Brett Whiteley was possessive, jealous and a ‘f..king misogynist’, says ex-wife Wendy Whiteley

Wendy Whiteley opens up about her own infidelity, marital abuse and ‘scary’ violence at the hands of celebrated painter Brett Whiteley.

Wendy Whiteley in her Lavender Bay home in Sydney.

In the 1970s, when Wendy Whiteley embarked on a long-term affair with folk singer and poet Michael Driscoll, her artist husband Brett suggested a menage a trois. Wendy recalls: “He wanted Michael and him and I to live together at one stage. I put the kybosh on that.’’

Wearing one of her signature headdresses, the 81-year-old keeper of Whiteley’s artistic legacy adopts a scornful tone and says: “Imagine the scene: the two of them sitting there chatting away and talking about living together with me and taking turns. I just went, ‘What are you doing? Talking about me as if I’m not even here! F--k off, both of you.’ ’’

Wendy is holding court at her heritage-listed Lavender Bay mansion overlooking Sydney Harbour and the lush public garden she created from scratch, and she says her husband of 28 years believed in free love – so long as the extramarital entanglements were “only for him’’. The celebrated painter, who had many fleeting affairs, alternately accepted and was enraged by his wife’s relationship with Driscoll – the man who introduced the couple to heroin.

In a new, quasi-biography, A Year With Wendy Whiteley, Walkley-Award winning journalist and author Ashleigh Wilson revisits the saga of Wendy’s most “significant” affair – and explores little-known chapters of her life beyond her identity as muse to a legendary artist. “People who treat me as only the ‘wife of’ get very short shrift,’’ says the woman who is now a significant figure in the visual art world.

A Year With Wendy Whiteley by Ashleigh Wilson tells the story of a woman who is so much more than a muse

She tells me that while she is happy to be known as Brett’s muse, the word is “highly overused’’. While making a pot of Earl Grey tea in the same sunny kitchen where Wilson interviewed her – the floor, walls and cupboards are white and pristine — she declares cheerfully: “I’m sick of being Wendy Whiteley.’’

In the book, to be released on November 1, Wendy claims Brett was sometimes “scary violent” with her during “the Driscoll years”. She says that in the mid-1970s, he tried to force her off the road following an argument about the affair. She recounts how “we had a huge row and he started getting violent. I ran out of the (Lavender Bay) house. I got into my car and started driving away, and he started following me in his car. Trying to run me off the road.”

The police intervened, and she drove away. Still indignant, she tells Review she heard the male officer say “understand mate’’ – meaning he identified with the painter’s fury over his wife’s infidelity. Yet Brett had so many lovers, Wendy had played “doorkeeper” at their home and his studio, turning away women who wanted to be “the replacement me”.

Brett Whiteley at his Sydney home in 1990.

There were long periods of stability and joy in the marriage, she stresses. She says “he always came home at night on the whole’’ and maintained that “one-night stand sex means nothing’’. She didn’t buy that line and says such encounters are “horrible … Once the sex is over that person is thrown away.’’ Of the road rage incident she says: “I remember being more angry than frightened. Brett never wanted me to have a car. He was in a way trying to destroy the car, which was an escape mechanism.’’

Although he embodied the 1960s counterculture, the artist was “possessive’’, “jealous” and at times “abusive”, she reveals in the book. He didn’t like her working and was “furious” when she co-founded a fashion shop in New York during her twenties. She tells Wilson that while she studied art after leaving school, “our relationship wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if I had been insisting on being an artist. I mean, he was a complete f--king misogynist as far as that’s concerned.’’

The Whiteleys in 1977.

A Year With Wendy Whiteley is a reflective yet compellingly frank account of the subject’s incident-packed life. Wilson examines her “foundational” role in Brett’s art as his most frequent model and muse, their passion and adventures while living in Europe and America as a young, glamorous couple within a bohemian art world. They mixed with royalty and rock stars including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret. Wendy reckons the royals were “a bunch of boring old aristocrats’’ but that Snowdon – who photographed the Whiteleys – was “cool’’.

The book also examines the couple’s heroin addiction and its harmful effects on their only child, Arkie. In 1992, Brett died, aged 53, from a heroin overdose. Arkie – who once said, “I’m often the parent in this threesome’’ – died from cancer in 2001, aged 37. In heartbreaking circumstances, Wendy became the owner of one of Australia’s most significant artistic estates.

Wilson, who wrote the 2016 biography Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing with Wendy’s blessing, explores how her shrewd stewardship of the estate and the Brett Whiteley Studio, a gallery in inner Sydney, has kept the painter’s legacy alive and kicking. Over the past five years, she has worked with a documentary-maker, theatre director and Opera Australia, who all developed shows based on Brett’s art and relationship with her.

She recently announced a $100m bequest, with almost 2000 of Brett’s artworks and objects to go to the Art Gallery of NSW and the Brett Whiteley Foundation. It’s one of the largest donations in the gallery’s history – Wilson calls it “a breathtaking act of generosity’’. She has also left a $500,000 bequest to her alma mater, Sydney’s National Art School. Even so, she frets over what will happen to the estate once she is gone. “Is there going to be somebody that can generate that spark … to not let it get dusty?’’ she wonders.

Whiteley at work in 1981. Picture: Ken Matts

Largely sourced from interviews Wilson conducted with Wendy across her kitchen table, the book paints a picture of the self-described designer as thoughtful, unusually candid and abrasively funny. At one point, she tells him that most contemporary art is “crap, like it’s always been’’.

In a passion project that has won her legions of fans, she has turned a state-owned railway siding once strewn with weeds and old mattresses into a magnificent public garden and tourist attraction. She estimates she has spent $3m building and maintaining this green retreat in front of her home and says some visitors speak to her as if she is a saint. “I am not Mother Teresa. I am a very flawed human being,’’ she says, laughing.

With a sprawling Moreton Bay fig at its centre, the garden became her chief distraction when Arkie, a London-based actor, passed away. In a voice hoarse with grief, she agrees this was the lowest point of her life: “It has incredible consequences about what could have been for her, as a person. What could have been for me as a person, like grandchildren. … Instead of sitting here crying and tearing my hair out, having hard physical labour to do and losing myself in whatever I was doing, it just turns that tape off, that endless tape.’’ Brett’s and Arkie’s ashes are buried in the “secret garden”, which is also tended by a professional gardener and volunteers, and she wants her ashes to be scattered there too.

A NSW government heritage plaque was recently fixed to the outer wall of the listed mansion where she has lived for 53 years – and it upsets her. The public garden is also listed, yet the plaque simply states that Brett Whiteley “Australian artist/Lived and worked here”. She says it’s “a disgrace” she and Arkie are not mentioned. “It’s been listed as Brett’s house … he’s been dead for 30 years and I’ve been here on my own, and before that it was a family home as well as a studio. My daughter’s not mentioned, neither am I.’’

With her huge cornflower blue eyes and halo of curls, Wendy was a great beauty – Clive James likened her to “a van Eyck angel in jeans and T-shirt’’ – and men flocked to her. Her first lover was an older, smitten Frenchman. She jokes in the book: “He would have been charged with some kind of a crime now.’’ She says: “He asked my mother if he could marry me. She nearly had a heart attack.’’ So did Wendy. “He was a nice guy actually,’’ she says now with a playful grin.

Whiteley in front of her husband’s portrait of her.

Born in Sydney in 1941, Wendy came from a high-achieving family – her great grandfather was a brilliant engineer whose legacy is still celebrated in Western Australia, while her grandfather was a knight and co-founder of what is now the CSIRO. In stark contrast, her father, George Yelverton Julius, was a “grifter”, writes Wilson – he was jailed for fraud, theft and reckless driving that resulted in two deaths. Her mother, Daphne, divorced him when Wendy was six for adultery in a case that made the papers.

Wendy recalls that back then, divorce was seen as “a huge failure. My mother obviously did the sensible thing when she left my father, throwing him out.” Even so, “I did what a lot of kids did … I thought it might have been my fault.’’

Her great aunt Kathleen O’Connor was a Perth-raised-artist who worked in Paris in the early 20th century and Wendy felt a deep connection with her.

She met Brett when she was 15 and he was 17. Although she was an accomplished art student at school and East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) “her career as an artist was over before it had really begun’’, writes Wilson, a former arts editor of The Australian.

At 22, Brett became the youngest living artist to have a work acquired by London’s Tate Gallery. During the 1960s, he and Wendy lived and worked abroad and there was an idyllic sojourn in Fiji – until they were deported when police found opium in Brett’s belongings.

Whiteley and daughter Arkie in 1992.

In 1978, Brett became the first artist to win the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year. But, writes Wilson, “the introduction of heroin into their lives, as well as several affairs, was causing trouble inside the Whiteley marriage’’. Wendy’s addiction spanned 13 years – she was arrested for heroin possession while “stoned off my face” in 1977, and kicked her habit 10 years later. Brett kept using and she says “that was the real disintegration of our relationship. I couldn’t be with him at all, which made him angry.’’

She is open about the effects of her addiction on Arkie, who, as an adult, confronted her in group therapy: “It (the confrontation) was horrendous … (but) it helped our relationship a lot.’’

Brett and Wendy divorced in 1990. Paintings worth millions of dollars were at stake, and the property settlement was so drawn out, it was unresolved when the painter died. Asked to nominate her greatest achievement, this witty, resilient woman who has coped with a jailed father, drug dependence, bitter divorce and the premature deaths of her ex-spouse and only child, replies quietly: “Being a graceful survivor.’’

A Year With Wendy Whiteley, by Ashleigh Wilson, Text Publishing, $45, is out on Tuesday. Wilson interviews Whiteley at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, on November 7