Air Kiss & Tell: Memoirs of a Blow-up Doll

By Charlotte Dawson and Jo Thornely

Charlotte Dawson is one of the most honest, self deprecating female personalities in Australian media circles. She has a great profile and loyal following from the hit TV show Australia's Next Top Model and Celebrity Apprentice, as well as from her days as a fashion journalist and model. She's constantly talked about - whether it's for her honesty about botox, her broken marriage to Olympic swimmer Scott Miller, her battle with depression, or her constant presence on the red carpet. In true Charlotte style, her story is told with wit, humor, and a touch of glamour. The book tackles many harsh truths, but is ultimately an uplifting story of triumph over adversity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742698892

Book preview

Air Kiss

& Tell

Air Kiss

& Tell

Memoirs of a blow-up doll

CHARLOTTE DAWSON

with JO THORNELY

The author wishes to thank Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat for their hospitality during the writing of this book.

First published in 2012

Copyright © Charlotte Dawson and Jo Thornely 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 088 5

Cover photograph credits:

Photography by Jez Smith

Make-up by Maria Nitsas

Hair by Joh Bailey Salon

Clothes by Carla Zampatti

Internal design by Lisa White

Set in 12.5/17 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword

1    Maverick is missing

2    Fire foal

Gods and monsters

3    How to be perfect in ten easy steps

4    Modelling and other mistakes

Pinpricks and nips

5    Marriage

Drunken pony express

6    Aotearoa and the zombie apocalypse

Fresh kill or dead meat

7    Love bites and a red rat

8    Bottom of the bottle

Close but no cigar

9    Careful, he might hear you

10   I blew up

Host-zilla

11   Mr Monopoly and the chastity card

12   The man shop

Troll busting

13   My reality

14   Advice to ponder

Foreword

This foreword was originally going to be written by my dear companion Maverick but, as you will see, Maverick is missing.

1

Maverick is missing

This is a story about the day I lost my blow-up doll in a private girls’ school.

I have a lot of stories, which is lucky for you, since you’ve just started reading this book. It would be a shame for you to open it to the first page and for me to just say, ‘Sorry, no stories. Let’s just ride out the next few hundred pages together in silence and then say we had a great time.’ But like I said, that’s not going to happen: my life has included a lot of stories. Some good, some bad, some scandalous and some fundamentally untrue. Some fickle, some florid. Lots of drama. A little bit of karma.

Of all the stories, this one, starring an inflatable plastic gentleman, is a highlight. It is, ironically, not overinflated. It’s funny, it has touched others, both friends and strangers, and it involves a man leaving. It pretty much sums me up.

I was in my favourite apartment, which I’ve lived in during my years of being single. It’s in one of Sydney’s most recognisable buildings, with breathtaking views over the glittering cobalt blue Sydney Harbour—the bridge and the opera house reminders that this is my town. I’m comfortable here. I’m surrounded by furniture, photos, rectangular artefacts collected from around the world and my meaningful things. I have, in the past decade, travelled the globe extensively and moved house ten times, countries twice. In this building, I’ve sought refuge from broken relationships and broken dreams, but I’m connected here, and now feel safe and nurtured. I need this view to comfort me and, though I’m eleven floors up, ground me.

This was an exciting day for my flatmates, Samantha and Moreno—they were on their way to a fancy-dress pirate party that, although I’ve been invited, I won’t be attending. Sam is an infectiously bubbly, high-pitched dynamo of a girl, who would sooner say yes to fun than to oxygen and has been known to pull the odd practical joke around the apartment. Penis-shaped candle in the shower, anyone? Thank you, no. Her boyfriend, Moreno, is a warm, less manic, funny and typically Italian man, save for the fact that he will do anything Sam wants. So they were on their way out of the apartment, dressed as pirates—albeit glamorously—and seemed unusually mischievous. I was planning on a quiet night in bed with a book, but I had, unwittingly, been included in Sam and Moreno’s earlier shopping trip and immediate plans.

There are two things that I could find in my bed that could make me squeal in flappy-handed horror. One: a huntsman spider. I have multi-legged terror-laced experience there. Two: suddenly realising that there’s a motionless human silhouette in my bedroom in the middle of the day.

I wish it had been a huntsman—at least I would have known what to do.

Sam and Moreno had decided that I needed some company that night, and found it in the form of ‘Maverick’—one of the least expensive (and oddly genital-free) inflatable sex dolls available on the market. I think they got him from the I’m-Really-Just-In-The-Mood-For-A-Cuddle aisle. Still, as ineffectual and unthreatening as Maverick (which was how he was christened on his packaging) was in reality, when you’re not expecting to see him tucked up in your bed, he is the very real and very surprised face of fear.

I went with my huntsman instinct and wanted to get the critter out. No deflating, no popping, just get my new plastic boyfriend out. Out of my bed, out of my apartment, out of my life. I realised that I could probably catch Sam and Moreno getting into their car eleven floors below, so I raced to the balcony, dragging the still-smiling plastic fellow by the ankle. I didn’t want to be ungracious about the gift, but I was ready to return to sender.

‘OI!’ I shouted from the balcony. ‘You bastards!’

Two smirking pirates looked up at the madwoman waving a naked, genital-free man above her head. It was surprising that they could hear me, such was the wind that afternoon. My plan was to drop Maverick on the heads of his previous owners; however, physics and a low-pressure cell conspired against me. A windy day coupled with the fact that Maverick weighed all of two grams saw him whipped from my grasp and suddenly airborne.

Like his Top Gun namesake, Maverick soared and looped the loop in an impressive acrobatic display. Over a tree he flew, gradually losing altitude, before traversing the netball courts of the expensive and exclusive private girls’ school across the road. Then, tired of his naked aerial adventures, he gently drifted behind a school building, watched with increasing helplessness and shock by the pirate pair below. At that moment, we all resembled blow-up dolls ourselves. In the moment immediately after that, though, we all resembled people laughing up our vital organs.

End of story, all done. Well, not quite . . .

Basically, when I’ve just lost over the wall of a private girls’ school a blow-up sex doll purchased for me by pirates, and the doll is still there somewhere, I start to worry. Who has seen this happen? Who is going to find it? In media terms, this may not end well. For anyone else, it’s just an anecdote to be related at parties. For me, it has potential scandal written all over it. Is there going to be a story in the paper tomorrow about me throwing someone, real or sex-related, off my balcony? There’s only one thing to do. Call Jo.

Jo is a friend of mine, and she is the go-to girl when you’ve done something like thrown a sex doll off a balcony. Or, as it turns out, just rigged a frog race in Fiji. Or just been told by your date that he’s killed a man, which has happened to me. Trust me: she’s the girl for the job.

I dial her number. ‘Jo, I’ve just lost a blow-up doll over a wall into a high school.’

There’s a stunned pause, then: ‘I’ll be right over.’

Jo came to my attention at a point where I seemed to take up a lot of hers. She wrote a blog about, among other things, Australia’s Next Top Model, and was less than complimentary about many of the people featured on the show. But mostly me. In spite of myself and her spite, I found her wickedly funny, and thought, well, if she’s going to insult me, I’d better ask her over for a drink. Eight hours later we were firm friends. And very, very drunk.

There have been many features to our friendship. Wine, certainly. A shared sense of the ridiculous, definitely. Copious amounts of eye-rolling, humour, tears, field trips and pondering over the human condition. And desperate phone calls.

Jo swooped in and together we formulated a plan. She whipped out her notebook and started asking me important questions about the situation.

‘How were Sam and Moreno involved?’

‘They bought the doll. They were dressed as pira—’

‘IRRELEVANT. Tell me how tall Maverick was, and describe his facial hair. It’s important. And hilarious.’

Once we’d stopped giggling, we approached the problem practically and obsessively. We would get Maverick back. We composed an email, albeit with liberal flexibility where facts were concerned:

Subject: Lost Property Enquiry

Dear Sir/Madam,

I regularly visit a friend who lives in a building very close to your school and, unfortunately, on a recent visit I lost some property that I believe may have ended up on school grounds.

On Saturday 28th March, while engaging in some tomfoolery on my friend’s balcony, the item became caught in the wind and blew across the road, over a tree, and behind a school building.

The item in question is an almost life-sized male doll of Caucasian appearance with brown hair, a moustache and a surprised expression. While it is unusual and a little embarrassing, I assure you it has great sentimental value and I am anxious for its return.

I realise that this may not be the kind of thing that could reasonably be announced at a school assembly, but if any of your staff or students do happen across this lost property, I would be very pleased to have it returned.

Thank you and best regards,

Jo Thornely

We did not expect a response, but we felt like we had taken some responsibility for my actions and gained a sense of closure.

Until a few days later when I received a call from Jo, sitting at her contract-strewn desk in her open-plan office, trying not to sound too excited.

‘I’ve got an email. They copied me in by accident. Oh my god.’

Subject: Re: Lost Property Enquiry

Hi Judy,

Love it!! Could I get my form class to look for it?

(Just joking! But Year 9 would love it!) Is this an April Fools’ joke?

Cheers,

Pat

It seemed the school was not taking our request for the safe return of Maverick seriously. It was time for another email.

Subject: Re: Lost Property Enquiry

Dear Pat,

Your email below may have come to me by mistake?

Either way, I can assure you that my request for the return of my lost property is not an April Fools’ prank. I’m not sure what they teach there at your school, but everybody knows that any prank played after midday on the first of April is null and void, and likely to result in justified retribution by the prankee—a ‘wedgie’ or similar (whatever the kids are doing these days).

I do appreciate your attention to my original email, however, and hope that Maverick (as the item has affectionately been dubbed) is found safe from harm. Punctures can, of course, be repaired, but with the normal teenager’s propensity for defacement, I fear that, if found, Maverick might not have survived with dignity intact.

My apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you and sincere regards,

Jo Thornely

Now that we’d had acknowledgement from the school—even inadvertently—we took to the situation with hilarious fervour. I had been dealing that week with something else that seems to be a regular feature in my life—managing a possible media scandal based on my personal life—and this brought welcome comic relief.

A few years before, I’d been living in a lovely home in Tamarama—one of the first places I’d moved into since returning from a five-year sabbatical in my home country of New Zealand. The house was modern, breezy and bright with a gorgeous view of the beach. At the front entranceway, there was a Japanese-style garden, and I vaguely remember gardeners coming to tend to it on occasion. Somehow, a story found its way to me through friends that a gardener was claiming I had approached him in a sexual manner. I was fairly new to the concept of Facebook, and was discussing the rumour with friends online, forgetting that a number of my friends were journalists. So despite my outrage and the falsity of the man’s claims, an apparently newsworthy story was born about me making sexual advances to the hired help.

I had just learned my first lesson in social media, and how important it is to keep some information away from it— for sure enough, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was following the thread. The story appeared online and in the newspaper and the paper even sought out the gardener, publishing both his claim and my denials. He stuck by his story; I stuck by mine. One commentator even suggested a lie-detector test. Eventually the gardener retracted his claims, but the damage was done: my digital fingerprint now includes the phrase ‘did she screw the gardener?’ Rumours and lies can seem flippant and weightless when they begin, but if you’re in a relationship or friendship, it’s hardly fair to have to explain to loved ones that you actually didn’t screw the gardener. It’s a pain in the arse.

As you can imagine, the opportunity to focus instead on a missing, possibly deflated, blow-up doll was tempting and delicious in the extreme. After a restless night, during which I imagined all the ills I would inflict on rumour-mongers should I ever meet them, welcome relief came in the form of a phone call from Jo early in the morning.

‘Hi, Charlotte. Go downstairs and walk up the street. Tell me what you see.’

Out of bed, trackies on, curiosity piqued, I went to get the newspapers. As I wandered towards the newsagent, I noticed a sign taped to a telegraph pole. Then another stuck to a fence. It was a missing persons notice. For Maverick.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? screamed the bold black print, with an accompanying picture. Jo had commenced a guerrilla campaign to get my inflatable doll back. I may have actually buckled with laughter, resembling one of the more familiar sights in a Darlinghurst laneway—a drunken crazy woman. This was exactly what I needed. What I didn’t need was a phone call from the Sydney Morning Herald. Oh, god. It’s about the bloody gardener again, isn’t it. I was over it. I answered crankily.

‘Hi, Charlotte, it’s Hornery.’

Andrew Hornery writes a Sydney-centric social and gossip column for Saturday’s Herald called Private Sydney with equal parts wit and bite. His role is more society reporting than tabloid scuttlebutt, but I still had my hackles raised and proceeded to rant about the bloody gardener and his rubbish revelations. I finally paused and let Andrew get a word in.

‘Darl, I’m calling about Maverick.’

Andrew Hornery was calling about my missing blow-up doll. Not about a scandal. Not about the end of a relationship or the beginning of a new one, or who I’d been seen with or without. Sure enough, taking up half the back page of the Herald that Saturday was a picture of me, a picture of Maverick, and the headline A WIND-UP GONE WITH THE WIND.

This wasn’t a story that had the potential to damage any relationships or friendships, or the power to distort reality or people’s perceptions of me. Sometimes even the smallest, most innocuous-seeming stories can be blown out of all proportion. The best you can usually hope for in those situations is to endure the twenty-four-hour cycle of speculation, discussion and then dismissal of the story dissolving into ‘who gives a fuck anyway?’

But my leading headline for this weekend was Maverick.

Jo and I went out to breakfast that morning and savoured the thrill of opening the Herald and even just giggling as we noticed other people reading it. It was far more exciting and enjoyable than being in the paper for almost any other reason.

The legend of Maverick lived on for a while. A couple of weeks later, I was eating alone at Una’s on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst, when the waitress who was clearing away my coffee cup paused. She leaned towards me conspiratorially, looked around to see if anyone was listening, and dropped her voice.

‘Did you ever find him?’ she whispered.

‘Who?’ I whispered back.

‘Maverick.’

I never did find him; Maverick remains ‘at large’. Which at five foot three with no genitals is ridiculous.

That’s the only story in this book that’s about a flying blowup sex doll, I’m afraid, but all of the stories have me in them. From things that have gone into my body to things that have (sometimes accidentally) come out, from New Zealand to Australia and back again, from childhood to a rough semblance of sort-of adulthood, there are good stories and bad stories. The bad ones never stay bad for long, and the good ones are almost always laced with a touch of something not quite right, or ridiculous, or fermented in oak barrels for a couple of years.

So, here we go. My stories.

2

Fire foal

To be or not to be?

That was clearly the question on the no-doubt well-glossed lips of my Divine Creator during the celestial board meeting determining who was to be designated life on Earth on 8 April 1966.

For a start, it wasn’t considered the most fortuitous year in the Chinese horoscope, especially if you were going to be born female. According to Chinese astrology, there is one Fire Horse year every sixty years. Females born in that year are considered defective, and Fire Horse women are thought to be dangerous, headstrong and extremely bad luck. Bad news for any mother trying to marry them off.

Despite instilling fear and trepidation into prospective parents in and around Asia (a skill usually left until the teenage years), the Fire Horse also has some not-too-shabby qualities, according to some astrologers. Apparently we possess enthusiasm, blind faith and courage. We can be bright, even brilliant, and can achieve our goals and inch closer to our dreams as long as we’re not too distracted or drunk. We can be equally capable of both extremely good and heinously bad deeds. We thumb our noses at mediocrity, but we deal with failure badly, like a teenager with a malfunctioning iPhone. We can swing between incredibly good fortune and devastatingly bad luck, but we’re humorous and sociable. We live our lives a little close to the edge, being fond of a challenge and excitement. We have very definite opinions about pretty much any subject, and usually adopt a passionate and immovable stance, particularly where justice and the protection of loved ones is concerned. We master new skills quickly, so we’re good people to call if you need to connect your TV to your laptop. Our ambitions can be overreaching, though, and horse people don’t often finish what they set out to achieve for fear of missing out on other, bigger opportunities. The grass is always greener to a Fire Horse, and of course to an actual horse, because he’s already eaten all the grass on this side of the fence. What? Oh, sorry.

We are reliable confidants, and sometimes obstinate and self-centred friends. Even though we’re strong, healthy and positive, we can be easily tempted by the lure of alcohol and nicotine in times of despair, depression and stress (as far as I know, real horses aren’t). We make our homes welcoming and comfortable and adore entertaining, but are also fiercely protective of our independence and cherish our own space. When we have money we enjoy it, share it and spend it, and when we run out we find a way to make more. We live by the theory that we can’t take it to the grave, so we tend not to hoard or stress about squirrelling something away for a rainy day. We focus on the future. As babies and toddlers, Fire Horses tend to love the sound of their own voices and, in my case at least, never really grow out of that.

So, seriously, what’s not to love about a Fire Horse, right? I don’t know why it’s

Reviews for Air Kiss & Tell

[susannahpk_83 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first read this book prior to the untimely death of Dawson.I enjoyed her humour and candor, however mostly I felt sad. She obviously wrote it with a fair amount of pain.Now that she has recently died, I am re-reading it as an ebook. I will now read it with fresh eyes and a new perspective.I recommend this book for people who want a perspective into the celebrity lifestyle and the emotional turmoil this life can bring.