CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FEISTY AND INTELLIGENT WOMEN

There are two things a real man likes—danger and play: and he likes woman because she is the most dangerous of playthings.

Nietzsche

Of all the spoils a millionaire could enjoy, Gordon Barton was a man who described beautiful and intelligent women as the most pleasurable luxury in the world. In his university days, driving a truck and smelling of animal hides and grease, he saw such creatures as far from reach, ‘I had a Cinderella feeling of fascination for demimondaines’. Barton fell for women easily and they fell for him. He had a little-boy’s vulnerability that led women to want to mother him. Nonetheless, he often found it difficult to extricate himself from women—leading to complications.

Marion Manton would remain one of Barton’s closest friends and confidantes throughout his life. She recalls him declaring many times while he was with Vonnie, ‘I will marry you one day when I get my divorce’. He didn’t really mean it and while Marion understood this, many smitten women took his proposals as gospel. Admits Marion, ‘We all knew that Vonnie was the great love of his life, but it didn’t bother us that . . . he was such an outrageous flirt. He was also very attractive and entertaining company.’

When stopping over in New York, Barton would give his girlfriends Marion’s New York number so they could find out where he was and what he was doing. They would call Marion, pestering her with, ‘Why is he staying with you? He’s promised that he’d marry me.’ Nonetheless, if a woman was interesting enough, Barton would stick with her through thick and thin. Over the decades he never lost contact with Marion Manton, for example.

John Crew doesn’t think Barton had a particularly high regard for women. Lawyer Aleco Vrisakis, who would represent and befriend Barton in the years ahead, agrees Barton was a man’s man—that he put women in a different compartment to men.

After Vonnie’s death, Barton would develop a pattern of relationships with women who had come from Catholic convent schools. They included Gretel Pinniger (Sydney’s notorious Madam Lash) as well as fashion editor and publicist Mary Ellen Ayrton (who would become Barton’s long-time partner). Some believed Barton was discovering his wild side.

Around September 1969, Barton met Judith Todd—the daughter of Garfield Todd, a former New Zealand missionary who had become prime minister of Rhodesia. Todd was, in Barton’s words, a ‘tawny-eyed beauty with long dark hair’ and he was quickly smitten not only by her beauty but by her protest against white oppression in Africa. Marion Manton recalls Barton’s excited plans that he and Todd would live together. He became so enamoured, that when the time came for her departure from Sydney he penned a piece for the Sunday Observer.

Rhodesia’s Bernadette Devlin? Black Africa’s white Joan of Arc?
Judith Todd’s unique one-girl crusade against white oppression in Africa inspires these comparisons . . . Todd lies under restriction at his farm on the Ngezi River—an opponent of the present right-wing racist regime. His daughter travels the world to campaign against Ian Smith’s illegal Rhodesian regime. She is well aware of what could happen if she returned home. Recent laws provide penalty of two years imprisonment for anyone supporting continuing British-sponsored UN sanctions against Rhodesia.

‘All opponents of the regime such as leaders of the two major African political parties are in gaol or concentration camps . . . All effective political opposition has been smashed.’

As for marriage?

‘It may come,’ she said, ‘but I’m not pursuing it.’

This attractive, softly spoken friend of humanity may leave some broken hearts behind her when she leaves Australia.

Gordon Barton’s would be one of those.

Barton would soon commence an affair with a much younger woman related to him through Vonnie. The girl was soon besotted by Barton, and willing to cater to anything he suggested. She quickly came to know what he liked. Observed Rosemary O’Grady, ‘She was totally dominating.’ In public, the young girl began to be possessive of Barton. Friends recall how she would drape herself all over him. Though she was naïve and unsophisticated, Barton seems to have appreciated her joie de vivre.

In June 1970 Barton was keen to pay his respects at the grave of the recently assassinated Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara had taken a year off in 1951 to journey through South America by motorcycle. Like Barton, Guevara had also read Bertrand Russell. His travels and readings had convinced him that the region’s socioeconomic inequalities could be remedied only by socialism through revolution. They influenced his vision of Latin America as a single entity in need of a continent-wide strategy for liberation—a borderless, united land sharing a common culture. Fascinated by Guevara’s life and ideas, Barton was keen to travel in his footsteps. He invited his young lover to accompany him, and over four weeks the pair travelled through Bolivia, Peru and Columbia.

During August and September 1972 Barton left his young children with the Hands and spent time in Europe, particularly London. He rented the top floor of a Knightsbridge house owned by Lady Antonia Fraser. The connection came through his friend, journalist Jonathan Aitken, who was then having an affair with Fraser. (Aitken would go on to become a Conservative MP, have a relationship with Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol, and later with Soraya Khashoggi, ex-wife of arms dealer Adnan. A minister under John Major from 1992, Aitken would ultimately serve seven months in prison for perjury.)

Barton’s young lover was living in London also and he took her to the enormous war cemetery in Verdun, France, with its wide expanse of graves of those who had died in the Great War. On her return to Sydney, he set her up in a sandstock cottage he owned at 22 South Street, Edgecliff. When Barton’s father George died, he also installed his mother in a luxurious three-bedroom Darling Point apartment. Furnished in pale, shimmering oyster, it gave her 180-degree views of Sydney Harbour. When she wanted to visit friends, a chauffeur would call for her in the Mercedes.

Interviewed for Vogue magazine by Daphne Guinness over lunch at Sydney’s power and society restaurant—Beppi’s—in May 1972, Barton was lured into a discussion on the differences between the sexes. He declared, ‘Women find it difficult to establish several close relationships with women’. Guinness pushed him to expand further. While admitting that ‘it might destroy my private life’, in his next breath Barton explained. ‘Men for example make love with their minds, women make love with their emotions and their bodies. Of course, though, there’s one respect in which I envy women. Reputedly they can have a dozen orgasms in a row. Very few men would I think ever claim more than three, even when exceptionally full of vitamins and very fit.’

As Guinness ordered sparkling mineral water and Barton unloaded further, it must have become clear that when Barton claimed, ‘It’s only men who have this very rich and very fruitful fantasy life’, he was talking from personal experience. He was adamant that while ‘women do have fantasies . . . they’re not sexual fantasies . . . Men use their imaginations a great deal more.’

At the end of 1971 a sexually naïve 25-year-old Catholic woman, Rosemary O’Grady, wrote to Barton to thank him for enlivening a dull year of study with his attack on the stock exchange rules. She had just gained entry to a law degree. In December 1971 the pair met in Adelaide and Barton took the young woman to a long lunch. He had an evening press conference at the Hotel Australia, so he entrusted his car to Rosemary, suggesting she call for him in two hours’ later and they could continue where they left off. That night they talked into the small hours over a bottle of Drambuie, sitting on facing beds in Rosemary’s room as she mended Barton’s socks. The next day she took him on an outing into the Adelaide Hills. Barton bought some art for his new Vaucluse house and a stone amphora for Rosemary. She quickly became besotted.

Rosemary recalls that in Adelaide Barton was largely his own man, which meant there was time for ‘long, quiet talks’. Over frequent meals together the pair would discuss the resources boom, universities, the Dutch East Indies, religion, freedom, birth control, sexual ethics and Noam Chomsky as well as nuclear weapons and the French.

Rosemary’s diary records the first night Barton lit a fire in his new Vaucluse home. She was with him as the place filled with smoke. They opened every door, letting the May chill flow in from the garden. Under blazing lights and an undraped expanse of glass the pair stood, shivering before the roaring fire, their eyes stinging from the smoke. On the carpet they wrestled like children. In conquering her, Barton sat on her chest, pinned her arms under his legs and laughed at her. She tackled him in turn, until again he had her pinned down and helpless.

To Rosemary it was clear Barton was in need of a wife. She in turn felt in need of a husband. Rosemary felt their interests were aligned and their temperaments matched. Not only that, she knew how to care for children and was willing to transfer her studies to Sydney.

With his hectic life, Barton’s women found he was always arriving and departing—never staying. Rosemary craved closeness, but knew she must keep a ‘dignified distance’. Usually too busy for a meal, he might visit her after work in Adelaide, so tired he had trouble keeping his eyes open. He would not sleep with, or let himself be nursed by her. When he left, it would be, ‘It was nice to see you’, and Rosemary would wonder why he came, what he wanted with her.

When Rosemary did visit Sydney in 1972, Barton seemed to find it quaint that she would never stay overnight when there were others in the Castle Cove house. To her it was simply good manners. Rosemary would find the sexual licence of Barton and many of his friends to be at odds with her own views on monogamy.

Perhaps concerned Rosemary was about to park herself permanently in Sydney, Barton suggested instead that she return to Adelaide, finish her first year of Law, then return to Sydney where they would tie the knot. He punctuated this proposal with a hug before fleeing the room. In retrospect, Rosemary suspects the reason Barton fled lay in his discomfort in revealing his particular sexual interests.

Rosemary recalls returning with Barton to his Vaucluse house one night shortly after he suggested she return to Adelaide. It was late. Barton’s much younger lover suddenly appeared from his suite. Rosemary will never forget the immediate lecture she received from the girl on why she ought not to marry Barton.

Faced with these sorts of scenes, other women came to loathe the young girl. Like them, she was desperate to keep Barton for herself.

Graham Cooke’s assistant and Allens’ corporate secretary Liz Weeding admits she fell in love with Barton the moment she met him in May 1963. Sharp as a tack and often ahead of the Allens lawyers, a decade later Barton poached Liz from his friend. She came to work at Tjuringa’s Pitt Street headquarters in September 1973, managing much of Tjuringa’s legal paperwork in relation to its acquisitions. Promoted to Tjuringa company secretary, she was soon in a position of power. With unfettered access to Barton, Liz would become not only mothering but incredibly protective of him. She had a knack of hunting down just the right eccentric outfit to satisfy Barton’s tastes for fancy dress. At one stage she sourced for his amusement a formal British governor’s outfit, complete with elaborate gold thread stitching. They developed a relationship and Liz was given a company car and eventually installed in the same tiny one-bedroom sandstock cottage on the edge of Paddington that Barton’s much younger lover had recently occupied.

In April 1974, Woman’s Day magazine ran an eight-page feature on Barton, spread over two weeks. By the story’s third paragraph, journalist Pat Miller had outed Barton’s promiscuous habits. ‘Well, you don’t go to the same restaurant all the time even if you like the cooking. Firstly, I’m not married, which enables me to have relationships with a large number of women. I can do this without going through all the legal and moral hassles which usually attend that.’ He did not want to marry again. Once, he had been keen on having more children—not just one but a dynasty—perhaps ten.

Revelations of five girlfriends in various parts of the world scandalised Sydney. Of course money and power—an empire of over 300 companies with assets of $60 million—inoculated Barton from his critics. One woman friend admitted in the story that Barton ‘says having sex with someone is a normal sort of thing if you’re friendly with them . . . as long as there isn’t going to be any hassle’. In Malcolm Turnbull’s Honi Soit interview a few months later he asked Barton whether he thought his reputation as a serious politician had been damaged by the Woman’s Day articles. Barton tackled the question head on. ‘I am not willing to make any compromises in the way in which I organise my private life . . . a man’s first responsibility is to enjoy his own life and his second responsibility is to try to create a situation where others can enjoy theirs . . . I wouldn’t like a country to be run by someone that had such a perverted sense of values as the traditional martyr-like figures of popular imagination. Usually these sort of people were sybarites at heart and flagellated themselves in an orgy of compensation.’

Liz Weeding had by now come to know Barton intimately.

He’s romantic in a non-involved way. He says we’ve got the best relationship—composed of affection, respect and convenience . . . The main problem . . . is that I know too much about him, and sometimes he resents it. He’s terrified of anyone knowing too much about him.

Barton bought Liz designer dresses and expensive jewellery, and colleagues started to assume the pair would marry. Barton was never a faithful partner and Liz recalls that she ‘would rant and rave and carry on like a fishwife, but it didn’t have any effect’. She tolerated Barton’s sexual appetite because she was rapt in him and she did not feel threatened by Barton’s other women. She rested on her belief that she was at least his ‘number one’. That was until Mary Ellen came into his life.

Liz recalls accompanying Barton to the opening of Angus &Robertson’s Perth store. The following night they returned together to Vaucluse. They had a dreadful row and Liz walked out into the harbour, her wet dress plastering her body, sealing in her anguish. A picture of her in that dress beside Barton sits on her bookcase to remind her how stupid she was about the man.

Barton and Liz Weeding publicly remained an item through January 1975, although when the pair visited Adelaide together Barton confessed to Rosemary O’Grady that he was sleeping not just with Liz but two other women. He needed empathy in a partner, he said. Early in 1975 he was still searching.

Peter Janson, who by 1975 had taken on some responsibility for coordinating Barton’s sexual trysts in Melbourne, claims it was he who introduced Barton to Mary Ellen Ayrton. He had already taken the measure of this independent and feisty woman, but could not afford to indulge her luxury tastes and besides, he was never one to commit to a relationship. He insisted that Mary Ellen, glamorous and beautifully groomed, an energetic career woman and networker, would be ideal for Barton. So confident was he of their compatibility, Janson would find many ways in the years ahead to call in favours for his introduction.

The public face of Estee Lauder, as its promotions and publicity director, Mary Ellen Ayrton had thrived in the world of fashion and beauty. She was the daughter of an Eastern Suburbs doctor, who had instilled in her a strong work ethic. From the age of twelve, she worked her school holidays in the local Double Bay newsagency. She started as the tea girl for Australian Consolidated Press, where she completed a cadetship on the Australian Women’s Weekly. Four years later, in 1965, she won the Young Vogue Talent Contest. This gave her a job on Vogue Australia. Appointed beauty editor under Sheila Scotter, she began to write much of the copy for the magazine and came to know its publisher Bernie Leser (who would remain a close friend).

Her husband, Tony Ayrton, was from a well-to-do wool-buying family with a house at Palm Beach. In the 1960s, Sydney’s northernmost beach was not only beautiful but elegant and classy—a haven for old, moneyed families. By the time she had her daughter in October 1969, she had landed a job with Helena Rubinstein in Melbourne. Charming and persuasive, Mary Ellen loved both the glamour and creativity of the cosmetics industry. However, it was always going to be a space where wealth was a prerequisite to full enjoyment.

By the early 1970s, the international market for Australian wool was collapsing. Mary Ellen’s wool-buyer husband was made redundant. As her career escalated and Tony struggled with problems of his own, their marriage foundered. Her husband’s personal problems mounted and he had walked out of the marriage in October 1972.

Barton and Mary Ellen certainly had traits in common. Both were always on the go and workaholics. Both thrived on variety. ‘I don’t think you should ever close your mind to something new’, she would say in a 1979 media interview.

As a high-profile promotions director, one person Mary Ellen well understood how to sell was herself. However, as their dating became more serious, some of Barton’s old friends from transport, politics, Tjuringa and university became perplexed. Not everybody could be Barton’s intellectual equal, but compared to down-to-earth idealists such as Vonnie and Rosemary O’Grady, some held the view that Mary Ellen was superficial and insincere. Some women were jealous. Many just didn’t see the attraction and couldn’t accept that Barton and Mary Ellen were falling deeply in love.

Barton had admitted to a reporter back in 1966, ‘I’m not good at spending money. I’ve never been taught how.’ While he had a penchant for large, white Mercedes, this was more for the space and safety element. In a Vogue interview in 1972 Barton had explained:

Although I could afford it, I would find it psychologically difficult to sustain for example a big yacht with paid crew on board . . . I even blush at the idea of having, say an expensive sports car . . . I find I get a little embarrassed about spending money on something that isn’t productive . . . on paintings, on wine, on things that have no other justification than just to enjoy them.

Mary Ellen had no such qualms.

Life with his in-laws and two young children at Vaucluse was not the stimulating company Barton had been used to with Vonnie. Liz Weeding suspects this is one reason Barton became renowned for stimulating dinner parties. With the help of his full-time housekeeper, Frances Knight, Barton was apt to throw together some extraordinary combinations of guests at short notice. Some friends recall being invited for drinks at Vaucluse before being herded into an IPEC truck and driven around Sydney, sitting unceremoniously in the windowless interior. Once unloaded, no-one would have any idea where they were—especially when Barton chose East Sydney’s No Names Italian eatery.

Barton took great amusement from asking friends to guess who it was sitting next to them, ‘Marion, I want you to guess who this is’. One night it might be Edward de Bono, the next time Theodore Geisel (author of the Dr Seuss books) or the prime minister of some obscure island republic. Occasional guests Bob Hawke, Lionel Murphy and Don Chipp were rather more recognisable. Memorable dinner parties included one in 1976 with Lord Snowdon, who had arrived to photograph Barton for an American Express ad. As the candles flickered over the dining table, the famous photographer had entranced Barton and Mary Ellen as he showed them the art of making a portrait with a polaroid camera.

For Barton it was often all about orchestrating unusual combinations of diverse personalities from all walks of life. He would bring together the eccentric Francis James, Madam Lash, standover man Tim Bristow and judge Sir Laurence Street at one dinner. Another would include Prime Minister John Gorton, Ainsley Gotto and feminist Germaine Greer. Mary Ellen recalls an unforgettable exchange between Ainsley and Germaine, prompted by Ainsley’s question, ‘So Germaine, tell us what’s all this feminism about?’ Once assembled, guests would attack the issues of the day hammer and tongs. Given Barton’s nocturnal nature, some of these dinners would go on late into the night.

Rosemary O’Grady was a Vaucluse house guest for the Australia Day weekend of 1975. Barton threw a dinner party for friends on the Saturday night. As the night wore on, Barton and Mary Ellen swapped their pewter wine goblets for joints. Declining the offer, Rosemary recalls feeling decidedly unsophisticated.

It was midday the next day before Barton and Mary Ellen surfaced. In a weekly family tradition, Barton took the family to lunch at the nearby Doyles at Watsons Bay. This day the atmosphere was somewhat strained. Rosemary will never forget the symbolism of Mary Ellen’s crab dish—its huge spiky claws extending across the table towards her.

As Barton’s relationship with Mary Ellen strengthened, his liaisons with other women became less regular. Guilt and jealousy, particularly the latter, polluted Barton’s Vaucluse home in the mid-1970s. Rosemary sometimes felt Barton deliberately encouraged jealousy.

Housekeeper Frances Knight was finding it impossible to manage Barton’s home. He was one to stay up late working and sleep in late. To Frances this was hardly a good example for the children. She fretted as Cindie became forever jealous of her father’s girlfriends and Geoffrey was in danger of growing estranged from his father. While Barton liked what he called ‘man-manipulators’, he was finding it incredibly difficult to extricate himself from the young woman who had become so obsessed with him since their trip to South America.

By now Geoffrey and Cindie were enrolled at well-known private schools—Cranbrook and Ascham respectively. Parents of their classmates as well as neighbours had heard of Barton’s reputation with women. His backing of the radical and rather racy Nation Review was also well known. To socially conscious parents, close association with Barton or his offspring tainted them. Many were uncomfortable letting their children play at the Bartons’ Vaucluse home.

Rosemary O’Grady was again a Vaucluse house guest in May 1975. She observed ‘his marionette frame, habitually spare and restrained in a conservative suit and leather chair’. Usually Barton would be quiet as a cat, thoughtful and distant. There were times though when he would laugh aloud, curse, exaggerate his latest feat and command attention.

Frances Knight would confide in Rosemary she was on the verge of resigning. She had taken a positive dislike to Mary Ellen and had gone out of her way to make it difficult for her to stay over. Tensions mounted further as Cindie Barton became jealous of the new woman in her father’s life. Says Kate Ayrton, Frances ‘resented my mother being there and she resented me being there, just as Cindie did’.

However, having broken her shoulder, at Barton’s insistence Mary Ellen, her five-year-old daughter Kate and their two cats moved in, temporarily abandoning their Double Bay waterfront apartment. Mary Ellen recalls Kate would come down for breakfast with the two Barton children. The housekeeper would permit her to sit at the table, but Kate would be offered nothing. ‘I’m not paid to serve your daughter,’ Mary Ellen recalls Frances Knight announcing, in front of the children. With her one good arm, it would be left to Mary Ellen to fix her daughter’s breakfast. The new arrivals also meant the histrionics from Barton’s jilted younger lover were at crisis point.

It was Monday night, 12 May 1975. Mary Ellen ‘lounged like a tiger’ in front of the fire, ‘her skin burnished and rich’, observed Rosemary O’Grady. The children were being bathed. Barton had begun to read Rosemary a letter from some woman admirer. Rosemary refused to listen. Her diary recalls the tension that was evident after dinner between Mary Ellen, Barton and housekeeper Frances Knight. It was close to midnight when Rosemary took the chance to escape the house, taking the dog for a walk. Barton caught up with her and the pair walked along the foreshore with a stiff breeze coming off the sea. A ship at anchor in the cove started to pitch. A storm looked to be gathering.

Barton was troubled and needed desperately to talk. He explained to Rosemary that he felt his need for women—to mother, to feed, to minister to his sexual desires—was a stumbling block. Given the increasing tensions between the women in his life, Barton had come to curse his own sexual needs. His relationships had clearly veered out of control. He was tired of the jealousies and histrionics. Lovers were trouble. Would he, Cindie and Geoffrey not do as well if not better on their own? His resentment was palpable.

He confessed to his own vanity, to his sexual appetite. But this one obsessional lover was driving everyone in his household mad. Her demands on his time, on his energy and goodwill had become insatiable. That night sleep was repeatedly interrupted by her calls. Barton took each patiently. He hung up from one at 3 am, only to get another at 4.30. In the Vaucluse house there hung a pervading sense of adults behaving badly, wrote Rosemary in her diary. The last entry for her stay read: ‘He says all this trauma will be over next time I come. I doubt it.’

Whether at a social function or just arriving home from a day at the office, Mary Ellen would whirl into a room with a maelstrom of superlatives and flattery. Tjuringa adviser Bill Pursche thought she was a mistake. Their lives ‘seemed to turn into a fairly shallow sort of society life then’ he recollects. Pursche doesn’t believe Barton was comfortable in that world.

Whatever friends thought, there is no doubt a great love was blooming between the pair. Their children could not help but notice. ‘They were besotted with each other . . . There was a tremendous energy between them . . . very affectionate and physical . . . always all over each other,’ recalls Mary Ellen’s daughter Kate. ‘Without them intending it’, admits Kate, ‘I do think that they neglected us a bit emotionally sometimes . . . they were so in love with each other that sometimes everybody else sort of faded a little bit into the background.’

Architect Peter Muller hosted them when he lived in Bronte House and recalls their ‘terrific rapport’. Fred Gardiner recalls that at IPEC functions, ‘She’d throw her arms around you. Kiss you left side, right side . . . of course the women would be left standing back.’ Mary Ellen usually failed to even acknowledge other women in the room. But while she rubbed up the wives of Barton’s colleagues and staff no end, there is no doubt that as a networker and hostess she was invaluable to Barton.

Marion Manton returned from New York in 1976 and lived in Barton’s Vaucluse house for at least six months. The pair picked up their relationship as if she had been gone only a week, Marion sharing Barton’s enormous waterbed. That was, until one evening Marion recalls Mary Ellen came by and discovered the arrangement. She ‘freaked out’, putting on a star turn at her partner’s disloyalty, Manton recalls. Marion moved out of the bed, moving her clothes upstairs to a small maid’s room, though it didn’t stop her sneaking back into Barton’s four-poster from time to time.

Friends recall Barton hosting huge parties at Loch Maree from time to time. A rather fey host—he didn’t appear to make any effort—Barton would ensure he invited an interesting, eclectic group, then stand back and let it happen. Everything somehow fell into place. Barton’s friends were very much at ease in his company. At these gatherings some would stay on and on, falling asleep at the table or on the floor. Solicitor and Liberal Reform candidate John Mant recalls some great parties—the booze and the drugs. Friends would stand on the balcony overlooking the blue of the harbour and remark, ‘It’s rather Great Gatsby’.

Harry Wallace, Tjuringa’s ex-general manager, and his wife Pat remember Barton’s Vaucluse house-warming. There had been live music and over a hundred guests—artist friends, journalists, publishers and old political colleagues. Pat Wallace laughs at the memory of probing the wave-motion of Barton’s waterbed together with Lionel Murphy.

During one of Paul Hamlyn’s visits to Sydney, Barton hosted a party at Loch Maree in his honour. One friend, Chris Dos Remedios, remembers there were a lot of people—including restauranteur Tony Bilson, and Gretel Pinniger. ‘What a lovely dress!’ he recalls remarking of Gretel’s caramel-coloured dress. As he drew closer the unusual pattern took shape, couples copulating—men and women, men and men, women and women—just small enough you needed to be within half a metre to make them out.