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Stan Kenton's daughter opens door to their dark past
You won't learn how badly damaged at birth Leslie Kenton's sister was from her sensational account of her incest with her father, jazz bandleader Stan Kenton. For those details, visit www.lesliekenton.com, the website where she hawks beauty products and weight-loss advice. She's a diversified talent credited with inventing the Origins cosmetics line. She's written many books. I read her new one out of curiosity about Kenton, a jazz figure best known for orchestral jazz and arrangers including Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo and Bob Brookmeyer.
I came away with insight into a Hollywood marked by narcissism, extravagance and addiction to trend, a Hollywood familiar from the vantage point of the film industry. Getting a jazz-based slant is refreshing, if saddening. In this fulsome memoir, we learn of the horrendously indulgent and perverted upbringing the talented, tortured Kenton and his wife, the lovely Violet, imposed on their lonely, super-sensitive daughter. Leslie tells a harrowing story, couched in prose that often careens into purple. It is at its stormiest when she describes the affair her father forced on her when she was 10. The incest didn't end until she was 13. That Leslie forgave her father is touching. It doesn't mean we should. That she dedicates this to him is startling. "Love Affair" is creepy, as might be expected. It's a New Age soap opera with detours into Dianetics, Freudianism, psychedelics and serial marriage -- and with a happy ending.
A Restless Soul Revealed
Stan Kenton's orchestra captured the world's imagination in the late 1940s, just as other swing bands were fading. For the next three decades, he would be the most popular bandleader who played what was, essentially, art music. Unlike Count Basie's band, Kenton's didn't play primarily for dancers. Unlike Woody Herman's, it didn't have an entertaining, singing showman up front. Unlike Duke Ellington's, it didn't have a repertoire of well-known, original popular songs to bring in crowds. Yet Kenton was a master of marketing: He packaged and sold the concepts of newness and modernity to a pop-music audience.
At first his experiments ran parallel to the beboppers, who were likewise introducing a more sophisticated harmonic system into jazz. Along with Dizzy Gillespie, Kenton introduced Afro-Cuban polyrhythms to North America. And where Ellington famously disdained categories, Kenton reveled in creating terms like "artistry in rhythm" and "progressive jazz." His music was at once futuristic, masculine and highly romantic, and his fanatical followers were the jazz equivalent of Trekkies.
Onstage, though, Kenton seemed far from a wild-eyed avant-gardist; his manner was buttoned down and conservative. He never appeared in less than a suit and tie and conducted himself like a combination of college professor and church leader. Early in Michael Sparke's "This Is an Orchestra!," a study of the man and his band published last year, the author quotes arranger Charlie Shirley, who calls Kenton "one of the straightest men I've ever met. Dedicated, clean, sober." Certainly bebop legend Art Pepper—a star of several Kenton orchestras who wrote a powerful memoir of his years as a junkie—perceived a world of difference between himself and his employer.
Yet "Love Affair"—a harrowing and intimate memoir by Kenton's daughter, Leslie—now reveals that he and Pepper were more alike than anyone realized. Mr. Sparke mentions that Kenton abused alcohol in later life; Ms. Kenton depicts her father as a lifelong alcoholic and such a troubled soul that you wonder at times how he could hold himself together well enough to keep his band going. Most shockingly, Ms. Kenton asserts that their own relationship was, for a time, incestuous.
Ms. Kenton's book is a fall-and-rise "recovery" memoir in the tradition of Lillian Roth's "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (1954). She worshipped her father in spite of his apparent shortcomings, and they bonded over a shared love of art and music. The tone she takes toward her father is one of forgiveness rather than accusation, and often the book reads like the tale of a taboo liaison (it's worth noting that she titled it "Love Affair," not "Daddy Dearest"). But keep in mind she was only 11 when, she says, he first forced himself on her, and only 13 when they broke the physical "affair" off.
Ms Kenton maintains that she and her father never stopped caring about each other, and she even seems to shield him from blame, claiming he suffered from dissociative identity disorder and portraying him as dominated by his controlling mother. Because Kenton had divorced Leslie's mother, her grandmother played an outsize role in her life as well. At one point, Ms. Kenton charges, her grandmother sent her off to a sanitarium without reason. On another occasion, she pushed her 10-year-old granddaughter to play "dress up" with a pair of creepy cross-dressers backstage at a theater in New York.
Fans of the bandleader, who have long been known for being insular and cultish, will be scandalized by the suggestion that his family life could be so sordid. In particular, they'll be horrified by the idea of Kenton as a victim rather than the one in control. Yet such revelations won't change the quality of the man's music, and in some ways Ms. Kenton's account is the most sympathetic and human portrait of the bandleader yet to be published.
During his lifetime, Kenton was among the most extensively chronicled musicians around: Every time he played a one-nighter in Peoria or hired a new trombonist, the music press took note. Yet in the 30 years since his death, surprisingly little serious, objective writing about him has been published. Michael Sparke's book, the first general history of the Kenton Orchestra, is the best evaluation yet of Kenton's 40-year musical development, and it serves to balance the hothouse intimacy of his daughter's portrait.
Over the decades, Kenton employed thousands of jazz's greatest soloists, as well as a dazzling array of composer- arrangers. Mr. Sparke has interviewed many of them, and his fast-paced narrative chronicles the many editions of the band that Kenton developed over the years. These included the original "Artistry" band of the mid-'40s; the bebop- influenced "Progressive Jazz" group after that; the classically influenced "Innovations" orchestra of 1950-52; the amazingly swinging "New Concepts" group of the mid-'50s (perhaps his best from a jazz point of view); and his "mellophonium" band of 1961-63.
As the names of these bands indicate, there was a self- consciousness to Kenton's musical experiments, motivated by a lifelong goal of fusing his roots in swing bands with his love for 20th-century classical music. Throughout his career, Kenton pursued a Quixote-like quest for a kind of undefinable art music that, in his own eyes, he never achieved (although the symphony-sized "Neophonic" orchestra of the mid-'60s probably came closest). Ironically, most of his musicians and arrangers wanted to create hard-swinging, hard-blowing pure jazz ensembles. As Mr. Sparke tells it, seemingly every time Kenton turns his back, his guys were trying to make the band sound like Woody Herman. The public turned out to be the necessary mediator, appreciating both the swinging and the artsy sides of Kenton.
Mr. Sparke is himself a diehard Kentonian who previously compiled two book-length discographies and has written dozens of liner notes. So one might have expected "This Is an Orchestra!" to read like the work of a worshipful fan. But Mr. Sparke isn't afraid to state a negative opinion, and he observes Kenton's oeuvre with a comparatively unbiased eye and ear. As he puts it: Kenton "experienced more triumphant achievements and more humiliating failures than most people would encounter in half a dozen lifetimes."
Mr. Sparke naturally does not incorporate any of Ms. Kenton's allegations, and thus the portraits of the man in these two books could not be more different. A definitive Kenton biography is still needed, to place both his private and professional lives together on the same page. Otherwise, Kenton might end up in that demimonde of musical icons whose artistry is hopelessly overshadowed by the unsavory details of their personal behavior.
—Mr. Friedwald is the author of "A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers."
Love Affair by Leslie Kenton
According to the LA Times, Leslie Kenton is “the Dalai Lama of the beauty business”, though I doubt the Dalai Lama would relish the comparison. A beauty journalist, she was hitherto best known for always wearing white and having four children by four different fathers, but Love Affair gives her a whole new claim to fame. She describes, in purplest prose, having an incestuous affair with her father, the bandleader Stan Kenton, from the age of 10 to 13. The book is dedicated to his memory “with all my love”.
An only child, Kenton was born in Los Angeles in 1941 when her father’s career was just taking off. Her mother, Violet, was a stunning blonde who “worshipped beauty and served it the whole of her life”. She believed that you should “smoke much, eat little and look as thin as possible” and she managed to look thin right through her pregnancy. She immediately handed the baby to her mother to look after while she set out on the road with Stan. (Confusingly, Leslie refers to her grandmother as “Mom”, and her mother as “Violet”.) Mom was a strict disciplinarian who got Leslie potty-trained by six months and hit her if she failed to sit up straight. From her, Kenton claims, “I learned that the appropriate relationship to my body was to punish it.”
She stayed with Mom until she was three and a half, then went to live with her parents in the Hollywood Hills, or more often on the road touring. She never met other children, but hung out with the band, sitting around in nightclubs while the adults got plastered. One of her best friends was Nat King Cole. She remembers, at six, going to the circus with her mother and Ronald Reagan. “Uncle Ronnie” for some reason was deputed to take her to the loo but she kept inspecting different loos and pronouncing them dirty, so “I ended up behind the large tent peeing in a pile of rubbish while Ronald Reagan stood by looking embarrassed.”
When Leslie was eight, her mother announced that she was divorcing Kenton so she could marry a distant cousin, Jimmy Foster. Apparently he gave her sexual satisfaction, which Kenton never did. It meant moving from Hollywood glamour to the cow town of Visalia, but Leslie enjoyed living a normal life for once, going to school, learning sports, and making friends her own age.
Health and beauty author turns her attention to incestuous past with father
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.”
Dance with the Dark
Small wonder that Leslie Kenton devoted her life to healing. Or that she'd have four children by four different fathers. As a child, she was raped by her own father, innovative jazz legend Stan Kenton. Now she has written an extraordinary book, Love Affair, about their relationship. Anne Harris met her
JOURNALISTS are by and large hit-and-run merchants. It's the nature of the business. You interview someone, put the piece together and usually never hear from them again. What your interview subject thought about it all is something you rarely discover. Leslie Kenton, not surprisingly, proved to be the exception.
My first interview with her was for Image magazine and was prompted by the fact that her beauty columns in Harper's and her book Raw Energy were turning the health world upside down.
She came to Ireland shortly afterwards for the Late Late Show and asked to meet me. "Hey," she said, "you have turned me into some mythic creature. Like the great white whale." She was laughing then. But in the 25 years that have passed, through countless books on healing, both physical and spiritual, she has certainly moved into the realm the mythic.
Over the years, we met again, each meeting marked by her publication of a new book. Our last meeting was 11 years ago, when she published Journey to Freedom, an exploration of shamanism. Perhaps that last title was work in progress. If, as the truism goes, it's the truth that sets us free, then Love Affair -- her memoir of an extraordinary father-daughter relationship -- is more likely her journey to freedom.
I couldn't wait to meet her. For all the girlie reasons. To see how she was doing, to measure myself in her reflection, to ask advice about a skin problem. Leslie Kenton challenged us all to take care of ourselves. Through her columns and her books she urged us to take responsibility. Like she did. For herself, for her four children by four different fathers, for her own destiny.
What her new memoir reveals is that she took responsibility for a lot more. For more than any one person should ever have to. Not alone did Leslie Kenton take responsibility for her father, she took responsibility for what he did to her.
This is a difficult story to tell. It would be easy to wish she had told it differently. But then it would not be Leslie Kenton telling it.
Her father was an American icon -- the legendary jazz band leader, Stan Kenton. Although Love Affair is an account of a life, it is really the story of a three-year period when, between the ages of 10 and 13, she spent her summers crossing America with him as he struggled to maintain the dream of the big band. Quintessentially it is an American adventure, a sepia-tinted road story like Paper Moon, full of sunrises and spare ribs and the night's takings in paper bags. Their relationship grows in intensity, his alcoholism as unchecked as the little girl's days roaming through funfairs and roller coasters in dusty mid-western towns, until finally it takes on the darkness of Roman Polanski's Chinatown.
Leslie Kenton, beautician and health specialist
Best known for her pioneering work in health, beauty and spirituality, Leslie Kenton harboured a dark secret – an incestuous relationship with her famous father. Perhaps even harder to grasp is the fact that she says she will never love anyone more than the man who hurt her so badly
IT'S a hot July night in Connecticut. An 11-year-old girl kneels on the white tiles of a hotel bathroom, mopping up blood as if her life depended on it. "If I can clean this up," she thinks, "everything will be okay. If I get rid of this blood – my blood – it will be as if nothing happened and this searing pain in my belly will disappear." This little girl is Leslie Kenton. She's bleeding because her father Stanley – known to the rest of the world as the great jazz man S
Attractive and articulate, Leslie Kenton has become famous in her own right, thanks to her work in health, beauty and spirituality. In addition to a string of bestselling books, she conceived the Origins range for Estée Lauder, was the first chairperson of the Natural Medicine Society in Britain and consulted with the European Parliament on behalf of the Green Party.
She regards herself as a bringer of light, and it's easy to see why. She really does glow with good health and radiant vitality, even though when we meet in a Russian tea room in Primrose Hill, she's both jet-lagged and recently bereaved. But Kenton is the last person you would pick out of a crowd if you were speculating about which stranger harboured the darkest secrets.
I can't help wondering what critics and readers will make of her book, which challenges us to contemplate horrific events with an open and empathetic mind, one unafraid to examine and embrace the personal demons that drag some of us to hell and back. It starts with the title – Love Affair. Generally, I tell Kenton, these stories bear titles like Mummy, Make Him Stop! "I'm going to call my publisher and have it changed!" she laughs, before adding, "But this isn't a misery memoir. There's an irony to the title. It has to do with the whole theme of the relationship. The best image is that of the double helix, like DNA, one strand of which was forged in terror and fear and rage and guilt, and the other, which was forged in an extraordinary luminosity and a childlike joy in being alive."
Kenton entered the world in June 1941. Her mother, Violet – a Hitchcock blonde devoted to glamour – was alone in the Los Angeles hospital. Her husband of six years, "a 6ft 4in, lanky piano player with size 131/2AAA feet and ambitions to match" – was away rehearsing for a show in Balboa, California.
Leslie Kenton: 'I was angry, but never hated my father'
Recently arrived from her home in New Zealand, Les lie Kenton sits in what was once her local cafe in London's Primrose Hill (she has a flat round the corner) and demurely sips mineral water. For someone who must be extremely jet-lagged, the 68-year-old looks unaccountably radiant. But then there is something uncommonly rarefied about this woman with 35 books on health, beauty and spirituality to her name. An elegant, silvery-blond Grace Kelly lookalike, she lost her original Californian accent long ago in favour of something not too far removed from the Queen's English and speaks as orn ately as she writes: in great flowing para graphs that frequently dip into new age-y philosophy and mysticism. An award-winning writer and broadcaster, she is about to publish a memoir that is likely to stick a firework under her public image and send it career ing up into the sky. With the provocative title Love Affair, the book reveals that her relationship with her father, Stan Kenton, the late jazz legend, was every bit as illicit as many friends and family members later admitted they had suspected all along. The band-leader pianist, an alcoholic said to be haunted by his own talent, raped his daughter for the first time when she was 11 years old. This continued over the next two years, but the way Kenton writes about it suggests that, to her, the relationship was an intense, mutually passionate one, with her as his confidante, his soul mate. The book's unflinching honesty in this matter makes it a compelling, if frequently unsettling read, but her website trailer for it strikes a bizarrely inappropriate note. A montage of old footage of Leslie and Stan frolicking together set against a jazz soundtrack, it appears to treat the subject of incest with a heady romantic glamour. Why?
Damaged by Daddy, the jazz legend with a terrible secret
All little girls are to some extent involved in a love affair with their fathers, and their future happiness as adults depends on the quality of the paternal love. Leslie Kenton's father, Stanley, was a man whom it was easy to adore: tall, charismatic, handsome, a legendary jazz pianist and bandleader. That was the public Stanley. In private, he was tormented, insecure and driven to consume heroic quantities of pills and alcohol, and to dabble with fashionable psychological fads and theories.
In her memoir of growing up with Stanley, Kenton - a bestselling writer on natural health, and one of the early advocates of raw food and detox - recalls: 'My parents loved to tell stories.' One of their favourites was about their first meeting. It was 1934 and Stanley was playing piano at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California, where Violet regularly came to dance. Stanley was too shy to speak to her, but one evening he went home and told his mother that he'd just seen the girl he would marry. In some ways, the pair were well matched - he talented but self-doubting, she with a powerful will inherited from her mother, both dazzlingly beautiful. When Leslie was born in 1941, her paternal grandmother, Stella, declared, 'This child cannot possibly be a Kenton. She is far too ugly.' Leslie's grandmothers had an unusually strong influence over her early years. Both women were formidable characters: manipulative, prone to superstition and mystical beliefs. Stanley and Violet spent the early years of their marriage living with his mother, but by the time Leslie was born they had moved to temporary lodgings with Violet's mother, known as 'Mom'. According to Leslie's account, her parents arrived home from hospital with their newborn infant, and immediately handed her over to Mom. 'Here', they said. 'You bring her up.' This the old lady did, in alarmingly despotic fashion, while Violet followed Stanley wherever his work took him. Leslie was apparently potty-trained by six months and eating with perfect table-manners by a year. Mom was, Kenton recalls, a tremendous smacker. 'For your own good, Leslie,' she used to say. By the time Leslie moved, aged three, to live permanently with her parents, these draconian child-rearing methods had sown a fine crop of neuroses - nightmares, obsessive behaviour and an alarming dissociation between her outer life and her private inner self. Stanley and Violet operated a very different regime of self-expression and absolute freedom - including the freedom to smoke cigarettes, aged four. So far, this could be the story of many a dysfunctional Fifties American childhood, but when Leslie was ten it took a darker turn. Her parents' marriage broke down and Leslie began the peripatetic life of the child of divorce, spending the holidays with her father. 'That summer,' she writes, 'he kept thanking me for being his "best friend" . I thought this was strange since he was not my friend, he was my father, but if he wanted to think of me that way, I figured that was OK.' In fact, it is apparent that Stanley was treating the child not as a friend, but as a surrogate wife.
'My father's relationship with me ultimately destroyed him' Writer Leslie Kenton reveals the secret incest she endured
It was June, four years ago, when Leslie Kenton first contemplated writing about her childhood. ‘My friend Gail Rebuck – who was my first editor and is now the chairman of Random House – she told me, “You need to write a memoir.” I said, “Gail, I can’t. No one would believe it, and the tabloids would go wild.” And Gail said, “Who cares? This book will be the bridge between what you have done before and the work you will do afterwards.”’ For decades, there have been hints that the woman known as the high priestess of the real beauty movement – she advocated high-raw, high-vegetable diets and detoxifying way back in the 70s, created the Origins range and imported the skincare tablet Imedeen to Britain – had built her luminous present from a murkier past. ‘I was not enamoured of the world I grew up in,’ she told an interviewer in 1993 when asked about her father, the American jazz band leader Stan Kenton, and her mother Violet. ‘I felt alienated.’ Two years later, she revealed a childhood suicide attempt. Now we learn in Love Affair the full extent of the horrors and the secret incest at its heart. This dignified book took her years to write. ‘It ripped me to shreds,’ she says. While working on it, she retreated to her rambling house perched atop an extinct volcano on New Zealand’s South Island. Sipping tea in her library, she presents a picture of calm, her two cats leaping balletically from the shelves behind her. She also maintains a flat in Primrose Hill, London, which she bought after she left America in the 60s and materialised among us like a honey-hazed vision.
Balancing her job as health and beauty editor of Harpers & Queen with three – later four – children, her rangy beauty was the best advertisement for her own lifestyle. Today, at 68, her energy is undimmed. ‘I get up in the morning and my first thought is, “It’s a new day! What am I going to do?”’
Love Affair is dedicated to her father – ‘For Stanley, with all my love’ – a tribute as startling as it is sincere. For her first three years, Leslie hardly knew her parents. They farmed her out to her maternal grandmother who raised her with slap-happy discipline while Stanley toured with his dance band across America. After her parents reclaimed her, she joined them on the road, shuttling from the back seat of their Buick into smoky dance halls, only intermittently attending school.
In the end, the beautiful Violet tired of this circus and exchanged her dark, charismatic husband for a stolid mark two, taking her daughter to live in suburban California. Leslie was furious. ‘Stanley and I would get excited about the same things,’ she says of their passion for jazz and Stravinsky. They shared a playful sense of humour. ‘He was very childlike, and that was the best part of my father. It created a deep bond. I think I was the only person on earth he felt he could be himself with. He would ring me in the middle of the night in a state and I would do everything I could to try to reassure him.’
Jazz great Stan Kenton raped his daughter, she claims in new book
Stan Kenton, the bandleader considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern jazz, conducted an incestuous relationship with his daughter, she has claimed.
Leslie Kenton, an author and former beauty editor of Harpers & Queen, said that her father first raped her when she was 11 and continued to do so until she was 13. She has chronicled events in her book, titled: "Love Affair: The Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Relationship." The musician died in 1979, aged 67, after a long battle with alcoholism. Related Articles Music teacher called Jazz Lady admits lesbian relationship with pupil Policeman's daughter denies false rape claim after sex Father's Day special: 20 famous fathers Josef Fritzl daughter 'falls in love' with bodyguard Britain has lowest rape conviction rate in Europe, study finds Despite the abuse - which led her to attempt suicide in her teens - Leslie Kenton said she still loved her father and describes him as a man of "creative genius, humour and joy". She believes he suffered from a condition known as dissociative identity disorder, which brought on selective amnesia. The Stan Kenton Orchestra was one of the most popular US big bands of the 1940s and Kenton was famous for his experimental "wall of sound". The Kansas-born musician toured extensively and the alleged incest began in the summer of 1952, when Leslie ws sharing her father's hotel room during a tour. "I believe he tried his best to resist touching me. Then, drowning in a sea of alcohol, he would come to my bed, only to deny the next morning that he'd been there," Kenton told the Mail on Sunday's You magazine. "There's no question in my mind that what ultimately destroyed my father was his relationship with me. He was horrified by what he had done, yet he could never really face it." Kenton, 68, said that she and her father shared a close bond when she was a child. "I think I was the only person on earth he felt he could be himself with. He would ring me in the middle of the night in a state and I would do everything I could to try and reassure him."
My father raped me when I was 11, says beauty guru Leslie Kenton
Beauty guru Leslie Kenton was raped by her dad, says memoir
It was June, four years ago, when Kenton first contemplated writing about her childhood and "Love Affair" gives full extent of the horrors and the secret incest at its heart, dailymial.co.uk reports. "My friend Gail Rebuck, who was my first editor and is now the chairman of Random House, told me, 'You need to write a memoir.' I said, 'Gail, I can't. No one would believe it, and the tabloids would go wild.' And Gail said, 'Who cares? This book will be the bridge between what you have done before and the work you will do afterwards.'" For decades, there have been hints that the woman known as the high priestess of the real beauty movement - she advocated high-raw, high-vegetable diets and detoxifying way back in the 70s, created the Origins range and imported the skincare tablet Imedeen to Britain - had built her luminous present from a murkier past.