There has been other music, of course. The sounds of the sixties are stored in a special compartment of my generation’s brain and replay themselves constantly. When battling the authorities in cases at the Old Bailey I would drive to court in a souped-up little pink Renault, playing Dylan and, from the early seventies, Springsteen, to rev myself up for the fight. Driving home, however, would be the time for one of my favourite fifties Broadway musicals, to which I would tunelessly sing along. I did go through an early folk music period and actually wrote a play (unperformed) about Phil Ochs, the American troubadour of the anti-Vietnam movement. He was hailed (mistakenly) as the successor to Dylan after the latter ‘went electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and died young, committing suicide in 1976, never fully recovering from his despair following Nixon’s election. We need a revival of the caustic humour and catchy melodies of the late-sixties folk movement to deal with the advent of Donald Trump. As for my guilty musical pleasure, which I indulge whenever I come home from war-torn countries or death rows or the like – it is Ivor Novello. After supping full of the horrors of the world, I think I am entitled to a short stay in Ruritania.
Theatre is my first and main love: in London the National, and in Stratford the Royal Shakespeare Company are delights that may keep me returning to Britain after Brexit. My own performances now tend to be confined to lecture rooms, although I did tour a one-man show, Dreaming Too Loud, around Australia in 2015. It was nerve-racking at first to face theatre audiences of up to two thousand. Although I initially rehearsed in London with a director who was taking time out from Jesus Christ Superstar, I owe whatever stagecraft I displayed to the great Australian theatre director Gale Edwards. I needed it – the opening scene had me blowing fake dust off an old law book, and on opening night I blew it right into my eye, half-blinding myself for the first act. John Mortimer, of course, also performed his own show –Mortimer’s Miscellany. His doctors warned him that it might bring on a heart attack, but he was delighted at the prospect of dying on the stage like Molière. John’s shows were popular (he performed at the Sydney Festival); he had, however, the advantage of pulchritudinous props – two actresses who read his favourite poems. Much as I would have liked to have Amal Clooney and Jen Robinson read extracts from my legal opinions, the language would not be quite so poetic.
As for food, despite my romance with Nigella Lawson, I have only moved, with technology, from boiled bags to microwave ovens. The best breakfasts I have ever had were provided by my mother until late in her life. She was no great chef (unless you liked porridge, which I didn’t) but her Sydney rock oysters on toast would set me up for the day. Here’s her simple recipe:
Oysters à la Mum
Slowly heat milk and cornflour (which thickens the milk).
Drop in Sydney rock oysters and add a soupçon of lemon juice and a touch of salt. Do not boil.
When oysters have expanded, pour onto freshly buttered toast.
Not quite the Oysters Tsarina beloved of the unreformed Sydney University Union board, but pretty good nonetheless.
I did not meet my wife until I was forty-one; before then, I was fortunate in lovers and friends that still remain. One was Jane Mills, whom I met in my early days as an Old Bailey defender. She had been a researcher for Harold Wilson, and then a producer at World in Action (a Four Corners equivalent). We had some fine times – in Cyprus, where we narrowly escaped the invasion by fascist Greek colonels, and in other parts of the Mediterranean. I took her away for some solitude because she had been nursing her dying parents; it was somewhere in the Aegean Sea that the ferry tannoy crackled with a call that her mother had died. We realised, as we saw the British consul waiting at the wharf, that there really is no hiding place.
With Jane, I embarked on probably the silliest adventure of my life, in a boat we hired in Corfu at a time when it was dangerous to sail close to communist Albania, a dark presence across the channel, with gunboats that intercepted trespassing tourists, who would be flung into jail. With my Australian friends Richard Neville, his wife, Julie Clarke, Clare Petre and Julian Disney we set out in a hired motor launch, curious to look at the forbidden land, having taken aboard too many bottles of Metaxa, the Greek brandy that is much more potent than ouzo. Jane had brought, in her bluestocking way, the latest copy of the New Left Review. This sparked a political argument with Richard, which ended with him flinging the magazine into the water and Jane jumping in to retrieve it. By the time we had cut the engine and fished her out, the boat was dangerously close to the Albanian shore, and drifting closer because the engine would not start. Suddenly, from a hidden harbour, there appeared an Albanian gunboat. I was still sober enough to be terrified, although Richard, roaring drunk, seemed to think that a few nights in an Albanian prison would be worth writing about (fortunately, he then passed out). The gunboat was getting closer – they could see the bloodshot in our eyes – when I took command and broke out the oars. We had two Oxford scullers – Rhodes scullers, no less – and with Jane as coxswain, Julian and I rowed for our lives back towards the Greek shore. It was a superhuman effort – the gunboat followed for a bit, but then turned back. At the wharf, the watching fishermen had been highly entertained by our drunken adventure. ‘Ouzo?’ they shouted. ‘No,’ we shouted back, ‘Metaxa.’ The rest of our crew staggered off to bed, as Jane and I made for a tavern and ordered Amaretto and whisky, so we could feel grown up.
I did one great thing for Jane – I took her to Australia. First, to acclimatise her to local culture, we went to see Bruce Beresford’s latest film, Puberty Blues. The co-author of the book, one Kathy Lette, was by this time an enfant terrible babysitting for mutual friends who thought her too enfant to take to dinner with me, and we did not meet until 1988 (of which more later). Jane and I spent happy days at ‘Happy Daze’, Richard and Julie’s property at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. They had been married there, under a waterfall, the previous year – an event Martin Sharp (my passenger that day) and I had almost missed when my father’s Mercedes exploded in a cloud of smoke somewhere short of Katoomba, and we had to hitch to the nuptials. Jane was so entranced by my country that she applied for the next available post at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and reckons her naturalisation ceremony was the most exciting moment of her life, other than her almost-trip to Albania. She now lives in Bondi with her partner, David McKnight, and is a professor of film studies at UNSW – and I still take her to the opera.
Jane was followed in my affections by Bel Mooney, a New Statesman journalist and novelist, married at the time to Jonathan Dimbleby. She too came to Australia, to swim with me at Balmoral and to gaze like a burnished goddess (at least in sunset photographs) on rocks at Hayman Island. It was an exquisitely romantic albeit difficult relationship: Jonathan and I got on well, but they had two young children and love did not find a way. Bel is now the agony aunt for the Daily Mail, dispensing wisdom, some of which may have come from our youthful entanglement.
Another love traveller to Sydney was Jeananne Crowley, an effervescent Irish actress who may still be seen tending to the Singapore wounded in box sets of Tenko, being seduced by Sam Neill in Reilly, Ace of Spies, and playing Michael Caine’s long-suffering wife in Educating Rita. She was feisty and funny and we had good times, especially with her writer and artist friends in Dublin, but eventually she found me beyond domestication.
My companion on trips around Australia and the Caribbean in the mid-eighties was television presenter Jennifer Byrne. We had a memorable holiday in St Lucia, staying at the Anse Chastanet, a resort on the beach, from which one day we snorkelled to the end of its rocky break-water to get a view of the Pitons – the island’s twin volcanic mountains – on the other side. When I lifted my head from the coral to take a look at them, I thought I saw a magical sight – an elephant, walking on the Caribbean beach. I wondered for a moment what hallucinogenic herb had been in my breakfast omelette. I swam back to Jen to whisper that I thought I had seen an elephant on t
he beach, at which she opened her mouth to laugh, taking in so much water that she instead choked. I dragged her to the shore, where her splutterings were watched with idle curiosity by, yes, a real elephant – one of the exotic creatures brought by Colin Tennant to his St Lucian plantation to amuse Princess Margaret and Tennant’s decadent friends.1
Nigella, of course, is even more wonderful than she appears on television. We were introduced by the novelist Jill Neville, Richard’s sister, who assured me Nigella would make a terrific wife – which I am sure she would have done. Jill’s intuition was right, up to a point – we were instantly attracted, and I loved Nigella’s intelligence and her wise insights into the literary and political by-ways of Britain. She was a restaurant reviewer when we met – she began to cook after we parted (although if she had started earlier, who knows?). She became a literary editor at the Sunday Times and said to me at one point, ‘The on dit is that there is a remarkable Australian novelist soon to be published here – Kathy Lette.’ I had heard the name, of course.
Nigella effortlessly negotiated intellectual society – when I took her to meet Zelman Cowen at Oxford, it transpired she was on first-name terms with all its great philosophers (her mother was the third wife of A. J. Ayer) and she attracted politicians and journalists from left to right, but lacked the confidence which she later found to recognise her own great talents. What most appealed to me – and it is not evident from the public coverage of her career – was her empathy with those who were sick or suffering: perhaps because of the tragedies in her own life (her mother had died young, as had her sister) she devoted much of her time to consoling friends in need.
Nigella was my partner when I became a QC and finally made it into Who’s Who. (‘Never make jokes in Who’s Who,’ she cautioned, much as Michael Kirby had warned against jokes in court.) It was strange to be with someone who was already so well known – her father, Nigel Lawson, was Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer. She did not share his politics and nor did I, but our relationship was a gift to the gossip columns. The very first party we attended – and left – together gave rise to instant comment in every tabloid, and soon to invented stories that we were engaged and her father disapproved.
I was close enough to Nigella to decide that she should meet my parents. Providentially, I had arranged for them to travel around the Mediterranean on a Swan Hellenic cruise – a rather upper-class British experience on a ship with Oxbridge professors describing the ancient history of the stopping places. When it docked in Corfu, Nigella and I, who were holidaying there, went to meet Frank and Joy, and had lunch with them on the ship. ‘How are you getting on with the other passengers?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course, they are English,’ my mother replied, ‘and so they look down on us a bit. We are seated furthest from the captain’s table.’ They were enjoying the cruise, however, and I thought nothing more of her remark, until I spoke to them again afterwards. ‘Oh, things changed quite dramatically after you visited,’ said my father. ‘The passengers became far more interested in us and we were put on the captain’s table for the rest of the cruise.’
‘Yes,’ added my mother. ‘Someone had recognised Nigella.’
My personal life changed dramatically in August 1988, when I was asked to do a Hypothetical on child abuse at Brisbane Town Hall. There were to be two thousand people in the audience for this charity event, which would be filmed as part of my ABC series. If it was Queensland, it must include Joh Bjelke-Petersen, I decided, but the ABC failed to interest him. Providentially, one of my country uncles had married the daughter of one of Joh’s loyalist MPs, Cecil Carey. I used this connection to put through a call. Joh had not seen the show so he did not put the phone down, and he reckoned (with my encouragement) that any friend of Cec had to be a friend of his. So he accepted. Who would I sit next to him? I liked to surprise with my juxtapositions – I had put John Howard next to a Vietnamese refugee, and John Kerr next to Michael Mansell, with a CIA agent on the other side. Who would be the opposite of Joh – young and vibrant and female? Obviously Kylie Minogue, who at first accepted. But just before I left home to hop on QF2 and plan some entertaining scenarios (difficult, on the subject of child abuse) a telegram – yes, we used telegrams in those days – came from my ABC producer: ‘Kylie suddenly unavailable. You will have to make do with Kathy Lette.’ For three hours, I thought, not thirty years.
Our first meeting was recorded thus: the panellists were at a Sunday school picnic in Melanoma, and I asked Kathy whether she would breastfeed her baby in front of Joh. Of course she would, and the startled premier pretended to be unconcerned at the hypothetical sight of her tit.2
It was a good show, prescient twenty-five years before the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse. Afterwards, Kathy and I talked, and did not stop talking. We arranged to meet back in Sydney, where I was staying at the Sebel Townhouse. As I walked to meet her at the Bayswater Brasserie, I passed under a branch of a tree and suddenly jumped to touch it. Me, jump for joy? Something had happened.
I took her to the opera, and we happened to be seated behind Gough and Margaret Whitlam. Kathy leant forward teasingly to Gough: ‘What’s the goss?’ He turned around, looked at us both, and expostulated, ‘You are!’
I was forty-one, Kathy twenty-nine: I think we both felt the urgings of our unborn children to get on with it. Kathy quickly checked me out with her friends, but most of them thought I was gay. One rather ungraciously observed that marrying me would be ‘a good career move’. I checked her out with my friends – ‘I’m thinking of marrying Kathy Lette,’ I confided in Julian Disney. ‘Well, Geoff, I’ve never thought you really wanted to be a High Court judge,’ was his elliptical reply. My sister-in-law, Francesca Davis, on behalf of the feminist lawyers in the clique around Mary Gaudron, pronounced her suitable. My mother was delighted – that I was marrying anyone – although my father was, I think, disappointed that he would not have the opportunity to advise the chancellor of the Exchequer.
Kathy promised to leave her husband, Kim Williams, and join me in London by Christmas. Kim had grown up a few streets away from me in Eastwood and had run Musica Viva and the Australian Film Commission – I have always thought it an Australian tragedy that he was never given the job for which he was ideally suited, namely running the ABC. Our relationship had to be kept clandestine (he knew nothing about it) and telephone calls were obviously difficult. Without email or mobiles, we needed some kind of supersonic carrier pigeon. And we had one, in Mary Ellen Barton, whose work with IPEC took her back and forth between Sydney and London – carrying our love letters.
I bought Kathy a Qantas ticket (how embarrassing to remember that I booked her economy, but she was only small in stature) for a flight to arrive shortly before Christmas. In November, Kim threw Kathy a surprise thirtieth birthday party at the Wharf restaurant in Sydney’s Walsh Bay, with a jazz band and all the trimmings. It made it more difficult for her to elope, to abandon her husband, home and hemisphere, but she was determined to go through with it.
Her arrival made me apprehensive – how could I possibly compete with Kim? How could I welcome her in a way that would show she had made the right decision, that we were true soulmates? My greetings with other girlfriends hot off QF1 had not been markedly successful – I met Jen Byrne, I seem to recall, in midwinter with a car that broke down on the motorway and a house where the heating had failed. I racked my brains: how could I possibly give Kathy a welcome that became her? The day before her arrival, I had a brain-wave. I would take her to the toilet.
Not just any toilet, the toilet. The toilet that had been on the front page of every Australian paper for a week – the toilet where Alan Jones had been arrested and charged with gross indecency. I had no axe to grind with Alan – I had never heard his show – but I was aware how much he was loathed by Kathy’s circle, at a time when Sydney really was ‘Jonestown’ and his influence on behalf of the conservative cause was massive. And so it was that I collected Kathy in a
car freshly oiled and greased, and headed from Heathrow to Soho’s Broadwick Street public convenience, which is directly opposite (Alan, how could you have been so blind?) a police station. There we met his arresting officer, who chatted to us about the case (later withdrawn) and took the picture of the youngish lovers, beginning life together at the Alan Jones Memorial Toilet.
We repaired to my home in Islington, and after an unpleasant time with certain journalists, who thought I had committed treason by rejecting Nigella (I was described, with alliterative waspishness, as a ‘legal Lothario’) we settled down and married. Our marriage came to many as a surprise, although not to an uncle of mine, a Wollongong bus driver who knew my love of comedy and said with a grin, ‘I know why you married her, you lucky bastard. You will spend the rest of your life laughing.’ It didn’t quite work out like that, but undoubtedly our love of wordplay and the endless possibilities of contorting the English language had played its part in our attraction.
Our house overlooked a church, which would have been convenient had the vicar not been Church of England and bound by its rules that forbade marrying a divorcee. In what was probably a spirit of ecumenicalism he had allowed his building to be used by a voodoo cult, whose blood-curdling screams shattered our peace on Sunday afternoons – but our marriage was a bridge too far. In vain I pointed out that his church owed its existence to Henry VIII’s desire for one divorce after another. In the end, we settled on Islington registry office, where a gay registrar with a ring in his ear did the honours. I arrived late from court, still in my Ede & Ravenscroft, to meet my best woman (Jane Mills) and Kathy’s literary bridesmaids – publisher Robert McCrum, playwright Dusty Hughes and poet (later Poet Laureate) Andrew Motion. The congregation quietly gambled on my middle name – the smart money was on ‘Lochinvar’ – and when it turned out to be Ronald there were hoots of derision. We held a party in the magnificent rooms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, designed by John Nash – I was a director of the ICA, and the setting was both bohemian and high establishment, on The Mall, which leads to Buckingham Palace. Our son, Jules, was present, in utero.
Rather His Own Man Page 24