In 1997, two years after Angelo died, Sue decided to make a break from the family home in Templestowe. So she invested in an impressive but somewhat dilapidated mansion in one of Melbourne’s most prestigious addresses: Heyington Place, Toorak. She then bought herself her first-ever new car, and a ring, before embarking on a building project to recreate Heyington Hall.
At the time, there were predictable comments about new money and, as Melbourne writer Kate Legge noted in a Weekend Australian Magazine profile, Sue’s desire to ‘stake her clout and announce she was now part of the scene’. Sue herself didn’t disagree with this assessment, quoted in that article as saying, ‘I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And I thought to myself, “Life’s too short”. I remember how hard it was growing up. We didn’t have much and my first memory of life is struggling’.
Ever the developer, Sue considers the purchase of Heyington Hall as much an investment as it was a labour of love. For the next four and a half years, builders traipsed through the stately mansion, gutting the original and creating, piece by exquisite piece, a mini-palace. ‘I love antiques and I love all things French’, says Sue, who delights in describing a home she clearly adored. ‘It was just gorgeous: Italian marble, chandeliers, Parisian silk, and a fabulous ballroom with a gold-leaf ceiling. I had little bulldogs inlaid into that gold leaf! There were little touches like that right through the place.’ The property also featured a cinema, gazebo, swimming pool, pavilions, and a fountain that automatically lowered in strong winds.
A real estate editorial led with the description, ‘It’s French, it’s fabulous …’, and the writer certainly had plenty of scope for luxurious superlatives:
Ceilings are painted with medallions, trailing flowers or cherubs. French curtains and silk wallpaper are hand painted and marble bathrooms and dome-ceilinged powder rooms are trimmed in gold leaf. The stair carpet was woven to match Versace rugs in the entrance and door handles were made in Paris. Drawing room and dining room carpets were made in Belgium.
The ballroom is used for meetings and functions. Gold leaf shimmers on the ceiling, air-conditioning outlets are disguised by being set into gilded mirrors and the chandeliers came from Paris. Parquetry panels turn the terrace outside into another dance floor and its glass roof opens to the stars …
Perhaps the most treasured asset was the gardens, where Sue indulged her passion for pretty flowers, complete with rose garden and a stage for entertaining.
Described as ostentatious by some and beautiful by others, the home was undeniably breathtaking. A neighbour, David Smorgon, business identity and heir to his father’s fortune, called it Buckingham Palace. Given Sue’s likeness to the English Queen, this comment was not far off the mark, although the home was dominated by French influences.
George Pappas, whose connection with Sue spans his roles as chancellor of Victoria University and director of the Western Bulldogs Football Club, recalls being impressed by Sue’s ‘appreciation of the finer things’ when he was first invited to her house: ‘The ceiling! I have never seen a ceiling like that. It was immaculately, beautifully painted. Very tastefully done. I remember thinking, you could do this in such a way that basically says “I’m rich”, and that’s all it says. Or you can do it in a way that says, “I can afford it but, you know what, I like this kind of elegant detail. And I’m going to have it done in such a way that we can all appreciate it”’. George adds: ‘Yes, Sue can be a bit over the top in some respects, but she has an appreciation of quality and taste. Just look at the way she dresses. She’s always, always elegantly dressed’.
The ballroom at Heyington Hall was redesigned to accommodate a variety of functions. In those relatively early days of Sue’s charitable efforts, it was a space purpose-built for philanthropy. Sue enjoyed equally the silver-service dinners hosting dignitaries and friends, attending to a sophisticated social set at cocktail parties, or working the room and leading from the lectern at business-based events. Melissa Chavulak, who refers to herself as Sue’s ‘go-for girl’, describes lavish events that always had the aim of raising money for diabetes research: ‘We had so many people and events. We had the head of Ford come for lunch when he was out from the US, and I remember Sue held a dinner for both major [Australian] political parties one night apart. I wore the same outfit because I knew none of the people involved would ever see the same photos!’ According to Melissa, there were so many comings and goings that people on the street would frequently ask if the home was an embassy.
Sue fondly remembers a visit from Mary Tyler Moore: ‘Mary had promised me if she ever came to Australia, she’d do a fundraiser with me—and she did. She came to my home in Toorak when she was filming the telemovie Like Mother Like Son in Melbourne and, in opening the dinner function, she said, “Welcome everyone, to Versailles!”’
Danielle did not move into the Toorak palace with Sue. Soon after the death of her father, which hit her hard, Danielle had shifted overseas to establish her career, her own place in the world. Sue is frank about what happened: ‘Danielle needed to find her own identity. It was far too much about “the daughter of”. Danielle didn’t like that connection … I understood that but her father had found that difficult’. And so, following her art studies at the University of Melbourne, Danielle travelled to Philadelphia where she started a Master of Fine Art at Temple University, before transferring to the city’s Academy of Fine Arts where she completed her postgraduate studies—she would later move to New York. According to Sue, ‘She wanted to pursue her art and her dreams. In America, she was just one among millions of people. She was free of her mother, free of “Danielle Alberti”’.
Danielle’s complexity is evident in her art, with strong themes and powerful imagery dominating her paintings. Her mother observes, ‘There was a lot of pain in Danielle’s art. In the earlier days it was dark. Soon after her dad died it was darker, and you could see there was paint dribbling. I could always tell by the colours she was using what mood she was in’.
Sue says that Danielle started to lose her sight at twenty-six, around the time she went to America, and that her work reflected her issues with her eyesight: ‘There’s one piece where there is a circle around the eye she was losing. I could see that and knew she was thinking about her eye and losing her vision’. Danielle’s cousin Andrew echoes his aunt’s comments: ‘Danielle’s art was a way of expressing herself. She would often draw eyes, and I think the work … reflected the stages of her diabetes. She would take a lot of pictures and use them for inspiration for her art. My sister Lana used to say Danielle always had a camera on her’.
Sue remembers how much her daughter loved colour, and modern art: ‘I used to call the work she liked weird. But Danielle was a bit different. She could see things in art that I couldn’t see. I was just too black and white for Danielle. We went to galleries, so many galleries, together and if I didn’t like something I used to say it was crap. She’d say, “Mum, can you say that a bit softer?”’
Danielle didn’t seek the limelight at all—quite the reverse. ‘She was a very private person and didn’t like all the high-profile business’, says Sue. But while she may not have wished for it herself, Danielle was very proud of her mother’s success and pushed her towards the spotlight. Melissa recalls, ‘Danielle was very liberated, not brought up in her mother’s era where women were kept in the background. She really encouraged Sue to step out and was always telling her to do public speaking. She would say, “You need to tell your story and you should write a book”’.
With more of a quiet naughtiness than the behaviour of a wild child, Danielle certainly knew how to stir her mother up. She enjoyed teasing her. ‘When she was in her late twenties’, recalls Sue, ‘living in New York, I used to ring her up sometimes to check in on her. I couldn’t get her one particular night, at around midnight New York time. I’d told her not to walk home from Broadway and I was a bit worried. At about one o’clock in the morning she answered the phone and said, “What, are you spying on me now?” But I didn’t mind—I was always conscious of the diabetes. Then she said, “By the way, I just dyed my hair red”. “What?!” “Gotcha.” She knew how to wind me up. And she would always laugh and tell me how predictable I am’.
Sue says her daughter quite enjoyed shocking her. She smiles and looks away for a moment, remembering: ‘When Danielle wanted to shock me, she’d use a bad word. I was thinking about this just the other day, about when she saw the changes at my home in Toorak for the first time. I showed her around the renovations at Heyington Hall and she took it all in. She had been in America and hadn’t seen what I had done. She was staying with me so I took her around the house to see all the beautiful things. There was gold leaf in the ballroom, the taps in the bathroom were gold swans … Afterwards, Danielle told me she thought I’d done a beautiful job, but used rather colourful language to describe the swans in the bathroom. She didn’t like those swans!’
Sue’s only nephew and self-proclaimed favourite, Andrew, remembers Danielle as someone who was, ‘like any child, one of very few people who could tell her mum off from time to time. She was definitely a rebel, always lots of fun, with that cheeky childlike quality that Auntie has as well. Danielle introduced me to ouija boards and all that hocus-pocus stuff—she loved all that’.
In Philadelphia, Danielle had lived in a studio, including through the city’s freezing winters. ‘She would wrap herself in two mink coats to keep herself warm. We used to call them her bear coats’, chuckles Sue. In New York, Danielle lived in the centre of the action, at the Chelsea Hotel. ‘When she took me there, I couldn’t believe it, it’s horrible’—Sue’s attempt at mock horror is unconvincing; she looks genuinely appalled. ‘It’s all condos now, but back then Danielle was living there with all her arty friends. I told her it was a dump! But, of course, that’s what she loved about it.’
An extremely private person, Danielle developed her own group of friends in the United States but kept her relationships to herself. She was also guarded about her diabetes and the increasing impact of complications of the disease. By her late twenties, however, it was clear that she was losing her sight. Then, when Danielle turned thirty, her kidney function began to deteriorate. Sue was aware that her daughter struggled in silence: ‘I tried to get her help in Australia but she wouldn’t accept it. I think the network of medical support was too strongly tied to me’. It wasn’t until Danielle was in New York, ‘free of the Alberti name’, as Sue puts it, that she accepted assistance: ‘She got psychological help, found a great endocrinologist and created a network of wonderful people around her’.
Sue continues: ‘But it was too late, physically the damage was done. Maybe if she had lived in the States earlier on. She was a difficult kid and I think she saw her illness as a failure. She never accepted it … Danielle wouldn’t tell me when she had hypos, when she had cysts, when she was in pain. But I don’t believe she looked after herself. Her blood sugars were often high. But Danielle was 55 kilograms so she wasn’t eating the wrong things. I think she got tired of taking insulin’.
Sue says of Danielle, ‘She was a great sounding board for me. I’d trust her with anything. She was very smart and she had the softest heart. She wasn’t always patting me on the back either. She knew when I was out of control’. She adds: ‘Danielle wrote me a note from New York. I only found it again recently. It said, “I know I’m a pain in the arse. I want to thank you for all you’ve done and for always being there for me. I know it’s been difficult for you”’.
Sue travelled to the United States to be with Danielle when she needed eye surgery as a result of diabetes complications: ‘I remember seeing Danielle in hospital. After she’d had the operation on her eye, the only way she could see was by leaning over the bed. She would draw that way until the blood ran out of her nose. It was the only way she could draw’. The pitch of Sue’s voice rises slightly as she imparts this shocking detail.
Both mother and daughter knew the young artist was losing her sight, but again Danielle shied from the truth. ‘She hid it from me’, says Sue. ‘She hid a lot from me after her dad died. She was so protective of me. She was struggling with her own misery, with the death of her father, but she knew I had a huge number of people to look after at work and everything else I was involved in. She was always protecting me, always encouraging me.’ Sue pauses as the tears well up. ‘She wouldn’t admit it, but she knew she was losing her eyesight and I knew she was too. She wanted to continue to draw even though she was desperately ill. She wanted to pursue her dreams. And I continued to support her, to tell her she could do it.’
Sue was allowed to take Danielle from the hospital for walks along the Hudson River to get fresh air: ‘She’d lean over the side of the river, point things out, and say, “Mum, can you see that? I don’t think I can see that. Can you see it?” She was testing out her eyesight. I knew then that Danielle was really struggling, but she didn’t want to say the words, “I can’t see”’.
The late 1990s was an extraordinarily busy time for mother and daughter. They both had so many things on the go, the two women doing their best, striving to be successful in all their ventures, though without the supporting drive and energy of the charismatic father figure of the household. But diabetes ruled their movements and their travels, albeit for different reasons: Danielle travelled between Australia and the United States, dealing with her grief over Angelo, developing her name as an artist, and trying vainly to manage her failing health, while Sue’s life continued to revolve around finding a cure to ensure her daughter’s survival.
Although the feedback about Danielle’s health had been sporadic, her family and medical team in Melbourne were aware that the complications of diabetes were slowly taking their toll. But it was still a shock when, in 2001, after the 31-year-old had been away from her home country for six years, Danielle’s kidneys finally failed. When the call came from the specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital, telling Sue to come to America as soon as possible, she responded immediately, making straight for the one-bedroom apartment in Tribeca where her daughter now lived. Sue remembers: ‘I slept in the lounge in an army cot bed just so I could be with her. We’d only just bought that apartment. We’d just refurbished it. Danielle had just moved in. She was only in it one week, one week’. The word ‘just’ comes out forcefully, the sentences delivered staccato, like bullets. Not for the first time when talking about her daughter’s last days, Sue cries and looks away.
‘It’s still there isn’t it. You’d think I’d have got over that’, she says, almost as if surprised. But Sue’s emotions about her daughter remain strikingly close to the surface. Sixteen years after Danielle’s death, she is just as likely to blurt out a fact about it without warning as she is to shed tears as she’s talking. Yet there is no sense that Sue would be offended or hurt with any questions or comments. Felicity Kennett, the wife of former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, puts it neatly: ‘Sue never makes you feel you are in danger of saying the wrong thing’.
Sue picks up the story of the trip to New York with a wistful air, emphasising how little she knew about the extent of Danielle’s illness: ‘She was very sick and had just been dealing with it. She was spending twenty hours a day in bed. She was just so weak’. Sue says she only learned the reality of the situation when she took her daughter to see the specialist: ‘When we saw the doctor, he didn’t have any bedside manner. He just said bluntly that her kidneys had failed and she needed a transplant. I didn’t know that this had been going on before I got over there, but some of Danielle’s university friends had already been tested for compatibility and offered themselves as donors. I was tested and was compatible, so of course I wanted to donate my kidney’.
Sue then reveals something she didn’t discover until much later, at her daughter’s funeral: ‘We’d been given the green light to go home for the transplant and Danielle used the phone in her bedroom to have a very long conversation with Richard and his wife. I didn’t know this was happening, I was sound asleep in the cot in the lounge room. I think she found Richard a sensible person to talk to. He’s smart and he’s got daughters and he loved her dearly. Richard offered her his kidney during that call. He didn’t realise exactly what was going on—Danielle kept it from him, she was protecting him. That’s what she always did, she protected all of us and didn’t want us to worry. Her attitude was, “There are people worse off than me, sicker than me”. I didn’t say it but I have to ask, really, who could that be?’
Andrew confirms the phone conversation in the Jenkings household and wonders aloud whether his cousin had a subliminal awareness of how sick she was: ‘Two nights before they were due home, Danielle rang up and asked Mum how the family was and what were we all up to. I remember Mum saying she seemed to want to stay on the phone longer, wanted to talk longer. Subconsciously, maybe she knew she was very unwell’.
A kidney transplant would have been difficult and prohibitively expensive to achieve in the United States, hence the decision to bring Danielle back to her home town of Melbourne. But departing the United States was not a simple process. ‘Because she had hidden how sick she was, it all had to happen very quickly’, says Sue. ‘Danielle needed to go on dialysis immediately, which is very expensive. The hospital she was in, Mount Sinai, is a very expensive facility and they advised that I would have to come up with about $100 000. So just to finalise things with the hospital and get us out of the country I had to … find the money. And, just to complicate things, while Danielle had been in hospital, her American visa had run out. So I had to organise her a new one so we could leave the US. Thankfully, the Australian Government was amazing. I rang the embassy and they helped me sort it all out.’
Sue recalls plaintively: ‘I was running around like a lunatic, trying to organise dialysis, organising a visa, transferring money, all in different time zones, and getting ready to donate a kidney. And then, while this manic rush is going on, all of a sudden the reality hit Danielle. It was like she realised for the first time what it had come to. “My kidneys have failed. I’m going to need a kidney.” And Danielle broke down’. But while the young woman was weak and naturally frightened, she was as determined as ever to do things her way. So Sue didn’t resist when Danielle insisted on going to the hairdresser before they travelled—it was important to her to look elegant for the trip.
The plan was for Danielle to be assessed by her medical team in Melbourne, in readiness for a combined pancreas and kidney transplant. But the plan would never be put into action.