High priestess of health and beauty
Leslie Kenton, health and beauty entrepreneur: b Los Angeles, June 24, 1941; m (1) Peter Dau (diss), (2) Dan Smith, 1d, 3s; d Christchurch, November 13, 2016, aged 75.
Leslie Kenton was dubbed the ‘‘high priestess of health and beauty’’. Every inch the earth mother, frequently dressed in flowing white clothes, she was propounding the virtues of raw vegetables and juice diets when the rest of Britain still swore by a spoonful of cod liver oil. Her magazine columns and books were read by millions in the 1980s and 90s.
A statuesque ash blonde, with gleaming blue eyes and a Californian twang – despite spending most of her life in Britain – she appeared the seductive looking product of her own advice.
She practised shamanism, lived in a remote Buddhist monastery and had the sort of free-spirited appetite for love that generated headlines – steamy tantric practices, a toyboy and four children by four men.
‘‘I get pregnant very easily,’’ she said. She even fried up her own placenta with onion and declared it was delicious – ‘‘like tasting the essence of my soul’’.
In fact, there was little she had not tried in the name of good health for her readers: the seaweed diet, the apple diet, cold baths, carrot face packs, vinegar baths and Tibetan medicines. She dished up home-made soya icecream and rice milk along with the sort of New Age philosophy – ‘‘I love beauty. I eat it. I feed off it’’ – that others preferred to call ‘‘New York gobbledegook’’.
Seemingly unfazed by criticism, she romped through projects and passions; books included Raw Energy, The X Factor Diet and Age Power. Yet, 35 titles later, she wrote something quite different – the memoir of her incestuous relationship with her father, Stanley Kenton, the American jazz musician and band leader. It shocked her fans.
She described how he raped her for the first time when she was 11. The abuse continued for two years. Yet she controversially called the book Love Affair. ‘‘I was angry with him, for sure, but I never hated him,’’ she said.
Leslie Kenton was born in 1941 in Los Angeles to Stan and Violet. Both parents were penniless and struggling artists and her childhood was chaotic and lonely.
Violet cared mainly for her husband and keeping her slim figure. ‘‘When she got pregnant she realised she wouldn’t be able to join him on the road,’’ Kenton later said. She was left for a year with her maternal grandmother while her parents went on tour.
She recalled growing up confused about food, in part because of her mother’s look of disdain as she ate. ‘‘I would survive for a while on a few chips or a slice of fruit,’’ she said. At a well-built 1.72m and 69.8kg, she later learnt to embrace her figure.
As her father’s success grew, she spent five years touring with her parents, educating herself with comics and books in the back of a Buick van, eating at truck stops and meeting Ronald Reagan and Nat King Cole. She was miserable in LA, where her father built a house. In interviews Kenton recalled of him: ‘‘He was either not there at all or ‘too much’ there.’’
The story that later emerged was quite different. One night after a concert her father had one too many whiskies. ‘‘The next thing I knew his massive body was on top of mine,’’ Leslie wrote. ‘‘In a rough voice he started to repeat my name: ‘Leslie. Leslie. Oh, Leslie.’ ‘‘ The next morning he denied it had happened. The cycle repeated itself until she was 13.
She remained loyal to her father, describing how they shared a love of music. Later she wrote that his mother had treated him sadistically. ‘‘I think I was the only person on earth he felt he could be himself with.’’
In her memoir, she described how she learnt to block out the memories of abuse helped by their gradual estrangement. She confronted Stan in 1972. He went ‘‘as white as a sheet’’, Kenton said. Her father told her: ‘‘All I can say is that I’m so sorry. At that part of my life, I didn’t know what was going on.’’ The dedication in her memoir read: ‘‘For Stanley, with all my love.’’
At 17, having struggled for several years at school, Kenton became pregnant. Her father demanded she have an abortion or marry. She chose the latter and worked as a part-time model in New York while her husband, Peter Dau, studied at medical school. They had a son, Branton, but after three years the relationship was over.
A one-night fling with an old school friend, Barry Comden (who went on to marry Doris Day), led to a daughter, Susannah.
There was a spell scraping a living in New York, buying food on a few dollars a day. She wed again in 1964, this time to a childhood friend, Dan Smith, a journalist who had long written her love letters offering to care for her. They had a son, Jesse, and the marriage lasted until the early 1970s. Years later she conceived her fourth child, Aaron, with another friend, Paul Cox. ‘‘I was never much in favour of marriage,’’ she declared with impressive understatement.
Branton became an entrepreneur, Susannah a voice-over artist, Jesse a plastic surgeon, and Aaron ran a wellness programme.
With Smith, Kenton moved to Paris and then, in the late sixties, to London, where he had a job with The Economist. She began experimenting with LSD as part of a medical trial during which memories of her father’s abuse resurfaced. Divorcing Smith, she retreated to a Buddhist monastery in Scotland for a month. ‘‘I went for a walk up in the hills, took off all my clothes, lay down in the grass all day,’’ she said.
In London and penniless again, she took a job as a business journalist so she could work from home. ‘‘I wrote about the heavy lifting gear industry, the aluminium industry, the airline industry,’’ she said. She soon switched to women’s magazines and, in 1974, found her calling as health and beauty editor of Harpers & Queen.
For almost 15 years she advised women on everything from getting rid of spots and wrinkles to losing weight and finding their inner voices. She had a knack for persuasion that encouraged her readers happily to try royal jelly and dew baths or raw goat meat.
‘‘She could have been a cult leader,’’ said one colleague. One editor described her later: ‘‘She was ahead of her time. She’d write all these quirky articles obeying mad-cap things – but now they don’t seem so mad. Drinking mineral water, eating raw food, avoiding stress – everyone’s doing it these days.’’
She left the magazine in 1988 to design a range of organic products for Estee Lauder and with the proceeds took time off to write a novel about Beethoven, entitled Ludwig – a ‘‘spiritual thriller’’ about a man who becomes obsessed with the composer.
She kept four homes: flats in the London suburb of Primrose Hill and LA, and houses in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire and in Governors Bay, out of Christchurch, where she moved in 1998. She died there of natural causes.
— The Times
‘‘She’d write all these quirky articles obeying mad-cap things – but now they don’t seem so mad.’’