Blonde Ambition

by Annette Sharp

  PR boss Roxy, who claimed to have been dubbed ‘sultana tits’ at high school, was looking newly buxom on Yorke’s arm at Kings Cross celebrity haunt Hugo’s Lounge weeks later. She talked openly of having ‘treated’ herself to a boob job following her break-up from Abrams and her newly enhanced breasts were, she said in interviews, ‘quite fab’ and her favourite physical attribute.

  Yorke, thirty-four, had been a fixture in the British tabloids thanks to his 18-month-long relationship with UK page three girl Katie Price, AKA Jordan, in 2001 and 2002. The couple’s romance was already over when Price gave birth to a son, Harvey, in May 2002. Yorke famously disputed paternity until a DNA test proved he was the child’s father.

  The football star was considered one of the world’s biggest playboys when Roxy made a trophy of him. By March, Roxy was on hand to collect Yorke as he flew into Australia. She was spotted whisking the football star away from Mascot Airport in her luxury car, a Porsche, sports writers muttered enviously. Just weeks later she would fly to London with Yorke for a few days rest and recreation. By July, the two were hitting Sydney’s bars and rubbing shoulders with veteran party girl Mimi Macpherson, little sister of ‘The Body’ Elle, and Australia’s own Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins at the launch of the new Mandalay Room at Kings Cross nightclub the Vegas Hotel, which was part owned by publican Richard Wynne, who had once run a pub for media proprietor Kerry Packer and by 2009 was bankrupt owing more than $120 million. After upgrading from Richens to Yorke, Roxy had been promoted to ‘It’ girl into the bargain.

  While there was some unsavoury tattle that would linger after the affair with Yorke ended, Roxy’s public profile had been supercharged as a result of her association with the football star.

  In 2008, Roxy decided she needed a criminal lawyer.

  The incident that marked her as fiery and hard-nosed—some would even say heartless—would involve her only sibling, sister Ruby, then eighteen and younger than Roxy by a decade. The pair became embroiled in a physical skirmish at Sydney’s newest nightclub, The Piano Room, after the younger of the two Jacenko firebrands arrived at the club for a night out with friends. A furious Roxy, believing her sister was trying to gatecrash an event she was hosting at the venue, moved purposefully to stop her. The stand-off quickly became physical and Ruby punched her sister in the face. Twice.

  ‘When she grabbed me on the wrist to tell me that I shouldn’t be there, I just saw red and punched her,’ Ruby later told a newspaper reporter.

  The venue, which would years later draw comparisons to West Hollywood’s notoriously cool The Viper Room due to the rotation of high-profile troubled stars through its doors—actor Matthew Newton, television personality Charlotte Dawson and prominent footballers among them—was located above Kings Cross’s iconic neon Coca-Cola sign and had been open just three weeks when the clash occurred on 23 April.

  After the women’s mother told Ruby to head to the police station, Ruby set off, with Roxy following. Once there, Roxy filed a police report—‘a fairly lengthy complaint’, said the police prosecutor—before being granted an interim apprehended violence order. Ruby was prevented from going within 50 metres of her sister and told not to visit her at her home or her workplace.

  The sisters ended up at Downing Centre Local Court on 21 May only to see the matter adjourned to 18 June. Newspaper reports recorded the women sat at opposite ends of the courtroom dressed similarly, in black, neither acknowledging the other. Roxy would be persuaded to drop the matter. ‘I don’t want my 18-year-old sister to end up with criminal charges, but what she did to me, her sister, was completely and utterly out of line and unacceptable,’ she told The Daily Telegraph after the hearing.

  The ugly domestic incident would hang over the two women for years. Some would say Roxy was merely being protective of her younger sister by refusing the 18-year-old entry to the nightclub—others said she was being protective of something that mattered far more to her, her professional reputation. The alleged assailant in the matter, Ruby, then in her final year of high school, would carry the scars. Marked as a spoilt, tearaway society debutante, the young woman would find herself in some surprising situations. There would be a night of partying at radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands’ home in July 2011 and a kiss shared with Sandilands’ then best friend, British boy-band singer Brian McFadden—something that broke in the online media in January 2012, nine months after Ruby’s camera was stolen, she would say, along with her iPad, computer and video camera, from an office in one of the Jacenko family’s Capitol Clothing offices.

  The sisters’ feud would split the family. Mother Doreen stood with Ruby. Nick Jacenko, with Roxy. He would say his wife was in the habit of encouraging Ruby to gatecrash Roxy’s parties when she was at a loose end socially. Devoted to her younger daughter, Doreen booked Ruby in to have her hair styled on the day in question before she headed to The Piano Room. Nick Jacenko would say he’d watched as the battlelines had been drawn between the sisters over many years.

  Roxy put the ugly headlines to one side and threw herself into the thing she loved most, her work, and spent the next year immersed in her business hoping to erase any reputational damage. By 2010, she had recovered her grit and was weighing up options for reality TV stardom.

  Six years after establishing her thriving PR company, in 2010 Roxy would begin talks with producers from the Seven Network about starring in her own reality show called The Sweat Shop. The program would see Roxy’s PR office fitted with cameras in order to capture the Sweaty Betty team’s ‘every move … crazy schedules, launches, events, social lives—even the cat-fights and tears’ reported News Corp’s Jonathon Moran.

  Australian television executives had been milking the reality TV genre for a decade. They were of the view there was still revenue in fly-on-the-wall reality programming. If they could get the warring Jacenko sisters on camera screaming at each other, there might even be ratings in it.

  Inspired by the success of US cable reality series The Hills, Roxy and her staff bared their souls for Channel Seven’s television cameras for two months. In July, after telling her staff to unleash their ‘inner bitches’ along with the inner workings of their PR shop, producers stopped recording and withdrew to review the footage. By October, the semi-scripted program had been canned by Seven. Roxy would later tell media and marketing industry website Mumbrella it had been ‘really invasive on [her] private life—and do you want to expose that much of your business?’ Uncharacteristically sensitive to public exposure, Roxy, insiders said, had been too restrained on camera, while her staff couldn’t be persuaded to unload on their boss. ‘It was too tame,’ said one participant. And Ruby hadn’t participated.

  Roxy took the news of the show’s shelving well. She consigned the Porsche to history and bought herself a new toy, a gutsy Aston Martin Vantage sports car. She had no comment to make on rumours she paid for it with $320 000 cash. Within weeks of revamping her image with a new car, Roxy’s relationship with Oliver Curtis would come to light.

  Curtis had been engaged to another woman, PR account manager Hermione Underwood, when he fell for Roxy’s undisputed charms.

  Underwood was the best friend of swimwear model and Sydney ‘It’ girl Lara Bingle, the one-time face of a controversial Destination New South Wales ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ ad campaign and the model who had rocked AFL star Brendan Fevola’s marriage in 2006. Bingle’s split from Australian cricket team captain Michael Clarke in March 2010 was the celebrity bust-up story of the year.

  That Roxy had somehow stumbled into the drama was not all that surprising. After moving out of a luxury beachfront Bondi apartment she shared with Clarke, Bingle checked in—up the road—with her best friend of three years Underwood, and her fiancé Curtis.

  Curtis’s friends at the time believed the young investment banker who styled himself in the manner of a tidy and fashionable young prince was living the Aussie male’s dream. Though he had been sacked from Transocean the year prior, he was risi
ng meteorically through the executive ranks at his father’s investment advisory company Riverstone and still had money to splash around, which he did liberally—something that likely didn’t escape Roxy’s attention. News of a romance between Curtis, twenty-five, and Roxy, thirty, titillated gossip columnists anew.

  ‘The ink was still wet on his wedding invitations for his planned marriage to Hermione when he took up with Roxy,’ said one astonished guest who was stunned to learn the wedding was off.

  The new relationship wasn’t without its obstacles—one of whom proved to be Bingle. When the mining investment adviser’s eye wandered after a couple of months dating Roxy, a paparazzi photographer would discover Curtis’s car outside Bingle’s new apartment and it would soon be reported in a newspaper column. Roxy, a former member of her staff said, was behind the tip. She had made the call to the photographer in the hope of diverting Curtis’s attention. It worked. The fledgling playboy rushed back to the spin doctor.

  While Curtis was being distracted by Bingle, there were also whispers Roxy, ever the opportunist, had taken a run at Bingle’s ex, cricket captain Clarke, who was still getting over his break-up with the swimsuit model. Predictably, Roxy had found herself with a front row seat to a story that dominated newspapers, women’s magazines and television news—the story of the Australian cricket captain’s split with Bingle.

  At the start of 2010, Bingle had been Sydney’s most famous Aston Martin driver. By the end of the year—after Clarke had dispatched Bingle’s car to a showroom to be sold in the couple’s break-up fire sale—Roxy would be. She would also be six weeks pregnant to her on-off boyfriend, Curtis.

  The new year would bring new plans—a baby among them. Roxy’s critics would say it was Roxy’s way of snagging a rich husband. News of Curtis’s Christmas Day proposal made the papers a week later.

  Curtis formalised the union with a magnificent round-cut diamond set in platinum with a diamond-studded band.

  ‘It’s a four-and-a-half carat diamond, but I’m not sure what the cost of it would be,’ Roxy later told Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend in 2013. ‘Obviously it’s not something I asked Oli when he gave it to me. My first question was, “Is it real?” That was before I said yes.’

  Another ring would follow. To celebrate the birth of her first child, Pixie Rose, in August, Curtis presented his fiancée with an enormous four-carat pear-shaped diamond ‘push present’. Four years later in 2015, she would have it made into a ring by a favourite jeweller, Nicholas Haywood.

  Fairfax columnist Andrew Hornery would report the proposal was sealed with an unusual gift for his future bride—a year of free blow-dries from celebrity hairstylist Renya Xydis in Paddington.

  Given the breakneck pace at which the couple was moving, no-one—except perhaps investigators at ASIC—was surprised when they bought a new home in March. That it was in leafy, conservative Woollahra surprised a few as Roxy didn’t strike anyone as the conservative, settled, old money Woollahra type, despite the fact she had spent her teenage years growing up in the upmarket suburb.

  Word that the couple paid $6.6 million came as a universal shock to all. Only four months earlier in December 2010, Curtis been outed as an associate of insider trader John Hartman. The couple’s purchase of the new 4-bedroom, 4-bathroom Edward Street family home would make Sydney’s real estate columns. Two years later the sale of the house would alert ASIC to the possibility Curtis could be attempting to cash up and conceal his wealth—prompting the Supreme Court to freeze his assets.

  While running a business, planning a wedding and preparing to welcome a baby, Roxy somehow found time to produce a book loosely based on her life. Spurred in part by her failed reality TV plans, her book, Strictly Confidential, would be a fictionalised version of her own life. She would later say the work, an 18-month project, would demonstrate how gruelling the PR world was: ‘It’s far from a life of champagne and canapés many like to think it is,’ she told blogsite Josie’s Juice.

  The book, early chapters of which were rumoured to have been ghost-written by Daily Telegraph scribe Joel Christie, on whom a character in the book, Luke Jefferson, was said to have been based, told the story of PR queen Jazzy Lou and her PR company Queen Bee PR. Like Roxy, the work-obsessed main character Jasmine ‘Jazzy’ Lewis had a string of high-profile boyfriends—though none with ongoing issues with ASIC. Some Sydney identities would make thinly disguised cameos. A former staffer, Sara Hills, future wife of Olympian Geoff Huegill, was tipped to be among them, along with magazine editrix Jackie Frank, Bingle, Clarke and Roxy’s sister Ruby.

  The book, promoted heavily by Roxy, found an audience with young chick lit fans and budding PR hopefuls. Its genius was it bolstered Roxy’s profile and gave her something she was invested in selling—the myth about herself. An intimate milestone that might have left another woman feeling content and ready to shrink from the media’s unforgiving eye—the birth of her first child—brought new opportunities and battles.

  Following the birth of Pixie Rose (‘PR’) on 16 August 2010, the workaholic was back at work within hours. Roxy revealed to one magazine she had worked until 8 p.m. the night before giving birth and was back on her BlackBerry checking emails three hours after a 2 p.m. caesarean section the next day. Being ‘far too busy building her business’ to take maternity leave drew swift online reaction and criticism. The ‘mommy bloggers’ erupted. Even traditional media had a view. The Herald Sun’s Susie O’Brien wrote: ‘Women like this should take the time they need to look after their newborns, and stop trying to be superheroes.’

  ‘Although some people will judge me for taking micro maternity leave, I don’t feel guilty in the slightest, nor will I apologise,’ Roxy told Grazia magazine. ‘I’d feel more guilty if I were to put Pix in child care because I [would] feel like I was dumping her.’

  Roxy admitted she could not step away from her company—her ‘brand’—and leave the work to others: ‘As brilliant as my team is, I definitely need to be the driving force behind the brand; my clients want—and expect—my input.

  ‘I built the company from the ground up eight years ago and it means too much to me to leave it in anyone else’s hands for say five months, which is why I was back in the office full-time four days after I had Pixie,’ she told the magazine.

  Word that the new mum had built a special nursery annex—a newborn’s ‘office’ complete with flat-screen television and ensuite—at the Sweaty Betty headquarters in Beaconsfield was considered news.

  Her decision to share her baby with her Instagram audience and set up an Instagram account for the toddler less than two years later would provoke a deluge of criticism that, five years on, showed no sign of abating.

  On 11 March 2012, Roxy and Curtis married in an extravagant ceremony at harbourfront restaurant Quay. Every small detail of the wedding would be reported, including the wedding gown that a bridesmaid let slip had been flown from Los Angeles on its own first-class seat, the white $460 000 Ferrari convertible the groom gave his bride, and the fact Roxy’s estranged sister Ruby had attended, in what guests would describe as a ‘tiny hoochi dress and pink hair’, prompting talk the pair had finally buried the hatchet. They hadn’t. Merely the tip. The wedding photos were published on online wedding site The Knot.

  Newly married with a young baby and a new house that would require a lavish makeover by a society interior designer within the year (and then a second makeover when Roxy wasn’t happy with the work), Roxy could have spent 2013 resting on her laurels. But it was not to be. There was something left undone that was still nagging her—reality TV stardom.

  In 2013, the Nine Network’s The Celebrity Apprentice program would present Roxy with the best promotional opportunity—and worst headlines—of her life. Promotions for the program would depict her as a she-devil with photoshopped horns and red eyes.

  Over ten weeks Roxy would find herself clashing with fellow alpha females, and some men, on national television. Olympic swimmer and series winner Stephanie
Rice would be reduced to tears in confrontations with Roxy, who also managed to clash with the woman many regarded as a Australian PR legend, corporate PR executive Prue MacSween. The clashes revealed that when placed under pressure in a reality TV environment, Roxy became condescending and righteous. She demanded respect yet gave little.

  After the third episode, producers of the program had found their platform to promote the show—Roxy and Stephanie Rice embroiled in ‘cat-fights’, as Nine’s promo department called them. Rice had become the television substitute for Ruby. The bickering continued off air in the mainstream media as Roxy served up her thoughts on the swimming champion day after day in dozens of media interviews.

  ‘Some may have thought I was a tyrant, but the reality is if I stood in the corner and didn’t pull my weight, people would have called me lazy and said I was not doing my bit,’ she told one blogsite. ‘So it’s neither here nor there for me. I do what I do with the best intentions in mind for the best result. Take it, make of it what you will—I don’t let opinions phase me.’

  The series was eventually won by Rice, and where many saw negatives, thick-skinned Roxy saw only positives. The Celebrity Apprentice brought Roxy a new national profile, which in turn lifted her social media followers—all the better to promote her paying clients. While her name and face had never been more widely recognised, all the attention, when it was gone, would leave something of a hole.

  In 2014, she would fill that gap with a new baby, a new business plan and new dramas.

  Many wondered if she’d ever know anything else.

  CHAPTER 3