Eileen Bond’s grief over TV show
Eileen ‘Red’ Bond is fuming over the portrayal of her family in House of Bond and is determined to set the record straight writes PHILLIP KOCH
It’s mystifying why producers felt the need to fabricate parts of the Alan Bond story when the truth is better than fiction – a tale of greed, theft, excess and betrayal on a scale never seen before or since in Australia.
“It’s just terrible,” Eileen Bond, Alan’s first wife, says of the two-part miniseries which premieres on Channel Nine this week. “I just don’t know what they are trying to do. It’s just appalling. I don’t want my grandchildren to see this.”
What has most upset this society matron – who is widely known as Red – is a scene showing the couple fighting over Alan Alan’ss affair with Diana Bliss, a hostess on his private jet at the time. Red (played by Adrienne Pickering) is shown warning Alan that she’ll take him for tens of millions of dollars before Alan threatens to kill her.
“When I saw that I nearly died,” says the 79-year-old, insisting Alan never spoke to her like that during their turbulent marriage. What really happened is enough of a story – Red reportedly shredded her cheating husband’s designer Italian suits and threw them on the lawn of their Perth mansion.
“My life has been up and down, but never boring,” laughs the mum-of-four and grandmotherof of-eight,eight, who spent 37 years married to o Alan, the former penniless Perth sign-writerr who made and lost billions, s, and famously won the America’s Cup for Australia.a.
These days she lives in a grand house in Perth and d spends time with her grandchildren, but can stilll command an audience when she makes her annual pilgrimage to the ritzy Spring Racing Carnivalal in Melbourne – often wearing pearls the size of Kool Mints.
It’s a quieter life than the one she lived with Alan, travelling extensively in private jets, hopping between grand homes in cities across the world, buying Van Gogh’s Irises for $54 million (the highest price ever paid for a single painting at the time) and splashing out $1 billion to buy Channel Nine from Kerry Packer.
“You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine,” Kerry said after he bought Nine back for just $300 million when “Bondy’s” business empire started to unravel, ultimately leading to bankruptcy and jail.
Of course, Alan – who died of complications from a heart operation at age 77 on June 5, 2015 and was laid to rest in Perth – will always be recalled as both a hero and a villain, having captivated Australia with his excesses, triumphs and disgraces.
He was almost made a saint when his Australia II syndicate brought the America’s Cup to Australia in 1983 – the first time this holy grail of sailing had left
‘My life has been up and down, but never boring!’
the New York Yacht Club in its 132-year history. His business empire stretched around the globe with gold mines, property, breweries, airships, TV stations, a telephone company – even an entire English village at one time.
But his fall from these dizzy heights was equally spectacular when he was found guilty of looting $1.2 billion from Bell Resources to prop up his Bond Corporation, which swiftly collapsed. Thousands of ordinary Australians lost their life savings, and Alan himself was declared bankrupt, with personal debts totalling $1.8 billion. He was convicted of fraud, jailed and stripped of his Australian of the Year honours.
Alan was long rumoured to have siphoned off tens of millions of dollars and hidden money and assets overseas – which he always denied – and after he was released from jail in 2000 he went on to build a new fortune estimated at $300 million, which was particularly galling for those investors who never got their money back.
He and Red divorced in 1992, and he married Diana in 1995 (she later committed suicide in 2012), but he and Red always remained friends.
“I just hope he is also remembered as being a father, a yachtsman and a man with a great sense of humour,” she says, admitting that while she hates her family’s life being sensationalised for TV, she does think the actress playing her was a “good looking choice”. That’s the spirit, Red.