Health and beauty author turns her attention to incestuous past with father

KATE HOLMQUISTreviews Love Affairby Leslie Kenton, Vermillion. 371 pp £12.99.

FATHER-DAUGHTER incest, which Leslie Kenton experienced, is taboo. Even more off-limits is the disturbing discussion of how a daughter could be in love with her father-abuser, see him as her soulmate, and remain loyal for the rest of his life, and her’s.

Leslie Kenton describes this relationship as a “double helix” of abusive love written in the DNA she shares with her father, band-leader Stan Kenton. As Leslie sees it, on a profound genetic and spiritual level, she was driven by some deep survival instinct to protect her father. She could not reject him without rejecting her very self.

Kenton ripped this book out of her soul in a painful process, in contrast to her 30 previous uplifting best-sellers about beauty, healthy living, ageing and spirituality. It seems now that Kenton’s high-priestess tomes were her way of coping and earning, while all along the girl beneath had been repeatedly raped by her father. Now in her golden years – she must be about 70 – she has spent the past four years facing the memory of her young girl’s blood on a hotel bathroom’s tiles.

Stan Kenton was a Hollywood jazz composer and band-leader, the mid-20th century equivalent of a rock star. His life, and that of his childhood sweetheart and beautiful blonde teenage wife, Violet, was chaotic and glamorous. They were immature young adults still at the adolescent stage when Leslie was born. Raised up to the age of 5 by her strict maternal grandmother, “Mom” (who would later become the right-hand woman of actress Joan Crawford of Mommie Dearest), Leslie called her parents by their first names.

Hollywood stars were drawn to Stan and Violet’s Hollywood home, where Stan dabbled in the 1950s trend for psychoanalysis until his “psychiatrist” was revealed as a fraud. He then became involved with scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, and proselytised wherever he went. Stan’s life was an unending cross-country bus tour of US dancehalls and radio stations. He would insist on bringing Violet and Leslie with him, with Leslie, still a child, sharing in the cocktails and late nights.

Stan and Violet divorced when Violet could take no more of her husband’s interminable travelling and infidelity. His replacement marriage to a 19-year-old never worked. Violet was so preoccupied by her own affairs that she would send the prepubescent Leslie off with Stan on summer holidays as surrogate.

Leslie became her father’s best friend and confidante in hotel rooms from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Stan would eventually say, “I love you so much, Leslie. It’s just, maybe I love you the wrong way.”

It took more than 50 years for Leslie to understand his meaning because she buried the pain. She would have three children with different men by the time she was in her 20s, and eventually find true love, and a fourth child, in a marriage that has lasted 40 years.

Stan’s abuse of his daughter was bad enough, but there was more. In her early teens, Leslie’s behaviour prompted her paternal grandmother, Stella, to send her to a Hollywood sanatorium for dozens of sessions of electro-convulsive therapy. This blanked her memory yet also made Leslie, who was once strait-jacketed in a padded cell, even more defiant. Later, Stella tried to cure her by drugging her and bringing her to a bizarre ritual that smacked of witchcraft, voodoo and more sexual abuse.

Kenton began to recall the incest and the witchcraft after undergoing therapy sessions that involved taking LSD and tripping for six hours, while the motherly therapist took notes. It almost beggars belief, but Kenton’s story rings true. To those who can identify with her, she has brooked challenging thoughts by refusing to see incest as black and white, villain and victim. Her father was a victim as much as she, as she sees it.

Kate Holmquist is an author and an Irish Timesjournalist