‘It’s research’: Why Blanche d’Alpuget engaged a male sex worker

It has been quite the road for Blanche d’Alpuget to get her new book – rejected by Australia’s ‘big five’ publishing houses for being too ‘racy’ – on the shelves.

Writer Blanche d’Alpuget with husband Bob Hawke at the 2019 Woodford folk festival.

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Blanche d’Alpuget has been paying a male sex worker, but not for that reason.

“It’s research,” she says, with a soft smile. “We met in a cafe and he charged me $120 an hour which, on a sliding scale, is at the lower end because I only wanted to talk.”

What about?

“Well, what it’s like to be a male escort, of course.”

D’Alpuget is a writer and she wanted to include a male escort in her latest novel, The Bunny Club, which she started writing “after Bob died”. Bob being Hawke, her husband of 24 years.

She suffered significant setbacks on the way to publication, and we’re meeting to discuss those setbacks – and the book, and the sex worker, and Bob – in d’Alpuget’s apartment in Sydney’s CBD.

It’s a swish place, with a gym and a concierge, but the proportions are modest, which suits her fine.

Bob and Blanche, as they were known during their marriage, had been planning to downsize from their famously beautiful five-storey mansion overlooking the water at Northbridge because he had wanted something simpler.

Blanche D'Alpuget. Picture: John McRae

They bought something “off the plan” only to discover that he wouldn’t be able to smoke his cigars, not even on the balcony, so they didn’t move into that place, and d’Alpuget ended up buying a different place in the building next door.

“I couldn’t afford to keep the other house,” she says. “The upkeep was too much. And it was way too large, just for one person.”

It wasn’t difficult to off-load the big house because “the man in the street above had been looking at it longingly for many years. He had a yacht, and we had mooring, and he was in the Bahamas, but he sent his brother around to have a look at it, and his brother just said, yes, it’s fine, so it never even went on the market.”

It sold, according to reports at the time, for $9.2m.

Settlement was delayed by a dispute with Bob’s daughter Rosslyn over Hawke’s will “which I tried to avoid because it’s only ever the lawyers that benefit” and then came the problem of what to do with all Bob’s stuff.

“There was just so much,” says d’Alpuget, and she’s not wrong.

He had carved bone horses, and Ming Dynasty bowls, and Christofle candelabras, and silver soup ladles, and wild boar desk ornaments, and Persian rugs, and dancing poles, and fertility figures, and Japanese puppets, and art, oh, the art – and six years on, it’s all pretty much gone, having been sold at auction.

“I gave away his suits, and kept his watches and his wedding ring,” says d’Alpuget.

She gave away 5000 books, including hundreds of expensive coffee table books, and she gave her hats – so many gorgeous hats! – to a charity that helps women trying to get on their feet after domestic violence, or homelessness.

She then took time to settle into her new place, which is very far from a shrine to Bob.

“Look around, I don’t even have a picture of him,” she says, “except for a small one, in my office.”

Why is that?

“Because he’s in my heart,” she says, placing a manicured hand against the linen of her dress. “He’s with me. I don’t need to make a song and dance about it.”

Shortly after Bob’s death – and the move, the estate dispute and the great downsizing – she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I believe it was caused by grief,” she says. “Grief and stress. There’s a very clear link. I had never had cancer before and there is none in the family.”

She had “brutal” treatment, including a full reconstruction, and chemotherapy.

She lost her platinum curls (they are back and, on this day, set just so) and she was “incredibly sick. For six days after the infusion, you are nauseous, and on the seventh day you feel better. And then you start again. Because they basically poison you to save you.”

On completing her treatment, she started to write and then rewrite her book, but got Covid and pneumonia (twice) “and I spent most of 2022 in hospital. And after that I developed long Covid, which is like chronic fatigue syndrome, with brain fog.”

Blanche d'Alpuget's new book.

It has been quite the road to get The Bunny Club on to the shelves, in other words.

“I also had a lot to learn,” she says, because while she previously has written biography (including Hawke’s), literary fiction and historical novels, she had never tackled a murder mystery with a bondage subplot, which explains why she needed to interview the male escort.

She wasn’t sure what to expect when she called him. He turned up looking not buff like a bodybuilder but smooth, “like a banker, or an ambassador. He’s in his early 50s. He’s coming to the book launch because I want to thank him publicly for helping me. He’s six foot two or six foot three, very dignified, and if somebody said this is the ambassador for Canada or something you’d believe it, although he’s got an Australian accent of course.”

He introduced her (in a writerly sense) to shibari, which is basically bondage, done the Japanese way, with silken ropes.

“He had videos on his phone, and I watched them, and I didn’t know whether I would include it in my book because I don’t always know what I’m going to write,” she says, but then realised that one of her main characters, Evelyn Sinclair, “like a lot of women, might enjoy that”.

Evelyn isn’t young; she’s 65. Thirty-six pages into the book she will be found naked (with a Brazilian), tied up and dead, with her long purple tongue protruding – and the race to find the killer is on.

The book is being published by Popcorn, which isn’t one of Australia’s “big five” publishing houses, all of which passed on the manuscript, saying it was too racy.

“One of them actually said it was inappropriate,” says d’Alpuget, and I wonder why she didn’t put that on the cover in inverted commas. “I honestly don’t know, but I sensed they were a bit horrified by it all,” she replies.

“It is edgy, and maybe they thought, we don’t want to read about an old sheila doing something like this. But it’s not a sex novel,” she hastens to say. “It has sex in it. But all my books have sex in them.”

She gave one of the early drafts to a friend, Ita Buttrose, “who loved it, and a number of other friends loved it, which was very encouraging”. She engaged an editor to help her with “the main goal, which was to write a murder mystery, with a metaphysical story, the original creation myth, the expulsion from Paradise, hiding in plain sight”.

Australia’s “big five” publishing houses passed on Blanche d'Alpuget's manuscript, saying it was too racy.

Her eventual publisher, Bonita Mersiades, who owns Popcorn, “got it straight away” and it certainly helped that by the time she was finished all the drafts, a new trend had emerged: older women are having sex with younger men in Babygirl (it stars Nicole Kidman as a chief executive seduced by a handsome intern); and in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and in Kathy Lette’s books, too.

“It’s good because probably two years ago I couldn’t have got the book published at all,” d’Alpuget says. “People would have thought, no, no, that would never happen.” Is this trend something she has noticed among friends? “No,” she says. Mostly, when women of “a certain age” (for the record, d’Alpuget is 81) get divorced or become widowed, they decide “never to live with a man, ever again”.

She has been “pursued a bit” herself but she doesn’t think she will remarry, in part because it’s difficult for women to give up their freedom once they’ve found it and because “grief is complex. You don’t really know when you’re through it.”

Writing helped. She also goes to the gym three times a week – “it’s basically all gay men, loud music, wild fun” – and never wastes time on the internet (she has no Instagram or X.)

She doesn’t really go overseas any more because “travelling isn’t what it used to be. I mean, travelling with Bob was particularly nice because we’d get chauffeured to the airport, ushered on to the plane, met at the other end, where they’d give you a cup of tea while they found your luggage and did your paperwork, and then there’d be a limousine to a hotel, where there’d be a nice manager out the front with a bunch of flowers.”

She enjoys being a grandmother (her son Louis Pratt has a two-year-old daughter; she shows me a photograph on her phone, and she’s a real cutie) and while she doesn’t like to think in terms of her own legacy, she hopes that when people think of Bob, they’ll remember that she loved him.

He loved her, too, that’s for certain.

The Bunny Club by Blanche d’Alpuget will be launched at a themed cocktail party hosted by the ABC’s Jeremy Fernandez at the Manly Spirits Distillery on Friday, March 28, as part of the Manly Writers Festival. Tickets are $55.