Jenny Kee on hard choices, family and John Lennon
Designer Jenny Kee reveals the truth about her colourful life, the difficult choices she has made along the way and that tryst with John Lennon.
Stellar
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It would be easy to presume nothing can faze Jenny Kee.
And when Grace Heifetz is asked to address the most torrid piece of folklore surrounding her fashion designer mum, Kee certainly gives off that impression.
Sitting next to Heifetz in a photo studio, their riotously patterned clothes a telling contrast to the stark, white walls around them, Kee doesn’t flinch as her daughter recalls what it was like to hear that she once slept with John Lennon.
“I just wanted to be John Lennon’s daughter so I could’ve inherited some money,” Heifetz tells Stellar, her voice deadpan.
Kee does not miss a beat as she dryly concurs: “She really would have.”
This relaxed openness, they say, is just one of the legacies of Kee’s wild-child past.
Because that one-night stand with Lennon — they met after she and some friends jammed the lifts at Sydney’s Sheraton Hotel where The Beatles stayed during their 1964 Australian tour, forcing the band into a stairwell — was just the beginning.
A year later, Bondi-born Kee would flee to London, where she dressed the rock gods of the day — Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — via her stall at the Chelsea Antiques Market.
Some of her famous clients also reportedly became bedmates. Later, she appeared naked on the cover of OZ magazine.
But even Kee has her limits when it comes to sharing it all. And she came up against them when Heifetz asked her to contribute to a new anthology about abortion featuring some of Australia’s most well-known women.
“First of all,” says Kee, “I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know whether I want to talk about it.’ But [then] I thought, ‘Well, this is the time to be honest about what we’ve all gone through as women.’”
Once she began sounding out people on the topic, Kee was surprised to find it remains taboo, particularly for older women.
Lowering her voice to a childlike whisper, she speaks of one friend in her 80s: “She said, ‘I had one, but I never told anyone about it... I never told my mother.’ It was sort of a sin and a secret.”
Kee has had four abortions, and she shakes her head when Stellar points out they are still a crime in NSW — where she lives in the Blue Mountains — unless two doctors agree continuing the pregnancy will cause “serious danger” to a woman’s physical or mental health.
Although the procedure is legal in all other states in Australia, access is still subject to an array of conditions.
“It feels completely wrong,” says Kee in response to the increased curtailing of reproductive rights abroad. “You just wonder where the world’s going.”
And so, wanting to support the book’s aim to destigmatise abortion, Kee speaks clearly and calmly about her own.
Her first two, in the ’60s, resulted from short-term relationships and were unproblematic for Kee — not only was she not ready to be a mother, but the procedure was openly discussed and legal at the time in London.
She went straight to a Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park after the second. “It’s what you did,” she says.
Memories of the third — in Sydney and the result of a pregnancy to Heifetz’s father and her then-husband, artist Michael Ramsden — remain tinged with sadness.
“I do regret [the child] I perhaps would’ve had in 1978,” says Kee. (Heifetz was born three years prior.) “Because I actually would’ve been happy to have had a second child. If support was really there, I would have.”
But her late husband, she says, was a regular pot smoker who was frequently not around.
And Kee was still suffering from the shock of the Granville train derailment in Sydney that killed more than 80 people a year before, including some who were in the same carriage as Kee and Heifetz, who was 22 months old at the time.
Heifetz, a literary agent, unequivocally supports her mother’s choices.
“It was absolutely the right call... it wasn’t right for our family,” she says. (Kee had her fourth and final abortion in 1983.) “It’s every woman’s right to make that decision.”
Her mother’s steadfastness spurred her own unconventional choices — such as having anonly child, which she says brings judgement. (Heifetz’s daughter Estella is 14.)
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“I found that more people asked me when I was going to have a second child than when I was going to have my first,” she says. “They can’t understand why you wouldn’t have a second, why you would choose to have one, and that your career is important, too.”
Kee was always the main breadwinner for her family, and in 1973, a year after returning to Sydney from London, she and fellow designer Linda Jackson opened Flamingo Park, where they sold creations that redefined the Australian fashion aesthetic, with help from famous fans like Princess Diana, who sported Kee’s koala jumper at the polo in 1982, and Karl Lagerfeld, who used Kee’s black opal print to line jackets for Chanel.
“I just went all out,” says Kee, whose own mother was on hand to help.
“There I’d be, in my glory in the shop, with all my [wild] clothes on, I’d be breastfeeding, and then she’d wait, the little one would have a sleep, and she’d take her home.”
At 72, Kee continues to paint and produce a range of silk scarves — or, as she puts it, “Making beautiful things, and [seeing] them on beautiful women.”
And just as she once found inspiration dressing London’s rock gods and their female muses, so too does Kee continue to inspire fashion’s new guard.
Last year, the popular Australian label Romance Was Born collaborated with her on their debut Paris show. And a few years back, Woolmark reissued some of her iconic jumpers for a capsule collection.
Plenty of time has passed since Flamingo Park closed its doors, but Kee continues to remain relevant.
Asked if this surprises her, she hedges in reply: “I don’t know, darl. It’s always been like that, in a sense. Because I’m just sort of... I’m a bit of a natural.”
Choice Words edited by Louise Swinn (Allen & Unwin, $29.99) is out tomorrow.
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Originally published as Jenny Kee on hard choices, family and John Lennon
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