Madeleine (18 page)

Chris too was trying to be honest. Joan had asked, in effect, ‘who left whom'. In March 1969, Chris wrote back:

Madeleine and I both thought the original separation was a good thing for both of us, she in London, me in California. Maybe we were too young, too unsure of ourselves to understand what we both meant by doing that—that we really wanted to part; perhaps—but the important question isn't allocating the blame, or even allocating the responsibility. About each other, as persons: we were never, during our time together, sufficiently at home and comfortable with our own selves to be able to view our relationship detachedly—which is the first necessity in working out problems together.
²⁵

Chris told his mother that he had been low in spirits for the previous couple of months but that things were now much better. He was not sure, however, about his future with Martha.

As Madeleine struggled in London, back home in Australia Ted was making waves. The Liberal member for Warringah had been lauded for his principled stand on the
Voyager
inquiry but, in March 1969, he risked the ire of his colleagues again by denouncing his own prime minister, John Grey Gorton, whom he considered a ‘dangerously irresponsible' playboy.
²⁶
Sex was in the air in Canberra, just as it was in London, and Gorton was a party boy, a drinker and a man at ease with himself and with women. For months there were rumours about an evening in November 1968 when the prime minister turned up at the American Embassy with nineteen-year-old journalist Geraldine Willesee after a press gallery dinner. The Americans wanted to talk about the crisis in Vietnam but the prime minister spent the next two hours in conversation with Willesee. The story became a source of gossip around the press gallery and then seeped into the public arena. It gripped the country for weeks, with voters divided between those who saw Ted as a prude and those who saw the incident as proof that Gorton must go.
²⁷

The prime minister was popular in the press gallery, and so was his American wife Bettina. A few days after Ted's outburst, she circulated a poem, adapted from one by William Watson, to the press gallery:

He is not old, he is not young,

The Member with the Serpent's tongue,

The haggard cheek, the hungering eye,

The poisoned words that wildly fly,

The famished face, the fevered hand,

Who slights the worthiest in the land,

Sneers at the just, condemns the brave

And blackens goodness in its grave.
²⁸

Ted copped further criticism for his actions. Alan Reid, the veteran reporter, later described him as:

Napoleonic in stature, thin faced and lipped, precise of speech and manner, religious, abstemious in his habits, bespectacled, proud of what he considered to be his morality and high principles, and possessed of a Savonarola-like zeal to secure their adoption by others, a zeal which earned him a high reputation and a wide berth.
²⁹

At a meeting of his parliamentary party colleagues, Ted refused to back Gorton. He resigned from the Liberal Party and went to the crossbenches. He was undeterred and decided he would contest the next election, later in 1969, as an independent. He wrote
A Time to Speak
, an account of the sensational events that justified his actions and laid out his views on democracy and society. He wanted his version of history to be recorded and his reputation retained.
³⁰
Ted fought a strong campaign but lost his seat.

Madeleine must have known of these events—Ted's sisters were in contact with her in this period—yet she gave no indication in letters of her views on the matter.

By May 1969, Chris was back in Cambridge, living with Martha and Matthew and planning their journey to Australia. Madeleine wrote to him saying that despite her depression, she was very happy, liked her job, her flat in Belsize Park, and—especially—London. He had not heard from her for about three months, and was relieved to receive the letter.
³¹
They continued to correspond even as they contemplated a divorce. Sometimes the exchanges were happy, ‘sometimes less so'.
³²

Chris, Martha and Matthew booked a passage on a freighter to Sydney. Martha had divorced her husband and was now pregnant to Chris. Chris wrote to Madeleine to tell her about the baby. ‘I am afraid it will make her sad, especially as she has been pleading with me to just visit her in London,' he told Joan.
³³
Madeleine must have been devastated by the news. She wanted a divorce, but the speed with which her husband was creating a new family must have been difficult to accept.

Martha was advised not to tackle the sea voyage because of the risk of miscarriage. The boat left without them, but Martha still lost the baby. A few weeks later she flew with Chris and Matthew to Sydney and they went almost immediately to visit Joan. Chris quickly signed up for casual work back at the ABC and stevedore work on the wharves.

Soon he was served divorce papers. Madeleine cited adultery as the grounds and named Martha as the co-respondent. She also sued for a share of her husband's estate. Martha, in a move she would later deeply regret, did not spare Madeleine's feelings. Charged with committing adultery, Martha and Chris responded by naming in court documents dozens of locations across the US and Australia where they had had sex. Chris also attempted to argue in the proceedings that Madeleine was the one at fault because she had deserted him.

It would be another three years before the divorce was formally granted by the New South Wales Supreme Court—on the grounds of adultery—but by late 1969, the ‘marriage of children', as Madeleine once called it, was over.
³⁴
Thirty-five years later, Chris would write that Madeleine, like his mother, blossomed after parting from her husband. But, for Madeleine, that blossoming would take a very long time.

CHAPTER TWELVE
To the Edge and Back

Madeleine's psychological state deteriorated in 1969. Some of her friends realised she was in a bad way. They were worried, too, about Colette, who had spent the summer as a hippie in Ibiza, but then wandered around London trying to live, in effect, without money. The sisters had little contact with each other, but one winter's night Colette called on Madeleine at her rooms in Belsize Park. Colette was shoeless, homeless and penniless, but Madeleine would not allow her to stay.
¹

Madeleine had just turned twenty-eight. Her efforts to find appropriate therapy for her depression had yielded little, and she was desperate. She took an overdose and was taken to St Stephen's Hospital and then admitted to an asylum on the edge of London, a grim institution where patients were locked in wards and heavily sedated. It was a horrific experience.

Christine Hill was dismayed when she went to visit Madeleine at the asylum. ‘They were injecting her with sedatives and she could hardly move…They would come around and give her pills and I would say, don't take them…People were in there for twenty years.' Christine visited several times and recalled that Madeleine was lucid but in despair and ‘just terribly sad about Chris'.
²
Some years later, Madeleine told Felicity Baker that she had meant to kill herself, but that the aftermath had been so ghastly that she was determined she would never do it again.
³

The Hellers were back in London after their time at overseas universities. Florence was alarmed when she saw Madeleine: the glorious, if unhappy, young woman she had seen in San Francisco was huddled on her bed, clutching an antique doll called Cloud, childlike and vulnerable.

Some weeks later, Madeleine wrote to her aunt and asked whether she could stay with her after her discharge. Frank had always been very hospitable to the St Johns but he ruled this out. Madeleine was expressing very negative feelings towards Ted, and Frank did not want his three young children to be exposed to her hostility. He offered to pay for a bedsit, but Madeleine did not take up the offer.
⁴
She went to stay with friends. It would be a long, slow road back to mental stability.

Early in 1970, she sent a handmade card to her aunt and uncle, Margaret and John Minchin, congratulating them on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. She decorated the card with a drawing of daffodils and wrote:

I'm sorry this comes a little late, but the daffodils have only just begun to bloom…I wish you many congratulations on your 30th wedding anniversary. Please forgive the paper—all I have with me at this moment! & the general amateurishness (I borrowed a 4 year old's messy paints)—I have just come out of hospital & this is almost the first thing I have done. I am being cared for very beautifully by some kind friends & I feel very reborn; a bit shaky but very eager. I hope to go away to the country on Sunday; meanwhile, London is very sweet—the sun is just shining through mist like a pearl & birds can be heard singing…
⁵

Madeleine was still fragile, but she was determined to recover her health. Her father believed she had inherited her mother's mental instability and that little could be done to help her, but Madeleine was a survivor and she began the painful task of rehabilitation. She felt unable to hold down a professional or office job and instead became a cleaning lady. Among her clients were filmmaker Clive Donner and his wife. They were so taken with their rather unusual cleaner that they invited her to stay with them at their house in the south of France—an invitation she did not take up.
⁶
Madeleine was a meticulous housekeeper and kept her own rooms beautifully. She used this work to help her climb out of depression.

Colleen Olliffe, now married to Michael Chesterman, organised a cleaning job for Madeleine at their flat at Number 2 Regent Square. Madeleine was still carrying a torch for Michael: had wept at the wedding reception, pouring out her heart to others at the table.
⁷
She was an unorthodox employee at Regent Square. She was friends with everyone in the flat, which was also shared by Winton Higgins, his wife Sue Young and another Australian, Ronny Matthews. Madeleine often stayed on for dinner, enjoying the joke of being such an upmarket charlady. She smoked copious amounts of marijuana, and her friends were amused that while she never seemed to have much cash, she always had enough for dope.
⁸

Regent Square was a cerebral household, host to a floating population of academics, artists and political activists. Among those who often stayed was the young Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, whose clandestine photographs of the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968 had made him an underground hero.

Madeleine's friends knew she was often unhappy. Her relationship with her father remained problematic and she told Sue she was distressed about a forthcoming visit from Ted.
⁹
But she did not talk of her suicide attempt or her hospitalisation. Mixing with the people she had known at university a decade earlier, Madeleine presented as lively, clever and acerbic. She told friends of her efforts to find jobs, including as an assistant to the stage director Kenneth Tynan.
¹⁰

She revealed more about her mental state in this period to her friends on the other side of town in Ladbroke Grove.
¹¹
Here, everyone was openly searching for something—sex, drugs, transcendence, the perfect song—and there was acceptance of a drifting person like Madeleine. Christine Hill, who had been so loving to Madeleine during her depression and her time in the asylum, shared a flat in the Grove with the Australian artist Colin Lanceley. Sue Hill and her husband Phil Jones lived across the road. Phil had been a big rock blues singer in Sydney before he and Sue travelled to London. He worked in a picture-framing business at first but soon joined the band Quintessence, set up by Melbourne musician Ronald Rothfield. Rothfield began following an Indian-Mauritian mystic, Swami Ambikananda, or Swami-ji, as he was known. So too did Christine and Sue, and Madeleine.

Swami-ji gave his followers Indian-based names—Sue became Vidya; Phil was Shiva Shankar; Rothfield was Raja Ram. He did not give Madeleine a new name—perhaps because her name was already close to Mary Magdalene: Swami-ji was interested in Christianity and his teachings melded Hindu and Christian beliefs. He urged his followers to love God and warned them off the drugs that were so readily available.

Quintessence and its music became the focus of the ashram set up by Swami-ji, and the group was present at the regular religious gatherings, or
kirtans
, in the huge mansion blocks in the area. Quintessence was named London's underground sensation for 1970 and it headlined at the Glastonbury Festival that summer and again in 1971. Twice its concerts sold out the Royal Albert Hall. The band recorded five albums between 1969 and 1972. And all the time, Quintessence was driven by its devotion to Swami-ji. At concerts, the band tried to ‘raise up the vibrations of the audience and ourselves to a more God-intoxicated state', Raja Ram told the BBC in 1970.
¹²

At first Madeleine held back from Swami-ji. But the ashram's warmth and its effort to operate like a family were irresistible and soon she was a regular at the
kirtans
, where fifty or so people jammed into a single room to hear Swami-ji speak. There was food and music, and Madeleine danced enthusiastically to the fusion of progressive rock, jazz and Indian chants. Her spirit was healing. At the ashram Madeleine was invited to strip herself back to the basics and to find a truth about herself and her life. She grasped the opportunity.

News of the Hill sisters ‘discovering' a guru down in Ladbroke Grove filtered back to the ‘rather militantly secular' group at Regent Square.
¹³
A number of other Australians, including actors Janice Dinnen and Deidre Rubenstein, joined the ashram, but Madeleine kept her friends in separate silos, although soon she was signing letters and postcards to family and friends in Australia with
Hari Om Tat Sat
—the Sanskrit mantra, meaning ‘The Lord, that is the truth'. The ashram had become a way for Madeleine to make sense of the world: