The Madman's Muse

Charcoal outlines the curves of a woman’s body, drawn with the hand of someone who is no stranger to its depths. The willing subject lays blissfully naked on a lounge, or perhaps it is the floor? It doesn’t really matter in this painting, there are no boundaries, the floors become the walls and the walls blend into one. A blue ambience penetrates the room, smothering the space and the curvy woman seemingly surrenders to the shade. The walls further bear homage to the naked figure, as preliminary sketches – equally as sensual – hang haphazardly from its corners.

The woman in the picture is Wendy Whiteley, the man behind the easel is Brett Whitely and if we are to take anything from the lines sprawled so freely but with such accurate interpretation on the page, it is that they are, what we modern romantics like to call, in love. Or perhaps more perceptibly, he is in love with her. This here is a wild passionate kind of love that spawns from the depths of sexual desire, intellectual attraction, spiralling addiction and a certain dependency on each other in a world where, for these two, nothing is reliable.

It seems, as each brushstroke would have it, that she was the even greater woman behind the great man.

“They were crazy about each other. They were hot for each other. There was a huge sexual vibe around them all the time. She was beautiful and she knew a lot about art and she was street-wise, and I think that she was, right from the age of being about 15 or 16, very much his teacher in a lot of ways. She was the love of his life. I mean, he never...I don't think that Brett ever loved anyone - anyone - the way he loved Wendy.” (FRANNIE HOPKIRK – BRETT WHITELEY’S SISTER, The Australian Story 2004)

It was ten years before this scene was created that Wendy Julius met Brett Whiteley in what many have described as a perfect storybook scenario, a scene from an updated forties film. In other words, as two aspiring artists, they got it right. In her black stockings and big dresses, Wendy was as conspicuous as Brett around the coffee shops, wine bars and jazz cellars in the heart of the 1957 city– though she was then only fifteen. She was the daughter of Daphnie May McKenzie and George Julius, the ‘black sheep’ son of the distinguished Sir George Julius, inventor and founder of the CSIRO. At the impressionable age of six, her parents divorced, leaving Wendy to cultivate an air of distrust and discontentment, put in place to ensure difficulties for her future relationships.

Wendy had attended Lindfield Public School where she was considered a “difficult” student but following the trend of many a difficult student, she was regarded as extremely gifted. She won art awards and a David Jones Drawing Prize, which helped offset the costs of East Sydney Technical College where she studies drawing. She left home, shared a flat with friends in Kirribilli, worked as a waitress and a sales girl and continued attending east Sydney Tafe in bare feet and homemade furnishing fabric smocks. When the lights went out and the kids came out to play, her look collaged tight denim, big hair, heavy makeup and a beatnik bravado. Fifteen year-olds weren’t what they are now, and this lady had it together. ‘Look at that’, Brett is supposed to have marvelled when he spotted Wendy at Jericho’s, a basement coffee shop in Rowe street noted for its strong coffees and thick soups, ‘I’d never be able to score a woman like that’. But score Brett did, and it was in this bohemian ambience that Brett and Wendy commenced what she later called their ‘inevitable’ association.

The next four years were a tumultuous ride for Wendy as Brett channelled his combustible energy, uncontrollable lust and inner musings through a paintbrush and various other materials. Wendy stayed at home while Brett travelled through Europe after winning the Italian Travelling Scholarship; however she worked double time waiting on tables eighteen hours a day to get the money together to join him. Tony McGillick recalled Wendy as the beautiful young girl of Whiteley’s mythology, always gliding about in the background, keeping an eye on things. She would attempt to keep the framework in which Brett operated under some kind of control. ‘She invented him’ said Lenore Nicklin, ‘the his-and-hers costumes, the fancy dress, the style. He went from being a correctly dressed crew cut lad to this exotic creature who wafted about in kaftans’.

In the summer of 1961, after several months of touring the continent, Brett and Wendy stepped off a train at London’s Paddington Station. Brett was twenty-two, completely unknown and entirely clueless as to how to crack the London art scene, and Wendy at only twenty was the woman who would stick blindly by his side no matter what station he chose to disembark. Biographer Graham Blundell reflects that they seemed to be instinctively drawn to wherever it was happening: in this case, Paddington – the cheapest area of London known to accommodate wandering Australians. They rented studio at 129 Ladbroke Grove, just up the road from Notting Hill, where the ‘brothers’ played the best jazz, ska and blue beat – and smoked the best dope.

Thus began the wild and passionate demise into the heart of the art culture- and in due turn, the drug and alcohol culture- that would define and enslave Wendy as she worked to keep up with her wayward lover.

“There was no serious intention to become addicts. But in the usual way, you think you can go on with having a little bit more. One day you wake up and find you're very ill when you haven’t got it. But in order to actually live that life, you've got to crawl out of bed, you've got to find the hideous - usually hideous - dealer, and you've got to butter yourself up to them, or sit in a room somewhere for hours, you know, with absolutely tedious, ghastly people.” (WENDY WHITELEY, September 2004)

At the peak of his success, the young artist and his blue-eyed muse were married on the 27th March 1962, at the Chelsea Registry office. The groom in a haircut and suit and the bride in turquoise wool with a wide brimmed hat lined in brown. They honeymooned at Sigean on the south coast of France, a little town with peasant houses painted blue and pines punctuating the otherwise flat expansive countryside. They lived for three months in an isolated workers cottage in the middle of the vine-covered fields. Wendy remembered this as the closest she had had to having a home in the sixties.

In November 1967- after returning to Australia, tiring of that landscape, and once again setting abroad- the family headed back to New York. Shortly after their arrival Wendy had the desire to create The Put On, an antique fur boutique with her friend Liz Sheridan. Sandra McGrath, a close friend to both Wendy and Brett, speculates that ‘the women realised that running their own business was the only way they could guarantee their financial independence, security and personal freedom’.

“Brett never liked me working, which he explained quite carefully to being about his mother leaving as soon as she got her finances together and she got the independence. He threatened me with divorce when I first was gonna open the shop in New York, and I just said, "Oh, well."

The power play between Brett and Wendy in their personal and sexual lives continued unabated when they moved back to Sydney in 1969 to rent an old style Victorian house in Lavender Bay. Filmmaker Jan Sharp had many opportunities to observe the process. ‘Brett was mining Wendy,’ she said. ‘He hated the fact that he loved her so much, the way she survived whatever he did to her. Brett constantly seduced new girls and Wendy had to win him back. “He ran away with a woman called Constance Abernathy for a few weeks’. Recalls Wendy in an Interview for The Australian Story in September 2004. ‘She thought Brett was terrific stuff, very entertaining, very marvellous, so she carefully explained to me we should share his genius. And he was intrigued and had a good time. Then she fell down an elevator shaft and started complaining and he arrived home, abandoning her, I might add, poor thing, with no teeth’. You just know that Wendy is laughing smugly on the inside. In time their relationship became peculiarly Euripidean, a battle to the death. ‘’We watched it unfold like a brutal apache dance. You always felt it must have been great to be Brett but not so good to be Wendy”. Wendy didn’t sit back and take the mental abuse lightly, and responded to her husband’s neglect by becoming wilful, domineering and turning her attentions elsewhere. Michael O’Driscoll became a friend of the Whiteleys around 1970 and by the time he entered their lives Brett and Wendy were fighting with true flair.

“[Brett] was going to the studio more and more often and he was mucking up a bit. A few little, you know, nymphettes going around there after the genius and stuff that he'd get involved with briefly. I'd go round there bad-tempered and mad and I got a lover. I'm not quite sure why. I was feeling pretty low and he was a gorgeous person. I mean, he was an amazing person. Unfortunately, another rather self-destructive person in the end, but I thought I was in love - I thought I was in love. Michael Driscoll was a romantic figure. This was a bard, a poet, a singer.”

The battle between Brett and Driscoll for Wendy was a creative one, both deriving great energy from it and putting that towards creative purpose, however the affair was ultimately superseded by their worsening addiction to drugs. Wendy’s indecision led Brett to the realisation that if ‘Wendy wasn’t there as a muse, it was all pointless’, and with a world of wealth up his sleeve, sealed himself in an endless supply of heroin. Wendy was inevitably pulled into the routine with him and she slowly started to loose touch with the world outside their Lavender Bay apartment. While her husband had painting and the accolades that came with it, Wendy had nothing but the drug. On April 2nd 1977, Wendy was arrested and charged with possessing heroin and attempting to take thousands of dollars in cash out of the country. She pleaded guilty to drug and currency charges in Midland Court, Perth and was quickly placed in a treatment program to rid herself of the addiction. It was decided that London was the best place for a detox and so off she went to stay, leaving her husband and his paper dreams behind.

The divorce was imminent. Wendy returned from England having broken with heroin and in her absence Brett had found another woman to occupy his thoughts and his bed. ‘I'd gone in another direction and I wasn't prepared to go back into - as much as I was still very attracted to Brett and loved him - I wasn't going back in there. It was too dangerous for me’. A little more than ten years later her husband would be found, encapsulating the ultimate tortured artist cliché, dead in a hotel room with a needle in his arm.

Ultimately, it becomes increasingly difficult to write on Wendy Whiteley without unfairly overshadowing her life with the all-encompassing ball of eclectic energy that is her far more famous husband. After all, there have been 6 biographies written on Brett with only a handful of paragraphs in total mentioning Wendy. She remains a shadow, not even important enough to earn her own page on wikipedia. Was it that she didn’t have enough of an impact on the art scene or on Brett Whiteley’s life and therefore not considered worthy enough for mention? I don’t think so- his paintings tell us that much. What we can see however is that the intensity of their relationship was such that Wendy sublimated her own creative life to Brett.