Jani Allan – gone but not forgotten: The extraordinary life and times of a SA legend

The final chapter of an extraordinary, trailblazing life which courted both kudos and controversy in apartheid South Africa was written when Jani Allan died in the US on Tuesday evening.

Arguably one of South Africa’s most well-known female journalists, the 70-year-old Allan succumbed to cancer in the Chandler Hall Health Services hospice, in Pennsylvania.

Jani Allan vs cancer: ‘This is so bizarre. I feel like Woody Allen’

In sharing the news of her damning diagnosis about two months ago with long-time friend Herman Lategan, her wry sardonic wit and existential view of the human condition, was en pointe as always.

“This is so bizarre. I feel like Woody Allen. He said that he wasn’t afraid of dying. He just didn’t want to be there when it happened,” she reportedly told him via Facebook. 

From Jani to Juliette

In a surreal twist of fate, the last job of South Africa’s first celebrity columnist was as a waitress in the small town of Lambertville, in New Jersey.

She was simply known as “Juliette” – her mother’s childhood nickname for her adopted daughter who was a classical piano prodigy at the age of four and a Latin scholar who read Chaucer aged eight…

Allan lived in the US in self-exile since 2001 in “a small ground-floor apartment, against a steel traffic barrier and a parking lot”, according to a 2013 Mail & Guardian article.

A taste of success: The Jani Allan salad

The Rodrigues-type reality of American anonymity adopted by the journalist was in stark contrast to the glamorous lifestyle which accompanied the golden glow of her glory days as influential columnist.

Her Just Jani, Jani Allan’s Week and Face to Face were lapped up by millions as soon as the weekly centrist newspaper, the Sunday Times, hit the shelves.

“When I was Jani Allan, I could delay the takeoff of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told M&G reporter Rowan Phelps, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it.

“They named a salad after me at a fabulous restaurant in Rosebank. At the time, I thought that was success. Now, I barely have influence over my Pomeranians.”

A Ferrari and Farrah Fawcett hair blowing in the wind

During her brief marriage to art collector Gordon Schachat, Allan lived it up in a sumptuous Italianate villa above Clifton beach, driving a Ferrari.

Their marriage lasted all of two years, when the man who would arrive for their dates in a Rolls Royce filled with roses, wanted a stay-at-home trophy wife and not a career-obsessed journalist.

The life of the long-legged model with the Farrah Fawcett hairstyle and golden tan, mirrored the vibrant and racy world of the jet-set elite portrayed in the 1980s Peter Stuyvesant made-for-cinema cigarette ads.

Instead of pre-movie notices about load shedding and bank rewards, cinemagoers got a glimpse behind the smokescreen of “Malibu to Monte Carlo” cool those days.

Beauty and brains

Allan, however, was an example of the winning combination of beauty and brains.

The outspoken libertarian interviewed politicians and stars – from FW de Klerk, Magnus Malan and Winnie Mandela to Roger Moore, Charlton Heston and the Dalai Lama… And, of course, Eugene Terre’Blanche.

Eugene Terre’Blanche ‘sex scandal’

Rumours of an affair with the rightwing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) co-founder and leader Eugène Terre’Blanche escalated into a full-blown “sex scandal” of box office proportions in South Africa and abroad.

In 1989, an assassination attempt saw the British-born beauty flee the country to London. She continued her career by writing for the London Sunday Times, the Spectator, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Express, among other publications.

Spy theory

In 2000, Allan claimed that she was unknowingly “used” as a spy.

She told the Daily Mail that she believes the South African intelligence concocted the sex scandal as part of an elaborate ploy to discredit the charismatic white supremist leader at a time when his intention to create a whites-only homeland, threatened national security.

Holey green underpants and ‘large bottoms’ through keyholes

In 1992, she sued Britain’s Channel 4 for defamation after Nick Broomfield’s documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, suggested she had a secret affair with Terre’Blanche.

During the epic trial in which Allan also faced off against her former friend, astrologer Linda Shaw, who testified that she saw Allan beneath “a large bottom” when she peered through her flatmate’s bedroom keyhole.

Another witness recalled finding a drunken Terre’Blanche on Allan’s couch, wearing little more than his holey green underpants.

In the end, Allan failed to convince the London High Court of her innocence, but throughout the years she stuck to her guns and denied the scandalous allegations.

‘Racist buffoon who fell off his horse’

In her Daily Mail interview, she bemoaned the overdose of Schadenfreude which had befallen her at the height of her career in 1989.

“I will always be known as the tart who slept with the far-right racist buffoon who fell off his horse.”

In her Fast Cars to Ventersdorp “reply” to the scandal, Allan provided a satirical look at her involvement with Terre’Blanche who was hacked and beaten to death on his farm in Ventersdorp in 2010.

‘I’ve invented a new way of being in the world’

In Jani Confidential, her 2015 best-selling memoir about “betrayal, back-stabbing and life in the very fast lane”, Allan comments on her survival strategy following “die skande“:

“I’m learning how to rock with the waves.  I’ve invented a new way of being in the world.” 

And that this woman – known for her unique “Allanisms” and razor-sharp comment on politics and society – did with chutzpa.

From that fast-car Ferrari, her life-changing fling with Ventersdorp to “Juliette’s” yellow VW Beetle with a cassette deck player and an empty bottle of Perrier-Jouët in the back.

Bet you she’s listening to a Rodrigues tape somewhere up there in the “Walt Disney blue skies”, before setting off clutching a pomeranian under one arm to find THE French existentialist philosopher, writer and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre for a Face to Face...

She would more than likely share her verdict once posted on her Facebook page that his “output was sadly limited by his insistence on clutching a cat whenever he wrote”.

And to agree to disagree about the famous conclusion of his play Huis Clos (No Exit) that “Hell is other people”.

She was after all voted the “Most Admired Person in South Africa” in 1987 before she herself became the Schadenfreude story on everyone’s lips.