KENNEDY HAD AIDS

You are not going to like this but I believe Graham Kennedy died from AIDS.

The pages of deserved tributes don’t mention it. But Graeme Blundell, his biographer, who spent seven years working on his book, hints at it in today’s Australian newspaper. He writes about meeting Kennedy two years ago – long after the star refused to cooperate on his biography, appropriately called The King.

He talks 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, in The Australian today, came the telling sentence: “There were large black patches on both his cheeks. They were so dark they looked like as if they had been applied with makeup”.

That is Karposi Sarcoma. The black sign of the black death. I have had several friends who have developed those splotches and have sadly died.

Several, like Graham Kennedy and Richard Wherett, eventually from pneumonia. Their immune system drops and can’t cope any more. And especially, like Kennedy, when you are a heavy drinker and chain smoker.

I said on the programme yesterday:

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 know several of his male lovers from back then. Nothing necessarily wrong with that -- as Seinfeld would say. One was former Melbourne TV and radio sports reporter Rob Astbury.

But remember, that 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.

Philip Adams says in The Australian today says that Kennedy, when the camera was switched off was “lonely and vulnerable.”

He said Kennedy was like a ventriloquist’s doll you could fold up and plonk in a suitcase until the next show. And Adams said, to prove my point, Kennedy was “imprisoned by his sexuality”. I rest my case.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005