Madeleine (12 page)

Living in the same house, Colette, too, saw her sister and future brother-in-law up close. She was surprised that Madeleine did not seem to care how she behaved in front of her boyfriend. ‘She did things to me in front of him, she behaved in the Madeleine way, she was not trying to hide it from him. I never saw her being vile to him, she was vile to me…She would create and destroy at such a rate I knew she had to be doing that to him.'
⁴

Chris was unperturbed. It did not seem to him that his life with Madeleine was so difficult. His tolerance of her behaviour, an acceptance akin to resignation, was now a key element of their relationship. Madeleine was struggling with self-esteem, but her intellect and her intensity exerted a powerful hold on her boyfriend.

Around this time, Chica Lowe moved her boarding house to 55 Grosvenor Street, Bondi Junction, and Chris and Madeleine went with her. Colette went her own way, sharing with friends in a $20-a-fortnight house in Oxford Street, Paddington. She was well known on the Sydney party scene. Madeleine had steered clear of the Sydney Push while at university, favouring the theatre and literature over politics, but Colette dipped in and out of the Baby Push, a slightly younger crowd who hung off the edges of the original group. She was sexually attractive—men could sense her wild streak. And she was a risk-taker, in a way that Madeleine could never be, embracing the 1960s zeitgeist with enthusiasm. One day, as a dare, Colette took the bus from Paddington to the city, braless in a see-through shirt, to the consternation of passengers.
⁵

Despite their clashes, Madeleine and Colette were soon sharing a house again: Madeleine and Chris fled Chica's when the atmosphere soured after Chica began an affair with one of the tenants. In Oxford Street, Madeleine squeezed onto the enclosed back balcony and Chris camped on a sofa in the adjoining sitting room. Chris recalled that one morning as he lay in bed, Madeleine, barely awake, came in and punched him in the eye. She was mortified when she realised what she had done.
⁶

After a year or so at the
Herald
, Chris knew reporting was not for him. He was asked to interview again for a foreign affairs job, but his lack of confidence ruled him out of the diplomatic life. He was accepted as a trainee talks officer in radio and television at the ABC, and when an information sheet was sent around for Fulbright scholarship applications, he wrote to half a dozen American universities to see if he could get a place as the first step in applying for a the grant. By chance an old St Paul's friend, Mike Rubbo, who had used his Fulbright to go to Stanford the year before, saw Chris's application to the Mass Communications course there and urged the department to take him on. There was a specific grant available to Australians—the Melville J. Jacoby Scholarship—and soon it was sorted. Chris would go to Stanford in the middle of 1965 for a boutique documentary-making course. It was a big break for the young Australian.

Chris parked the Renault down at Lady Macquarie's Chair on the harbour and broke the news to Madeleine. They should both go, Chris said, but first they should get married.

Madeleine responded: ‘You don't have to.' She was giving Chris a way out. To Chris, there was some attraction in breaking off the engagement, yet it was also unthinkable given their shared history.

Whatever his own hesitations, Chris insisted they would go to the US together, and they drove to Clifton Gardens to tell Val and Ted that they were getting married. Ted made a wry remark about wanting to ‘recover the sofas' that year but there was never any question that he would pay for the wedding.
⁷
A date was set for shortly before Chris's departure by plane for San Francisco. Madeleine decided she would follow by ship. A long sea voyage met her desire for living in style, and Chris was happy enough to confront the first few weeks at Stanford without the extra pressure of Madeleine's volatility.
⁸

Some of Madeleine's friends were surprised when the wedding invitations arrived in the post: they had not realised the relationship was serious. Colette wondered if her sister's decision to marry had been a way to win Ted's approval. Despite their fractious relationship, Madeleine often tried to gain his attention and love.
⁹
Felicity Baker recalled that Madeleine had always had a ‘deep ambition' to marry, to attain a ‘respectable married status, to create a home and family for a respected man'.
¹⁰

At 5.30 p.m. on Friday 4 June 1965, Madeleine and Chris were married. There had been a small crisis when Ted decided he did not want to walk his daughter down the aisle to ‘give her away' and had to be persuaded by Val.
¹¹
Madeleine was almost hysterical by the time she battled her way through the Friday afternoon traffic to enter the church. Her uncle, Bill Baker, performed the ceremony at the Church of St James—where Val and Ted had married a decade earlier. Madeleine's choice of venue startled her friends, who had expected something less ‘establishment' from the woman who had played Lolita Montez.
¹²

Madeleine had refashioned herself since university. She had lost weight and looked stunning in an expensive Chris Jacovides dress. But she banned photographs. She controlled every aspect of the wedding, and she enjoyed being perverse. She wanted to be different. Colette recalled that Madeleine thought being in the social columns was terribly
infra dig
, ‘the lowest of the low'.
¹³
Not having photographs was about showing she did not care a toss about such things. Madeleine was also sensitive about her appearance, so may not have wanted pictures. Looking back, Chris wondered whether she refused to be photographed because she did not want to be recorded as married.
¹⁴

Colette was a bridesmaid and she, too, wore a white Jacovides number. A superb dressmaker like her grandmother, Colette had planned to make the dresses for Madeleine and herself and had even bought the fabric. But at the last minute, Madeleine changed her mind. Colette was upset, even more so when she found the Jacovides bridesmaid dress did not suit her.

Chris recalled that he felt ‘incredibly alone' that day. He had given up his rented room as he prepared to fly to the US, so he dressed for his wedding in a stranger's house. Then he met the groomsman at the Pioneers Club in nearby Bent Street. The wedding ceremony was a blur, and years later Chris could not recall the name of the groomsman. It was a strange period for the twenty-four-year-old. He was getting married, but within a few days would be separated from his bride as he headed for Stanford alone.

Seventeen-year-old Annabel Minchin was overwhelmed by the romance of the day and cried her way through the proceedings. Winton Higgins was an usher, even though he had had little contact with Madeleine in the previous couple of years. Marilyn Taylor was intimidated by the whole show, despite the fact she was already ‘on the wireless' at the ABC. Many of the Octopus gang had not been invited, so rapidly had their lives moved apart since university. But Colleen Olliffe and Richard Walsh were among the guests. Richard was not close to either Madeleine or Chris, but assumed he was there due to his connection to Ted, whom he had come to know through the
Oz
trials the previous year. Ted had defended the printer of the magazine, Francis James, in the court case in which Walsh, Richard Neville and artist Martin Sharp had been charged with publishing an obscene issue.
¹⁵
At the church, Richard shocked Colleen when he whispered, ‘Imagine her being the first of you to go!'
¹⁶

As they walked back down the aisle as man and wife, Madeleine dug her nails into Chris's arm and whispered, ‘Too fast!'
¹⁷
She had a picture in her mind of how the event should unfold and she had no hesitation in trying to control Chris. But it was a stressful day for Madeleine. Chris recalled, ‘We were both taking a leap, escaping Oz, escaping family.' Looking back, he felt it must have been confronting for Madeleine to have chosen the kind of church of which Ted approved, yet to know that Sylvette was not there to see her wed.
¹⁸

The reception in the sunken living room at Vino del Mar turned out to be a ‘spiffing affair' according to Colleen.
¹⁹
But there was an awkward moment when Ted rose to say a few words. He loved making speeches, but when Madeleine announced ironically, ‘Well, you won't get a speech out of him!', Ted backed off.
²⁰
At the end of the evening, Madeleine changed from her wedding dress into her going-away outfit of a grey woollen pants suit. She was glowing.

As they prepared to leave, the new Mr and Mrs Tillam stood in the elevated entrance area of Vino del Mar gazing down at the guests. ‘It was as if she was saying, look at me, this is my moment,' Marilyn Taylor recalled.
²¹
Her pants suit had been made by a men's tailor but had not been entirely successful, according to Colette. Madeleine thought the suit made her look like a lesbian; Colette thought it was the kind of suit worn by little Italian boys at a wedding.
²²
Nonetheless, Madeleine wore it.

The young couple drove in the Renault to the Bundanoon pub, about 150 kilometres from Sydney in the Southern Highlands. A couple of days later they were back in the city, at the stylish Belvedere Hotel near Kings Cross. Colette recalled that Madeleine had been enchanted with the Belvedere when they had seen the hotel as children. The next morning the newlyweds took photographs on the balcony, Chris in his tweed jacket, cigarette in hand, Madeleine in her grey suit.
²³
Then Roger Tillam drove them to Sydney airport for their goodbyes, and Chris flew out to San Francisco. It was 10 June 1965.

Three days later, Madeleine wrote to her mother-in-law to thank her for her wedding gift of a necklace ‘which I shall wear with the greatest pleasure'.
²⁴
Joan had given Chris a Sidney Nolan painting, and Madeleine, staying temporarily in Paddington, told Joan that she could not wait to have a household for the painting. It was ‘heart rending' to leave the wedding present behind for a year but the Nolan was too valuable to cart to Stanford and she asked Joan whether she could leave the painting in her care.

Joan had grown very fond of Madeleine. A few days later, she sent a box of flowers to her daughter-in-law's cabin as her ship departed for San Francisco. From Auckland, Madeleine posted a letter of thanks and enjoyed the blooms all the way to Honolulu.
²⁵

CHAPTER NINE
American Dreams

In his first days in the US, while he waited for Madeleine to arrive, Chris bought a second-hand Chevrolet and rented an apartment at 1159 Bay Laurel Drive in Menlo Park, the suburb closest to the Stanford campus at Palo Alto. It was the top floor of a two-storey house set back from the street on a circular drive. There were huge trees everywhere in the slightly unkempt garden, as well as birdbaths and a sundial, squirrels, jasmine, Virginia creeper and bees, and magnificent magnolia trees lined the streets.
¹
The Tillams' landlord lived below, but upstairs was private and roomy with casement windows, a large living room and a study as well as a double bedroom. It was, Chris told his mother, ‘sylvan, airy and quiet'.
²

Chris threw himself into his course, which was led by Henry Breitrose, one of the most influential film and mass communications academics of his generation. When Chris arrived in the summer of 1965, Breitrose's Documentary Film Program was at its height. His students, including Chris, were smart, highly educated, artistic and literary. Many were being exposed to the technical side of film-making for the first time, and the department buzzed with experiment and energy.

‘It looks like being exciting & tough,' Chris wrote to Joan ten days before the course began.
³
Mike Rubbo was showing him the ropes, but Chris was apprehensive. Mike was leaving big shoes to fill: he had been a social and academic success in the course and was about to leave for a job at the Canada Film Board, the Mecca for documentary makers in those years.

Around the middle of July, Chris went to the San Francisco wharves to collect his wife after her sea voyage. He was late and found a grumpy Madeleine, shoulders slumped, sitting on her suitcase. The trip had been a disaster, her cabin mate appalling, the whole experience nothing like her dream of a stylish ocean journey.

Chris had always been her rock, but now he was torn between his role of Madeleine's pacifier and the demands of his course. Madeleine, to her credit, stumped up early the next morning to accompany him to the Central Valley to record some audio of a horserace for one of his projects.

She found work house cleaning in Palo Alto for $14 a day while she looked for a proper job. She told Joan in a letter at the end of July that America was ‘too exciting for words—there is so much of absolutely everything, both good things and bad, and everything is so much bigger! There are marvellous shops near us without even going into San Francisco. But of course, San Francisco is—superlative.'
⁴
She loved the ‘posh department stores' in San Francisco, with their scented air and floors of beautiful clothes:

It's all terribly clean—like the rest of these parts—and the climate is perfect—cool, crisp and sunny…there are the most wonderful old houses…flowers and vines grow in every available space—you see a lot of window boxes, with geraniums tumbling down onto the foot-path.
⁵

The letter was upbeat and positive. Nothing less would have been expected back home at the start of such an exciting American experience. But Madeleine was already becoming adept at presenting an image that was not always based on reality.

Chris was ‘frantically busy' with his course and Madeleine apologised for his not writing to Joan.
⁶
When Chris did write to his mother, he grumbled about the workload in his course, saying, ‘there isn't really enough time to do any one project properly'.
⁷
In fact, it was worse than that. Chris knew he was not coping with some aspects of the course, and this was confirmed when Henry Breitrose told him that he was not performing at an appropriate level.