THE fashion designer Jenny Kee has disclosed that she slept with John Lennon when she was 17 after the singer declared that he had never been with an Asian girl.

Kee, 59, famous for her use of iconic Australian imagery on creations that range from jumpers to bedspreads, writes of the encounter in her memoir, A Big Life, which goes on sale on Monday.

She says she also slept with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Roger Daltry but denies she was “a hardened groupie”.

The designer, whose creations were worn by the late Diana, Princess of Wales, said that she slept with Lennon in Sydney during The Beatles’ first visit to Australia in June 1964. Lennon was still married to Cynthia, his first wife. He began the affair with Yoko Ono, the Japanese musician and artist, in 1968.

Asked by Australia’s Who magazine how she ended up in Lennon’s bed, Kee replied: “You’ve got to have a strategy. There was wall-to-wall security, but we pressed all the buttons in the lift until it jammed, and that’s how we got on to the stairwell and met them.

“There was no holding back. I was tunnel visioned. But in the end he [Lennon] chose me. He said: ‘I’ve never been with an Asian girl before.’ Sleeping with John Lennon was a fantastic thing.”

The magazine asked: “So you paved the way for Yoko Ono?” Kee said: “Well, he’d never been with an Asian girl before, so what can I say? I wasn’t a hardened groupie — I was very naïve. I’d only had two boyfriends before that. We got it on and magic happened.”

Most of Kee’s encounters with rock stars occurred in London after she moved there in the late 1960s and worked at the Chelsea Antiques Market, where she claims to have frequently dressed, and, it appears undressed, well known musicians.

Kee said that Jimi Hendrix came to her market stall and spoke to her on the day that he died. She told the magazine: “He was quite vacant, he was lost. You could see that fame and everything had just got to him. I feel privileged that I’ve touched these great icons . . . John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and Princess Diana.”

Kee went on to design for Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel. In her later life, back in Australia, she lived with Danton Hughes, son of the Australian writer and art critic, Robert Hughes.

Danton Hughes, who was 20 years her junior, committed suicide in the Sydney home he shared with Kee in 2002.

He was convinced, Kee says, that his father, Robert Hughes, loathed the sight of him. Robert Hughes did, allegedly, disapprove of his son’s relationship with Kee. In his own memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, which is also about to released in Australia, he refers to Kee as his son’s “far older” lover.

In turn Kee, in her book, remembers Hughes Sr, whom she knew well in London in the 1960s, as an “arrogant, pompous, generous — and upwardly mobile hippy”.

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