AT first glance, she makes an unlikely femme fatale. She’s fifty, and for anyone half that age she could be a favorite younger aunt, the naughty one who teases you, swears a bit and laughs a lot. But if you were an old man — aged sixty-five to eighty five, say — with an itch for female company, she’d look inviting enough. Especially if she wants to. And if you are old, lonely and rich, she certainly wants to. She’s an expert at it.
Marilyn — not her real name — is a mother, a grandmother and a successful small-business proprietor. What her family doesn’t know is that she is also rather devious when it comes to serious subjects like sex and money. Her friends call her ‘Mrs Swindell’, and they’re only half joking. Her specialty, these days, is taking dirty old men to the cleaners.
In fact, she has manipulated the sexual harassment laws and the Equal Opportunity Act to relieve a millionaire of $30,000 for seven weeks’ ‘work’.
This is how she did it.
THE plot, if you can call it that, is hatched in late 1997. Marilyn boasts to her friends that she will extract money, serious money, from ‘some old boy’ before Christmas. It starts as a joke, and ends as a bet. One she’s well-equipped to win.
Marilyn, not to put too fine a point on it, has been around a bit since she left her parents’ farm in western Victoria almost thirty years ago.
She was a bright girl — she started school at four, high school at ten — but in that time and place brains didn’t mean much if your parents didn’t think daughters were worth educating.
The choices, she recalls, were ‘nursing, teaching or typing’. She chose nursing. She was good at it, she says. But, later, after leaving the country boy she’d married at twenty (’I was too young; he was too dull’ she wisecracks) she gravitated to the fast life, and did a lot of things that would have shocked her respectable folks, had they known.
Not that she was self-destructive. She doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, despises drugs and those who use them; her vices have always been men and money, preferably together.
She is short, stocky and no classic beauty, but people like her. Especially male people. Her assets, apart from a sharp brain, a quick tongue and a steady nerve, are roguish green eyes, a nose just aquiline enough to make her face pleasantly predatory, an infectious smile — and what she describes as the signature feature of the oldest profession, generous breasts.
She collected husbands — a couple of her own, several of other people’s. She once ran away to Europe with one of the latter. When the money and the novelty ran out, she left the man with a huge hotel bill and a guilty conscience.
Later, she was visited in Melbourne by two men employed to collect unpaid European hotel bills. She calmly told them that although they had the right address they were out of luck: the woman they were looking for had moved to Scotland. She even wrote down an address for them.
In the late 1980s, Marilyn opened a sandwich and catering shop in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. It was a success, like most things she has done. But, after a few years, it palled, and she sold up.
Then, last year, she went back to nursing. Which is where the story really begins …
SHE signs on with a reputable agency in early 1997, one that specialises in looking after old people in their own homes. She produces glowing references, a few of which are genuine. The clients love her. They’re frail, elderly, lonely and rich. She’s bright, cheerful, and wants to be rich. ‘I saw the wealth and thought, “I wouldn’t mind a bit of that”,’ is the way she puts it to some of the other nurses.
Her chance comes in October. The agency is having trouble filling a position with an elderly widower in Caulfield. He’s in his seventies, but still runs the importing business that has made him a millionaire since he came to Australia as a refugee during the war, when he was one of those shipped across the world on the ship ‘Dunera’. Despite his age, the feisty ‘Dunera boy’ doesn’t need a nurse; he wants a ‘live-in housekeeper’ who, he stipulates, has to be ‘under fifty and attractive’.
Three women sent for interviews complain to the agency that he is a ‘dirty old man’ and that they couldn’t possibly work for him. Marilyn, however, thinks he sounds ideal for her plans. The agency tells the client she is forty-seven, attractive and very friendly indeed.
When she gets to the house for the interview she finds a leering gnome with a big belly, a thick accent and a spa bath. It’s the spa that makes them both sure they’re on a winner.
When Marilyn sees it she coos ‘Ooh, what a lovely spa!’ The gnome winks at her and suggests she might like to hop in it with him if she takes the job. Sharp business people both, they close the deal immediately.
He insists on driving her to her existing job, nursing an old lady in Toorak. They sit in his big Mercedes Benz sedan, talking. He asks if she’d like to go interstate with him, and dine out every night. She says she would. She brushes his arm and kisses him on one jowly cheek before she gets out. She’s baited the hook, and he’s taken it.
Days later he takes her to dinner at the Hilton. He reveals he’s staying at the hotel because his wife — mother of his adult children — has died only three weeks before, and he doesn’t want to sleep at his house yet. Tough as she is, Marilyn is shocked at this callousness; she’d thought he’d been widowed at least six months.
She masks her distaste, and plays the part she has chosen with the ease of long practice. ‘Most of the old men like him are afraid of the young dolly birds, because they know that a twenty five-year-old gorgeous blonde must be after their money,’ she explains later. ‘But a nice, respectable-looking, middle-aged housewife like me is to be trusted.’ She laughs ironically.
‘That first time we had dinner at the Hilton, I said I wouldn’t stay with him. But of course I did. I had a couple of glasses of wine to make it look good and said (here she assumes a mock-genteel accent): “Oh, I feel a bit giddy. I must have a little lie down before I go home.” We went up to the room and, of course, as soon as I lay down on the bed he was all over me like a rash.
‘Next morning the silly old fool took me down to breakfast. There I am in evening clothes from the night before and he’s saying to the staff “Have you met my housekeeper? She’s just dropped in to see me this morning. Isn’t that nice?” I stayed with him two days. The doormen saw me, and smiled. They knew what was going on.’
After a week of dinners, she moves into the house in Caulfield. There’s not much housework. She washes and irons the gnome’s shirts and squeezes him orange juice in the morning before he goes to the business. Her main duties are in the bedroom — which, uncharacteristically, she finds increasingly unpleasant. One reason is that the gnome occasionally injects himself with a drug that gives him a four-hour erection.
‘The sex nearly killed him,’ she is to recall. ‘He had to go to hospital one morning and have an ECG. They fitted all these wires and stuff on him. After that he took it easier. He’d just turn over, give my boobs a bit of a pat and go to sleep. I’d sneak off to the other room because it was like sleeping with a pig.’
She kills time during the day by watching television — and entertaining a male friend, who doesn’t suspect what’s going on because she tells him the old man has a wife.
At first, she schemes to lure the gnome into marriage. But she gives that idea up when she works out that most of his wealth is tied up in a family-owned business effectively controlled by his sons, married men who despise their father’s behavior so soon after their mother’s death, and are rightly suspicious of the housekeeper’s motives.
The pair eat at restaurants most evenings. ‘His only friends were waitresses, and that was only because he carried wads of cash and stuffed money into their hands. He talked only about himself. All his business problems, his investments. He told me everything.
‘On the way home he would nearly make me sick talking about the girls in the restaurants. “See how they love me!” he’d say. “They can’t keep their hands off me.” I told the silly old goat they only wanted his money, but he wouldn’t take any notice.’
After a month Marilyn senses the old man is already looking around for other women. Top of the list is an Asian girl in her twenties working in a Toorak restaurant. Marilyn deduces that the waitress and her boyfriend are setting up a sting of their own. She decides she has to get in first.
The old man disgusts her in a way she hasn’t expected. There isn’t a photograph of his wife displayed in the house; he has thrown them all in a box in a back room. She discovers that he has been visiting brothels for years. And that he keeps pornography.
Ironically, after returning from shopping one afternoon, she finds a syringe cap on the bedroom floor that hadn’t been there that morning, and guesses he’s brought a prostitute into the house.
‘I started to hate him. He was suggestive every day. I was sick of the suggestive talk.’ She buys a disposable camera, and takes pictures of the pornography, the syringe and sex-drug, and any business documents she can find.
She makes her move in mid-December. He is going to Queensland for Christmas, and has asked her to go with him. She fancies the free holiday, and knows he will shower her with gifts. But there’s one problem: ‘I knew it won’t look good for my case against him.’
The case being sexual harassment. First she goes to a doctor. Not her own — ‘he’d know I was up to something’ — but one she’d never seen before, in Malvern.
She puts on an act she’s still proud of months later. She bursts into tears in the surgery. Tells the doctor, sobbing, that her employer is a monster who forces her to sleep with him and that she can’t refuse because she doesn’t want to lose the job. She asks for advice and sleeping tablets, and gets both.
Next step, the law. She telephones Maurice Blackburn and Co., a well-known firm in workplace disputes, but they were too busy. Then she goes to a referral centre which recommends ‘the best feminist lawyer in Melbourne’, a woman at a small city firm that specialises in sexual harassment cases. She makes an appointment for the afternoon of Wednesday, 17 December.
The lawyer is tough, efficient, and dead easy to deceive. She swallows her new client’s bogus tale of misery without question. Three hours later, when Marilyn gets back to Caulfield, the gnome is home, waiting. He complains, asking where she has been. She tells him she’s been to the city to get him a Christmas present. He brightens, and asks her what it is. ‘It’s a surprise,’ she says, unblinking.
It’s a surprise all right. When the lawyer’s letter arrives two days later, he is very surprised indeed. And dismayed. The letter outlines a list of alleged offences under the Equal Opportunity Act. The bottom line: $36,000 ‘compensation’ to take it no further.
The old man’s sons, themselves married with children, are furious and mortified. They tell him to settle it quickly and to avoid scandal at all costs. He settles for $30,000, on condition the settlement remain confidential.
‘I would have taken $10,000,’ Marilyn confides later. ‘I just hope he reads this.’
She is in a suburban hotel lounge, crowded with pensioners hoeing into a Tuesday special discount lunch before playing the poker machines. ‘Look at them,’ she says suddenly over the din of dentures grinding half-price wiener schnitzels, waving her arm defiantly at a sea of grey heads. ‘They’ve done nothing in their lives except hang out the washing. At least I’ve lived a bit.’
The truth is, Marilyn’s sting was never only about money. That’s why, just before she left the big Caulfield house the last time, she tipped out the owner’s expensive cognac — and filled the bottles with a mixture of cold tea and vinegar.
Meanwhile, she wants to make the most of her most marketable commodity. She’s looking around for another rich old man with an itch for female company. ‘A knight would be nice,’ she muses.
AND the gnome? In March 1998 he advertised for a new housekeeper. Three months is a long time when you’re seventy-six. Any night could be your last.