The scars that heal
When Deborah Hutton was rushed in for surgery on a facial skin cancer, she was shocked to hear it had been caught “just in time”. She tells Juliet Rieden about the wake-up call we all need to heed.
It feels strange to meet up with Deborah Hutton and not be greeted by her usual smile. But smiles are not possible at the moment. Deborah’s face is a swollen, dull yellow on one side, strained and painful with a Band-Aid stretching from her nose down her cheek. The dressing covers a gaudy wound and as we settle down to talk about her unexpected cancer surgery she can’t help but shield her lip with her hand, an involuntary protection instinct.
When I ask what her face looks like underneath the dressing, Deb pulls out her phone and shows me a photo taken a couple of days ago by the nurse before she removed the stitches too numerous to count. It’s a raw, arresting shot revealing a meandering oval-shaped angry scar criss-crossed with stitches mapping out the edges of the skin flap that was lifted in surgery and then sewn back in place. The affected area is surprisingly large, tracing right down along the top and corner of Deborah’s lip.
When and she shared the photo on Instagram expressing her releift and gratitude that "they've got it all", it sparked an unprecedented outpouring of support from more than 7000 people from all over Australia.
“I um-ed and ah-ed about doing that. Instagram is the only social media I use and then only if I want to say something. But it shocked me to see my face after the surgery and I thought, I want people to see this because there’s an ugliness to skin cancer that frightens the s*** out of you. It has certainly frightened me. But what’s more frightening is if you just sweep it under the carpet and put your head in the sand. I got a real wake-up call.”
Like many Australians, Deborah is not a newcomer to skin cancer, but this one caught her completely unawares. “I didn’t notice it at all,” she says. “I had my first skin cancer about 15 to 20 years ago. I wasn’t scared because my whole family is riddled with it. It was our normal. My uncle looks like a patchwork quilt; he’s had so many cancers removed. We’re Queenslanders without Mediterranean blood. Mum’s had stuff cut out and burned off. I just accept it as part of Australian life. →
“Then nine years ago I had an infiltrating BCC [Basal Cell Carcinoma]. It was very similar to this cancer, in exactly the same spot, although this one is a bit bigger. That was massive for me back then and a huge shock. I had flap surgery where they do a frozen section procedure. They put me under and just kept on cutting until they had everything.”
From that moment on Deborah’s attitude changed. “I really took it seriously. That was the slap – literally – across the face when I realised: ‘you’ve been an absolute idiot’.”
Like most of us, Deborah was raised in an era when sunscreen was something that got in the way of a tan. “When I was at school, there was a great pride in getting burnt because if you shed your skin, you peeled and that was paraded as ‘my first peel for the season’; seasoning like you do for a new frypan. It was ... summer’s here! What were we thinking?”
As a TV presenter, celebrity ambassador and former model, Deborah’s face is also her calling card. It has graced many covers of
The Weekly, not to mention TV shows, so the prospect of permanent scarring could also be career defining. But the severity of that first big surgery put all that into perspective and made Deb realise she had been taking cancer, a life-threatening disease, for granted.
“It all changed for me then, nine years ago,” she says. “I started a new regime of having my skin checked religiously every 12 months and if anything was spotted I check again every three months until it’s all clear.
“And it was on one of these random visits when my dermatologist said, ‘I think there’s something there, let’s keep an eye on it, come back in six months’. I couldn’t see anything.
There was no redness, no pain, no dryness, no bleeding, just a tiny little bump, like a pimple but without the pimple. But it didn’t go away.”
Deborah mentioned the bump to her surgeon, who immediately did a biopsy. “When they went in they actually had to do two biopsies because there were bumps on either side of the original scar,” she adds.
It took a couple of days to receive the results and Deborah confesses she was anxious. “There’s a paranoia that sets in. I thought ‘here we go again’, and I was very, very nervous. The two spots were about a centimetre apart from each other. That’s not good. And I could tell that one was more across the lip. So I thought … How much of my lip will be left? Do they have to take part of my nose as well?”
As she waited, Deborah started to research other therapies that might not involve invasive surgery on her face. She talked to a good friend who knew about alternative therapies, plant-based creams and the like, and she was surprised when her friend turned round and said: “Let’s be clear, Deborah, you have cancer.”
“She was right of course. You think oh, it’s just a skin cancer and you burn it off, cut it out, you use a cream or whatever, and there’s a levity about it. Skin cancer feels less scary than cervical cancer, lung cancer or brain cancer, and there are obviously greater degrees of the way it affects your system. But people can die from melanoma and the sooner you detect it and treat it, the greater the chance you have for survival.”
The results from the biopsies were definitive. Deborah had two pernicious skin cancers. “One they described as ‘nodular’, which is very similar to what I had the first time. I became quite fearful,” she admits.
Deborah received her diagnosis just before COVID-19 restrictions were implemented and had to wait for pathologists to return before she could go in for the day surgery.
“I was under for three hours and when I woke up I didn’t know if I was Arthur or Martha,” she says. “But
I did understand what had gone on. A friend of mine came to pick me up and the nurse said to him ‘you don’t need to go and buy a lottery ticket today, she just won the lottery’. Basically if I had I left it any later it would have been quite precarious; there was a good chance it was going to enter the bloodstream … That really hit me.”
Deborah’s face was dressed so she couldn’t yet see the scar. “The swelling was huge. I came out looking like
I’d done a couple of rounds with Joe Bugner and he’d seriously won! When I went back to get my bandages changed, they said ‘we’re taking the stitches out now’. I wasn’t ready for that.”
Deborah asked the nurse to take a photo rather than bring a mirror. “I wanted to look when I was calm and ready.” And when, a couple of hours later, she finally saw her face, it was a shock. “I’d cried when I came out of surgery because it was so much bigger than I thought. And then after the stitches came out and I looked at it … Wow! I shed more tears. The surgeon had done a great job and I know that my skin is strong and heals brilliantly, but I just didn’t expect it to be that big. The most frightening thing was that I had only just caught it in time.”
Deborah knows the wounds will fade and she says she’s not worried about scar lines on her face – like others she has, this one will tell a story, which is why she wanted to show it on The Weekly’s cover. →
“I cried when I came out of surgery. The scar was so big.”
A resilient life
Deborah Hutton was born in England and came to Australia when she was nine months old. “My father was a Qantas flight engineer and we were one of the first families to be based over there as part of the original Kangaroo Route.” After the family relocated back to Australia her parents separated and a difficult divorce followed. “The Family Law Court in those days decided that the boys would be better off with their father and the girl with the mother, so they split us up. It would never happen today. My brothers grew up with my father in Sydney. I grew up with Mum in Brisbane with my grandparents.”
Then when Deborah was five, her mum remarried. “I was the flower girl at the wedding,” she recalls, showing me a sweet photo of the wedding. Later, with new stepdad Brian, the family moved to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. “As a kid you don’t question things. It was an adventure and we went out on a cargo ship with all these tea chests around us. My stepdad went over on the promise of some great property boom happening in Moresby. He thought he was going to make his fortune, which didn’t happen. Instead we lived in a shabby little gyprock lean-to and he ended up flipping burgers while Mum did a correspondence course. We were there for three years.”
When they returned to Australia it was to a farm in Glen Aplin, just outside Stanthorpe in country Queensland. “We lived there through some pretty hard times after relocating from Moresby. We were taken by frosts and hail and I spent my time in the packing shed packing stone fruit, being allergic to peach fluff and feeding the chooks. I rode my bicycle six miles down a dirt road, parked it behind a tree which was on the New England Highway, and then got a bus 20 miles to Glen Aplin and then walked to school.”
When that marriage fell apart Deb and her mum went back to Brisbane and then moved to Sydney. “There were so many different schools and I was always the new girl who was picked on. But I think the gift in that is that I’ve never been really scared to walk up to someone and shake their hand and say, ‘g’day, I’m Deborah’. You can’t be shy. I think you’re forced to come out of yourself.”
Deborah was feisty too, leaving home at 16. “I just knew I wanted to grow up really quickly,” she laughs. She had a boyfriend who was 10 years her senior and he suggested she should try modelling. “He saw something and he was right,” she says.
That shift from country girl with no clue about her future to independent, career-minded model changed her life. It also changed her name. “I grew up as Debbie Haylock. That first boyfriend had organised some photographs, and I took them and went to see Vivien at Vivien’s modelling agency. She looked at the photos and said, ‘that smile will make a million but that name has got to go’. She asked about other names in my family. I said, my grandmother is a Hamilton. So she grabbed the White Pages, flopped it open at the Hs and settled on Hutton. ‘Deborah Hutton,’ she said. ‘I like it. Are you happy with that?’ I didn’t have a relationship with my father, so I couldn’t give a rats about keeping his name. And that’s how it happened. I walked in Debbie Haylock and walked out Deborah Hutton.”
Pretty quickly Deborah landed a contract to model in New York but while she loved the travel and meeting “awesome people” she found the work was pretty intimidating. “It was a terrifying experience to walk into the great Eileen Ford’s office in New York. She was the head of Ford Models and she was emaciated.
I think she ate three sticks of broccoli a day, and she’d sit there, peering over her glasses with this frozen hairdo.
She took one look at me and said, ‘Welcome to New York, lose 10 pounds and come back to see me next week’.”
Deborah was gobsmacked. Until then she had never thought too much about her body. “Sharon Stone was also at Ford’s and had just arrived there, and she and I were dieting together. We went to the gym and found diet restaurants. I don’t think I quite got to the 10 pounds and it was always my downfall. I was never quite thin enough or tall enough for that market. Eileen sent me off to
Italy. But that really didn’t work either because I definitely wasn’t tall enough and the food was really good.”
Deborah ended up modelling for six years before she landed a job back home as the face of Australian department store Grace Bros. “When I got the Grace Bros gig doing commercials that was my ticket out of modelling. I became the Grace Bros girl. I was a talking model. I played the store’s buyer in adverts. →
“I just knew I wanted to grow up really quickly.”
They’re still on YouTube. I sound like I’m English, as if I’m sucking on a toffee,” she jokes.
Looking back, Deborah says those first years modelling, though fun, damaged her emotionally. “It took years to accept myself for the size
I am. I still struggle with it. I love food. I can’t help it. I love cooking and I think one of the greatest things in life is enjoyment of food and having a drink and a laugh with your friends. If you can’t do that, what’s the bloody point?”
Deborah’s first boyfriend didn’t go overseas with her and their long-distance romance fizzled out. In fact, she ended up marrying his brother, which is another story. “It lasted for two years. We bought a house and he was desperate for me to have children straight away.
“He just wanted two little girls and a white picket fence. I said I’m only 28, I don’t want to have kids, it’s a big world out there, I want to go and see it. Don’t you?”
Deborah’s biggest romance to date was with the late media agent Harry M. Miller, who she says she misses every day. “He was an amazing man. He comes to me all the time. It’s hard when you’ve spent over a decade with someone and it was such an incredible time in my life. We built a farm together and we travelled. I learned a lot from him and I often hear his voice in my head.”
“We met because he wanted to manage me and then it was after that we started to go out. I was so struck by his enormous presence and how very funny he was and obviously he was quite powerful, and I thought that was all really lovely. I was so attracted to that. He’d get away with absolute murder because of his sense of humour. It taught me a lot about how you can put people at ease if you can make them laugh. He saw me and wanted to craft me into Grace Kelly. Well, I’m not Grace Kelly and I’ll never be Grace Kelly. But I think he always wanted to sand off the edges.”
Did Deborah think then about starting a family? “I definitely wanted children,” she muses. “But I didn’t want to have children with Harry. He was willing to but I didn’t want to be part of the dynasty because that would have been his fourth wife and he would have had his sixth child.
I saw what sort of father he was. He was loving, but he was a father at a distance until they got old enough so he could have a conversation. I thought, that’s not something I want to take on. So just the way timing of life presented itself, it didn’t work. I wasn’t drawn to have children so desperately that I would leave the relationship just to go and find someone to have kids with. And I was never going to have kids on my own. I saw what my mother went through. Too bloody hard!”
Deborah turns 59 in December, which means that next year she’ll be 60. “I think it’s going to be amusing. Wow, 60! Awesome.”
Does she have any plans?
“I’d be very surprised if I’m living in Sydney in my 60s. I think one of the things that’s happened over the last few months is a silence and a stillness that we’ve all gone through collectively and I really feel that there’s a yearning to have a quieter life. I used to have a place at Pearl Beach and I spent a long time in the country as a kid. I can build a good fire, I can feed the chooks.” AWW