KENNEDY AND AIDs

I could be tricky this afternoon. I could be a coward. I could wait to make a certain statement until about five to six and then go off overseas on two weeks leave. Do a runner. But that is not my style.

I want to take this head-on. I want to talk about Graham Kennedy and my claim on this programme last month that I believed he died of an AIDS-related illness. A doctor’s certificate said he died of pneumonia. A blood test taken at his nursing home several days before his death said he was HIV Negative.

AS you would have seen, or heard, on the news earlier this week his long-term lover – former TV and radio sports reporter Rob Astbury – returned to Melbourne from overseas this week. He has admitted that he is HIV positive.

I said a couple of weeks ago:

“You are not going to like this but I believe Graham Kennedy died from an AIDS-related illness.”

The pages of deserved tributes for our greatest TV entertainer didn’t mention it. But Graeme Blundell, his biographer, who spent seven years working on his book, hinted at it in The Australian newspaper. He wrote about meeting Kennedy two years ago – long after the star refused to cooperate on his biography, appropriately called The King.

He talked about him “wearing heavy blue pyjamas, some sort of undershirt beneath, and Ugg boots. Unshaven, he stared out the window, his beard wispy and orange in colour, his thin, patchy, shiny white hair plastered across his scalp.”

And then he wrote: “There were large black patches on both his cheeks. They were so dark they looked like as if they had been applied with makeup”.

I said on this programme that is Karposi Sarcoma. The black sign of the black death. And I said I have had several friends who have developed those splotches and have sadly died.

Their immune system drops and can’t cope any more. And especially, like Kennedy, when you are a heavy drinker and chain smoker.

Remember: I researched and wrote the first book about AIDS back in the 1980s. It was sympathetic to AIDS victims and I personally paid for it to be published.

I said on air:

The obituaries will make much of his solitude and his almost fanatical protection of his private life. My theory was that because, at the peak of his fame, he was paranoid that his awesome audience would discover that that he was gay. I knew several of his male lovers from back then. Nothing necessarily wrong with that -- as Seinfeld would say.

That’s why it was such a joke when the magazines made front page headlines about Graham Kennedy getting engaged to singer Lana Cantrell. He was gay and she was a lesbian.

This was at a time when if the word got out you were a “poofter”, it would destroy your career. The famous singer Johnny Ray almost got sprung in Sydney and lived in fear of international exposure.

Phillip Adams, who roasted me in his newspaper column said Kennedy was “imprisoned by his sexuality”.

And when attacked on TV, radio and in print I recited the mantra: All history owes the dead is the truth.

I said I would produce evidence of my claim. I was confident I could. I had read parts of Rob Astbury’s manuscript. His descriptions about dinner and sex with Kennedy at his Frankston home were too detailed to be inventions. And there were intimate details about Kennedy’s sexual proclivities and medical condition like mouth ulcers etcetera. Astbury’s last chapter called The Last Supper was explosive and damning.

He talked about Kennedy’s fear that he was HIV positive. About Kennedy’s warnings to him about contracting the disease. That’s in Kennedy’s lover’s book which I have read. But that is NOT sufficient to defend or prove what I said.

I set myself a deadline to prove it. And, regrettably as a journalist of 45 years, I cannot. I cannot. I cannot produce “the smoking gun”. A couple of wouldbe witnesses have let me down.

I made an apology some days ago that some people said was a qualified apology, a “Clayton’s apology”. So this afternoon I will say, unequivocally, I am sorry. I am sorry for the hurt I have caused Kennedy’s friends and his myriad of fans whom he entertained so well for so long.

I genuinely believed what I said at the time but I truly regret the heartache that I caused. I’m sorry.

Friday, June 10, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005