By Donal Lynch
Sunday Jun 4 2006

WE'VE only just air-kissed and Kathy Lette is gone again. "I'll just be two ticks," she squeals, vanishing around a corner. I wait. Was it something I said? When she reappears, the skirt is shorter, the heels are higher and the smile even wider. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

"I wanted to give you an original look, darling," she grins. "A lot of people are going to see this, right?"

If ever any author ever knew how to do what Bette Midler calls "the whole bit", it is Kathy Lette. The suit screams, "Look at me!" Her ruby lips fire off soundbites at a dazzling rate. Every point is punctuated with a stiletto-sharp quip.

I compliment her on her youthful figure (after all, not many 47-year-old women can successfully wear a skirt which is, in effect, a patterned belt), and she gives a little self-deprecating sigh.

"Oh darling, I'm haggard today. It's been a long slog: the books, the babies, and the fun-loving fellatio." She pauses for a sip of mineral water. "I'm against plastic surgery, but it's getting harder and harder. Show me a woman who's happy with her age and I'll show you the electro-convulsive therapist who helped her get that way."

After Kylie (with whom she is good friends) and Germaine Greer ("I'm Germaine with jokes," she tells me), Kathy is probably Australia's most famous female export. Her "clit-lit" ("not 'chick-lit'," she corrects me) books are huge best sellers and one of them, Mad Cows, was made into a film starring Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel.

She has recently followed in the footsteps of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde as guest writer at the Savoy in London. A few snide reviewers questioned whether Kathy was "worthy" of the honour. "There were bunches of sour grapes all round after that one," she remembers.

In truth, Pommy mistrust is nothing new to Kathy. She first shot to notoriety in her adopted homeland after she nicked Nigella Lawson's boyfriend, Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer and television host.

"He [Robertson] had a television show, Hypotheticals, and Kylie Minogue was supposed to do it. She cancelled. Robertson said, 'Get me a motormouth,' and they got me. I thought he was gorgeous."

There was just one problem: "He was involved with Nigella at the time, and I can't cook or anything. The gossip columnists had an absolute field day. Everyone's question was: How could good-looking gorgeous QC dump good-looking gorgeous domestic goddess for loudmouth colonial nymphomaniac? And I was like, 'How dare they call me a loudmouth!'" She giggles at the memory.

Robertson and Kathy eventually married. But she and Nigella moved in the same social circles in London and initially things were very awkward.

"She didn't speak to me for a few years," Kathy says. "But a lot of Chardonnay has flowed under the bridge since then. I had Salman Rushdie's stag night and Nigella was invited. As all his friends are female I said we'd have a stag party with only women. We all went with men's suits, slicked our hair down and I had Puppetry of the Penis performed at the house. I took her aside and said, 'Look, we're both strong women, we're sisters really.' And it was fine then."

Still, even today Kathy confesses she is not too keen on domestic goddesses as a breed. "Emily Pankhurst tied herself to the railings to get women out of the kitchen. I don't particularly want to send them back in, even if it is to lick spoons and fellate vegetables."

She might sweeten her politics with gags, but Kathy has always been a feminist. While still a teenager she gained huge notoriety with her first novel, Puberty Blues. A sort of comedic Female Eunuch, Pubes (as Kathy calls it) was a satirical take on Sydney's ultra-macho beach culture. The book became a huge hit and was soon made into a film.

But in contrast to the practised interviewee she has since become, the young Kathy, who had left school at 15, was "freaked out" by sudden success and went into hiding. "I had no idea it would be so big. I had only written it for my girlfriends so they would know they're not just a support structure for their breasts and ovaries," she tells me. "I didn't know how to handle the attention."

To add to her problems her mother, the headmistress of the local school, and father, were horrified by the racy content and refused to speak to her for years.

KATHY retreated from the media spotlight and took a variety of odd jobs: as a human street sign, a kissogram and a care worker. In her 20s she came back to writing, first working as a newspaper communist in Sydney before travelling to America to work as a sitcom writer for Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles. In the late Eighties she came back to writing books.

As her profile grew, her parents began to come around from their shock at Kathy's Pubes. "Time was all it took," she tells me. "We made a pact that they wouldn't read my books, and we would be great mates but not interfere in each other's lives."

These days it's Kathy's husband and two kids who are more likely to wince at her one-woman cabaret. She's careful to emphasise that the title of her latest book, How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints), does not refer to Robertson, since, "if I did commit murder, he's the only one who could get me off".

She says the details of the dysfunctional marriage in the book, such as her heroine's lack of desire to have sex after having to do all the housework, were "researched during cappuccinos with girlfriends" rather than being drawn from her own life.

Still, Robertson doesn't escape a gentle ribbing. "My husband works pro bono - my two least favourite words in the English language. At the moment he's working in a human rights court on Sierra Leone. He's a very good person but not domestically inclined. He says, 'I'd like to help but I'm a man - I can't multi-task.' I tell him, 'If you were at an orgy, I bet you could!'

"The problem with being married to a human rights lawyer," she continues, "is that you can never get the high moral ground. When we had babies, I'd say, 'Come in here and change its nappies,' and he'd say, 'I have 30 people on death row.'

"First I was shocked. After a year I was like, 'Let them die.' And after three years I was like, 'I'll kill them myself!'"

Just then Kathy's phone goes off and the salty gags die on her lips. "I have to check it's not a problem with one of the kids," she tells me, rooting frantically in her handbag. The phone cuts out.

"I think it might have been my daughter," she says. "She's lovely but slightly 'Taliban'," she adds, now back in character. "Before I go home I have to change into a long Quaker skirt and churn some butter. And embroider something. But I understand. She needs her own oxygen. And I take up a lot of that."

Does Kathy ever get exhausted, as she puts it herself, "dropping my own name and haemorrhaging charisma"? "I am 'off' sometimes," she admits. "It's just when you see me I've been let out of the cage, so I get excited. But I can get quite serious when I'm writing. I do like 12 drafts to make it look light. I can lie in a coma of depression in the foetal position if things aren't going well."

For the moment, though, she is very definitely out of the cage. This week she will attend a literary party in London, the theme of which is Dressed to Kill ("I'm wearing hot pants and a dagger"), and then it's Down Under, where after years of press sniping she is enjoying something of a popularity renaissance.

"I can't wait. At home [in Australia] they have literary lunches with 500 women ranging from teens to octogenarians. I'm always pleased when I meet my fans and they're just great girls. I mean, could you imagine if they were grey, dandruffy men in raincoats? What on earth would we say to each other?"

Somehow, I'm sure she'd think of something.

'How To Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints)', by Kathy Lette, Simon & Schuster, ?15.99

- Donal Lynch

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