Documentary reveals new secret behind Michael Hutchence’s death
New Michael Hutchence documentary Mystify not only has revelations about the INXS frontman’s life from the women he dated, but the director has uncovered information that leaves no doubt about how he died.
Entertainment
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It’s 1984. Michael Hutchence has arrived a the Cannes Film Festival to meet up with director Richard Lowenstein.
Just weeks before the pair had met for the first time when Lowenstein shoehorned in directing INXS’s Burn For You video in Queensland before flying to Cannes to promote his first feature film Strikebound.
Hutchence had seen Lowenstein’s video for Hunters and Collectors’ Talking To a Stranger on Countdown and tracked the director down.
“We were these pasty Melbourne punks who’d flown up to Mackay and we meet these guys (INXS) on banana lounges with their beautiful girlfriends. The centre one comes up and he had a mullet and said ‘Hi I’m Michael’.
“Within two days we were all snorkelling off the Great Barrier Reef looking at corals which is something Melbourne punks just do not do. Michael had this amazing way of disarming you. The connection started there.”
When the new friends met up again in Cannes, INXS had just played in Nice and the night he met with Lowenstein he found out the band’s single Original Sin had just reached No. 1 in France.
“Michael partied through the night, there may have been some Peruvian marching powder involved,” Lowenstein laughs.
“Michael ends up asleep on the steps outside the Australian Film Commission offices in Cannes. I literally witnessed (film critic) David Stratton walking into the Australian Film Commission and dropping a one franc coin in Michael’s hand thinking he was a beggar who was zonked out.”
Lowenstein has countless Hutchence stories, but he lets other people tell theirs in Mystify, his new documentary about the singer.
It started life as a biopic ten years ago, with Lowenstein struggling to cast someone to play Hutchence.
“We were seeing everyone from famous actors from around the world to undiscovered Irish actors and they had their charm, but it was their charm. No one had Michael’s unique charm.”
In the meantime he was doing interviews with key people from Hutchence’s life for what was going to be DVD extras for the biopic.
The first was Bono, back in 2010 on U2’s last Australian tour.
“Bono read the script for the film, he loved it,” Hutchence said.
“People would start talking to me on a level of intimacy they’d never done before knowing that I wouldn’t misuse it because they knew I knew Michael and they felt safe.”
Then in 2013 news of Channel 7’s INXS miniseries drama was revealed.
“We literally had our distributor pull out once the miniseries got announced. That was very disappointing but in the aftermath I’m extremely pleased. We thought who better to play Michael but Michael himself so the DVD extras became the documentary.”
Mystify’s main revelations come not from bandmates, but from Hutchence’s girlfriends.
Model Helena Christensen and film producer Michele Bennett (who he dated for over five years — Never Tear Us Apart was written about their breakup) have never spoken about Hutchence, while Kylie Minogue has never gone into such intimate detail (she provided Lowenstein with home movie footage, where both stars film each other naked).
“Michael had great friendships with Australian blokes, who had great war stories about him letting them share his rock star life, but the real emotional insights came from the people who woke up next to him.
“That included his manager Martha Troup, not that they slept together, but she told a story that didn’t make the film of the night Princess Di died Michael came into her room and curled up like a baby and she held him like a mother.
“He was saying ‘I met her, that could have been me’ and he wound up being tortured by the paparazzi when he was with Paula Yates.”
It speaks volumes of Hutchence’s personality that the key women in his life, who he broke up with, still speak fondly of him.
“He had the greatest way of breaking up but still making these women love him,” Lowenstein says.
“As in Kylie’s story, same as Michele and Helena, they all had a dramatic end. He knew he had to break up, but he didn’t want to. He constantly wanted to be a bohemian.
“I think he hated hurting people and loved pleasuring people, not just in the obvious way.”
Lowenstein even tracked down Hutchence’s secret final girlfriend, known only as Erin, an American he met in a hotel foyer and dated for three months towards the end of his life.
“To her credit, she has resisted all publicity and attempts to get her to speak. I’m sure many girls have stories about Michael, but she brought along her diaries written by a 22-year-old that was with him for three months, it wasn’t a fly-by-night, groupie thing.”
Erin’s diaries, as well as new information Lowenstein uncovered by looking at Hutchence’s coroner’s report and speaking to neurological and suicide experts, left the director in no doubt the rock star took his own life in a Sydney hotel room in 1997.
“Erin tells stories of him losing it and crying in the bathtub and being in the foetal position. She saw his combination of love and frustration over the Paula situation and how much toll that relationship was taking on him.
“He loved Paula but Erin saw him for up to about a month before he died. He was fighting the battle to keep the Paul and Bob Geldof thing together as well as the pressure to get another hit record with INXS, he was finding it completely distressing and exhausting.
“Erin was one of the first ones who said he was always in danger of committing suicide, she said every time I saw him I thought he was going to kill himself.”
Lowenstein got access to the coroner’s report from Hutchence’s family, and found information — which is explored in major detail in the documentary — which had been overlooked.
“Erin saying what she did lined up with my (suicide) theory, then I got the full coroners report which no one had seen except the family, but they weren’t reading it properly, I took it to a neurologist and asked them what was going on and they said ‘No one’s picked this up, he was hugely brain damaged. I’m a suicide specialist as well, that puts him in a high risk for suicide’. He would have found this out with the MRI when it happened but no one knew about it, he only told people about losing his sense of taste and smell, he wanted the rest to be a secret, that’s what Helena told me.”
“There’s were things in the autopsy — a huge amount of alcohol in the blood, that puts him at high risk for suicide, there’s a complete lack of sleep — he hadn’t slept for over 36 hours, there’s phone records and plane flights from that period you can track — he’d been in Australia 48 hours. And he’s got an old frontal lobe contusion in his brain.
“Those three things are a perfect storm for suicide, he was an extremely high risk. So the neurologist and suicide specialist said you could close the book on that.”
Christensen goes into detail about the assault on Hutchence in 1992 from a taxi driver while in Copenhagen.
While he told the world he’d lost his sense of taste and smell, he made the supermodel keep the extent of brain damage he’d suffered a secret — Lowenstein’s film details exactly what impact it had on his life — and death.
“Michael was a different person after that assault. I know there’s theories about auto-eroticism and his death, which is what Paula Yates told 60 Minutes. It was obvious she wanted the world to think he wasn’t sad or depressed, but the evidence was there.
“I know he was turning up the volume on all his sensory experiences. When you lose your taste and smell, that’s common to do that. The enjoyment of normal stuff has gone, you ramp it up.
“But I could see he was very scatterbrained, it wasn’t just being troubled, there was synapses going wrong. He’d repeat conversations. I didn’t sit there and think this is a rock star taking too many drugs. I knew something serious was wrong.”
Hutchence and Yates’ daughter, Tiger, gave the movie her approval after Lowenstein showed her an early cut.
That version had no INXS songs in it, with the band’s management refusing to give the documentary permission to use them.
“After the miniseries something happened to the band’s management,” Lowenstein says.
“I think they started to treat INXS like a brand, rather than a bunch of human beings. But maybe I didn’t want to publicise the brand and give away final right of cut of a film and make something about the human being. That did cause some conflict.”
Tiger Hutchence-Geldof actually wound up emailing the band (who Lowenstein also screened the film for privately — they were impressed with how it captured their friend) and management and record label, and within 24 hours Lowenstein got access to use INXS songs, as well as Hutchence’s side project Max Q and the Wembley concert footage.
“I had been a nervous wreck, people expect to see him on stage singing INXS songs, so Tiger gets a very big thank you in the credits. She said she learned a lot about her dad by watching it.”
Lowenstein said that was his goal — to offer a different take on Hutchence.
“People think he was this stereotyped louche rock star. He was just the opposite. He was a very handsome man with great eyes and the long hair but he was more likely to sit with a waitress he met and talk to 4am about what she does at college and not go to bed with her.
“A lot of rock stars get off on their wealth. Michael never had any money in his pockets, he usually had an assistant with a credit card who had to pay for all his friends. It wasn’t fun for him unless he had his friends around him.”
The director also learned more about Hutchence than expected.
“I realised how little I actually knew him. I went into the film thinking I was one of his close friends.
“The one time I cried making the film was when I found all these interviews from the late ‘80s where Michael is talking about Dogs in Space (his feature film debut Lowenstein directed) and how he was waiting for me to ask him to do another film.
“At that stage I was off trying to make a big Hollywood film which didn’t happen. So I’m listening to all these old interviews and he was too shy to say ‘Hey, put me in another film’ but he’s telling journalists ‘I wish Richard would put me in a film’.
“I should have made another indie film with Michael, a thriller or something. I didn’t cry at anything else, but at that, because I was so stupid.”
Lowenstein has a longer version of Mystify, featuring a whole segment on Hutchence’s acting career (including Dogs in Space), which he plans to release on DVD.
Mystify also serves another purpose for Lowenstein.
READ MORE:
TIGER HUTCHENCE-GELDOF LIVING IN A ‘SQUAT’
KYLIE MINOGUE ON HER “SUPERHERO” BOYFRIEND
“I didn’t recognise the legacy that was being left behind. I do feel that I because was there at the beginning, I owed him a legacy that gave him some respect.
“It’s also partly an apology for not taking notice more at the end, not pushing myself on him more at the end. He was very difficult to get in contact with.
“It’s hard being the friend of a famous person, you think they’ve got so much stuff going on they don’t want you calling them, so partly the film is an apology to him.”
Mystify opens July 4
Originally published as Documentary reveals new secret behind Michael Hutchence’s death
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