A tragic figure in spite of high life

One-tine media darling Jani Allan tells Tina Weavind that people still aspire to be like her, but for different reasons

Jani Allan is probably one of South Africa's best-known media personalities, as much for what and how she wrote as her high-profile, eccentric personal life.

A Gallup poll taken among the wealthy whites in 1987 named her "the most admired person in South Africa".

She was beautiful, wealthy, smart and thoroughly irreverent. She interviewed celebrities and soon became one.

But after 20 years as an agenda-setting media darling during the 1980s and 1990s, Allan was ultimately dethroned by her alleged affair with Eugene Terre'Blanche, leader of the right-wing AWB.

This week, she said: "People still aspire to be like me, but for different reasons."

Allan has written for publications such as the UK and SA Sunday Times, Scope magazine, The Spectator, London Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

She even wrote speeches for Bantu Holomisa for a while, and hosted a radio show.

Allan moved to the US permanently in 2001. She stopped writing almost completely for a while, and reinvented herself in earnest as a waitress. At Easter this year, she started a blog called "My Grilling Life" about her new career at an upmarket restaurant in New Jersey.

Despite her sometimes glamourous and often eccentric life, Allan is a tragic figure. Virtually penniless ("as poor as a church mouse"), she says of herself: "I have no family anywhere in the world." She owns nothing either, except an ancient yellow VW bug. "It's more convenient than a bicycle," she says.

She has a prosaic understanding of her poverty: "I am spectacularly hopeless with money, and believe that the only hope I have to make a small fortune is if I had been born with a large one. And I haven't so I won't."

But she's not entirely alone, living as she does with her "three American daughters", Pomeranians called Molly, Breeze and China. She says her girls have been the best thing she has ever spent money on.

The worst thing she ever bought? "A load of BS from the American I married". After arriving in the US in 2001, she married New Jersey entrepreneur, Peter Kulish. It didn't end well.

She says the last thing she spent money on was a pair of Reebok takkies (she wore the other pair out waitressing). The next thing she's going to buy is "a bottle of Veuve Cliquot".

Asked what financial advice she might have for a young person, Allan says: "Keep MUM. Money under mattress. Save a little every week. Soon you will have enough to blow it on a trip to New York."

She's not desperately distressed about her poverty, though: "If you want to know what God thinks of money look at the people he gives it to."