He’s been given an honorary doctorate for lyrics that aren’t even his.
Oh well, he can’t be regarded as Jonathon Swift anymore can he?
When I suggested that he should listen and read Bob Dylan to become a better lyricist. He laughed and said he didn’t like Bob Dylan. I said, “Don’t laugh his lyrics are studied at university, he is studied as a poet.” He said he wanted what we were writing to be studied at university one day. “Don’t you mean my writing. I had sat for half the honours programme in Australian poetry. One year in I left.
Back at home just afterwards I dated men who also had big futures, they knew bigger names, names beyond his wildest imagination.
Elite business and political realms, that was where I was more comfortable. But there, I was in danger I didn’t have our powerful friends and family there. I had the scum of the Antipodes ready to obscure who they were plus I had danger from a man who stole to get a good payment from a label. He was desperate to be signed and had been without a contract for a year, even with work he portrayed as his.
After that I just had to die, disappear and cease to exist, it was necessary to traumatize so heavily that I could no longer write, that I could no longer remember them. It didn’t suit them to be the formidable woman I could be and that I was raised to be.
If I had a bigger boyfriend he would throw a narcissistic tantrum, an “owning” tantrum, and an owning of work tantrum. He wouldn’t allow me to go unfettered. I just permitted to. I half ignored him. He couldn’t touch me here could he?
He loved withholding money and seeing me squirm. I was worried that people could find out and think that I took drugs or was in the party scene. I wasn’t like him. I was 100% not a drug taker. I was ashamed of some of them and tried to keep the worlds separate. As I said to someone I met straight after who was very entrenched in the industry, I liked the ones who weren’t famous. Famous people are terrible people. They say you never want to meet your heroes.
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I was in a different sphere, a polished and upper sphere right next to people who either were or knew some of the most important people in the world. Some guy who was from a band with a needle sticking out of one arm and prostitute on the other wasn’t someone with whom I wanted to be associated. Plus at Sydney we just didn’t like or respect that style of music. This was an indie and alternative scene, we were bright young things, we saw alternative bands together and there were bands in the Sydney Union Building on campus on level 3 on Wednesday at lunchtime. I told them that they would have played there. Some of the bands to play there became the biggest bands in the world. No one respected manufactured pop, we all listened to Triple J and one of the announcers was in our Patrick White tutorial. They were all tutorials for Nobel Laureate Patrick White.
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He just forced someone under the threat of trauma and abuse to write for him so he could give the pretence that he, too, is a writer. Forever afterwards I had to be ‘disrupt-able’ and there were many pre-emptive attacks. He sent people who were regarded to be stalkers and psychopaths to do the job that other people would not do. Once he committed fraud, he told me he couldn’t take it back, “I told everyone they are mine, and now I have signed contracts and accepted money for it.”
He told me that he had to change my destiny.
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He said I had to die or disappear for it or else, like that part in the movie, when someone powerful threatens you he said to me, “I can make look crazy.” “Nothing good for you love, tell anyone and I will deny it, I will have you destroyed for it. “Don’t say anything love, you gonna look crazy, and you know what will happen to you, you know it will, because of the way you are, people won’t believe you.”
Then with shades of Coercive Control, and echo of a partner who participates in domestic violence, through bared teeth he said “I don’t want it love, I don’t want that to happen to you. But it will.” “I can’t have people know that this is where my work from.”
Not all were famous then, and they were the best ones. When I returned home, I said to a man who was in the music industry in my MBA. I said this famous man was calling me and bothering me, “I tell him to stop, but he just keeps calling.” “He tells me to stop dating anyone powerful, from a big firm or wealthy. “Nothing good for you love. Nothing good for you. You can’t be with someone like that, not now, I will ruin his life too.” His threats were imbued with that in England too.
My therapist said to me, there were two options they for the men they were making a show of destroying me in front of. Option one, do nothing. Option two turn yourself inside out trying to do something but still not be able to.
The truth sets people free and back in Australia at university I was in my element. No longer was I around streetwise shysters from the wrong side of the tracks who were willing to do anything to be famous. To me that was a room of people who seemed willing to do anything to be famous.
He seemed to have a short circuit in his head. He hadn’t finished school but wanted unlimited power so he was thug-like to some women and polite to others. Very charming, on the borderline of smarmy. He was never going to be in politics, and he didn’t understand many, many laws, but that didn’t bother him, like many other white men at the time he didn’t think he needed to obey them. He considered himself to be of that class of men to which laws simply do not apply, a bit like some of the paedophiles. He seemed to be taking a leaf out of the book of lawlessness. Hence why so many inured and forced women and men were in his circle. He thought that, like some of his friends, who were well-known lawbreakers, some people should just be untouchable by the law, and “aren’t we the privileged few.”
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If he made the right moves, and finagled access to unlimited power, he could buy, shyster, and force his way into that elite group of being beyond police questioning and that of judges. He would happily sit there and perjure himself if required. No conscience means no problems. No one was ever going to be brave enough to give evidence to the contrary, and besides, he could just use blunt force and the media loved him, as a media darling he could get away with any rape, any inurnment, and forcing anyone to do anything at anytime.
Imagine for a minute in theory, the most popular or most powerful man in the world. If he forced or coerced someone to have sex. Slept with someone underage or did something illegal. If he good looking and standing and seeks out the right people to stand next to, police will never even take a call. He knows how to shut people down, how to rattle the sabre. How to flex, how to psych people out. Guys like these just involve innocent people in making them untouchable.
What he did confide in me though, was as that he lacked the nous to be in politics or to be taken seriously by the British upper classes he wanted to be around royalty. “Why force a child to be famous.”
He was tantalized by fame and refused to accept that there are people who choose to live discreetly wealthy, “stealth wealth” lives. I tried to explain it over and over again.
Case in point, the university I was at, he was very jealous of the next man that I dated. He was able to spend more on toys at 21 than he could. Everyone in his class knew billionaires, they flew private, knew lawmakers and judges. He was excluded from that world that he was chaffing at the bit and willing to steal from to get into, then he would be unstoppable.
His desire for brash wealth revolted women like me, “Why have money unless you can show it off love.” “Everyone is going to know how much money I have one day.” He was upwardly mobile and hankering to go on first private jet, I wondered if he would be taking his inured woman on the jet.
The university attracted very wealthy people from around the world. Kids flew in on their parent’s private jets, they drove Ferraris or Lambos, everyone was well-heeled and no one discussed money. Without their cars they just looked neatly dressed. I had a different set of clothes and a wardrobe from Kookai that I wore at university.
He would have been very out of place there, not just for his use of language but his lack of education. It wasn’t all vagina talk, drugs and toilet humour. When I suggested he go to university he said “I haven’t finished school love. I won’t get in.” “It would be good for you I said.” I thought he needed some critical thinking skills. To come back down to earth. University is a good place to learn how much you don’t know and how much you don’t matter.
The men there would not have liked him, he was their opposite. I just knew he wouldn’t fit in there. I relished being back around the safety of men like that. No one discussed money, no one was trying to be in the media or to be famous, no one worried how things would look in the media every second of the day.
I just didn’t matter how many times you told him that not everyone wanted to be famous he couldn’t seem to accept it, I lectured him on how children should not be exposed to the media unless they really had to, unless it was beyond their control. He said he really wanted his children to be as famous as he is, he wanted them to be an extension of his fame. I couldn’t stand the thought of controlling children or training them to want to be in the media or the centre of attention. I despised being the centre of attention; I realised that so many creatives are also like that. We are shy and retiring, we just don’t like it. The thing is so many people get there due to their creativity, the fame comes second and not first. For him it was fame first, it didn’t matter where his words came from.
Well “schemaed” children should know who they are, and do what they need for themselves otherwise they could end up in unhappy lives or even committing suicide. Some people just don’t like being in public, it’s okay if it’s not for them, they shouldn’t be punished for it the way I was.
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I also didn’t like that I had to completely change and not go back to university. He wouldn’t have fitted in around those people, he didn’t fit in the with university students in London either. He wasn’t a reader, a thinker, a man of deep thought. The others, we could a little a university revue.
I wanted to be Mary Shelley. I wanted to challenge them to a lyrics writing competition. I didn’t intend to be a co-creator of Frankenstein. I wonder if her words were mixed in with his, but he took credit. Everyone knows Shelley wasn’t a nice guy.
He offered the world on a string. I just knew too much though. Apart from being told to go from 56 kilos to 43, (we negotiated and it became 47) I needed breast implants to give me “enormous breasts.” At that time I wondered if I could perhaps write a dissertati, switch to law school, and be lawyer or in politics and I wondered how that would fit in with my image and if people would still respect me. Could I still accomplish my dream of being a poet?