Mother of Rock by Robert Milliken

Author:Robert Milliken [ROBERT MILLIKEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2011-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

One fight led to a severing of their relationship for more than a year. It happened one night in the back room at Max’s Kansas City, although its origin and nature are unclear. Germaine gives a graphic account of it: “I came in and joined a party that Lillian was already in and she just ripped into me. She abused me up hill and down dale – everything about me. My face, my hands, my feet, my voice, my mind, my past, my future, my everything. The New Yorkers were just sort of sitting there as if this was some sort of mud wrestling contest and I was made to respond in kind. But there was no way I was going to do that. And besides, Lillian was too vulnerable. So I just sort of sat there with tears running down my face thinking, ‘Why are you doing this? What have I done?’ It was as if there was no need for it to be justified: ‘I feel like giving you a pistol-whipping with my tongue and I’m doin’ it and I’m doin’ it good.’ And I just couldn’t believe the brutality of it. So I left.”

It must have been one of the few times in her life when Germaine failed to respond to a verbal pistol-whipping, if that is what it was. How could a woman of her strength and verbal skills have remained so uncharacteristically passive? The survivors from that time at Max’s have little recollection of this sensational incident, possibly because so many sensational things happened every night at Max’s in 1968 and 1969. But happen it did, and it was possibly the culmination of an inner competitive tension between the two women that found its outlet in a public display.

Lillian was proprietorial about New York and enjoyed taking charge of visitors. Much as she might have needed Lillian to introduce her to the city’s late sixties underground life, Germaine was not a person to be taken charge of. Germaine says: “I think what Lillian wanted, if she wanted to have anything to do with me at all, was to sort of be my agent in New York, that I would do what she said and I would meet the people she said. And she had a very odd way of doing that. She would say things like, ‘Here is Germaine Greer, Miss Dover Heights 1956.’ Gee, thanks.” [Dover Heights was then on the edge of Sydney’s most exclusive suburbs.]

It was almost as if the two women had too much in common: independence, drive, energy and an Australian background combined with a desire for stardom on a wider stage. New cultural frontiers were being explored and both of them wanted to lead the way. Their competitive edge was often apparent. Marion Hallwood, a Sydney friend then at Columbia University, says: “Lillian would sometimes express political opinions. Lillian was having lots of direct encounters with politicians around that time, with the Nixon presidential campaign. She knew lots of details.

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