As the year wore on, the Kylie machine went into full throttle. A huge round of promotional appearances for the new single and album began, alongside work for charity, when the BBC announced that Kylie would appear on the Children In Need appeal on November 19, where she would perform ‘Step Back In Time’ and ‘Spinning Around’. She also announced plans to perform at 2005’s Glastonbury festival.
In early 2005 the Showgirl tour was launched to great acclaim. The costumes looked like something out of the Moulin Rouge, while all the energy and excitement that had accompanied Kylie’s previous tours was out in force. And then, in May, just short of her 37th birthday, Kylie was forced to make an announcement that caused worldwide shock. Kylie Minogue, the very embodiment of youth, femininity and beauty, had found a lump in her breast. After going to the doctor, she was told the worst. It was cancer and the treatment was going to take at least a year.
Initially, Kylie was as professional and dignified about it as could be. She put out a statement through her Australian tour promoters, The Frontier Touring Company, saying that she was going to have to postpone the Australian leg of the tour, and typically, she seemed to be worrying about letting her fans down rather than worrying about what was going to happen to her. ‘I was so looking forward to bringing the Showgirl tour to Australian audiences,’ she said. ‘I am sorry to have disappointed my fans. Nevertheless, hopefully all will work out fine and I’ll be back with you all again soon.’
Kylie’s real state of mind did not become public until much later, but it finally emerged, unsurprisingly, that she had gone into a state of shock. The massive publicity surrounding the initial announcement didn’t help. ‘I had one day’s grace when I knew and then the next day we made the announcement and then I was virtually a prisoner in the house,’ she later confessed.
‘Not that I intended to go anywhere, but from then on I was just completely thrown into another world. It’s really hard for me to express how I felt or even the chain of events. It’s such a personal journey. I felt really bad for everyone around me. I’m like, “Oh my God, my poor parents.” It’s like a bomb’s dropped. It’s still sinking in. It’s a very steep learning curve. I would just quietly go to my bedroom and just have 20 minutes to myself and try to deal with everything.’
There was initial speculation and hope among the public that it might not be as bad as all that, but these hopes were dashed extremely quickly, when it turned out Kylie was going to undergo immediate surgery. She was based in Melbourne, where her parents were looking after her, when it all took place: just nine days before her birthday, a tumour was removed. Olivier was also present.
The only person to say anything publicly at this early stage was Dr Jenny Senior, who said that the operation at St Francis Xavier Cabrini Hospital had been a success. ‘I feel confident that we caught the cancer in time and that she is now on the road to complete recovery,’ she said. ‘Kylie has been the perfect patient and has charmed all my staff. I just wish I could have met her under happier circumstances. Kylie is resting after the operation and her spirits are high and she is feeling fine.’
Dr Senior went on to thank Kylie, her family and Olivier for ‘making my job very easy. They were so welcoming. Her spirits are high and she’s feeling fine. Kylie has asked me to pass on her thanks once again to all who have expressed their love and concern for her. Your support has certainly helped her through a tough time.’
It wasn’t only her fans’ support that was helping: there was Olivier, too. There can be no question that he aided Kylie’s recovery: he was there for her throughout the operation, providing complete and total moral support. ‘He has been fantastic and has really come through for Kylie,’ said a friend of the Minogues. ‘She hasn’t had much luck with men in the past but Olivier is great for her and the family adore him. He held her hand throughout the tests and was there when she came round after the operation. We know he’ll continue to be there for her throughout her recovery.’ They were right.
The Minogue family were also giving their full support. As Kylie began the process of recuperation, everyone gathered round to protect the fragile star, with the siblings telling the world what she had been going through. ‘We have all been to see her at hospital and she is going from strength to strength,’ said her brother Brendan, now 35 and a cameraman for Australia’s Channel 9. ‘She is dealing with it all with amazing style and grace. For all the campaigning she has done about cancer awareness, it still doesn’t prepare you for that moment when you discover a lump under your skin the size of a golf ball that shouldn’t be there. She has had to adapt pretty quickly to all this.
‘Dad had prostate cancer and was cured. Kylie has gone to the same hospital as Dad and feels good about that. It is bringing her immense comfort and she just isn’t fazed by any of it. We were all so worried about her but Kylie genuinely isn’t. She has shown remarkable bravery. I’m so proud of her. No one likes to find a lump beneath their skin and when she was told it was cancerous, we all kind of went into shock. But she is in good hands. She found the lump in her breast while she was washing and decided to do something about it immediately. When people realize this, I’m sure there will be millions of girls spending a little longer in the shower from now on.’
Support continued to pour in from all over the world, with Prince Charles, no less, sending her a note wishing her a speedy recovery, alongside Sir Elton John and Robbie Williams. And as her programme of radiotherapy began, Kylie moved out of the parental home, simply to escape the gaggle of reporters that were outside waiting for her every day. ‘Kylie is finally getting the peace and privacy she needs to recover,’ said a source close to the singer. ‘But there is still a long, long way to go and more time to recover.’
But there was a hint of cheer shortly afterwards when Kylie released a statement saying that the chemotherapy had been a success. Dannii made an appearance at the Diamonds & Vanity party at London’s Natural History Museum, where she, too, was upbeat: ‘Isn’t the news just great?’ she asked. ‘She’s been inspirational, she’s a fighter. I want to be there to support her and we both give huge thanks to the wellwishers.’
Kylie’s positive attitude was certainly coming through loud and clear. Putting paid to rumours that she had moved to Europe to escape the press, she turned up at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, where she met children who had been struck by the disease. She didn’t actually say anything about her own condition, but clearly provided a boost for the young patients: ‘There’s a champ, there’s a champ coming by,’ said one.
Aware that her treatment was going to continue for months to come, Kylie made the decision to move to Paris to be with Olivier. She was pictured for the very first time wearing a headscarf, bringing home the brutal truth that even the beautiful Kylie Minogue was suffering the ravages of the treatment, namely losing her hair. It took some courage to appear in public as she did: Kylie, after all, was known as an international beauty and style icon and to be pictured with hair loss, even if it wasn’t actually on display for the cameras, took some guts.
This was backed up by Dannii, who, with Kylie unavailable for comment, was rapidly becoming a sort of pseudo-spokesman for her sister. She is coping ‘gracefully’, said Dannii, and had found worldwide messages of goodwill, ‘very helpful and supportive’. ‘Sis is doing really good,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a stressful treatment. Anyone who is going through that would know that it is physical and mental. She is handling it very gracefully and I would just have to say that honouring her privacy I wouldn’t want to go into any details of anything. It’s a tough time on the family as well. But she wishes anyone else going through this, she wishes them all of her love and all the best as well.’
And so it went on. The press, while constantly fascinated by what was going on with the world’s favourite pop star, actually treated Kylie with a great deal of respect. She was pictured from time to time, always wearing a headscarf, unfailingly polite and charming, no matter how rotten she felt. Som
etimes she was up to going out and shopping; at other times she stayed at home, being cared for by Olivier and her family. There was the odd weekend away with Olivier, too, although everything was conducted on a quiet scale.
There was a good deal of speculation, too, about the state of Kylie’s health, but what rumblings did emerge from the Minogue camp did on the whole appear positive. Kylie was put on a special diet to help her gain weight: she went up to six and a half stone, the heaviest she has ever been. Public affection, to say nothing of respect for the way she was handling herself, continued to soar. There was a sense of real celebration when she was strong enough to return to her parents in Australia for a visit, to say nothing of hopes that Kylie was on the mend.
And, indeed, she was. The news came out, in a very low key way, that she was getting much better. And then Kylie began appearing without her headscarf, showing off a sleek new look, as her hair had clearly begun to grow back. Finally, what really convinced everyone that she really was much better was when, shortly after her 38th birthday, she joined Dannii on stage as the latter performed at London’s G-A-Y club, much to the thrill of the crowd.
It was an extraordinary recovery. Kylie Minogue had been out of the limelight for a year, only occasionally pictured looking weak and frail, with results that finally paid off in June 2006 when it was announced that the chemotherapy had been successful and she had been given the all clear. Many people might have decided to take it easy for a while after what had, after all, been a gruelling year, but Kylie was having none of it.
For a woman as focused and ambitious as she, it had been torture being forced to stay at home, waiting helplessly until she was told that she was well enough to venture out once more, and the moment she knew she’d beaten her illness, the formidable Kylie machine swang back into action. Desperately keen to make up for lost time, an album and a tour were both announced at a press conference in Melbourne, held by her tour manager Michael Gudinski. It also emerged that she had written a book while she was ill, Showgirl Princess. There was a real sense of happiness in the air as he cracked open a bottle of champagne and announced that Kylie was back.
She started making appearances in public, too. Kylie had reinvented her look on numerous occasions in the past, and now the old trooper actually used the suffering of the past year to her advantage. Her hair was now growing back, and she had it cut into a 1920s-style bob, a gamine style that suited her delicate features down to the ground. The smile was more full on than ever, while Kylie was clearly rediscovering her power as an icon.
It was announced that the V&A museum in London, no less, would be holding an exhibition of her costumes, from that famous pair of gold hot pants to some of her most spectacular stage displays. Kylie herself had largely remained quiet while all this was going on, working behind the scenes on plans to relaunch herself, until she was sure she was strong enough to step centre stage once more. That moment finally came when she made an appearance at Sir Elton John’s annual White Tie and Tiara ball at the end of June, 2006. She looked stunning, wearing a Chanel dress and £3 million of Bulgari jewellery, leaving everyone in no doubt that a full recovery was on the cards. ‘It’s a miracle I got better,’ she said to her fellow guests. ‘It’s my official coming out.’
In an interview with Cat Deeley, which was shown on Sky One, Kylie was now able to reflect on the past, remembering the moment she was told that something was very badly wrong. ‘The moment my doctor told me, I went silent,’ said Kylie. ‘My mum and dad were with me, then we all went to pieces.’ Of course, Kylie was due to start the next leg of her tour, and incredibly, her initial impulse was to go ahead. ‘I was saying, ‘No, I’ve got my flight to Sydney in two hours. I’m getting on a plane’,’ she related. It was her father Ron who made her see sense, saying, ‘No. You’re not getting a plane. You’ll just sit down.’
Kylie sparkled in the interview. Covered in diamonds, she looked more beautiful than ever: the message, clearly, was: I’m back.
But even so, her lighthearted demeanour and cheery presence did not conceal the fact that she’d had a very frightening year. ‘Having had cancer, one important thing to know is you’re still the same person at the end, you are the same person during it,’ she said. ‘You’re stripped down to, you know, you’re down near zero. But it seems that most people come out at the other end feeling more like themselves than ever before. I’m more eager than ever to do what I did. I want to do everything. I don’t want it to sound soppy but that’s the way it is. Try to enjoy the moment. Have a laugh. Swim in the sea. Hug and kiss.’
Kylie was also deeply grateful to her fans, and when she talked about some of the letters she received, from the very young to the very old, the measure of her popularity was not in doubt. ‘We don’t want doctors to put needles into you,’ wrote one little girl. ‘When are you back on stage?’
But Kylie was also aware that as an immensely popular figure and role model, her so-far successful battle with the disease will have given others hope. ‘I know there will be people who will see this, be watching this now, there will be X amount of women being diagnosed,’ she said. ‘I love to say: you can get through it. You can.’
Kylie also revealed for the first time that, even before she found the lump, there were indications that something might be wrong. Very unusually for her, she even began to have doubts about her capability to stage such a colossal tour. ‘I distinctly recall going to my two sound guys and saying, “Maybe I’m too old for this? I’m so tired,”’ she said, also adding that she had started to come out in cold sweats. Her self doubt, as much as anything else, was an indication that something was wrong. Kylie was not too old to be doing what she was doing – Madonna, a decade her senior, is still going strong – and she should have been at the peak of her physical fitness rather than feeling so drained.
After the operation, which was now confirmed to have been a partial mastectomy, Kylie stayed with her family in Melbourne for two months, as her recovery began. And, whether or not she was actually aware of it, her determination almost certainly played a key role in her recovery – after all, it is often said that when it comes to cancer, it is the positive patients who get well. ‘Always one to rise to the challenge, I thought, Okay, okay, you’ve got to fight it,’ she said. ‘You can’t sit back and let everyone else do the work for you. Time keeps ticking, you go through the motions. I don’t want to go into the doom and gloom of it. It’s hard. The days you didn’t see me – or no one saw me – were the days that I simply couldn’t get up or could not do anything. To walk to the corner store was a great … I did it. I got to the cafe. And then got home.’
Despite the fact that the world had seen the pictures of her looking so frail, Kylie’s words still came as a shock. Over and over it became apparent quite how serious this illness had been. And over and over, her positivity and determination came up trumps, not least when, still in the early days, she decided to visit a children’s cancer ward. ‘That day the father of an ill child eyeballed me and said, “And how are you doing?” she recalled. I said, “Fine, fine,” and managed to go off and find a corner to contain myself.’
In actual fact, there was still a lengthy course of chemotherapy to undergo, and Kylie was faced with a difficult choice. While her family had been looking after her in Australia, Olivier had to return to France. The relationship had been growing increasingly strong in the course of Kylie’s illness, on top of which there were some of the world’s greatest experts when it came to cancer in Paris. And so Kylie decided that, against her parents’ wishes, she would accompany him to France, where she would have treatment at the Institut Gustave-Roussy. To ease parental concern, and to help Olivier look after her, Kylie’s mother accompanied her daughter half way across the world.
As she was about to begin chemotherapy at the Institut Gustave-Roussy, Minogue received a further blow when doctors warned her that she was unlikely to become pregnant naturally after the treatment. For a woman who wanted to have children, this was a s
erious blow. ‘I’ve just rolled along,’ said Kylie, when she was asked if she’d made a conscious decision to postpone motherhood. ‘The past few years have been pretty full on. I didn’t have much time to stop and think about it … I love children – always have, always will.’
Another issue that Kylie had to deal with was losing her hair, a traumatic occurrence for any woman, but especially one who has been such a famed beauty as Kylie. Again, she took it on the chin, saying merely that she became extremely competent with tying a headscarf. ‘It wasn’t so much of an issue for me,’ she said. ‘I’m used to having different looks.
‘Of course there was a price on my head at that time: who’s going to get a picture of her with a bus flying by and her scarf coming off? I don’t want to be like, I had this, this, this. That’s boring, it’s personal and I don’t want to remind people of that. This is coming out the other side. It’s like springtime.’ Dannii helped, too. ‘She would come to Paris on the Eurostar, put the music on, get me moving,’ her sister said.
Of course, even Kylie had her very dark days. ‘That was a very difficult time, waiting for the phone to ring or for the doctor to come over,’ she said of the period when she had to wait to see if the chemo had worked. ‘I can hardly believe that I’m here.’
Nor was that the end of it. Although the chemotherapy had been successful, Kylie now had to undergo a course of radiation to try to ensure that the cancer did not come back. She did, however, begin to see a physical recovery: initially she had shaved her hair off in one go so that she wouldn’t have to see it falling out bit by bit, and now it was finally beginning to grow back again. ‘When [your hair] starts to grow back it’s so thrilling,’ she said. ‘There’s an eyelash! There’s an eyebrow! You are sure you’ll be the one [for whom] it never does.’
Kylie Queen of the World Page 20