She took over as his manager. Now Gaynor Wheatley is helping bring John Farnham’s story to the stage

At 69, in simple black pants and a white top, with small gold hoop earrings, she has a warm, unaffected manner and a loveliness about her. I remember thinking when she was on TV that Gaynor Martin, as she was then, was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.

Glenn Wheatley obviously thought the same; they got together in 1980, at the height of her soapie fame, and when they married in 1982, TV Week’s cover referred to the “Sons & Daughters Real-Life Wedding”, not mentioning the music promoter at all. When I raise her time as an actor, she corrects me with a laugh. “I was a soapie star, there’s a difference.”

She gave that up to raise the children and support her entrepreneurial husband, life with whom involved great highs and epic lows, including the time they lost everything when Geelong’s Pyramid Building Society collapsed, and they had to move out of their stately Melbourne home and into her parents’ house, where the kids slept on blow-up mattresses.

Then there was the time Wheatley went to jail for 10 months for tax fraud. “I always knew it would be an adventure,” she says of life as Gaynor Wheatley. “There were a few moments I could’ve done without – like the whole jail thing.” She laughs. “As soon as I get a letter from the Tax Office now I have post-traumatic stress, but most of it was good. The majority of it was great, and there was always a lot of love, and ‘Oh god, I stuffed up, let’s go.’ ”

When Wheatley’s organs were failing, Gaynor managed to get Farnham on the phone to him one last time, to say goodbye. In the days after, the families were together. “I was a blithering mess,” Gaynor says. “John just turned around, held my hand and said, ‘You’re my manager now.’ And I was like, ‘Of course I am, I’ll do the best I can.’ ” Inside, she was terrified. Then she reminded herself that she’d been there every step of the way. She knew stuff.

At about the same time, Gaynor thought she’d better take a look at Wheatley’s desk. On the top of it was a yellow legal notepad, of the kind he liked to use, with a to-do list scrawled on the first page. On that list were two words: Farnham musical. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I’d better get my head around this,’ ” she says. ” ‘Can I be the G. Wheatley to keep this going?’ ”

Cassel was wondering the same thing, so when they finally met, his primary feeling was one of relief. “I was slightly nervous because Glenn and I had built up a relationship over a long period of time, whereas Gaynor and I hadn’t interacted,” he says. “Then when we connected I was like, ‘Why did Glenn keep us apart? You’re amazing.’ ”

As they began working together, it became clear that a musical about the Eureka Stockade, as promising as it was shaping up to be, was not the right way to treat the Farnham songbook, particularly in these post-COVID times when everyone was looking for something positive.

For Cassel, the realisation hit at a 2023 promotional event, where he flagged to journalists that he was working on a Farnham musical. “The room was buzzing as soon as I said it, you could feel the energy,” Cassel says. “So many people came up to me after the formalities and mentioned it. I realised they were all expecting a musical about Farnham, which was not the musical we were planning. We were more Les Mis than Mamma Mia!. What they wanted was the feeling they got when they saw Farnham perform live.” He called Gaynor with a blunt assessment. “I think we’re developing the wrong musical.”

She understood. If anyone was looking for a bit of sunshine after the horrors of the pandemic, it was Glenn Wheatley’s widow. “It was beautifully written, it was beautifully sung, but it wasn’t joyous,” she says. “Michael and I went: ‘We need joy.’ ” They went back to the drawing board, asking writers to pitch new ideas for a musical about Farnham using Farnham’s songs.

Jack Yabsley grew up in Coonabarabran, central NSW, and his parents were big Farnham fans. He remembers family road trips when he was a toddler on which the Whispering Jack cassette was on high rotation. It must’ve imprinted on his psyche because, decades later, he was always first on the dance floor at Michael Cassel Group parties when You’re the Voice came on. As an out-and-out fan, he’d pitched various storylines for the Farnham songbook first time around – “a romantic comedy, a sports comedy, a bush community trapped in a tiny community hall trying to cheer each other up” – but at the end of every email he had put a rider: “As a fan, I want to see a biopic. That’s what I would want to see.”

When asked to pitch again, this time with a story based on Farnham, he knew the slice of life he wanted to focus on. “Part of the theme of this show is that you can’t do it alone,” he says. He points me to a YouTube video of Farnham singing You’re the Voice at an outdoor concert in Munich in 1987, blond locks flowing, clad in leather pants, 100,000 adoring fans chanting along. “It’s peak rock-star John Farnham – but the only way we get to that John Farnham, where he’s a music god, is with these people who helped rebuild the John of 1981.”

Those people included not just Wheatley but the musicians who also gambled on the creation of Whispering Jack, like keyboardist David Hirschfelder, guitarist Brett Garsed and sound engineer Ross Fraser, and those who accompanied Farnham on his subsequent tours, like backing singer Venetta Fields. Gaynor put Yabsley in touch with many of these people, who he interviewed as part of his research. “They’re all alive and they have these incredible memories, specific little stories you can pepper through the musical, real insider information,” he says.

If the friendship between Farnham and Wheatley became iron-clad when Wheatley mortgaged his house to produce Whispering Jack, that strength doubled when Wheatley hit trouble, his friend helping him out financially and visiting him in jail. “Glenn would have thrown himself under a bus for John, and John, likewise,” Gaynor says. “They had an incredible love.” Not that it was always smooth sailing. “I often said they fought like sisters. They’d both huff and puff, decide not to speak to each other, which was always bemusing to Jill and I. We’d call each other and say, ‘storm incoming’. But then they’d see each other and hug it out.”

I wonder how it feels, to be so immersed in the 1980s again, as the musical comes together. It’s a double-edged sword, Gaynor concedes, keeping her late husband ever front of mind. “Great, sad. Great, sad.” She’s stopped asking herself, “What would Glenn do?” and is learning to trust her own instincts, and says she’s looking forward to being able to finally stop and grieve once the musical opens. Also, “be a grandma!” and do other things for herself that she hasn’t had time to do. Not travel, she says – she’s not much interested in that without Glenn and in any case, they went to plenty of places together.

What would he say if he could see her now? Would he be proud of her? “I think he’d just be, ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going,’ ” she says, laughing again. “He was like the Energiser bunny and that’s how I feel, there hasn’t been time to sit back and go, ‘Oh, let’s be proud.’ There’s still too much to do for John.”

I was a university student working part-time at Brashs record store in Camberwell, in Melbourne’s east, when Whispering Jack was released. It was September 1986 and nearly everyone walking into the store that summer wanted the album, most buying it on vinyl, some on cassette and, as 1987 progressed, some on CD, a strange, newfangled thing that occupied a small corner of the store. Whispering Jack spent 25 weeks as the top-selling album in the country, won a swag of ARIAs and became the biggest-selling album by a solo Australian artist. That record has not been surpassed and, given the globalisation and fracturing of the music market, is unlikely to be.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this success was far from guaranteed. It was the mid-1980s and commercial radio made or destroyed careers, and nobody in radio wanted to know about a new album by Johnny Farnham of 1967 Sadie fame. Nobody except Cherie Romaro.

A powerhouse radio director at a time when women weren’t, Romaro was the country’s first female commercial radio music director and the first female content director. She was running Sydney’s 2DAY FM when her old mate Glenn Wheatley called to tell her that he was flying up from Melbourne to play her a new album by Johnny Farnham – now to be known as John, please. “He turned up with the album in a paper bag,” Romaro recalls over the phone from her Sydney home. “I later learnt the reason for the paper bag was that he didn’t want anyone else to know it was John Farnham, because he was getting so many knockbacks.”

Wheatley owned Melbourne’s EON-FM at the time but even it wouldn’t play You’re the Voice more than once, and then only because Wheatley told them to. The knockbacks came not just from radio presenters but from record distributors too: nobody would touch it, so Wheatley Records had to release the album itself.

Romaro didn’t know any of this when Wheatley put the album on the turntable in her office, picked up the needle and placed it down on You’re the Voice. The hands clapping, the music building, the first lyrics, “We have the chance to turn the pages over” – it took her about 30 seconds to feel the power of the song.

She listened for a little bit longer, then picked up the album, walked down the corridor to the studio where a presenter was live to air, and gave it to him. “Put this on,” she said. He saw the name on the cover, and sighed. He didn’t want to. “Put it on, you’re going to play it,” she said, and left the studio. As she walked back down the corridor, she could hear You’re the Voice playing through the speakers.

When she got back to her office, Wheatley was in tears. “I had no idea he’d put everything he owned behind this. I had no idea of the struggle. He’d made sure I heard it with clean ears. It was a great moment.” They hugged it out. The station’s phones started to light up with callers. Romaro directed her team to play You’re the Voice on the hour, every hour.

History rolled on from there. Wheatley subsequently gave her a framed CD of the album, which included a plaque bearing four words: “The whisper started here.”

Romaro has become closer with Gaynor since Wheatley’s death, and has admired how she’s stepped into his shoes, from making sure the Poppy Stockell documentary wasn’t derailed by the events of 2022 – interviewing Farnham for it while he was at his condo in Port Douglas, becoming a talking head in the doco herself – to working on the tribute concert and co-producing the musical. “She probably underestimates herself sometimes,” she says. “I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that nobody should do that with Gaynor. What she’s achieved while grieving Glenn has been nothing short of courageous and brilliant.”

Romaro will be at the musical’s opening night. She’ll also be a character on stage, something she’s looking forward to but is also slightly apprehensive about. “I’ve always loved being behind the scenes, but I can’t escape this one, so I’m just going to try to embrace it and enjoy that wonderful cast putting John centre stage.”

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