It was the Seventies and heads turned when the mound of drugs came to Goldie Hawn: America’s squeaky-clean Itgirl, the fresh-faced Oscar winner with a rising fi lm reputation and an aura of wholesome decency.
But Hawn, who has built a successful career on her image as an airheaded innocent, shocked everyone by plunging lustily into the cocaine.
“She took a huge snort,” claims her ex-husband Bill Hudson, 61, who has written a tell-all book that threatens to shatter Hawn’s saccharine reputation as he lifts the lid on their tempestuous four-year marriage which ended in 1980 and tells some harsh home truths about his famous daughter, actress Kate Hudson.
Hawn was married to her fi rst husband, director Gus Trikonis, on the evening she took Hudson to see the Rolling Stones in 1975 but that night she went home with him, he reveals.
“We headed back to her house… had some wine and both smoked some pot,” he recalls. “We spent most of the night getting high.”
And having sex. They made love from 1am, for 12 steamy hours, until 1pm the next day, Hudson claims. He was soon to discover her insatiable and adventurous sexual appetite.
“We made love everywhere,” he writes. “Airplane bathrooms, rooftops, under the covers in fi rst-class… Just any and every place we could fi nd.”
Actor George Segal once told him: “Everybody knows Goldie’s always up for a good time,” he writes.
Hudson’s memoir, Two Versions: The Other Side Of Fame And Family, promises to expose the side of Hawn the world has not seen: egocentric, self-indulgent and immoral. It brands her a sex-crazed “movie star who enjoyed having open relationships and limiting access to their children”.
Hawn, 65, has long been Hollywood’s golden girl, maintaining her youthful fi gure, childlike giggle and wide-eyed, happily ignorant innocence for decades. She was not only successful as an actress but also became wealthy by producing many of her greatest fi lms including Private Benjamin, Protocol and Wildcats.
When her career seemed to be fading in the Nineties she revived it with smash hit The First Wives Club and The Banger Sisters.
Though they have not married, Hawn’s 28-year relationship with actor Kurt Russell has made them one of Hollywood’s most enduring and stable couples, and with her penchant for Eastern mysticism and passion for New Age psychology she has remained Hollywood’s favourite hippy-dippy, ditzy blonde long after becoming a grandmother. But Bill Hudson’s book could explode that goody-two-shoes image.
He recalls an early date with Hawn at a Chinese restaurant in 1975 which he should have taken as a warning. A strange man sitting across from them was behaving rudely and on learning that it was director Gus Trikonis,
Hudson told Hawn: “Gus is a f***ing a**hole.” With no expression on her face, Hawn replied: “Oh, um, that’s my husband.”
Hudson writes: “I guess that was a sign of things to come.”
After their second date at the drug-fuelled Stones concert and their marathon sex session, Hudson reveals the couple exchanged their “I love yous”, yet she still had to divorce Trikonis before they could wed in 1976.
But Hawn’s ego began to run rampant, as did her cheating on Hudson.
“She was also starting to develop the none-too-pleasant habit of referring to herself in the third person,” says Hudson.
“‘Goldie will do whatever she wants, when she wants,’ she yelled.”
He can’t say he wasn’t alerted to this side of her. Before their marriage Hawn’s father said: “Just watch yourself. I know she’s my daughter but Goldie tends to want a different man for every moon she’s in.”
Hudson, best known as the lead singer of hit group The Hudson Brothers, claims that Hawn begged him for an open marriage and had affairs with her Shampoo co-star Warren Beatty and French actor Yves Rénier.
SHE stunned her husband when she informed him that she had had an affair with a Swedish man named Bruno and planned to see him again. “My mouth dropped open,” says Hudson. “I didn’t know how to respond. Wait, weren’t we just saying how much we love each other?” he recalls asking his wife.
“Didn’t we just make love for days on end? Now you tell me this guy is coming here and staying with you? Are you going to tell him about us? She glared at me but didn’t say a word. That was all I needed. ‘When you are fi nished with Bruno, you can call me. You have my number.’ And I left.”
But after her renewed fl ing with her Scandinavian lover, Hawn came crawling back to Hudson in tears, he recalls, pleading: “I’m in love with you.”
She begged him: “You’re my soulmate. I know it in my heart. It’s just that I’ve always believed in an open marriage.”
He forgave her and they had a son Oliver and daughter Kate who are 35 and 32 respectively and both actors.
But family life with Hawn was not the blissful scene she presented to the glossy magazines, he claims.
“Her priorities shifted when she fi lmed Foul Play with Chevy Chase and our kids were her second priority,” says Hudson. By the time Kate was born in 1979 he claims he felt more like a mere sperm donor.
“It was very businesslike,” he writes.
“The attitude was to basically: have this baby, get it done and keep moving. It felt like another project.”
But Hawn’s insistence on an open marriage doomed their relationship, he claims.
“She was more into showbusiness than I ever was and I could live with that but not the infi delity.”
He blames an unfavourable custody deal in their divorce for poisoning his relationship with his daughter.
“The lack of visitation meant many knock-down, drag-out fi ghts with Goldie,” Hudson says, angered as Russell increasingly usurped his role.
His children “didn’t realise that I was slowly but surely being replaced as their father fi gure”.
The narcissistic drug-abusing sexpot egomaniac that Bill Hudson describes is at odds with the sweet naif that Hawn has portrayed herself to be from her earliest days as a go-go dancer daubed in body paint on TV comedy series Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
Even after playing a former groupie in 2002 comedy The Banger Sisters, Hawn insisted: “I wasn’t a stoner. I wasn’t a drinker. It just wasn’t my world… I just don’t like drugs. I never did.”
BORN Goldie Jeanne Hawn in Washington DC, the daughter of a dance teacher and a musician, she won a best supporting actress Oscar for her 1969 comedy triumph Cactus Flower and went on to star in such hits as Overboard, Bird On A Wire and Death Becomes Her.
She has made spiritual treks to India, fl irted with Buddhism and founded a non-profi t foundation encouraging children to calm their minds through mental exercises, writing her book Ten Mindful Minutes about the need for children to take mental breaks.
But that is just a façade for the ruthless businesswoman with a voracious sexual appetite, Hudson claims in his memoir, which he hopes will serve as a warning to fathers who risk losing touch with their children in a bitter divorce.
“I tried to stay in contact with my children but Goldie made it impossible,” he says, lamenting that he agreed to the terms of his divorce.
“I will honestly regret that decision until the day I die.”
Yet despite burning many bridges with his memoir, Hudson improbably hopes that it will lead to a reconciliation with his children.
“I realise there’s nothing I can do to fi x it but I hope there’s eventually a resolution.”
WHY KATE IS A SPOILED BRAT
GOLDIE HAWN turned her daughter, actress Kate Hudson, into a “spoiled brat,” claims Kate’s father Bill Hudson.
Kate, whose fi lms include Almost Famous and Bride Wars, has long been estranged from her father and they have not spoken in years.
“I love Kate but… she has done stuff which is just awful,” he writes.
“She is a spoiled brat in my eyes.”
He complains that she has not called or visited her 88-year-old grandmother who has Alzheimer’s disease.
“I have called Kate and texted her dozens of times begging her to help her grandmother but she hasn’t responded to me,” he says.
Kate, divorced from The Black Crowes rocker Chris Robinson, had a baby by Muse front man Matt Bellamy in July but Hudson does not expect she will let him see the child.
He points out: “Kate has a four-year- old step-sister whom she doesn’t even want to see. How sick is that?”
Kate has branded Hudson a dreadful father and after being raised by Kurt Russell has said: “Kurt is my dad. Kurt is a saviour who came into my life.”
She once raged that Hudson “doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall… The bottom line is, you call your kids on their birthday.”
Hudson says: “I love Kate but I think she has been contrived and destructive with me and with her brothers and sisters.
“She’s had a life of privilege from both parents. And the only thing that she really has to talk about is emotional devastation that she’s exaggerating.
“Kate has used the story of her being abandoned by me because she needed tragedy in her life. She grew up in Hollywood with private planes.
Nobody was going to sympathise unless she had some tragedy.”