Love, Sweat and Tears

by Zelie Bullen

  Then we both arrived back at the wheelbarrow at the same time and she said bluntly, ‘I heard your boyfriend died.’

  I looked at her, wanting to ask her if she was right in the head. I managed to get out, ‘Yeah, he did,’ then turned my back on her and walked away, thinking she was an idiot. Everyone had been tiptoeing around me and the subject of Grahame; I couldn’t believe anyone would be so insensitive.

  We kept working. The next time we met at the wheelbarrow she said, ‘The reason I mention it is that my dad just died too.’

  I turned around and looked at her, and there were tears in her eyes. I said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ But again I walked away, not wanting to be friends.

  When we met up at the wheelbarrow for the third time, she asked, ‘How did he die?’ She obviously wanted to talk about it, and something now stopped me turning away. She was grieving too, and I empathised with her. From that day on, Heidi and I were inseparable.

  She was a couple of years younger than me, and so innocent. Even though I was in a horrid place as well, I wanted to say to her that it would be OK. She wanted to talk about Grahame, and I ended up talking about him so she wouldn’t feel so alone. I don’t think I would have opened up to anyone else at that particular point, but Heidi’s need for comfort and my hope that I could make her feel better started me talking. In that way the grieving journey became a bit easier for me. I relaxed a bit more, instead of blocking everyone out and thinking no one else could understand.

  Wayne Glennie was a polo player who had managed to land the job on the film of taking the horses between locations, using a flash Chevy pick-up and a horse trailer he’d hired off a mate at the end of the polo season. The other horse trucks were just standard jobs, but Wayne was driving a very nice truck that was comfortable to ride in and—more importantly in a humid Queensland summer—was air-conditioned. Heidi and I used to jostle to get in his truck and Wayne would joke about us being his own personal grooms, calling us over as though we were a couple of beer wenches, and we’d play along, giggling as we went.

  Towards the end of that movie, I talked to Wayne about what I was going to do next and he offered me a job as a polo groom. I didn’t know anything about polo, but it was another professional horse job and I could tell Wayne was a nice guy. At the time, Wayne and Jean were both looking for a place to live, so they became housemates not long after meeting each other, and they got on really well too.

  Jean continued to work at Movie World, but I don’t think she particularly liked anybody there. All the people I thought of as friends she found Gold Coasty and superficial, not at all like the Perth scene she was used to. She didn’t really fit in and I think she missed me when I was away on that film.

  After a few months Wayne and I started seeing each other and he was a great support for me, without expecting any long-term commitment. I warned him that I didn’t want anything serious; I had sworn to myself that I didn’t want to fall in love with anyone ever again—it hurt too much. Wayne was four years older than me, he had twelve horses of his own, he was a professional horseman and he ran his own business. It was now twelve months since Grahame had died and I missed physical contact. Wayne was just what I needed. He was such a perfect healer—a big warm teddy bear. There were no promises and no pressure, but tons of spontaneity and a life full of animals again—stuff I felt I could deal with.

  The experience taught me another important lesson. When I felt like I was drowning in grief and there was nothing else for it than to give up, I just let go. I stopped needing to feel in control. I don’t know if that would work in every situation, but my advice is that, when you’re consumed by that feeling of wanting to control your life, to bring back everyone you’ve lost and to make it how it was before—just let it go. That’s what I have done every time something has turned bad.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jean

  The third series of Ocean Girl started and the producers asked me if I was ready to come back as the lead stunt double. They had used another stunt double for the start of the second series when I hadn’t initially felt up to it, but I eventually went up to Port Douglas to shoot some of the scenes towards the end of that second series, after working on Pursuit of Honor.

  I headed to Port Douglas once again. Filming went on for several weeks, and both Wayne and Jean came to visit me at different times. After we finished filming in Queensland, the unit had to head to Melbourne for some studio work. While the film trucks drove back to Melbourne—a journey of two or three days—the cast and crew were allowed to fly off to our homes for a couple of days.

  Wayne organised a barbecue so I could catch up with everyone for the short time I would be there. Mum flew in from Cairns. I was shocked and hurt when Jean phoned and told me she couldn’t come because she just didn’t feel up to it. I tried to insist that she come, but she wouldn’t be swayed. She promised she’d see me the following day.

  We had a great party. Late that night there were a few people left singing on the veranda when the phone rang. It was Jean. She was crying. I kept asking her what was wrong and she finally said she had done something stupid, but she wouldn’t tell me what she had done. She just said that she was sorry, and that I was the only person she wanted to talk to and apologise to.

  My heart sank. What did she have to apologise for? I eventually got out of her that she had slashed her wrists.

  I felt great fear and confusion. I kept her talking for a couple of minutes and then I asked her to hold on for a moment so I could go to the loo and that I would be straight back—could she wait? She agreed.

  I knew Wayne had been drinking, but Mum had gone to bed early, so I ran down the hall and woke her up, gave her the keys to Wayne’s Pajero and asked her to go over to Jean’s as quickly as possible. Mum reacts well in a crisis situation, and she quickly woke up from her deep sleep and took off.

  I went back to the phone and kept talking to Jean. She and Dave had got married just after Julie died; I had been her bridesmaid, but things hadn’t turned out well. At the time, I had felt that their marriage was wrong. They had a strange relationship, where they would call each other cruel, destructive names all the time. The name-calling didn’t even stop when Jean was living on the other side of the country. I had also noticed that she would constantly put herself down, unlike the Jean I used to know.

  I told her on the phone this sort of relationship wasn’t worth it. She told me it wasn’t because of Dave—fuck him, she said, and I could hear the anger in her voice. But then she sighed and said that it was her—she was just useless.

  There was finally a noise in the background and then Jean was yelling, ‘No, no, no!’ and I heard her drop the phone. Mum picked it up and said she was with Jean, and that she would bring her to me. She hung up.

  Mum managed to bandage Jean’s arms. She told me later that when she went into the bathroom it looked like a war zone—there was blood everywhere. When she went to get a towel, several were soaked with blood. Jean refused to let Mum take her to hospital but agreed to come to my place.

  When they arrived, I made Jean show me her wrists; I didn’t believe she could have done anything like that, but she had. Wayne and I couldn’t sleep; the two of us lay on top of our bed hugging Jean, who lay between us. She was limp and ashamed; she was at rock bottom. She kept saying that it was because of me that she wasn’t dead. I asked her to think about how her death would have affected her mum and the rest of her family. She said she knew they would be devastated, but she felt that they would somehow cope without her. Everything I asked her, she had an answer to. She said that there was simply nothing to live for anymore, and she was in debt to the tune of seven hundred dollars, of which two hundred was owed to Wayne.

  Wayne couldn’t believe it. He said he didn’t give a shit about the money. He would have said the same thing even before he realised how depressed she was—she was our friend and you help friends when they need you.

  Jean was a proud independent woman and she
calmly told Wayne she couldn’t take his money. I then asked about her dog and she said that she knew I’d look after it. I think she could see I was starting to struggle—what she was saying felt so familiar to me. I was looking into her eyes and thinking, ‘I know where you are and it’s not a nice place to be.’ I knew that when you’re that low nothing anyone says can make a difference.

  Then she said to me, ‘Can you think of a reason I should wake up tomorrow?’ I couldn’t think of anything to say to make her think, ‘Oh yeah, good point,’ and that was awful. I ended up saying, ‘Yes—me. Don’t you do that to me.’

  She said, ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  I didn’t really care what the reason was, as long as she was still alive. I had to fly to Melbourne the following day and I told her that I wanted her to come with me. She said no, she had work at Movie World. I yelled at her, ‘Bugger Movie World!’ But she argued that she wanted to pay back the money she owed—how would she do that if she wasn’t working?

  We argued back and forth. I offered to pay for her flights, and the accommodation in Melbourne was all paid for; I told her it would be fun. But she wouldn’t buy into any of that. She explained that she found the thought of us having to save her torturous.

  I argued that I wouldn’t be able to relax if we were apart. She had come and helped me when I was at a low point, so why wouldn’t she let me help her? In the morning, Mum offered to move in with her, but she wouldn’t have that either.

  Finally, we agreed that Wayne would check up on her every day, and she and I would speak at least once a day. I flew out to Melbourne that morning, still worried but glad that we had a babysitting arrangement in place.

  About a week later, Jean’s housemate called and asked for Wayne. I thought that he must want a hand moving something, so I gave him Wayne’s number and hung up. I didn’t think for a minute anything could be wrong with Jean, because I’d had a good conversation with her the night before. She had seemed so happy. We had already spoken during the day, but she rang again that night to tell me Dave had finally agreed to a divorce and it meant she was free. She was on top of the world, saying she could take back her maiden name and that she didn’t have to be associated with that man anymore. She could get her life back and she could start all over again.

  The coroner estimated her time of death to have been about midnight, two hours after we had had that phone conversation. She had asphyxiated herself by connecting the hose from her vacuum cleaner to her exhaust and filling her car with carbon monoxide.

  My biggest fear was that she hadn’t meant to kill herself—that it was an attempt to get attention that had gone wrong. But then I read the letters she had left behind.

  One was to her landlord, apologising for owing him money; one to her parents, thanking her mum for everything and apologising if she was hurt; one to me, saying she hoped I understood and could forgive her and asking me to look after her dog. The final one was to her husband Dave, five pages of pure venom.

  Wayne and I took her body back to Perth for burial and I did the eulogy. I remember seeing Dave at the funeral, wearing large sunglasses and a black suit. He looked straight at me, but I looked away because it was too much.

  When I looked at him again, he was still staring straight at me. I started making my way towards him, not knowing whether I was going to punch him or hug him. He watched me coming closer and his chin started to quiver. I put my arms around him and he hugged me back very tightly and sobbed.

  All of a sudden, I heard Jean’s voice say, ‘Can you let him go now, please.’ So I let him go, turned away and walked off.

  Jean had severe self-worth issues, and she was going through depression, loneliness and despair; but I know that life can change very fast and I wish she could have survived to see that. Since then, I have pined for Jean and wished she was here to share so many different things with me. Several times over the years I have known that she would have been the perfect person to fill various positions. Such a waste. I miss her.

  CHAPTER 15

  Sled

  I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life, and I’ve found they usually pay off. Sometimes I’ve taken those risks because I was in grief and I thought, ‘What the hell—what have I got to lose?’

  When I returned to Melbourne after Jean’s funeral, I returned to Ocean Girl producer Jonathan Shiff’s beautiful family home to stay with them for a while. I was very lucky because it would have been hard for me to be going back alone to a hotel room every evening.

  When filming was completed, Jonathan was still worried about me and he asked if I would like to travel to North America with himself and Marzena, as her chaperone on a promotional tour; Ocean Girl had been sold to Disney Channel and was to be released that spring in America.

  Wayne was terrific about it and encouraged me to go, so I said yes. It was only for ten days, and we spent the whole time in Los Angeles. It was great fun; we stayed in a lovely hotel in downtown LA and they spoilt us rotten. Both Marzena and I were quite new to the industry—I was twenty-four and she was fifteen—and they dressed us up in ridiculous teenybopper clothes so they could film us walking along a Californian beach in winter. We were freezing. When we weren’t busy, they sent us off shopping with a limo driver.

  Early in our stay, I decided to take another risk—I would ring the world-renowned animal trainer Paul ‘Sled’ Reynolds.

  It took quite a bit of courage to ring Sled; it was the first time I had done something like this without any support. I’d at least had Jan and the girls there when I began work at Movie World. However, it was the beginning of a time when I took bigger risks and didn’t care so much about what happened, because what did it matter anyway.

  Sled’s movie career went all the way back to the 1981 version of Tarzan, the Ape Man. He had also worked on movies as big as Dances with Wolves and Indiana Jones. At that time he had worked on about forty films, many of them very famous. I knew he had trained horses for some big films, but I was unaware that he worked with other animals too.

  Just after Grahame died, Sled had come to Australia to work on The Phantom Legacy, a new attempt to put the famous old comic hero up on the big screen. Sled had brought four stunning Andalusian horses out from America for the movie and they were stabled in Sydney. At the time, Chris Anderson was one of the people who were worried about me. He told me that I needed to get my act together—I needed to start eating and getting fit again as he was planning on using me to double the female lead on The Phantom Legacy. During this time, Sled travelled around Australia meeting people and looking at other animals they could possibly use, so I heard a bit about him.

  After millions had already been spent in pre-production, The Phantom Legacy was put on hold, as can sometimes happen. Eventually, it was filmed and released fourteen years later in 2009. When I knew I was going to America, I asked Chris for Sled’s number, which he happily passed on. By now, too, I’d realised I didn’t want to head back to Australia after the promotional tour—polo work didn’t start for another four or five months and I thought this might be a good time to explore the United States.

  I called Sled from my hotel room and told him I was an animal person from Australia who was really interested in meeting him. I said I had been disappointed when we hadn’t met while he was in Australia. In reply, he was very direct, asking me what it was I wanted, so I told him straight out that I was hoping to meet him while I was in America. He asked if I was free to come out and visit his ranch—naturally, I said that would be great.

  He then told me, to my utter amazement, that he had to take a zebra and a camel to a studio in downtown Los Angeles for a photo shoot the next day. He said he would swing past my hotel on the way back, pick me up and take me to his place for the day; one of the girls who worked for him could then drop me back after work. I almost fell over, I was excited about seeing a zebra and camel up close—up until then I had only been around horses, dogs and cats.

  Marzena had interviews lined up so she did
n’t need me that day, and it all fell into place beautifully. I remember pacing in the foyer prior to his arrival. He pulled up in a cool Chevy pick-up (my dream truck) towing an amazing-looking aluminium animal trailer. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, is this really happening?’

  His girlfriend at the time jumped out of the passenger side. She offered her hand with a great big smile and said, ‘Hi! I’m Deanne, really nice to meet you.’ I felt a little relieved to know that a friendly woman was with him. I had begun to think that perhaps this wasn’t the safest thing I’d ever done, planning to drive off with a stranger in a foreign country (hoping he wouldn’t shoot me or rape me or cut me up into tiny bits!). But they were both very warm and I instantly felt safe; I had a good feeling about meeting these people.

  As we drove away, I had to ask, ‘What do you mean, a zebra and a camel? I thought you were a horse trainer.’

  He smiled and said, ‘Oh yeah, we do a bit of this and a bit of that.’

  We drove for a couple of hours, chatting, before we arrived at Sled’s ranch. As we drove up his driveway, we passed lions, tigers, wolves, a kangaroo, a small bear, and some other amazing animals.

  We parked in his lot, and I looked around in wonder. There were about twenty dog runs and kennels in a U-shape. Along one wing of the U-shape were a few enclosures with three or four house cats in each. In the distance, I could see the most stunning Andalusians, Friesians and Quarter Horses in various yards with shelters. In another area, I saw long-horn cattle, a zebra and several camels. I was thinking, ‘Where am I?’

  Deanne gave me a tour of the place and took photos of me with all the different animals. At the end of the day, Sled told me that if I wanted to extend my trip to California I was very welcome to stay in the house with Deanne and himself as they had a spare room. They were both incredibly hospitable and it was a fantastic day. I was learning fast to take one day at a time, to enjoy and appreciate every hour I could. Later, as Sled had promised, one of the girls who were working there gave me a lift back to my hotel.