The real Tracy Grimshaw:
TV’s Tracy Grimshaw has finally found happiness, contentment and a sense of belonging in her life away from the small screen. Tracy tells Michael Sheather how she is basking in the peace and tranquillity of her rural property, yet still has a good social
on finally finding peace and why she won’t give up on love
Happiness – true happiness – has always been one of life’s most elusive desires. Sometimes, it’s transitory. Just when you think you finally may have it within your grasp, it somehow seems to melt away. Tracy Grimshaw, the long-time host of the Nine Network’s A Current Affair (ACA), has had plenty of joy in her life – and her fair share of sadness, too – but right now, she says, is perhaps the happiest and most satisfied time of her life.
At 57, Tracy is at the pinnacle of her professional game. A Walkley Award-winning journalist and widely regarded as perhaps the most incisive and tenacious interviewer on television, she is both a ratings’ winner and a role model for many in the cut-throat broadcast industry.
As pleasing as these accolades undoubtedly are – her Walkley Award for broadcast interviewing proudly occupies the top bookshelf in her sitting room – they are not the major source of Tracy’s satisfaction with life.
That has its foundation in the quieter, balanced life she leads away from the studio, on a beautiful seven-hectare rural property on Sydney’s outskirts. Here, she keeps a selection of horses, which she tends every morning after she rises with the sun. There’s also a small pack of welcoming, eager hounds, too. Yet, even her beloved animals are only a part of the equation.
“I live in paradise,” Tracy says, her legs curled up beneath her on a lounge in her front room, where huge windows give panoramic views of her property. “I love where I live. I am happy – very happy – satisfied and very grateful, too. In a way, this is my sanctuary where I’m free to be myself and just be who I am. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“I am grateful because I know I’m lucky – I have been in the right place at the right time during my career and that has helped me along the way. Of course, it hasn’t all been luck and I’d like to think that I’ve brought something to the table all these years but I know that luck has played a big part, too.”
In a revealing interview, Tracy talks openly about her life away from the cameras, getting older, the myth of her supposed “crippling shyness”, her shock at criminal charges levelled against her ACA colleague and reporter Ben McCormack, her future in television and how there is still more than enough room for love in her life.
“One of the benefits of getting older, certainly if you are doing it right, is that you get to know yourself well enough to be sure about what you want. That’s where I am. I know what ticks my boxes and what doesn’t tick my boxes.
“If you’re lucky – I know some people aren’t lucky enough to live their dream, though they try very hard – then you get to create the right space for you. And that’s what I have done here. I’m very aware of my luck and grateful for that luck.”
Undoubtedly, that’s luck mixed with liberal amounts of determination and ability. Her longevity – 12 years as the host of A Current Affair and 10 years as host of the Today show – is testament to both her tenacity and her talent in an often brutal industry that regularly casts women aside in their early 40s.
Tracy’s home – a simple rural farmhouse renovated with her rustic but stylish touch, replete with reclaimed oak floors – is nestled against a gentle hillside that shelters it from another property on one side and looks out on a scene that is breathtaking, especially as the morning sun burns off the early mid-winter mists.
Country at heart
“I have shutters in my bedroom but I don’t close them at night because I love waking up with the sun,” says Tracy. “I look out the window and think, ‘How the hell did I pull this off?’ I walk down to the stables every morning to put the horses out – their happy little faces are out over the doors of their boxes and I say, ‘Brace yourself boys, it’s cold’. I walk them out to the paddocks and a half-hour later the sun is up in the sky and I think, ‘God, this is so good’.”
Tracy has lived in the country before. She owned acreage outside
Sydney a decade ago but sold up when she moved back to Melbourne for a time. She returned to Sydney after losing her mother Barbara to cancer in 2011. “I tried living in an inner city suburb again in Melbourne,” Tracy explains. “It was a lovely place, and if I was ever going to live in the city again it would have been there but I really missed seeing a paddock every day. I just needed to walk out my door and look at a paddock.”
Tracy’s love affair with rural life and horses began when she was growing up on the outskirts of Melbourne during the 1960s. “We grew up in an outer suburb called Greensborough,” says Tracy. “It was an outer suburb then but it’s practically an inner suburb now. But then, there were paddocks at the end of our dirt road.”
Also at the end of that road were horses. Tracy would wander off to the paddocks to pat the horses, indulging her childhood fantasies about Elizabeth Taylor and the movie National Velvet like thousands of little girl across the country. “I grew up wanting horses. I had that little girl’s love of horses that most little girls grow out of eventually. My mother certainly hoped I would grow out of it because we were broke and she knew how expensive they could be.
“She used to say to me, ‘Darling, you’ll meet boys and when you discover boys you won’t want horses any more. And I did meet boys and I realised that I could have horses and boys. So when I got old enough I bought my first horse and then my second horse and my third horse and so on. I have never sold one. I have kept them all, though those first three died when I was in Victoria. And I have two on the property now.
They are part of my family.”
Setting the record straight
As insulated as she feels at home, some things still disturb Tracy.
Speculation about her in sections of the tabloid press hits the top of that particular list. Moreover, while some she ignores as blather and grist for the mill, there are other claims she feels compelled to correct.
Last year, a magazine claimed that her life is ruled by a “crippling shyness” that affected most aspects of her life. “Tracy has battled shyness her entire career,” a friend allegedly told the magazine – claims that were then repeated by a tabloid website. “The person you see on TV is not the same person you would meet on the street. She is so introverted it actually affects her daily life.”
“That is simply not true,” says Tracy. “Anyone who knows me will tell you that is not true. I certainly don’t suffer from anything even remotely like ‘crippling shyness’. And I’m really glad to be able to correct that. In many ways, I understand that rubbish will sometimes be written about you and that really is rubbish, but I don’t tie myself up in knots about it.
“I would not like people to think that because I don’t regularly appear on the red carpet that I sit here cringing between these four walls, terrified of the world. That’s so not how I live.
“I just don’t live my life for public consumption, that’s all. Just because you don’t seek the spotlight doesn’t mean that you’re fatally allergic to it.”
In contrast, Tracy says she is, in her own way, very social. “I’ve got a huge network around me,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of mates who live around here and we’re always at each other’s houses. There’s a lot of that. I have mates in the city, too. I will go out to dinner after I come off air and just get a cab home if I have a few drinks. I don’t lead a hermit’s life. This place is busy.”
Similarly, a magazine declared earlier this year that the day that NSW police arrested ACA colleague Ben McCormack on charges of using a carriage service for child pornography material was
“the worst of Tracy’s life”. “I would have thought that the day that my mother died trumped that,” Tracy says flatly. “Ben is a colleague of mine and has been for a long time. He works in the same office and so do many people. We’re a tight team at ACA. Having said that, I don’t see Ben socially. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
What the future holds
On the day Ben was charged in April, Tracy was in Tasmania interviewing Senator Jacqui Lambie and wasn’t in the studio to host the show. “After we finished I checked my phone and there it was,” recalls Tracy. “I felt bad that I wasn’t there because people were rattled and upset. It wouldn’t be right to comment on proceedings. They will play out as they should in the court.
“However, I will say that we promised our viewers that we would not shy away from reporting it. We’re not sweeping it under the carpet or pretending that it didn’t happen.”
And what of the future? Has she considered retiring? “Am I going to shuffle off into retirement after ACA?
I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t thought about when I am going to shuffle off. I like it at ACA. I don’t think I’ve got another 10 or 15 years but I don’t think I’ve only got another two either. I’m 57 now. I can say categorically that I will not still be doing it at 67 but I don’t know at what point that will hit me. I suppose at some point I’m going to think, ‘It would just be nice to ride the horses and pat the dogs and not go to work, but it hasn’t hit me yet.”
And what about romance – is there a special someone in her life? Tracy, who’s always guarded her privacy, is coy. “I don’t want to create mystery where there is none,” she says. “I haven’t answered that question during the past 37 years and I don’t think
I’ll start. If I do start then I will never stop. I don’t answer that because I’m a public person but that doesn’t mean I have to give up a private life. I know there’s a level of curiosity but I think that curiosity gets less as I get older.
“The blokes I’ve gone out with haven’t wanted a public profile anyway. I haven’t gone out with people who are well known and if I had gone out with someone who wanted to be in the limelight, I might have headed for the hills anyway.
“I think that if I had married then that might be different. Once you make that kind of commitment then perhaps that’s a case for laying it on the line. But that hasn’t happened. That’s not to say that might not still happen. Who knows?
“Anything can happen and if the right bloke knocked on the door then it still might. You never know. You just never do know how things might play out. But if I ever do plan to get married, I’ll tell you.”
“I understand that rubbish will sometimes be written about you.”