posted 11-15-2010 01:19 PM                       

quote: John Wilson

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I'm assuming there's someone over there with the same name that makes that comment make sense...

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quote:

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ANDREW DENTON: The Bohemian part of your life for which you are best known was in the seventies and into the eighties when you had a relationship with the sisters, Leona and Bunkie, which was a talking point for many years in Australia. How does that relationship work with two women?

JACK THOMPSON: It doesn't.

ANDREW DENTON: It did for 15 years.

JACK THOMPSON: But what happened in this relationship was what happens in a lot of relationships. Particularly when you are very young, you fall in love with someone and then you meet someone else and you kind of fall in love with them, too. How can you give all your love to someone and fall in love with someone else? My answer at the time was it's qualitative, not quantitative. My love isn't something you can get a bucketful of and that's it. It's a qualitative thing. You can love more than one person in your life. And what happens with most people is that they make the other relationship a secret and keep it hidden. When this relationship became apparent to the three of us, we all three sat there with tears and "how could you" and all of that over a period of an afternoon. We agreed that we would attempt to go on living the truth of this without ever lying about it for as long as it was tolerable.

ANDREW DENTON: Tell the truth: you must have walked away from that afternoon meeting of tears and just gone quietly somewhere, "Yeah!"

JACK THOMPSON: Well, that is the perceived truth, Andrew, but it's not necessarily. As I said to people later, you know how difficult it is to live with the woman you live with. Twice that. Twice as much joy maybe. But certainly the same amount of joy. Because it was always an individual, because it was always monogamous in that sense, because it was always one on one, it was always just that love for each other. I used to say, "Try coming home late and drunk. There is one at the front door and one at the back. So you don't get any room." They would gang up.

ANDREW DENTON: Of course. Let's put the boot on the other foot, though. If you had been in a relationship two guys to one woman, would you have been comfortable with that?

JACK THOMPSON: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: Yes?

JACK THOMPSON: Yes, at that stage of my life, yes.

ANDREW DENTON: You are still with Leona after I think 15 years. Bunkie left.

JACK THOMPSON: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: I can only imagine that was difficult for all three of you, her leaving?

JACK THOMPSON: It was. It was difficult but it was made less difficult because it was a relationship that over the last five years simply unravelled, so when the final parting came it wasn't as dramatic as it might have been.

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