The secret life of Blanche

Blanche d'Alpuget has finally revealed the details of her long, clandestine affair with Bob Hawke, 30 years after he first proposed.

Blanche d'Alpuget has finally revealed the details of her long, clandestine affair with Bob Hawke, 30 years after he first proposed. Kate Legge asks: why now?

Blanche d’Alpuget leans across the table and pins me with her grey-green eyes, highlighted lustrously beneath blonde wisps of hair. “Come on,” she scoffs in her deep, husky voice when I ask her whether her husband, Bob Hawke, has had cosmetic surgery too. “He doesn’t need it.” Her cupid lips curl into a smile. “He’s not the sort of person who ever would. He’s a bloke.” And she laughs in an earthy, almost bawdy honk at this stupid idea.

D’Alpuget doesn’t need renovating either but the vanity’s part of what keeps these two smitten, on alert for external threats, like the old flame who bailed Hawke up at Melbourne airport the other day. D’Alpuget was talking to him on the phone when the ex-girlfriend circled. “I won’t say who she is; (she’s) very well known,” she recalls. “I heard her say, ‘Oh, darling. You look wonderful. I still love you.’ I said to him, ‘Bob!’” She growls humorously.

We are sitting in a Northbridge, Sydney, cafe that she chose for our meeting instead of her harbourside home, a view-fetching dangle of rooms perched on the slope of a hill where the former First Lady had expected to retire. “They have workmen there,” the publicist from Melbourne University Press had explained earlier.

Coincidentally, I last visited this busy strip of shops with Hazel Hawke and her daughter Sue more than two years ago while researching a story about life with Alzheimer’s. On our way back from a trip to Hazel’s physiotherapist, we stopped to buy fruit and flowers across the road from this cafe, which sits at the gateway to the suburb where they all dwell. Hazel laughed a lot that day. Disinhibited by her illness, she found my “big teeth” hilarious and told me Bob had smoked smelly cigars in her kitchen. She was intrigued, too, by the ants taking a shortcut through her letterbox.

She’s less active now and will not be able to grasp d’Alpuget’s finely wrought account of her clandestine affair with Bob Hawke – before and during his prime ministership – divulged in a pocket-sized, hot-pink book entitled On Longing. It’s the author’s first literary offering since she abandoned the mask of mistress to marry the man she calls her Muse, or M for short.

If the fact of infidelity doesn’t surprise confidantes and courtiers, the facts of this undercover courtship might: dates that mock public perceptions of Hawke mastering his peccadillos, saucier details such as the camouflage gear of red wig and Stetson hat, the safe houses, risks taken, truths frayed, caution thrown overboard in perhaps the greatest love story of our political history.

Secrets and intimacies were left out of her “warts and all” biography of the Labor giant because of clear-eyed calculations made by everyone familiar with the arithmetic of public life. D’Alpuget’s acclaimed version of Hawke’s beginnings, with its insights into his flaws, intemperance and ambition positioned him for his run to the Lodge.

Her postscript is a small yet panoramic tale of passions heightened by the forbidden nature of their pleasure and the agonising interruptions to an addiction stronger than alcohol, which Hawke swore off for 10 years – although his desire for d’Alpuget was not so powerful as to sabotage his hunt for the highest office in the land.

She reveals how he asked her to marry him in November 1978 but a year later, as his campaign for a federal parliamentary seat took shape, he cancelled out. “‘Divorce could cost Labor three per cent,’ he had fretted several times, back when this was an issue for us,” she writes. “As it turned out, he made the right decision: for himself, for me, for his family, for mine, for his party – and, as became obvious, for the nation.”

In 1952, Hazel Masterton had an abortion because the birth of the child conceived out of wedlock with her fiance, Bob Hawke, would sabotage his bid for a Rhodes scholarship, then available only to the unmarried. Born to rule in the eyes of his parents, Ellie and Clem Hawke, the idea of his greatness, persuasive and compelling overcame every obstacle in its path.

*   *   *

IT'S HARD TO DISLIKE d’Alpuget. for a start she saved my bacon, cheerfully lending me her tape of our conversation when my decrepit machine conked out on the job. Gutsy, intelligent, warm, she’s open to all sorts of possibilities, possessed by an infectious spirit of inquiry.

In her feminist days as a member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby she was the only “sister” who advised a friend to go ahead with a pregnancy that this mother has never regretted. “Blanche is an amazing character,” the fellow writer says. “She’s so full of different angles and corners, a very complex, deep, vibrant being.”

Dressed in a pink woollen coat and grey pants, high-heeled boots on her dainty feet, she’s an extremely glamorous woman who pampers and preens assiduously, pestering me afterwards for a peek at the photos taken for this story. Yet she’s profoundly committed to the spiritual side of life. This quest introduced her to the Quakers, Jung, Siddha yoga, Benedictine meditation and prayer, the metaphysical Johannine teachings of Christianity, and finally Subud, an inter-faith Indonesian practice. She’s even explored rebirthing in the hope this might help to conquer her fear of public speaking.

Hawke’s agnosticism hasn’t cooled her mystical fire but his “high-maintenance” life post the Lodge dampened the output of this prize-winning author of two biographies and four works of fiction. Fans who lament her lean years shake their heads at a fiercely independent woman who has been blissfully content to travel at his side. These contradictions add to her mystery.

The Hawke children wore black to Blanche and Bob’s 1995 wedding in a silent protest that makes one of them now wince. Protective loyalty for Hazel remains fierce but the woman who replaced her has grown on friends and family. Sue Pieters-Hawke and d’Alpuget get on well mostly. Another of Hazel’s closest allies confesses she has warmed to her as the years roll by.

“All of us feel sad for anyone who’s ill, whoever they are,” d’Alpuget says. “In Hazel’s case it’s very sad to see someone who used to be so vibrant struck down with such a dire disease, and that’s how I feel about that. It’s a very, very sad situation.”

Fifteen years ago d’Alpuget revealed she had been molested as a 12-year-old by a 54-year-old judge, a family friend, long since deceased. The essay, Lust, published in a collection called Eleven Deadly Sins, provoked debate because she refused to portray herself as a victim. Her father, Lou d’Alpuget, a former editor of Sydney tabloid The Sun Herald, a distinguished yachtsman known as “a bull of a man”, had a huge row with her over the revelation.

“He was very upset when I wrote it and it was published and he was upset in retrospect that he hadn’t protected me,” she says. “I had to write it; it was like a poisoned dart lodged in my hide that I had to work out of my system.” If she’d owned up to this while the judge was alive her father would have “walked down the street and killed him”.

D’Alpuget proffers a similar reason for withholding the true story of her relationship with Hawke until distance lessened the capacity for injury. “You must understand,” she instructs, “I could not say much about his womanising because he was married. It would have been terribly damaging, terribly hurtful. I wouldn’t have done it.”

One of Hawke’s former minions is critical not of her timing but of her need to tell us at all. Indeed, they’ve been in the women’s magazines again, wearing matching white slacks instead of terry towelling robes as they did in 1995.

D’Alpuget herself decries modern mistresses who blab to the media for their 15 minutes of fame and six-figure sums. She wanted initially to explore her mother’s death, which she witnessed, entranced by the soul’s desire to be free of the body. This spiritual exit from the world slides into the book’s closing pages but it’s the physical longings of two warm-blooded beings that dominate her narrative, “a beautiful, uplifting love story” she couldn’t ignore.

Two worms in a bottle is how the pair seem to outsiders who’ve observed them, hands entwined, eyes caressing each other with a silky anticipation, fluent in a vernacular that couples of many years’ standing often forget.

*   *   *

BLANCHE D'ALPUGET WAS WEARING a white linen dress sewn by her mother when she met Bob Hawke in 1970 at a party in Jakarta where she and her then husband, Tony Pratt, were “the golden couple” among Australian expats. A former journalist on The Mirror newspaper, d’Alpuget had accompanied Pratt to Indonesia, landing a job at the Australian Embassy’s information bureau. “I used to go down the corridor to peek at her,” confesses an elderly gent, one of a throng of admirers.

“Blonde and beautiful,” remembers radio host Mike Carlton, then the ABC’s South-East Asia correspondent. “Blanche could stop an entire press conference simply by walking into the room. Like almost every other journalist, I wanted to get into her pants.”

Hawke wove a similar magic. Libido unlimited. Handsome and extrovert, he seduced women wherever he went. In 1976 their paths crossed again when d’Alpuget was researching the life of industrial judge Sir Richard Kirby. “With mutual, wordless consent it was agreed we would become lovers as soon as possible – which happened to be in a different city, the following night,” she writes.

“He was charming, funny and straightforward … what he loved was sex. He was a busy man; I was a playmate. That suited me – I wanted a playmate too.” Her only serious competition lived in Switzerland, home to the ILO meetings Hawke attended annually as ACTU chief, but “slowly, dreadfully, I came to realise … that his love-life was a kind of freewheeling, decentralised harem, with four or five favourites and a shoe-sale queue of one-night stands.”

Certainly power is an aphrodisiac that emboldens even the ugliest kings. Pollsters call it charisma. John F. Kennedy had it. Bill Clinton, too. One of Hawke’s courtiers quotes Hillary Clinton’s line: “He was a hard dog to keep on the porch.”

D’Alpuget also strayed. “It was a sexually free and joyful age,” she writes of those 20 years between the Pill and AIDS. She’d met her first husband at 17 and says they both took side trips, discreetly, during their marriage.

The mostly male news media in Australia turned a blind eye to the private life of public figures. “Sometimes when I arrived for an assignation, half a dozen serious men in suits would say ‘Hullo, dear’ and return to their discussions. I recognised them from the TV news.

“(Bob and I) were able to see each other every few weeks; in between there were no phone conversations, no notes, no messages. I longed for contact but he would simply vanish somewhere, into his huge, feverish, demanding life.”

D’Alpuget completed her biography of Kirby then returned to her debut novel, Monkeys in the Dark, drawing on her Muse, his sayings, their love, as she would continue to do in book after book. Her “married life had turned cool” while her entanglement with Hawke heated up. By now he was ringing every day.

One evening in November 1978 he proposed to her. Full of brandy, he leaned his head against the exposed brick wall of the ugly house they were meeting in that night and said he was separating from Hazel. D’Alpuget was swept away, “slain with delight”, but she did not consent immediately.

He’d done all the talking, discovering little about her, mispronouncing her name, calling her “Dapplejay” in his gruff, blokey tongue. She agonised over the fate of her son, Louis; she wrestled with her creative freedom; but, hopelessly in love, she moved out of the marital home on return from a trip to Malaysia.

She wondered when he would take the first step in his separation from Hazel. He told her he had serious career decisions to make. “It was this that we talked about; somehow domestic issues faded into the category of unimportant.” Suddenly the daily phone calls ceased. Then Hawke’s mother died. A week passed, two weeks; finally he rang to tell her his divorce was off.

Insiders say Hazel refused to leave, putting Hawke in the invidious position politically of having to walk out on his marriage less than a decade after being named father of the year. “It was a straight-out political calculation,” a family member says of Hawke’s decisions on the home front.

D’Alpuget writes of her devastation, experiencing physical symptoms akin to withdrawal. Suicidal thoughts turned to murderous plots against his life, days of sobbing, near insanity, until “tempered by the experience of suffering” she forgave him. This unravelling occurred in the latter half of 1979.

*   *   *

oN J3, 1980, d’alpuget and Hawke began working together on the biography. “We were still deeply attracted to each other but we both accepted that personal wishes bow to force majeure.” Like an addict going cold turkey, she sweated him out of her system through writing.

D’Alpuget acknowledges the Hawke book “helped to persuade those who mattered to make him the leader of his party, from which point electoral success was assured”. And it was her spade work on his drinking, she says, that prompted him to go on the wagon six months after she’d begun the project. “Within a week or 10 days of showing him my research, he stopped,” she says.

My copy of Robert J. Hawke has “Melbourne Herald Bureau – Do Not Remove” inscribed in capital letters across the front cover because this was the bible for any journalist covering his Labor government.

The standards for political biography today make full disclosure necessary. Veteran journalist Laurie Oakes changed the rules when he condemned Cheryl Kernot’s memoir for excluding her affair with Senator Gareth Evans in the story of how she dumped the Democrats for the ALP.

Morrie Schwartz, who published the Hawke biography, says he knew the author was friends with her subject but he had no idea they’d been lovers. The author dismissed those who inquired whether she’d had an affair with Hawke while she worked on the book. “I don’t know what I’d have said had they asked the correct question,” she writes in On Longing. That bullet was simply this: have you ever had an affair?

Does d’Alpuget’s admission concern Schwartz? “God, it’s obviously relevant, isn’t it,” he says now. “It’s very hard for me to speak about the Morrie Schwartz of a quarter of a century ago. I probably would have gone ahead with it. Today, I’m not so sure.”

Oddly, Melbourne University Press, which published d’Alpuget’s Kirby biography, The Mediator, declined her book on Hawke. She says MUP’s director at the time, Peter Ryan, didn’t believe Hawke would snatch the crown. “He thought Bob was finished.” Ryan gives a fuller reason off the record, suggesting the decision wasn’t simply commercial.

*   *   *

AFTER BOB HAWKE'S 1983 election victory, d’Alpuget and her husband attempted reconciliation, unsuccessfully. Towards the end of 1985 she met “a mystagogue”’ who mentored her spiritual discovery. She shifted to Sydney. “I loved being single. I had my own bed, my own front door. Men were for fun.”

Then, one afternoon in November 1988, the Prime Minister’s abstinence weakened and he called her. They agreed to meet at the house of a confidant. Arrangements were trickier because security officials tailed his every move. “We rushed into each other’s arms, laughing … with relief that we still loved each other,” she writes.

One of Hawke’s staff remembers his boss “used to have mystery weekends in Sydney. I thought he was just going up there on the punt.” Hazel’s closest friend, Wendy McCarthy, doubts that the former First Lady knew Hawke’s resolve had lapsed.

The deal done before they’d marched on Canberra tied Hawke to sobriety and tethered him to the porch. Late in his third term this pact came unstuck. After he lost the leadership in late 1991 and he and Hazel moved to Sydney to build their new home, a “bit of magic” on the Northbridge hill, tensions surfaced and the marriage once more began to flounder.

Hawke’s private secretary, Jean Sinclair, who’d kept d’Alpuget at arm’s length, both women frosty towards the other, died the year he retired from parliament. In the days following her funeral, d’Alpuget writes, whenever she meditated or became still, Sinclair’s “pretty, elfin face, smiling warmly, appeared – now as a friend urging me closer to (Hawke)”. The relationship quickly grew into a “passionate longing neither of us had ever known before”. One night, lying close together in her Sydney apartment “a fiery spirit swept through our bodies, as if we had been cast into a furnace and were being burned alive. The experience was so intense we could barely move or speak.”

Divorce proceedings began but, having been jilted once, d’Alpuget wasn’t convinced Hawke would follow through. In late 1994 she travelled to Pakistan. She was to meet him in Hong Kong on her way home but the plane from Peshawar was cancelled and she arrived a day late. Stranded, she could not warn him. Hawke didn’t believe her story and “whimpering with grief, we said goodbye”. She says she never wanted to see him again.

Drawing on her spiritual strength, she faced the ruins of the affair. Then one day he rang, begging to apologise in person. The Pakistani ambassador in Canberra had secured confirmation through officials in the Peshawar control tower that her flight out that day had indeed been scratched.

Mills and Boon couldn’t script this precipitous reprieve. Hawke’s initial disbelief was born out of suspicion. If, as she writes, he’s a man not to be left in a city on his own, then she fit the same bill in his eyes. Their friends say the jealousy still flares, even now that they are married.

One of her dearest friends, Michael Epstein, a Melbourne psychiatrist, says he was dining with d’Alpuget in Sydney one night when, halfway through the second course, she looked at her watch. “It’s 8 o’clock,” she worried. “Bob will get upset if I’m late.”

Cushioned by the familiarity of a 30-year friendship, Epstein wouldn’t hear of her abandoning him mid-meal. He used to live in Sandringham, around the corner from Hawke. D’Alpuget often met the then ACTU leader there. Epstein jokes that he’s keeping a pair of sheets for his grandchildren, a rare piece of memorabilia that might rival any eBay bidding war for Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

Epstein told d’Alpuget he wasn’t about to sit there finishing dessert on his own. Sure enough, he recalls, she was late home and Hawke wasn’t happy.

John Lonie, one of two “bridesmaids” at the pair’s wedding, laughs at Hawke’s impatience. “He frets when she’s away or when they’re apart. This love is stronger than ever. They’re like teenagers.”

On Longing is dedicated to Lonie, a screenwriter, handsomely slung. “There is only room for one big bull in Blanche’s paddock,” he teases. “I never have to worry because I bat for the other side.”

There’s a proprietorial vigilance between Hawke and d’Alpuget, a possessiveness that is a vital sign of sexual life. Epstein says he’s felt Hawke’s masculine glower occasionally even though his “mad adoration” for d’Alpuget is purely platonic.

She insists neither of them have cause for jealousy. Hawke told party clansmen and women who gathered in Sydney last March to mark 25 years since his election that d’Alpuget had brought him exquisite happiness. And in his recent television interview with Andrew Denton he elaborated on the formula for bliss, nominating physical attraction, shared interests and emotional and intellectual fusion.

“Sex is very, very important,” d’Alpuget tells me. “The love between men and women necessarily has to be erotic. To start the fire going there has to be sex. How that stays alive, I don’t know. It’s a living spirit.”

She’s 64, he’s two years short of 80, an age gap likely to be magnified unless he truly is no mere mortal. “If he were older and frail,” she says, “I would look after him with enormous delight. I think about it with great pleasure.”

Hawke’s mind is sharp, his pace hectic as he travels back and forth from China mostly helping companies negotiate licences and contracts. He always does the cryptic crossword; reads four or five newspapers every morning; puffs on three to four cigars a day out on the balcony; and remains engaged with state and federal politics. She helps administer RJL Hawke and Associates, a business kept separate from the taxpayer-funded office he’s afforded as ex-PM. In September they’re off to Kazakhstan.

D’Apulget says she has found the international circuit “enormously interesting and stimulating”. At election time she accompanies her husband to Labor fundraisers and campaign launches. Once a week she attends the Newtown hall where followers of Subud gather for Quaker-style meetings.

“I can’t see myself getting the time and headspace for another novel,” she says. “I really can only get three to four hours a day, then I have to go home to running the house and the business.” Then there’s the dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback, and her husband. “Bob’s high maintenance in this respect. He can’t do anything domestically, just nothing really, nothing at all. He can’t work any piece of machinery. I accept it. That’s the package.” But he indulges her. “He likes me to enjoy myself.”

At the close of his acknowledgements to The Hawke Memoirs in 1994, he thanked Blanche for her excellent account of his life and for putting “aside her own book to work as my editor”. More than 50 years ago it was Hazel who typed and retyped all the drafts of his thesis as the then Rhodes scholar completed his Oxford degree. Acts of love and sacrifice litter Hawke’s past.

D’Alpuget says she’s wrestled like every woman with that balance between self and surrender. She is planning to update the Hawke biography and was mortified recently when her tape recording of an interview with a former Canberra mandarin was blank. How will she handle the womanising this time? A sealed section? Her publisher, MUP chief Louise Adler, has suggested the simple confession: “Dear Reader, I married him.”

Staff writer Kate Legge’s previous story was “Clubland” (July 5-6), about club violence spilling on to the streets of Melbourne.