Kylie Queen of the World

by Julie Aspinall

  It was an unusual pairing, by anyone’s standards. Up until now, there had been only two romantic interests in Kylie’s life: her first boyfriend David Wood and her squeaky-clean co-star Jason Donovan. But now rock’s baddest boy and soap’s sweetest star were being spoken of as an item and the world was agog. So what on earth was it that made Michael fall in love with her? She was a very sweet girl, but ‘girl’ was the key word. Look at pictures and videos of her back then and what stands out, apart from the 1980s clothes and hairstyles, is naivety. If this was a girl who had seen the dark side of life, then Michael Hutchence was Mahatma Gandhi. Just what did he see in her?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kylie, when asked the same question in an interview a few years ago. ‘But at the time we started dating I was, you know – pull out a picture of me at that time and you’d be going, “Yuk!” And he told me a story about being somewhere and I think maybe I came on the television or something and different people in the room said … something nasty about me, and Michael said, “I like her. I think she’s good.” This was before we’d met and I just remember that story sticking to me.’ Did he fancy her? ‘Yes. I really don’t know why. I can’t figure that one out but, um, yes. He did.’ Actually, that one is not so hard to figure out. Kylie had almost exactly the same figure then as she does now – she just dresses it differently. Michael Hutchence was clearly a man ahead of his time.

  There are various stories about how the couple met, the most colourful being that in 1988 Michael approached Kylie in Benny’s bar in King’s Cross, the red light district of Sydney, uttering the immortal line, ‘I don’t know what we should do first – have lunch or have sex.’ Another version has it that he ran over to her screaming, ‘I want to fuck you! I want to fuck you!’

  As Kylie recalls the occasion, the first story is true. ‘I was so young, about 19 or 20, and I remember being overly protected by some bodyguards, who must have thought I was too innocent to be in a place like that,’ she says. ‘I felt crowded, pushed into a corner. Anyway, Michael Hutchence sort of stumbled by – he was probably really drunk – and I think his first ever words to me were: “I don’t know what we should do first, have lunch or have sex.” That was entirely shocking to me … then.’ Funnily enough, Jason Donovan, who was present at the time, remembers a rather more formal quip from Hutchence: ‘I saw Michael go by and heard him whisper “Do we go out to dinner or just get married?”’

  Whatever Hutchence’s opening line was, Kylie was flabbergasted. That naivety was not an act. ‘I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth,’ she says. ‘I was too taken aback. I do remember that I kept thinking about him. I couldn’t understand why he would pay attention to someone like me. I was like, here I am, so uncool and just a little thing and he’s Michael Hutchence and fancy saying anything like that to me! But, you know, it was shocking and amusing and tantalising and humorous. And in a way, that was Michael.’ A group of Michael’s friends, who had been watching the encounter, were extremely amused. ‘It was absolutely hilarious,’ said one. ‘The moment Michael saw her, he jumped up and started running at her with his arms waving, loudly making obscene suggestions.’

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing came of that encounter and it was not until they were both in Tokyo a year later that the two really began to get on. Kylie had gone to one of his concerts. ‘I was in the audience and thought he was looking at me,’ she says. ‘Later on I realised he was very short-sighted and couldn’t have seen a thing. It didn’t matter. It made me feel good just thinking about it. I was backstage afterwards and somebody said, “Michael would like to meet you.”We had a little chat and went back up to his hotel room with a bunch of people. And I was just this straight person at a rock ’n’ roll party. So straight. I was sitting on his bed and he was asking if he could get me a drink and I kept saying, “Oh no, no, it’s okay, I’m fine, thank you.” His girlfriend Jonny was jealous because he was talking to me.’

  On another occasion she recalled, ‘The first time I met him, he was trying to chat me up and I was like, no. I had a boyfriend at the time and he had a girlfriend. Once we were seeing each other, he was like, “I was trying to get you to have a drink”, and I didn’t want to. But after much persuasion I said, ‘All right, I’ll have a Baileys,’ because that didn’t taste like alcohol. Then he met me after an INXS show and I had on white tights, see-through sandals and a good girl skirt. I was too naïve to think why he’d ever be interested in me … And then people went back to his hotel room and I went and saw things I’d never seen before.’

  Kylie was about to see an awful lot more. When Michael Hutchence the musician is forgotten, memories of Michael Hutchence the lover will long linger on. Michael embodied sex. Every move he made, every decision he came to, everything but everything, involved sex. ‘He would have put himself in a position with a rather unattractive-looking prostitute from Kings Cross without even thinking about it because it was perverse, it was dirty and it was risqué,’ says Nick Egan. ‘Knowing Michael, it was always something other than the straight missionary position. There may have been hidden cameras in the room. There may have been another person involved. There may have been two other people involved. There may have been three girls and him. I mean I know, all that kind of stuff happened.’

  Michael’s fondness for what might be called multi-person sex is confirmed by another friend, Greg Perano. ‘The way he indulged himself sexually was likely to be with a quantity of women,’ he says. ‘He liked having more than one partner at a time. He did like to spend hours surrounded by attractive women. He was like, you know, the knight who rides off and slays all these dragons and comes home with the beautiful princess and everyone goes, “Fantastic.”’ Or in Michael’s cases, princesses. And if truth be told, it’s hard to imagine Michael as a knight in shining armour – the more obvious comparison is with Lord Byron, the poet who was, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

  Greg also remembers that Michael suffered from a nihilistic streak, a trait that should perhaps have forewarned his friends that the rock star was likely to come to an untimely and mysterious end. ‘I remember one night that we [spent] about two hours riding around on his motorbike around the parking lot and seeing how close we could come to walls,’ he recalls. ‘Then we had three people on the motorbike and I looked in his eyes that night. You could see that if he rode his motorbike into the wall and killed himself, it wouldn’t have worried him.’

  This was very strong stuff for a little girl best known for playing a garage mechanic and squeaking about how lucky she should be. But Kylie was ready for a change. Paul Flynn, the editor of Attitude magazine, sheds a little more light on the nature of their relationship by observing that Kylie was quite as willing to be corrupted as Michael was to corrupt her. ‘I knew her stylist, Will, in Manchester,’ he says. ‘Will got the impression from Kylie that Michael Hutchence was an arch seducer just the way she talks about him. It seems as though Kylie and Jason had had an extremely innocent relationship and that she was gagging to shag Michael.’

  She might well have been but Kylie also had the sense to play it cool. In those very early days, when she rang Michael a couple of days after the party in the hotel room and told him she would be in Hong Kong the next day, he assured her that by an extraordinary coincidence he would be there too and asked if he could take her out. ‘What I didn’t know was that he’d been told I was coming and had travelled to Hong Kong especially,’ she says. The next day they met up. ‘We went out and must have stayed talking in the streets of Hong Kong till four or five in the morning,’ she recalls. ‘We just hit it off amazingly well. But I wouldn’t let him kiss me, which probably drove him crazy. After that he started sending flowers and there were constant telephone calls. Then we started going out. I just remember him treating me so well. He did throughout our entire relationship.’

  There was just one problem. Kylie still had a boyfriend: one Jason Donovan. Up until then it had been Jason who dropped hints about looking around elsewhere:
now, to his utter disbelief, he was seeing reports in the papers about Kylie and Michael. As usual Kylie and Jason were on opposite sides of the world so he couldn’t confront her personally: worse still, for the first time ever, she was avoiding his phone calls and then neglecting to ring him back. But Kylie knew this approach could not continue forever. Matters finally reached a head a fortnight after she and Michael linked up: she finally rang Jason in New York and confessed that she was seeing someone else.

  Jason was devastated. Although he had been the one who was so coy about confirming their relationship to the outside world, the one who had been so confident that Kylie would wait until the day he was ready to settle down – if, indeed, that day ever came – he suddenly and belatedly realised that Kylie was the woman he wanted. It was too late. Kylie was being introduced to a whole new world by Michael and there was no going back; soon she dismissed the four years she and Jason had spent together as ‘a childhood relationship’.

  Jason’s hurt and anger soon turned to bitterness. Shortly afterwards, he went on the Australian television programme Hey Hey, It’s Saturday, to review a pile of singles and used the occasion to make his feelings about his ex quite clear. ‘And to think, this girl could have been my sister-in-law,’ he snapped, holding up a picture of Dannii Minogue. ‘I guess I’ll have to grow my hair longer’ – a reference, apparently, to Michael’s long and unkempt locks. But he wasn’t the only one to be wrong-footed by Kylie: Dannii was taken aback by her sister’s new choice of partner too. ‘When she told me, I was shocked,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t picture them together.’

  Initially, Kylie was extremely coy about the romance, just as she had been with Jason. ‘At this stage we are just friendly,’ she said shortly after she and INXS’s singer had got together. ‘I don’t know if it’ll develop in to something serious, we’ll just see how we go.’ And after admitting he made her happy, she added, ‘But then it sounds like I met him and my whole life changed. I have met other people as well but Michael is a great friend and very under-standing. Performers look at other performers in a different way than the public do. You know that they are not immortal, they are real. They could be like the image they portray, or nothing like it. We just met and got along really well, we will just see what happens. It is nice having someone like Michael I can call up.’

  Michael himself was in heaven as he basked in his unlikely conquest. ‘It’s very weird but Kylie’s really got to me,’ he said at the time. ‘It’s like some sort of spell which has made me feel all soppy. We’ve known each other at a distance for years but suddenly it’s like seeing someone through different eyes. People who think we’re ill matched don’t know the real Kylie. I guess we might look a little odd together – I mean, I’m almost six feet and she’s just over five feet. But there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Kylie. I’m so proud of her. She’s simply gorgeous.’

  It was 1989, the end of the decade that was synonymous with excess and there was no better companion for Kylie with which to party the year out in style. And she wanted to: years later she remarked that if Michael hadn’t been there to show her the seamier side of life, she’d probably have found it anyway. Like the character of Sandy in Grease, her heroine Olivia Newton-John’s most famous role, Kylie was about to swap her girl-next-door image for that of a vamp. And she couldn’t wait.

  ‘I’m a fatalist; that’s the time I was meant to meet him,’ she said, looking back years later. ‘I was meant to blossom and learn a bit more about the world. And I can’t think of a better person to do it with. Similarly, he was going out with me – a really young woman – and it was almost too much for him to see that nearly every day I’d learn something. I was changing and learning and blossoming right in front of him. It was almost frightening to him – although frightening’s not the right word, he loved it. But at the same time it is strange to see someone absorbing all they can. He just held my hand and took me on a trip to parts of the world I didn’t know existed.’

  The change was almost instantaneous. Although her features remained the same, the way Kylie presented herself altered dramatically: no longer the ingénue, she soon became a woman of the world. Kylie adored Michael, adored her new image and adored her new life and, fittingly for someone who has grown up so much in the public eye, that change was visible through an abrupt change of direction in her videos. The bubbly-haired soap star was replaced overnight by a sex siren, and whereas Kylie had formerly been jolly and girly, now she was sexy and sultry. Her mouth seemed to grow larger; her eyes took on a more knowing look. Kylie had been, if not exactly corrupted, then initiated into a very different world. And she loved it.

  ‘There was this story with the ring I have on my finger in “Better The Devil You Know”,’ Kylie said in The Kylie Videodrome, a round-up of her videos, referring to the song that was her first release after meeting Michael. ‘It was a ring that was Michael’s and I think a fan gave it to Michael or a fan made it for him. It was just silver and it had an “M” on it and he – and I – used to wear it. We had just started going out then and you see the difference.

  ‘There are videos from the start of my career and then it goes to “Hello, what has happened? There has been a big change in this girl’s life.” And it was him and it’s just one of those little things that you do. I wanted to get my little personal thing in there, you know? That song, that video, that time was a big turning point for me.’ The video, incidentally, caused uproar when it was released, not least because it features Kylie being fondled by a man practically twice her size. Kylie was scantily clad and the man was black; it shouldn’t have caused such a fuss but it did. But then, everything Kylie did was starting to cause an uproar. She has often referred to the fact that she grew up in front of her audience; well, here she was entering late adolescence and to the stunned horror of everyone, discovering sex. Better the devil you know? Kylie was all out for new experiences and as eager as a young child to find out what was waiting for her in the great outside. She was soon to find out.

  And Michael didn’t just inspire Kylie to change her image. Of all unlikely people, he inspired Pete Waterman to write a song, too. ‘“Better The Devil You Know” was actually inspired by Kylie’s relationship with Hutchence, although he never actually hung around the studio with her or anything,’ Waterman wrote in his autobiography I Wish I Was Me. ‘She rang me up at this time and asked if I’d help shield her from the press so she came up and stayed with me in Cheshire and we went horse riding and stuff together. Of course, the paparazzi wouldn’t give up and we had to put up with photographers falling out of trees and falling through hedges, left, right and centre.’ It was a small price to pay. Kylie was massively, helplessly, head over heels in love.

  6

  The Lord Byron Of Rock

  Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence could not have been more different. Michael was born in Sydney on 20 January 1960 and spent his childhood in Hong Kong. When he was 12, the family moved back to Australia, but three years later, after the separation of his parents, Michael moved to California with his mother, where by all accounts he was rather a lonely child – a condition that was not helped by severe acne (a legacy that remained as an adult in the form of his pock-marked skin).

  The rows between his parents had also taken their toll on the young boy. ‘I was very shy as a kid and looking back I’d say it was because of all the problems going on at home,’ he once revealed. ‘I don’t understand couples who stay together for the sake of the family. It’s incredibly upsetting – I know because I’ve been through it. At that time I was so shy I hardly spoke. I had spots and felt I was absolutely grotesque. I’m still shy and I hate people commenting on my looks because I still consider myself to be fairly ugly.’

  Three years later, when Michael was 17, he moved back to Australia and broke free of his childhood demons when he formed a band called The Fariss Brothers with three school friends, a band that was later to rename itself INXS. The name couldn’t have been more apt. ‘The good,
sensible, rock and roll thing to do is to be completely drunk, take drugs and have sex all day,’ Michael announced, shortly before his death in 1997 at the age of 37. ‘I’ve led a much more decadent life than I’ve let on for a long time.’ He wasn’t exaggerating. ‘Michael had this incredible power over women,’ revealed one friend, ‘They would do anything for him.’ A friend of the Danish model Helena Christensen, Kylie’s successor, recalled a night he spent with the couple.

  ‘Helena was always asking what everyone’s fantasies were,’ he said. ‘She said Michael used to ask her. One night she invited me and my girlfriend to dinner with them. We had room service in the Halkin Hotel in their suite. We had a real laugh but then there was this sudden change in the atmosphere and I thought things were going to get heavy any minute, so I left. It felt like anything could happen in that room and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I’ll never forget that night.’

  Bill Leibowitz, a New York-based lawyer who worked with INXS, also remembers Michael’s extraordinary powers over women. ‘He projected what I call the triple S threat: sincerity, sensitivity and sensuality. Add to that his incredible voice, charisma, stage moves and the fact that he was a great-looking guy and women just found him completely irresistible. When I’m on an aeroplane, I can’t even get a stewardess to get me a Coca-Cola. Michael blinks and he’s in the restroom with her.’

  Michael’s life was dominated by sex; indeed, it is likely that it proved to be his undoing. He was found dead in a Sydney hotel room in 1997, hanging by a belt from the back of the hotel door and to this day it is a matter of debate as to whether he meant to commit suicide. His last partner and the last love of his life, the late television presenter Paula Yates, was adamant that it had been an accident caused by an experiment in auto-erotic asphyxiation. Certainly, there was a dangerous quality to Michael and that, combined with a very high sex drive, proved to be too unnerving for some.