SOPHISTICATION had not yet entered her lexicon but she was working on it—and Michael was doing his damnedest to help her along on that path.
I liked Kylie—how could I not?
The five-foot-tall 21-year-old he introduced me to as his next girlfriend—although I admit I was shocked beyond belief to hear it—was quite impressive. Although self-conscious and vulnerable at times, like Michael himself, Kylie Minogue was open-hearted and polite. She had many other attributes too. Apart from her obvious beauty, she was family-oriented, bright, ambitious, a fast learner, self-aware and eager to please. The cherry on top was that she was talented.
Kylie’s Neighbours character, Charlene Robinson, your everyday girl mechanic in overalls and a flannelette shirt, had been a big drawcard on the huge television soap opera Neighbours for two years. By the time she ‘married’ her real-life boyfriend ‘Scott’ (Jason Donovan) and left Neighbours to pursue pop, she also had one of the most recognisable faces in the UK. Kylie blazed a path a string of other Neighbours alumni would follow over the years, although none would have such eyebrow-raising success on the charts.
Right out of the box, her very first single, ‘Locomotion’, spent seven weeks at #1 in Australia. A rerecorded version reached #2 in England; #1 in Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Japan and South Africa and #3 on the US Billboard Hot 100. (Wouldn’t INXS have loved to do that right off!)
In fact, in the eighteen months before meeting Michael, Kylie had grinned her way through a whole cavalcade of dance-pop videos that became hit singles around the world.
Affectionately nicknamed ‘the Singing Budgie’ (short for budgerigar), Kylie had even won the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on television in Australia in 1988! But you could have knocked me over with a budgie feather to think that a Logie would impress Michael.
His previous girlfriend Rosanna had told him, in the first blush of their relationship, that although their love was strong, the day would come when his career would take a natural dip. Then he’d feel the tug to move on; maybe fall for someone famous. Naturally Michael denied this could ever happen. But in some ways Ro was foretelling the future.
Of course the English and Australian media went into a frenzy over the ‘odd’ and very famous couple. For the first time Michael began to be troubled by stalking paparazzi with telephoto lenses.
We met up at a Japanese restaurant in Sydney. Kylie was her adorable, blonde, curly-haired, spunky self while her ‘older man’ (by eight years) Michael was wearing a dorky hat which, coupled with his black thick-rimmed everyday glasses, gave him the appearance of Inspector Gadget.
Heaven help the man attempting to hide out next to Kylie Minogue.
When she excused herself to go to the bathroom all eyes in the restaurant trailed her to the door. It was my birthday and, after dinner, the three of us went to see a movie. That ended in a fan pursuit so hysterical it was like the chase scene in The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night.
Actually I came to see how Kylie was very clever when it came to the media and public relations. After several years in the limelight with an effective management machine behind her, she understood the career value of the right ‘photo op’ at the right time. She was frugal with the opportunities she offered the professionals and she shared the depth of her publicity experience with her new boyfriend. She warned him how easy it is for them to turn on you.
Michael had never known bad press. He couldn’t imagine it becoming a problem. INXS had always been on the up-and-up trajectory. His feeling was that you, the interviewee, have the power to control the information. It had always worked for him so far. He mused about the hundreds of interviews he had given, how he’d steered the flow and the content with his thoughtful answers and disarming humour.
True enough.
But Kylie had worked in London. The big time. In the domain of Fleet Street. She was familiar with the perils of wowserish, scandal-addicted front-page journalism. Like the tabloid News of the World, for instance, founded in 1843 on the trail of vice, outrage and sensation. Before it crashed to earth in 2001 (following its self-inflicted, unsurvivable phone-tapping scandal) at times it was the biggest-selling English language paper on earth. In the USA, it was the National Enquirer which came sniffing after celebrity drug and alcohol shenanigans, more gossip and scandal: a licence to print money to the paparazzi. So much power in the hands of so few.
Attack was always better than defence; that was the power of committing to the right exclusive at the right time. Michael shook his head. Doing media campaigns was a hard slog sometimes, and repetitive. But he was superb at it and he knew it. He simply could not see the pitfalls.
In November 1989 INXS returned to the site of their greatest recording success, Rhinoceros, to start the process of recording their seventh studio album. They welcomed back producer Chris Thomas to the big chair for the album that would be X.
X: ten in Roman numerals. Ten years since their first album. X for ecstasy, some might guess. And, of course, the essential X of INXS.
This would be the third of Thomas’s trilogy of INXS albums. Music that keeps playing on radio stations scattered like confetti around the world. Songs strangers sing as they wander past you on the street.
But before X could sit in the classic racks alongside Listen Like Thieves and Kick, there was much to be done. Since Michael, Andrew, Tim, Kirk, Jon and Garry last made a record together they’d been awarded so much silverware they didn’t know where to put it. Yes, there had been side projects, but it was time to reopen the chronicle of INXS and see what the next chapter could bring.
The band had taken a whole year off after the utter brain-grinder of the international Kick tour. Now they were back working together again, the gloves were off in some respects too. Instances of paranoia and insecurity ran rife. Andrew was still offended Michael hadn’t discussed Max Q with him. On the other side, there was a rumour that it was Andrew who pushed Chris Murphy to shut Max Q down promotionally.
Now, after the success that had come from the other band members giving the green light for Michael and Andrew to co-write their last album Kick alone, the musical powerhouse of the group discovered he was no longer automatically co-writing everything. Michael, never one to be tied down, had co-written two tracks in the running, ‘Faith In Each Other’ and ‘Disappear’, with Andrew’s little brother Jon while they were hanging out being residents of Hong Kong together earlier in 1989. There was friction over whose songs would go on the album.
By Christmas 1989, when Michael and Kylie’s romance was new, our family’s nomadic impulses were on full display. In our regular chats with each other we were all preoccupied with new pastures, future plans. Of course this probably seemed normal to Kylie. It was a good fit. She regularly flew back and forth across the world in search of new markets herself.
Rhett, who’d always been resourceful and artistic, was visiting from Los Angeles. He’d been working on music videos there with the help of Nick Egan and others.
Rosanna had given Michael a parting gift. She’d arranged for Rhett to move in with her friend Lovey, an actress with an apartment near the Hollywood Bowl. Michael was constantly trying to find ways to settle our younger brother into something that would inspire him to find his niche. It seemed to be working out well.
Meanwhile, our mother was making a new life for herself on the Gold Coast in Queensland with her new love, Ross Glassop. We’d all become really fond of this loving, gentlemanly man too and it was a joy to see her so happy. She’d opened yet another make-up academy and published a book in 1988: Make-up Is Magic: From the 1920s to now, corrective, fantasy and fun. Kell was in Hong Kong with his Susie and they seemed pretty happy together as well. They hadn’t made it back to Australia for the holidays that year. Michael, Rhett and I were very pleased that our parents had found life partners who suited them so much better.
I was planning a return to LA, and soon we’d be scattered across the globe once again.
Kylie, meanwhile, was rehearsing—in her case for her second major tour; this one called Enjoy Yourself, after her second album, due to start in Australia in February 1990. She and Michael met up when they could, all the while being tracked and troubled by the goss-hounds of the paparazzi.
In late 1989 Michael rented an apartment at the gracious Connaught, overlooking Hyde Park in downtown Sydney, for a while. He and Kylie stayed there together when they could. She was very close to her stylist Nicole Bonython-Hines, ‘the stylist’s stylist’, who had worked with her from her early days. Nicole was designing stage gear like the Australian flag jacket, silver shorts and outsize red cap Kylie would wear for the upcoming tour, so there were heaps of clothes stashed at the Connaught. One time when Kylie was off doing something else, Michael asked me to come and get a Hard Rock Cafe jacket Kylie wanted Erin to have. We found the tiny thing in the bedroom. Unopened shopping bags of new clothes spilled all over the floor—no doubt part of the cache of things Nicole had brought in for her to try, or that she’d bought out shopping with Michael.
After Kylie enjoyed Christmas with her own family in Melbourne, she and Michael hosted a small get-together at the Connaught on New Year’s Eve. That would be a launching pad for various other parties our small group hopped in and out of together through the night.
At the last party of all, I finally got the chance for a quiet one-on-one when Kylie sat herself down next to me. I asked her how she and Michael met.
Apparently Nicole, who was the daughter of gallery-owner Kym Bonython and his model wife Julie Bonython, knew Michael, and she had offered to arrange a date.
But Kylie didn’t raise the precursor incident, repeated on many Tumblr pages (although its original source has proved elusive).
‘I was eighteen, standing in a corner by a wall, really scared, surrounded by three bodyguards,’ Kylie said. (This was three years before they got together.) ‘He came staggering over, really drunk, wasted on something, and he said, “What are we going to do first, have lunch or have sex?”
‘Those were the first words he ever said to me.’
I rather suspect that instead of the two words ‘have sex’, there might just possibly have been a single four-letter word in that question. But if so, the ladylike public persona of Kylie Minogue wouldn’t have been likely to repeat it.
When Michael arrived to pick Kylie up at her hotel in Hong Kong for their first lunch date, he told me, he was ‘very late and slightly inebriated’. He wasn’t concerned until he knocked on the door of her suite; but when it opened, there sat her parents formally arranged like a judging panel alongside her manager Terry Blamey, inspecting him with great interest. Fortunately, Michael’s mastery of social niceties got him through but it was a near thing.
Kylie revealed herself to be a well-raised young woman from a close-knit, watchful family. Michael was very sweet on her and he always called her ‘my baby’. Before then, his partners were always taking care of him. This time, he was the protector. He tried to have a private life with her and let things develop naturally. But people were intrigued by the whole ‘innocent’ Kylie–‘rampant rock-star’ Michael angle. Those who adored the goofy, naive side of Kylie were quite suspicious of Michael’s intentions too, at times.
My brother had never dated anyone this famous before. He was shocked by the insistent paparazzi, their subtle reconnoitring. The telephoto lenses you couldn’t see trying to catch you taking off your clothes, bathing at the beach or kissing your girlfriend in a park when an affectionate whim crossed your mind, the results plastered across some magazine in the doctor’s waiting room when you went in for a sore throat.
This was the time when the price of catching somebody famous off guard started to skyrocket. Magazines outbid each other for romantic new celebrity couple pics. And frankly, the sight of Michael and Kylie cuddling on the grass on a sunny afternoon got everyone excited. It was sort of like the Loch Ness Monster—a photo proved that ‘Michael and Kylie’ really did exist.
Michael had painstakingly learned, tour by tour, how to stir up an enormous crowd and keep them happy for hours, how to play to the back row at stadiums. Kylie was just beginning to move into that phase of her career and there had been no ‘pub tours’ or ‘support spots’ for her to break in her show-woman tricks. Michael took great pleasure in helping her find key musicians for the backup band she was about to tour with. James Freud from Models would play bass and, in the Australian leg of this world tour, Greg Perano was on percussion. When the songbird needed some confidence to face a live audience, they set up a small, private warm-up show with Michael front and centre.
Their relationship was new and exciting and the two of them spent a lot of time on the phone. Michael had been trying to come up with the right lyrics for one of Andrew’s new instrumental recordings when Kylie rang one day. It was around the time she was filming her first lead feature film role as sixteen-year-old Lola in The Delinquents.
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Well, in the next scenes we shoot, Lola has dyed her hair. So I’m having it done now!’ she laughed.
‘True? What colour?’
‘Suicide blonde!!!’
As well as the colour Kylie’s honey-coloured tresses turned that day, ‘suicide blonde’ is an expression with a history. It traces back to ‘blonde bombshell’ Jean Harlow, star of the 1931 comedy Platinum Blonde, who regularly had her hair treated with ammonia and household bleach. The resultant toxic vapours were suspected of causing kidney damage. A star with genuine talent, Jean sadly died from complications of kidney failure at the age of 26.
Anyway, INXS’s ‘Suicide Blonde’ (A. Farriss, M. Hutchence), inspired by Kylie’s dye job for The Delinquents, became such a fresh, infectious romp racing out of speaker systems around the world. The first single off X sounded like nothing else with its syncopated, sampled harp riff from Native American blues artist Charlie Musselwhite blazing away.
INXS had found out that Charlie was in Sydney while they were laying down X. He came in and played some great stuff that was used on three tracks. Charlie’s 1967 album Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band announced a legend, and INXS adding some of his harmonica raunch to X was a master stroke.
‘Suicide Blonde’ reached #2 on the Australian charts, #9 in the US top 10 and #11 in the UK.
The Delinquents wasn’t a hit movie but Kylie was well reviewed and even did a topless scene (!). At its premiere in Sydney, waves of music and film names parted like the Red Sea when she entered hand in hand with her beau. They looked very comfortable together, exuding a mix of Pearly King and Queen splendour and streetsmart Aussie hip. Michael was in an outfit he wore for the Max Q ‘Sometimes’ video clip: jewel-patterned black pants, combat boots and a black vest with pearly button strips that showed off his dancer’s chest. Kylie was in a thigh-scraper mini-dress that looked like black velvet with a giant, sequined crossword puzzle on it and a platinum waif bob. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. She grinned like the cat that got the cream.
In a Sydney Morning Herald story in 2015, Kylie said, ‘Michael was Byron-esque, he was poetic, he was cultured and hilarious and tender. He was all of these things. I guess I was the perfect age, I was 21 years old, to get the butterfly wings and go out into the world and we collided at that time and I guess he just fast-tracked some of it. Anyway, it was a glorious time. I loved it.’ And you know, so did he.
Here’s to butterfly wings.
In mid-1990 Michael and Kylie dropped by to see me in LA where I’d returned to live yet again. Michael raved about a place he’d snapped up in the South of France for US$1.5 million cash—a bargain!—from the manager of Duran Duran. Apparently he’d been there before. Years ago, when holidaying with Michael Hamlyn at Cannes, just some obscure upstart Australian hanging on the coat-tails of Richard Lowenstein, he’d gone to a party there. The villa was called Vieille Ferme des Guerchs. Later Michael’s caretaker told me that Simon Le Bon often called during summer months, to ask if it was vacant. But I think mostly Simon just came when Michael was there, later, and they hung out and were what the English call ‘naughty’, whatever that means.
Michael asked me if I’d move into the front cottage and manage the villa. He wanted to let it out for photographic shoots, and it was hired out that way for a while too. My eldest, Brent, had left home by then to attend college in Oregon, and if Erin hadn’t been only twelve years old and dealing with some crucial years of school, I would have done it.
Michael had his dream home. He began referring to it as ‘the family home’ pretty quickly too. He finally had a private garage for his Aston Martin and bought a black Mercedes jeep for running around in and a yellow Peugeot convertible for staff and visiting guests. Some wonderful family times were to be spent there, and some bleaker days too.
Chris Bailey of the Saints and his wife, Pearl, joined Michael and Kylie in the south of France that year. There had been two months touring Europe with INXS for Michael on the Suicide Blonde tour, including four nights straight at Wembley Arena (a feat of drawing power and performance). Finally, he had three weeks to himself.
The little village of Roquefort-les-Pins was surrounded by a pine forest in the Alpes-Maritimes, Provence. The views from the two largest upstairs bedrooms of the villa were enthralling. On a clear day you could see all the way to the Riviera coast. With all the surrounding villages, it was impossible to be bored or uninspired. Whether your medium was paint, words or music, it was an artist’s dream.
And Michael’s ‘farmhouse’ itself was rather grand, set as it was on just over one-and-a-half hectares of lush land overlooking the Cote d’Azur. The main villa was nearly four hundred square metres. There were five bedrooms upstairs and a vaulted basement with a sixth bedroom downstairs. The ceilings were low, fitting the period history. There was a fully equipped kitchen and a graceful swimming pool that Michael would later redevelop (as it was a little run-down) set in beautiful natural gardens.
Most of the lounge and dining furniture was in situ when Michael bought the villa but Kylie helped him with the rest. She was eager to try out some recipes, comparing notes with Pearl while the two vagabond minstrel poets, ‘Byron’ and ‘Shelley’, did what they always did when they got together—drink and talk all night. The foursome did some sightseeing, exploring local villages and eateries, picking up last-minute Christmas gifts and checking out various cities on the French Riviera including a daytrip to the principality of Monaco.
Pearl sensed that things didn’t quite feel right between Michael and Kylie on this visit. Although there was no hostility on display, their body language had cooled.
In fact, Michael had already begun romancing Helena Christensen. He had ‘met’ her (albeit over the phone only, so far), through Herb Ritts. Although most people did not know her name at this stage, Helena had made quite a splash in the 1989 Chris Isaak video ‘Wicked Game’, which Ritts directed. Often voted one of the sexiest videos of all time, it features the camera following the magnificent twenty-year-old Helena slowly in close-up embraces along the beach.
As the new decade dawned in January 1991, INXS played two sold-out indoor shows in Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes, before heading off to Brazil’s Rock in Rio with its sensational line-up of Ziggy Marley, George Michael, Billy Idol, Donna Summer, Run DMC, Guns N’ Roses and Robert Plant. At those three concerts alone they played to more than 150,000 people.
For another big show in Buenos Aires, a stunner in just shorts and stilettos kissed Michael happy birthday onstage with a cake for his 31st. This seven-month tour would wind from South America up through the northern continent to Canada, then jet down to the southern hemisphere and Australia before travelling through many of the countries in Europe.
The INXS X-Factor tour started in Los Angeles on 1 February with a warm-up at the Whisky Au Go Go and a great after-party in Michael’s suite at the Four Seasons. They left California for four more dates on the east coast and on Saturday, 9 February, appeared on Saturday Night Live playing ‘Suicide Blonde’ and ‘Bitter Tears’ in New York City.
By this stage Michael and the rest of INXS had become quite socially fragmented. Because 1991 was the year Mark Opitz spent on the road with them as musical consultant, he remembers it well.
‘I noticed on the tour that Michael definitely lived in his part of the tour and the band lived in their parts of the tour,’ he recalled. ‘Like Andrew did what Andrew did, was just solo. Tim did what Tim did after shows, which was get on his computer and look at cars, or whatever. Garry had Jodie there so they’d be off doing what they were doing and Jon would be confused about what he was doing but Michael would be going off, sometimes taking Jon with him, to parties. And I’d go off with Michael too when I was there, heaps, to parties, thinking “I haven’t done this before”,’ said Mark wryly.
His role was one only a visionary band and management might have come up with. ‘My main job on that tour was to be the first person backstage—with the tour manager, Michael Long—to comment on the show. To give technical advice on how songs are running into each other, how the set was working, how the songs were working … You know, anything that I could see, while they were fresh. It was quite fun doing it because everyone was in an up mood then.’
Helena and Michael arranged to have their first face-to-face contact. She was coming to New York for a modelling assignment.
Michael was nervous about their first date. A few days before she was due to arrive, to alleviate his nerves, Michael asked if Mark would come along, and also invite their mutual friend, New York-based artist Kay Mahoney (sister of both Jimmy Barnes’ wife, Jane, and also Jep Lizotte, coincidentally the caterer for the Max Q album sessions at Rhinoceros) to dinner too.
‘And so Michael’s first date with Helena,’ Mark said, ‘was with myself and Kay at the New York Plaza Oak Room. It was a fabulous, palatial, oak-and-velvet kind of old-English room, with massive casement windows overlooking Central Park and snow falling under light outside. It was beautiful. Just stunning. INXS fans huddled across the street in the snow. But there it was. Plaza, New York—you know, it was just like being in a James Stewart movie.’
Helena had never been to an INXS concert, had never seen Michael perform live. The first time she did was at Madison Square Garden on 16 February.
What an amazing showcase that was! Michael did not disappoint; he never did. But in the audience was not only Helena, but also our mother and her new husband (of two weeks), the gorgeous Ross (the boss) Glassop, retired and highly decorated Royal Australian Air Force commander. Mother and Ross were on their ‘round the world’ honeymoon, having married in Reno, Nevada, on their first leg.
The band and our mother were staying at the Plaza, a Manhattan property that its owner Donald Trump called ‘the Mona Lisa of hotels’. That and the private Learjet that the band was touring in were signs that they had indeed come a long, long way from those days of dingy motels with four to a room, sharing soggy hamburgers and fish and chips.
In fact, at this stage INXS stayed at the Plaza for an entire month.
‘We all had these amazing, palatial, huge rooms,’ Mark said. ‘Just massive. I had the benefit of knowing the head chef of the Edward VII room, the restaurant. And so we used to get a private table down in the kitchen every now and again, as well, which was quite interesting. But I really count myself lucky to be able to say, yeah, well I spent a month holed up in the Plaza, in a great room, in the snow. Getting paid for it. How good is that? That’s what it was, for a year. Chicago, Toronto, shit, so many places, you know. Kentucky. Just incredible.’
Mark witnessed firsthand how much Michael was enjoying himself at this time.
‘We’d get back from say Philadelphia, one car would take the band, who didn’t want to go out—mostly everybody—back to the Plaza with the bags. And those who wanted to go out, which was usually just me and Michael, would take one of the other cars, and head off down the Village or to clubs. Like I remember going to clubs once with him and Michael rang ahead and Peter Allen was waiting for him, for a private party. It was full on. Going out most nights, coming home late and going, wow, did that really happen?’
When Mother and Ross were escorted backstage by INXS’s hefty head of security, Jeff Pope, before the show on 16 February, the only other person in the room was the former Miss Denmark herself. Helena was standing there in a long white dress, hair cascading around her bare shoulders, unsmiling and statuesque. Mother didn’t immediately recognise her and wondered who she might be with. Before she could introduce herself, Michael appeared and made the introductions. It was also Ross’s first time at a concert—any concert, in fact—and I’m sure he was glad for his hearing loss from 40 years as a fighter pilot and instructor in the air force, because the reception at the 20,000-seater was overwhelming.
After the show Mother and Ross retired to the Plaza and slipped a note under Michael’s door, inviting him for lunch the next day and suggesting that he might like to bring Helena along. Imagine their surprise when he showed up to the restaurant with Kylie instead. It was a meal laced with uncomfortable pauses. Mother gathered that Kylie was staying in Michael’s suite, but when had she arrived? Mother had no way of knowing if Kylie had seen the note to Michael, inviting Helena instead of her. To be fair, we had no idea Kylie was there at the time. The frostiness was only interrupted by Michael’s questions to Ross about his career, as he was keen to get to know his mother’s new partner better. None of us met up with Kylie again after this and she left New York the following day.