At 16, Marcia Hines crossed the globe for her first job. She didn’t know she was pregnant

The year was 1970. Marcia Hines was 16, and, with her mother’s blessing, left Boston for a country that still refused to accept African American immigrants. She knew nothing about the local politics when she accepted her first-ever paid performing gig in the controversial hippie musical Hair. At first she thought she’d taken a job in Austria. “I just wanted to sing,” she says.

When Hines arrived in Sydney she was also pregnant, although she did not know for several more months until “something inside me started kicking”. When the baby arrived, she would become a 17-year-old single mother in a distant, conservative and judgmental land. A nervous Hines rang her mother, an open-minded woman who let her daughter go to Woodstock at age 16, to tell her the news. “She said, ‘You’ve chosen a strange, strange career. But keep your baby’,” HInes says.

Marcia Hines at China Doll in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo. Credit:Wolter Peeters

It has been a strange career, and an unusual life. From moving to conservative 1970s Australia for Hair, then playing the world’s first black Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, to attracting a new generation of fans as an Australian Idol judge in the 2000s (a role she is about to reprise) and starring as a disco queen at age 69 in this month’s Velvet Rewired stage show – much of it while juggling single motherhood – Hines has kept “relevant”, as she says, for more than 50 years. She doesn’t know how she pulled it off. “If I did, I’d sell it,” she says with a hearty laugh. “I’d put it in a bag and sprinkle it.”

When I arrive at China Doll restaurant at Cowper Wharf in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, Hines, who eats there so regularly she is on a first-name basis with staff, is sitting in the corner, wearing a billowing white and gold shirt and a diamond crucifix necklace. It’s a lunch session in the lead-up to Christmas at a fashionable restaurant on Sydney Harbour, so there is glamour galore. But at almost 70, she is still the most beautiful woman in the room.

We briefly reminisce – we met on a magazine shoot 10 years earlier – and I introduce her to the photographer, Wolter Peeters, who has been asked to shoot a portrait of Hines on the wharf outside. She looks alarmed. “I don’t like drawing attention to myself.” Staff find a nook upstairs, where Hines and Peeters’ lights are obscured from wider view by a table of rowdy businessmen. She relaxes. Many entertainers enjoy the profile that comes with their job. Hines is not one of them.

Marcia with her fellow judges on Australian Idol.

It was music that hooked her as a kid, not a desire to be famous. She’d sit by the radio in the home she shared with her mother Esmerelda and her older brother Dwight and listen intently. “I thought people lived inside the radio,” she says. “I’d listen, more than sing along. Most singers listen.” She’d go to her godmother’s church and sit in the choir box, soaking up their gospel songs (her mother’s church was primly Anglican). She later won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she sang opera before quitting the program. “I hated it,” she says. “It was too straight for me.”

As our prawn dumplings and salmon sashimi arrive, Hines tells me about how her parents left the Caribbean for the United States before she was born. Her mother’s family was a high-profile one in Jamaica – her uncle was a politician – and Hines is related to former US Secretary of State, the late Colin Powell, and singer Grace Jones. She once met Jones’ brother Noel, a pentecostal bishop, and noted his likeness to her brother. The compliment was returned. “Noel said, ‘You remind me of Grace.’”

New Zealand king salmon sashimi with blackened chilli dressing at China Doll.Credit:Wolter Peeters

Hines’ father, Eugene, died when she was six months old during an operation to remove shrapnel from a war wound (she does not know which war). So Hines, her mother and her brother were a tight-knit unit in the middle-class suburbs of Boston in the 1950s and ’60s. There was no hardship, but no silver spoons, either. And it was a tumultuous time for race relations. “I lived in America during the civil rights movement,” Hines says. “I know prejudice.”

When Hines was 16, Australian promoter Harry M. Miller held auditions for the musical Hair, which had been globally controversial for its nudity, drug references and anti-Vietnam war message. Director Jim Sharman wanted six African Americans in the show, so went to the United States to recruit them. A friend of Hines auditioned but was too polished. “We’re looking for a rough diamond,” the casting team said. Her friend knew just the girl.

The dumplings at China Doll.Credit:Wolter Peeters

“My mum said, ‘Do you want to do this?’” says Hines. “I said, ‘Yeah, think so.’” So her mother backed her decision. “‘If you don’t like it’,” her mother said, “‘you can always come home.’ That’s the best thing you can say to a kid, that you can come home. I auditioned and maybe nine days, 12 days later, I was on a plane to Sydney. I just wanted to sing. I had no idea what would happen after that. I’ve always been game. Not stupid, but game.”

Hines was warned that Australia was a prejudiced country. “My mother said, ‘Don’t listen to nonsense. Wait until you get there and see.’”

When she and her fellow African American actors arrived, they were the “toast of the country”, she says. “We were invited to all the best parties, with all the socialites. The Vietnam War was still raging, [King’s] Cross was full of black and white guys, Americans. That made it OK.”

Still, it could be uncomfortable. Hines’ 2001 biography Diva said the Hair cast members were stared at and pointed at constantly by Australians who had never seen an African American person in the flesh before. Some were refused service by real estate agents and taxi drivers. “Total strangers would come up to me and touch my hair; I mean, literally, run their fingers through it and stare,” cast member Deni Gordon is quoted as saying.

Hines first disclosed her pregnancy, in tears, to the stage director Sandra McKenzie, when questioned about whether her eating habits were causing her to become chubby. She rang her mother, who’d guessed already from photos.

The baby’s father was US guitarist Phillip Gibson, who had little to do with his daughter. Earlier this year, Deni Hines told this masthead she spoke to him for the first time at age three, over the phone. “He told me he was coming to meet me on Christmas Day. I sat outside our home from sunrise to sunset and he never showed up.”

Marcia Hines with daughter Deni in 1976 after being awarded Queen of Pop.Credit:Fairfax

Hines worked until the end of her pregnancy, which ran longer than the usual 40 weeks, and did one final show before going straight to the hospital to be induced. She was back at work less than two weeks later, and for a while daughter Deni slept in a makeshift creche under the stage.

Hines “would not be who I am if I didn’t have my daughter”. Nonetheless, she would not recommend teen motherhood, either. “Once you have a baby, you’re no longer a baby.”

Australia in the 1970s judged teen mothers, too. But Hines said she never felt disapproval. She had enough money to hire a night nanny while she worked, and her creative friendship circles included many people shunned by the rest of society, such as gay men, whose love was criminal in NSW until 1984. “I lived in a bubble, let’s be honest,” she says. “Being a performer allows you to be with like-minded people. You don’t have to venture out, and I didn’t. I’m a very accepting person. Everybody goes to hell in their own way.”

Hines would call her mother to ask baby questions, and get unsentimental advice in return. When Deni would not stop crying, her mother asked if she was fed, and dry. The answer was yes. “She said, ‘Swaddle her, and walk out of the room. You need to walk out of the room.’” When Dwight committed suicide in his late 20s, Esme called to tell Marcia, who sobbed. Her mother was again her rock. “I took that child through measles, mumps and chicken pox,” she once quoted Esme as saying in that phone call. “‘I gave birth to that child. That’s my son, don’t cry. Go home and bury him.’ And I did just that.”

Esme moved to Australia to live with her daughter, and would look after Deni during Hines’ long tours. “We had three generations. It’s always interesting because you’ve a common enemy – you’re the common enemy. She’d say, ‘She’s just a baby.’ I’d say, ‘Mum, she’s 25.’” Esme remained in Australia until she died in 2003.

Hines’ latest show, Velvet Rewired, opens at the Opera House on Saturday.Credit:Getty

Hines still tours. Her latest show, Velvet Rewired – which is on at the Opera House from Thursday – has been performed in several Australian cities. She spends about three months a year in hotel rooms, bringing along incense and her cat to make them more homely. The travelling, the fame and the media interviews are the price of doing a job she loves. “The downside to a public profile? I don’t want to go outside. I really don’t like drawing attention to myself. People say, ‘How do you handle it?’ I make my home great, with everything I want. And I stay home.”

The upsides include sharing the joys of music. “People tell me great stories about what their music has meant to them,” she says. “That’s a great feeling.” She still regards as a career highlight being voted Queen of Pop for three consecutive years from 1976, not just because it was an honour, but because people had to go to the effort of buying a TV Week magazine, filling in the form, cutting it out, stamping and addressing the envelope, and posting it, in order to vote for her.

Hines returns to Boston and Jamaica frequently, and watched the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, which triggered the Black Lives Matter protests, with great sadness. “I’m not a political person. It was just a damn shame to see one human being so cruel to another human being. I do understand the protests. But I don’t live there any more.”

Australia is her home. She has been married and divorced several times – including to the doctor who treated her mother – and now lives in the inner city with her partner of six years, whose name she will not reveal. He’s not an entertainer. “No, no, no, no, no. I like to talk about something other than what I do.”

Throughout the interview Hines is polite, friendly and a little circumspect. Now the tape is off, she relaxes. She orders dessert. She asks all about my children, offers motherly advice and sympathises with my angst over my son’s discovery that Santa is not real. She chuckles and she teases, and then warmly kisses my cheek as she leaves.

It has been a strange life, and a remarkable one, during which a pregnant American teenager who arrived in a strange country has somehow managed to remain grounded for almost 50 years.

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