While it might be customary these days for women over a certain age to dread becoming invisible in a youth-obsessed society, Julia Hartley Moore isn’t having a bar of it.
At 67 – and one of the country’s top private investigators – the glamorous great-grandmother-of-four is challenging the notion that older women pass directly from middle age into decrepitude. When she turned 65, a professional man asked if she had thought about retiring yet.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Don’t old people retire?’” she laughs. “Instead, I went out and bought myself a brand new car, a huge thing. People probably thought I should have bought a little nana car because I’m getting old. But it doesn’t even dawn on me to act my age.”
Once labelled by celebrity gossip columnist David Hartnell as “Mature Barbie” (she took it as a compliment), Julia says she has never felt invisible, but knows plenty of women who do.
“The amount of women who ring me up and say, ‘I’m 50 and I’m invisible’ is huge. Or they say, ‘If I divorce my abusive husband, how will I ever find somebody else at this age?’
“It’s a shame there is such ageism towards older women in this country. If you look at France, Italy or the Netherlands, there are newsreaders in their sixties who are still on air.
“I go out to places and people will say to me, ‘Oh, you didn’t need to dress up, Julia!’, but that’s just how I roll. Why should I dress down? It feels like we’ve been programmed to not draw attention to ourselves. However, I don’t think it does women any good, especially when you get older.”
From dyslexic teenage mother – she had three daughters by the age of 16 – to serving Princess Diana in Harrods, to becoming a modern-day Miss Marple in her forties with no formal training, Julia has never taken the conventional route.
It’s been a career built on stamina, hard work and gut instinct, while overcoming many barriers in a male-dominated field.
“I’ve always held a fundamental belief that anything is possible, even when other people told me it wasn’t,” she tells the Weekly from her Auckland home office, which she shares with her fourth husband, TV producer Steve Butler, 64.
“When I first started my company, I met these two guys who were PIs who told me I’d never ever make it in the industry and that I’d be a better hairdresser. I said, ‘Sorry, guys, I reckon I can.’
“I’ve had so many other male investigators, who I’ve called to help me with a job, also say, ‘No, Julia, you’ll never be able to do that. I don’t think it’s possible.’ So I do it on my own and then say to them, ‘You missed out on a really lucrative job.’
“The biggest challenge is how ex-cops have treated me in this industry. Their attitude towards me has never changed. Because my work isn’t just investigating infidelities, I get a lot of cold cases, too. So sometimes I get anonymous calls where someone will rip into me and say, ‘Since when did you become an expert in cold cases?’ I take it as a compliment because, clearly, I’ve upset them, solving these cases when I haven’t been in the police.”
Not for want of trying, though. At 18, she went to Henderson Police Station in Auckland and asked how she could join, but was told she was “too feminine”.
“I’m a girl, of course I’m feminine! And yet they didn’t know I had grown up with my older brother learning to hunt, shoot and riding horses.”
Raised in Glen Eden, West Auckland, Julia’s English father Hartley owned his own business, while her Scandinavian mother Arneth was the homemaker.
She describes her childhood as “isolated”, relating better to animals than people. Due to her dyslexia (which went undiagnosed until later in life), she was put into a special needs class at school.
“I was made to feel so dumb, not that I thought I was,” insists Julia.
“Both my parents were academics and duxes of their school. And here’s this kid that’s weird, a little unruly. I was just odd. I guess I’m still odd.
“But my mother was always telling me there was nothing I couldn’t achieve if I set my mind to it. She always told me never to be a sheep and just follow. What she instilled into me was so powerful.”
After leaving school at 14, Julia had sex a year later, naively unaware it might result in a pregnancy.
“Sex education in those days was learning about the reproduction system of rabbits! I didn’t know how anyone got a baby.
“Weeks had gone by and I hadn’t got a period. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, so I went to the doctor to see what it could be,” she reveals.
“In those days, you paid one dollar to see the doctor. And after I’d seen him, the receptionist refunded me that dollar and I thought, ‘How nice of him.’ But, of course, maternity care was free.”
She remembers ringing her mother from a phone box. It was the first time Julia had ever heard her cry.
“She cried not for herself or for the shame, but because she knew what was ahead of me.” It took four months for Julia to tell her father, who then went to the man who had impregnated his daughter and told him he had one of two choices, one of which was to marry Julia.
“My parents tried to adopt the baby when she was born, but people deemed them too old. And I was legally under the age to have a child, so the only way I could keep my baby Karolina was to marry her father, which is what I did.”
Then, only 11 months later, Julia gave birth to daughters Annika and Louvisa, born at 33 weeks. Doctors were concerned for the teenage mum’s health, so the twins stayed in a Karitane Hospital for several months. When they came home, Julia and her mum took over feeding three babies with a bottle.
“Man, it was hard. I look back and think, ‘Who was that little girl who had three little girls?’ It’s hard to relate to that person now.
“That marriage didn’t last longer than four years. After we sold the house and divided the assets, I wanted to go buy another house, but the bank manager told me, ‘You can’t do that, dear. You don’t have a husband.’ I felt determined not to stay oppressed.”
After Julia’s second marriage of 14 years ended – the couple owned a multimillion-dollar stud farm in the Waikato – she ended up moving to the UK for a fresh start. A job recruiter took one look at her and declared she was “Harrods material”.
“I began in the perfumery section and stumbled across a theft ring by fluke. Other staff would hide very small, very valuable items on their person. I overhead these girls talking while I was in the toilet!
“So I went to two security guys who I’d gotten to know and told them. They said, ‘You’ve got a budding career as a detective.’”
Returning to New Zealand in her early forties, Julia started working for an insurance company. Her role was primarily re-investigating insurance claims that were suspicious. She started her own company in 1996, before becoming the star of reality series Private Investigators, which aired internationally.
Her personal life took a backseat to work and Julia – who says her short-lived third marriage was “madness” and on the rebound from the breakdown of her second marriage – was determined that if she ever got married again, she had to do it for the right reasons and with someone in her age group.
“I’ve always had large age gaps in relationships and I didn’t want that again. I met Steve when he was a producer with 60 Minutes, who did a story on me. I thought, ‘What a nice guy, pity he’s so young!’
“We spent a year on the phone talking for hours at a time, but never meeting up. I felt shocked to learn he was only three years younger than me. Then he did another TV story on me in 2008 and asked me out. Before our date, I had a couple of paper towels stuck under each armpit because I was that nervous,” laughs Julia.
The pair have been married 12 years now and she describes them as having the “most amazing” relationship.
“While what I’ve gone through has not been the easiest, it’s been the best in terms of making me who I am. I wouldn’t change it, quite honestly, and I don’t feel old.
“When Clint Eastwood was 91 and directing a film, one of the crew said to him, ‘How the hell do you keep going?’ And he replied, ‘I just don’t let the old man in.’ I’m pretty much the same. I don’t know if there’s an old woman knocking on the door, but she’s not coming in!”
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