IT'S THE FIRST time June Dally-Watkins has entered the Mandarin Oriental Hotel since the waitress asked her why she was laughing and crying at the same time.
That was in May, when she was in Hong Kong to market her autobiography, The Secrets Behind My Smile (Penguin).
The memoir took four years to write, along with a year of editing it down from four books' worth of anecdotes about her pioneering international modelling career and more than 50 years as the owner of finishing schools and modelling agencies in Australia. The memoir explains how she rejected a marriage proposal from actor Michael Rennie, as well as why she kissed Spencer Tracey after a London ballet and Gregory Peck under the moonlight at Rome's Forum, but resisted taking it further with either Hollywood star.
The writing also forced her to go back to her childhood in Watson's Creek, a farming community in New South Wales, where she was raised by her mother and grandparents. She had no real contact with her father until she learned in her sixties that he was a deluded playboy who had seduced her mother without telling her he was married. He had at least two other daughters outside his marriage. The shame made Dally-Watkins' mother push her daughter into the glamorous career she felt she had been denied. But at the end of her working life, Dally-Watkins struggled with depression as she looked back at her international fame.
Decades before anyone spoke of feminism, she had run her businesses as a single mother of four. Women ridiculed her for not devoting enough time to her husband and predicted her children would become delinquents.
'I remember when my father-in-law patted my husband on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, son. As soon as the children start coming, she'll give up the business.' I thought, 'No way. I'm going to have my own life.' I always felt that a woman should have her own life. I never stopped dreaming and planning.'