‘Adventures. Travel. Sex!’: Kathy Lette’s post-divorce life
If women over 60 are invisible, then Kathy Lette is the exception that proves the rule. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend. You can meet him if you like’.
Should I stay or should I go? Recent statistics – take the sudden rise in so-called silver divorces, for example – suggest that more women of a certain age are asking themselves that question: should I leave my marriage?
Maybe it’s because the sex has dried up, and their husbands have become more like their brothers. Maybe the kids have grown up, and no longer need their mother at home. For her own set of reasons, Kathy Lette, 65, found herself, some years ago, wrestling with the question. She had been married for almost three decades to the silky-chord barrister Geoffrey Robertson, and things were … well, let’s let her tell the story.
“We’d been drifting for a while,” she says. “It wasn’t sex, but emotional intimacy that was missing. It had been a good marriage, but we were no longer making each other happy. That’s the truth of it. The marriage was dying, and I did not want to die with it.”
Like Moana, she believed there was more beyond the reef. So she took a deep breath and dived into post-menopausal singledom.
What did she find?
“New adventures,” she says excitedly. “Travel, with my three sisters. Champagne. Sex! I’ve got a boyfriend. You can meet him if you like.”
Meet him? I look around. There seems to be no one else in the apartment.
“He’s in there.” Lette points mischievously toward a closed door. “That’s the bedroom.”
If women over 60 are invisible, then Kathy Lette is the exception that proves the rule. On the day of our interview, she’s wearing a colourful mini dress and her shoes are Christmas-ornament silver.
“Tell me, do I look ridiculous?” she says.
Since she looks fabulous, I’m not entirely sure what she means. (It turns out that she had been worried about her eyebrows, which had gone all Julius Sumner Miller on her. Unable to find tint, she had rummaged through her make-up bag, picked up the wand she uses to colour her greys, and run that through them.) Now we’re sitting for a bushy-eyebrowed chat over lamingtons. She has wheeled the old clothes horse away from the window so we can enjoy the view, which is all bobbing yachts on Sydney Harbour.
I’ve come to Lette’s apartment in Potts Point because she has written a new book, The Revenge Club, which she’s keen to promote. I’ve been curious to meet her. Lette is known to be brilliant at saucy one-liners – “What do women want in bed? Breakfast!”; “What do women want in a man? A great big throbbing organ, called the brain!” – but friends who know her say there is much more to her than the props and costumes (think: bouncing nude on a beach with a giant inflatable thong, and the corgi dress she wore to meet the Queen.)
“She’s fantastic,” says her friend Rebekah Giles, a prominent Sydney lawyer who first met Lette at a party for the Australian team at the 2012 London Olympics. “So much more than the puns.”
You can probably guess why Lette tends to lean so heavily on humour: she’s been subjected to some horrendous snobbery over the years, particularly from literary types. She’s learnt to respond by deflecting and denying her own achievements (one example: she occasionally refers to her own, crisply-written books as “cliterature”). Search beneath all that and you will find – as friends have done – a woman who is kind and vulnerable, especially when it comes to matters of the heart
“Ask her anything,” says Giles. And so I do.
In the course of our conversation, I ask her about her book, of course, but also her two marriages, first to Kim Williams – recently named the new chairman of the ABC – and then to Robertson; her devotion to her son Jules, who has autism (he can tell you the match point of every game at the recent Australian Open, but not how much change he’s due at the corner store); divorce in her fifties, and sex in her sixties; her very real sense of loss when her teenage best friend, Gabrielle Carey, dramatically ended their friendship after they wrote the sex-and-cigarettes novel Puberty Blues together; and her sorrow when Carey died suddenly last year after a long battle with depression, with the friendship never mended.
She is desperately shy (and, indeed, proper) on that last topic, “because I don’t feel it’s my place,” she says. “My heart was broken when the friendship ended, and I hadn’t seen her for years before she died, not since I was 21. I always hoped we would reconcile, and then it didn’t happen.”
Lette and Carey were still working-class schoolgirls – Lette at Sylvania High and Carey at Gymea High – when they bunkered down over a manual typewriter with a pinging carriage return to write Puberty Blues. Lette had nothing in the way of literary pedigree: her mum, Val – still going strong at 93 – was a teacher; her father, Merv, had been a front-row forward for the Bulldogs (that’s the Canterbury-Bankstown rugby league club, for those outside Sydney). Merv won a hundred pounds for being the fastest in the game at the time, and used it to buy a block of land to build a house on, at Oyster Bay in “the Shire” where Puberty Blues would in time be set.
“I would never have had the courage to write that book without Gabrielle,” Lette says. “It came out of the experiences we were having as surfie chicks. People were scandalised. We didn’t care. We were having a great time. Politicians were enraged. We got a newspaper column out of it, the Salami Sisters. And then the friendship suddenly ended. Gabrielle ended it. And I understand. You do need to separate when you have these intense friendships in your teens. You’ve got to go your own way. But I always thought we’d come back together in our dotage, in the most spectacular way. I had tried to rekindle the friendship a few times but she, she, she, she … well, she always rejected me, and we never spoke again. Never ever saw each other again, before she died.”
Lette says there was “no big fight” but Carey wanted to move on from Puberty Blues, which she did, decisively and deliberately, winning important literary prizes and developing, toward the end of her life, a serious interest in the study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Lette says a narrative developed whereby Gabrielle “was serious, and I just went to parties. That hurt, because nobody wants to be portrayed as the silly one, in a chalk-and-cheese situation”.
In truth, Lette also has a prodigious work ethic. Her latest book is her 20th. Her novels have a feminist message. Her one-liners are smart. She is published in 18 languages, suggesting wide appeal. She was for a time the writer in residence at London’s storied Savoy hotel. She wrote Julian Assange’s cameo in The Simpsons.
“I know I don’t write serious, academic literature,” she says, “but I do work hard, while I’m having fun.”
That’s what Lette was doing – working hard and having fun – when she met Kim Williams. She was 21. He was seven years older and, at the time, head of the national chamber orchestra Musica Viva. “I found him dazzling,” she recalls. “He was a proper grown-up. He’d been to university. He was a composer. I think because I’d left school at 16, I had been looking for my Henry Higgins. He introduced me to adult life. Suddenly I’m not having pasta from a can. I fell madly in love.”
They had been married for about six years, and honestly having a ball, when she met Geoffrey Robertson, now 77, on the set of his TV show Hypothetical. “The producers were looking for someone young and spunky to sit next to Joh Bjelke-Petersen,” she says. Robertson wanted Kylie Minogue, but she wasn’t available, so they called on Lette.
“Years later, Kylie became a friend,” Lette says. “She would come around for dinner in London, and Geoff would say, ‘You know, if Kathy hadn’t turned up for Hypothetical that night, I’d be married to Kylie’, and I’d be like, ‘In your wet dreams, Robbo!’
“The truth is, it was what the French call le coup de foudre, that bolt of lightning. Geoff was 12 years older, and as tall as me again, and on the set that night he was so charismatic, orchestrating this incredible event. [Robertson is a Rhodes scholar, and King’s Counsel]. I couldn’t stop looking at him and then we sat up talking all night, and the sexual tension … oh, God.”
She didn’t immediately go to bed with him – “No, no, I was married”, and Robertson was dating Nigella Lawson at the time – but there was no question in her mind that she would.
“I was 29. It’s so young when you look back,” she says. “And I still feel bad about it because I really hurt Kim. But then my best friend [Catherine Dovey, daughter of Gough Whitlam] went round to see him, and she ended up marrying him. And so, in the end, I made Kim very happy because they are the perfect couple. We’re having dinner tonight. And since I know you’re going to ask, yes, he’ll be the best chairman of the ABC. He’s made for that job. He’s pragmatic. He is politically astute. He’s got a great sense of humour. He’s across everything: music, news, broadcasting. He ran Film Australia. There couldn’t be anyone better equipped for that job. He’s brilliant, just brilliant.”
And Robertson?
“I went to London, and married him.”
In the decades that followed, Lette turned their spectacular London home into something of a ribald, alternative Aussie embassy, hosting mad dinner parties that stretched into the early morning hours, with characters like Barry Humphries dropping around (his house backed onto theirs; he’d text her from the back porch to say, “Do let me in, Kathy. I’m poised at your rear entrance!”). As her fame in London grew, Lette found herself being invited to events at the real Australian Embassy, where she ran into Camilla before she became Queen.
“Now, she’s a real woman’s woman,” she says. “When the press was getting stuck into her, before she got married, I said, ‘I hope you’ve got your Wonderbras around.’ She looked at me like, what are you talking about? I said, ‘Women are each other’s human Wonderbras, uplifting, supportive, making each other look bigger and better! I hope you’ve got good girlfriends.’ And she has. Because she’s hilarious. And Charles, who, you know, calls me the antipodean Boadicea …”
Wait. Did Kathy Lette just name-drop the King? “I’m sorry, but that’s who you meet over there,” she laughs. “You just do!”
Beyond the social whirl, Lette was also raising children. Her firstborn, Jules, 33, has autism, and “he’s a delight, but in the beginning, it was challenging. Autism was something frightening then. A lot has changed. Back then, you had a vision of your child becoming a plant in a gloomy room. Like they would institutionalise him or something if I didn’t step in. I was trying to navigate things for him, mostly on my own, because Geoff was busy working. I think he would agree with me on that point.
“It was hard and heart-breaking because with autism, you’re often trying to keep your head above water. I know that all lawyers are workaholics, but Geoff was particularly chronic, and of course the work he was doing was important. I might be exhausted, and I’d say to him, ‘Can you please come in here and change this nappy?’ He’d say, ‘Well, I’d like to, but I have 350 people on death row in Trinidad.’ And what am I supposed to say?
“After the second baby [Georgina, now 30] was born, I’d think, facetiously, ‘Oh, let them die!’ Even now, saying that, I feel like the worst person in the world. It is a joke, obviously, but I think women will understand. It’s hard when you’re doing most of the heavy lifting and thinking, ‘I can’t complain, because his work is so much more important than what I do. He’s saving the world.’ Geoff is the most brilliant man, but not the most domesticated. He uses his smoke alarm as an oven timer. Once I had the flu, a really bad flu, and I said, ‘Can you make me something?’ He brought me up … OK, nobody will believe this, but he put Vegemite in a cup and poured hot water on it, as a kind of broth.”
Things got easier as time went on, but as Lette’s career blossomed, and her friendship circle widened, she would often find herself heading out alone to the theatre and other fancy events. “I didn’t have a partner, in that sense. I was married and busy but lonely inside. And by the end, we were just done. Twenty-eight years is a long time to find someone’s anecdotes interesting – and for them to find your anecdotes interesting, of course. You can outgrow your life together. I think a lot of people stay together out of inertia, and I didn’t want to do that.”
Some women don’t have the money to go, but Lette was independent, both financially and professionally. She had also started taking HRT and “it was like rocket fuel”, she says. “Before that, I think I had lost my confidence. Once I got on the HRT, it was like, ‘Oh, game on’, you know. Everything – I mean everything – just comes roaring back.”
Horny for life?
“Yes! You feel a little bit bolshie, a little bit more selfish. You start putting yourself first. You know, women, mothers, they always take the burnt chop. On the family priority list we’re even lower than the dog and the hamster. That’s the Mum. And then suddenly, I was just ready to do something for me. And look, it’s important to say that Geoff wasn’t happy either. He will say that too. If you asked him right now, he’d say yes, he worked way too hard.”
Is he also in a new relationship?
“Yes, yes, but he can talk about that. The main thing is, we’re friends. It took a little while, but we now talk all the time, and if I was to ring him with a problem he would be there for me. When Gabrielle passed away, he was my first phone call, you know, to talk it through because he knew how emotionally embroiled I was with her, and he was so wise and really helped me. And I love that friendship that we have. But it was time to go. And he let me go. And I’m not saying there’s no pain there, but there’s goodwill. You don’t throw away 28 years of memories, friendship, camaraderie, laughter, love. You want to keep that in your life as much as you can. And taking the acrimony out of divorce – thank you, Gough Whitlam, for letting people get a no-fault divorce – and realising that you don’t hate each other, you’re just spent, that’s not failure. That’s just change.”
Lette was one foot out the door – single and ready to mingle, and to further develop her career – when she suffered a serious professional blow. “My old agent died, and I got a new agent, and he did not believe in me,” she says. “I gave him the idea for this new book – women taking control in the prime of their life – and he said nobody will want to read about that, and it seemed like he was right, because then my UK publisher dropped me, too.
“It was a real crisis of confidence. ‘Am I done? Am I finished?’ Because I felt like I was in my prime, but society wants to erase women over a certain age. I wasn’t ready to be erased. I thought, ‘I have another adventure in me. A few more adventures’.” She found a new agent, a new publisher, and her new book, The Revenge Club, is on the shelves this week.
“So, that’s my message. Don’t write us off. We have not passed our ‘amuse by’ date,” she says. “It’s true that I’ve never wanted to make a serious move, like being chair of something – there’s a reason why they’re called ‘board’ meetings – but I did want to keep writing books, and this is the book I needed when I was going through a situation where I wanted to take life by the horns.”
Speaking of horns – sorry, it’s contagious! – can we talk about the man in the bedroom? Bouncing Cruise-like on the sofa, Lette says: “Yes, of course! He’s gorgeous! The way we met was like something from a movie. I was newly separated, and I was jogging through Regent’s Park in London, and he was sitting under a tree playing Bach on a guitar. He’s a composer, and we started talking and you know, when you meet someone, and you just think, ‘I never want to stop talking to you’? Then you find yourself hoping he’ll call, like you’re a teenager again.”
He did call, and he’s since moved into her home. His name is Brian O’Doherty, he’s seven years younger, and one of nine in a Catholic family from Northern Ireland. Lette says she faced the same hurdles as everyone as she prepared to hop into bed, never mind a whole new relationship, with somebody else for the first time in a long time.
She makes a joke about her nervousness – “If women gave the Nobel Prize, it would go to the man who invented the dimmer switch!” – then softly adds: “I think I held my breath in for like four hours. But you know the man is probably thinking the same thing about himself, right? And what’s the point? You’re older than you were. But you know what you like. I can’t recommend it enough. It is something women really can look forward to if they decide to plunge back in.”
So, can we meet him? “Yes, yes! He’s taking a nap, but let me see if I can raise him now.”
She rises from the couch and taps gently on the bedroom door. Before long O’Doherty emerges, bleary-eyed, with bed hair. He’s barefoot, and dressed like a classic Aussie beach bum with clothing sourced from the bedroom floor. His smile is radiant, and the way they look at each other … well, it answers the original question, doesn’t it? What was out beyond the reef? Happiness, in a crumpled Hawaiian shirt.
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