Bob Hawke and Blanche D’Alpuget: A love story
It’s a love story.
“Oh sh--,” I said to my producer. “Do I really have to ask them when they first started to have sex? I know we’re paying for this but they will just tell me to get stuffed and you can’t blame them.”
“Every woman in Australia wants you to ask them that question,” she insisted.
“Well let them ask it then. God, I hate this job sometimes!”
“Don’t go all ABC on me,” she replied. We don’t make ‘television programmes’. She drew the inverted commas derisively in the air and she smiled facetiously. “We sell Toyotas.”
It was 1995 and a great scandal had broken. Bob Hawke at 64 had just announced his separation from the popular Hazel, his wife of some 40 years. He had fallen in love with his 50-year-old biographer, the vivacious, clever and beautiful Blanche D’Alpuget. They were widely disparaged as a ‘two-timing couple’ and I had the exclusive interview. But if it really was such a great scoop why did it taste so much like a poisoned chalice?
It was a measure of the toxicity that a leading television critic at the time actually felt sorry for me. I would have been fired, he surmised, had I not asked the question. On my behalf he lamented: “When did the sex begin?” would become the question of the year and that I would live the rest of my life in its shadow. He was wrong of course. It was so trivial that really only I remember it. For the most part that gauche question (which in fact was Executive Producer John Westacott’s snappily edited contraction of my much more hesitant and diplomatic exploration of adultery) was soon consigned to a forgotten corner of the archives. But with the death of the great man last week it all came back to haunt me.
An argument against early retirement in my trade is that you might eventually get better at it. Certainly if you hang on long enough you might revisit the scene of an old crime and get to clean it up. Almost two years ago on 60 Minutes I got the opportunity to amend history. Two decades after that first encounter in 1995, I was back again with Bob and Blanche in a wide-ranging interview about politics, life, death and love. This time I was able to ask a much better question than: “When did the sex begin?”
Wooley: I must say now with the weight of experience and the years upon me, I wouldn’t ask when it began but rather how long can it last?
Bob: Forever!
Blanche: Absolutely! I think the thing for both of us is love means adoration.
Wooley: You’re a believer in romantic love?
Blanche: Yes I’m a believer in something a bit more than romantic love because as we understand it now its somewhat saccharine.”
Indeed, Blanche, as a writer of romantic fiction, among other subjects, has identified something that has always troubled me about Australia. As a people we are not very romantic. My edition of ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse’ is 900 pages long. Most of it, at least three-quarters, is devoted to love poetry. But quickly off the top of your head name me one great Australian love poem. They are out there but nobody quotes them. And my anthologies of Australian verse are 99 per cent about horsemen, the landscape, the weather, outback characters, shearers, strikes, trains, coral reefs and wildlife but almost nothing about love. Love in our country is apparently a bit distasteful, sticky-sweet and cloying. So if you are a hapless sufferer, “Mate, keep it to yourself.”
But in my last interview with them back in January 2017, Bob and Blanche were not doing that. The famous couple, publicly and unstintingly declared their deepest love in a way that I found to be touching and charming. As I fully anticipated many critics in our hard-hearted media would not be so charmed. Media is a cold and lonely business without much of the milk of human kindness. The private life of journalism is I’m afraid so often a cold bed of unhappy marriages, so perhaps there is a too ready cynicism concerning any public protestation of love. So Bob’s claim that he is forever grateful to Paul Keating for deposing him and so leaving him free to pursue the love of his life without disastrous electoral consequences was not well received by the hard-hearted. Surely, they thought, this made a mockery of the most important business of politics and statecraft?
Bob: Thank you Paul because if it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have had this.
Wooley: So out of adversity... comes redemption.
Bob: Yeah absolutely and that’s not just playing with words, that’s a simple objective fact of life.
Wooley: Love was more important than prime-ministership?
Bob: Absolutely!
Wooley: In you (Blanche) he found someone he loved even more than himself, didn’t he?
Blanche: Yes I think so, yes.
Bob: Absolutely!
My film crew and I spent two days chez D’Alpuget-Hawke, a luxurious five-level mansion on the sparkling waters of Sydney’s exclusive (unless you are rich) Middle Harbour. From the rooftop putting green down the funicular railway through sub-tropical forest to the boathouse and a spot of fishing, it was a most agreeable assignment.
Of course we all fell hopelessly in love with Blanche. How could we not? She is delightful, smart, and beautiful in that timeless and stylish European way. We thought of Brigitte Bardot while Bob thinks of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Indeed he has composed a small ditty of praise along those lines and was only too happy to serenade his beloved for the cameras while she bathed in the soft bright light of his adoration.
I know many hardened folk spewed and considered Bob to be a besotted old fool. Perhaps they felt jilted because Bob’s often claimed “love affair with the Australian people” was clearly over. He had found another love. And why shouldn’t love be for everyone, politicians as well as poets. It’s just that poets make such a better fist of explaining it. The Roman politician Mark Antony gave up everything for the love of the Egyptian Queen, Cleopatra. Shakespeare gave to Antony the words Bob meant to say.
Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space,
Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
Is to do thus: (They embrace)
Shakespeare knew that the great story wasn’t a dissertation on the state of Roman politics in the first century BC. It was the love story of a great Roman leader and an Egyptian Queen. Nor should the Hawke story be just a dry tale of macro-economic reform in late 20th century Australia. It was the love story of a great Australian leader and the glamorous biographer who had fallen in love with her subject.
As Mark Antony found in Cleopatra, so Bob had found in Blanche; someone he loved more than Rome, more than public duty and even more than he loved his good reputation.
Unlike Antony and Cleopatra the story had a happy ending.
When I last saw him at age 87 Bob Hawke was a lucky man.
And best of all, he knew it.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019
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