By the time she turned 40, 60 Minutes star Liz Hayes wasn’t just a household name, she also had three failed marriages behind her.
Now, the TV host – whose autobiography I’m Liz Hayes: A Memoir is out this week – is finally opening up about her tumultuous relationship history.
“It was ugly, it was unpleasant,” Liz says of the negative attention she received.
(Credit: Getty)“It was a crap time. Let’s face it, these things are not great. And it’s magnified. It becomes bigger than Ben Hur,” says the star, who married her first husband, builder Brian Hayes, in the late ’70s when she was just 21.
They split in the mid-’80s around the time she scored the gig as co-host on the Today show in 1986.
“You’re looking at yourself. You’re reading about yourself. You’re noting that the view of you is pretty grim, so you come away thinking I am pretty grim, I’m a bit of a failure on that front.”
Liz was married to advertising millionaire John Singleton for less than a year in 1991, and a three-year marriage to Sydney doctor Stephen Coogan followed. That ended in 1997.
But her fourth union – with former 60 Minutes soundman Ben Crane – is the one that stuck and the pair have been together for more than two decades.
Her marriage to entrepreneur John was short-lived.
(Credit: Supplied)“You could go knock on everybody’s door and say, ‘Well, can I give you a bit of backstory?’ You can’t do that, so you just have to accept that that’s the deal. But frankly, it’s a bit soul-destroying to have seemingly the world telling you, ‘Yep, you’re a dud,'” the 67-year-old adds of the interest in her rocky relationship history.
Throughout it all, the TV host kept her first husband’s last name. But she reveals she’s battled an identity crisis over the years.
“I grieve Beth Ryan, because I quite like Beth Ryan. Liz Hayes is who I’ve become. I was born Elizabeth Ryan,” says the veteran journalist, who was born to dairy farmers in the regional NSW town of Taree.
“When I hear someone say, ‘Hi, Beth,’ I know they’re in my soul. When I realised, oh, I’m now Liz Hayes… that’s a very odd moment. It’s peculiar.”
“Writing this book and writing ‘Beth Ryan’, I hear my dad, my brothers… I’m not Liz Hayes. To this day I’m Beth. It was only when reading the book that I went back and realised how big a deal it was to let go of that,” she says.
It’s a rare show of candidness from Liz, who has closely guarded her private life, in large part due to a terrifying experience with a man who stalked her for 25 years.
“I just had to change everything I did,” says Liz of learning to live with the threat after court orders did nothing to deter him.
