There is still a touch of Southern belle girlishness to Kay even in her
mid-fifties. She is slim, wearing fitted black trousers, a nipped-in black
cardigan, a bow hangs in folds from a cornflower blue blouse, and more of
those click-clacky heels. Her hair is loosely coiffed and blonde, make-up is
sparse, and she has puppy-brown eyes which crinkle attractively at the edges
when she smiles. There is nothing brash about her style; in fact, she is
self-effacing and occasionally tremulous.
She says that she hates her voice but it’s only on the tape that you notice
how distinctively odd it is – think Loyd Grossman’s strangulated vowels and
Madonna’s version of posh English, with an occasional Southern twist.
Tenderness, for instance, becomes “tindirness”; Charles is “Chols”; naughty
is “norty”; Picasso’s erotic show “Picawsow’s eh-rot-eeeek” (as in the
French).
She slips out to the kitchen, with its lino floor of customised spots in
homage to Hirst, whose work she didn’t get in the division of spoils, for
regular refills of water and asks me fairly early on if I mind if she
smokes. An American who still smokes! How revolutionary! “You know, I had my
first cigarette when I was 50 years old,” she says. “Well, going through
divorce makes you do strange things.”
Kay Hartenstein was born on Valentine’s Day 1953 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Clinton became governor after she’d left and she says: “I’m kinda glad I
didn’t meet him when I was young – I would have been just his type!” Her
high-school boyfriend for six years – who she later says was one of the only
Jewish people in Little Rock – ended up working as a lawyer at the same Rose
Law Firm as Hillary and had an office next to hers: “He knows them both so I
know all the scoop!” Kay glints.
As a side note, Charles Saatchi’s first wife, Doris, who was his boss and
responsible for turning him on to art, came from Memphis, an hour away from
Little Rock. “He had a thing about Southern blondes,” Kay says. “Well, Chols
had a real love affair with America as a young man.”
Kay says that Little Rock (she slurs the words so it sounds like a whisper…
liddlerahrk) became much more sophisticated after Bill came on the scene,
but when she was growing up it was a “wonderful” hick town. Her father was
an elevator contractor and her mother was a mom to four children. There was
a new car every other year, country club membership and Hattie May – “a big
black lady who was a darling, like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, who would
hug us when we cried”.
When she was four, Little Rock made news headlines for all the wrong reasons.
In September 1957, nine African-American pupils had been bussed in to join
the Little Rock Central High School but were prevented from attending the
racially segregated school by a line of National Guard soldiers, who had
been deployed by the Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus in support of the
segregationist protesters, many of whom were parents of pupils. It wasn’t
until 1959, school closures and the intervention of President Eisenhower
that Little Rock public school reopened as an integrated school.
Kay says that although she grew up in a non-racist family, she was naturally
aware that Little Rock was segregated and absorbed people’s comments on the
street: “Builders would use the N-word and there were great financial
divides between the blacks and the whites.” Still, she was appalled when the
partner of a leading member of the liberal intelligentsia in London asked
her whether her father was in the Klu Klux Klan: “I said, ‘Do you really
think that every single person in the South is a member? No, of course, my
father wasn’t in the Klu Klux Klan.’
“I was so shocked by that. There are some deeply racist people in the South
but there are some deeply racist people here, too. I’ve seen a lot of
anti-Semitism, as well. Even before I went out with Charles, I used to hear
the most extraordinary comments. It would be normal dinner party
conversation for people to talk about ‘yids’. And Charles was aware of it.
Absolutely. We’ve had lots of conversations about it.” Did it get to him?
“Of course. Whenever you see him described, it’s always ‘Charles Saatchi,
British Jew’ – they always say his religion. Why mention it?”
She is the only member of her family to have moved away – and keep moving –
which she attributes to being the third child: “It made me more independent
because I was left to my own resources a lot.” She loved reading and was
always interested in art, regularly daubing the walls of her school with
murals. “Look, I’m a typical American story of opportunity. Little town.
Regular parents. I have never been extravagant. I like nice things but I’ve
had to make my own money in my life and my own way. The way I was brought
up, and I was very lovingly brought up, is that I could do anything I wanted
to and it had to do with my energy and how hard I worked. You really
believed that and I think that is the great thing about America.”
At university in Memphis on a full scholastic scholarship, she still had to
get a job – working nights in the campus infirmary, doling out Darvon [a
stronger version of aspirin, “maybe with morphine in it”] as a hangover cure
to drunk kids, while her friends were out enjoying their sorority parties.
Somewhere at this point, Kay got married. It is interesting that she did not
offer this detail herself since we were going through her life with what
seemed to be a degree of thoroughness. Later on, I suddenly remember reading
a throwaway reference about a previous marriage and ask her about it. “I was
married once for six months when I was a student,” she says, looking a bit
uncomfortable. She had already said that she’d lived with a boyfriend, which
was a mistake, but this was another one: “Yes, well, they’re all mistakes
until you find the right one. It’s just a question of how long you stay with
the mistake.” So tell me about this mistake. “He was an artist – very
bohemian; the exact opposite of my high-school boyfriend – and I fell for
the myth of the sensitive artist. The only thing it did was make me decide
that I didn’t want to get married again for a long time.”
