Jackie O’s on-air candour a test of husband Lee’s British reserve
On Friday came news KIIS FM breakfast host Jackie “O” Henderson and her husband Lee Henderson had ended their 18-year union. Few in the industry were surprised by Henderson’s sad news.
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SOMEWHERE between the 10th cup of slap-face morning coffee and the 11am phone call advising that the paparazzi have the family cornered in Bondi love can quickly go to seed in a media marriage.
It doesn’t always end explosively and messily amid a battery of ill-chosen words and accusations at a Logies, ACRA or Walkley awards’ night party.
It doesn’t necessarily steal away quietly following a long angry silence borne of one party’s gripes that the other is constantly prioritising their demanding job over family.
No, sometimes love just sputters out on the couch one Saturday night in the moments between the arrival of takeaway pizza and the Foxtel movie download — its death coming so naturally and expectedly few mourn its passing.
Some will say this is no different to any other relationship breakdown. That largely holds but with media relationships “the job” is frequently the sexiest component of the union, a demanding mistress or master (with a social media peepshow fetish) that needs to be obeyed — and sometimes at personal cost.
Jackie O leaves the family home
On Friday came news KIIS FM breakfast host Jackie “O” Henderson and her husband Lee Henderson had ended their 18-year union.
Few in the industry were surprised by Henderson’s sad news.
She has been open in the KIIS FM and 2DAYFM studio confessional booths about turbulence in her marriage.
Twice the couple discussed separating before proceeding, Henderson has admitted.
There were signs the relationship was in trouble — among them, Henderson’s recent 10kg weight loss, her revelation the couple fought “constantly” at one time and her admission to having once “jealously” sacked a “hot” Swedish nanny after coming home to find the young woman wearing tiny shorts in her husband’s presence.
And then last month came the distressing news that her radio boss’s four-year-old son had died in his sleep.
Henderson broke down on air in September while discussing little Tate Bargwanna’s unexplained death: “We’ve tried every day to go on air and carry on because DB (father Derek Bargwanna) would never want us to take a day off, but it has been really traumatic for the whole team,” she said. “To see that happen to someone we know and love so much has been really hard.”
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The subject clearly distressed Henderson who is mother to a seven-year-old daughter, Kitty, and for whom the funeral may have been allegorical.
Henderson has previously confirmed a desire to wanting to have more children and of having more babies “in tubes”. Kitty’s was an IVF conception.
“I do have some swimmers sitting there, little bubs in tubes that might one day see the light of day. I’m still paying storage for them,” she has said before, at the beginning of this year, confirming she had “10 or 12 embryos” on ice.
At 43, Henderson may now be weighing up the fate of those “swimmers”.
Should she choose to take a leaf out of single mother and radio rival Fifi Box’s book and have a child on her own — her radio audience will undoubtably champion her decision.
There has been little Henderson has not shared with her adoring KIIS FM and 2DAY FM audiences over the past two decades, some of it without a green light from her largely private British photographer husband.
He is said to have been less than thrilled when his wife claimed Lee was the reason she had Botox injections.
“I got it originally in the frown part because I was frowning all the time and Lee thought I was always pissed off,” she said.
Still, it was probably easier for Lee to hear than the story of him pulling on her underpants on a regular basis and of him suckling her lactating breasts.
Despite Henderson’s KIISFM partner Kyle Sandilands’ best attempts, she has tried to keep the couple’s sex life off the radio.
Oversharing has long been a career hazard in radio.
In 2007 Triple M radio star Brigitte Duclos’s marriage to former AFL player Michael Thomson ended a couple of years after Thompson discovered, from a business client, that Duclos had informed her Triple M audience her husband had left the barbecue on for three days.
Thompson reportedly hit the roof after learning about his wife’s indiscretion.
Duclos would later admit “the hardest thing was some of the topics we covered talking about life situations that were close to home.”
Though devastated by the break-up, Duclos found work — which may have contributed to her divorce — the perfect antidote to her heartbreak.
“I just had to get through it,” she said. “I put myself into programming mode and just went bang. Probably like a bit of a machine there for a few months, just going through the motions. Work was incredibly supportive. We got through it.”
It’s advice Henderson may choose to replicate now that her own marriage, her second, is behind her.