aptly by a journalist from the Good Weekend magazine as ‘the anchor and the billowing sail’. As John Frost, the producer of stage-show Jerry’s Girls—which Jeanne starred in in 1987–91—explains: 91

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HELLO DARLING! Barry is pretty much the power behind Jeanne. She’s still quite insecure about her talent, and Barry is always there to build her up, and make the right decisions about her career. He won’t let anything hurt her. Katie Little paints this picture of her parents’ relationship: It is amazing how much my mother defers to my father. She is such a strong-willed, independent and intelligent person, but I’m always surprised at how much Mum does what Dad wants her to do. She is like a traditional wife in that sense. Mum does everything for Dad. Mum does everything for everybody. She doesn’t know her limits. Mum and Dad are the absolute opposite extremes of each other. I remember I was trying to get a deposit together for a place in Chippendale and my Mum said, ‘Oh great, how much do you need, we’ll mortgage the place in Paddington for you so you can buy it,’ while Dad on the other hand said that they’d do nothing of the sort. Barry can be described as an introvert who has an eye for detail: he weighs things up, thinks things through, gets things right. He is prudent and solid as a rock. Jeanne, on the other hand, is an extrovert who can be reckless. Unlike Barry, she has no time for detail: she lives spontaneously, is frequently frivolous and finds it almost impossible to say ‘no’ to people because she does not want to let anyone down. In short, Barry is led by his head, Jeanne by her heart. But as Jeanne 92

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Homeward bound explains, ‘It would be very dull if we were all the same.’ And despite Jeanne and Barry’s differences, their marriage is one of the rare success stories in Australian show business. It was not long after her engagement to Barry that Jeanne found a job as a private secretary in an advertising business. She later shifted to the Sheriff’s Department, which handled prosecutions for the attorney-general. But this was the time that Barry’s career shone more brightly than Jeanne’s. Barry had become Stuart Low’s successor as Sydney’s leading interior designer, and in 1971 he was elected National President of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia. Some might think this surprising considering he never formally studied interior design. But he could certainly draw and had a natural affinity with colour, a creative talent that Barry says was encouraged and indulged during a sickly childhood. Born on 3 July 1930, he was an only child who was spoilt by a doting mother and who spent much of his childhood in bed recovering from bronchitis and pneumonia. ‘Consequently, as a child I was a dreamer, who lived in a fantasy world fed by books, writing and toy theatres,’ explains Barry. It was also during his childhood that Barry started to write. He has been doing so ever since. It has taken Barry Little almost an entire lifetime to write a massive fictional tome on the opium wars in China. The novel, which he continues to write today, has been spurred on by Barry’s love of the Orient and his passion for literature. 93

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HELLO DARLING! In 1940, Barry was enrolled in Sydney’s Barker College, while his father James forged ahead in his pharmaceutical career and his mother Dora languished at home ‘eternally frustrated and jealous of my gregarious father being out in the world’. James had a pharmacy on Gardeners Road, Mascot, and became a member of the New South Wales Committee of the Pharmaceutical Guild in 1935, five years after his son was born. By 1950, James was the president of the Guild. But his dreams were cut tragically short three years later when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the 20th Australasian Pharmaceutical Conference in Sydney. Barry was given the ominous task of identifying his father’s body at the city morgue. ‘His body was completely black,’ he says. ‘I went into shock and wandered around the streets for hours in the rain. Finally someone found me and they contacted my mother.’ Even as a teenager, Barry had high aspirations. ‘I wanted to be an actor, a writer, an artist—anything to keep me from having a life of mediocrity,’ he explains. Two years before he graduated from Barker College, he auditioned for a children’s radio serial, Spanish Gold, and landed the lead role. In 1948, he found employment as a copywriter at the Colgate-Palmolive Radio Unit, where he worked alongside radio pioneers, Roy Rene and Jack Davey. It was at this time that Roy Rene, who had enjoyed a longstanding reputation as Australia’s most successful vaudeville and variety star, became famous for his role as Mo McCackie on McCackie Mansion. When Barry started work with Roy at the radio 94

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Homeward bound station, this show had the largest audience of any in Australia. As one observer noted in 1949: At eight-fifteen on a Tuesday evening, every week of the year, a strange phenomenon takes place. Regardless of strikes, famine, plague or drought, the majority of Australian people snap on radio receivers, automatically swing the dial to a network and listen. While most people remember Roy for catchphrases like ‘Fair suck of the sav’ and ‘Don’t come the raw prawn with me’, Barry remembers him for his unsavoury habit of ‘spitting down the stairwell in the studio; everyone would duck’. Barry’s other boss, Jack Davey, ran a series of quiz shows that were recorded weekly before a live audience. It was in the quiz show Ask Me Another that Barry appeared as Jack’s ‘gong boy’. At this time Barry befriended such celebrities as couple Vivien Leigh and Sir Laurence Olivier, who first toured Australia in 1948, eight years after their wedding. Barry’s friendship with Leigh survived her marriage. When the ageing star returned to Australia in 1961, for an eight-month tour of the Antipodes in the stage play The Lady of the Camellias, Barry organised a party for her at his mother’s home in Lindfield. Says Barry: ‘Under no circumstances was I or any of the other guests allowed to talk to her about Gone With the Wind, because, as she explained, it had ruined her life.’ According to Jeanne: 95

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HELLO DARLING! We worked all afternoon getting ready for the party. I wore a stunning white crepe full-length dress and had my hair arranged with two hairpieces. After all, this party was for a beautiful movie star. One of her fellow castmembers told us that Miss Leigh would like a chair to be placed in the middle of the room so that nobody could sit beside her for too long and that she drank gin on the rocks. ‘What? Not even any tonic or water?’ I said in amazement to Barry. Finally there was a knock on the door. In came some of the cast following Vivien Leigh and her lover John Merivale. I gasped when I saw a very ordinary woman, with little make-up and wearing a shirtmaker dress, being escorted to the lonely chair. Our waiter immediately served her drink, while Barry sat on the floor at her feet to have a chat. As Vivien took out a cigarette from her purse, John Merivale ran across the room with a lighter. This happened all evening with various people allowed to sit at her feet. Even though Barry was making friends in high places, he was itching to use his creative talents. He applied for a course in fine arts, and when his application was rejected, he accepted a job offer from Stuart Low. According to Barry: Stuart taught me everything there was to know about interiors: about mixing colour, about furniture and about having an eye for design. He was an amazing teacher, and people were really in awe of his talent. 96

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Homeward bound Barry’s skills as an interior designer, which include his considerable talent as a colourist, are many and varied. But one skill sets him apart from his competitors: his application of—and passion for—oriental design. In 1970, Babette Hayes, the co-author of Australian Style, a book dedicated to the crème de la crème of local designers and architects, described him as: one of the most original interior designers working in Australia today . . . A strong emphasis on the East touches on every house that Barry Little designs and yet his colours are strong, blending citrus, aqua and lime with earth tones . . . Victoriana is dull to Barry Little. He regards it as a hangover from the ugliest period of English taste. Barry’s love for the Orient started in the 1950s. It was a love affair that prompted him to say: We have as much to learn from Asia and Polynesia as we do from our roots in Europe . . . Our tastes are no longer running towards rosy chintz but towards the subtleties of Japan or the exotic colours of Thailand . . . Around 1960, the same year Barry first met Jeanne, he took three months to explore a handful of Asian countries, and he has returned to Asia almost annually ever since. It was on his first trip abroad that Barry made the acquaintance 97

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HELLO DARLING! of Jim Thompson, the founder of the Thai Silk Company, and Ronnie Laing, the long-time interior designer for the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Barry’s friendship with both these men proved instrumental to his entrée into the design demimonde of the Orient: Jim Thompson introduced Barry to suppliers of traditional paintings, furniture, sculpture, porcelain, jade and the Thai silk for which the name Jim Thompson is synonymous; while Ronnie Laing was a key contact for Barry when he later imported tortoiseshell and rattan furniture into Australia, and equally during his presidency of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia. In 1971, when Barry organised the first of many trips for twenty-five of his colleagues to the Philippines, Ronnie helped secure a function at the Malacañang Palace, where the group (that included Jeanne) was received by Imelda Marcos. The trip to the Philippines was the first of many similar trips that Jeanne and Barry embarked on throughout the seventies and eighties, including a tour in 1976 of Honolulu and the United States as guests of the American Society of Interior Designers—where they visited the Iolani Palace in Honolulu and the home of author John Steinbeck in the Salinas Valley, California. As Barry explains: Jeanne and I kept going on these trips no matter what it took. They were important to me as an interior designer and important to us as a couple. We kept travelling and seeing the world; it opened our eyes to other cultures, 98

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Homeward bound other people’s lives and helped us keep our finger on the pulse of what was going on out there in the wider world. Even when we had our daughter in 1974, even when Jeanne worked on the Mike Walsh Show and had all her television commitments and social appointments, we would still jet off. Nothing would stop us. Jeanne reflects on this frenetic period of their lives and explains: Like so many fathers, Barry said we wouldn’t be able to cope travelling with a baby and in those days the Society of Interior Designers always expected the wife to attend. He didn’t realise that it broke my heart to leave Katie with carers, even though his mother, Dora, would visit her every day. I still cry today at the thought of this separation. Nineteen seventy-one was a busy year for Jeanne and Barry. Barry Little Interiors had grown out of the studio on Elizabeth Street in the city, so the business was shifted into a two-bedroom terrace located at 95 Paddington Street, Paddington. The couple, still to be married, lived upstairs, while Barry worked downstairs in a space that was—after much ‘toing and froing’ with the local council—converted into a showroom. Ruth Williams, who was Barry Little’s secretary for twenty-five years, describes Barry’s workspace as: 99

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HELLO DARLING! a tastefully decorated terrace with a glass opaque shopfront, a stock of decorative items, fabric, wallpaper and sample books, where Barry could be found drawing a floor plan and working out a colour scheme. Ruth remembers that sequins from Jeanne’s outfits could frequently be found trailing through the studio and up the stairs into the house. Ruth would pick the sequins up one by one and dispose of them before the arrival of clients. ‘Whenever Barry had clients,’ says Ruth, ‘Jeanne was banished from the showroom, because it was always rowdy when she was around.’ One journalist described Barry and Jeanne’s home as ‘a masterpiece of colour toning and detail . . . the house has a definite Eastern atmosphere created mainly with Barry’s extensive collection of objets d’art’. The dining room, in particular, was depicted as ‘a golden glowing room designed for comfort using tone on tone—from apricot shades through pale oranges to persimmon. One wall is completely covered with mirrors.’ But the press articles were not just about interior design: Jeanne and Barry’s private life was the source of much attention. They were interviewed about their passions, their pastimes and their partnership. Jeanne and Barry were no strangers to festivity, then or now. Parties at the Littles’ have endured guest punch-ups, heated debates, the curtains catching alight and a guest falling into the bath and knocking herself out. Wallpaper designer 100

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Homeward bound Florence Broadhurst was a frequent guest. It was around 1976 that Florence, then in her twilight years, sat at the head of a table set for eight. Florence had become hard of hearing, and she wore a hearing-aid carefully concealed under her sprayed coiffure. After a few too many cocktails, she began dozing off because none of the guests were talking to her. Thinking it was not a ‘good look’ to have a guest asleep, Jeanne, who was seated at the other end of the table, shouted to her old friend: ‘Florence, how is your daughter-in-law?’ Florence quickly shot back a deadpan, characteristically diva-like response: ‘She’s dead.’ Parties at the Littles’ never follow any formula. According to Jeanne: Because Barry was the president of the Society of Interior Designers, it was our responsibility to entertain decorators from all over the world. And then of course when my television career took off, we had those people to entertain as well. Mike Walsh frequently asked me to entertain someone who had just jetted in. In those days our guests mostly drank gin and tonic, Scotch on the rocks or champagne. My first course was usually Coquilles St Jacques, scallops in white sauce served in their shells with cheese cooked under the griller. I would put them on the table and call the guests over. ‘We’ll just have one more drink,’ they’d say. I would often have to put the food back in the oven three times before they finally came to the table and they were usually very sloshed by the time they arrived. 101

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HELLO DARLING! Once Jeanne completely forgot that she had invited friends over for a meal. When they turned up at the doorstep with champagne and flowers, Jeanne greeted them in her dressing gown and curlers. Katie Little says that she grew up with the feeling that my parents’ home was like that of a classical movie star. I grew up with that old style of entertaining that simply doesn’t happen anymore. At dinner parties there were layered cakes, beef stroganoff, lasagne and, in the middle of the day, when someone came over, they’d have the coffee percolating, trays of sandwiches, biscuits. Though Jeanne loves to entertain, there are varying reports about Jeanne’s ability as a cook. Barry says she is ‘not the best’. Katie gives this example: Dad used to make these brilliant pancakes for me in the morning before school, so fine and gorgeous. Mum knew I loved them, but she didn’t have the time, so she would whiz up the batter and instead of making lots of pancakes, she’d pour all the batter into the pan and it would come out about three inches thick with the bottom completely black because she’d burnt it. There’d be smoke all over the kitchen. Then she’d top the pancake with cream and ice cream and that’d be my breakfast. Jeanne was thirty-three years old and Barry was forty-one when they said ‘I do’ on 23 October 1971, at a church in 102

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Homeward bound Paddington. Jeanne wore a simple, pleated dress the colour of crushed almonds and an exotic, pastel pink headdress. Says Jeanne: I bought the fabric for my wedding dress from a seconds shop and thought I’d give the idea a test run before I made the real thing, but it turned out so well that I kept it and it only cost me twenty dollars to make. I wanted to keep my wedding dress simple because the headdress was the real feature—after all, it covered my dreadful hair. For the complex task of making the headdress, Jeanne engaged the help of a milliner. The headdress was painstakingly crafted from dozens of coiled strands of fabric, and then threaded with cuttings of lily-of-the-valley. But when the final product was delivered the day before the wedding Jeanne burst out crying. The ends of the fabric, which looked like little flowers, had been painted bright yellow and orange—not pink as I had requested. So I had to unpick it all, repaint it, wait for it to dry and put it back together again. It took me hours when I had so many other things to organise for the wedding. Every woman has her bad hair moment, but when Jeanne made her entrance at her wedding the guests would not have known either way. The elegant headdress cascaded from 103

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne’s temples down onto her shoulders like a mass of oldfashioned rag curls. (One journalist described the headdress less romantically as ‘looking like noodles tumbling down’.) Never one to do things by halves, Jeanne had not one but two matrons of honour: her good friend Kerry Lawrence and her niece Faye Dunne. They wore risqué hotpants with dresses split to the waist. Barry stood beside the unconventional trio in a sedate dark grey suit. In his pocket was an old ring from a second-hand shop. They had plans to buy new silver wedding rings on their honeymoon in Mexico. Jeanne and Barry had put much thought into the mechanics of their wedding reception—putting their prudish, teetotal relatives in the same room as their chain-smoking, kaftan-wearing friends might be a recipe for disaster. So the plan was to stagger the arrival of their guests. ‘It was deemed prudent to have the reception in two sittings,’ says Faye Dunne. ‘The relatives would come first and the party people would come later.’ The theory was that by the time the first group were satiated, they would leave. But the plan didn’t work out. ‘It soon became obvious that none of the relatives had any intention of leaving,’ explains Jeanne. Everyone was getting into it; even my mother who never ever drank broke her ‘no drinking’ rule and joined in the champagne toasts, while my sister Cathie was leading the Highland fling. I think they thought the champagne was lemonade and it all started to really get out of hand and we needed to take drastic action. 104

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Homeward bound The newlyweds enlisted the help of Jeanne’s cousin Keith to remove the older members who had settled in for the evening and take them away in his mini-bus to the local club. Jeanne and Barry helped their guests into the vehicle and waved them off, only to have the mini-bus return an hour later minus only one of the elderly passengers. According to Jeanne: They hadn’t been to the club at all; instead they’d taken Auntie Lottie to the hospital. The sliding door had opened as Keith had taken a corner, and Auntie Lottie, who had been leaning against the door sound asleep because she’d had so much to drink, silently rolled out onto the road. But it wasn’t until the door had slammed shut that anyone noticed she’d gone. By this stage they’d travelled twenty blocks and they returned to find her in the gutter, still fast asleep. With Auntie Lottie ensconced at Darlinghurst’s St Vincent’s Hospital, the busload of relatives returned to the reception, where they partied with Jeanne’s and Barry’s ‘diverse’ friends until 4 am. As Faye remembers it, ‘When the relatives returned to the party they were still tipsy. They had the decorators and designers in stitches when they told them about Auntie Lottie.’ A week later, Jeanne and Barry left for a month-long honeymoon in the United States and Mexico. For the journey, Jeanne designed what she calls ‘a wardrobe in a bag’, namely 105

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HELLO DARLING! five pieces of black jersey lined with animal skin print that could be put together in a host of combinations. It was 6 am when they arrived at San Francisco airport, where they had arranged to meet Barry’s friend, Ron. Barry had first met Ron on his travels to the United States in the 1960s, when Ron was one of New York’s leading interior designers. As Barry explains: ‘Ron used to live in an apartment that overlooked Central Park, wear designer suits and jet about the world to decorate homes from the Bahamas to Marakesh.’ But a few weeks before Jeanne and Barry’s arrival, Ron had suffered a midlife crisis, and so when he greeted them at the airport as a ‘long-haired hippy in pyjamas’ they didn’t recognise him. He was now into transcendental meditation and lived with several friends whom he referred to as his ‘family’. As Jeanne explains: The ‘family’ was a group of young men who wore their hair long, over their shoulders in plaits, Indian-style shirts, strings of beads, torn jeans, embroidered vests and Japanese kimonos. They lived together in a ramshackle house and shared their welfare cheques, food stamps and clothes. It was with ‘the family’ that Jeanne and Barry spent the first two nights of their honeymoon. The house in which they stayed had a bright yellow exterior, broken windows and doors that were falling off their hinges. The interior was just as startling: the living room was ablaze with psychedelic 106

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Homeward bound murals; the bathroom was home for a pet dog; the bedroom had soiled mattresses on the floor; and the kitchen was a mishmash of dirty plates, cigarette butts and the mouldy remnants of food. Remembers Jeanne: In the back garden, which was completely overgrown, Ron’s friends chanted mantras as they squatted in the lotus position, or just sat around rolling giant reefers and talking about the meaning of life. Barry and I looked at each other and thought, ‘What have we gotten ourselves into?’ The following night was just as colourful. We were invited to join our friends in town for a party. Not knowing what we were in for, we tagged along feeling like the preppy couple from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Ron and his friends had all dressed in really bad drag for the evening, complete with dodgy wigs and knobbly knees, and when we arrived at the basement of an old hotel in the heart of San Francisco we realised what was going on. This was San Francisco after all—the epicentre of the gay world—and this was Halloween, their special night. It was wonderful, overthe-top, the amazing costumes, the wild hairstyles, the exotic make-up—it was a riot, until I turned around to see a young man dressed like a Christmas fairy trying to hit on Barry. 107

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne and Barry packed their bags for New York the following morning. They had a room at the Pickwick Arms which is located, as far as Jeanne is concerned, ‘in close proximity to anything that matters in the Big Apple’, namely Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Times Square, Central Park, Grand Central Station and all the shops in between. Recalls Barry: It cost us twenty-eight dollars a week and we didn’t have a fridge in our room, so we used to fling the windows wide and freeze the gin on the window sill and have a drink before we went out. The couple spent their days exploring the shops, the galleries and the landmarks; their nights were filled with Broadway shows, restaurants and bars. For much of their stay Jeanne wore a ‘lovely pair of pale fox pelts, complete with heads, paws and tails’ that she found at ‘a bargain basement store, just the thing to wear casually tossed about my neck to protect me from the chilly autumn winds that blew along the canyons between Manhattan’s skyscrapers’. After New York, the couple continued their adventure in Mexico City. According to Jeanne, this is where the honeymoon really began. The couple rented a room at the Hotel De Cortes, which has been an inn since the days when Mexico was a colony of Spain. Located at the top of the Reforma—a long, wide boulevard that runs through the heart of the ancient city—their hotel provided the perfect place from which to explore the cobble-stoned streets, the 108

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Homeward bound lavish churches, the restaurants (such as the Hacienda de Los Morales which Jeanne says is one of the best she has ever dined in) and the opulent, colourful rooms of Chapultepec Castle, which has been a residence for Mexican rulers since the fourteenth century. They set a day aside to visit the ancient city of Teotihuacán and its focal points, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. From Mexico City, Jeanne and Barry travelled south to Acapulco where they stayed at a hotel with views of the ocean, and spent their days sunbaking, swimming and drinking margaritas. The romance came to an abrupt halt, however, when Barry contracted what Jeanne refers to as ‘Montezuma’s revenge’. As Jeanne explains: When he wasn’t running to the toilet, he was lying in bed feeling sorry for himself. I went to a nearby pharmacy, where no one spoke a word of English, but they caught the drift when I rubbed my stomach and made groaning noises. They gave me a bottle of bright pink medicine that I took back to the hotel for Barry. I wasn’t sure how much of the stuff to administer, so I just said, ‘One tablespoonful every hour, darling.’ Well it worked all right, his insides seized up like cement and he didn’t go to the toilet for a week. By that stage, however, Mr and Mrs Little had returned to Sydney.

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HELLO DARLING! In early 1974, Jeanne decided to fulfil her dream of opening a fashion boutique. ‘Jeanne Mitchell’ was located in Five Ways, Paddington. It was a diminutive space that was a jumble of mannequins, fabric scraps, magazines, lipstickstained coffee cups and pincushions. A narrow staircase led to an upstairs fitting- and storage-room, which was later converted into a makeshift nursery. From the moment Sydney’s latest fashion designer opened her doors reporters were intrigued. A journalist noted on 19 January 1976 that Jeanne ‘made clothes for the social set, copied originals from Vogue or Harper’s and threw pink feathers and sequins together’. When another journalist made an enquiry about the success of her salon, Jeanne replied: It’s like a rats’ nest, darling, but it’s going like a bomb. People just come in and say Pierre Cardin, you know, or Courrèges and I say,

YEAH,

and I just do it. Extortionate!

I’ve got just the thing for you. Only $90 and a great thing out the front like a Joey bag for your boobs.

SUPER!!

Shortly after the opening of the shop, Jeanne was featured in a number of tabloids wearing outfits emblazoned with advertising slogans such as ‘Coca-Cola. It’s the real thing’, ‘Ford’ and ‘Thomas Cook’s Tours. Time Away’. She sourced the Coca-Cola fabric at a market stall in the Philippines and had the Ford fabric printed. Wearing a slogan on an article of clothing was a novel idea in the early 1970s. Says Jeanne: 110

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Homeward bound As far as I can recall there didn’t seem to be a copyright issue with using fabric that featured company logos back then. You could buy it all about the place. It was just a bit of fun. Most people used it for bedspreads and curtains in kids’ rooms and things like that. Jeanne Little’s fashion experiment did not escape the attention of the press or the companies whose products she endorsed. Thomas Cook News described her on 15 August 1974 as ‘a billboard with curves’, while a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph asked on 23 June 1974: Do you see yourself as a walking billboard? If you don’t you could be missing out on the latest fashion craze. Print a name on a T-shirt and you’re part of the game. But T-shirts are just the beginning. Designer Jeanne Mitchell has made advertising a fashionable concern. In an effort to get away from the gloomy colours and styles that reflect gloomy economic depression, Jeanne decided to brighten up the casual scene with bright, original screen prints. Sponsored by the business companies, she added a designer’s touch and made complete outfits from their industrial trademarks. Jeanne believes the trend will have a large following . . . Coca-Cola, in particular, was taken with the designs. According to Jeanne: 111

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HELLO DARLING! Three men in black suits came in to my shop and looked at my Coca-Cola pants. I told them I could make them any size, shape, whatever. Three months later, Coca-Cola had a promotion to send in so many Coca-Cola bottle tops to win a pair of the pants. Amazing. Life could not have been better for Jeanne: she had a great marriage and social life, a wonderful place to live and a successful business. As well, her husband’s career was going from strength to strength: Barry had recently expanded his repertoire by importing furniture from the Philippines with his friend Ronnie Laing. It was when Barry was on one of his many business trips to Manila that he received a phone call from Jeanne. Barry still remembers it: ‘She screamed down the phone, “We’re going to have a baby!” and then she burst out crying.’

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Chapter five

Everyone’s in love with you Jeanne Little is one of those amazing people who has become famous without actually doing anything—Daily Mirror

WHEN JEANNE LITTLE

FIRST APPEARED IN OUR LOUNGE ROOMS

in 1974, she was probably wondering what she was doing there. Just the day before she had gone to the offices of Sydney’s Daily Mirror to deliver her husband Barry’s editorial copy. Barry wrote an interior design column about his craft for the newspaper. When Jeanne made her entrance (something at which she is an expert), a journalist who worked in fashion editorial could not ignore the striking woman in her equally striking outfit. According to Jeanne, ‘They asked me on the spot to pose for a fashion spread. I thought it was a fabulous idea, because business wasn’t going too well at the dress shop and I thought it might help things along.’ What Jeanne Little did not realise when she agreed to do the shoot was that her 113

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HELLO DARLING! appearance in the Daily Mirror would change the course of her life. Most pregnant women are prone to tears, but Jeanne was relaxed about her impending childbirth: she continued to work at the dress shop, fell into her unlikely role on the Mike Walsh Show, and entertained guests at her home. She even dined out with Barry the night before she had her baby. As she told Michael Parkinson on his show in 1981, ‘When I fell pregnant I didn’t want to turn into a vegetable and stay at home.’ At 3 am on 27 September 1974, only sixteen days after her first appearance on the Mike Walsh Show, Jeanne’s waters broke. ‘I’d felt a bit squeamish, but I blamed the food.’ Shortly afterwards, she arrived with Barry at the Crown Street Women’s Hospital. It was here that Jeanne endured almost eight hours of labour, before her daughter, Katie Mae Little, emerged into the world. It was 10.36 am. According to Barry, the new mother asked the midwife what her daughter was like, and the midwife replied, ‘She’s got long eyelashes.’ Jeanne, who is rarely seen in public without her trademark false eyelashes, sat bolt upright in bed and retorted: ‘She must take after her father, because I haven’t got any of my own.’ It was later that the wonder at the miracle of life set in. As Barry explains, ‘When it was all over, after she had the baby, Jeanne collapsed and fell to pieces crying.’ Jeanne received countless visitors when she was in hospital, but the first person to visit was wallpaper designer Florence 114

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Everyone’s in love with you Broadhurst. According to Jeanne she ‘walked into the room in a mink coat and diamonds and said in her commanding voice, “Don’t let anyone breathe any germs on the child.”’ A few days later, postnatal depression set in when Jeanne’s milk ‘turned to cement’. Jeanne says: To my delight I had a bust line that would have made Elizabeth Taylor envious, but the milk didn’t seem to flow in spite of breast pumps that nearly squeezed me to death. The head sister said, ‘Sorry dear, they’ve gone hard, we’ll give you a needle to get rid of them.’ The hospital gave me bottles of Carnation milk, but when I got home Katie was always sick and crying with hunger. We took her back to the hospital but they shooed us away. But it was more than just her child’s health and the intricacies of breastfeeding that was getting Jeanne down: ‘I wondered how I would ever be able to look after the new baby, cook and clean, as well as having the dinner parties and running my shop.’ Six weeks after she gave birth, Jeanne Little was back at work. Two months had passed since the Daily Mirror’s article— titled ‘Can you Guess Jeanne’s Secret?’—which featured Jeanne in her fashionable maternity wear. Now these outfits were packed in mothballs and Jeanne busied herself with new outfits for herself and for her steady stream of clients. In 115

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HELLO DARLING! addition, she had already signed a contract to appear twice a week on the Mike Walsh Show. She would arrive for her performances at the Channel 10 studios carrying nappies and bottles under one arm, wigs and costumes under the other. She now admits that juggling a newborn, a frock shop, her new-found television career, her husband’s work commitments and her domestic duties was one of the most difficult things she has ever done. I often worked until three in the morning finishing designs. When I did get to sleep, Katie would wake for feeds. I was exhausted. I felt it was too much for me, but I’d pull myself together and say, ‘You can do it, women can do anything.’ The strain that Jeanne was feeling did not manifest itself outwardly—she looked more glamorous than ever. As one reporter who visited her boutique noted: ‘It was noon, and she had a mouthful of pins, a baby on her shoulder and she was wearing a full evening dress.’ Jeanne explained to the reporter that her attire was just ‘an old thing for scrubbing the floors in. I wear evening clothes all the time. I even wear them to the beach.’ Public opinion was polarised by this woman whose voice sounded like a ‘cat being dragged through a barbed-wire fence backwards’ and who looked, according to John-Michael Howson, ‘like an extra from Dr Zhivago’. She was variously described as a screaming banshee, a talking chainsaw, a 116

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Everyone’s in love with you zany sidekick and less flatteringly ‘the biggest bag in Australia’. The public either loved her or hated her, but as the ratings on the Mike Walsh Show indicated, they certainly couldn’t get enough of her. There was no one like Jeanne Little at the time. Female entertainers such as Noeline Brown and Denise Drysdale had a different sense of humour, which prompted reporters to take the curious stance of comparing Jeanne Little to male entertainers. One headline blared that Jeanne was ‘Barry Crocker with eyelashes’, while another claimed that she was ‘the Aussie woman’s answer to Ernie Sigley’ (a Melbournebased performer who hosted his own show on Channel 9). But most members of the press described Jeanne Little as Paul Hogan’s female counterpart or, as one headline put it, ‘the ultimate female ocker’. It was a comparison that stuck. Jeanne carved a niche for herself as a voice for the common woman, or as one reporter from the Daily Telegraph deemed it, ‘the voice of Mrs-Everybody-Next-Door’. During Jeanne’s first appearance on television she offered advice for women on how to look good while pregnant. The next time that she appeared on the Mike Walsh Show Jeanne brought up the bane of every pregnant woman’s existence: food cravings. Mike probably expected me to rabbit on, but I said, ‘I haven’t got time to worry about cravings. I’m either cleaning the house or making dresses.’ I advised women 117

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HELLO DARLING! to keep busy and stop thinking about themselves. Think about the women in the fields of China! They haven’t time or money to think about cravings! Several months into Jeanne’s television career, one journalist wrote: ‘Jeanne has become so popular with her straightforward comments . . . She tells the housewives in her own way what she thinks of things they should wear and how they should treat things that bother them.’ Jeanne’s role on the Mike Walsh Show expanded swiftly: she added colour and spice to discussion panels, did movie reviews, performed stunts and magic tricks, and told the sidesplitting anecdotes for which she is renowned. Mike Walsh referred to her as ‘the woman who brought her own special brand of lunacy to the show’. Soon she had her own special segment called ‘Shopping Bag’, which took an irreverent look at merchandise ranging from potato cutters to vases to sex-shop lingerie. Says Jeanne: I dreamt up the ‘Shopping Bag’ segment using shops that had items which I could send up. For instance, from a Scouts shop I sourced lots of things that Scouts carry in their backpacks, such as dried food et cetera. One product was called Dream Soup, so I said, ‘What if it rains and it gets wet? They’ll be eating wet Dream Soup!’ Jeanne seldom, if ever, read a script. While her segment producer David Mitchell (and a host of researchers) certainly 118

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Everyone’s in love with you fed her ideas and gave her some direction, Jeanne’s appearances were mostly off the cuff. As David explains: I used to work out all the bits and pieces that Jeanne would do, all the anecdotes she would tell. There was a corkboard backstage with five columns looking at the week ahead, and Jeanne’s name would be written in the columns three times and it was up to me to think of what Jeanne would do. But she always had a lot of ideas, anecdotes, stories as well; she’s very intelligent, very quick. Sometimes I’d give her a line. Such as once, when we sent her to the Melbourne Cup, I told her to pretend that she thought the bit where the horses walk around in a circle was the race and to say it was very slow. According to Jeanne: Television puts so much pressure on you. They’d say, ‘Now be funny, be terrific.’ They’d almost say, ‘Three, two, one, you’re on!’ I’d think, ‘Heavens, I have to be hysterical.’ She says that if, during the performance, she saw the producer twiddling his thumbs, she would tell herself, ‘I have to be madder. I have to rev it up. I knew what I was going to talk about and the producer would ask “Will it be funny?” and I’d say, “I certainly hope so.”’

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne Little might have been hard for reporters to pigeonhole, but she fit into the format of the Mike Walsh Show with ease. The show, which is best described as a cross between a current affairs program and a variety show, was fast-moving, quirky and fun. It started in 1973 and ran for an hour-anda-half, five days a week. It was only supposed to screen for three months. But it became an instant hit and exceeded everyone’s expectations, including Mike Walsh’s, who had been lured back from a working holiday in England by Ian Holmes, the then Channel 10 station manager. Ian had devised the format for the show, and he was confident that Mike Walsh, who had been a disc jockey, radio broadcaster and television compere, was the person to host it. According to Mike Walsh: They sent me back to Australia on a first-class airfare, and the show was pretty terrible in the first few months. It was pre-recorded about two weeks in advance—we were lucky if most of our guests hadn’t died before it went to air and you couldn’t be topical, so it was pretty horrific. When producer David Price came on board, he and I realised it could be transformed into a huge success, which it was. It was the highest rating show in the country for many years. We got the right people, we went live and once we did that things were cooking. John-Michael Howson, who appeared on the Mike Walsh Show from its inception, remembers the formative days of the show: 120

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Everyone’s in love with you When the Mike Walsh Show started they had to bus in seniors, who only came for the cup of tea and the cookie—I’m serious. There was a cemetery out the back of the studio and Jeanne and I used to joke that the audience were so old, the bus should drop off half of them there on the way back to the retirement village. At its peak five million viewers tuned in to the Mike Walsh Show every week on 130 stations across the country. Midday ratings for the program—which was on Channel 10 from 1973 to 1976 and later switched to Channel 9 from 1977 to 1985—were almost twice today’s scores for highrating television. Media personality, publisher and former editor Ita Buttrose described the show as ‘an oasis in the desert of daytime television’, while one reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald said less succinctly in 1992 that the show was ‘a diet of song, dance and zany stunts with animals, including a camel that had imbibed a bucket of beer and a milkshake before disgracing itself on the studio floor’. The show did feature its fair share of animals, including a singing pig, a talking dog, copulating rabbits, a man-eating ferret and a cat who demonstrated an innovative indoor lavatory for felines. One program featured Jeanne wearing an eye-patch and a slinky black-and-white dress to mimic the spotted Dalmatian she had on the end of a lead. Once on stage, the dog proceeded to ‘hump’ the host’s leg. The audience went hysterical. 121

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HELLO DARLING! Then there was the time that Jeanne was instructed to ride an elephant named Siam. According to Jeanne, one of Mike’s regulars, Mike ‘Shirley’ Williams, was supposed to ride Siam that day, but ‘Shirley’ had a dream the night before that the elephant went crazy. So, Jeanne replaced Shirley. With much trepidation, she hopped onto Siam’s back as she asked the trainer what it would do. ‘It will just walk around in circles,’ he said. Jeanne and Siam had not gone far before the animal flinched and reared up on its hind legs. Jeanne was so petrified that, unbeknown to the nation and the seniors sipping their tea and eating their cookies, she wet her pants. Says John-Michael Howson: Jeanne and I were often partnered and we would go hither and thither around the country doing various appearances and charity gigs. They got us to do the most bizarre things. Once we went to Darwin and they said, ‘Get in with the crocodile, it would be a good shot’, and we said, ‘All right’, and in we got. A week later the crocodile took a man’s arm off. The zany duo also performed a series of highly successful pantomimes that were broadcast live to air. John-Michael Howson explains: My favourites were Off White and the Seven Wharfies and Gone with the Wind Up, where I played Harlot Mascara and Jeanne played Prissy. They were totally high 122

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Everyone’s in love with you camp, outrageous and the public adored them. As soon as the pantomime had been done, people called up the station and asked if they could book to be audience members for the following year, which was unbelievable. David Mitchell was segment producer on the Mike Walsh Show from 1974 to 1980, and he worked in tandem with Jeanne Little and John-Michael Howson for much of that time. He says: Mike Walsh was very bright; he surrounded himself with people who were self-generators—Jeanne Little, JohnMichael Howson, Dr James Wright, Mike Williams. All conductor Geoff Harvey had to do was introduce these identities with his band and they would take over. Mike had a stock-standard series of expressions—such as shock, surprise and outrage—which he would deliver down the camera and that was all he had to do. Mike didn’t have to make himself the centre of attention—he knew the people that watched the show loved his regulars. The show had a motto, ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em gasp, make ’em cry’, and it did that every day of the week. Regular interviews with Hollywood celebrities and heavyweights added sex, spice and scandal to the show. When Danny Kaye, the American star of film, stage and radio, appeared on the show, he caught Mike Walsh reading from a cue card. Danny proceeded to dominate the interview 123

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HELLO DARLING! by pre-empting his own questions. English actor Joan Collins took a flirtatious approach: she batted her eyelids at Mike Walsh and announced to all and sundry that the host was indeed ‘virile and butch’. But Oscar-winner Peter O’Toole topped them all. A seemingly drunk and/or stoned O’Toole recounted a particularly unsavoury tale about urinating in the sink of his dressing room and Katharine Hepburn, who starred opposite him in the film A Lion in Winter, catching him in the act. As O’Toole explained to Mike Walsh, ‘I then shook Kate’s hand and dripped my way into conversation.’ Other celebrities of note who provided entertainment for Mike Walsh devotees included such classic actors as Gregory Peck, James Stewart and Frank Thring, and such comic dynamos as George Burns, Dudley Moore and Spike Milligan. In the late seventies, George Burns took centre stage with Jeanne Little. An afro-toting Jeanne told Burns (and the nation) in great, rambling detail about her Auntie Lottie falling out of the mini-bus during her wedding reception. George Burns listened graciously and intently to Jeanne’s quirky tale, waited for the delivery of her punchline (‘and there was Auntie Lottie asleep on the road’), and said, po-faced: ‘I didn’t understand a word you said.’ By the eighties, a new breed of Hollywood talent signed up to appear on the show, which was now on Channel 9. At the start of the decade American actor Robert De Niro offered his opinions and insights on his Academy Award– winning role in Raging Bull, while a boyish and beaming Mel Gibson provided anecdotes on Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli. 124

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Everyone’s in love with you As the Mike Walsh Show gained momentum and popularity, so did the public’s desire for popular culture, gossip and intrigue. John-Michael Howson was groomed as ‘Hollywood Howson’. His role was to travel abroad and interview the likes of Liza Minnelli, Elton John and Barbra Streisand. The Mike Walsh Show had a massive audience, made up mostly of stay-at-home mums. Pennie Tyrell, who raised her three children in Canberra in the 1970s, says: ‘Watching the Mike Walsh Show was the only thing that stopped me from going batty. It kept women up to date with current affairs and issues.’ Mike Walsh goes one step further and claims that his show had a positive impact on his viewers’ self-esteem. ‘It did a hell of a lot to make women feel more assured about themselves,’ he says. Whatever the Mike Walsh Show did for women, one thing is certain: it turned topics such as sexuality, promiscuity and contraception into a public debate. In 1978, Shere Hite—who is internationally recognised for her work on psychosexual behaviour and gender relations—appeared on the show after the launch of one of her many books. The author’s candid dialogue—which was certain to shock many viewers at the time—included a graphic description of the clitoral structure: ‘We have just as large a genital area as you do, only most of ours (besides the clitoris) is internal . . . which is very interesting, I think.’ In typical Mike Walsh style, he stared down the barrel of the camera, feigned surprise and retorted: ‘Well, I didn’t fall asleep.’ Another regular guest who never failed to create controversy was author, activist and feminist Germaine Greer, an 125

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HELLO DARLING! old friend of Walsh’s from his university days. But it was controversy of a different kind when author Kathy Lette made her appearance on the show shortly after the launch of her book, Puberty Blues. When Lette criticised the show, Walsh leapt to its defence, saying, ‘You might think this is a blue-rinse-set program, but this show’s got balls!’ In 1977, a photograph of Mike Walsh appeared on the front cover of the Bulletin, prompting reporter George Negus to remark that ‘such was the power of the “Mike Walsh phenomenon”’ that ‘an appearance on the program helped sway public opinion’. While the producers of the show could never boast that the program tackled hard-nosed current affairs, they could say that it presented the softer, funnier, more human side of politics. According to Mike Walsh: ‘One of the old things that we used to joke about was that one day we’d get lucky and have a stripper followed by the Prime Minister followed by a dog spot, and we finally did that, and I was pleased.’ In 1977, Gough Whitlam walked onto the set arm in arm with his wife, Margaret. Gough set a trend that was followed by two other high-profile politicians: Malcolm Fraser and Bill Hayden, who both appeared with their wives. Then Bob Hawke made his stage debut in 1981, making the savvy decision to sit in the host’s chair for the day. A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald described the then Federal Opposition spokesman on industrial relations as ‘a wet chicken. He walked stiffly, slumped rather than sat, told a bad joke and didn’t know how to get his guests off on time.’ 126

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Everyone’s in love with you The same reporter also claimed that the fun really started when Jeanne Little appeared on the set. He referred to the zany banter that ensued as ‘politics upstaged by the absurd’. She yelled ‘DARLING’ at him, pinned a carnation in his buttonhole to make him look ‘H-E-W-W-M-A-N’ and took him on a razzle dazzle of nonsense. Miss Little took the smile off the Hawke face when she asked if politicians were really friends behind the scenes or ‘do you hate each other’s guts?’ ‘Seriously,’ he intoned in his best diplomatic manner, ‘because you disagree with a man doesn’t mean you can’t admire his integrity or like him as a person.’ There was more, but Miss Little wasn’t going to let him get away with it. ‘Aaahhhooo Bob. That gets me right

HERE.’

In his role as interviewer, Bob Hawke was eager to ascertain Jeanne Little’s thoughts on the state of the nation. Without a moment’s hesitation she replied: ‘Now unemployment . . . the answer is obvious . . . make the school leaving age thirty-five.’ In the mid seventies, Jeanne featured prominently in ‘ocker’ advertising pioneered by John Singleton. Her first television commercial was for Sleeman Ford, a dealership that sold second-hand cars in Melbourne. Says Jeanne: I was very excited and imagined myself leaning over the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce, so I wore a glamorous evening 127

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HELLO DARLING! dress. When I arrived in Melbourne it was raining and the film crew and their camera were under a tarpaulin. It was low budget with no make-up artist and only a shed to change in. I was told to point and yell while I skipped over puddles of water towards the camera. No wonder I had mud up to my knees, I ran through the puddles about twenty times! I was paid five hundred dollars. That was a fortune to me after being paid only fifty dollars a week by Channel 10. The commercial had the desired effect, because even though it annoyed people, it got their attention—the dealership sold every car. I only realised how offensive the ad was to some people when I was in Melbourne three months later buying some fabric and a lady beside me suddenly turned to me and said: ‘It’s you! I can’t stand you! You in that terrible ad!’ ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I stammered. ‘I was told to do it that way!’ I grabbed my fabric and ran. Says Mike Walsh: They made her screech and carry on in those early Singleton ads, in a dress, mud up to her knees—I’m sure she made a lot of money out of them, but they were illadvised because she really started to upset people, so we had to be very careful how we used her on the show for a while because people were really ‘off’ her. ‘Are you paying attention?’ she’d scream at you—typical Singleton advertising in those days, all meant to upset you. I think 128

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Everyone’s in love with you she paid a big price for that actually. So, we made a conscious decision to show her as a performer rather than a screaming harridan. But from memory I think we limited her performances for a while to let that ocker image bury itself. Reporters certainly slammed Jeanne after she appeared in the Singleton advertisements. One claimed that she was ‘a yelling peril before which no kiddies’ vowels could survive’, while another said ‘she could probably demolish the Sydney Opera House with one well-placed squawk’. In its 1976 September issue, Cleo summed up the advertisements as follows: ‘The ocker ad is with us. Each night, Jax the Ripper, Jeanne Little, Betty Best and . . . others screech, whine and grate at us like so many demented cockatoos. They’re ugly, vulgar and tasteless—but they work.’ Nineteen seventy-six took Jeanne Little on a roller-coaster ride of emotions: in February, she was on a high with her first Logie win; in July, she was in a well of despair—her eightytwo-year-old mother suffered a fatal stroke. For much of the winter of her life, Katie Mitchell had been robust and healthy. She lived alone and always insisted on doing things for herself. But she was hard of hearing, her sight was not good, and she had already suffered several minor strokes. When Jeanne heard the news that her mother was in hospital, she remembers racing straight to her side. 129

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HELLO DARLING! It was 11 pm. I had just finished a charity event and came home to a message that said Mumma was in hospital. I arrived and I was looking and looking for her; there were so many elderly people in there—fifty or more— with oxygen masks pressed to their faces. I couldn’t make any of them out. They all looked the same. So I proceeded to look for the mole on my mother’s forehead which was the button that I pressed as a child to make her stick her tongue out. Katherine Mitchell’s funeral was held at St Andrews Presbyterian Church in Brighton-le-Sands. The location was significant: it was where Jeanne’s mother had performed in fundraising concerts. The congregation was packed with mourners: most of them were forced to stand. Jeanne recalls that when she arrived at the church: Elsie, my sister, was crying already. We smiled because she was known to cry at a stranger’s wedding. But here we knew we had to get through this service, remembering the wonderful memories of our lives and our selfless mother, the matriarch who held our family together, a brave hard-working immigrant. As the service ended, the strains of a Scottish piper who started to play outside the church brought us all undone. It would be two years before Jeanne could talk about her mother’s death without ‘dissolving completely in tears’. 130

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Everyone’s in love with you From time to time, Jeanne still visits her mother’s plaque at the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium. Katherine Mitchell’s ashes are located in close proximity to those of her younger brother, John, who had been with her on her voyage to Australia in 1912. When Jeanne thinks of her mother in her later years, she remembers that: I used to go around to her place and let my washing dry on the clothesline in the sun while I had cups of tea or jelly lamingtons with Mumma in the sunroom or overlooking the bay. One day, as we sat there, the phone rang and she answered it. By this stage she was very hard of hearing and so she said to the caller, ‘Would you just say that again? No, I can’t quite get what you’re saying. Could you repeat that?’ I ran over, grabbed the phone off her and put my ear to the receiver. Instead of being shocked, I just laughed. It was a filthy phone caller who must’ve had all his dreams come true when he was asked to repeat his foul obscenities. When Jeanne accepted her Logie Award in February 1976, she could not have envisaged that her mother’s death was just around the corner. The award ceremony was a glitzy affair, one that was fruitful for the Mike Walsh Show. There was Jeanne Little’s win as Best Female Personality in New South Wales; while Mike Walsh took home the equivalent male award and the show got a guernsey in the ‘Most Popular’ category. One observer from TV Week noted that: 131

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HELLO DARLING! The huge vote which saw the Walsh show take out three Logies is proof indeed that the format of the show and the performances and personalities of Mike and Jeanne are big business for the 0–10 Network. The Logie win came as a complete surprise to Jeanne and the success was sweet. Producer David Mitchell explains: Jeanne got the Logie based on about a year’s work. She was a phenomenon, she just burst onto the scene. When she first started we put on the credits ‘Jeanne Little dressed by Jeanne Mitchell Originals’, and that’s all the ‘money’ she got. Then it was decided that she should get a fee and next thing she was taking home a Logie—unbelievable. Barry puts it another way: If you’d have told her just six months before that she was going to win a Logie she would’ve laughed at you. We were just happily going along with our lives, me with my career, her in the dress shop with the baby. I suppose the key to understanding Jeanne is that she has never, ever tried to get to where she is. The television career, the Logies, everything just happened to her, like it was somehow meant to happen. Winning the award left Jeanne Little speechless. According to one reporter, she ‘drooled her way through a thousand 132

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Everyone’s in love with you thankyous’, before she gave ‘special mention to all the people who hated her Norman Ross commercial’. It was American actor Martin Milner, star of Route 66 and Valley of the Dolls, who presented Jeanne with her Logie statuette. He was so struck by what he saw and heard that he said to compere Bert Newton, ‘Is that for real? Hell, I’ve never worked with Harpo Marx before.’ For the night, Jeanne Little was bedecked with an afro wig that she teamed with her trademark false eyelashes, an elegant apricot beaded gown and oversized jewels. She could not have looked more different to her friend Garry McDonald (aka Norman Gunston), who won two awards that night: the Gold Logie and the George Wallace Memorial Award for Best New Talent. In his acceptance speech for the former award, McDonald, who sported a greasy comb-over and bloodied tissues stuck to a freshly shaven face, thanked all the people who helped him secure the award and accused them of being ‘crawlers’. He also thanked his mother for not having the operation that would have prevented him from being born. Despite looking like each other’s polar opposites, it was unanimous that the Logie Awards that year belonged to Jeanne Little and Garry McDonald. One reporter from TV Week observed: ‘It was Jeanne Little and Norman Gunston who really stole the show. Overseas guests sat back wideeyed and open-mouthed as the two went on to charm the audience.’ According to Jeanne: 133

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HELLO DARLING! The morning after the Logies we shot a promotion for the Mike Walsh Show. Mike stood on a high pedestal holding his Logie, while the regulars and staff raised their arms towards Mike as a salute to their winner. I laughed to myself as I waved up at Mike, because I had won the equivalent award. About a month after the Logie Awards Jeanne commented to a journalist that ‘my big dream is to win a Gold Logie as Australia’s top female personality’. Within a year, her wish had come true. But a year is a long time in television. By the time Jeanne Little won the 1977 Gold Logie Award, she and Mike Walsh had parted company.

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Chapter six

The train kept a-rollin’ Since she quit the Mike Walsh Show two years ago, Jeanne Little has wandered through the TV wilderness, as lonely as a cloud!—Sun-Herald

THE LOGIE AWARDS

ARE A CULTURALLY ELUSIVE PHENOMENON.

They’re as Australian as a Holden ute or a packet of Minties. They are perhaps best described as the Australian equivalent of the Emmy Awards. Supporters insist such a prize can increase a celebrity’s currency in the marketplace and reinforce a performer’s talent and self-esteem. They call a Logie a performer’s highest accolade. Critics assert the awards are a shoddy copy of an American concept and insist the winners reflect the tastes of the readership of TV Week (namely teenage girls). Conspiracy theorists argue that network publicists engage in mass voting to rig the results. Any which way, winning a Logie can change a celebrity’s life. It changed Jeanne Little’s. 135

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HELLO DARLING! The 1977 Logie Awards was a curious event for Jeanne. What should have signalled a magical moment in her short television career instead evoked mixed feelings. One of the reasons for this was the response Jeanne received from her peers when she won the award. As she explained to a reporter from the Good Weekend in 1994: When I won the Gold Logie there were a few gasps of shock and some polite applause. Later, only a few people came up to congratulate me, out of all of those present. They resented me because I hadn’t spent years painstakingly learning my craft, as they had. In the beginning, I’d been tolerated because everyone believed I was a nineday wonder. Now, there I was, with my flat chest, thin hair, walking off with the Gold Logie. Jeanne’s apprehension was also due to the retrospective nature of the Logie Awards’ voting system—by the time Jeanne won her Gold Logie she was no longer employed by Channel 10. Jeanne explains: It came to me at a very low time in my career. I won the award for the work I did on the Mike Walsh Show, yet I was no longer working with Mike Walsh. In fact, I wasn’t working on anything at all. My career was at a complete standstill. I had signed a contract with Channel 7, yet they did not know what to do with me. However, here I was taking home the Gold Logie. 136

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The train kept a-rollin’ Mike Walsh has this to say about Jeanne’s Gold Logie win: All those piss-elegant greats who thought they were contributing something to the ‘yarts’ suddenly found themselves upstaged by this strange-throated vaudeville character. Which I’ve always loved—kick the establishment. He does, however, have a particular spin on Jeanne’s rapid rise to success, claiming her Gold Logie win was attributable to the broad ‘reach’ of the Mike Walsh Show. You’ve got to take into account that most of the shows weren’t syndicated that widely in those days. For example, Don Lane’s show was only broadcast in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide. It hardly played in provincial cities, and that was pretty typical of most of those shows. We were on 115 stations, and therefore we had the biggest audience, and therefore Jeanne was a big star, and she was very much loved, and the public obviously voted for her. Mike Walsh had already made an appearance on stage ahead of Jeanne that night. The award was for the Mike Walsh Show and, as for Jeanne, it was for work done the preceding year. But this award was not for Walsh to collect. As the Daily Telegraph’s report reflects, trouble had been brewing between Mike Walsh and Channel 10: 137

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HELLO DARLING! The animosity spilled over at the annual TV Week Logie Awards in Melbourne, when Walsh claimed the Logie Award for the show ahead of Ten’s general manager, Mr Ian Kennon, who was to have received the award on behalf of his channel. After collecting the award, Walsh famously refused to hand it over to Channel 10, who insisted the award belonged to them. Today, the award still sits alongside countless other awards in Walsh’s Cremorne office. On 7 February 1977, Mike Walsh and his program made the formal switch from Channel 10 to Channel 9. It was a deal Walsh had been negotiating for months. Jeanne Little claims she was one of the last to find out about it: I read about the news in the Sydney Morning Herald. I was shocked. It felt strange to read about something that was going to impact on my life so significantly in the newspaper. I was never consulted, none of us were. The deal was made and it was a fait accompli. It left me feeling confused. The midday ratings of the Mike Walsh Show, which were almost twice today’s scores for daytime television, had not escaped the attention of Channel 9 boss Kerry Packer. So the media mogul paid Walsh an exorbitant fee to switch channels, as well as allowing him to establish his own 138

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The train kept a-rollin’ production company to present the show. Ian Holmes, the then Channel 10 chief executive, dryly observed: ‘When Kerry Packer wanted something, he usually got it.’ This arrangement suited both parties until years later, when Channel 9 took the production inhouse with Ray Martin at the helm. Producer David Price told a journalist from the Daily Telegraph on 14 June 1977: ‘There was a lot of politics behind Mike Walsh’s move . . . and the whole story never came out. There were allegations that Mike wasn’t satisfied with the money Ten were offering him.’ Walsh’s move was accompanied by a row with Channel 10 over missing footage of the early Mike Walsh Show. This footage is still missing today—which means any record of Jeanne Little’s appearances from 1973 to 1976 has been lost. When Mike Walsh leapfrogged from Channel 10 to Channel 9, most people assumed that Jeanne Little would follow. Even the then vice-president of Channel 9 programming, Gordon French, announced to the press with supreme confidence that, ‘she is part of the deal. She will be coming across to Nine.’ But Jeanne had other plans: By this time I was ready for a change. I felt stale; there was no feedback on my performances and I couldn’t tell whether I was growing or not. And besides I didn’t want people to get sick of me doing the same old thing. So off I went. 139

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HELLO DARLING! But it was not that simple: a decade would pass before Jeanne turned her back on the zany alter ego that she claimed both suffocated and irritated her. In 1976, Jeanne was still relatively new to television, and perhaps a little naïve about the pushing and shoving that goes on behind the scenes with industry heavyweights. She was also overwhelmed by her popularity, which she says left her ‘gasping for breath’. Her total displeasure and discomfort at being typecast as what she describes as a ‘dumb blonde’ did not sink in until the damage had been done. In 1988 she told a reporter from the Sun: I wanted to do something that had more depth to it. I was sick of being a clown, which was something that had developed little by little over twelve years or so. I look at those old shows now and see over the years I had become a caricature. A few years earlier she said this to another journalist: ‘I would like to relax and be myself . . . debate Buddhism or the relationship between China and Russia, but people wouldn’t take me seriously.’ According to Barry, his wife was typecast for a number of reasons: This is what was expected of her. It was what worked, what the public enjoyed, and what television manage140

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The train kept a-rollin’ ment wanted. So they restricted her role. Every time she tried to offer an opinion about politics, current affairs or a charity that she felt strongly about, the topic was politely changed, the subject redirected, the footage cut or whatever. When asked why he thinks his former colleague was typecast as a dumb blonde, Mike Walsh replied: As opposed to what? An opera singer? Or a Shakespearian actor? . . . That’s what she is—everyone is typecast as a performer. Her raison d’être was doing these zany Jeanne Little sort of things. John-Michael Howson views matters differently. He blames the lack of creativity in Australian television for an endemic misuse of talent: The problem is there are not the creative writers that there used to be. A good writer has the ability to tailor and transform things for a unique, quirky and eccentric stage persona—which is what Jeanne Little is. In America they would have known exactly what to do with her. Just as they tailored things for Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr or Fran Drescher, they would have tailored a show for Jeanne Little. It wasn’t until later in her career that Jeanne found the true depth of her talent. 141

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HELLO DARLING! To imagine that the private Jeanne is anything like the harebrained character that she played on the Mike Walsh Show is to grossly underestimate her. Marcia Hines, who met her on the set of the hit musical Jerry’s Girls in 1987, describes Jeanne as ‘one of the most intelligent and articulate people I know. There’s so much beneath the flighty character we know from television. She’s so misunderstood.’ Hines later told Good Weekend in 1994 that Jeanne is ‘extremely well travelled, has a real knowledge of the world and is very, very good at summing people up. I respect any woman who hasn’t used her sexuality in a blatant way to get on.’ John Frost, the Australian producer of Jerry’s Girls, made this comment about her: ‘Jeanne is astute and can be strong . . . you can’t steamroll her. She’s also one of the few people in show business nobody seems to speak ill of.’ Winning a Gold Logie can elevate a celebrity from the mundane to the glorious. In the mid 1970s Jeanne Little was Australia’s hottest female star. So when news spread that she was ‘up for grabs’, a fierce bidding war ensued. Says Barry: The producers at Channel 10 were adamant that they didn’t want her to leave. What we didn’t realise was Australia’s three commercial networks—channels 10, 9 and 7—were all eager to sign her up. Eventually they all made good offers, but to us it wasn’t about the money; we chose the offer that we thought would allow Jeanne to develop professionally. 142

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The train kept a-rollin’ In late 1976, Jeanne signed a lucrative deal with Channel 7, which made her—according to a number of reports—the highest paid woman on Australian television. As Mike Munro noted in the Daily Mirror on 18 November 1976: She will sign a one-year contract with Channel Seven believed to be worth more than $50 000 . . . Jeanne and her husband, Barry, the Daily Mirror’s expert on interior design, were ecstatic today. ‘Trooly, daahling, I just can’t believe it,’ she said at her Paddington home. ‘Reely, it’s fabulous—I’m still in shock.’ Reporter Mike Gibson made this comment about the deal: I did detect a certain stunned amazement around town . . . That was certainly the case at our pub last night. ‘A thousand dollars a week for Jeanne Little . . .’ mumbled one bloke as he stared into his beer. ‘Surely they’re paying her $1000 a week to shut up . . .’ muttered his mate beside him. ‘You know, if I had to go home to a voice like that every night, I’d move out.’ The Channel 7 deal looked good on paper, but it did not work out as Jeanne and Barry had expected. The network had a contract with one of Australia’s hottest stars, but they had nowhere to put her. According to Jeanne: It was Glen Kinging who wooed me across to Channel 7. Glen, who is still a great friend of mine, admitted that all 143

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HELLO DARLING! along they didn’t know how to use me, and then I suddenly won the Gold Logie and they were obliged to do something definite with a Gold Logie winner. Barry believes that Channel 7 was just trying to outdo the competition. ‘They had lost Paul Hogan to Channel 9 in 1976,’ says Barry. ‘So they countered by signing Jeanne and foiling Channel 9’s apparent plan to continue using her in the Mike Walsh Show.’ Barry’s theory was supported in the press, who had a field day speculating about Jeanne’s future. The Sun asked on 31 January 1977: ‘Jeanne Little, where are you? Since Channel Seven’s momentous announcement that they’d secured your services for this year, you’ve appeared on television only once. So, what’s happening?’ Channel 7 finally got its act together, by planning for Jeanne to star in a series of comedy specials by writer, actor and producer Digby Wolfe. But when Wolfe returned home to the United States for a holiday and then announced he wasn’t coming back, Channel 7 was stuck with a personality but no show. It was around this time that Jeanne did a brief stint on Channel 7 on the current affairs program Willesee but, says Jeanne: ‘It was obvious from that start that Willesee and I didn’t fit. We have a completely different sense of humour.’ She was also teamed with movie buff Bill Collins for lunchtime chats (‘Wearing one of Jean Harlow’s dresses was probably the highlight’), and given her own afternoon chat show called Jeanne’s Little Show. Jeanne describes the latter as: 144

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The train kept a-rollin’ a mini Mike Walsh Show that only lasted six months. It was on at 3.30 pm in the graveyard time of television, when women were picking up children and taxis were changing over. It was the pits. The show was done on a shoestring, the sets were made of crêpe paper. We did all our own make-up, made all our own costumes, and most of the time we had to organise our own rehearsals. The producer loathed all the funny suggestions I made. I’d interview people, do silly spots like being a bus conductor in a frizzy wig who gave the passengers an apple for good behaviour. Usually the audience fell asleep. We found out later they got them from the psychiatric centre down the road. It was outrageous. Then, in early 1978, came what should have been a breakthrough. Channel 7 approached English comedy producer Austin Steele, who had worked on The Two Ronnies and Dave Allen’s series of Australian specials. They wanted Steele to put Jeanne into a situation comedy and the result was Cuckoo in the Nest. For the first time Jeanne had to learn lines. Jeanne was cast as a scatterbrained, madcap divorcee named Jeanne Phillips. The plot was simple: every time Jeanne left one of her many husbands, she moved in with her conservative sister, long-suffering brother-in-law and their two teenage children. Jeanne’s presence usually disrupted the entire household. A pilot program was made. This was shown to Channel 7 executives, who approved of it, and the 145

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HELLO DARLING! series was given the thumbs up. By July 1978 four episodes were made and put to air. Then, without warning, it was dropped. Delamore McNicoll, a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph, was one of the program’s supporters: ‘This could have been one of Channel 7’s biggest mistakes. Jeanne, playing her normal, madcap self, is brilliant. She shines in situation comedy.’ Most critics said that Jeanne was the best of a bad lot. Most were unanimous that Jeanne was outstanding ‘in her tailor-made role, but an abysmal script, cheap studio production and mediocre supporting cast weigh her down’. The press described Jeanne variously as ‘the heartbeat of this halfhearted production. She shines through the cheap-looking sets, visually and audibly’, and ‘For a housewife who soared to fame on raucous vocal chords hinged to feather-brained comments . . . Jeanne emerges as a situation comedy performer much better than I expected.’ As a result of both Jeanne’s Little Show and Cuckoo in the Nest major scuffles broke out between the Littles and Channel 7 management, and Barry nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘He contracted alopecia, a condition where his hair fell out in clumps,’ says Jeanne. ‘He was depressed. He couldn’t sleep or eat. It was terrible.’ Barry’s health was a big price to pay for trying to turn his wife into a superstar: I’d taken over as Jeanne’s manager—and still had my own business to run—when all this erupted. It was just such an extreme situation. She’d won the Gold Logie, yet 146

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The train kept a-rollin’ here she was doing the most ridiculous things that were obviously not working for her. It was ruining her career. They kept trying to change her. Telling her to walk differently, talk differently. They didn’t understand what her strengths were. We wanted answers, something positive for Jeanne to channel her energy into, but we weren’t given any. I started to stress out, we both did and it all came undone. At the end of the year, Jeanne Little did not renew her contract with Channel 7.

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Chapter seven

The times they are a-changin’ I’m a fake darling, I can’t sing, dance, act—anything. I can’t even speak properly—Jeanne Little

AMID JEANNE’S

UNSUCCESSFUL YEAR AT

CHANNEL 7,

HER

daughter, Katie, started school. Barry Little’s secretary, Ruth Williams, remembers the day Jeanne left Katie on the other side of the iron gates at Rose Bay’s Kambala. ‘Jeanne came back to Barry’s studio and she was in fits of tears,’ says Ruth. ‘Although she tried to continue to be hardworking and independent, it is always hard for any mother to let go and she was pretty devastated.’ At the time Jeanne told reporters: ‘Luckily, working on daytime television, I am able to combine motherhood with my career. I can take her to school every morning and pick her up after I finish work at the studio.’ Jeanne had all the ingredients to make her career a success—determination, dedication and drive—but she also had her life in perspective: 149

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HELLO DARLING! The day Katie Mae came into my life, she was more important than any career. Katie is and always will be the light of our lives. I loved having Katie, watching a child grow. It has made me a nicer person. I’m less selfish and more understanding. Growing up with a high-profile parent was not easy for Katie Little, but it did make life exciting. Katie recalls: I was dragged everywhere. To lots of different parties, overseas, to the Green Room out the back of the Mike Walsh Show playing with my toys, being cuddled by everyone, in the make-up room with Mum. I’ve always been able to get along with a lot of people and I suppose it was because Mum and Dad always dragged me around. There was always something happening, a party to go to, somewhere to be. I was never bored as a kid—there was always something to do, and I was very independent as a child and I still am. Mum had her career going, Dad had his career going and I always had my things that I had to do—the three of us were always doing our own stuff, happily working away. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I didn’t have what you’d call an average, normal childhood. Most of the children at Kambala had no comprehension of the life that Katie led, but there was one girl who did— Kate McDonald, whose father is actor and comedian Garry McDonald. According to Jeanne: 150

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The times they are a-changin’ I’d turn up to school in a wig and false eyelashes, having come straight from the studio, and then Garry would turn up in a flowing sarong tied loosely about his waist and bare feet and all the other parents would look at us and think, oh my goodness me. The bullies on the school bus savoured this spectacle. ‘I had a bit of a hard time at junior school,’ says Katie. Kids from the senior school teased me mercilessly, saying ‘Hello daaarling’ all the time. They did it a lot. I remember a gang being up the back of the bus and them thinking they were very tough. It did have an effect on me at the time. Jeanne remembers this period as a terrible time for Katie being my daughter. I took her to a couple of fêtes that I had to officially open. All the people would hang around me asking for my autograph, taking photos and pushing Katie out of the way, so I decided not to take her to any functions ever again. When we took a holiday overseas we would often encounter, Australians travelling abroad who recognised me. One time we were in Rome and we were told that His Holiness was giving a service. We found seats and the Pope began. Suddenly, about three rows back, a woman started shouting—‘Jeanne, Jeanne Little! What are you doing 151

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HELLO DARLING! here? Can I get a photo of you?’—while the Pope was trying to conduct his service! She went on and on so much that I told her to meet me outside. She obviously didn’t care about the Pope or the Catholics and rattled on about how she was from Newcastle. It was so embarrassing. But we got used to this sort of thing happening. In spite of the more difficult trappings of Jeanne’s celebrity, Katie took life and learning in her stride. She became a prefect ‘not because I was especially academic but because I could always see the good in people. I was very creative and I did a lot of extracurricular stuff—like sport—that I was hopeless at, but like Mum I gave things a go.’ Katie still retains this enthusiasm and joie de vivre, and she is blessed with a forthright attitude and a dry sense of humour. Like Jeanne, she is diminutive, blond and perky; she thinks, speaks and moves quickly, while she emanates a natural warmth that makes you feel like you’ve known her forever. In 1979, Jeanne left her unsavoury experience with Channel 7 behind. She signed a year-long contract with Channel 9, at half the salary she had become accustomed to. The contract spelled her return, as a regular, to the Mike Walsh Show. Barry explains: I ran into producer David Price. He suggested that Jeanne might like to come back on board with the old crew. Mike Walsh didn’t particularly want her back, but David 152

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The times they are a-changin’ thought it would work and it was he who stepped in and smoothed the waters. According to Jeanne: I was a different person because of the work I’d done on Jeanne’s Little Show, which comprised mostly interviews. It taught me interviewing skills and how to think up my own segments. I had to sing duets and dance with some of the stars who appeared on the show. So I felt quite capable for the first time on the Mike Walsh Show. Jeanne also had the benefit of hindsight. She knew what she was getting herself into with her former boss. Fans across the nation knew Mike Walsh as a fun-loving, blue-eyed bachelor. Jeanne Little felt he could be moody, temperamental and demanding. Says Jeanne: He frequently flew into a rage over what I felt was the smallest matter. He would scream and shout obscenities and hurl objects such as telephones, books and magazines across the room. He never directed these outbursts at me personally, but I couldn’t help but be affected by them. I saw him as a loner who lived an odd existence. He didn’t seem to have a family life as such. The producers would often call to wake him up in the mornings and he would apparently grumble and curse at them. John-Michael Howson paints this picture of Mike Walsh: 153

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HELLO DARLING! Talent comes in complex boxes. Admittedly there were days where he came in and he had a temper, but never when he was on camera. When he was on camera he went for broke. None of the viewers would have guessed what was going on behind the scenes. But whenever he did go off at someone, he never ended the day with an angry word. He made sure he talked it through which, in my mind, counts for a lot. David Mitchell agrees that Mike Walsh was tough: But I learnt more from him working in television than anyone else. Although he could be extremely temperamental—Mike really was the one that everyone was frightened of—he knew what made for good TV. When he was angry, he was usually angry for a good reason. He’d always say, ‘What’s your big finish Jeanne?’ and if she didn’t have a big finish, she knew that she’d failed— but really it was me who had failed because we worked together. I remember Mike struck fear into all of us minions who were working for him, because if you did a segment that the audience didn’t react well to, it was given an award for ‘appalling segment’. This award became like an inhouse joke and it was something we all dreaded because it was written up and put on a plaque in the office for all to see. Geoff Harvey always pre-empted these awards. He’d strike up the band with a particular song towards the end of the dud segment. When he did that we knew our fate was sealed. 154

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The times they are a-changin’ Mike Walsh refuses to answer any questions about his personal life. But comments that he has made to various reporters over the years help to provide a window into his world. In 1982 he said to a reporter from the Sun-Herald: If I want to do anything, I want to do it as well as I can, at optimum level. I’m not a second-prize man. I’ve never deliberately set out to get second prize at anything. I hate failure and I’ve skated pretty close to it a couple of times. And he said this to a journalist from Woman’s Day: ‘I’ve got two speeds. One is busy; the other is absolute stop. I’m a worker. I wind up like mad, the show works on adrenaline. Then I collapse into quiet and dull periods.’ Mike Walsh is a perfectionist who expects the best from himself and also from those who work for him. It is an entrepreneurial instinct that has made him a success, but it also means he is imbued with a sense of ownership over what he feels is rightly his: namely, the talent that he grooms. Jeanne Little explains: When I did the John Singleton ads Mike went off his brain at me. I remember feeling very upset. He said I hadn’t consulted him, but there was nothing in my contract to say that I should. After I appeared in the ads, he even stood up in front of the studio audience and talked to them about what a bad decision I had made. He acted not like my father, but like my agent or manager. 155

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HELLO DARLING! But I was paid ten thousand dollars for one of those ads, which was a lot of money in those days. At one point it got so bad that my stuttering became a real issue—I felt so stressed out by the pressure that he put on me. Mike even objected to me appearing on any other Channel 9 program except for his, which is not normally the case—when you’re with a network they use you for whatever format you fit into. When you work for Mike you give him 100 per cent, not less. It was around this time that Jeanne and Barry booked a three-week holiday to Japan. It was their second honeymoon. They had been married for eight years and Katie was five years old. A highlight of the trip was a stay in Tawaraya, a 300-year-old ryokan (traditional inn) located in the heart of Kyoto. It featured kimono-clad staff, lantern-lit pools and a daily six-course meal that was a gastronomist’s dream. What made Tawaraya so special was that the same family—who are committed to preserving Japanese traditions—have served guests at this ryokan for eleven generations. According to Jeanne: ‘We had our backs scrubbed, our baths filled up, our beds rolled down and our slippers put out for us. We just put our feet up, relaxed and contemplated the future.’ Shortly after her return from abroad, Jeanne was back at work. It was the beginning of a new era. Her role on the Mike Walsh Show now diversified to include do-it-yourself segments on all things domestic: brewing beer, assembling cocktails, arranging flowers, papering walls, restoring furniture. She 156

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The times they are a-changin’ offered tips on social etiquette, promoted Aussie paraphernalia, reviewed movies, and interviewed celebrities such as Carry On star Barbara Windsor, Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson and pop-singer Adam Ant. Jeanne also needed to jump into the hot seat from time to time. As she explains: Once there was a knife thrower on the show, who threw knives around his wife. When he had finished, Mike asked me to stand in her place, so I pretended I was terrified, knowing the man would never make a mistake. Three weeks later there was a photo in the newspaper of his wife—she had a broken nose because her knifethrower husband had missed! Jeanne also provided beauty advice on skin, nails, hair and elixirs of youth. She recalls: One day the producer phoned in a panic and said, ‘You have to come straight away because someone has dipped out.’ I said, ‘I haven’t got any ideas,’ and he said, ‘Just think of something on the way!’ Running out the door, a photo on the mantelpiece gave me a thought. When I walked on, I said, ‘Hello darlings! I’m going to show you how to have your photo taken so you’ll look wonderful!’ There was a big stool on the set. I said, ‘Don’t sit on the stool. Hold on to it, take three steps away from it and lean sideways, so all the skin on your face and neck 157

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HELLO DARLING! stretches and you look ten years younger. Then, for people who are older, all you have to do is this.’ At this point, I took a big bulldog clip and gathered the skin at the back of my neck into it. ‘This way you’ll look twenty years younger,’ I said. The audience screamed with laughter. Would you believe I received hundreds of inquiries asking, ‘What was the thing you put on the back of your neck? Where can I buy one?’ But it was in her 1984 tribute to cabaret performer and silver-screen goddess Marlene Dietrich that Jeanne really shone. It started when the director of the Mike Walsh Show, Brian Phyllis, suggested that Jeanne Little looked like Dietrich. Within days, Jeanne was pencilled in to mimic Dietrich singing The Boys in the Back Room. Jeanne was completely comfortable in her role as the famously androgynous icon, wearing a tailored pantsuit, complete with top hat and tails and standing under a street lamp languidly smoking a cigarette. Startling though were the low, velvety tones of her singing voice—much better than many would have expected, given her reputation as a screaming banshee. The performance was a real shift away from anything the public had previously seen Jeanne do and it was the first solid indication that there was a deeper layer to her talent. According to Jeanne: Things changed for me on television after I sang Marlene. And years later when I did my first one-woman cabaret 158

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The times they are a-changin’ show, Hello Dahling!, and sang a medley of Marlene numbers, everyone, I mean everyone—even little old ladies with shopping bags—came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Oh Jeanne, when you sang Marlene it was just faaabulous.’ Jeanne had done a little bit of public singing before her Dietrich number. She had performed a few duets on the Mike Walsh Show with comedian and songstress Maria Venuti. More significantly, however, she cut a record in 1977 named Darling, Are You Paying Attention? This was co-written and co-performed with 1950s-style rock group, The Silver Studs. One side of the record featured ‘The Oceana Roll’, a song first recorded by American singer, entertainer and actress Jane Powell (Jeanne sang it in a lower register); the ‘B’ side included an original song, which the record was named after. But perhaps Jeanne’s performance as Marlene Dietrich in 1984 was the first time she had put her heart and soul into song. When Jeanne wasn’t singing, performing or interviewing a celebrity on the Mike Walsh Show, she was travelling interstate or overseas. In 1980, she was flown to London to appear on Parkinson, where the host introduced her as ‘a comparative newcomer to the world of television . . . the real-life Dame Edna Everage, suburban superstar’. Jeanne appeared on the chat show alongside such distinguished guests as film veteran Dora Bryan, comedian and actor Alfred Marks (star of Fanny Hill and Desert Mice), violinist Stéphane Grappelli and disc jockey Pete Murray. But it was Jeanne who stole the show. 159

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HELLO DARLING! Jeanne made her entrance in a dress that packed a punch: an elegant, single-shouldered black gown with vibrant, almost garish, coloured panels reminiscent of Australian flora, and hundreds of beads and sequins that twinkled and winked under the studio lights. Explains Jeanne: The dress started out being just plain black with the coloured panels. But I made a stopover in Hong Kong and just had to buy the beads. From then on all the boys on the plane were just marvellous, darling, sewing and sewing all the way. The ‘boys’ were two Qantas flight attendants, who were concerned that she wouldn’t get the hundreds of beads sewn onto her dress before she arrived at her destination. So, at an elevation of 25 000 feet, they each grabbed a seat beside her, and took up a needle and thread. Jeanne barely came up for air during her appearance on Parkinson. British viewers were mesmerised. On 21 January 1980, a journalist from the London Evening News noted: Parkinson’s Saturday night audience surely wondered what had hit them—in fact, he looked dumbfounded himself— when Jeanne Little breezed into the studio in a bizarre outfit, a blond mop falling into her eyes, and proceeded non-stop to yap on, in what was a predominantly Australian, but one of the strangest accents ever to be heard on British television . . . The dizzy dame can talk the hind 160

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The times they are a-changin’ and front legs off a dozen donkeys . . . But what a woman! You wouldn’t need a TV set with her in the house. A journalist from Sydney’s Daily Mirror gave this account: ‘Her performance on Saturday night’s Michael Parkinson Show was a stunner which has several million bemused Poms still trying to decide if it actually happened.’ A television critic from London’s Evening Standard wrote quite simply: ‘Who or what was that?’ To this final quip Jeanne made this retort: ‘I don’t understand, darling. The audience laughed in all the right places.’ When Jeanne first walked onto the set, she admitted to the host she was nervous because she knew little about Parkinson’s favourite topic: cricket. ‘I tried to do a crash course. But when I asked for help from those in the know they said “Quiet, I’m watching.”’ She went on to explain that all she knew about cricket was that cricketers ‘polished balls in their crutches’. Jeanne soon settled in and proceeded to tell Michael Parkinson (and millions of British viewers) some of her anecdotes: her rock-climbing boyfriend Ken who scaled the drainpipes of her London flat; the Indian doctors who washed their colanders of rice in her bath; and her favourite story about her Auntie Lottie, who tumbled in a stupor out of the mini-bus during Jeanne and Barry’s wedding reception. The conversation turned, as it invariably does, to the sound of Jeanne’s voice. She agreed that it was unique, and spun a tale about attempting to correct it once by taking diction lessons from an Oxford professor of English. He 161

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HELLO DARLING! taught her to say phrases such as ‘Good afternoon’, ‘Come into the room’ and ‘How delightful to meet you’. But as Jeanne explained: ‘He seemed to wince every time I opened my mouth. I thought I was getting somewhere until the day the professor’s secretary told me he’d shot himself.’ When Michael Parkinson visited Australia a few months after the show he described Jeanne to a reporter from the New South Wales Sunday Sun as ‘an event’. He then added:

One thing you never do with Jeanne Little—that’s the first time you see her—you don’t switch off. You have to stick with it and see, is this real? She went down over there like she does over here—fifty per cent love her and fifty per cent think she’s a Martian.

Jeanne’s new stint on the Mike Walsh Show included overseas assignments to such locations as China, Japan, Thailand, Manila, Fiji and the United States. In Australia, she went almost everywhere: Darwin, Walgett, Melbourne, Brisbane, Broome, Goulburn, Gosford, Griffith—the list goes on. These trips frequently involved charity work for causes such as cancer, AIDS and leukaemia. From Channel 9’s perspective, they were a thinly disguised attempt to promote the Mike Walsh Show. For many of these local excursions, Jeanne Little was teamed with her old friend John-Michael Howson. ‘Jeanne never made a lot of money out of the Mike Walsh Show 162

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The times they are a-changin’ and I thought she was terribly underpaid for what she did,’ says Howson. We never made money out of the charity gigs. We’d be away once a month, or even once a week. They push you out there, and it’s promoting the show. Others didn’t want to do it. It was a form of exploitation. They’d think, ‘Good old Jeanne, good old John-Michael, they’ll do it— because they’re suckers.’ We thought we owed it to the public and charity. But Jeanne wasn’t as much of a ‘sucker’ as her employers thought. She says: The Channel 9 publicist would always ask me to attend these charity requests. After I had left 9, people still phoned me up, and when I couldn’t attend I would tell them to contact the publicist at Channel 9. She finally phoned me and said, ‘Please don’t refer these people to me!’ But, whether Jeanne Little and John-Michael Howson wanted to go on these trips or not, they still made light of their lot. Says Howson: We used to find ourselves in the funniest situations in these country towns. We’d soon find out there were all sorts of dissensions in the community and the locals 163

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HELLO DARLING! would say, ‘If you meet Vera don’t talk to her’, or ‘Make sure you don’t talk to Fred’. And we’d say, ‘But we’re just here to raise money!’ We were swept from one house to another drinking cups of tea. There was almost a war going on in these towns and we were the trophies. Often we’d be invited to the local football club. They’d have fancy-dress concerts and we’d be asked to be the judges. A number of big butch footballers would get up on stage dressed in fabulous drag and looking like Carmen Miranda or Marilyn Monroe. It certainly gave us insight into the folklores of Australia. Jeanne and I had come to town and they’d go for broke. Jeanne remembers attending an event in a far-flung town that was hosting a Walt Disney-style circus. They suggested I take my daughter Katie to have a photo with Goofy for the local paper. Well, Goofy was a man wearing a great big shiny plastic head and as soon as Katie saw him she screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop crying. Then the manager said to me, ‘You’ll have to climb up the ladder where Goofy will help you onto his tandem bicycle, then he’ll ride across the tightrope.’ Climbing up the steel ladder in my high heels I was shaking with nerves. When I finally got on the bicycle, I looked down from the top of the huge circus tent and saw the manager holding Katie. They looked so far away and I was terrified. 164

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The times they are a-changin’ On another occasion Jeanne and John-Michael Howson were flown to Torres Strait Island for the weekend. ‘A lot of the people there worked in Cairns and watched us on the TV,’ explains Howson. We got picked up by a yacht, we anchored off the island, and the islanders came across with thrones and put us on them. There were drums beating and flowers all around us, and they danced in grass skirts and sang songs. We were like the prince and princess of the island and they did a speech about their culture and I stood up and said, ‘If you look up to the two of us, you should worry about your culture.’

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Chapter eight

Lady willpower I’m living proof that you can make a fortune out of a disability—Jeanne Little

THE PEOPLE WHO WERE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO MEET JEANNE Little at functions would remember her charity work well. But the image of the star which is imprinted on the minds of the television-watching nation has more to do with fashion. For many years on the Mike Walsh Show, Jeanne did segments on Hollywood glamour, bikinis, wigs and wedding gowns. She showed women how to look beautiful, apply make-up and dress on a shoestring. In 1981, she designed a replica of Princess Diana’s wedding dress. Says Jeanne: I had a bolt of white cotton in my sewing room and for a joke I thought I’d make something. Because Di’s dress had the longest train of any dress before, I didn’t cut the train on my dress, I just left it with about thirty yards rolled onto the cardboard. 167

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HELLO DARLING! On 13 October 1982, Jeanne launched the Glad Bag Fashion Awards. The idea for this competition came about when Jeanne appeared on the Mike Walsh Show wearing an outfit made of black garbage bags. She teamed this pseudo biker’s outfit with glam rock eye shadow and a perpendicular punk hairdo. Jeanne explains: I had blond spiky hair at the time and I really wanted a punk outfit made from patent leather to go with it, but when I priced one I nearly fainted. That afternoon I was in the supermarket and saw black shiny packets of Glad Bags. So I threw an outfit together, did my appearance on the Mike Walsh Show and when I went home the phone rang—it was the editor from New Idea, who said, ‘What about making an outfit in every colour from the Glad Bag range and we’ll give you a spread in the magazine.’ This appearance in New Idea prompted a call from the manager of the Macquarie Shopping Centre in the Sydney suburb of North Ryde. She had organised a series of fashion parades and was eager for Jeanne’s participation. Jeanne agreed to host the shows. For her appearance, and that of seven models, she designed a range of garbage bag dresses. The only problem was that the plastic outfits made Jeanne and the models sweat profusely. As she told a reporter later: ‘Darling, it’s all such a laugh. The only problem is, we’re losing half a stone every hour, so by tomorrow we might be invisible.’ According to Jeanne: 168

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Lady willpower At the end of the week, there were a few nicely dressed businessmen watching—the Glad promotions manager, Roger Maynard, and some executives. They later met with me and between us we cooked up the Glad Bag Fashion Awards. The rest is history. The Glad Bag Fashion Awards invited budding designers to create their own outfits from garbage bags and to submit a photo of their creations to Channel 9. First prize was a car, and each runner-up received a television set. The competition—and Jeanne Little—could not have been more popular. Jeanne made appearances at dozens of Westfield shopping centres across the nation and gave countless interviews to print, radio and television reporters. She described the advantages of her designs to a journalist from New Idea in June 1982: If anyone spills anything on you, you just wipe it off. Because they’re so cheap you can always carry a spare. And if you get into a really bad state at a party, you can be put out with the garbage and collected the next morning. As Jeanne jetted around the country on one of her many promotional tours, thousands of people turned up to greet her in their fantastic plastic creations. When she alighted at Perth airport she was mobbed. In Tamworth, the town was overrun with scores of fans who, according to one reporter, 169

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HELLO DARLING! ‘wore garbage bag knickerbockers, bridal gowns, tennis skirts and matching mother/daughter outfits’. At the Melbourne Cup, hundreds of punters arrived in much the same outfits (Jeanne wore a sleek black suit made from bin liners. She dubbed it ‘recession fashion’); in Sydney, garbage bag mania threatened to outdo the spectacle of the annual City to Surf fun-run as many of the participants warmed up in shorts and sweatshirts made from plastic. Yvonne Staein, who was a member of a studio audience for the Mike Walsh Show around this time, says: ‘The garbage bag thing was at its peak. Everyone was talking about it. A group of girlfriends and I were herded into the studio like cattle and given cups of tea and next thing Jeanne Little ran past onto the set.’ According to Yvonne, Mike Walsh then asked a woman from her group to go backstage for a makeover. She was whisked backstage, transformed by hair and make-up artists and dressed in one of Jeanne Little’s garbage bag dresses. When she came back out, we barely recognised her. She just looked extraordinary, dressed up in a mad green creation. It was hilarious. In 1982, the Glad Bag Fashion Awards picked up the first of many accolades, receiving an award for the Best Use of Television from Regional Television Australia. A decade later, in 1992, Jeanne launched the Glad Wedding Competition on Midday, with host Ray Martin. This time entrants were 170

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Lady willpower asked to submit bridal wear and Jeanne made the comment: ‘If the wedding doesn’t work out, you can just hose it down and wear it with the next person.’ Two years later the Win Jeanne Little Commonwealth Games Competition was launched in Woman’s Day. Entrants were invited to make an outfit from Glad or Chux products for the opening ceremony of the 1994 Commonwealth Games, to be held in Victoria, Canada. The first-prize winner would appear at the Games with Jeanne Little, wearing their garbage bag creation. Later that year, the competition was honoured in an awards ceremony held at Disney World in Florida. The Council of Sales Promotion Agencies Worldwide Award of Excellence bestowed it with the top prize for the World’s Best Promotion Using a Product. The Win Jeanne Little Commonwealth Games Competition beat such global heavyweights as McDonald’s and Amtrak. In 1996, Jeanne’s garbage bags were given another burst of life. The Glad Olympic Parents for Atlanta Program was launched by the then Governor of New South Wales, Gordon Samuels, at an event held at Sydney’s Garden Island Naval Base. The concept for the competition was for Glad to fund the trip for the parents of a young Australian Olympian who was attending the Games in Atlanta. According to Roger Maynard, the director of Maynard’s Promo Marketing, who worked closely with Jeanne during this period: It was a huge event, with Jeanne Little and her family present and a VIP attendance of dignitaries and past 171

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HELLO DARLING! Olympic winners. There were people such as Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser in attendance, as well as the young Olympians who were about to represent Australia. The older Olympic legends espoused how important it was for the fresh blood to have their parents in the stands barracking for them, giving them much-needed support. Later that year, the Glad Olympic Parents for Atlanta Program received a state award for excellence from the Public Relations Institute of Australia. ‘This Glad garbage bag thing has now been going for over a quarter of a century,’ says Maynard. It culminated recently in the Glad to be Gay float that appeared in the 2001 Sydney Mardi Gras featuring Jeanne Little dressed in Glad garbage bags. The term ‘put on your Glad Rags’ is now a seminal part of Australian slang and it comes from Jeanne Little. Even though the 1980s marked a period of great success for Jeanne Little, they were not without their trials and tribulations. After Jeanne’s appearance on Parkinson in 1980, she was approached to star in a six-part, half-hour variety series to be produced by the BBC. In addition, she was offered a role on Dr Who as the doctor’s mad Australian aunt. But a career in London was not to be. Actors’ Equity in the United Kingdom blocked both deals, so Jeanne returned to Australia to lick her wounds and polish up her stage style. 172

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Lady willpower In 1981, Jeanne again fell pregnant. She and Barry had been talking about adding another bundle of joy to the family for some time. ‘We always wanted to have another baby,’ says Jeanne. ‘We didn’t want Katie to be an only child, as Barry was an only child and I knew how wonderful it was to grow up with siblings.’ It was when Jeanne was employed by Channel 7 that she and Barry first discussed the idea in earnest, but they agreed to put it off until the following year. Jeanne’s career invariably got in the way, however, and on it went until five years had passed, Jeanne was forty-three years old and her biological clock was ticking loudly. ‘I suppose I never thought I’d have problems having a child later in life, because my mother had given birth to me when she was forty-five years old,’ says Jeanne. ‘What I didn’t realise at the time I fell pregnant was that this was perhaps my last opportunity.’ Three months into the pregnancy, tragedy struck. After discovering spots of blood on her underwear, Jeanne went to the Crown Street Hospital, where a radiologist confirmed that the baby that Jeanne was carrying no longer had a heartbeat. That was on Wednesday. On Thursday, Jeanne was wheeled into the operating theatre for a curette. On Friday, she had herself discharged and drove to Gosford for a charity event. According to friend Jennifer Benjamin: Even though she’d just had a curette, she just wouldn’t dream of letting anyone down. If she’d accepted something for charity and then something else came up that 173

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HELLO DARLING! was a paying job, she’d never let the charity down. She is wonderful like that. Although Jeanne is physically strong she suffers from nervous exhaustion because she simply cannot say no. It was the following Monday that the magnitude of the preceding week’s events hit Jeanne. The catalyst was an article in the newspaper, which said (in reference to her appearance at the charity event on the weekend), ‘Jeanne Little would go to the opening of an envelope.’ Normally Jeanne wouldn’t care, but when she read that remark in the paper she crumpled. Jeanne failed to fall pregnant again. Putting off having a second child is one of the biggest regrets of her life. Fate dealt Jeanne another heavy blow in 1985. The Mike Walsh Show had shifted from daytime television to a twiceweekly evening slot in February. It was a multimillion-dollar deal, reported in the Daily Telegraph as being ‘the biggest ever signed in Australia’. Mike had been negotiating the deal with Kerry Packer for some time. He hired new staff for the show at the end of 1984, and dedicated the start of the following year to planning and production. Mike Walsh was upbeat about the imminent change. He made this comment to a reporter from Woman’s Day in November 1984: It’s great to have a new challenge. This is a very exciting time for me. With daytime, the challenge was to get 174

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Lady willpower viewers to watch us. We had to change viewing habits. The challenge of night-time isn’t getting people to turn on their sets, because they’re already on. The challenge is to get them to turn the dial to watch you . . . I have a pretty good gut feeling. I do alright when I stick with that. It was a brave move: the twelve-year-old Mike Walsh Show was at its peak; it was seen on 116 television stations around Australia, reached six million viewers, and generated huge advertising dollars. John-Michael Howson tried to dissuade his former boss from making the change: ‘I said to him, “Don’t kill the golden goose. You’ve got it made. I know it is hard doing five shows a week. But this is not right for you. It will simply not work.”’ Reporters were unanimous that Mike Walsh was taking a big risk, but he was convinced that his show had the right ingredients to make an evening timeslot cook. One journalist referred to television after dark as a bloodbath, ‘an arena littered with corpses of those who have tried and failed’. Shows by Don Lane, Daryl Somers and Bert Newton had already been axed from Channel 9. Initially, Mike Walsh and his company, Hayden Productions, continued to produce both the daytime and the nighttime television programs. Walsh’s replacement in his old lunchtime slot—which was renamed Midday—was former 60 Minutes reporter Ray Martin. According to John-Michael Howson: 175

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HELLO DARLING! Midday was 180 degrees away from the Mike Walsh Show. They tried desperately to get Ray Martin to do comedy, but it was alien to the man. It was the worst possible idea to put him in that timeslot. It was neither chalk nor cheese. It wasn’t a current affairs show, it wasn’t a variety show; what was it? Midday however, in its various incarnations with hosts such as Derryn Hinch, Tracy Grimshaw and Kerri-Anne Kennerley, lasted thirteen years. The new Mike Walsh Show lasted six weeks. In any case, the arrangement that Hayden Productions had with Channel 9 came to an abrupt halt when Kerry Packer took the production of Midday inhouse; Mike Walsh subsequently won a $9 million breach of contract settlement. Twenty minutes before the opening night of the new Mike Walsh Show on 19 February 1985, Jeanne Little hopped onto a motorbike and rehearsed her entrance onto the set. JohnMichael Howson had an ominous feeling: I was running around the place like a mad thing saying, ‘For God’s sake you cannot do it! You cannot take risks with people’s lives.’ I’ll never forget how upset I was. They don’t think of you as a human being, they think of you as a thing, a puppet. ‘Good old Jeanne, she’ll do it,’ they think and, of course, she was so pliable and goodnatured. Anyway, they plonked her on the bike and then she had the accident. 176

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Lady willpower According to Jeanne: I was taken out into the car park at the rear of Channel 9. I had never been on a motorbike before and I had a lesson that lasted ten minutes. We were then called into the studio for a camera rehearsal. John-Michael jumped into the sidecar and I started up. I was told to drive around in a circle passing the chair where Mike Walsh would be sitting. But the bike was going too fast. Frantically I turned the knob, but in my panic I turned it the wrong way and the bike shot across the studio floor like a rocket with John-Michael yelling, ‘Shit, she’s trying to kill me!’ as he laughed uproariously. The bike smashed into a steel pole; John-Michael was thrown into the air, while I was thrown into the pole. Jeanne fell heavily, cracked seven ribs and severely bruised her kidneys. She was in a lot of pain, but insisted that she would play her part, and when an ambulance was called, she refused to leave. Jeanne appeared composed—as if nothing had happened—when she walked onto the set minutes later. She played her usual madcap self, spun some improbable yarns and made Mike Walsh, the audience (and no doubt the viewers at home) laugh. But it was a lucky escape. When Jeanne finished her part, she was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital, where she was examined by an orthopaedic surgeon. ‘He claimed that she was lucky she didn’t break her back,’ says Barry. ‘A crack 177

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HELLO DARLING! a couple of inches lower and she could have been a paraplegic.’ One of the producers who worked on the show that night claims that Mike Walsh was extremely shaken, and he was amazed that Jeanne was able to continue. The following day, the Daily Mirror’s front-page headline read, ‘Jeanne Little Agony’. Six weeks later, the Mike Walsh Show was out of business. Jeanne says that when she learnt of the show’s cancellation she felt sorry for Mike, ‘but for myself I thought, “So what?” I really didn’t care a whit. Honestly, it was almost a relief.’ Jeanne Little appeared on Midday with Ray Martin from early 1985. Her contract with Channel 9 stipulated that she continue as a regular in this lunchtime line-up, but Jeanne Little and Ray Martin were not a good mix. Her segments were much the same as they had always been on the Mike Walsh Show: she talked about fashion, books, movies, travel. But, privately, Jeanne did not feel comfortable with the new show, nor with her new boss. Ray Martin was very stiff, didn’t laugh and I felt that he was even embarrassed on my behalf. He wanted to be the straight, intellectual interviewer. A lot of the viewers stopped me in the street saying, ‘What’s happened to the fun on the Midday show?’ A few months later I heard an ad on the radio advertising Midday as being ‘Fun! Fun! Fun!’ I guess he was told to loosen up. 178

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Lady willpower In late 1985 Jeanne approached Sam Chisholm, the head of Channel 9, and said, ‘Darling, I want to leave because Ray Martin and I don’t fit.’ According to Jeanne: For all my differences with Mike, he and I still really had a good rapport on television; we had a spark that worked. He knew how to ham things up and take them to the next level. I remember I had previously planned with Mike to do a spoof of Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’. Geoff Harvey had done the music in my key and Bill Wallace, one of our segment producers, was to appear in a gorilla suit and get into bed with me. Everyone thought it was hilarious, but Ray Martin seemed to wince, and I thought to myself, this is simply not going to work. A few months earlier, in mid 1985, Jeanne appeared on the recently revived Blankety Blanks, hosted by Daryl Somers on Channel 9. Its revival was to be short-lived, however—the show was wrapped up by the end of the year. Still it was fun while it lasted. Blankety Blanks was a popular game show which had a former life on Channel 10 with media celebrity, comedian and host Graham Kennedy at the helm. The original show, which ran from 1977 to 1979, featured two contestants and a panel of six celebrities including Ugly Dave Gray, Noeline Brown, Stuart Wagstaff, Mark Holden and Jon English. The show, based on a US version called Match Game, was full of 179

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HELLO DARLING! sexual innuendo and double entendre—a comedy program with a game show format built around it. The show commenced with the host reading a short scenario, which, at some point, contained the word ‘BLANK’. It was the two contestants’ job to each fill in the ‘BLANK’ with a word of their own. The host then proceeded to the panel of six celebrities, who had also each filled in the ‘BLANK’ with a word of their own. A contestant’s score was based on the number of celebrities’ answers that matched their own, and the contestant who received the most matches was declared the winner. It was after Jeanne’s first appearance on Blankety Blanks that she felt off-colour. Says Jeanne: I was at the airport in Melbourne waiting for a plane and I had to run to the loo several times. The same thing happened on the plane. When I arrived in Sydney, I went to the ladies’ room again, then got my keys out and ran to the car, where I wet my pants! It was then that I thought something was seriously wrong. Shortly after, Jeanne made an appointment with her doctor. To her great surprise, he discovered a growth in her lower abdomen that was, according to Jeanne, ‘the size of a coconut’. ‘I can still remember the trainee nurse who performed the scan,’ says Jeanne. ‘She said to the doctor, “Is that the stomach?” “No,” he replied, “that’s the growth.”’ Jeanne was referred to a specialist who suspected cancer. She was 180

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Lady willpower told that without performing an operation to remove the growth, it could not be ascertained whether it was malignant or benign. The operation was scheduled for five days later. Jeanne was convinced she was going to die. ‘Even the specialist thought it was goodbye,’ says Jeanne. ‘I was so sure I wasn’t going to be here that I wrote about twenty cheques and paid up all our bills before I went into hospital.’ According to Barry: ‘Jeanne was wonderful, she kept saying, “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” But I was devastated. I couldn’t come to terms with the news at all.’ Says Jeanne: I felt so sad about leaving Barry and Katie. Your partner can always find someone else, but for a child to lose a parent, that is something else altogether—she was only eleven years old. Before I went into hospital I chose someone else Barry could marry. It was somebody we both like. I talked to him about this just in case something happened to me during the operation. A few days before the operation, Jeanne and Barry did something they had not done since the day they were married. They went to church. Says Jeanne: I’m not what you would called religious, but I am very spiritual. I just sat there and prayed. All I kept thinking was, I can’t believe this is happening to us. One day you’re laughing, and the next day you’re dying. 181

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Chapter nine

Life is a cabaret I’m a fantasy figure for people. What happened to me could have happened to any housewife—Jeanne Little

JEANNE’S

ILLNESS WAS NOT STRAIGHTFORWARD AND SURGEONS

at Paddington’s Royal Hospital for Women were tentative about the operation, repeatedly postponing it until they were clear on the full extent of the procedure that would be required. ‘All of that was on my mind,’ says Barry. ‘There were grave concerns that there could be complications. What kind of cancer was it? How widespread was it? They couldn’t tell until they opened her up.’ The operation eventually took place on 9 July 1985, ten days after Jeanne was first told the news. Barry sat in the hospital cafeteria with daughter Katie and Jeanne’s sister Cathie, waiting out the procedure. At 6.30 pm—two-and-ahalf hours after Jeanne had first been admitted into surgery— the surgeon appeared, announcing that the operation had 183

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HELLO DARLING! been a success. He had removed the growth and it was benign. According to Barry, ‘Katie and I just fell into each other’s arms and burst into tears of relief.’ When Jeanne’s anaesthetic started to wear off she felt like a piece of rubber: I blearily opened my eyes to see Katie bending over me. She had on her little grey school cap, with two plaits dangling either side of her face. She just shook me and said, ‘Mum! Mum! It’s wonderful news.’ As soon as I saw their smiling faces, I knew everything was all right. I slumped back into oblivion with tears in my eyes, saying a grateful prayer to God. I don’t think I could live through another ten days like that. That was in 1985 and to this day I have never forgotten that moment. Jeanne was luckier than most. Two days before she was discharged from hospital, she received the tragic news that a friend had died from cancer. ‘I first met Chris Ankin at school, at Barker College,’ says Barry. He was the only schoolmate that I kept in touch with and Jeanne and I had become very close to him. He was part of our inner circle and he was the first person from our crowd to die. This news came as a terrible blow. Jeanne says this event, combined with her own cancer scare, turned her into a stronger person: 184

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Life is a cabaret It made me realise what life is all about. Sure, there’s all the success, the fame, the projects and the possibilities, but family is, without doubt, the most important—the most precious—thing there is in the entire world. In 1987, Jeanne, by now forty-nine years old, received an unexpected phone call. It was from producer John Frost, who wondered if she wanted a part in a musical that he was working on called Jerry’s Girls. As Jeanne explains: ‘He said, “Do you want to audition for a stage show?” and I said, “Daaarling, have you got the right number?”’ John said he didn’t care that Jeanne had never appeared on stage (she had, but her three lines in The Women in 1970 were hardly worth a mention). He asked her to learn a song and hire a musician to accompany her and play it in her key. ‘So I made a tape and learnt it,’ says Jeanne. When I turned up for my audition at the Footbridge Theatre there were all the top singers of the day waiting to perform—Lola Nixon, Marcia Hines, Debra Byrne and Judi Connelli. ‘What are you doing here, Jeanne?’ they asked. If they hadn’t seen me already, I would have run out the door, but I was stuck. Then I remembered my mother and her tireless work ethic, and I said to myself, ‘All right, I’ll have a go and then I’ll just go home.’ American director Jerry Herman was eventually to be so impressed with Jeanne Little that he wrote a punk version of 185

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HELLO DARLING! Hello, Dolly! for her. According to Jeanne, she had to fight for acceptance, but it was a fight that paid off: We were given a record of Jerry’s Girls music and I said I would only be in the show if I could have the funniest song, ‘Put it Back On’—it was in exactly my key. After a couple of weeks the American director announced who would sing what. I knew that I had been cast in the musical because of my TV name, but I was given bits and pieces that were inconsequential. So I burst into tears, walked out and telephoned my agent, who told the producer, John Frost, I didn’t want to be in the show. ‘Put it Back On’ had been given to Lola Nixon, a true entertainer. When the song was taken away from Lola, she was so sweet and accommodating, but I knew she was hurt. But I had to protect my reputation. It wasn’t worth being in my first musical if I pussy-footed around with nothing much to sing. A few weeks later, Jeanne had her tap shoes on. She was in rehearsal for an extravaganza that one reporter described as ‘a swing through the best musicals Broadway has produced . . . the ultimate ritzy glamour trip’. According to Barry: Once Jeanne had the part she had to learn how to sing and tap dance. All day and night she’d tap, tap, tap around the house until she got it into her head. She’d practise her songs so loudly that the neighbours would 186

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Life is a cabaret finish them for her. She’d always fantasised about being a star in a Broadway musical and, in a way, she took this part to prove that she could, even at her age. Between being cast and going to rehearsals, Jeanne overheard a well-known Australian celebrity say loudly in her direction, ‘Amateurs always lose their voices.’ Jeanne became obsessed with proving that woman wrong. In fact, when the entire cast of Jerry’s Girls eventually went down with a throat virus, Jeanne hung on out of sheer determination and was the last to have the night off. ‘I was singing with haemorrhaging vocal chords.’ When asked about his decision to cast Jeanne, John Frost replied: She was one of our biggest coups. I had a gut feeling it’d work and it did. She’s fabulous. I still remember the first time I came face to face with Jeanne Little. I was in an elevator after the Australian premiere of Mae West’s seventies comeback movie, Sextet. Jeanne Little introduced the film to the audience and she ended up being funnier than the film. Jerry’s Girls is a celebration of the work of awardwinning Broadway composer Jerry Herman who, in March 1987, became the first lyricist to have three musicals each run over 1500 consecutive performances on Broadway. Herman is revered for musicals such as Hello, Dolly!, Mame, La Cage 187

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HELLO DARLING! aux Folles, Mack & Mabel and Milk and Honey. Jerry’s Girls is a combination of all these shows. It first appeared as a modest, yet critically acclaimed, cabaret presentation in New York in 1981, but morphed into something far superior when it featured an all-star cast on Broadway in 1985. Both incarnations of the show were staged and directed by Larry Alford, who conceived the idea with Jerry Herman. Alford also led the Australian version of the show, which was redesigned for a local audience. The Australian lead line-up consisted of (at various times): Judi Connelli (star of Chicago, The Mikado and Applause), Debra Byrne (Les Misérables and Cats), Marcia Hines (Jesus Christ Superstar and, in the 1980s, known as the Queen of Pop), Lola Nixon (singer and theatrical identity), Angela Ayers (actor, singer and voice-over artist) and Jeanne Little. The show opened at Sydney’s Footbridge Theatre on 30 July 1987 and exceeded everyone’s expectations. It went on to become one of Australia’s biggest musical hits. In 1987, Jerry’s Girls was one of the highest grossing musicals of the year, taking $1.5 million in the first three months. That year, it broke all-time box office records in Sydney (where it played for nine months), before it moved on to Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. The musical toured nationally for four years. According to Jeanne: During the third season of the show at the Footbridge, one of the producers, Ashley Gordon, said to me, with his 188

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Life is a cabaret head in his hands, ‘Oh Jeanne, I’m so depressed!’ I asked, ‘Ashley! What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘There’s still one unsold seat!’ He roared with laughter. Of the thirty-nine musical numbers in the show, Jeanne had eight to perform. Her costumes ranged from glittering beaded sensations, to a specially padded stripper’s body— otherwise referred to as a fat suit—which swam on her skeletal frame. ‘It has two big boobs and a pot belly,’ she commented to a reporter at the time. ‘It’s enough to make me anorexic for life.’ Jeanne was terrified each evening getting up in front of the audience. She’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What am I doing? It’s all been a big mistake.’ She told a journalist she thought her voice sounded like Kamahl and likened her first, professional appearance on stage to being naked in public. ‘I knew people would be thinking, she’s that boring old thing from the Mike Walsh Show who used to say “daaarling”,’ Jeanne says. ‘So I knew I had to work ten thousand times harder than anyone else.’ Barry and Katie had a bird’s-eye view of the stage on opening night. Katie’s advice was, ‘Mummy, don’t be frightened, just do your best and everyone will love you.’ The night exceeded Jeanne’s wildest dreams. One journalist remarked: ‘When Jeanne Little took her final bow at the end of the opening night . . . the audience went wild.’ Jeanne could not have guessed at the reviews that followed. Rhapsodised, Mick Barnes from the Sun-Herald noted that: 189

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HELLO DARLING! The wild card is Jeanne Little, the zany TV blonde with the awful speaking voice, sharing the top billing in her stage debut. Unequivocally, it is a sensational first. Little, an audience favourite, lays ’em in the aisles with a comic touch that surely must preclude to a new career in musical comedy. A reviewer from Sydney’s Star Observer wrote on 7 August 1987: The biggest, most thrilling surprise is Jeanne Little. Forget that all-too-familiar voice. This lady can sing, with rich, slightly deep tones . . . One of the most poignant moments of the show is when she removes her wig, and sits in a single white spotlight to sing ‘I’ll Be Here Tomorrow’. It is too brief, but sufficient to reveal her as a significant new musical theatre talent. Another critic, from the Bulletin, wrote: ‘Not only are dynamic Debbie Byrne and beanpole Jeanne Little two major draws for the high-glitz, high-hokum Jerry’s Girls . . . but they very nearly steal the show.’ Barry attributes much of Jeanne’s success in Jerry’s Girls to director Larry Alford: He was the first to make her aware of her wider talents. If she’d been given the right direction thirteen years earlier, when she entered television, who knows how far 190

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Life is a cabaret she could’ve gone. Sure, TV gave Jeanne a profile, but in many respects even this worked to her detriment. Jeanne’s new career in theatre was relentless: she performed eight shows a week and rarely saw her family. Dinner parties were a thing of the past. Says Jeanne: It was very lonely. I’d get home after a show and Barry would have left my dinner covered in Gladwrap and I’d heat it up in the microwave. I had to unwind until about 3 am. So, I’d sit downstairs and watch TV on my own or write letters. In the morning, Barry would make Katie breakfast and lunch while I slept in. Behind the scenes, Jeanne’s eyes were opened to another world: tearful disputes, heated disagreements and dressingroom doors slammed almost off their hinges. Some of Jeanne’s co-stars repeatedly left in a huff or refused to perform when their voice was not in, what they deemed, perfect pitch. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the fighting backstage,’ explains Jeanne. I thought, this is unbelievable. I was a terrorised dill who had to learn that this was the norm! When one star was away during the first week of our performance, our American director was shocked. He said, ‘On Broadway, nobody stays away if they’re able to walk!’ Angela Ayers, the consummate professional, on the other hand, was still 191

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HELLO DARLING! dancing up until she was six months pregnant. John Frost eventually said, ‘Angie. It’s time you gave up.’ That week, Angie’s replacement phoned in, at the last minute, to say that she was ill. The theatre was packed. John Frost phoned Angie’s home. Her husband answered and told John that Angie was at the Theatre Royal with her mother. John grabbed a taxi and went to the theatre, where he found Angie milling about waiting for the bells to ring for the start of the show. John said, ‘Angie, would you come back for just one night? There’s an audience waiting and we’ve held the curtain.’ Angie—the pro— agreed. While she was getting ready, John Frost talked to the audience to tell them what had happened and when Angela Ayers appeared the audience were uproarious. Life backstage also provided some light-hearted moments. One of these was when Jeanne was on stage, singing ‘The Man in the Moon is a Lady’. ‘My co-stars lined up in the wings, pulled down their pants and mooned me,’ says Jeanne. ‘I just went blank and made up ridiculous words to fill in the gaps.’ When the musical shifted to Melbourne, Jeanne Little did too. She lived with Marcia Hines in Toorak for three months, and during the show’s Adelaide and Brisbane stints, the new flatmates were provided with other inner-city apartments. Jeanne’s newfound success and her frequent absences from the family home put a strain on the Little marriage. According to Barry: ‘Initially the euphoria of the show carries you 192

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Life is a cabaret along for a while. But when that died down I was left with a wife I hardly ever saw and a child to take care of.’ It was when Jeanne was living interstate with Marcia Hines that she says she ‘became desperate for Barry and Katie. I’d had enough: no food in the fridge, odd hours, living out of a suitcase. No thanks.’ But there was another, more esoteric reason, that Jeanne wanted to come home. In 1991, in Brisbane, Jeanne was awakened by a strange noise. ‘There were two bedrooms and a small kitchenette,’ says Jeanne. The first night, I heard heavy footsteps thumping around me in bed. I glanced at the clock: it was 2 am. Nobody was there and I knew I hadn’t been dreaming, so in terror, I grabbed my pillow and ran into the kitchen where I put on the TV and slumped in a chair for the rest of the night. The following morning, I told Marcia, who had previously confided to me that she had once seen her dead brother in spirit. ‘Jeanne,’ she said, ‘just say the Lord’s Prayer and you’ll be all right.’ The next night I woke with someone tugging my blanket—it rippled as it was being pulled off me. I jumped out of bed seeing 2 am on the clock again and I slept in the kitchen once more. I was terrified the next night. I woke with the Venetian blinds rippling up and down. I went to the bathroom and looked out: there was no wind outside. I thought to myself, nothing can hurt me. So, I went back to sleep. An hour later I woke with the room like a furnace. It seemed 193

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HELLO DARLING! like a huge ball of energy. Suddenly something like a bag of bricks thumped on top of me, holding me down. I could hardly breathe and I could hear chattering in my ears like chanting. Finally I said, between my teeth, ‘Get away from me and leave me alone.’ Suddenly I felt like I was released. I ran down to the ground floor in my pyjamas and asked if I could be moved into another apartment. The whole time I was there I was terrified. When the manager returned from Melbourne, he came to see me. ‘Jeanne, I’m sorry they put you in apartment 206. Quite a few people have said it’s a bit strange.’ In 1988, Sydney was alive with the festive spirit of the Bicentenary. And the New South Wales Royal Bicentennial Concert held at the Sydney Entertainment Centre—performed before Prince Charles and Princess Diana (and a hand-picked VIP audience) and broadcast live across the nation—featured Jeanne in a segment called ‘Made in Australia’. Jeanne’s old friend, producer, researcher and writer, David Mitchell, explains: We did a medley of old Australian songs. It was kickstarted by Pamela Stephenson and then went across to Rolf Harris, who was Ginger Meggs, Barry Crocker as Don Bradman and then Jeanne was to do Charles Kingsford Smith. During one of the songs, a small-scale model version of the Southern Cross was to fly in and land on the floor of the Sydney Entertainment Centre, and the 194

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Life is a cabaret real Kingsford Smith was to get out and join Jeanne Little and Wayne Gardner, who was the flavour of the month as the world champion motorbike rider, and then Jeanne was to sing her song. She was outfitted in a pair of jodhpurs, a flying jacket, a scarf, goggles and a leather flyer’s hat. But, of course, no one had checked to see if she could hear the orchestra properly in all that gear. So she started in absolutely the wrong key, but she had the very good sense to stop the orchestra and start her song again. As she did this, she looked up at Charles and Diana and said, ‘Sorry royal daaarlings!’ The show got a huge rating. At that stage, before the Sydney Olympics, it was the highest rating show ever on Australian TV, and they ran it again a week later. I remember that Rolf Harris had forgotten to zip up his fly, and after we watched the re-run I had to sit in a darkened room colouring in every frame to cover up the fact that his white shirt was poking out of his trousers. According to Jeanne: When I came off stage, Ivor from the band ran over to me and said, ‘Jeanne you were so wonderful starting again! Most people wouldn’t have had the guts to do that!’ But I simply couldn’t hear a thing and I thought, ‘What’s the point of going ahead with it if I’m going to mess it up?’ Afterwards, I remember being backstage with some seasoned club performers and there was Kylie Minogue 195

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HELLO DARLING! standing in a corner all by herself with a group of nasties ignoring her and muttering ‘she hasn’t paid her dues’. I can’t believe how bitchy the industry is. I’d previously met Kylie at the Logie Awards. She had quickly risen to fame on Neighbours. At the Logies she was standing all by herself in the corner, just as she was at the Bicentennial Concert. I felt sorry for her all alone, so I went over and chatted to her. I was so proud of her at the Bicentennial Concert. She was riding around in a red Holden singing her lungs out. After the concert Jeanne was presented to Princess Diana. She was instructed to call Her Royal Highness by a formal address. ‘I said, “Hello daaarling! You must’ve been so tired flying all the way over to Australia to sit through this long concert.” Princess Diana replied: “Oh no, we had a very comfortable double bed on our plane, so we arrived completely rested, thank you.”’ In 1989, Jeanne took her newfound tap-dancing and singing skills onto another stage. This time she appeared in a musical comedy called Stepping Out at Sydney’s Glen Street Theatre. Directed by Peter Williams, Stepping Out opened on 3 May (and continued for a few months) before touring interstate. Jeanne was cast as the worst dancer in the show and made this comment to a reviewer: ‘Believe me, it’s not an act.’ Stepping Out centres on a group of people, from varying levels on the social scale, who assemble each week to take a 196

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Life is a cabaret tap-dancing class. Set in a parish hall in north London, the apprentices are led by Mavis, a retired dancer, while Glenda accompanies them on piano. The students attend the lessons for a host of reasons, but mostly to escape the day-to-day humdrum of life. The play examines the relationships that form as a result. Stepping Out received mixed reviews. Bob Ellis in the Sydney Morning Herald said: ‘Peter Williams and his cast achieve a level of comedy that is entertaining and sometimes delightfully surprising, but which is ultimately only skin deep . . . For all the zest of this creative ensemble, Peter Williams doesn’t ever bring it off.’ Ronnie Gibson from the Sunday Mail remarked: ‘If they’d cut half an hour from the script and thrown in some more spirited dancing, we wouldn’t have been yawning.’ John Carmody from the Sun-Herald didn’t enjoy the show either, but argued that Jeanne was one of the show’s highlights: ‘People like Donna Lee, Jeanne Little and Jack Webster deserve far better than this limp extrusion from the sausage machine of the London commercial theatre.’ In response to the reviews, Jeanne penned a letter to the Sun-Herald: ‘I agree that our opening night was far from perfect. We deserved to be severely criticised, but perhaps not in the way Mr Carmody began . . . I will personally refund your money if you don’t adore it.’ It was around this time that Jeanne and Barry hatched the idea for their one-woman cabaret show, Hello Dahling!. Research for the show spanned two years. It included an examination of the private and public faces of Marlene 197

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HELLO DARLING! Dietrich, Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Janis Ian. The couple left no stone unturned. They scoured bookshops, libraries, archives, and music and video collections. In mid 1991, Barry booked a return trip for two to the Big Apple with the purpose of ‘seeing who was doing what in cabaret’. The duo hit New York streets with a fistful of tickets, but the shows that created the biggest impact were The Will Rogers Follies: A Life in Revue (described by one reviewer as ‘an upbeat celebration of a folk hero who made the world a better place’) and big-band vocalist Rosemary Clooney at the Rainbow Room. The Rainbow Room is located in the lofty heights of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, and is so opulent it threatens to outdo the celebrities who grace its stage. It features crystal chandeliers, a revolving dance-floor, an orchestra, a bird’s-eye view of the city, and an audience in black tie. When the Littles arrived in the foyer, Jeanne spotted a svelte cardboard cut-out of Rosemary Clooney. ‘I thought how wonderful it was that she hadn’t changed in all those years. Then on came this vast 250-kilogram woman in brilliant blue. But she was sensational!’ When the Littles returned home, they wrote and produced Hello Dahling!, a gutsy tour de force that played to packed houses night after night, first at the Blue Mountain’s Clarendon Guest House and later at the Tilbury Hotel in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo. A long line of tradition in Australian cabaret had started at the Tilbury in the 1980s. Today the Tilbury is a sleek inner-city bar and restaurant, but back then it was a hotspot for live entertainment. It was the place 198

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Life is a cabaret where many of the old-guard cut their teeth, including the Sydney Theatre Company Wharf Revuers (featuring Jonathan Biggins, Phil Scott, Drew Forsythe and Tony Sheldon), and solo entertainers such as Nancye Hayes, Toni Lamond and Garry Scale. By the 1990s, satirical revues and one-person shows emerged from this venue, with performers such as Penny Cook, Georgie Parker, Glynn Nicholas, Jane Rutter and John Waters. Hello Dahling! toured nationally for two years after its stint at the Tilbury, at venues such as the School of Arts Café in Queanbeyan, Cable Beach Club Resort in Broome, and Darwin Casino. Hello Dahling! marked Barry’s return to the world of show business. Forty-four years had passed since he had worked as a copywriter for radio pioneers Roy Rene and Jack Davey. The motivation for the cabaret came in 1992 when the Littles saw a performance by female impersonator and theatre veteran Reg Livermore at the Clarendon Guest House. After the performance the owner of the venue, Bob Charter, approached Jeanne with the suggestion that she do a show for him. It was not a new idea: Jeanne and Barry had been discussing the idea of a cabaret show for a while. ‘But we knew it had to be the very best I could do,’ says Jeanne. Otherwise everyone would say, ‘So what?’ and I’d never get the chance to do anything like it again. I’ve knocked back a lot of jobs and ideas in my life because I didn’t think they were right for me, but this time I decided to go for it. 199

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HELLO DARLING! Supporting Jeanne in Hello Dahling! was musical director and performer Colin Salter. He had recently returned from the United Kingdom, where he worked at the Edinburgh Festival as a musical support and soloist for the Bob Downe Revue, toured with actor and comedian Dillie Keane and performed a season with female impersonator Lily Savage at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre. Jeanne had first met Salter when he returned to Sydney to work on Ducks Out of Water, a comedy held at Mike Walsh’s Hayden Room, a cabaret venue which formed a small part of Walsh’s burgeoning interest in theatre and cinema. It was a fortuitous meeting. According to Jeanne: After Colin Salter came off stage, Barry and I asked him if he would consider being an accompanist to the new show we were doing. Initially he wasn’t very interested because I hadn’t any experience in cabaret, but he didn’t have much work on and contacted us eventually. We offered him a third of our profits from the show and he came on board. We told him we wanted someone who could perform while I changed costumes, someone who could help carry the show. Hello Dahling! included powerful, poignant renditions of Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Janis Ian songs. In true Jeanne Little style it also included a host of dazzling costume changes. The songs were linked by anecdotes 200

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Life is a cabaret about Jeanne’s life and career, told with hilarious candour (she described the shame of being upstaged once by a cockroach, and sent up what she calls her truck-driver voice). In addition, the show toyed with gender. Says Jeanne: I started off singing the first half of the show dressed as a man, with short brown hair, black tails and a top hat. People who’d come to the show would think, ‘Oh my, this isn’t the Jeanne Little I came to see.’ I like that. The first half of the show was dedicated to men and was about men. After the interval I changed into the outrageously glamorous woman people thought I was. A highlight of the show was when Jeanne sang a Marlene Dietrich song called ‘Hot Voodoo’. ‘We bought a gorilla outfit,’ says Jeanne. ‘I crawled in and gradually took off the head and body suit to the music and emerged as a glamorous star, just as Marlene did in her 1932 movie Blonde Venus.’ Another high point included a black-leather-clad Jeanne singing a Cole Porter medley—‘I Get a Kick Out of You’— with outrageous lyrics penned by friend Peter Benjamin, who co-wrote Australia’s first indigenous musical, Lola Montez. I get a kick out of pain Use both your shoes to abuse and to bruise Oh, choose to amuse me—please do ’Cause I like a kick out of you. 201

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HELLO DARLING! I get a kick out of canes Grip me, unzip me, then strip me and flip me Oh, whip me and rip me in two ’Cause I like a kick out of you.

I get a kick when you’ve found a way To make me let you break me. I get a kick and I’m bound to say: ‘I’m tied to you, baby, so make me.’

I get a kick out of chains Wind up confined in a bind of some kind While you grind—I won’t mind it—that’s true. ’Cause I like a kick Oh, give me a kick ’Cause I like a kick out of you.

This song (with Jeanne in over-the-top pseudo-bondage attire) was followed by Jeanne in one of her stunning trademark creations. The dress (made from orange and white rubbish-bin liners) was cut thigh high and featured a ruffled skirt and neckline. Inspired by festive South American costume, the outfit also featured a hat made from a cone-shaped lampshade that overflowed with flowers. The memory of her first performance of Hello Dahling! at Sydney’s Tilbury Hotel is still palpable to Jeanne. 202

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Life is a cabaret Colin and I went upstairs to get changed before we went home. We didn’t know how our producers would feel about our show beginning with little or no publicity. The previous show—which had enormous publicity, including a two-page spread in the Bulletin—had not been a success. It’d been axed before the finishing date, so we were asked to start at the Tilbury earlier than expected. Colin Salter and I wondered if the same thing would happen to us. We were in the dressing room after the show when suddenly the door opened. It was Geoffrey Williams, one of our producers. He had two glasses and a bottle of French champagne. He knelt at my feet, poured the champagne and said, ‘Your show is fantastic! I’d like to extend the season.’ The critics agreed with Geoffrey that Jeanne’s one-woman cabaret was a triumph. ‘Jeanne is a unique Australian entertainer and her tight, bright, smart, slick, stylish, autobiographical cabaret show is pure gold,’ noted one. ‘It’s a glass-shattering performance of song, dance and costume which has left critics talking in superlatives and audiences cheering for more,’ commented another. A journalist from the Sun-Herald said: ‘Her voice amazes, her repertoire amazes, and her frocks go beyond amazement into something approaching the hyperreal . . . To put it simply, Hello Dahling! is a must-see show from a must-see diva.’ The success of Hello Dahling! provided the impetus for the Littles to produce their second one-woman cabaret show 203

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HELLO DARLING! three years later, in 1994. Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich documents through song the enigmatic star’s life: from her beginnings in the decadent Berlin cabaret and transsexual scene of the 1920s, to her role as one of Hollywood’s leading lights, through to her on-the-road cabaret show when she was well into her fifties, travelling across Europe, the United States and Australia. Jeanne narrated Dietrich’s biography between songs with her dry and insouciant wit. When Jeanne made her entrance, her inimitable voice brayed out, ‘Daaarlings, it’s only meee!’ Jeanne had of course already played Dietrich for the Mike Walsh Show ten years beforehand, but she again found herself attracted to Dietrich, mostly because she believes she has a lot in common with the star of the silver screen. Dietrich worked in the world of cabaret in the later years of her life, had a small voice but used it to her best advantage, and experienced feelings of guilt when she chose to be a working mother. According to Jeanne: What I admire about Marlene Dietrich is her glamour and her wry, sardonic sense of humour. And I think she really went for it when she was a bit older, touring the world with her cabaret show. Most of the icons, like Greta Garbo, retired when their film careers came to an end, but Marlene continued in the public eye until her seventies. That was really brave. She was always the first to do so many things. I think she stands far ahead of her contemporaries. I mean, Garbo was created, whereas Marlene created herself. 204

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Life is a cabaret Barry was also a Dietrich devotee. When the Hollywood icon toured Australia in 1965, he saw her perform at Sydney’s Theatre Royal, to a musical arrangement by composer and lyricist Burt Bacharach. Says Barry: When she was doing that show, she’d get up on top of her car every night and sing her lungs out. They’d hoist her up in her Chanel suit. She was a grandmother and she was so glamorous well into her fifties. She had these postcards that she’d give out to people at the end of the show. They were signed black and white photographs. I’ve still got one. Research for Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich was equally as relentless as Hello Dahling!, but this time the couple had another game plan. They wanted to meet Marlene Dietrich’s close acquaintances. Jeanne and Barry set their sights again on New York and booked a series of meetings. One of these included dinner with veteran biographer, broadcaster and raconteur Sheridan Morley, who penned Dietrich’s biography in 1977. Jeanne describes the meeting: We had dinner with our friends Angela and Richard Farrington. They had invited Sheridan Morley as their guest. Sheridan kept us entertained with some brilliant anecdotal tales about Marlene, which I included in the show. One of these stories was about Marlene’s lover who had inherited a farm of 30 000 chickens. Then a huge flood occurred and all the chickens drowned. 205

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HELLO DARLING! Marlene said to her lover-turned-farmboy, ‘I told you that you should have been keeping ducks.’ The morning after dinner with Morley, Jeanne claims a strange series of events occurred. Barry and I were going through Marlene’s original music all morning, and we thought we’d just walk along the street to find a restaurant for lunch. On the way a busker came towards us, knelt on the sidewalk and shouted ‘Marlene!’, and started to sing ‘Falling in Love Again’. Barry gave him twenty dollars because he simply couldn’t believe it. We went on our way wondering if he sang that song to everybody. Barry said, ‘After the twenty dollars, he probably will.’ Finally, we found a restaurant and had to catch a lift up to the third floor. When we stepped in, ‘Falling in Love Again’ was playing overhead. It was like Marlene was guiding us the entire time. Then, when I returned to Australia to start on the stage show about Marlene, a friend sent me a golliwog as a mascot. Some people have a brooch, or a rabbit’s paw or a photo, but mine was a golliwog. I found out later that Marlene had in fact always had the same doll and if you look closely at her movies and books, there she is with her golliwog. It was eerie. For Marlene—A tribute to Dietrich, Jeanne again appeared on stage alone, except for the accompanying 206

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Life is a cabaret pianist and musical director, Peter J. Casey. He complements Jeanne during twenty-five songs made famous by Marlene Dietrich such as ‘Falling in Love Again’ and ‘The Laziest Gal in Town’. Jeanne remembers a poignant night when she and Casey performed ‘Lili Marlene’: As I sang, a man in the audience started crying and continued to cry until the end of the show. I always went into the audience after my shows to thank everyone personally for coming. The man’s wife told me she hadn’t ever seen him cry like he had that evening. Between sobs, he told her that when he was in a concentration camp during the war in Germany, when one of their friends was dying the prisoners would hold each other and sing ‘Lili Marlene’ because it was the only song that all of them knew the words to. Jeanne had another heart-rending experience that same evening. She narrated a story about the tragic end of an affair between Marlene Dietrich and Melbourne-based journalist Hugh Kernot. She had told the story dozens of times before. According to Jeanne: When Marlene was performing at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre in the 1960s she received the news that her lover had been decapitated. He had been covering a story on an oil rig in the Bass Strait. He went across by helicopter, but the sea and weather were treacherous, and the helicopter 207

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HELLO DARLING! crashed into the oil rig and both Hugh Kernot and the pilot were killed instantly. It is a story that is well documented in Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (WW Norton & Co, 1977), written by journalist Charles Higham, who worked at the Bulletin with Kernot at the time of the accident. But it seems that Kernot’s widow was in the audience that night. Not long after the performance, Barry received a call from Kernot’s daughter saying her mother was upset and requesting that I not use the story again. So I didn’t. Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich ran for ten years. In January 1996, Jeanne performed the show in the United States for the opening of the West Coast Cabaret Convention in San Francisco. It was for this performance that Jeanne first poured herself into a copy of Dietrich’s famous sequined dress and swan-feather coat (Jeanne’s was made from cotton wool). ‘It got so dirty, I had to make a new one every six months,’ she explains. It was one of six extravagant costume changes. Jeanne received a standing ovation for the West Coast Cabaret Convention performance. ‘That made me realise that I’m as good as anyone,’ she said. ‘I just sing differently.’ Later that year, she was nominated for an Australian Entertainment ‘MO’ Award for Best Female Musical Theatre Performer, along with Marina Prior, Jill Perryman and Debra Byrne. One reviewer claimed that Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich marked ‘Jeanne’s professional coming-of-age . . . 208

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Life is a cabaret Little has defied her detractors by wooing critics and audiences alike with her original one-hander.’ Another reviewer, from the Sydney Morning Herald, made this remark: ‘Jeanne has a fine singing voice. Much finer than Marlene’s, actually . . . Jeanne was deservedly pelted with roses at the end . . . See this show if you haven’t already. It’s bloody good.’ A third reviewer said: ‘Her musical arrangements would have done Mr Burt Bacharach himself proud . . . this is no impersonator, but a star in her own right performing a funny, touching tribute.’ In late 1993, just before she launched into Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich, Jeanne Little was made an offer that she could not refuse. She was invited to perform at the Sydney Opera House alongside three of Australia’s brightest stars of musical theatre: Nancye Hayes (My Fair Lady, Sweet Charity and Chicago), Kerrie Biddell (highly acclaimed, multiawardwinning jazz singer) and Toni Lamond (Oliver!, Gypsy and 42nd Street). The show was called Legends at the Sydney Opera House, and it was a chic affair, with two grand pianos and the appearance of four ‘legends’. Jeanne’s appearance in the show was a fitting acknowledgement of her contribution to the world of stage and cabaret. The Legends series was originally launched in 1991 at the Tilbury Hotel. The first Tilbury Legends included four stars of Australian theatre, opera and jazz: Nancye Hayes, Jennifer McGregor, Judi Connelli and Su Cruickshank. Each of these performers presented a musical autobiography, and the season 209

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HELLO DARLING! culminated in a joint performance. In 1992, these Legends were replaced by June Bronhill, Toni Lamond, Lorrae Desmond and Kerrie Biddell, who (with the exception of Lamond who was replaced by Jill Perryman) toured interstate; the ABC televised the results. In 1993, the format was devoted to just one star, June Salter. Then Jill Perryman fit the bill for a sell-out season at the Tilbury in early 1994. It was in mid 1993 that producers and owners of the Tilbury Hotel, Geoffrey Williams and Michael Freundt, first started to discuss the idea of Legends at the Sydney Opera House. On 8 February 1994 it became a reality. Of the twenty-eight numbers, Jeanne had eight to perform. Six of these were solo acts: ‘When’, ‘At Seventeen’, ‘He’s Funny that Way’, ‘Facelift’, ‘I’ll be Here Tomorrow’ and a Dietrich medley. One of Jeanne’s appearances included a duet with Kerrie Biddell; another included the finale—‘Next to You I’m Even Better’—which featured all four performers. As Jeanne recalls: The show was a great success and, more importantly, I felt it was an honour to be asked to be part of the show. Being on stage is, for me, like a dream come true. I have never asked to be on television, have never asked to be in a musical or to do cabaret, people have asked me. It’s as though I’ve got a wonderful angel that’s in charge of me. I do believe that some people’s lives are guided for them. I suppose, as I get older, I just keep accepting bigger and bigger challenges. I relish a challenge. It’s only when you’re young that you worry about falling flat on your face. 210

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Chapter ten

Still crazy after all these years Ageing isn’t a graceful thing like going down a gentle slope. You wake one morning and find you’ve fallen down three huge hills—Jeanne Little

IN 1990, JEANNE’S DAUGHTER KATIE TOOK ON SOME CHALLENGES of her own. She left for London, where she lived and worked. The wealthy parents for whom she nannied once asked about her famous mother. Says Katie: ‘They were pretty taken with that idea, I think. Then they asked, “What’s she famous for?” and I said, “Oh, she makes clothes out of garbage bags.”’ According to Jeanne: I have photos of myself waving Katie off to England at the airport. My smile looks like a grimace because I was utterly heart-broken. After some months, I missed her so much that Barry and I flew to New York and arranged for Katie to fly over from London to join us. We had the most marvellous time together, but we knew when she had 211

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HELLO DARLING! to return to England that she wasn’t going to be happy. She had a few different jobs when she was overseas, and one of them was teaching. She said the headmaster treated her and the other teachers like slaves. Katie, being headstrong, appeared in the headmaster’s office one evening with her luggage. She told him she was fed up with his treatment, so she was leaving. Barry and I were fast asleep in Sydney when the phone rang at around 3 am. It was the headmaster reporting our daughter as a missing person. We both nearly fainted, thinking she had been abducted, and we didn’t know what to do. Finally, a couple of hours later, the phone rang. It was Katie. She had caught the train to London where she was staying with a friend of the family’s. But we later realised the principal had only phoned us as a power play, because Katie didn’t want to bend to his rules. Years later when Barry and I were working on the club circuit and we were packing up for the night, a young girl came over to us and asked if I was Katie Little’s mother. When I said ‘Yes’, she replied: ‘Katie is our hero! She was game enough to tell off that old monster headmaster. He was eventually reported to the board and fired from the school. We worship Katie.’ But in 1991 Katie Little ran into trouble. She returned to Sydney at a time when dance music was at its peak. ‘I thought it was going to change the world,’ says Katie. Like 212

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Still crazy after all these years most converts to the rave phenomenon, Katie was hooked on the synthetic, seductive world of dancing all night and sleeping all day. She was also hooked on the drugs that make such a lifestyle possible. Says Katie: Speed, ecstasy, pills, you name it; and then lots of pot so I could come down. I went through a pretty heavy period. Mum and Dad always said to me don’t ever stick a needle in your arm, and I’m really glad that at least I took that to heart because I know a lot of people who went way off the deep end. According to Jeanne: When Katie got into the dance scene, she started seeing a DJ, Tim. So, Katie started DJing too. ‘I want to be a female version of Itchy and Scratchy,’ she said. We didn’t dream that drugs would be involved. Katie asked us one night, ‘Mum and Dad, why don’t you come to see me DJ?’ We went to Kings Cross into a hall with lots of people dancing around by themselves. Katie said, ‘Dad, do you want a drink?’ Barry said, ‘Can I have a beer?’ Katie laughed, ‘There’s only water, Dad!’ How were we to know that these people who pop pills don’t drink alcohol? The turning point for Katie was the night she crashed her mother’s car: 213

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HELLO DARLING! I’d split up with my boyfriend and I was rowing with my parents. So I drove down to Bondi Beach, bought a bottle of vodka, hooked into that, and stupidly decided to drive up Old South Head Road. I don’t even remember getting up there. I just came off at one of the corners and knocked down a tree in someone’s front yard, broke the axle, passed out and came to with my head over the steering wheel. I staggered towards these poor people who’d come out the front of their house and said, ‘I need to use the bathroom.’ They just pointed me in the direction. I got in there and just looked in the mirror and realised I was screwed. It was midnight when the phone rang at the Littles’ residence. It was Katie’s boyfriend, Tim. He was at the Rose Bay Police Station and he told Jeanne and Barry that their daughter had been involved in an accident. Says Barry: ‘Tim said she was all right, but at this point I had had enough.’ It was the jolt that brought Katie down to earth: she left her boyfriend, left her DJing job and left the drugs behind. But, according to Katie: Even though I was getting myself together, I was sad for a long time, I was really heartbroken, because I knew it was wrong that Tim and I weren’t together. But everything had gotten out of hand. He and I worked together, lived together and partied together. It was all just too intense, really touch and go. I remember hopping into 214

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Still crazy after all these years bed with Mum. I’d never, ever done that before, but I just hopped into bed and she put her arms around me and said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, you’ll get through it.’

Jeanne’s advice was right. It did not take long for Katie to get her life back on track and, in the meantime, so did her ex-boyfriend, Tim. In 2000, he reappeared in Katie Little’s life. Three years later, in October 2003, Katie and Tim were married in a garden ceremony in the outer Sydney suburb of St Auburns. On 28 March 2005, Katie gave birth to Jeanne and Barry’s first grandchild—Tom Little Poulton.

Despite all her theatre commitments, Jeanne still had time for other projects: she made regular appearances on Good Morning Australia with host Bert Newton from 1989 to 2005; and she released her first CD, a live recording of her one-woman shows, in 1994. Then, in 1997, she joined Beauty and the Beast, the revamped television chat show which had started in the 1960s and which was now to be hosted by shock-jock Stan Zemanek on Foxtel. On this program, the ‘beast’ and four ‘beauties’ discuss viewers’ letters; during an interview with a reporter from the Daily Telegraph in 1999, Jeanne described it as ‘talkback on speed’. In other words the debates that occurred during the live-to-air program were often impassioned, controversial and contentious. As one reporter in the 1990s put it: 215

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HELLO DARLING! Before you can blink, the discussion has descended into a mad free-for-all, with wild statements on AIDS, unprotected sex and homosexuality being thrown around the room . . . the topic soon changes to one-night stands, vibrators and bodily fluids. The host’s role was to lead this discussion and add fuel to the fire by goading and baiting the panellists. Stan Zemanek turned this into an art form. On one notorious program he made this remark: ‘This is the only show that I know where you can abuse the shit out of four women and not get arrested.’ Fortunately for Jeanne, she was one of the regular ‘beauties’ who did not cop a savaging from Zemanek. ‘Stan used to sort of agree with me,’ says Jeanne. ‘I used to get strange snippets out of the overseas newspapers to spark an idea. Stan would say, “I can always rely on you for the weird stuff.”’ According to Jeanne: The fights on the show were real; people got really upset, some of them even cried. The studio audience lapped it up and really got into it. I loved the current affairs and politics. I loved wearing over-the-top outfits to give viewers something to look at. The show launched around the time the boat people were landing illegally on our shores, which caused argumentative opinion and made for great television. 216

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Still crazy after all these years On one particularly heated show, Zemanek sat in the host’s chair alongside his panel of beauties—Jeanne Little, the millionaire heiress Rose Hancock Porteous, publishing executive Lisa Wilkinson and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. A woman called ‘Cheryl from Burwood’ wrote in and accused Hanson of being a racist and a bigot and suggested that she head back to her fish and chip shop. Hanson replied: ‘I’m not a redneck, I’m not a racist—I’m a realist.’ She accused the media of misconstruing her remarks. Rose Hancock Porteous, who was born in the Philippines, said she took offence at Hanson’s comments and asked: ‘Asians— what is it in us that you don’t like?’, to which Hanson replied: ‘It’s not that I don’t like Asians but I want balance restored in this country.’ The ensuing debate developed into a screaming match between the four women—Jeanne Little included. According to a journalist from the Daily Telegraph, when the cameras stopped rolling, the screaming continued and Hancock Porteous stormed off the set and vowed never to return. Today’s version of Beauty and the Beast offers in-yourface television: drug addicts, pederasts and bisexuals who lead double lives. One viewer even claimed that she had got drunk one night and slept with her brother’s homosexual lover! This is just part of the day-to-day routine of the show. But it was not always this way. When the original show was screened in 1963, it was a genteel problem-solver that offered advice on keeping homes tidy and husbands happy. Illegitimate babies were a hot topic (the accepted advice was 217

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HELLO DARLING! adoption). Graham McPherson, the show’s original producer, recalls a shocking episode when one of the panellists suggested abortion. The program’s two main sponsors withdrew their support and letters to the station poured in from outraged viewers. According to Jeanne: I never saw any of the early programs, but apparently the panellists weren’t even allowed to say the word ‘pregnant’. It must have been dreadfully dull. These days we talk about oral sex on the show and no one flinches. In the 1970s, the show stepped up a gear. It dealt with contraception, drunken husbands and the pros and cons of premarital sex, while the first dilemmas over gay sons emerged. In the 1980s, topics included drugs and feminism; the show went off air in 1983, before the AIDS scare hit, so safe sex was barely discussed. Beauty and the Beast made household names out of fashion writer and television presenter Maggie Tabberer, Sydney socialite Dita Cobb and media personality Ena Harwood. ‘Beasts’ over the years have included Stuart Wagstaff, John Laws, Clive Robertson and Derryn Hinch. On 15 December 2000 Jeanne Little received a letter from Government House, Canberra, informing her that she was the recipient of an Order of Australia Medal for her charity work and contributions to the entertainment industry. On Australia Day 2001, her award was announced to the press 218

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Still crazy after all these years and published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette. The award was a complete surprise to Jeanne: Our dear friend Jennifer Benjamin, who worked with Barry at Stuart Low’s when he first met me, was always eating out with us and would ask what I had been doing, as friends do. I always seemed to be going to a lot of charities, so Jennifer decided to get Barry to secretly make a list of all the charity events I hosted. With this list at her fingertips, Jennifer contacted the various charity organisations that Jeanne had been affiliated with over many years, and requested references in support of her nomination of Jeanne for an OAM. Jennifer also contacted such entertainment-industry heavyweights as Alan Jones, Bert Newton and Mike Walsh. The responses that Jennifer received were fulsome and wholeheartedly in favour of the honour. By the time Jeanne received the award, her television career had spanned twenty-seven years, and she had been involved with charities and community services for much of that time. A list of the major organisations that Jeanne has dedicated herself to is exceptionally long, but includes the Children’s Medical Research Institute, the Leukaemia Foundation, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, the War Widows’ Guild of Australia and the Royal Blind Society. Jeanne is patron of the Australian Stuttering Foundation (and played a pivotal role in raising almost $42 000 for the 219

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HELLO DARLING! organisation in 1998); appeared centre stage during a fundraising cruise for homeless children around Sydney Harbour (and managed to convince diners aboard the boat to pledge $60 000 for the Wesley Mission); and used her considerable clout in Jerry’s Girls to raise a hefty sum for the annual Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal. She was appointed the president of New South Wales Children’s Week in 1986, the International Year of Peace and, at the time, made this statement to the press: I’d like every child throughout New South Wales to draw or paint a picture called ‘peace’, and hang it on their front fence. I want the whole of Sydney to be a great celebration with the streets lined with paintings like a giant art gallery of peace. Just as Jeanne adds colour and life to any charity that she is associated with, she left her indelible mark on the award ceremony for the OAM itself. Says Jeanne: I was presented my medals by the New South Wales Governor Marie Bashir, who is the most wonderful woman. The protocol person came up to me before being presented and told me that I should address the Governor as ‘Your Excellency’ et cetera. But when I met this sweet woman, I simply grabbed her hand and called her darling. She didn’t flinch! 220

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Still crazy after all these years In 2004, Jeanne was at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, making some kids with cancer smile and laugh. According to Jeanne: I was doing a few appearances on the Today Show, and they’d asked me to go out to the hospital to do a segment. The cameraman was very late and I had four little kids getting restless. I tried to entertain them. Finally a producer arrived and said, ‘The cameraman is here.’ So I said, ‘All right kids, let’s all talk and sing,’ when suddenly I felt someone at my elbow. I half turned around and saw Mike Munro, who has often been at charity events that I’ve attended, and said, ‘Oh, Mike, you’re here too!’ Then of course I saw the big red book he was holding and he said, ‘Jeanne Little, this is your life.’ And so it was that Jeanne appeared on the television program This is Your Life, like many celebrities and public figures before her. The concept is straightforward: the host of the show ambushes the celebrity, presents them with a red book of ‘their life’, and then brings them to the studio to review their achievements. The guest is reunited with family members, old friends and acquaintances; many a tear is often shed in the process. A chauffeur drove Jeanne home to her Paddington terrace, where she spent the afternoon getting dressed, applying her make-up and getting ready for her appearance on the show. ‘A minder stopped me from answering the 221

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HELLO DARLING! telephone, because the person who is being profiled on the show needs to be kept a secret,’ says Jeanne. She and the driver came inside. Would you believe the dog had thrown up on the carpet? I steered them away and put rubber gloves on and cleaned up the mess. Then, after I’d gotten ready, I was whirled away to Channel 9 where there was a huge audience and where family and friends were installed in a holding room—I was out of my mind with emotion when everyone I loved popped out onto the set and said something about me. Jeanne’s siblings Cathie, Lottie, Margaret and Norman were the first to emerge onto the set. Lottie described her little sister as accident prone. She recounted a tale about Jeanne lathering her mother’s hair with dye and washing it out hours later, only to discover her mother’s locks had turned bright purple. The Channel 9 team had also tracked down two of Jeanne’s long-ago friends, Annette Marsden and Kerry Lawrence. Annette, Jeanne’s friend at Hurstville Opportunity School, recalled Jeanne looking for ‘elbow grease’ in the cupboard, after her home economics teacher had asked her to ‘put some more elbow grease into the dishes’. Kerry, on the other hand, described meeting an effusive and glamorous Jeanne at Permewan Wright, the wholesale company on Sydney’s Phillip Street in the 1950s. Then Barry made his appearance. He stepped onto the set, amid thunderous applause from the studio audience and an introduction from 222

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Still crazy after all these years Mike Munro which stated that the Littles had now been married for over thirty years. Barry said (with impeccable timing): ‘It’s been hell.’

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Epilogue

JEANNE LITTLE’S

LIFE IS STILL FULL WITH HER ONE-WOMAN

shows, her frequent appearances on Beauty and the Beast, and her commitments as a celebrity and charity patron. She travels overseas and interstate; reads; and hosts dinner parties for her many friends. In late 2004, Jeanne got into the head, and the costumes, of yet another famously controversial woman, Marilyn Monroe. The result was her third gutsy one-hander—written and co-produced with her husband, Barry. MM: A Tribute to Marilyn Monroe was launched at the Q Theatre in Penrith in Sydney on 29 October. MM did the rounds of the clubs in Sydney and then appeared interstate. The show continues to this day. Jeanne explains the origins of the show: 225

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HELLO DARLING! It grew out of constant requests for another show. I started off researching Carmen Miranda and Lucille Ball but realised their lives weren’t interesting enough to build a show around. But the life of Hollywood’s most famous blonde generated much material for a floor show: an unhappy childhood, sexual exploitation, broken marriages, drug abuse and a well-documented affair with both John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert. ‘Everyone in the audience loves the mystery surrounding Marilyn, her affairs, how she died,’ says Jeanne. They all want to talk about whether Marilyn was killed or committed suicide. They even come backstage to continue arguing about the controversial points of the star’s life. But with Marilyn, the mystery will never be solved. In 2005, Jeanne and Barry launched a revamped version of Hello Dahling! which Jeanne describes as ‘a completely new show, nothing like the original’. Midyear they took this show on a tour of southern Australia. According to Jeanne: We appeared at all the performing arts centres— seventeen shows in fifteen days! Our agent sent us from Melbourne, to Mt Gambier in South Australia, and then back to Melbourne again. The weather was very cold 226

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Epilogue with ice all over the car in the mornings and driving in the rain was dangerous. We could hardly see the road as we drove like hell to get to our next destination. We did 4500 kilometres in fifteen days. Amid all this, Jeanne also found time in 2005 to coauthor a book (with Robbie Tarling) titled Dirty Deeds: The Complete Guide to Home Cleaning (Wilkinson Publishing, 2005). The book provides encyclopaedic advice on day-to-day cleaning, and took Tarling six years to research and compile. Jeanne’s role was to inject the book with amusing anecdotes and comments on everything from removing ink from upholstery to washing urine out of rugs! In the introduction for the section on the effective removal of clay, Jeanne wrote: I got to be quite familiar with clay after making pottery on a TV segment. As the wheel turns you are supposed to hold the ball of clay firmly. On this occasion I held it a bit too firmly and much to my horror it turned into something like a penis. So, I grabbed the top and tried to squash it down, but it flopped over, spun into the air and suddenly landed on some poor woman in the audience. According to Jeanne: I don’t think that people associate me with a cleaning book. But Robbie Tarling started writing it, then I met 227

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HELLO DARLING! her and I said, ‘Look, I’ve had mad dinner parties and television people are grubby eaters. They always spill red wine and coffee everywhere. I know how to clean up all of that.’ So she said, ‘Come on board and we’ll write it together.’ It’s rocketing along as I speak. Jeanne kicked off 2006 with an appearance on the ABC television program, Talking Heads. Hosted by Peter Thompson, best known as a broadcaster on Radio National, the program profiles one celebrity each week and has included some of Australia’s most influential personalities. The result is a mini-biography that focuses on all aspects of the guest’s life: early influences, career choices, personal highlights, future aspirations. Jeanne’s appearance on the show included a frank discussion about her mother’s significant role in her life and what it was like to grow up without a father. She described her passion for fashion (‘I love sewing so much I could easily sew every day’), and she revealed that she dreamt of opening another dress shop: ‘I wouldn’t mind designing some mad clothes . . . because a lot of young people love mad designs. I think I could be an inspiration to them.’ When asked what she had in store for the future, Jeanne explained that she barely had a minute to think about that, but she intended to take Hello Dahling! on a tour throughout South Australia. Other than that, Jeanne said that she and Barry ‘might just go off into the sunset’. 228

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Epilogue But it was when the conversation turned to Katie that Jeanne’s eyes lit up. She said to Peter: Well, darling, you know, if I had to say the best thing that’s happened to my life it was having my daughter, our daughter, who is the dearest girl. She looks after Barry and me as though we’re her children. She will do anything for us. And then she had a beautiful little son with her lovely husband, Tim, and I just feel as though I’m really, really blessed. I have a lot of things to be thankful for.

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Notes

Note: Any quoted material that is not sourced below is from Jeanne Little’s personal papers. Dedication ‘. . . her mother’s frustrated life: too much power inside the home, not enough outside it.’ M. Coulton, ‘Feminist Icon Dies’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 2006, p. 1. Chapter 1 ‘. . . the nasal whine of a Hills Hoist . . .’ K. Burke, Sydney News, 22 March 1995, p. 4. ‘. . . a conversation with a chainsaw . . .’ S. Humphrey, ‘The Voice Behind the Chainsaw’, The Australian, 7 July 1983. 231

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HELLO DARLING! ‘. . . vulgar, elasticised vowels . . .’ T. Lawrence, ‘With Jeanne, a little goes a long way’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 1984. ‘. . . a piece of rubber to bite on . . .’ R.W. Rathbone, The Suburb that Grew from the Sandhills, Rockdale City Library, Sydney, 2000, p. 122. Chapter 2 ‘. . . I’ve had to work hard at it . . .’ J. Clare, ‘Maaarvellous!’, Sydney City Monthly, September 1980, pp. 43–8. ‘. . . I realised the varnish was chipping off.’ M. Hohensee, ‘There’s a Madcap under the Wig’, TV Times, 6 December 1975. ‘. . . like some member of the khaki Klu Klux Klan . . .’ J. Cadzow, ‘Meet the New Jeanne Little’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 2–3 May 1987, p. 3. ‘. . . gave them a special propensity for treacherous behaviour . . .’ G. Willett, Living Out Loud: A history of gay and lesbian activism in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, pp. 10–11. ‘. . . We were beaten up so badly . . .’ A. Dennis, 2002, ‘Yfronts didn’t spare the drag divas’, Sydney Morning Herald, , accessed 2 February 2006. 232

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Notes Chapter 4 ‘. . . change the mind of the prejudiced, the fearful, the conditioned and the sexually repressed . . .’ G. Willett, Living Out Loud: A history of gay and lesbian activism in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, pp. 10–11. ‘. . . At eight-fifteen on a Tuesday evening . . .’, 2005, ‘Top hat worn by Roy Rene’, Powerhouse Museum, , accessed 3 March 2006. ‘. . . one of the most original interior designers working in Australia today . . .’ B. Hayes and A. Hersey, Australian Style, Paul Hamlyn, Sydney, 1970, pp. 139–40. Chapter 5 ‘. . . He walked stiffly, slumped rather than sat . . .’ H. Robinson, ‘TV Host Bob Hawke made it look easy . . . except for Jeanne’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September 1981. ‘. . . They’re ugly, vulgar and tasteless . . .’ K. Blanch, ‘The Great Ocker Ad Debate’, Cleo, September 1976, pp. 130–3. Chapter 6 ‘. . . Now, there I was, with my flat chest . . .’ G. Callaghan, ‘Singing Her Own Tune’, Good Weekend, 22 October 1994, p. 52. 233

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HELLO DARLING! ‘. . . flighty character we know from television . . .’ S. Macmillan, ‘Bosom Buddies’, Sunday Telegraph, 31 March 1991, p. 107. ‘. . . few people in show business . . .’ G. Callaghan, ‘Singing Her Own Tune’, Good Weekend, 22 October 1994, p. 52. Chapter 8 ‘. . . with corpses of those . . .’ J. Kukso, ‘Set to be the top gun of night-time TV’, Woman’s Day, 26 November 1984, p. 9. Chapter 9 ‘. . . a significant new musical theatre talent . . .’, ‘Jerry’s Girls’, Sydney’s Star Observer, 7 August 1987, p. 12. ‘. . . but they very nearly steal the show . . .’, ‘Big Dealer’, The Bulletin, 11 August 1987, p. 8. ‘. . . Jeanne a profile, but in many respects . . .’ G. Callaghan, ‘Singing Her Own Tune’, Good Weekend, 22 October 1994, p. 52. ‘. . . Peter Williams doesn’t ever bring it off . . .’ B. Ellis, ‘Delightfully surprising comedy, but only skin deep’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1989, p. 16. ‘. . . we wouldn’t have been yawning . . .’ R. Gibson, ‘Oh, Step on it’, The Sunday Mail, 25 March 1990, p. 47. 234

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Notes ‘. . . People like Donna Lee, Jeanne Little and Jack Webster . . .’ J. Carmody, ‘Way out of Line’, Sun-Herald, 7 May 1989, p. 113. ‘. . . an upbeat celebration . . .’, ‘Follies returning to Oklahoma Aviator’, , accessed 4 March 2006. ‘. . . Talking in superlatives . . .’, ‘Oh dahling, it’s just so dazzling’, The Sunday Mail, 30 January 1994. ‘. . . audiences alike with her original one-hander . . .’ L. Leopard, ‘A Little Marlene, Anyone?’, Review, 1 May 1999. ‘. . . talkback on speed . . .’ J. Albert, ‘The Beast is Back’, Daily Telegraph, 28 January 1999, p. 3.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude and thanks to Jeanne and Barry for being brave and fearless, and two of the most gorgeous people I know. Thanks to Katie Little for your honesty, and to all the friends and relatives of the Little family for your invaluable time and side-splitting anecdotes. To my literary agent, Fitzroy Boulting, and to Jo Paul, my commissioning editor from Allen & Unwin for your patience and vision. To my editor Collette Vella—who continued to edit this book beyond her tenure at Allen & Unwin—for your unbelievable skill and generosity of spirit, and to Catherine Taylor and the rest of the staff at Allen & Unwin who worked on this book. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Greg Duncan Powell, for your love and for your curries. 237

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Index

ABC 210, 228 ABC Radio 24 Actors’ Equity 172 advertising 110–12, 127–9 Alford, Larry 188, 190 Allen, Peter 50 American Society of Interior Designers 98 Ankin, Chris 184 Ask Me Another 95 Athens 62, 63–4 Australian, The 6 Australian Cancer Research Foundation 219 Australian Entertainment ‘MO’ Award 208 Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 50 Australian Stuttering Foundation 24, 219 awards Australian Entertainment ‘MO’ Award 208

Council of Sales Promotion Agencies Worldwide Award of Excellence 171 Glad Bag Fashion Awards 168–9, 170 Gold Logie 134, 136–7, 142, 144, 146 Logie Awards 5, 129, 131–8, 196 Order of Australia Medal 218–20 Public Relations Institute of Australia 172 Regional Television Australia 170 Ayers, Angela 188, 191–2 Barcelona 75–6 Barker College 94, 184 Barnes, Mick 189–90 Barry Little Interiors 99–100 Bashir, Marie 220 Bay of Biscay 64–5 BBC 172 Beauty and the Beast 215–18, 225 Benjamin, Jennifer 90, 173, 219

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HELLO DARLING! Benjamin, Peter 201 Biddell, Kerrie 209–10 Black and White Ball 48 Blankety Blanks 50, 179–80 books Dirty Deeds: The Complete Guide to Home Cleaning 227–8 Booth Luce, Clare 89 Brandt, Davey 10, 11 Broadhurst, Florence xiii, 58, 101, 114–15 Bronhill, June 210 Brook Street Secretarial Bureau 67 Bulletin 126, 190, 203, 208 bullfighting 75–6 Burns, George 124 burnt toast dress 33–4 Buttrose, Ita 121 Byrne, Debra 185, 188, 190, 208 cabaret shows Hello Dahling! 197–203 Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich 204–9 Will Rogers Follies: A Life in Revue, The 198 see also musicals; theatre Cairo 62, 63 Callan Park Mental Asylum 17 cancer 180–1, 183–5 Capriccio’s 44, 47 Carmody, John 197 Casey, Peter J. 207 CD 215 Central Railway 17 Channel (7) Seven 136, 142–7, 149, 152, 173 Channel (9) Nine 117, 121, 124, 138–9, 142, 144, 152, 156, 162, 163, 169, 175, 176, 178, 179, 222 Channel (10) Ten 1, 3, 116, 120, 121, 128, 136, 137–9, 142, 179 charity work 37, 122, 162–3, 167, 173–4, 218–20, 225 Charter, Bob 199

Chartres Business College 39 Children’s Medical Research Institute 219 Chisholm, Sam 179 Clooney, Rosemary 198 Cobb, Dita 218 Cobbin, Bob 53–5 Coca-Cola 110, 111–12 Coles 38–9 Colgate-Palmolive Radio Unit 94–5 Collins, Bill 144 Collins, Joan 124 Colombo 62, 63 Commonwealth Games 1994 171 Connelli, Judi 185, 188, 209 cosmetics 38 Council of Sales Promotion Agencies Worldwide Award of Excellence 171 Coward, Noel 198, 200 critics 89, 135, 146, 161, 189–91, 196–8, 203, 208–9 Crocker, Barry 194 Cruickshank, Su 209 Cuckoo in the Nest 145–6 Daily Mirror 1, 3, 61, 113, 114, 115, 143, 161, 178 Daily Telegraph 33, 117, 137, 139, 174, 215, 217 Darling, Are You Paying Attention? 159 Davey, Jack 94, 95, 199 David Jones 9 De Niro, Robert 124 Desmond, Lorrae 210 Dietrich, Marlene 158–9, 197–8, 200–1, 204–9 diphtheria 6–7 Dirty Deeds: The Complete Guide to Home Cleaning 227–8 do-it-yourself segments 156–7 Dr Who 172 drag clubs 44–8 drag shows 45 Wizard of Oz, The 47

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Index Dunne, Faye 15, 23, 27, 32, 46, 48, 104, 105 Ellis, Bob 197 Everage, Dame Edna 50, 159 Farmers 48 fashion 1960s 66–7 boutique 2, 110–12 burnt toast 33–4 designers 169 faux pas 57–9 food 34, 35 industrial waste and refuse 35–6 milk-bottle tops 33 one-dollar coin dress 33 parades 168–9 Fishburn, Jimmy 88 Fortnum & Mason 69–70, 81 Foxtel 215 Fraser, Malcolm 126 French, Gordon 139 Freundt, Michael 210 Frost, John 91, 142, 185, 186, 187, 192 garbage bags 168–72 Gardner, Wayne 195 Gibson, Mel 124 Gibson, Mike 143 Gibson, Ronnie 197 Glad Bag Fashion Awards 168–9, 170 Glad Olympic Parents for Atlanta Program 171–2 Glad Wedding Competition 170–1 ‘Glitter Girl’ 49 Gold Logie 134, 136–7, 142, 144, 146 Golden Egg, The 69, 70 Good Morning Australia 215 Good Weekend xiii, 91, 136, 142 Gordon, Ashley 188–9 Goulder, Edward 20 Greer, Germaine 87, 88, 125–6

Hanson, Pauline 217 Harris, Rolf 194, 195 Harvey, Geoff 123, 154–5, 179 Harwood, Ena 218 hats 34, 35, 58–9, 62, 158, 195, 201, 202 haunting 193–4 Hawke, Bob 126–7 Hayden, Bill 126 Hayden Productions 175–6 Hayes, Babette 97 Hayes, Nancye 199, 209–10 headdress 48, 103–4 Hello Dahling! 197–203 Hello, Dolly! 186, 187 Helpmann, Sir Robert 37, 50, 54 Herman, Jerry 185–6, 187–8 Higham, Charles 208 Hinch, Derryn 176, 218 Hines, Marcia 142, 185, 188, 192–3 Hite, Shere 125 Holmes, Ian 120, 139 homosexuality 49–52 Housing Commission of New South Wales 21 Howson, John-Michael 2, 50, 116, 120, 122–3, 125, 141, 154, 162–3, 165, 175–6 Hurstville Opportunity School 22–3, 37, 222 ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ 201–2 Ian, Janis 198, 200 Interior Decorators Society of Australia 57 interior designing 93, 97–100, 101, 113, 143 International Year of Peace 220 ironwork, ornamental 15, 17, 19 ‘Jeanne Mitchell’ 110–12, 132 Jeanne’s Little Show 144–5, 146, 153 Jerry’s Girls 91, 142, 185–91, 220 John Singleton 127–9, 155

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HELLO DARLING! Kaye, Danny 123–4 Kennon, Ian 138 Kernot, Hugh 207–8 Kinging, Glen 143–4 Kingsford Smith, Charles 194–5 Kogarah Home Science School 37, 39 Kyeemagh Infants School 21 Laing, Ronnie 98, 112 Lamond, Toni 199, 209–10 Landstrome, Alexander (Sandy) 6, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23–4 Landstrome, Catherine (Cathie) 6, 7, 9–11, 12, 13–14, 19, 23, 26, 28, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 104, 183, 222 Landstrome, Charlotte (Lottie) 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 26, 46, 222 Landstrome, Elspeth (Elsie) 6, 19, 25, 26, 130 Landstrome, John 12–13 Landstrome, Katie 7–17 see also Mitchell, Katie Landstrome, Margaret 6, 19, 26, 222 Landstrome, Norman Daniel 7–16 Landstrome, Norman Jnr 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 222 Lawrence, Kerry 41–2, 56, 61–79, 104, 222 Laws, John 218 Legends at the Sydney Opera House 209–10 Leigh, Vivien 95–6 Lette, Kathy 126 Leukaemia Foundation 219 Little, Barry (Barrington) James ix–xv, 6, 14, 55–9, 80–1 Ask Me Another 95 Barker College 94, 184 born 93 Colgate-Palmolive Radio Unit 94–5 health 146 interior designing 93, 97–100, 101, 113, 143 newspaper column 113 oriental design 97–8

radio career 94–5 relationship with Jeanne 89–93, 102, 192–3 Spanish Gold 94 writing xi, 93, 94 Little, Dora 94, 99 Little, James 94 Little, Jeanne 1st television appearance 1–3 1st word 7 appearance 2, 38, 42, 88 Australian Entertainment ‘MO’ Award 208 Beauty and the Beast 215–18, 225 Black and White Ball 48 Blankety Blanks 50, 179–80 born 6 Brook Street Secretarial Bureau 67 cancer 180–1, 183–5 CD 215 character 21–2, 52, 90, 92, 149, 228 charity work 37, 122, 162–3, 167, 173–4, 218–20, 225 Chartres Business College 39 Coles 38–9 cosmetics 37–8 creativity 32–7, 62 Cuckoo in the Nest 145–6 Daily Mirror 113–14 Darling, Are You Paying Attention? 159 defeats Oxford professor of English 161–2 diphtheria 6–7 Dirty Deeds: The Complete Guide to Home Cleaning 227–8 do-it-yourself segments 156–7 Dr Who 172 drag clubs 44–8 education 21–3, 37, 39 fashion boutique 2, 110–12 fashion designs 1–2, 27–8, 32–7, 40–2, 48, 57–8, 62, 88, 160, 167, 202

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Index fashion faux pas 57–9 Fortnum & Mason 69–70, 81 Glad Bag Fashion Awards 168–9, 170 Glad Wedding Competition 170–1 ‘Glitter Girl’ 49 goes rock climbing 77 Gold Logie 134, 136–7, 142, 144, 146 Golden Egg, The 69, 70 Good Morning Australia 215 grandmother 215 hats 34, 35, 58–9, 62, 158, 195, 201, 202 haunting 193–4 headdress 48, 103–4 Hello Dahling! 197–203 Hello, Dolly! 186, 187 honeymoon 105–9, 156 Hurstville Opportunity School 22–3, 37, 222 ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ 201–2 Jeanne’s Little Show 144–5, 146, 153 Jerry’s Girls 91, 142, 185–91, 220 Kogarah Home Science School 37, 39 Kyeemagh Infants School 21 Legends at the Sydney Opera House 209–10 Logie Awards 5, 129, 131–8, 196 ‘Made in Australia’ 194–6 Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich 204–9 as Marlene Dietrich 158–9, 197–8, 200–1, 204–9 maternity fashion 1, 115 Midday 121, 170–1, 175–6, 178 Mike Walsh Show 1–3, 32–4, 99, 114, 116–21, 123, 127, 128–9, 131–8, 139, 142, 144, 152–3, 156–9, 162–5, 167–8, 170, 176–8, 189, 204 miscarriage 173 MM: A Tribute to Marilyn Monroe 225–6

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motorbike accident 176–8 Movie Ball 48 New Idea 168–9 Order of Australia Medal 218–20 patron 24, 37, 219, 225 Permanent Building Society 39, 41 Permewan Wright 41, 61, 222 Pinky 62 postnatal depression 115 pregnancy 112, 114, 117–18, 173–4 Purple Onion 44–6, 47, 51 ready to read the ABC news 24 Regional Television Australia 170 relationship with Barry Little 55–8, 59, 80–1, 89–93, 99, 102, 192–3 relationship with Bob Cobbin 53–5 relationship with Colin Morrow 79–80, 82–4 relationship with Ken 77–9 relationship with Peter Pascoe 43–4 sexual assault 52–3 scrubs floor in evening wear 116 ‘Shopping Bag’ 118–19 shyness 22–3, 38 singing 63, 64, 153, 158–9, 185–7, 190, 192, 195, 196–7, 201–2, 208–9 Stepping Out 196–7 SS Strathmore 61, 62–5, 67 stutter 23–4, 156 surgery 180–1, 183–4 Sydney Mardi Gras 2001 172 Talking Heads 228 tap dancing 186, 196–7 television career 1–3, 32–4, 101, 116–23, 124, 127, 132, 134, 136–8, 140–1, 143–7, 149, 156–8, 159, 170, 190–1, 215, 219, 228 television commercial 127–9 This is Your Life 221–3

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HELLO DARLING! Today Show 221 travelling overseas 61–84 voice 1, 3, 5–7, 21–2, 43, 44, 47, 56, 80, 116, 143, 158, 161–2, 189, 190, 203, 209 wedding reception 102–5 wigs 58–9, 167 Willesee 144 Win Jeanne Little Commonwealth Games Competition 171 Women, The 88–9, 185 work attire 39–41 Little, Katie Mae xi, 33, 34–5, 92, 99, 102, 114–15, 116, 149–51, 152, 156, 164, 173, 181, 183–4, 189, 191, 193, 211–15, 229 Lloret de Mar 74–7 Logie Awards 5, 129, 131–8, 196 London 65–71 Low, Stuart 81, 93, 96, 219 McCackie Mansion 94 McCormack, Peter 1 McDonald, Garry 133, 150–1 McDonald, Kate 150–1 McGregor, Jennifer 209–10 McIvor, Dormie 47–9, 91 McNicholl, Delamore 146 McPherson, Graham 218 ‘Made in Australia’ 194–6 Mardi Gras Sydney 2001 172 Marlene—A Tribute to Dietrich 204–9 Marsden, Annette 22, 222 Martin, Ray 139, 170, 175–6, 178–9 maternity fashion 1, 115 Maynard, Roger 169, 171–2 Merivale, John 96 Michael Parkinson Show 59, 114, 159–62, 172 Midday 121, 170–1, 175–6, 178 Mike Walsh Show xiv, 1–3, 32–4, 47, 116–27, 131–2, 134, 137–9, 142, 144, 152–4, 156–9, 162–5, 167–8, 170, 174–8, 189, 204 milk-bottle tops dress 33

Milner, Martin 133 Minogue, Kylie 195–6 Miranda, Carmen 51–2, 164, 226 Mitchell Brothers Ironworkers, The 17 Mitchell, David 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 118–19, 123, 132, 154, 194 Mitchell, John (great grandfather) 25 Mitchell, John (uncle) 8–9, 10, 16, 17, 32 Mitchell, John Spiers 8–9, 10, 24–6 Mitchell, Katie (Katherine) 7–17, 19–21, 24–5, 27–9, 31–2, 37–8, 39, 40, 62, 129–31 Mitchell, Lottie (auntie) 16, 105, 124, 161 MM: A Tribute to Marilyn Monroe 225–6 Monroe, Marilyn 22, 164, 225–6 Moody, Robyn 51 Morley, Sheridan 205–6 Morrow, Colin 79–80, 81–5 Movie Ball 48 Munro, Mike 143, 221, 223 musicals Hello, Dolly! 186, 187 Jerry’s Girls 91, 142, 185–91, 220 MM: A Tribute to Marilyn Monroe 225–6 Stepping Out 196–7 see also cabaret shows; theatre Negus, George 126 New Idea 168–9 New South Wales Children’s Week 220 New South Wales Committee of the Pharmaceutical Guild 94 New South Wales Royal Bicentennial Concert 194–6 Newton, Bert 133, 175, 215, 219 Nixon, Lola 185, 186, 188 Olivier, Sir Laurence 95 one-dollar coin dress 33 Order of Australia Medal 218–20

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Index Sleeman Ford 127–9 Society of Interior Designers of Australia 93, 98, 99, 101 Spanish Gold 94 Spiers, Elizabeth 25 SS Strathmore 61, 62–5, 67 Staein, Yvonne 170 Star Observer 190 Steele, Austin 145 Stephenson, Pamela 194 Stepping Out 196–7 Sunday Mail 197 Sunday Telegraph 111, 146 Sun-Herald 135, 155, 189–90, 197, 203 Sydney City Mission 9 Sydney City Monthly 38 Sydney Mardi Gras 2001 172 Sydney Morning Herald 6, 121, 126, 138, 197, 209 Sydney Opera House 209–10 Sydney Snow’s 17

oriental design 97–8 ornamental ironwork 15, 17, 19 O’Toole, Peter 124 Packer, Kerry 138–9, 174, 176 pantomimes 122–3 Paris 71–4 Parkinson, Michael 114, 161, 162 Parliament House 17 Pascoe, Peter 43–4, 48, 51, 53–5 Permanent Building Society 39, 41 Permewan Wright 41, 61, 222 Perryman, Jill 208, 210 Phyllis, Brian 158 Politzer, John 56 Porteous, Rose Hancock 217 Porter, Cole 198, 200, 201 Poulton, Tim 213–15, 229 Poulton, Tom Little 215 Price, David 120, 139, 152–3 Prince Charles 194, 195 Princess Diana 167, 194–6 Public Relations Institute of Australia 172 Purple Onion 44–6, 47, 51 radio programs Ask Me Another 95 Spanish Gold 94 Rainbow Room 198 Redfern, Jamie 50 Regional Television Australia 170 Rene, Roy 94–5, 199 Revlon 48–9 Robertson, Clive 218 Royal Blind Society 219 royalty 194–6 Salter, Colin 200, 203 Salter, June 210 Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal 220 Sanderson, Charlotte Drummond 24 ‘Shopping Bag’ 118–19 SIDS Red Nose Day (charity event) 37

Tabberer, Maggie 218 Talking Heads 228 Tarling, Robbie 227–8 television commercial 127–9 television programs Beauty and the Beast 215–18, 225 Blankety Blanks 50, 179–80 Cuckoo in the Nest 145–6 Jeanne’s Little Show 144–5, 146, 153 Midday 121, 170–1, 175–6, 178 Mike Walsh Show xiv, 1–3, 32–4, 47, 116–27, 131–2, 134, 137–9, 142, 144, 152–4, 156–9, 162–5, 167–8, 170, 174–8, 189, 204 Talking Heads 228 This is Your Life 221–3 Today Show 221 Willesee 144 Thai Silk Company 98

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HELLO DARLING! theatre Legends at the Sydney Opera House 209–10 Women, The 88–9, 185 see also cabaret shows; musicals This is Your Life 221–3 Thomas Cook News 111 Thompson, Jim 98 Thompson, Peter 228 Tilbury Hotel 198–9, 202–3, 209–10 Today Show 221 Tyrell, Pennie 125 University of Sydney 17 voice 1, 3, 5–7, 21–2, 43, 44, 47, 56, 80, 116, 143, 158, 161–2, 189, 190, 203, 209 Wagstaff, Stuart 179, 218 Wallace, Bill 179 Walsh, Mike 2, 33, 101, 118, 120, 123–4, 125, 126, 128–9, 131–2, 134, 137–9, 141, 153–6, 157, 170, 174–5, 176, 177, 178, 179, 200, 219

War Widows’ Guild of Australia 219 Wesley Mission 220 Whitlam, Gough 87, 126 wigs 58–9, 167 Wilkinson, Lisa 217 Will Rogers Follies: A Life in Revue, The 198 Willesee 144 Williams, Geoffrey 203, 210 Williams, Mike ‘Shirley’ 122, 123 Williams, Peter 196–7 Williams, Ruth 99–100, 149 Win Jeanne Little Commonwealth Games Competition 171 Wizard of Oz, The 47 Wolfe, Digby 144 Woman’s Day 155, 171, 174 Women, The 88–9, 185 Woodcock, Kerry see Lawrence, Kerry work attire 39–41 World War II 17–19, 20 Zemanek, Stan 215–17

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