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.

As their obsessive love for one another grew, her father broke the ultimate taboo and by her account, raped his daughter.

And yet, despite the almost identical landscape of this story, the resonance is less Humbert Humbert and Lolita than Cathy and Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. It is a story of two people impacted together against their peers, their relatives, their circumstances. Against the world.

"If we had not broken the taboo," Kenton says, "our bond would not have been so great." Note that troubling "we". In all the story, she takes an equal part. To an almost preternatural level. Cutting through a myriad of unspoken questions, she says, "I do not believe in forgiveness. Forgiveness is irrelevant." She pauses, then utters the words that could set whole continents devoted to victimology on their heads. "I could have been the perpetrator."

Sitting now in a pretty Russian cafe near her Primrose Hill flat, still luminously beautiful, there seems to be a new quietude. Perhaps it is the jetlag. I feel she has less time for wittering on about beauty and has a lower boredom threshold. But four years on retreat in New Zealand, excavating a troubled past, is probably guaranteed to cut any journalistic crap. Kenton says, "I needed to reach my soul." This reach-out she calls her dance with the dark.

It was, of course, the dance that began the day she was born. And it will continue forever, she tells me.

For the first three years of her life, Kenton scarcely knew her parents. Her father, a jazz pianist and composer, was dedicated to his own American dream of leading a big band but spent most of his life on the exhausting business of "one nighters" across America. Her mother, Violet, was an American beauty, inevitably disappointed that beauty did not deliver the charmed life she had expected. They farmed Leslie out as a baby to Violet's mother, "Mom", who raised her with the terrifying discipline of the time.

Both of Leslie's grandmothers had a strong presence in her early years. They were strong women -- manipulative and superstitious in equal measure. 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 live with Mom.

According to Leslie's account, her parents arrived home from hospital with their newborn child and immediately handed her over to Mom. "Here," they said, "you bring her up." Which she did. Leslie was apparently potty-trained by six months and eating with perfect table manners after a year.

When they finally did reclaim Leslie to bring her to their new home, Hollyridge, it must have been something of a seismic shock. She learned to smoke, aged four. Which was probably apposite enough considering she spent her time shuttling from one smoky dancehall to another and only intermittently attending school.

Inevitably, the beautiful blonde Violet tired of this peripatetic existence and exchanged her brilliant, ambitious husband for the more stolid Jimmy. Taking her daughter with her, she moved to suburban California. Leslie was not best pleased.

But thus her fate was sealed. She was to spend her holidays with her father.

All little girls are to some extent in love with their fathers. And only the wilfully obtuse ignore the very real sexuality of children and indeed the power of a little girl to "lure" an adult. That is why so much depends on the quality -- and the propriety -- of paternal love.

Kenton's and her father's passion and mutual dependency was the kind that is forged in the trenches. "My father drank a lot after each job, even if we had to drive on to the next night's work without sleep. I didn't like it when he drank. He was always 'different'. Then he didn't remember things and he was never funny. He never called me 'Shortstuff' when he was drunk.

"We raced from job to job, diner to diner, hotel to hotel. He made me the navigator. He told me where we were supposed to be and it was my job to work out the fastest way on the map to get there. I was always scared I'd be wrong and we'd get lost."

They shared a passion for jazz and Stravinsky. They shared the same 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," she says.

During the summer of 1952, they met up while the band toured. He was deeply troubled, his ambition still unfulfilled, drinking a lot of alcohol, and she, a mere 10-year-old, would incur his wrath by watering the whisky. She shared his hotel room:

they slept back-to-back in the same bed. He was drinking even more heavily while she tried to police him, this 6ft 4in man.

"That summer he kept thanking me for being his best friend. I thought this was strange since he was not my friend, he was my father.

"I so identified with Stanley and his concerns that it was as if I was becoming him. I wanted to take on as much of his pain as I could to relieve him of it. And I tried to grow up fast, since that seemed to be what Stanley wanted. Like Jennie in the movie [about a forbidden love affair], I would examine my budding breasts in the mirror as if they belonged to someone else. Was this the person I was to become? Was she someone my father wanted me to turn into? Or was all this a terrible mistake?"

It is clear that he was, in many ways, beginning to treat her as a substitute for a wife. One night, she says, the final boundary was crossed and he raped her. It was the beginning of an incestuous relationship that lasted until she was 13.

During her visits to him, the days were as sunny as ever. They went to the movies. They had favourites which they would seek out in any city or town they toured. One favourite was Jennie and another was Beauty and The Beast, less because of its transformative qualities than its expression of the "animal spirit which lies not too far from the surface of all human beings".

Some nights, he left her alone. "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 he'd been there."

Leslie Kenton thinks that her father experienced a condition known as dissociative identity disorder involving selective amnesia, which she also developed because, she says she blocked out the incest. Her body, however, would not let her -- or him -- off the hook. She suffered fevers and pains. "I believe my body was processing a lot of trauma [and the fevers were] getting it out."

Finally she took an overdose and had to have her stomach pumped.

Years later, as an adult, Leslie told Violet what had happened. "She was horrified but not surprised. The moment I told her, everything came together for her. She remembered Stanley ringing her to tell her I'd become a pathological liar."

Despite the disassociation, he was terrified of someone finding out. He raged and screamed at her and complained of her "lying". "One night he shook me to the point where it didn't matter to me if he killed me. Something broke in me and my relationship with him broke. Basically I said deep inside, 'I don't belong to you any more. Never again will I let you in in that way.' It was a turning point in my life.

"I do not know how to express the damage that a family like this does. This is a disease that's passed on." And Kenton is convinced that her father's pathology was passed down from his mother, Stella, whom he later described as "a witch".

The incest had ended, but what she calls "the scars of shame" were more persistent. So what was it that saved her? Two things, she tells me. "Grace. And my children. All my life I had a passion to have children. I had my first child when I was 18 and that was what saved me. When I got pregnant at 17, my father said, 'You can't keep this baby.' And I said 'I will'."

There was something else as well, however. But it was to be another 10 years at least before she came across London psychiatrist Joyce Martin, in the mid-Sixties, one of a handful of doctors licensed to use small doses of LSD to rediscover repressed memories.

She played a crucial role in Leslie Kenton's salvation. During the course of treatment in 1967, Leslie experienced searing pain. Two sessions later, she recalled the first rape.

It would be years before all the memories gradually resurfaced, including the weird role of Stanley's mother in two suspected rituals involving drugs -- although arguably even more sinister was Stella's incarcerating of her, aged 13, in a sanatorium for a brutal series of ECT treatment to further "fry" her memories. She has subsequently been able to verify the details of this by speaking to others, including the family friend who cared for her in her fragile state afterwards.

But did it all really happen? Psychologists say that there is no sexual relationship more passionate than the unconsummated one. And the stronger the passion, the deeper the potential for repression. Is it possible that it was a deeply repressed, obsessive, but unconsummated, incestuous love that resurfaced under the LSD therapies?

The answer, surely, must lie with Stanley Kenton.

Leslie confronted her father Stanley in 1972, when he visited London to play in Ronnie Scott's jazz club and record a Sounds for Saturday show for the BBC.

She went to his room at the Mayflower hotel and said, "We need to talk about some things." And as she talked, all her fear of his wrath left her. "The outburst of rage, or blame or denial" she was expecting, never happened. He was a big man and he physically crumbled. "'Where was it... I mean, the first time,' he wanted to know."

Then he said: "What did they do to you, Shortstuff, that summer that I was away?" When she told him about the ECT, he said: "My mother was such a witch."

The next day, he told her: "All I can say is that I'm so sorry. During that period of my life, I hardly knew myself what was going on."

Was this an admission of guilt? Certainly it was an admission of some sort of misbehaviour. Neglect, dereliction of fatherly duty, but an admission of actual incest? It's not quite clear. But does it really matter? Because some things are very clear.

At an extremely vulnerable age, Leslie Kenton was not being cared for. Neither mothered nor fathered. She was a child on the road, living on the edge, if not quite hand-to-mouth, with an alcoholic father. The chances are very high that it did happen. They were lying in the same bed and he was drunk more often than not. Drunken fathers make passes at helpless daughters.

It's true, he neither confirmed nor denied it. It seems clear he could not remember. He was by then a hugely dysfunctional man, possibly suffering huge blanks. But he knew he was guilty of something. And he had left his little daughter with a huge legacy of damage to repair. Thanks to her children and her extraordinary, unflinching spirit, she has made this a life's work, which has benefitted her fellow man.

Three things in this memoir have the potential to cause controversy. Firstly, there is the "retrieved" memory. This is thorny territory, but the circumstantial evidence in Kenton's story is overwhelming. Secondly, there is the absolute refusal to be a victim, right down to eschewing the word "abuse" in favour of the strictly accurate "incest". While to all intents and purposes a 10-year-old child can only be seen as the victim, Leslie Kenton's life's purpose has been to learn to love the dark as well as the light -- in her father, herself and the universe -- and to bless them both. And finally, it is her belief that the relationship with herself destroyed her father, stopped him fulfilling his ambition. It is rationalisation too far: he did that all by himself.

She last saw her father in 1979, shortly before he died. He had married twice more, to a woman much younger than himself whom he physically abused, and finally to an old friend. Leslie saw him two weeks before his death. He had been drinking all afternoon, was in his boxer shorts and looked like "a cheap bum". She told him she loved him more than anyone in the world. She wanted him to know that despite all he had done to her she loved him.

She knew he heard because he changed from being an old man to "the child with the china-blue eyes".

The funny thing is, sitting in the Russian cafe, holding the book that testifies unblinkingly to an incestuous relationship, you suddenly see, through her own china- blue eyes, Leslie Kenton, the child. And it really is good to know that the spirit of that rebellious child proved unquenchable.

Love Affair by Leslie Kenton (Vermilion, €16.05)

- Anne Harris

Originally published in