by Bunkie King
We aren’t extravagant. Most of my wardrobe is sourced through opportunity shops and I never feel justified buying new jeans or a $20 pair of shoes. For gala occasions I usually borrow clothes from the people we’re staying with. On the odd occasion when we attend a film premiere I might buy a new outfit. One time Jack says we can buy something special to wear and I have lots of fun scouring the expensive shops looking for something ‘razzly’. I find a beautiful long red dress with a matching jacket. I feel like I have stepped out of a renaissance painting when I put it on.
Jack’s needs always come first. Le has told me that that’s the way it is when you live with a public figure.
‘Partners of famous people go along for the ride,’ she said. ‘Enjoy it and don’t complain. You get entrée to all these amazing places and meet all these incredible people. You get so many opportunities to experience things.’
She’s right, I know that, but I’m still not comfortable. I guess I don’t feel I have a valid reason for being treated as someone special.
By now, most people in the film industry know that Jack lives with two sisters. Even his mother Pat has taken to introducing him as her ‘bigamist son’, although I don’t think she values me. Pat is highly intellectual and pretty well ignores me whenever we go to visit her. However, she relates easily to Le and treats her as if she’s the real (de facto) daughter-in-law. I probably could be more involved in the conversations but I feel that I am still gleaning wisdom and as such I should look, listen and learn. And that’s exactly what I do.
As Jack’s fame grows and we are his constant companions, journalists become curious about the nature of his threesome relationship. In October 1974, he cooperates with Leigh Bottrell on an article for the Daily Telegraph with the cheesy headline ‘Jack and his Jills’. The article doesn’t name Le and me and doesn’t mention that we’re sisters. Jack is quoted as saying he sometimes feels ‘like a bone being fought over by two dogs’.
When I hear about this it is just too much and I confront him. Jack flat-out denies having said anything like that. He claims that the journalist made it all up and that he has ‘never spoken with this Leigh whatever-his-name-is’ even though the article was one of a series published in the Daily Telegraph that quotes him at length. The previous day’s article was headlined ‘Jack: the Giant Lady-Killer’.
No wonder ‘Jack the lad’, as the media are calling him, starts to get abused on the street. Women see him and yell out, ‘Chauvinist pig!’ He just thinks they’re bourgeois prudes who are making a moral judgement. I don’t agree with these women but I don’t agree with Jack, either. For him, the issue is about having the personal freedom to break social taboos and live the bohemian lifestyle. It’s all about free love. What he doesn’t seem to comprehend, and the thing that I am beginning to see, is the aspect of us losing our identities — we are no longer individuals. We are Jack’s girls, collectively and possessively.
Chapter 12
Jack Thompson’s blonde bimbo
The feminist movement might be in full swing in the 1970s but it completely passes me by. My grandmother was a doctor and my mother was trained in stage performance but I grew up with no real concept of how to actively develop a career. With my life so wound up in Jack’s, it’s impossible to lead a normal life, to develop my own identity. Gradually I begin to realise that I am missing out. I don’t have my own career or any real way to earn money.
To compensate, I make myself indispensible as Jack’s personal assistant, his gofer (go for this, go for that), fetching and carrying when he is on set. His agent, June Cann, makes the arrangements; I follow up on them. I am Jack’s first point of contact and protect him from unnecessary interruptions. Because we don’t have a phone at home I use the nearest public phone box or we simply leave most business to when we are in Sydney or on location.
I try to ensure he makes appointments, but Jack is notoriously late and likes to fly by the seat of his pants; he’s dreadful at getting anywhere on time. Even if film producers send a car to get him to location, they still have to wait. Catching aeroplanes is really stressful for Le and me — Jack usually just scrapes in, but a couple of times he misses flights altogether.
I drive Jack around. Once, Jack phones to say he’s finished his meeting.
‘Pick me up at the Travelodge Hotel in North Sydney,’ he instructs.
I wait in the car for five hours. When he finally arrives he finds me curled up in the driver’s seat in tears. He is apologetic but it continues to happen, time and time again. I know never to go looking for him; he makes it quite clear we’re never to do that. It would embarrass him. We never know what he is up to most of the time, whether he’s working and earning money or in meetings.
If it was just one of us living with him, things might be different. Then he would need to be more accountable and communicative, but because Le and I keep each other company, he can disappear for hours whenever and wherever he feels like it, with barely any explanation.
***
In 1974 we travel to Quorn in South Australia to film Sunday Too Far Away. Jack is cast in the role of Foley, a heavy-drinking champion sheep shearer. The character of Foley is close to Jack’s heart. He’s worked on a sheep station in outback New South Wales and knows these men, knows how to re-create their speech, their gestures, their way of living. Thanks to recent unseasonal rainfall the desert location is green and colourful. Vivid. We enjoy the outback experience.
We’re stoned most of the time and have brought the usual supply of drugs to see us through the shoot: some choice Sumatran heads a friend has sent from Indonesia through the mail, wrapped in a sarong and brown paper, plus a Vegemite jar full of hash oil, while for special days there are some tabs of LSD. For breakfast I sometimes coat a piece of toast with the black hash oil, just like Vegemite, with some cheese or marmalade on top. I wash it down with a cup of tea. During this period, Jack, Le and I are managing our relationship reasonably smoothly. Perhaps the drugs enable me to keep a happy bubble around our threesome, protecting me from my true feelings. That’s certainly how it feels.
Filming goes over schedule by a couple of weeks; to save money, the production is reduced to a skeleton crew for the last few days. Le and I do the catering. I bake two chocolate cakes for morning tea, the same day they’re to shoot the opening scene where Foley’s car runs off the road.
‘One is a normal chocolate cake,’ I explain. ‘The other is laced with hash oil.’
The stuntman decides to eat some of the hash-oil cake before getting into the car. Not something I would do, that’s for sure! Take after take, with the cameras rolling, he can’t flip the car on the right mark. He keeps going faster and faster until the car finally flips and rolls and rolls, nearly ending up on top of one of the cameras. We see the ‘rushes’ for the shot; the car rolls perfectly, coming straight for the camera, as planned. Suddenly, the image pans up to show clear blue sky as the operator runs for his life.
The release of Sunday Too Far Away in 1975 elevates Jack’s image in the public’s mind from sex symbol and larrikin to iconic Aussie male. It coincides with an emerging appreciation for our unique qualities as a country and a people.
Jack happily capitalises on his image as the quintessential Australian bloke by appearing in a range of lucrative print and TV ads. A day’s work can pay more than a year on Spyforce. For a cigarette ad, he is dressed in racing gear, a helmet perched on his knee. I arrive at the studio around lunchtime and sit on a box, waiting for a break in the shooting.
‘Get back!’ yells the photographer, indicating that I should get behind the curtain that separates the set from the make-up section where the models are. Shocked, I scuttle back behind the curtain, upset that Jack doesn’t speak up and explain who I am. On the other hand, I’m flattered the photographer thinks I’m pretty enough to be one of the models.
I have always wanted to be an actress but have let that possibility slip while I get caught up in Jack’s slipstream. Now that he is earnin
g enough that I don’t have to work, I decide to audition for his next film. The role is one of his girlfriends. The irony doesn’t escape me.
When I get the part I am surprised, but figure it’s because I am Jack’s girlfriend, not because of my talent or ability.
Scobie Malone, filmed in February 1975, is based on a famous novel by Australian author Jon Cleary about a Sydney homicide detective. Supposedly it is to be shot in James Bond style. Unfortunately, the director of the film, Terry Ohlsson, has worked mainly in commercials and has no real experience directing actors. The script is full of useless sexual clichés and, even though it is produced and partially written by Casey Robinson — one of the uncredited screenwriters on Casablanca — it doesn’t achieve the required sophistication to succeed.
In the title sequence shot from a swooping helicopter, Jack’s character Scobie is seen driving across the Harbour Bridge. He arrives at his ‘singles only’ apartment where topless women parade around the swimming pool while the theme song intones, Scobie Malone, Scobie Malone, love him but don’t expect to own Scobie Malone.
My part as his girlfriend is only a couple of minutes of screen time in a scene that comes right after the opening credits. It requires me to strip off and lie on Scobie’s bed while he kisses my breasts.
‘At least Bunkie and I didn’t need much rehearsal for those scenes,’ Jack later quips.
Yet I still hope to be an actress; I want to be recognised for my abilities, not for my famous boyfriend. I’m embarrassed by the whole Scobie Malone affair. Jack boosts my spirits by hosting a surprise twenty-first for me, the first birthday party I’ve had since I turned six, back living in Tathra. Jack takes me to dinner and then we kick on at the house of architect David Turner. There’s lots of smoking and drinking; everyone’s spirits are sky high. People refer to it as one of the best ‘happenings’ of the year.
The stills photographer on Scobie is Peter Carrette, who made his name as a paparazzo in 1969 when he crept into the Sydney hospital room of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, after she had overdosed. (It happened when they were here to make the film Ned Kelly — that ‘500 people in the world’ thing again.) Peter’s photograph of Marianne on life support appeared in magazines all over the world. Mostly, Peter cultivates celebrity friends and helps them in their rise to the top in return for later favours. He and Jack become lifelong friends.
We’re back on the farm when filming on Scobie is finished and Peter comes to visit. After a couple of days Jack tells Le and me that Peter has informed him that the Daily Mirror is going to publish a sensational article detailing our threesome. However, if we cooperate, we can choose the journo and have input into the article’s content.
I tell Jack that I’m uncomfortable being pressured into exposing our private life to the public. Jack, however, tells me that Peter has suggested a journalist, Jim Oram, who would take a sympathetic approach. I get the impression that he is unknown to Jack. He presents the concept to us in a way that makes us believe the revelation is inevitable. Jack knows that under normal circumstances we would never agree. However, he is the mover and shaker and we feel we have no choice but to go along with it. Reluctantly.
Jim Oram joins us on the farm soon after. He chats away to Jack but never interviews Le and me, so we aren’t aware of his ‘angle’. After having a cup of tea Jack suggests we go for a bushwalk to the cascades. We behave as we normally do with visitors, and strip naked to have a swim in the creek. Oram strips down to his underwear. I am totally naive in dealing with the media.
Our story is published in June 1975 over three consecutive days, accompanied by Peter Carrette’s photos. These include a still from Scobie Malone with Jack’s face hovering over my naked breast. There is no television on the farm, we never listen to the radio and rarely read papers, but driving through town I see a newspaper poster on the street with the headline: ‘Tea Then Nude Swim’. The serialised articles about ‘Jack Thompson’s Intimate Life’ are the Mirror’s biggest selling issues to date.
The mid-1970s is the era when soft-porn films like Deep Throat, Emmanuelle and Last Tango in Paris are causing sensations around the world. Although the Mirror articles themselves aren’t salacious — there’s no mention of orgies or of the drugs we openly smoked in front of Oram — they stimulate the public’s fantasies about how ‘sexually liberated’ people behave. Thoughts of us shamelessly, guiltlessly satisfying our erotic desires, unconcerned by the judgment of the morally uptight form in peoples’ minds.
While both sexes view Jack enviously, this larger-than-life alpha male, Le and I are viewed merely as sex objects — the blonde and the brunette. From then on, Jack is portrayed as a local version of Warren Beatty or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner; the ménage à trois is mentioned in almost every article ever written about him. Journalists ask him how big his bed is. Does he use the rhythm method? What’s it like, Jack?
Being very media savvy, Jack knows how to maximise his image as a ‘fantasy hero’.
I’m 21 years old and suddenly my private life is on public display. Some people think the Mirror articles are a publicity stunt, some are disgusted — others have lurid fantasies about it. Many assume Le and I have no moral boundaries because we’re living in a ménage à trois with sexy Jack Thompson. In social settings I sense women behaving insecurely around their male partners. Perhaps they fear we might seduce their partners, or entice them into having sex with us — maybe even start an orgy!
The image of me being an amoral, sexually liberated woman could not be further from reality. I am the epitome of the unliberated housewives of the pre-1970s feminist era: no independence, no career, no financial equality.
The Mirror articles coincide with the release of Scobie Malone. Jack receives the worst reviews of his career to date. The endless parade of naked flesh doesn’t help his credibility.
For my two and a half minutes of screen time I receive more publicity than the lead actress, Judy Morris, yet my dream of having a serious acting career is shattered. With all the publicity through the Mirror articles and Scobie Malone, I am really embarrassed about the media coverage and my pathetic performance. I would now and always be regarded as ‘Jack Thompson’s blonde bimbo’. Our private life is declared fair game. I cannot escape the public perception of me as the stereotypical sexual plaything.
It starts to feel as if I am sliding down a slippery slope, unable to find my footing. Questions keep flooding my mind. What am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? I can find no answers. Maybe I’m simply too lazy to take the necessary steps towards my own liberation. Perhaps I’m too scared. But I’m also tired of waiting for Jack while he goes off and does whatever he wants. I’m sick of waiting for the next drama. I am on permanent alert, trying to correctly interpret Jack and his needs. I’m paranoid about everything — and every interaction I have with anybody else. He suspects that I am flirting with other men when I’m not even aware of their existence. I can walk down the street with Jack and look in a shop window and he will ask if I am checking out some guy.
These anxieties lead me to develop a thumping migraine for the first time in my life. We are staying in Sydney at the home of Jack’s brother, Peter, and his wife Victoria. My head is pounding; I am very unhappy and tell Jack that the situation is untenable. For reasons I don’t understand, he drives me to a hotel in Rushcutters Bay, books me in, walks me to my room and then leaves.
With my head still aching I collapse onto the bed. Peace at last, I think, thank Christ! I have no baggage, no money, no idea what will happen next but with a thumping head I just don’t care and fall asleep.
I’m dead asleep in my clothes on top of the bed at seven o’clock the next morning when I’m startled awake by loud knocking on the door. It’s Jack, letting fly with accusations.
‘What did you do? Where have you been? You went with someone last night. You went out!’
‘No I didn’t. I’ve been asleep all this time.’ This is the truth.
‘No
! No!’ he yells angrily. ‘I asked reception to keep an eye on you and they said you went out about 15 minutes after I left you here.’
Despite my aching head, I shout back at him.
‘I couldn’t frickin’ move, I just crashed on the bed and that’s where I stayed. I’m still in the same clothes!’
‘I’m taking you home,’ he states.
Feeling hopeless and without the strength to fight, I go with him. I have no job, no money, no family or friends. No self-confidence. I feel I also have no choice. My second attempt to leave him is aborted as dramatically as the first in Sri Lanka. Somehow I’m unable to break away.
Chapter 13
From Cannes to Taos
By May 1976 I have given up trying to move on. My need to belong, to be part of a family, means more to me than Jack’s mind games. I have also learnt to accept not being the ‘special one’ or an independent identity. I can’t imagine finding anything better than the life I’m living. I resign myself to being the spare wheel and decide to enjoy the travel and excitement of being with Australia’s hottest movie star, which, admittedly, does have its attractions. There’s also the undeniable appeal of life on the farm at Coffs, the one place where I feel truly comfortable.
Throughout these years of his rise to fame, if Jack isn’t working on a film, we leave Australia at the end of summer for the Cannes Film Festival and tour Europe before heading to London then home via Los Angeles and Hawaii. Jack is often publicising films that are premiering in England or the US, and uses every opportunity to network and raise finance for a script he is developing, which never actually comes to anything.
Cannes 1976 is the first trip that Le and I take to Europe. Travelling is always exciting, seeing new places and meeting new people. But there is always a tinge of apprehension for me when I leave the relative safety of Australia. We don’t have a travel itinerary. We just go with the flow, which can be nerve-racking for me. I like to know where I am going to be sleeping that night and I don’t from one day to the next.