A health guru’s dark secret

California health and beauty guru Leslie Kenton has written 35 books, says Nick Duerden in the London Guardian—but none like her new memoir, Love Affair. It contains the revelation that she’d had an incestuous relationship with her father, the late jazz legend Stan Kenton. She was just 11 when he first raped her, she says, and the abuse continued for two years. But she doesn’t see herself as a victim. On the contrary, she says, she and her father were “soul mates.” Stan Kenton, a tormented alcoholic, was able to confide in her, she says, and she was passionate about him. “Appropriate or inappropriate, the whole thing about our relationship was that, while it was on one side forged in lies and deceit—and yes, in horror, too—the other was forged in ecstatic wonderment. We shared everything: music, the wind, the sea. My father felt free to be who he was around me in a way he couldn’t with anybody else. Tell me, how many love affairs do you know like that?” Now 68 and a mother of four, Kenton dedicated the book to her late father and bears him no ill will. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe there are good guys and bad guys like in the movies,” she says. “You know, human beings in certain circumstances will do certain things. It doesn’t mean they are crazy.”

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