Nene (revised edition)

By Peter FitzSimons

With Magazine Wars, a new ABC drama series from the makers of Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, set to recreate Nene King's heyday presiding over WOMAN'S DAY in the race for ratings, Peter FitzSimon's biography of Nene takes us behind the scenes of Nene's triumphs -- and tragedies.
It's 1987. Big hair and shoulderpads rule. Flamboyant deputy editor Nene King storms out of NEW IDEA to become editor of Kerry Packer's WOMAN'S DAY, determined to overthrow NEW IDEA and her former boss Dulcie Boling's supremacy. What followed was the rise of celebrity and gossip-fuelled journalism, a world where Nene reigned supreme. Even the once untouchable Royals - Charles and Diana, Fergie and Andrew - became fodder for the magazines' ratings war.Famous for her friendship with the Packer family, infamous for her publication of Fergie's toe-sucking picture, Nene's own life has not been free from tragedy. Her beloved husband, Patrick, went missing while diving with friends off Bondi. His body was never recovered. When the shock of the tragedy saw Nene end up in Narcotics Anonymous, she realised it was time for change. Retiring from the world of magazines, gradually Nene took back her life ...Now, in 2013, as Paper Giants: Magazine Wars airs on the ABC, Nene brings readers right up to date with the continuing ups and downs of her rollercoaster life, when, deceived by people she trusted, Nene lost her home and all her savings. As Nene has said, 'it's a personal journey, it's all I can do, the triumphs and the tragedies. And I'm sure you learn more from my mistakes than from my achievements.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781460700228

Peter FitzSimons

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald. He is the author of over twenty-seven books - including biographies of Charles Kingsford Smith, Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nene King, Nick Farr-Jones, Steve Waugh and John Eales - and is one of Australia's biggest selling non-fiction authors of the last fifteen years.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In June of 2001, my wife, Lisa, and I went for a little R & R to Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Just three days earlier I had launched the biography I had written of Nancy Wake, and the last thing I had on my mind was my next book, whatsoever that might be. During our stay, however, Lisa — who had edited Dolly magazine for four years and Cleo for ten — took the opportunity to catch up with her old colleague from Australian Consolidated Press, Nene King, who had retired there. The two had coffee, and in the course of the conversation the subject of both my book on Nancy Wake and Nene’s own long-awaited biography came up. Nene said hers was going nowhere fast and, lightly, Lisa said to her, ‘You should get Pete to write it.’

She mentioned the conversation to me when she got back to our apartment and, though I was vaguely interested, it was certainly no more than that. In the first part I was too exhausted to even think straight, let alone embark on another project and, secondly, I wasn’t sure that Nene and I were a natural fit. I gather she was of similar ambivalence. One way or another, however, the idea grew on both of us. For me, one of the great advantages of the project became progressively more clear. That is, whereas I had been obliged to spend a good six months reading up on Labor Party literature to understand the culture in which Kim Beazley had grown so as to write his biography, and a similar amount of time on the French Resistance before attempting to write about Nancy Wake, in this case I had married my interpreter!

Lisa knew a lot of the key players in Nene’s professional sphere, had herself been professionally shaped by the passion of putting magazines together, was entirely familiar with the Packer culture in which Nene had prospered, and would clearly be a superb guide in this strange new world I was entering.

Too, when I looked into it, it was clear that Nene King had an extraordinary and colourful story to tell. From a young Jewish girl who wanted to be a ballerina as she grew up in genteel Melbourne, she rose to be the ‘Queen of magazines’, as she was so often described. Along the way she lived a life full of many joys and a few miseries; plenty of unexpected twists and turns; and had met many people of whom I thought she could provide an interesting perspective. Nine months later we put signatures on contracts and began.

In the course of writing this book I talked to many of Nene’s friends, all of her family, one or two of her enemies, and many of her colleagues — most of whom subsequently appear in this book. Needless to say, I am indebted to them all for their kindness in helping me piece it all together, but most particularly I express my gratitude to Susie Palmer, Val Hopwood, Jo Mayfield and Scarth Flett, all of whom were very generous with their time and energy to help me. Also, Bob Cameron, Jo Wiles and Suzanne Monks were unstinting in helping me to understand the nuts and bolts of what Nene achieved on magazines under her command. Both Richard Walsh and Dulcie Boling were also wonderfully accommodating. It cannot have been easy for Ms Boling, particularly, to discuss things she had never spoken publicly of before concerning both her own life and the woman who has long been portrayed as her greatest rival, but she did so and I warmly express my appreciation for it.

In terms of other books that I have used to familiarise myself with this new landscape, I owe debts to the work of Paul Barry, The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, Ita Buttrose’s autobiography, A Passionate Life, and Bert Newton’s memoirs, Bert. I found the work of Bronwen Gora of News Limited newspapers useful in understanding just what happened when Patrick Bowring dived on the Koputai in 1996. I also drew on the writings of the internationally renowned journalist William Shawcross to try and understand the events surrounding Diana, the Princess of Wales, in August of 1997. Also his 1993 biography, Murdoch, Ringmaster of the Information Circus, was useful for understanding reasons why Dulcie Boling acted as she did in the early 1990s. Trevor Sykes’ book Operation Dynasty helped me comprehend some of the machinations of the dealings between the Packers and the Fairfaxes in the mid to late eighties. I also drew upon Denis O’Brien’s history of the Women’s Weekly entitled The Weekly. In 1993, journalist Ian Gillespie produced for SBS a documentary about journalism in Australia called ‘Fear or Favour’. In Chapter 10, I have relied heavily on material from that film to describe a tragedy that occurred in the waters off Tasmania. A subsequent article in the magazine Who also provided information. I cite that here, rather than in the text itself, so as not to break the flow. My current colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald, David Dale, and my former colleague at the same, Richard Glover, have both written extensively about women’s magazines, and I constantly consulted both their work and them personally. My appreciation to them both. The staffs of libraries of ACP, the Herald-Sun and Fairfax — as well as those at the Glebe Coroner’s Court — have all been very helpful and I record here my gratitude.

I have arranged the material in rough, though not strict chronological order, so as to explore particular themes in a smooth and not staccato manner.

This is my thirteenth book and by this time I have a very good team of people who have helped me put it together. My thanks, as always, to my researcher, Kevin Brumpton; my transcriber of interviews, Margaret Coleman; and my help in all things to do with the form and texture of the book, my indefatigable and treasured colleague at the Sydney Morning Herald, Harriet Veitch, who put many weekend and evening hours into the project.

I record my appreciation, and professional respect to the people at HarperCollins, most particularly Publishing Director Shona Martyn (a former magazine editor of great repute herself), Associate Publisher Alison Urquhart, and my always patient and positive project editor, Vanessa Radnidge. I cannot thank her enough.

My thanks also to Belinda Lee who edited this manuscript.

In all of my books I have called on the services of my wife, Lisa, but never moreso than with this one. She made it better and more finely nuanced at every turn, and on one notable occasion worked right around the clock in her efforts to do the book justice. Her insights and deep knowledge of the magazine industry were invaluable and her ability to spot the exact thing the narrative needed to fill it out and make it real, is extraordinary.

And finally my warm thanks to Nene herself. In all my born days I have never worked with anyone so totally open about their lives, loves and mistakes as she has been, and it has been a pleasure to document her life story. She was never defensive over anything, and never tried to steer me away from any back alleys she didn’t want explored. Indeed, her mantra throughout was ‘warts ’n’ all’. Well, she’s got it.

She presented her life to me as an open book, and this is it …

Peter FitzSimons

23 August 2002

1

‘A PRETTY LIFE’

Her birth was a whole lot easier than raising her.

EMILY KING, NENE’S MOTHER

It was rising 1935, and the strapping Lionel King was mesmerised by Emily Myers practically from the first moment he saw her. She was a very prim, delightfully dainty eighteen-year-old ballerina giving lessons to local girls in her parents’ home in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, and three evenings a week Lionel would ride around on his bike as he escorted his young sister Val to receive instruction.

‘And plié … and step … and plié and step …’ He could hear Emily’s firm instruction to other students as he and young Val made their way through the white picket gate, up the Myers’ neat garden path. Always, he would get that little thrill of excitement as he was about to see the alluring fairy again, even if momentarily. As the weeks went by, Lionel found himself taking young Val to ballet a little earlier and leaving a little later, all so he could linger longer. The lovely Emily was kind to his sister, was clearly an absolutely first-class teacher, and possessed the two most important prerequisites of all for Lionel — she was Jewish and unspoken for.

Over those gloriously balmy summer months, the twenty-year-old aspiring businessman got to know both Emily and her family better. Emily’s mother, true, could be a little intimidating — Clare Myers had been one of the first women in Victoria to get a law degree and practise as a solicitor — but plenty of people had said that his own mother was difficult and he knew that could be managed. The funny thing about Clare Myers was that despite having broken many barriers in professional life herself, in no way did she push her daughter Emily to do likewise. To the contrary …

Clare never wanted her sweet daughter Emily to go to an office like she had, nor to have a career in the sciences like her industrial chemist husband, Joe, and instead actively encouraged Emily to pursue ballet because she felt it offered ‘a pretty life’. Emily had thus embraced the discipline from the age of five, and had formed great friendships with others learning the dance form, including her best friend of all, Bobbie Helpmann, who was seven years older than she. The Myers family had come to know the Helpmann family well over their years of common membership in Adelaide society (where Emily had grown up), and though the former had never felt any of the latter’s passions for bulldogs — the Helpmanns being long-time leading lights of the Adelaide Bulldog Club — on the matter of ballet they couldn’t agree more. Robert Helpmann was already the star of Jimmy Brennan’s Ballet School when Emily joined as a young girl, and over the years he had taught her many things.

‘You have to feel the music, Emily’, he would tell her in his kindly, sparkling way, ‘and feel the dance. Be light, light, light!’

Happily, though she took a little longer to warm up, Emily more or less liked the cut of Lionel’s jib in return. For her, too, it was imperative that her partner be Jewish and from a good family, and Lionel fulfilled those conditions. At least he just about did. In the strictest of all strict terms, Lionel couldn’t be counted as Jewish because his mother had only converted to Judaism to marry his father — and the Semitic tradition was that Judaism passed from generation to generation via the maternal branch of the family — but he had been raised fully Jewish and that was the main thing. Further, his prospects seemed fairly good, as his parents’ clothes shop was quite well known in the Footscray area, and it seemed likely that he would take it over himself one day in the near future. Emily had her own worries about Lionel’s parents — his mother, particularly, always seemed a little cold to her, and his father a little weak — but again, you couldn’t have everything.

And so they began their courtship: attending the ballet, waltzing the night away at clubs, and going for Sunday picnics up in the picturesque Dandenong Ranges. Often, when Emily was dancing at the theatre, Lionel would pick her up afterwards and they would go out for supper together — though he was extremely careful to get her back before her curfew of 11 p.m. As a couple, it seemed to their friends that they suited each other only reasonably well. Emily, in personality and force of will, was every bit as strong a woman as Lionel was strong physically. ‘Prim and dainty’ did not remotely describe the approach Emily took when there was a difference of opinion. Still, between them they somehow worked it all out well enough to get married on 6 July 1936. Lionel was 21, Emily just 19. To her very closest friends, Emily acknowledged that while she didn’t yet have a great and passionate love for Lionel, the main thing was that she felt he would always be good to her.

Once back from their fortnight-long honeymoon on a cruise to Fiji, they moved into a charming Art Deco flat owned by Lionel’s parents at 61 Robe Street, St Kilda, just about a hundred metres away from the beautiful Port Phillip Bay. Their block of flats wasn’t the best in the street, but it was comfortable enough — which was as well, because merely days after marrying, Emily fell pregnant and was soon beset by morning sickness. Each morning, early, when Lionel would kiss her goodbye to go to the family clothes shop, she would be lying there wanly, and as often as not would be there still when he returned.

Nine months later, their son Peter was born, soon to be known in the immediate and wider family circle as ‘Snowy’ because he was always the white-haired boy of the Kings who could just about do no wrong. Snowy was an easygoing but accomplished kind of kid, good at pretty much everything and never any real trouble. Which was more than could be said for the world itself at this time.

Throughout the latter part of the 1930s, Emily and Lionel had reacted to what was happening in Europe with outrage — most particularly what that evil man Hitler was doing to the Jews in Germany — though it would only be much later that they would find out the full horror of the situation through newspaper reports and letters from Jewish friends in Europe. It was a very momentous day indeed when England declared war on Germany in September 1939. Only hours later, Lionel, Emily and Snowy gathered around the HMV Bakelite radio in the corner and listened, as through the crackle, Prime Minister Robert Menzies spoke for history. ‘It is my melancholy duty’, he said in his stentorian tones from a studio in Canberra, ‘to inform you officially, that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. No harder task can fall to a democratic leader than to make such an announcement …’

For some time Lionel prevaricated. He wanted to join up, but he didn’t want to leave his young family. He wanted to do his duty but, as Menzies had made clear, a part of the duty of all was to keep the economy going, and that surely included the retail business Lionel was working in. Finally, in 1942, both as a patriot who identified with the original call of Britain to arms, and as a Jewish man who felt his race had been severely wronged by Germany, he joined up. Against Emily’s better wishes, Lionel applied to learn to be a fighter pilot and when he didn’t make it, accepted the next best thing, which was to be trained as part of the ground crew that kept those fighters in the air. Though it was rare, there were cases of guys making it from the ground crew to the controls of the fighters themselves. He could only hope.

It was amid many tears, then, that Lionel left in the middle of 1942, kissing his wife and child and leaving them behind on the platform at Melbourne’s cavernous Spencer Street Station, and boarded a troop train bound for Gawler in South Australia where he would be based while he undertook training. Later he had time for just one quick trip home before heading to his posting to New Guinea, which had suddenly become strategically important now that the extent of Japanese ambitions in the Pacific were clear. New Guinea was viewed as a possible staging post for a Japanese invasion of the Australian mainland and it had to be held at all costs.

Emily felt the first familiar waves of nausea at much the same time as Lionel saw the waves of the Pacific lapping on New Guinean shores. She was pregnant again, and their daughter was born on 8 March 1943.

‘Her birth was a whole lot easier than raising her,’ Emily would say afterwards.

They called her ‘Nene’, after her great aunt Selena on Emily’s side who had had that appellation as a nickname. In the Jewish tradition — and that was the one she was going to be raised in, by God — you never name a baby after someone who is alive, and as both Emily and Lionel had always liked the name Nene, that was that. Snowy was pleased enough to have a baby sister, but as he was already six years old, the actual impact was minimal.

It was, of course, extremely difficult for Emily to be at home with two young children while Lionel was up near the front lines in Merauke, New Guinea. The most he could offer in the way of support from that distance was to send warm letters — even though whole paragraphs were frequently blacked out by the Army Censor — tiny grass skirts for his daughter and a noisy tom-tom drum for his son. What made it worse for Emily, however, were the actions of Lionel’s parents, particularly his mother. For Emily was quite right that her mother-in-law, Margaret King, could be a bit on the cold side. In mid-1943, Emily was informed by her mother-in-law that she and the children would have to move to other premises, because the King Seniors had discovered that with all the American brass moving into Melbourne as the headquarters of the defence of the South Pacific, they could get a much higher rent for the apartment now housing their grandchildren.

Emily was shocked. Disbelieving. Her mother-in-law couldn’t be serious! Sadly, she was. She wanted the young family out of the apartment forthwith. Well, Emily might have been a dainty ballerina famous in local circles for the neat precision of her pirouette, but she also knew how to dig her toes in. She simply refused to go. In response, progressively more threatening legal letters arrived from her mother-in-law’s lawyer, but Emily still refused to budge. Giving her strength was the fact that she had the backing of her own dear mother to stay put exactly where she was — a mother, incidentally, who wrote her own strong legal letters in kind, informing the same lawyer and Margaret King herself that her daughter would be going nowhere. Clare was a warm and loving rock, and her daughter leant on her in many ways. Often, Emily would take the infant Nene and young Snowy over to her mother’s place to stay for a few days, just so as she could have the strength to go on. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s constant support, Emily doubted she could have borne it.

As the legal letters between the two parties began to crackle and spit, it soon became clear that the whole thing could be settled only in court, and a date was set down. Lionel, who had been kept closely informed through urgent letters from both his wife and his mother, rushed back from New Guinea on compassionate leave and — in a moment Emily would never forget, nor allow her husband to forget, ever — kissed his mother hello on the courthouse steps. After that, it was some minutes before Emily could bring herself to even speak to Lionel, and even then it was by ascribing to him a single word that satisfactorily belittled both him and his wretched mother. Neither woman would look at the other throughout the entire half-day court proceeding, while for his part Lionel looked, on the whole, like he’d rather be in Philadelphia.

Emily, with the infant Nene sitting on her knee throughout, won the case on the grounds that she was a serviceman’s wife and therefore took priority in matters of accommodation, and Lionel headed back to New Guinea, where he would remain for another two and a half years.

It was by virtue of such circumstances that when Nene first had the veil of babydom lifted from her it was to focus on a relatively stressed and unhappy mother, a rouseabout brother who was a lot older than she, and an entirely absent father. Every news bulletin on the radio was eagerly listened to in the usually vain hope that they would hear some information about Lionel’s regiment in New Guinea. Similarly, the visit of the postman was either the climactic or anti-climactic point of the day. ‘Daddy will be home soon’, became something of a mantra around the house in those early years. Nene had only the photo on the mantlepiece to show her what her father looked like — strong, tall and handsome in his Royal Australian Air Force uniform — but that looked nice enough.

As a child, little Nene always seemed on the noisy-but-smart side of things. It wasn’t that she could read by the age of three or anything, just that she was always asking questions, and for her to understand anything, you really only had to tell her once. True, to get her to do something you mostly had to ask her five times — so strong-willed and obstinate could she be — but that didn’t become a real problem until later.

Emily, for one, wasn’t at all surprised that both Snowy and Nene appeared to be smart kids. The pride of the family was her brother, Nathaniel Myers, who was the first surgeon to successfully separate Siamese twins in Australia and who would go on to be a pioneer in heart surgery as well. Emily felt sure that little Nene showed some of the early spark she had recognised in her younger brother as a wee one.

At last, the great day arrived. Little Nene was told her daddy was coming home. The Japanese had been routed on the Kokoda Track, Australia was safe, the war was over, and all was right with the world. Nene was told her father was a hero, and he certainly seemed to fit the part. For he was, the little girl was delighted to find, very kind, warm and loving, and seemed eager to make up for the time he had been away by giving her well above her fair share of kisses and cuddles. Always when she cuddled up to him close there would be the delicious smell of tobacco, her father having taken to smoking unfiltered Camel and Havelock cigarettes during the war.

Initially, Lionel said he simply wouldn’t go back into the clothes store business again with his parents. Apart from trying to mollify Emily’s ongoing rage over the fact that he had kissed his mother on the courthouse steps, he felt he had changed and grown in his time in New Guinea, and didn’t want to go back to a life of fitting people out for suits, shirts and pants. This approach was admirable as far as it went, but it soon became obvious, even to Emily, that Lionel didn’t actually have a lot of choice in the matter, particularly when his parents said they were prepared to make him a partner. Post-war Australia remained a place of severely straitened economic circumstances and it was only a couple of months after he returned home to Melbourne that the little store in Nicholson Street, Footscray, called Harry King Clothing, became Harry King & Son. Sure, it was a hassle for Lionel to be constantly vigilant about keeping his wife and his mother from being at the store at the same time, but he settled down well, and the business generally prospered under the new energy he provided in his co-command with his father.

While Lionel and Emily King were not rich, per se, they certainly had more money than most, even in their generally well-to-do neighbourhood.

Robe Street, St Kilda was a lovely part of the world in which to grow up. It was the kind of quiet thoroughfare where the families all knew each other, their children played together, and neighbours were always popping into and out of each other’s houses for some milk or sugar, or just a bit of a chinwag over a cup of tea. Nene as a toddler was a familiar figure on the footpath taking her red tricycle up and down the tree-lined street, as often as not with Snowy riding shotgun beside her to make sure that she was okay. Not that there was a particular need. The few cars there were just nudged their way along, and the concept of ‘stranger danger’ hadn’t yet been invented.

Often on weekends, the family would pile into Lionel’s new Ford Customline and head up to the spectacular Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges for a picnic. After work in summer, Lionel would frequently take both of his kids down to the shore of Port Phillip Bay, where they would either romp around on the beach in the lee of the swaying palm trees, ride ponies for hire, or meander along the long pier which thrust well out into the waters, and gaze at the ships being loaded at the dock. Along St Kilda Esplanade there was also the St Moritz ice-skating rink which they used to visit on Sunday afternoons, as well as a place where they could play mini-golf. Luna Park was just one hundred yards along from there again, and the famous Palais Theatre — where Emily had sometimes performed as a younger woman — was a cultural institution.

In those immediate post-war years, there was a general sense of joyousness that the Allies had won against the forces of darkness and that Australia had emerged with honour and freedom intact — and where better to express that joy than along St Kilda Esplanade? On a good day it seemed that half of Melbourne travelled to the entertainment precinct that their neighbourhood bordered, and Nene’s family felt kind of privileged to be living there all the time.

By the time their daughter had turned five in 1948, the weekday pattern of the Kings for the next few years was set. Every morning at about eight o’clock Lionel would leave the apartment to make his way to the store, followed shortly afterwards by Snowy heading to the mightily prestigious boys’ school, Wesley College, and Nene to the nearby St Michael’s Primary — the local High Anglican private girls’ school. In attending their respective schools, Peter was fulfilling the specific desire of his father, and Nene that of her mother.

As a young man, Lionel had always wanted to go to Wesley College, but had had to settle for Melbourne High because his parents just didn’t have the money. The first day he had seen Peter dressed up in his Wesley College uniform ready to attend the school of his own childhood dreams, Lionel told Emily it was one of the proudest days of his life.

As to Nene going to St Michael’s, Emily had herself attended this school when she’d first arrived with her family from Adelaide as a young girl and had reasonably fond memories of the place, at least up to the point when someone had uttered an anti-Semitic slur at her — whereupon she’d promptly left. When you were Jewish, back then, you just had to learn to live with such occasional nastiness, but both Lionel and Emily felt sure that those days were gone.

The Kings were ‘liberal Jews’, that is, while they were regular attendees at the Temple Beth Israel Synagogue on Alma Road, St Kilda, and observed the Jewish holy days of Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and Passover, they also celebrated Christmas. Pork was banned from their table, certainly, but one way or another ham and bacon were deemed okay. Saturday was just the first day of the weekend, and not the ‘Holy Sabbath’, as some families referred to it. And, while they hung a Mezuzah beside the front door of their house to indicate to visitors that they were entering a Jewish home, that was as far as it went, and they had plenty of goyim (non-Jewish) friends. In short, they were a Jewish family and happy to be so, but it was not the defining mould of young Nene’s formation …

Ballet was. From the age of five onwards, Nene would often accompany Emily down to the Palais Theatre to see companies as august as the Bolshoi Ballet perform. And that was just the beginning … for in theatres all over Melbourne, year round, Nene would sit beside her mother at the ballet and be entranced in the darkened hush as these ethereal figures — ‘like fairies’, Nene always thought — floated across the stage on their tippytoes, acting out classical dramas from another time, another world. Always, at the part in Swan Lake where the white swan finally dies, it would seem like not a soul in the theatre was breathing … until after that climactic scene when everyone would jump to their feet to cheer and wildly applaud. Encore! Encore! Nene’s mother would clap and cheer with the best of them, often with tears in her eyes, both at the sheer beauty of the spectacle they had just been privileged to witness and, perhaps too, at thoughts of what might have been …

Once they saw Emily’s old friend Robert Helpmann dancing with the great Margot Fonteyn, but afterwards Emily would never seek to renew their old acquaintance by trying to see him backstage. Emily always took the view that the twain was torn and that was that. When she had married Lionel, she had left behind that life and her firm view was that this was her life now — for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

But hark, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and fair Nene was the sun …

A rising sun, with a great ambition. Others of her friends at school might wonder what they were going to be when they grew up, but not Nene. She knew. She was going to be a ballerina. A great one … like Margot Fonteyn, only better. Her mother, she was sure, would be so proud. In her room, right above the beautiful dolls’ house that her dad had made for her, stocked with her kewpie dolls and a big black golliwog, she put a framed poster of a ballerina in an exquisitely graceful pose. Nene was going to be just like her and live, as her mother and grandmother called it, ‘a pretty life’.

Emily couldn’t help but look at her daughter a little dubiously when she voiced her ambition. After all, her seven year old was not exactly of classic ballerina proportions, nor of temperament. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was a solid little girl with shoulders that would do a wharfie proud and legs like the trunks of oak trees. It seemed she had all of Lionel’s robust athleticism and strength and none of her mother’s delicate daintiness. This view that Nene lacked a couple of crucial prerequisites for living a pretty life was confirmed one night when in a burst of rage about Snowy getting more attention than she thought he deserved, Nene grabbed his head while he was in the bath and bashed it against the tap hard enough that it gushed blood and …

And where was she? Ah yes, wanting to be a ballerina. Nene simply would not be discouraged. She insisted that her mother teach her all the classical ballet moves and then she practised them endlessly to the sound of the record player. Emily, who missed her ballet teaching more than somewhat, happily obliged and took her daughter through the five basic positions.

‘And plié … and step … and plié and step …’ they began.

Most afternoons when Snowy returned from Wesley College he would hear the phonograph going as he put the key in the door, and open it to a view of his seven-year-old sister doing her unique impression of a swan dying. His mother would be in the kitchen preparing their usually sumptuous dinner as she gave the odd tip — ‘point your toes a little more, dear, and try not to thump so much on the floor’. Sometimes, if Emily had a few sips of sherry as she prepared the evening meal, Snowy and Nene could persuade her to do the splits right there in the kitchen, as they all fell about laughing. Not for too long though. Nene had to get back to her practising. Oft times she would still be going when her father got home at around 6.30 p.m., after having dropped off at the Footscray Bowling Club for a quick drink on the way home from the shop. Nene would tell her father straight up: Margot Fonteyn had had to work hard to make it, and so must she.

On Sunday nights Nene would even strut her stuff in front of an audience with her best friend, the supremely elegant and beautiful Maris Day. The mothers of the two girls had been dancers together in their teens and their two families were very close. Though three years older than Nene, and a good foot taller, dear Maris never made much of that and the two of them would prepare their spectacle in the kitchen of the Days’ tiny apartment in nearby Jackson Street while their families would warm themselves in front of the fire. Sometimes they would raid their mothers’ wardrobes to try to come up with the right ballet look, finding Maris’s mum’s wedding veil and train particularly useful.

Then, as Maris’s mother carefully put the record needle down on the right song at their signal, the two girls would emerge — giggling at first but preening up as they got closer to centre stage — and begin their performance. Everyone, even Snowy, would always applaud — just possibly more enthusiastically than the performance deserved — and Nene would be thrilled, absolutely thrilled.

Sometimes, when she would stay over at the Days’ place, she and Maris would talk until late about just how they would go when they got to be real ballerinas, and what places such as London, Rome, New York and particularly Paris would be like. It was clear to Nene that the first step towards all this was to perform on a real stage, and luckily enough, the School of Dance where she was getting extra lessons two afternoons a week was putting on a musical right then. Nene resolved to do everything in her power to impress Miss Higgins and win the lead role: to sing like a songbird, pirouette like a princess and generally wow them.

She just knew she had what it took, and really worked hard to master the singing and dancing. On the morning of the audition, Lionel kissed his daughter good luck, and assured her that he felt positive she would get the role. And the audition actually seemed to go pretty well. At least, Miss Higgins said ‘fine, Nene’, and then made a very firm notation on her pad. Nene felt pretty sure she had the role.

She was a carrot. Not even the carrot, the one out the front that all the other carrots sang to, or one of the cute baby carrots in the first row, but the third carrot from the left up the back. Her carrot suit was hot and the stalk of the green fern that had been stuck down her back to make the leaves stand up straight like the top of a carrot was horribly itchy. Nene wanted to cry. Off-stage, she could see the prissy little girl who had got the part she wanted being primped and preened, as she made ready to sing her big number. Nene was a very crushed carrot indeed.

Emily, of course, sympathised with her daughter’s pain. But sometimes, looking at her big-boned ebullient child with her ungainly ways and loud manner, the quiet and fine-boned Emily would whisper to Lionel in wonder pure: ‘Where did she come from?’ This was said with great love, to be sure, but there was also genuine wonder that such a girl as this could have sprung from their loins. For his part Lionel didn’t know, didn’t care, and was always a lot less put off than Emily by the fact that Nene was closer to a battleship than a ballerina. For she was, and would always remain, his little girl.

Which was not to say she was an easy little girl. There was always something in Nene which, when everything else might be going like clockwork, just liked to go counter-clockwise. Like her approach to Aussie Rules football, for example …

The Kings were Carlton people. Lionel had been born not far from Carlton’s home football ground of Princes Park and he had been a good enough player as a kid to make the Victorian Junior team. It was just in his blood, and Emily’s too for that matter. Her great passion beyond ballet was the Carlton Football Club and she was every bit devoted to the side as were her husband and her son, who loved nothing better than accompanying his father to cheer for the mighty Blues.

Nene, meantime, supported the Geelong Cats. Nothing anyone in the family could say would dissuade her. She cheered for the Cats and that was that. Didn’t know why, she just loved ’em! Her special pleasure was the days when Geelong took on Carlton. From the age of eight or so, Nene would often go straight from ballet classes and, still wearing her tutu under a thick warm coat, accompany her father, mother and brother to watch the big game. They cheered for their team. She cheered for hers. Somehow, the net amount of sound generated from Lionel, Emily and Snowy on the one hand, and Nene on the other, was always about equal. Where did she come from?

And why did her hair go like that? Nene’s hair was naturally frizzy with the rough consistency of steel wool. But she didn’t like it like that, so every morning before school, in a practice that would stay with her for her entire life, she brushed it and combed it and brushed it some more for between half an hour and forty-five minutes. And every day, bit by bit, nature reasserted itself and it would become frizzy again, until she straightened it out, one more time. Certainly, as a habit it was a bit obsessive, but then so was Nene. She continued to do it, forever and ever, amen.

Nene was at home when it happened. The phone rang and Emily answered it. A few words and then her mother was screaming. As Nene ran to her, she dropped the phone, fell to the floor, still screaming. On and on and on. Despite herself, Nene wondered how such a long scream could keep going without pause to take breath. It was a little while before she could get the story out of her. Emily’s mother, Clare, had died. Dropped dead of a heart-attack at the age of 63, while on a brief trip to Adelaide. Emily was more than just traumatised by the sad occurrence.

For a long time she could not speak her mother’s name without bursting into tears. In the family, ‘death’ as a topic of conversation was banned outright, because it would set her off again. Nothing that was black remained in the house. And she flat-out refused to answer the telephone any more. It could ring off the wall for all Emily cared and unless Snowy, Nene or Lionel were there to answer, it remained unanswered. Emily would never forget what happened the last time she picked up a phone, and wasn’t going to take the chance again. The only exception to this was because of a code that Snowy, Nene and Lionel developed for Emily whereby if the phone rang two peals, paused, and then rang again, she was to pick up because it would be one of them — and they knew enough never to ring her with bad news.

The death of Nanna Clare left Snowy and Nene with just one surviving grandparent in Lionel’s mother, Nanny, with whom Emily had had the bitter falling-out over the apartment. Though Emily would never forgive and forget as long as Nanny lived, there were two factors which meant that Nanny was still a presence as Nene was growing up. First, because Lionel was in the family business and personally remained close to his mother, familial ex-communication was never on the cards. And secondly, the allied unifying force of Judaism — the notion that families must come together on holy days no matter what — meant that as Nene grew up there were frequent family gatherings where Nanny would preside, often at her house in nearby Herbert Street. Always, Emily would sit there tight-lipped, and Nanny thin-lipped, as they opened the presents from each other.

Nene’s best friend at St Michael’s was a girl with curly black hair called Dianne St John. During the day the two littlies faced the round eternal of lessons, prayers, the learning of their catechisms, and the endless religious ceremonies that this High Church school insisted upon. Then in the afternoons, they would frequently play with their dollies together, either at Nene’s house or the wonderfully spacious St John house over on Fitzroy Street.

For Nene, Dianne made bearable what was otherwise a quite difficult time for the wee one. She never felt like she fitted in at St Michael’s and, as it turned out, she wasn’t the only one to hold that view. After the headmistress of St Michael’s School, kindly old Sister Katrina, suddenly died, the King family received a singularly jarring jolt. As soon as Sister Shirley took over, she asked to see Lionel and Emily King in her office. After a little bit of small talk about this and that and nothing much in particular, Sister Shirley got to the point. And a difficult one to make it was, too.

‘Look’, the Sister finally said, ‘Nene’s Jewish, and she shouldn’t be at this High Anglican school. We can’t have a Jewish girl on her knees learning the catechisms, taking Holy Communion and going every day to the Chapel.’

Emily, particularly, was stunned. It seemed extraordinary that even thirty years on, her daughter should face the same anti-Semitism — for that’s the way she saw it — that she herself had faced at St Michael’s. In response, Emily and Lionel decided to send Nene immediately to Emily’s other old school, the Methodist Ladies’ College, long regarded as one of the best girls’ schools in Victoria. Founded in 1882 with the stated aim of ‘forming a collegiate institution for girls unsurpassed in the colonies’, MLC was full of tennis courts, historic buildings, statues, fountains and open space, and had both the senior and junior schools located on an enormous verdant block on the corner of Glenferrie and Barkers Roads in the suburb of Kew. The school motto, Deo Domuique — ‘For God and for Home’ — said a lot about its ethos, and the foundation stones laid by the school’s first four principals, each of whom had been a Methodist minister, had been built upon in a coherent fashion by those who had followed them.

Once you went through the huge wrought-iron school gates, complete with the school crest, and found yourself on the other side of the ancient stone walls that bounded the school, you really were in a different kind of world. At the first full school assembly that Nene attended — just a few days after the nine year old had tearfully said her goodbyes to Dianne — the MLC headmaster, Dr Harold Wood, stood on the stage of the mighty assembly hall, and gave the girls what amounted to a fire and brimstone sermon about how it was a mortal sin to buy a Tattersall’s lottery ticket. In this world, he said, gambling was wrong! Other points he touched upon were how petticoats were outright banned, and how all students would be expected to sign a pledge promising that they would never ever drink, whilesoever they were students at MLC, and this included in their own home.

The sturdy little red-headed girl in the second row on the left listened, and was vaguely interested, but only vaguely. It seemed a curious thing to get so fired up about trivial things such as lottery tickets and petticoats. Though she knew she would never feel like that, it was kind of interesting that the headmaster did, as did many of her fellow students judging by the way they nodded their heads in full agreement.

Nene felt, in short, a little like an outsider among a people not her own, and it was a feeling that would never really leave her while she was at MLC. While she wore the regulation black shoes, grey stockings, grey tunic, grey gloves and green felt hat like all the rest, still she never felt like one of the tribe.

Anti-Semitism, however, would not be left behind just because her school had changed. In an altercation Nene had with another student when she was eleven, the other girl had finished the argument by yelling at her: ‘You dirty half-Jew.’ It was a viciously hurtful insult that, at the very least, pushed Nene to gravitate a little more to other Jewish girls at the school, and among these were Sandra Smorgan, Vivienne Wajsbren and Shirley Carp. Sandra was from one of the richest families in Victoria, which had made its money by producing steel, while Vivienne and Shirley were also very ‘well-to-do’. With Nene the quasi-leader by virtue of her rather forceful personality, the girls formed a group notable among their peers not just for their Jewishness, but for always pushing the envelope of non-conformity. The extremely firm rule at MLC was that their school hats must always be worn plumb-bob straight up and down. Nene, Sandra, Vivienne and Shirley were always getting into trouble for wearing theirs at a jaunty angle. Sometimes they would be seen surreptitiously smoking down behind the swimming pool sheds, not because they liked cigarettes, but because they wanted to show defiance. When, in gym class, girls had to kneel to prove that their gym tunics were no higher than four inches above the ground, a pound to a peanut said it was Nene’s group who would be in trouble for wearing their skirts too short. They were to be demure at all times, according to the school. A real problem was that Nene just didn’t do demure — she was never that kind of girl.

Not that the girls knew much of boys for all that, but they were trying to learn! A lot of chatting about them was done on Tram 69, heading down the massive boulevard of Balaclava Road and then left on Glenferrie, a route that tracked its way through some of Melbourne’s most scenic parklands. As they went — and all the moreso as they moved into their early teenage years — the young women would habitually chew their gloves as they gazed longingly at the boys from Xavier College, Scotch College and Carey Grammar, as they too made their way to school. Whole battalions of MLC girls ended up marrying the young men of these colleges, many of them only shortly after leaving school, and even at this age

Reviews for Nene (revised edition)

[faradaydon_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Shoddily written account of the life of Australia's magazine queen, Nene King. FitzSimons had unfettered access to his subject, but the book is spoiled by gee-whiz writing and an unacceptable list of factual blunders. Disappointing.