I love you more and more.Seeing d’Alpuget in the flesh, you have to take his point. The resemblance between the two women is striking, even now that d’Alpuget is 75: the high priestess forehead, the wide-eyed gaze, the sex starlet lips. Gabor, of course, was famous in her own terms: beauty queen, film icon, animal lover.
The first thing to know about Blanche d’Alpuget, independent of Bob Hawke, is that she is strikingly frank. This might be a product of her upbringing in Darling Point, in the harbourside heart of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, as the adored only child of a larger-than-life, hyper-masculine father and a well-bred, socially sensitive mother. Her father raised her with unapologetic vigour to sail, fight and believe she could do anything .
D’Alpuget, say those who know her, probably quite liked being called a sex bomb. “She’s terribly vain,” says old friend, novelist John Lonie, affectionately. “I know people see that as a criticism, but it’s actually a very endearing feature. She’s beautiful – she’s always been beautiful. I’m a poof, so she doesn’t do anything for me, but I think straight men find her very sexy, too. She’s like Aphrodite.
Writing also proved a solace – both the work on the biography, and the completion of her quintet of novels about the English medieval king Henry II, which she was working on during his last months. “Writing for me is never a chore,” she says. “It’s something into which I’m deeply drawn: something I can retreat to. So that helped a great deal.
When she met Hawke again in 1976, the stage was set, and the pair immediately became lovers. D’Alpuget describes their affair as intoxicating, inspirational and devastating. She slowly realised Hawke was simultaneously “having affairs with women all over the country, that his love life was a kind of free-wheeling, decentralised harem, with four or five favourites and a shoe-sale queue of one-night stands”. Nonetheless, late one night in 1978, he asked d’Alpuget to marry him.
In fact, she was unharmed. She had swum out a window of the plane and been rescued by a passing yachtsman. But the die was cast. “By the time [Hawke] learnt [I] was alive and unharmed, his mindset about the future had changed,” she writes. Within two years, he had divorced Hazel, and he and d’Alpuget were married.Marriage, even for wonder couple “Bob and Blanche”
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