Wendy Whiteley: the muse behind the master
IN FRONT OF the camera, Wendy Whiteley arranges her body with all the ease of a woman who has spent decades posing for an artist’s gaze. A natural aesthete, she casts a critical eye over the first image, declaring that she likes the colours and composition, but wants her feet in the frame.
Wendy is dressed in dramatic layers of black and white, still committed to the look she has sported for more than 50 years, although the signature headscarf these days is as much an easy option as it is a style statement. As Australian art royalty in the ’60s and ’70s, she mastered bohemian long before it became chain-store “boho-chic”, and she insists she’ll never be shot in outfits supplied by a stylist – “I say, ‘Bugger off, I’m not wearing those’”. With her bug brooch, silver bagel-sized bangle and ruched rubber bracelet (“a bit of S&M”), no one could replicate her idiosyncratic style anyway.
She does, however, submit to a make-up artist, instructing her to go heavy on the eyes. “Unfortunately,” says Wendy, with a wry smile, “I think you might call it ‘the heroin look’.”
Wendy has been “clean and sober” for 27 years, but she knows her story precedes her. For the past five decades, her life has been played out in the headlines: the dazzling rise to fame with charismatic wunderkind Brett Whiteley; heady days as the first couple of Australian art, roving the globe and befriending the likes of Bob Dylan and Dire Straits; the couple’s descent into heroin addiction; their 1989 divorce; Brett’s overdose three years later; bitter legal wrangles over
He was the charismatic wild child of 20th century Australian art and she the bohemian beauty by his side. More than two decades after Brett Whiteley’s death, Wendy Whiteley is still honouring her late ex-husband’s legacy, while creating one that is distinctly her own. She talks to Susan Horsburgh about their dazzling life together, the answer to grief, and a new, hard-won notion of happiness.
his will; the tragic loss of only child Arkie; Wendy’s transformation of a harbourside wasteland into a stunning public garden.
At 75, Wendy has lived a big life, and Brett has been at the heart of it all. He still is. As custodian of his cultural legacy, Wendy curates all the exhibitions at the Brett Whiteley Studio, where he lived and worked for four years before he died. Here, in the back streets of Sydney’s innercity Surry Hills, Wendy has opened the latest show, Brett Whiteley: tributes, celebrating the myriad influences on his art and life, from painters Matisse and Van Gogh to poet Rimbaud and writer Patrick White, who Wendy remembers as “a bad-tempered old fart”.
“Brett saw himself as a bowerbird – he thought that everything was up
for grabs,” she says, “and there’s no such thing in existence really that’s totally original. Most artists would deny that they’re influenced by anybody, which is crap.”
In an art world that seems to pride itself on being impenetrable, Wendy is refreshingly direct – almost gruff and determinedly unsentimental. She’s not big on pleasantries – she complains repeatedly about the ultra-healthy, “almost inedible” lunch brought in for her, until a sausage roll is eventually fetched from a bakery nearby – but you don’t doubt her honesty. Wendy just wants it the way she wants it, and she knows her exacting approach can be mistaken for arrogance.
Sinking into the studio’s sofa, Wendy looks straight ahead as she speaks, only occasionally making eye contact. After all the talking she has done for last year’s coffee-table book, Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden, next month’s new biography Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, and an upcoming bio-pic, she admits she’s “pretty well Whiteley-ed out”, yet she is a generous interviewee. Certainly there is no greater expert on Brett than Wendy – the model, muse and love of his life.
The granddaughter of CSIRO co-founder Sir George Julius, Wendy was born in Sydney in 1941 of distinguished stock, but her philandering father, known as “Gentleman George”, was the black sheep, kicked out of the family home when Wendy was young and later sent to jail for burglary. As a result, Wendy says, she always felt like an outsider, “torn between pride and shame”.
Dubbed “Mad Wendy” growing up, she was a rebellious 15-year-old art student when she met Brett through friends in the mid-1950s. He was 17 and working at Lintas Advertising Agency, but determined to be a famous artist. Brett spied her marching down bohemian Rowe Street – then the epicentre of Sydney’s thriving artistic community – in skin-tight jeans and was smitten; she was intrigued by his energy and ambition. They became inseparable.
Their sexual connection was electric, but Brett, with his halo of ginger curls, was insecure about his looks and wildly possessive. “People were always pulling his hair, asking if it was real or a wig,” recalls Wendy. “Blokes in pubs would call him a ‘bloody poofter’.”
His confidence grew, though, with every accolade. In 1959, Brett was awarded a travelling art scholarship to Italy, and so began a decade living like gypsies around the world. In 1961, they based themselves in London, where Brett’s career took off and he became the youngest-ever artist acquired by the Tate Gallery. They married in 1962 and daughter Arkie arrived two years later.
“We really grew up together,” says Wendy. “We did everything together and we talked a hell of a lot. We went to all the museums together, we learnt the visual arts together, and mostly we agreed.” Brett thought Wendy was the superior talent and valued her opinion above all others. “And I was quite talented,” she says.
“But I stopped doing it without thinking about it twice.”
Wendy looked after their domestic life, but she bridles at any suggestion that she sublimated her own goals in favour of his. They were in love, exploring the world, meeting some of the biggest names of the 1960s – it was no sacrifice. “Somebody had to go and buy the food,” she reasons, “and I don’t like living in chaos.” Wendy didn’t have Brett’s vaulting ambition, it seems, but she was happy to be a springboard for his.
Most of the time, she says, he wasn’t hard to live with at all, but then the infidelity crept in. “Later on, he was mucking up a bit with the girls and then we’d have a huge row,” she says, “and then I ended up with a lover, which made it even worse, because ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander’ did not exist.”
In 1967, the Whiteleys moved into New York City’s famed Chelsea Hotel – home to Arkie’s one-time babysitter Janis Joplin – and Wendy opened a clothes shop. Brett, still scarred by his mother leaving the family a decade earlier, was incensed; Beryl Whiteley had started a business and then bought a car and a ticket to London, and had never come back. “That’s what women did when they got independent,” says Wendy, “so he didn’t want me to drive and he didn’t want me to have a job.” She opened the shop anyway.
After New York came Fiji, but they were chased out of there on drug charges and arrived back in Sydney
Later on, he was mucking up with the girls and then we’d have a huge row. I ended up with a lover, which made it even worse.
in a blaze of publicity in 1969.
That’s when they moved into their harbourside home, where Wendy curated the interiors so essential to Brett’s iconic Lavender Bay paintings. It was there, in the mid-’70s, that they first tried heroin, and before long they were addicts. Wendy sought treatment alone in England and eventually broke free of heroin’s grip in the late ’80s, but Brett couldn’t, and the marriage ended in 1989.
When 53-year-old Brett died of an overdose in 1992, it was almost inevitable. “The first instinct was shock – and then anger and rage,” recalls Wendy. “‘You stupid bastard!’ He had so much still to offer.” Losing Arkie to adrenal gland cancer nine years later, though, seemed much more unfair. “The feelings were completely different,” says Wendy. “I just had to live in the day and spend as much time with her as I could.” In denial, Wendy kept hoping for a miracle cure, but Arkie died at the age of 37.
After Brett’s death, without asking for permission, Wendy had started transforming the derelict railway land at the foot of her Lavender Bay home into an enchanting “guerrilla garden”. When Arkie died, she kept going, grateful to have something consuming and constructive to do. The garden became her salvation. “It was like the opening up of something again,” says Wendy, who has scattered the ashes of Brett and Arkie there. “That’s the best answer to grief – to do something creative with your life.”
For more than 20 years, she has poured millions of her own dollars into the public garden and last year her living work of art was finally secured with a renewable 30-year lease. It’s the place where Wendy is happiest, and she can be found there most days, covered in dirt – she has scratches on her wrists today from a recent tussle with the bromeliads.
It’s tough physical labour and these days her body is feeling it. She gave up cigarettes two years ago, but still has the smoker’s cough – and dodgy knees now from carrying more weight. “I don’t look in the mirror that much because I go, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I think seriously about facelifts and Botox and injections, and then I don’t get round to it.”
Gone is the vanity of her youth. She has let her hair go grey, and most days she wears a scarf to cover her overgrown curls; she’s even thinking of lopping them all off. Working in the garden, she says, “I couldn’t give a stuff what I look like.”
Travel sounds good in theory, but the thought of actually doing it is exhausting. “I don’t particularly like going out,” she muses. “I love being at home … The garden is amazing – and life is amazing. I’ve ceased to think I can control a f***ing thing, actually, so everything has a freshness about it when you stop thinking you can control much.”
Grief has given her a new sense of gratitude. “I don’t take anything for granted anymore,” she says.
“I try not to expect too much from anything – so when something really great happens, it’s a nice surprise … I certainly don’t expect to be happy all the time like that mad American idea.”
Happiness, she realises now, is not a state of euphoria. Although the idea of being “content” has always horrified her – “I always think of cows chewing their cud” – she suspects that’s what she is. “When you’re not thinking about how you are, you’re okay – when you’re literally absorbed in what you’re doing,” she says. “It’s just not self-obsessed.”
When she was younger, Wendy thought kindness was somehow the province of the dim-witted, but time has stripped away her armour of intellectual snobbery, she says, making her nicer and less judgmental. “It’s defensive, that stuff, anyway,” she says. “It’s fear of other people … It doesn’t matter what they’re wearing or whether they’ve been to the Louvre.”
Wendy’s wisdom has been hardwon, but she finds herself, at 75, with a deep sense of purpose and satisfaction, fulfilling what she has called her “moral and emotional obligation” to honour Brett’s memory, while leaving her own singular trace on the world.
After Brett’s death, Wendy seriously considered ditching her married name, but then thought better of it. After all, she figured, a name change could never wash away the marriage that has defined her. “What a dumb idea,” she scoffs. “I’ve been Wendy Whiteley for more than 50 years – and that’s fine.”
The first instinct was shock – and then anger and rage. He had so much still to offer.