Escaping from glamour yet trapped in it

BOOK EXTRACT

The Last Nizam is journalist John Zubrzycki's anecdotal-laden account of the life of the extraordinary Mukarram Jah, who gave up his titles, wealth, palaces and diamonds to drive bulldozers in the Australian bush.

In 1985 Helen made her social debut at a fashion show organised by Elle, Perth's most exclusive boutique. 'She took a tableful of friends that night, arrived fashionably late and featured a blinding array of fabled Indian jewels,' recalls Steve McLeod, who wrote the Woman's Day feature.

'From then on the hoi polloi got to see more of Helen, most often in [Juanita] Walsh's weekly social columns. She was at the Louis Feraud Parade, the opening of the Merlin Hotel's discotheque, the party for Garrard, jewellers to the Queen...and, most of the time, so was Peter Forbes.'

Helen's next step up the social ladder came in the autumn of 1986 when she threw open Havelock House for the first time for a cocktail party to raise funds for the Black & White Committee, a well-endowed Perth charity.

When she phoned Jah in India to tell him of her plans, he was disapproving, but there was nothing he could do about it. 'I want to live my life the way I like to live, to enjoy it and not worry about what people might say. It's taken me all this time to come to terms with that. It's been the hardest thing of all,' she told McLeod a few days later.

Perth had never seen a party like it. The 250 paying guests were treated to an Arabian Nights theme that included real camels, papier mache elephants and inflatable crocodiles floating in the illuminated swimming pool.

The only things missing were the tiger cubs that Perth Zoo had refused at the last moment to deliver. Helen ordered 23 bottles of Moet & Chandon to wash down the barbecue prawns and marinated chicken. Drunk on champagne, Helen forgot her nervousness and began dancing with Forbes's bisexual boyfriend, a young university student named Mark Brown.

Though the official party was over and most of the guests had gone home, she ordered more champagne to be fetched from the kitchen and told the pianist to keep playing. Brown began flirting outrageously with Helen as a drunken Forbes kept crying out: 'That's my boyfriend. I love him. She's taking him away from me.'

The one-night fling turned into a full-blown affair and a few months later, while on a visit to Murchison House Station, she asked Jah for a divorce. 'We wanted different things from life and gradually we tended to follow different paths,' Jah would later say.

'I wanted to escape the so-called glamorous life. I had taken my fill of lavish parties and shared little in common with the glitterati of Perth's money society...Helen, on the other hand, was happy in this environment. She loved the constant parties, the attention and I suppose the escape these things gave her.'

In seeking an escape, however, Helen had sealed her fate. In February 1987, after complaining of throat trouble, she was diagnosed as being HIV-positive. Within a few months Brown and Forbes had also tested positive.

'I remember Helen coming to my room one morning. She was crying,' Jah recalls, sitting on his blue armchair and lighting another cigarette, the late-afternoon Mediterranean sunshine streaming through the window of his Turkish apartment.

'I asked if there was something wrong. She told me she had AIDS.

Thinking it was some kind of women's disease I said to her, "I'm sure we can fix that." The doctors told us it was a new disease, they didn't know much about it, but they knew it was fatal. I asked if there was a cure. They said there wasn't one.