All the way to the top with the help of a little blonde ambition

The Foreman family business empire, with Diane at the helm, is estimated to be worth $135 million, but detractors question her financial nous. Picture / Richard Robinson

Diane Foreman, the Takapuna businesswoman this week linked to National leader Don Brash, battled her way out of loneliness and poverty to become one of the country's richest women.

Within a few minutes of meeting the 157cm-high blond dynamo, she will remind you how tough her life has been, how nothing came easy for her and how people think - and sometimes say - the meanest things to her.

Foreman was holidaying in Port Douglas and saying little this week, but in a candid interview at her boardroom overlooking Auckland harbour in 2004, she revealed how businessmen made sexist cracks within her earshot and tried to dent her confidence when she started in the corporate world.

A blonde's place was in the bedroom, not the boardroom, they said. Men were charming to her initially, "when I could be written off as the boss's brainless dolly bird", but when she pulled up a boardroom chair alongside those same men, they felt threatened and lashed out.

A couple of decades ago Foreman was a solo mother who loved nothing better than to hunker down for the evening in front of Coronation St, with a Coke and a chocolate bar. She left school at 15, struggled through an unhappy marriage in her 20s and ended up alone, working two jobs to make enough money to support her daughters Nikki and Amy.

Now the tough-talking, committed gym junkie runs a global business, has one of the world's most valuable paintings on her Viaduct Harbour office wall and featured, as part of the Foreman family, on this year's NBR Rich List with $135 million.

Her Emerald Group includes global food, property and investment businesses. Her controlling stake in the successful and expanding ice-cream chain New Zealand Natural has given her outlets in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the United States. She is also vice-chair of Mercy Ascot Hospitals. And her expansion plans are ambitious.

After leaving school she became a typist, married then separated and worked as a Takapuna real estate agent, while waitressing three nights a week. She declares solo parenthood far tougher than running an international business.

By the time she met wealthy Hamilton plastics manufacturer Bill Foreman, Diane was a practice manager at the Remuera and Takapuna offices of dynamic ear, nose and throat surgeon Henry Glennie. It was at these medical offices that her bad luck ended because there she met Bill Foreman whose wife, Mary-Pat was ill with cancer.

As Foreman told the story in 2004, Bill's wife had given him instructions to re-marry from her deathbed. When he asked who, his wife had replied "that girl at Henry's office". A luncheon invitation was extended - and Diane's friend told her he was undoubtedly only seeking to employ her as a nanny to his daughters, Sally and Penny.

The two fell in love: "When Bill was 60," recalled Foreman, who is around 30 years younger, "he was stunning,". He was also one of the founders of Trigon which the Foremans sold in 1996 for $130 million.

What Foreman didn't mention was how shocked and upset some of Bill's children were at the speed of their father's re-marriage.

Bill Foreman had already been married twice: first to Mary who left him for another man, and with whom he had four children; then to Mary-Pat (they had two girls).

After several years as a corporate wife and scrambling to read her husband's business faxes as they came through, the third Mrs Foreman was appointed to the Trigon board, initially as the family representative after Bill had suffered a stroke.

Things did not start well. At an early board meeting, squeezed into a new Patrick Steel suit bought for the day, Foreman became trapped in a toilet. She had to dry her hands on the skirt's lining to screw the loo door handle back on.

Her appearance at Trigon meant the parting of the ways with Bill's long-term partner, John Gibb. "Diane was never part of the equation," said a source.

In 1996 she handled the sale of the company to Sealed Air Corporation for $130 million. The new company she established, called the Emerald Group, moved into new territory: an oak furniture manufacturer and other retail businesses in the United States, private surgical and rehabilitation hospitals here and in Australia, the luxury boutique Emerald Inn at Takapuna, commercial property, food manufacturing and exporting businesses. Two years ago, New Zealand Natural had retail sales of more than $70 million.

Some however, say Foreman's business expertise is a joke. "She is in over her head, she doesn't have the skills," says one Auckland businessperson. "I can't believe they made her deputy of the Business Roundtable." What she does have is an extremely direct, go get 'em manner and an appetite for getting her own way.

Foreman is also into charity work. At last month's North Shore business awards, Foreman entered the business hall of fame. Enterprise North Shore noted that she had founded the Hearing House for Cochlear Implanted Children. She was a founding member of the Robin Hood Foundation which matches corporations with charities needing business advice and mentoring.

It wasn't just money that she stepped into when she married Bill Foreman. His two daughters, Sally and Penny, were still at home as were Diane's two daughters Nikki and Amy. Adopted son Joshua and their daughter Charlotte, now 9, added to the mix. Joshua, 15, is at Kings College, as is Don Brash's son, Thomas.

Two years ago, the couple were listed as owning four houses, including the $10 million maritime-style clifftop family house at Takapuna which has its own lift, a city base in Parnell, a house in Port Douglas and another on Waiheke Island.

Some say it is not a happy family, others liken it to something out of Peyton Place. Bill Foreman, now quite frail after the stroke, is totally estranged from the children of his first marriage and has been for some years. His eldest children believe Diane to be a manipulative gold digger who married their father for his money and has turned their father against them.

He refused to attend a family reunion this year at which 30 family members gathered at the family bach at Whiritoa, on the Coromandel.

As usual, the bitterness comes out over money. The kind and genial Foreman's family trusts are now the subject of a multimillion-dollar legal case, the largest lawsuit of its kind in New Zealand.

Trust lawyers refer to it as a "landmark" case. Litigation concerns the entitlements of some of the trust beneficiaries to see trust documents, including financial statements, distributions and the assetts and liabilities of the trusts.

Although many of Bill Foreman's old friends have been sidelined, Diana has many new ones, most of them from the far right of business and politics. Foreman is a member of the Act Party and vice-chair of the Business Roundtable. One friend is journalist and former Act MP, Deborah Coddington, who was linked with Business Roundtable executive chairman Roger Kerr before marrying Wellington QC, Colin Carruthers.

Act Party president, Catherine Judd, another close friend, told the Listener last year that Foreman was "actually very tough and feisty. She doesn't crumble, she doesn't get aggressive, she's firm. I've never seen her lose it. Possibly she does privately, but I've never seen it."

Asked two years ago who she admired politically, Diane Foreman immediately cited Don Brash for his intelligence and integrity, two qualities she said she found rare in politicians.

Foreman, of course, already knew Brash through the Act party and possibly business circles, and obviously admired him. When he was a new list MP, she offered him a room at her fancy Emerald Inn on the Shore.

As Business Roundtable deputy she also offered him help when he mounted his October 2003 takeover challenge against Bill English.

In August 2005, according to the Sunday Star Times, Foreman suggested to Brash that National MPs be told that National's coffers would dry up if they didn't back him. "Could you contact all your friends in the business community and ask them to lobby their MPs for you, ie: no Brash no money?"

As Brash put it to caucus: "The Party is currently very short of money, with no obvious willingness on the part of those who could do so to write out big cheques ... I believe that attracting that money would be substantially easier with me as leader."