Still Life

Larry Schwartz

Two years after his death, a tangled web of bitter feuding and intrigue continues to haunt the memory of artist Brett Whiteley.

SHE too was once in thrall to the devilish lure of heroin. So when Brett Whiteley’s former wife heard that the artist’s body had been found in room four of the Thirroul Beach Motel she was not so surprised.

“Hardly,” says Wendy Whiteley, now preparing his inner Sydney studio for its opening as a museum. “I mean I was an addict myself … Death can happen, yes. I was fully aware of that.”
Brett Whiteley knew what it meant to teeter at the edge as though his very creativity depended on facing some inner abyss. “Art should astonish, transmute, transfix,” he once wrote. “One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia … One must virtually describe the centre of the meaning of existence.”
And in a biographical note for a late 1970s exhibition, he wrote that he “imagines he will die some time in his 50s”.

He was 53 when he died in the New South Wales motel he had visited before to endure the agonies of “cold turkey”. He was found on 15 June 1992, a bottle of whisky, cigarette stubs and sticky-sweet juice bottles beside his bed.

But the circumstances of his death pale beside the clamor about him in the aftermath.

Wendy Whiteley has been almost deafened by the clamor. “It’s very irritating. It’s like, for God’s sake, what more do you want?” What more does who want? “Well everybody. I mean what more do they want. The guy, whatever he was as a total human being, happened to be one of the, if not the, best artist Australia has produced and people just want more, don’t they?” She says she is “getting a bit sick of people making their lives out of principally Brett’s and then secondarily mine …”
When Whiteley was alive, people would camp outside his inner-city converted-factory studio-home. Two and a bit years after he succumbed to acute cardiac respiratory failure, interest in the man eclipses that in the work. And the drama that has unfolded over those years has only intensified fascination.

IF Brett Whiteley’s last months were ugly – former girlfriend Janice Spencer has characterised it as a time of “depression and anxiety” dominated by the desperate need for heroin – there is an ugliness too to the mood that has persisted through the
court battle over his estate and the tussle to tell his tale.

The race to tell the Whiteley story began with a “deluge” of offers to journalist Janet Hawley, who is close to the family.

Would-be chroniclers, including Blanche d’Alpuget and, it is understood, David Marr, have come and gone, cautiously withdrawing lest they join alleged personal and publishing casualties that include: The marriage of one of Australia’s leading actors,
now turned biographer; The job of a top publishing executive; A court-ordered withdrawal of a book on Whiteley and; Legal threats, accusations and abuse.

“When hyenas attack a zebra in the bush, the only thing that is left is a stain on the grass,” says Stuart Purves, Whiteley’s art dealer since 1966.

Trying to make sense of the Whiteley saga, you encounter a blur of accusation and counter-accusation until it seems there is no simple, undistorted truth.

Courted by publishers to write a book days after the death, Hawley warns of “an immensely complex whirlpool, fascinating and difficult and very easy to get wrong if you try to be simplistic about it”.

Wendy Whiteley says: “Everybody’s got a subjective view and everybody will make up their own minds one way or another about what the moral virtues of an artist are or aren’t and the personal psycho-battle that goes with it.”
NOR is the publishing industry alone in being perceived as predatory.

There is an obvious distrust of motive. A weary Wendy Whiteley says: “You might get the impression here that I’m a bit pissed off with journalists because I sure am.”
Purves fears that the pop star aspect of the painter’s life will be elevated by writers motivated mainly by money at the expense of the “art and poetry” of Whiteley’s work. “I don’t think too many want to tell the story of Brett the Marvellous. I might be wrong.”
Pursuing the Whiteley story through a spray of expletives and warnings from almost everyone except Wendy Whiteley of possible litigation, you get the sense that there is more here than misplaced prissiness.

WHY the interest in Whiteley anyway? “It’s pop star stuff,” says actor Graeme Blundell, co-author of an unauthorised biography he hopes to complete for Pan Macmillan by the end of the year.

“We know much more about him than we know about any of the other painters. We know about him the way we know about Graham Kennedy or Don Lane or Bert Newton. He was a sort of pop star in the way he lived his life. He wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.”
He was a complex man of many parts, says Hawley, who has chronicled the Whiteley saga intermittently and says she became a friend in his last four years. “Part of Brett was fascinated with the phenomenon of stardom,” she says. “He was fascinated with the power of rock stars like Bob Dylan or Dire Straits.”
But Wendy Whiteley insists: “It doesn’t go beyond the paintings. It is because of the paintings. If the paintings weren’t there, nobody would know the difference. He would just be another junkie.”
The fascination with the doomed artist has been fuelled by a highly publicised court dispute over his estate that culminated just over a year ago in Whiteley’s actress daughter, Arkie, receiving the bulk; $500,000 went to each of the painter’s mother
and sister; a painting of herself to his former girlfriend, Janice Spencer; and nothing to ex-wife Wendy.

Wendy Whiteley has refused to co-operate with Blundell and Margot Hilton, whose marriage broke up during research for their book. From the bunker of the artist’s studio, she says: “I wonder that he isn’t too concerned about keeping out the Margot Hilton and Michael Driscoll story.” (A poet and songwriter, Driscoll is said to have been a close friend of both Wendy Whiteley and Brett with whom he once collaborated on a book of verse and paintings.) “She ran off with Michael. I think Graeme must have at some stage wished he never thought of the idea (the book).”
Across town, Blundell sees strong parallels between his relationship with Hilton and the Whiteleys’ relationship. “I don’t know if it (the marriage to Hilton) was a casualty of this but we are still working together and it (the book) is still proceeding on course.”
THE telephone rang at the home of Robert Adamson, a long-time friend of Whiteley. Wendy Whiteley was on the line. As the Sydney poet recalls, she said: “Who is this Graeme Blundell character? I’ve never heard of him. He’s not a writer. Why should he be writing a book about Brett?” “Wendy said to me, `I hope you’re not going to talk to (him) about Brett. If you do I don’t think I’ll ever want to talk to you again’.”
He stresses that for decades Wendy Whiteley played a crucial role in her husband’s work. Adamson eventually agreed to talk to Blundell but only on condition he was allowed to approve the sections of the final draft in which he was quoted. He does not want to betray the painter’s ex-wife. He still claims the right to withdraw comment if not satisfied.

Adamson’s wife, photographer Juno Gemes, became friendly with the Whiteleys after their return from New York and Fiji in 1969. She recalls a 1987 photo session in Sydney while Wendy was in London, in which Brett lapsed into an hour-long monologue on the joys of being unfettered after long years of marriage.

However, she believes Brett Whiteley could not easily cope with being alone. After the divorce, she feared he might be too much alone with himself and was relieved when told that Whiteley had found a woman (Spencer), described to her at the time as bearing a strong resemblance to Wendy 20 years earlier.

Gemes says she received a threatening letter from the Whiteley’s daughter, Arkie, through a lawyer. Then came the call from Wendy and an hour-long conversation.

Still unsure whether to talk to Blundell and Hilton, they resolved to invite them to a lunch. It was to be a commemorative meal to remember their ill-fated friend as well as to “check the (co-authors’) intentions”.

So it was that a tentative trust was established over lunch at the Adamson-Gemes home on the Hawkesbury.

THE book is drawn from interviews, published diary extracts, comment in newspaper, radio and television documentary. There has been enough in it so far to make its editor, Barry Oakley, baulk. “Barry keeps writing in the margin, I am pleased I am Catholic and older than this man was. Ed'.No wonder the Sixties didn’t work. Ed’.”
In one scene in Blundell and Hilton’s draft, about which they are contractually prohibited from detailing, the forlorn Whiteley is depicted gazing from his house at the waters of Sydney Harbor, oblivious to the naked women sprawled on a bed inside. Another chapter takes its title from lines in a Leonard Cohen song on New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel in which he describes oral sex with singer Janice Joplin.

“Something went terribly wrong and there just aren’t the witnesses,” Blundell says of the painter’s New York stint in the 1960s when he lived at the Chelsea. “I’ve created a story around it all. I know he was f…..g Janis Joplin. He used to say to one of his girlfriends that in the middle of f…..g she used to just lean over and swig out of this huge jug of bourbon. He said it was like f…..g a truck driver.”
Blundell says the book is intended to be “a hybrid between the glitzy tabloid, sleazy tell-alls on one hand and the pompous literary unreadable biography on the other”.

He concedes that the story is depressing. “Yet he had the most extraordinary life that anyone could imagine. Robin Wallace-Crabbe, the author and painter, is a friend of mine and he said all us artists are completely jealous … We all envied the mega f…..g. We all wanted to do it. The rag-top hair and the funny suits. He was great.

He was a performance artist.”
Friends shown early drafts had been engrossed by “the story of this trapped individual who had so much going for him but rejected it all along the way”.

Blundell claims members of the Whiteley family have contacted friends “and they have said they are not to talk” to Hilton or himself. He says that in turn he and Hilton took legal action over a letter circulated by the artist’s daughter, Arkie, and a friend.

“I can’t remember the words but (they) called us sleazebags and sleaze merchants and said that we had no credentials to be writing this book … We slapped a writ on them claiming that this was defamatory, reserving the right to sue for damages. They refrained and published in the media an apology and there has not been a word since.”
Actress Arkie Whiteley is based in London and, said her Sydney agent, not available for comment. Her mother indicated she saw no need for us to speak to her.

According to Blundell, Janice Spencer is “still grieving and is broke and is having a very bad time out of it”. He believes the family is particularly sensitive because it wishes to play down the significance to the artist of the former girlfriend.

Spencer had been a major beneficiary of a disputed 1989 will which would have left the studio as a museum, splitting the rest of the estate into 20 shares, two of which she was to receive.

In the New South Wales Supreme Court in May 1993, Mr Justice Powell ordered that parties to the estate abide by a later (1991) will last seen stuck to the bottom of a kitchen drawer. Arkie Whiteley’s lawyer says a subsequent claim by Janice Spencer for an entitlement as a de facto wife has been disputed by the estate and the matter is yet to be resolved.

Blundell claims a deliberate attempt to rewrite the Whiteley story without her. “Part of the clean-up is that the Queen (Wendy) and the Prince (Brett) were always sort of doomed to be together forever and there was going to be a reconciliation and Janice never existed.”
And Wendy Whiteley, who spends her days in the painter’s studio surrounded by his oils on canvas, collages, brush and ink on wood responds: “I couldn’t give a s… what they say about Janice Spencer.

I have no interest in Janice Spencer.”
Blundell singles out Hawley in particular, claiming she omitted mention of the former girlfriend in stories since Whiteley’s death.

Hawley says there were “difficulties writing about Janice Spencer”.

Hawley was extremely cautious in her comments about the late artist and his family. Eventually after talking to Wendy Whiteley and Arkie’s lawyer, she dictated: “Brett Whiteley while alive had consistently given many of his friends a different interpretation on the length and nature of his relationship with Spencer to the version that Spencer was conveying./” She claims that after the divorce Brett often talked about reunion with Wendy. Hawley says the two had had a reunion in Queensland about a year before his death “that both were happy about”.

She says the fact that Wendy Whiteley is co-curating a retrospective of his work next year is proof that she had been “wife, companion, model, mentor, critic, everything”.

Hawley says she sent Blundell and Hilton a letter asking them not to include anything she had written about Whiteley in their book. She had also asked them not to use anything said in conversation when they approached her. She says she is concerned with the likely tone of an unauthorised book on Whiteley written without agreement or input by “primary sources”.

ANOTHER who has been embroiled in the saga, Tom Thompson, has quit as Angus & Robertson’s publisher of literature since a Federal Court judge ordered the company in October 1992 to withdraw a paperback adaptation released soon after Whiteley’s death of a 1979 Bay Books book by art critic Sandra McGrath.

Thompson alleges the incident was used within the publishing company to pressure him to leave.

He says the release date was brought forward by about seven months by the publishing director while he was away at the time of Whiteley’s death.

He claims that the paperback version was originally approved by the artist but was opposed by the family after his death because of a new section, “the addition which mentions life with Janice Spencer. This is much of the reason they wanted it removed. The expunging of Janice Spencer is very much part of the revising of history”.

Thompson says he too had been commissioned in the 1980s by another publisher, Craftsman House, and had written the bulk of a manuscript on Whiteley. “I was going to write the book which he wanted me to about going through the excess of the ’80s and coming out the other end. About getting over the junk habit.” He says he quit the project when Whiteley returned to drug use.

He says Sandra McGrath had also been engaged to write another, more extensive Whiteley book. She had travelled overseas and interviewed friends and associates of the painter, including Bob Dylan. “She’s got some terrific things.” However, HarperCollins, of which Angus & Robertson is an imprint, had asked her to return their advance.

Along with Hawley, and Bob Hawke’s biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget, it is believed that David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, has rejected a proposal to write an authorised Whiteley biography.

Hawley says she received a “deluge” of offers from publishers, with the promise of a $100,000 advance for a book for Pan Macmillan. She says when she was approached to do the book soon after the artist’s death, the publisher wanted an assurance from the family that her book would be the authorised biography.

In the turmoil of the time, emotions were still raw and the Whiteleys were not yet ready to make such a decision. She was discouraged also by conflict within the family about what sort of book, if any, they wanted.

Penguin Books’ publishing director, Bob Sessions, remembers its involvement with a proposed book by d’Alpuget: “We did have a number of meetings with the Whiteley family …

“At the beginning it looked quite hopeful, as if we were going to be able to have access to the material we felt we needed in order to do the job properly. As the meetings wore on … it became clear that that wasn’t going to be particularly easy; that she wasn’t as welcome as she thought she might be …”
D’Alpuget remembers it a little differently. “I reflected on the emotional and psychological state the family was in at the time I was doing this and came to the conclusion that it was too soon,” she says.

She says both Arkie and Wendy were disappointed and at one stage urged her to change her mind.

Wendy Whiteley says: “We were all up to our necks in chaos. Blanche has a life to live too … We put the whole thing down extremely amicably.”
Wendy Whiteley claims several people who had been close to Brett had chosen to be interviewed by “an authoritative biographer … when things have calmed down”.

Meanwhile, Blundell wonders whether his book with Hilton could run into problems if the Whiteleys contest the ownership of words and images.

REMEMBERING the agony of his last months, Janice Spencer said in a recent report on the $3.2 million purchase by the New South Wales Government of Brett Whiteley’s studio (along with 10 art works) for a public museum: “It was depression and anxiety.
It was a shambles. It was very hard to get him motivated, even to go out for coffee. It was only about heroin, picking up the heroin, ways and means of getting his next hit.”
Wendy Whiteley will have her say about Brett in a reminiscence to be included in a book next year from Thames and Hudson released to coincide with a retrospective of the artist’s works.

According to Barry Pearce, senior curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the book will be a hardcover version of a paperback catalogue available at the exhibition next September. As co-curator Wendy Whiteley says: “My focus is Brett Whiteley as an artist. Not as a pop star.”
And she has sound counsel for the curious: “A very good idea to find out about an artist’s life is to actually go and look at his f…..g pictures.”

The Sunday Age 4 December 1994