Blonde Ambition

by Annette Sharp

  While business was booming at Capitol, Roxy was battling at school—both academically and socially. Young for her year, she would repeat Year 1. All the property moves hadn’t helped young Roxy establish lasting friendships. Being naturally bossy and prone to the odd outburst had also left her short of candidates.

  Her parents had started in the workforce at a young age and Roxy, fourteen, was determined to emulate them. She started looking outside school to business opportunities. She found a job at McDonald’s in Drummoyne, a 10-minute drive from the family’s Hunters Hill home. She would sign up for seven shifts a week, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Roxy would say. She loved the job and loved the money more.

  After a spell at Marist Sisters’ College Woolwich from Year 8—her ‘favourite’ school she would later say—Roxy completed her high school education at independent Anglican girls school Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School in Darlinghurst. Her move to SCEGGS would coincide with her parents’ move from Hunters Hill in Sydney’s north to Woollahra in the east in 1996.

  Real estate columnist Jonathan Chancellor would record the Jacenkos selling their massive 100-square waterfront home with jetty and moorings for more than $3 million. In December 1996, they paid $3.2 million for a pretty 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom post-heritage home on a 1492-square-metre parcel of land at 22 Rosemont Avenue, Woollahra. Nick Jacenko also snapped up a home at Horderns Beach, Bundeena for $575 000 at around the same time.

  Roxy, now entering Year 11 and almost seventeen, was feeling newly attractive with her corrected eyes and teeth and starting to fantasise about owning her own car. She could see herself in a Mercedes SLR convertible—the kind of vehicle one of the young glamours on television’s Melrose Place might drive. It would be a car to make her fellow SCEGGS students green with envy as she cruised through the rarefied streets of Sydney’s eastern suburbs—from Bondi Beach to Oxford Street’s strip of pretty Paddington boutiques, fifteen minutes west, and then finally the 5-minute drive home to the new Woollahra estate.

  Her parents liked the idea of a car, but they had something better in mind for their spirited daughter—a well-serviced 14-year-old second-hand Volvo. It would be fair to say she was initially underwhelmed. The boxy early eighties model Volvo was the antithesis of the sexy, showy, muscle cars Roxy fantasised about. If it had one redeeming feature, it was that it was red—or orange, though red sounded sexier. Friends recall Roxy accessorising it with vibrant printed car-seat covers from the markets and promising herself that once she had saved her 10 per cent deposit for her first apartment—something she was not yet on the lookout for, but would be soon enough—she would save up for her second car, probably a Mercedes.

  ‘[My parents] never just gave me anything. While I was at a private school and girls would get Mercedes for first cars, I got a fourteen-year-old Volvo that was worth $4000. It was always instilled in me that if you want something, you have to work. No-one is going to give it to you,’ she told beauty website Beauticate in 2015.

  Her third car, when she was in her early twenties, would be the much-wanted Mercedes SLR. It followed a VW Golf convertible upgrade from her parents, and would precede a long line of showy muscular status-symbol vehicles that would eventually make Roxy hard for the paparazzi to miss on Sydney streets.

  The Jacenkos’ new family home in Woollahra backed onto the 1857 mansion Rosemont, for which the street was named. The historic 38-room house had for forty-eight years been home to the famous Australian retail family the Lloyd Joneses, whose forebears had opened Australia’s oldest surviving department store, David Jones. Rosemont was also once home to the parents of Australian writer Dorothea Mackellar who, legend has it, was living in one of the home’s nine bedrooms when she wrote the indelible poem My Country.

  In 1998, Nick Jacenko would make the newspapers in a landmark Land and Environment Court battle after it was alleged he cut down trees bordering the historic property and his own. Then owner of Rosemont mansion, British peer Sir Raymond Burrell, Ninth Baronet Raymond of Valentine House, accused Nick of taking a saw to three trees that grew along the boundary of their two houses inconveniently blocking sunlight to the Jacenko tennis court. The trees had been protected by a heritage order that covered the entire property, the court heard. Nick would say the trees were dead, smothered by a bougainvillea vine that he had cut down as it was growing on his tennis court. The court would reserve its judgment in the matter.

  ‘My dad—he is brutal, but that makes him inspirational,’ Roxy would tell Fashion Marketing Online in 2010, speaking generally about her father. ‘[He is] always striving to do everything better, faster and ahead of the game.’ On this occasion, Nick had indeed been ‘faster’ than the absent Etonian baronet.

  While Doreen and Nick were dealing with their new neighbours in court, Roxy was flunking school. ‘I was the girl who got 60-something in the HSC,’ she told Business Chicks website in 2013.

  However, during his 2013 interview with Roxy, Sydney Morning Herald reporter Adam Courtenay would report that Roxy had ‘dropped out of school’ to study fashion design at TAFE’s East Sydney design school. Regardless of whether she had a certificate showing she had completed Year 12, in 2016 Roxy admitted school had not been for her. She would tell Cara Waters at Fairfax she ‘did miserably’ academically: ‘Basically I may as well not have been there,’ she said.

  While design school couldn’t entirely focus Roxy’s attentions either, it did fire her love of fashion and she dabbled with the thought of working at her parents’ manufacturing business and one day possibly running it. Unfortunately, Roxy’s bossy style clashed with her mother’s own management style. Within six months, Doreen sacked her daughter.

  ‘I had decided at eighteen that I knew how to run her business better than she did,’ Roxy said years later.

  With her mother deciding it was time for Roxy to find a job, Roxy would have to rely on her own resourcefulness and ingenuity to propel herself forward—luckily she had both in spades. By 2003, the Jacenkos were importing and exporting garments from Sri Lanka and India internationally. Capitol Clothing was stocked in boutiques from the Netherlands to Spain. In Sydney, Nick and Doreen were fine-tuning their property portfolio.

  During Roxy’s lifetime, starting with the year she was born, her parents had acquired a commercial property in Smail Street, Ultimo for $165 000, a commercial property on the city fringe in O’Riordan Street, Alexandria in 1993 for a bargain price of $175 000, and three years later a commercial property in Queen Street, Beaconsfield for $2 million. It was in this property, in 2004, that Roxy would launch her PR business. Another commercial property in O’Riordan Street, Alexandria was added to the portfolio in 2002 for $1.6 million.

  While Nick and Doreen would hang onto their commercial properties for decades, the couple turned over their residential investments more frequently. A home wasn’t something you grew attached to or kept for long. In 2009, they sold their Woollahra home, mid-renovation, for $11.8 million—almost four times what the couple had paid for it twelve years earlier. The sale notice would sit side by side with a listing in the real estate pages stating that Nick and Angela Curtis’s enviable Palm Beach retreat was also on the market with expectations of $6 million.

  By then Ruby, too, had finished school and was dabbling in the family business. Her mother would press her husband about her youngest daughter owning a small car that she could park easily on the congested streets of Sydney’s party district, Kings Cross. Roxy and Ruby would find themselves compared in newspapers to the often warring American celebrities Paris and Nicky Hilton.

  Newly cashed up, and with their children finished school, the Jacenkos were headed to the waterfront at Vaucluse—or might have been had the relationship between Nick and Doreen not been unravelling. At about the same time his daughters were having their shocking dust-up at a Kings Cross nightclub in 2008, Nick and Doreen were parting with $12.5 million for a 936-square-metre block on the waterfront at Vaucluse. The couple immediately went to work on
their dream home at 2 Loch Maree Place—a 3-storey pile with jetty and boathouse. But as their daughters’ relationship imploded, loyalties would once again be tested within the family.

  The two Jacenko women were not only different women, they had been raised differently. While Ruby was in her teens, Doreen had identified her potential as a pageant queen. Nick would recall his wife driving their pretty high school student Ruby to ‘RSL clubs, workers’ clubs and pubs’ to participate in beauty competitions around Sydney. He would question Doreen’s motives after travelling to Mittagong in the Southern Highlands to attend one competition and recall his wife telling him she wanted Ruby to have a shot at becoming Miss Charity Australia. Roxy, who by then had finished school and was formulating a business plan, may not have approved of Doreen’s beauty pageant dreams. Her relationship with her mother during this period was strained. Doreen, Nick would say, had not foreseen a charity queen title for Roxy. The older sister, in contrast, had been trained by her father to be ‘self-sufficient and financially independent’.

  By 2011, Ruby’s appearance at her mother’s side at a Rose Bay flood relief charity night to raise money for Australian flood victims would raise the perfect arches of a hundred sets of eyebrows. The young bombshell attended the dinner on her mother’s arm dressed in a tiny, short, clingy, rubber dress. It was at about that time Sydney socialites started to wonder about Doreen’s influence on her daughters. A family friend would say of Ruby that she could do no wrong in her mother’s eyes. At the same age, Roxy could no no right.

  When a bored Ruby felt the need to let her hair down with friends on a night out, Doreen, as Nick was informed by a Capitol employer, would encourage her youngest daughter to take a look through her sister’s mail for a suitably fabulous party invitation.

  In her sister’s mail, Nick suspected, Ruby discovered details of the event Roxy was holding at The Piano Room on that 2008 night. Ruby has always denied knowing her sister was at the nightclub but the women’s father believed Doreen was complicit in Ruby’s plans, and has claimed Doreen had a solicitor on standby when the feud erupted—making Roxy the victim of a family conspiracy that hurt.

  ‘We never got along,’ the younger Jacenko told Larissa Cummings of The Australian, explaining the warring sisters’ relationship. ‘It was a build-up of years of being spoken to like a staff member. It was me saying, “No more”,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald.

  Ruby’s lawyer Daniel Hakim confirmed the public feud had split the family ‘down the middle’. ‘Ruby is living with her mother and their father has taken Roxy’s side,’ he said, adding that the pair fought at a Double Bay greengrocer just weeks after the incident in Kings Cross.

  In the year before the incident, the four Jacenkos had been working out of the Beaconsfield headquarters owned by Nick and Doreen. To outsiders, the relationships within the enterprising family looked entirely functional and closer than in most families. Within the Beaconsfield building, Doreen and Nick preoccupied themselves running Capitol, Roxy was established within the Sweaty Betty showroom and Ruby dabbled in her own social media, PR and events business. Ruby would later launch a lifestyle blog NotGoingHome and a range of T-shirts from the premises.

  Despite appearances, sisterly relations remained icy. Ruby would leave Australia for new pastures in Los Angeles in the years that followed and would establish a new website, ChickDriven, critiquing cars for a female audience. She would also drop Jacenko as her surname and use her mother’s name, Davis, placing greater psychological distance between her and her sister.

  After her wedding in 2012, Roxy would tell Fairfax Media that the Kings Cross ‘catfight’ was ‘one thing I will never get over’. Ruby would concur: ‘The relationship will never be repaired.’

  In 2011, Nick and Doreen separated. Reports indicate it was not for the first time—that the couple had separated and reconciled in 2008. Nick moved into an apartment at his Beaconsfield premises, a space he referred to as his ‘shed’. He would reconcile again with Doreen before moving out again in 2013 following a blow-up between the three Jacenko women. He moved in briefly with Roxy and her husband and baby Pixie at their Woollahra home, later relocating to Roxy’s investment property in Nelson Street, Woollahra, for a month.

  The real estate columns would record that the Jacenkos’ incomplete Vaucluse dream home—just a few doors away from where Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio had holed up with a retinue of pretty models while shooting Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby—was to be sold. It was finally sold in 2014—more than a year after builders finished working on it. Its sale price, $15.6 million, was estimated to have been millions less than the Jacenkos believed it to be worth. Nick and Doreen would never spend a night in their dream home, which came complete with dream boatshed to accommodate a much-wanted wooden speedboat.

  The couple’s bitter and difficult divorce remained unsettled three years later. Roxy, who had once agitated for Nick to leave Doreen and booked an appointment with a divorce lawyer on his behalf, switched her support to her mother and rejected her father, who was promptly banned from the Sweaty Betty offices. From 2013, Nick would choose to access his office through the loading dock so as to avoid any further conflict at the shared Sweaty Betty entrance where Roxy frequently had ‘hysterical’ confrontations with her father.

  Rumours Roxy was agitating behind the scenes to have her mother tear up a hardstruck settlement and was considering initiating her own lawsuit against her father for future loss of inheritance, helped no-one—and the divide between the two camps grew.

  In 2013, following his final split from Doreen, Nick would begin a relationship with high-profile fashion designer Lisa Ho, who had called administrators in following the closure of her 30-year-old fashion business—an event that, the designer said, ‘broke her heart’. Nick and the designer were introduced that year, the designer recalled, by mutual friend Lindy Zaoui who first approached Roxy with a request for Nick’s phone number.

  ‘Nick and I were introduced by a mutual friend who also knew Roxy,’ Ho said. ‘Roxy was doing Celebrity Apprentice and Nick invited me over to her house to watch the show. Nick was then babysitting Pixie every week and I went over. He was there and Roxy was very nice to me. Sadly that didn’t last.’

  Roxy, said Ho, took her upstairs to her bedroom and dressing room to show the designer her wardrobe and, pulling her aside, confided she needed a mother figure because her relationship with her own mother was at the time not good. Ho’s 27-year marriage to textiles importer Philip Smouha had ended eighteen months earlier in 2011 and, like Nick, she was going through a difficult divorce. She and the Capitol owner had much in common, despite an 11-year age gap.

  The self-made businesswoman was one of six daughters who grew up in Albury on the New South Wales and Victorian border. Ho had English grandparents; her grandmother worked as a tailor and her grandfather spun wool at Sydney Woollen Mills in Parramatta. Growing up in a home with domestic violence, Ho would move to Sydney and study fashion design at East Sydney Technical College before launching her successful fashion label in 1982. The designer would sell garments in over 200 stores including David Jones, Grace Bros, Sportsgirl and Dotti and open twelve boutiques in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane before her label was picked up internationally and stocked in Neiman Marcus, Barneys and Bloomingdales in America and Selfridges and Harrods in the United Kingdom. At the Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in 2000, Ho would be honoured in a segment on Australian fashion icons and was asked to design a gown worn by Olivia Newton-John, who played a ceremonial role welcoming athletes.

  Her marriage to Smouha, her second, ended in 2012 with a text message from her husband telling her their marriage was over. Smouha’s business had gone into administration in 2009, nine years after buying his elderly father out of his textile-import business Smouha Fabrics, after which Ho took on her husband’s debt.

  Mere months after meeting the designer, Roxy, spying a business opportunity, proposed a 3-way business arrangement tha
t would see the PR woman, her father and Ho take equal shares in Lisa Ho Designs Pty Ltd following a $1 million bailout from Roxy who would manage the PR of the reforged business. After considering the plan, and giving Oliver Curtis access to the company’s books to conduct due diligence, Ho ultimately decided against the partnership, choosing instead to liquidate her companies. She didn’t want to be business partners with Roxy.

  As Roxy’s dreams of a joint business venture with Ho collapsed, Roxy would turn on the designer. She would start by uninviting Ho on a Mediterranean holiday on board the Curtis family’s yacht Vanquish, and would ultimately decide that Ho was really one thing—a rival for her father’s love and, annoyingly, his wealth. Within a few weeks, the designer found herself in gossip columnist Ros Reines’ sights in August 2013. Labelled a ‘frump’ by Reines in an accompanying article, Ho was photographed paddleboarding in a swimsuit with Nick on the harbour in Vaucluse. Reines, an admirer of Roxy’s, wrote Nick was planning ‘to use family money to help revitalise Ho’s career’—one of Roxy’s chief obsessions. Roxy’s animosity towards Ho would boil over twice more publicly.

  CHAPTER 4

  Counter Girl Smile

  I was just hungry and a hustler

  Roxy

  HER METHODS WERE sometimes questioned but no-one ever disputed the simple truth that Roxy Jacenko put in the hours. She maintained she worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and would say she only needed four hours sleep a night to function—it was mostly true.

  There was a point in her youth when Roxy toyed with the idea of becoming a police officer. She respected an iron hand and was drawn to danger and adventure—but her mother talked her out of it fearing for her safety, Roxy would say.

  Roxy was her parents’ daughter—a born salesperson with an entrepreneurial spirit. She was gifted with all the proven qualities of a great salesperson—she was tenacious, confident, didn’t take no for an answer, was charismatic, reliable and was breathtakingly resilient. She also knew how to fight mean and dirty if she felt the occasion demanded it, and often she believed it did.